Joel Barlow (1754-1812)

Joel Barlow celebrated America (that is, both South America and North America) in his writings, from poems on hasty pudding to disquisitions on the new British American nation's constitution and legal system. But Barlow's celebration was always in the context of his knowledge of countries other than America -- France, Britain, Germany, and Algiers, for instance -- countries that he hoped would achieve an equally free representative government, during the seventeen years he spent away from British America and then the new United States as an international statesman.

Joel Barlow was born on a farm in Connecticut and began his formal education at Moor's Indian school (later Dartmouth) in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1772. He matriculated to Yale College with the class of 1778. At Yale Barlow began to evidence his interest in poetry, moral philosophy, and science as the keys to the improvement of the human condition. Barlow's college years were spent largely away from college, because the Revolutionary War interrupted classes at Yale, and students were sent home because of concerns about occupation in New Haven and safety of family members at home. Barlow married Ruth Baldwin secretly during this time, and he began his life as a writer, embarking on a career that would take him to Europe and northern Africa. Barlow's seventeen years abroad gave him the intellectual freedom and impetus to pursue projects that would not have been condoned, even by his friends, in Federalist America. By 1805, when the intellectual climate in America had shifted so that it might accommodate the liberal Republican tendencies of Joel Barlow, the Barlows returned to the United States and established themselves in the Washington community made inviting by the presidency of their friend Thomas Jefferson.

Barlow's poem, The Vision of Columbus, was published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1787, thanks to subscriptions he had received from people as distinguished as King Louis XVI of France, the Marquis de Lafayette, and George Washington. Barlow's goal -- to deliver a poem that would extol the past as a mere prelude to the promise of what might become the glory of "America" -- appropriated the Spanish and Portuguese efforts into his own story, as if they were preludes to the necessary war that would occur in the British North American colonies because such was the course of empire, to establish arts and sciences in a putatively free and confederated band of states. He adopted stories of the Portuguese and Spanish historians, blended them with some of the stories told by British writers and intellectual historians, and came up with his own millennial version of American history. In effect, the poem instructed citizens of the newly confederated states about the social and political history and the geographical and topographical sites of the land they had, in Barlow's view, inherited as theirs. To this end, Barlow created a global view of the Americas in his poem's opening, identifying and defining the courses of rivers and streams, the highest mountain peaks, the widest waterways between islands, and so forth.

The first two books of The Vision of Columbus (1787) are printed in Early American Writings, Gen. Ed. Carla Mulford, Assoc. Eds. Angela Vietto and Amy E. Winans (Oxford University Press, 2001). This prose "dissertation," a disquisition on Manco Capac, the traditional founder and lawgiver of Peru, follows Book II in the poem.