Joel
Barlow, American poet and politician, born in Redding, Fairfield
County, Connecticut. He briefly attended Dartmouth College before
graduating from Yale University in 1778, where he was also a post-graduate
student for two years. From September 1780 until the close of the
revolutionary war was chaplain in a Massachusetts brigade. He then,
in 1783, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, established there in July
1784 a weekly paper, the American Mercury, with which he was connected
for a year, and in 1786 was admitted to the bar.
At
Hartford he was a member of a group of young writers including
Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, and John Trumbull, known in American
literary history as the "Hartford Wits". He contributed
to the Anarchiad, a series of satirico-political papers, and in
1787 published a long and ambitious poem, The Vision of Columbus,
which gave him a considerable literary reputation and was once
much read.
In
1788 he went to France as the agent of the Scioto Land Company,
his object being to sell lands and enlist immigrants. He seems
to have been ignorant of the fraudulent character of the company,
which failed disastrously in 1790. He had previously, however,
induced the company of Frenchmen, who ultimately founded Gallipolis,
Ohio, to emigrate to America. In Paris he became a liberal in
religion and an advanced republican in politics. He remained abroad
for several years, spending much of his time in London; was a
member of the "London Society for Constitutional Information";
published various radical essays, including a volume entitled
Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792), which was proscribed by
the British government; and was made a citizen of France in 1792.
He
was American consul at Algiers in 1795-1797, securing the release
of American prisoners held for ransom, and negotiating a treaty
with Tripoli (1796). He returned to America in 1805,and lived
at his home, Kalorama in what is now the city of Washington, D.C.,
until 1811, when he became American plenipotentiary to France,
charged with negotiating a commercial treaty with Napoleon, and
with securing the restitution of confiscated American property
or indemnity therefor. He was summoned for an interview with Napoleon
at Wilna, but failed to see the emperor there; became involved
in the retreat of the French army; and, overcome by exposure,
died at the Polish village of Zarnowiec.
In
1807 he had published in a sumptuous volume the Columbiad, an
enlarged edition of his Vision of Columbus, more pompous even
than the original; but, though it added to his reputation in some
quarters, on the whole it was not well received, and it has subsequently
been much ridiculed. The poem for which he is now best known is
his mock heroic Hasty Pudding (1793). Besides the writings mentioned
above, he published Conspiracy of Kings, a Poem addressed to the
Inhabitants of Europe from another Quarter of the Globe (1792);
View of the Public Debt, Receipts and Expenditure of the United
States (1800); and the Political Writings of Joel Barlow (2nd
ed., 1796).
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