Abstract
JOEL BARLOW in I788 was a man in search of a vocation. He had tried publishing, psalmody, law, and the ministry. He had also essayed poetry and for a period of five years in Hartford associated with the Connecticut Wits, a literary group of Federalist persuasion. Then in the summer of I788 he went Europe as land agent for the fraudulent Scioto Company. By the time he departed for Algiers in December I795, his onetime friends in Connecticut had given him up as a Jacobin, for he had become deeply committed the revolutionary movement in France and was an intimate of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, the Comte de Volney, the English reformers, and the members of the Gironde. As a result of shrewd commercial investments, he had also acquired sufficient wealth afford diplomacy.' The new United States minister France, James Monroe, arrived in Paris in I794, and the two men, thrown together as a result of their friendship with Thomas Paine and their mutual faith in republican institutions, became good friends. Monroe's official instructions from Secretary of State Edmund Randolph were concerned mainly with strengthening French-American relations and obtaining compensations for maritime depredations. Later dispatches elaborated upon his duties, and one letter directed him to buy peace with Algiers, a practice followed by most European powers. Monroe confessed unfamiliarity with Barbary affairs, but he immediately began working toward a Mediterranean settlement, knowing at least that it was urgently needed. Barbary pirates had menaced
Published Version
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