JOEL

See also:

• JOEL BARLOW (1754-1812)
• BARLOW, PETER (1776-1862)
• BARLOW, SIR GEORGE HILARO (1762-1847)

BARLOW (1754-1812)  , American poet and politician, born in Redding, Fairfield county, Connecticut, on the 24th of March 1754 . He graduated at Yale in 1778, was a post-graduate student there for two years, and from September 178o until the close of the revolutionary war was chaplain in a Massachusetts brigade . He then, in 1783, removed 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 obnoxious " 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 180.5, and lived near Washing-ton, 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 on the 24th of December 1812 .

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., 1996) . He also published an edition, " corrected and enlarged," of Isaac Watt's Imitation of the Psalms of David (1786) . See C . B . Todd's Life and Letters of Joel Barlow (New York and London, 1886) ; and a chapter, " The Literary Strivings of Joel Barlow," in M . C . Tyler's Three Men of Letters (New York and London, 1895) .