Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
latest political and social theories, turned humanitarian, reëxamined
his Calvinistic theology in the light of current deism, and became one
of the free democratic thinkers swarming in every European capital.
He was equally at home in London and Paris, passing long periods of
time in both cities. An active member of the Constitutional Society of
London, he was intimate with Joseph Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Tom
Paine, sympathized with every liberal movement, and offered his pen to
the cause of a freer England. His _Advice to the Privileged Orders_ was
eulogized by Fox on the floor of Commons, and the Pitt ministry was
moved to suppress the work and proscribe the author. Thereupon Barlow
went into hiding. There seems to have been considerable provocation for
the government’s action. “It is safe to say,” remarks his biographer,
“that no political work of the day created so wide an interest or was
so extensively read.” With Paine and Barlow both loose in England there
was need of the government looking to its fences.
In 1793 he was made a citizen of France. His French career was not
unlike Paine’s, whom he resembled in many ways. He had much of the
latter’s genius for publicity and skill in propaganda, and his career
was a great stimulus to radicals at home. He was not too busy to
serve his country in a diplomatic way. He risked his life to aid
American prisoners in Africa and by his skill and address eventually
freed them--an achievement that few men could have gone through with
successfully. In the meantime he had not neglected his private affairs.
He made a fortune in the French funds, which he increased by able
merchandising. He had come to his goal by distant roads, and on his
return to America in 1805 he took up his abode at Washington, creating
a delightful countryseat on the outskirts of the raw little capital
where he maintained a salon for American liberals. He seems to have
felt no inclinations towards Connecticut; the old ties were broken
now for good, the French Jacobin could not fit into the rigid grooves
of Hartford Federalism. Six years later he was impressed a second time
into the diplomatic service, was sent to France on a difficult mission,
followed Napoleon, then on the Russian campaign, was caught in the
break-up of the grand army, suffered exposure, contracted pneumonia,
and died in a village near Cracow in Poland--a fate which many honest
Federalists regarded as amply merited by his vicious principles.
The later reputation of Barlow has been far less than his services
warranted or his solid merits deserved. His admirable prose writings
have been forgotten and the _Columbiad_ returns always to plague him.
The common detraction of all Jacobins and democrats fell heavily on so
conspicuous a head. “It is simply impossible,” says his biographer,
“for the historian of Federal proclivities and environment to do
justice to the great leaders of Republicanism in America.” Barlow
was forced to pay a heavy price for his intellectual independence.
Detraction was always lying in wait for him. John Adams, who had
suffered many a sharp thrust from him, wrote to Washington, “Tom Paine
is not a more worthless fellow.” Of the Yale dislike Barlow was well
aware, for he once confessed that he would have presented the school
with some needed chemical apparatus but he “supposed that, coming
from him, the college authorities would make a bonfire of them in the
college yard.”[390] Yet it is hard for a later generation to discover
wherein lay the viciousness of his life or principles. A warm-hearted
humanitarian, he was concerned always for the common well-being. The
two major passions of his life were freedom and education. During the
last years at Washington he was ardently promoting a plan for a great
national university at the seat of government, and had he lived ten
years longer his wide influence would probably have accomplished it.
His sins would seem to have been no other than an open break with the
Calvinism and Federalism of the Connecticut oligarchy--somewhat slender
grounds on which to pillory him as an infidel and a scalawag.
The social foundation of Barlow’s political philosophy is lucidly
presented in the _Advice to the Privileged Orders_, a work that
deserves a place beside Paine’s _Rights of Man_ as a great document
of the times. It does too much credit to American letters to be
suffered to lie buried with a dead partisanship. It is warm with the
humanitarian enthusiasm that had come down as a rich heritage from
the Physiocratic school of social thinkers. Two suggestive ideas lie
at the base of his speculations: the doctrine of the _res publica_,
and the doctrine of social responsibility for individual well-being.
The former, given wide currency by the _Rights of Man_, resulted from
the imposition of social conscience on abstract political theory, out
of which was derived a new conception of the duties and functions
of the political state--the conception that the state must be the
responsible agent of society as a whole rather than the tool of a
class, and that its true concern is the _public thing_, safeguarding
the social heritage as a common asset held in trust for succeeding
generations; the latter resulted from the inquiry into the relations of
the political state to the individual citizen--its responsibility as
the social agent, for the social waste of wrecked lives and thwarted
happiness, a waste that a rational social order would greatly lessen if
not eradicate. Barlow flatly denied that the primary function of the
state is the protection of property interests; its true end lies in
securing justice. But justice without equal opportunity is a mockery;
and equal opportunity is impossible unless the individual citizen
shall be equipped to live on equal terms with his fellows. Hence the
fine flower of political justice is discovered in education; in that
generous provision for the young and the weak that shall equip them
to become free members of the commonwealth. Like Paine’s _Agrarian
Justice_, the _Advice to the Privileged Orders_ is an extraordinarily
modern work, far more comprehensible today than when it was written.
