Letters

His own motives were comparatively simple: to render a service to his country whilst traveling at its expense & perhaps making a lucrative investment or two in Algiers (the bulk of his Hamburg fortune he had put into French government bonds & Paris real estate, counting on Napoleon to increase their value; but he left some $30,000 liquid for speculation), and to conclude the business speedily lest his Ruthy grow jealous again. His strategy was to placate the Dey with gifts & assurances until the American minister to Portugal (his old friend & fellow Hartford Wit, Colonel Humphreys), whose charge it was to conclude the treaties with Algiers, Tripoli, & Tunis, could raise $800,000 in bullion by selling discounted U. States Bank stock in London & Hamburg: a harder job, in Barlow’s estimation, than treating with a moody & dangerous Moslem prince. He wanted me with him because my adventure with the assignats convinced him I had inherited my father’s gifts, which he believed might be of use to him in the business; and he was delighted at my “cosmopolizing,” as he call’d it, since he’d left me to Mme de Staël.

Good Barlow, at once so canny & so ingenuous! Barely 40, he had come as long & almost as various a road as my grandfather: from the conservative hymnist & naive chaplain of “our” revolution, who had watcht Major André hang’d & dedicated his Vision of Columbus to Louis XVI, he had been “cosmopolized” himself by the French Revolution into atheism & antimonarchism. He had alarm’d his British & even his conservative American friends with his tract of 1789, Advice to the Privileged Orders; with his Letter to the National Convention of ’92, which had earn’d him Citizenship in the French Republic along with Washington, Madison, Hamilton, & Tom Paine; and with his poem The Conspiracy of Kings (same year), a call for the overthrow of all monarchies by general revolution. But despite their Jacobin tone, these works had in common — so I see plainly now, but felt even then despite my own ingenuousness — more enthusiastic & sententious naivety than deep conviction. Whereas his little mock panegyric in three cantos, Hasty Pudding—a nostalgic hymn to that American breakfast & to New England, written on a January morning in Savoy in ’93—was a pure delight: a chef-d’oeuvre written as a lark.

It markt for Barlow a turn he was just now perceiving clearly, as I was later to see in retrospect certain turnings of my own: he was become at once less ideological (I mean in Bonaparte’s sense of the word) & more political; less radical & more perspicacious; less ambitious & more shrewd. He had learnt enough from his victimizing in the Scioto swindle to make a legitimate fortune in Hamburg; James Monroe — a good judge of good judges of men — had chosen wisely his representative to the Dey. Barlow’s review of the political complexities of our mission, his subsequent sharp assessment of the Dey’s character & adroit manipulation of it, together with his new-found expertise in international finance, much imprest me & endear’d him to me, the more as they were maskt (the word is too simple) by a bluff Yankee cheerfulness that was in fact his prevailing humor. It disarm’d his adversaries and led them to believe him an easy mark; they came genuinely to like & trust him, & relaxt their intrigues against him, so that in the end he most often got what he was after.

(As I write this, B. is on a mission of far more delicacy & moment as Madison’s minister to France: negotiating with Napoleon & his foreign minister, the Duc de Bassano, for repeal of the Berlin & Milan decrees, which permit French confiscation of American vessels trading with Britain. And I pray the dear man will succeed: I who am fresh from doing my utmost to ensure his failure! But of this, more presently.)