BARLOW, JOEL, an American literary and political character of considerable note, was born in the year 1756, in the village of Reading, in Connecticut, the youngest of ten children. His father died when he was yet a boy; and he was sent to the college of Newhaven, in his native state, in 1774. In the course of the prescribed exercises of composition he discovered a taste for poetry, and two productions crept into public view, one entitled The Prospect of Peace; the other An Elegy on the Death of Mr Hosmer, member of the American congress. It appears that Mr Barlow was destined for the clerical profession; and that his friends solicited and obtained for him the appointment of chaplain to a militia company of Massachusetts, the functions of which he performed till the peace.
At the conclusion of peace between the United States and Great Britain, he abandoned the ecclesiastical life, and settled at the village of Hartford, where, two years afterwards, he published the poem entitled The Vision of Columbus.
After quitting the service of the church, he appears for some time to have practised law; but in 1788 he abandoned that profession likewise, and came to Europe as the agent of the Scioto Land Company, a fraudulent association, of whose real character and designs he was ignorant.
Having during this period become deeply interested by the events of the French revolution, he published, in the years 1791 and 1792, several political pieces of a republican character, and in 1793, from motives of curiosity, accompanied the four commissioners of the National Convention who were sent to Mont Blanc to organize that department.
Objects of a commercial nature at length drew him to Hamburg, and afterwards to the coast of Africa, where he received the commission of consul-general of the United States, with instructions to enter into and conclude treaties with the Barbary powers for the purpose of procuring the ransom of the American citizens who were detained as slaves in those countries. The execution of this commission was prompt and successful; and, after residing for some time in Paris, to which he returned from Barbary, he, in 1805, proceeded to America, and purchased a neat habitation in the territory of Columbia, the seat of the general government, to which he gave the name of Kalorama. Here he formed an acquaintance with certain influential members of Congress, to whom he greatly recommended himself by the publication of a short sketch of a plan of national education, and an address to the citizens of Washington upon occasion of one of the anniversaries of American independence. He now also published the superb quarto edition of his national poem, to which he finally gave the name of The Columbiad. Having returned to the United States, in 1811 he received the appointment of minister-plenipotentiary to the court of France. This nomination met with powerful opposition in the senate, and passed only by a small majority.
The great object of his mission was to obtain compensation for the American property confiscated in virtue of the Berlin and Milan decrees. This arrangement was to be regulated in a manner the least onerous to the French treasury. American ships and cargoes were, at the same time, to be freed from unjust detention, and a new commercial treaty was to be formed on principles of national justice and reciprocity.
Barlow
Barmen.
In pursuit of this object he followed the Emperor Napoleon to Wilna in the memorable winter of 1812; but this diplomatic journey was without advantage, and the failure was the more mortifying, as it was undertaken without the advice or instructions of the American government. Mr Barlow was returning to Paris, when he was seized with a violent inflammatory disease, of which he died on the 26th of December, in the fifty-eighth year of his age; and was interred at Zarnowitz, an obscure village near Cracow.