That the “State has no right to punish a man, to whom it has given no
previous instruction,” and that “She ought not only to instruct him in
the artificial laws by which property is secured, but in the artificial
industry by which it is obtained,” are doctrines that seem far less
preposterous to us than they seemed to Timothy Dwight. The president of
Yale College was greatly troubled over Calvinistic sin; Joel Barlow was
greatly troubled over social injustice; in that difference is measured
the distance the latter had traveled in company with the French
Jacobins.
The root of his political thinking is the doctrine of equalitarianism.
“Only admit,” he says, “the original, unalterable truth, _that all men
are equal in their rights, and the foundation of everything is laid_.”
Accepting the romantic doctrine that human nature is excellent in its
plastic state, and capable of infinite development, he is untroubled
by the fact of human selfishness. He sees no bogey in democracy to
frighten timid souls, no specter of anarchy in the rule of the people.
They say mankind are wicked and rapacious, and “it must be that
offences will come.” This reason applies to individuals; but not to
nations deliberately speaking a national voice. I hope I shall not
be understood to mean, that the nature of man is totally changed by
living in a free republic. I allow that it is still _interested_
men and _passionate_ men, that direct the affairs of the world.
But in national assemblies, passion is lost in deliberation, and
interest balances interest; till the good of the whole community
combines the general will.
If government be founded on the vices of mankind, its business is
to restrain those vices in all, rather than to foster them in a
few.[391]
It was his sensitive social conscience that brought him to revolt
against all class government. He had seen the naked sordidness of such
governments in Europe, and he watched with concern the beginnings of
like government in America. The significance of the Hamiltonian program
could not escape so shrewd an observer as Barlow; he was too much a
realist to take political professions at face value. “I see,” he wrote,
“immense fortunes made by our funding legislators out of the public
funds which they funded for themselves.” Politics for profit was a
sorry spectacle to him, and he occupied his mind much with the problem
of erecting the machinery of an adequate democratic state that should
be faithful to its stewardship as agent of the whole.
It was this difficult problem with which he dealt in his _Letter
to the National Convention of France_. In this suggestive work two
ideas determined his thinking: the doctrine of the sovereignty of
the majority will, and the doctrine of government as a social agent.
In both he returned to the position of Roger Williams a hundred and
fifty years before. The sovereignty of the majority will he conceives
to be continuous and immediately effective; it cannot be held in
check by a rigid constitutionalism, for as Paine had pointed out,
such constitutionalism is no other than government from the grave.
He proposed therefore, that the fundamental law be amendable by
legislative enactment, one legislative body proposing and the next
determining, under full publicity. As a guarantee that such action
should express the popular will, that love of power on the part of the
agent should not defeat the purpose of society, he held that there must
be annual elections. Representatives should be periodically excluded
from candidacy, and other representatives fresh from the people sent
up, for “power always was and always must be a dangerous thing.” The
principle of recall he regarded as indispensable in a democratic
government, for it “will tend to maintain a proper relation between
the representatives and the people, and a due dependence of the former
upon the latter. Besides, when a man has lost the confidence of his
fellow citizens ... he is no longer their representative; and when he
ceases to be their’s, he cannot in any sense be the representative of
the nation.” The fundamental principle of state-craft Barlow states
thus: “Every individual ought to be rendered as independent of every
other individual as possible; and at the same time as dependent as
possible on the whole community.” The familiar romantic doctrine of
the diminished state is implicit in all his reasoning. Like Paine he
would do away utterly with the old mystery of government under which
ambitious men cloak their will to power; “for whatever there is in
the art of government, whether legislative or executive, above the
capacities of the ordinary class of what are called well-informed men,
is superfluous and destructive and ought to be laid aside.”
A thoroughgoing radical in economics and politics, Barlow was no
innovator in polite literature. He had pulled himself out of many a
Connecticut provincialism, but he stuck fast in the bog of provincial
poetry. It has long been the fashion to make merry over _The
Columbiad_, and there is only too patent a reason for it. To criticize
it is a work of supererogation. The appeal of “the grand style” seems
to have been too much for him. Some explanation doubtless is to be
found in the fact that he was working over an earlier poem done in the
days of an ebullient patriotism. It was a mistake to return to it,
for the heroic note in the vein of a political pamphleteer must play
havoc with it. What he now attempted, in the light of his long European
experience, was to embody in the narrative suitable political ideas,