John Barth - Letters

I assumed the letter, & the strategy, to be duplicitous. Barlow himself thot it a tactic to the opposite end — the establishment of more & more American “defensive” fortifications in the western territories, to protect the settlers flooding illegally onto Indian lands — and did not even report it to the American minister. General Wayne’s rout of the Indian “confederacy” at Fallen Timbers the following year (and the admission of “Tennessee” into the Union in ’96 as one more slave state) confirm’d my assumptions. I liked to imagine, as I watcht King Louis & then Marie Antoinette go under the guillotine—& then the Girondists, & then the Hébertists, & then the democratic republic, & finally Robespierre himself — that the author of that letter had been relieved at least of his scalp by the surviving Iroquois; for I was certain the cause of Indian sovereignty (about which, at the time, I had no deep feeling one way or the other) was lost as long as he lived to pretend to champion it.

The end of Robespierre & the Terror on the 9th Thermidor of Year II (27 July 1794), ended also my interest in the revolution, which — even before Bonaparte came to the fore — we saw to be increasingly in the hands of the generals rather than those of the sansculottes. Barlow was in Hamburg, recouping his fortune as a shipping agent after the collapse of the Scioto real-estate swindle. Mme de Staël was back at Coppet, writing her Réflexions sur le procès de la reine, which had disturb’d her as the execution of the King had not. Both were eager to return to Paris; both sought my opinion of their safety there in Year III, under the new Directory. For some reason, Germaine’s letters to me were uncommonly confidential (I later learnt she was using them as trial draughts for her more serious epistles). Her affair with Narbonne, she confest, was ending: for one thing, he remain’d in England when she return’d to Coppet in ’94, and she suspected he had taken another mistress. Apparently, she wrote to me in the spring of that year, everything I believed I meant to him was a dream, and only my letters were real. For another, she had met & been fascinated by Benjamin Constant in Lausanne, who in turn was fascinated by the audacious young Corsican, Bonaparte.

The city, I regretfully reported, now that the Committee of Public Safety had been guillotined, was safe. I myself was penniless, & unemploy’d except as an occasional counterfeiter of assignats, the nearly worthless paper currency of the moment. I had discover’d in myself an unsuspected gift for forgery, and was being courted by minor agents of both the left & the right, equally interested in bankrupting the Directoire. I was nineteen, no longer a novice in matters of the heart. My politics were little more than an alternation of impassion’d populism & fastidious revulsion from the mob; the two extremes met like Jacobins & Royalists, not so much in my cynical expediency as in the psychological expedient that was my cynicism: a makeshift as precarious as the Directory itself. I dared to hope Germaine might find all this, and me… romantique.

And so she did, for the 1st décade of Brumaire, An IV, whilst reopening her Paris salon with Constant & the Baron de Staël. When the spirit took her, she would revert to her waiting-maid or sans-culotte costume & fetch me, in that famous plain carriage, thro some working-class faubourg to reenact “our” escape of ’92. But her heart was Constant’s; her mind was on the composition of an essay, De l’Influence des passions; the serving-girl whose clothes she borrow’d for the escapade was a secret Jacobin infested with crab lice, who thus spread the vermin not only to her mistress & to M. Constant, but also to me & thence to the bona fide (& thitherto uninfested) working girl whose bed I’d shared thro the Terror. Germaine found the episode piquant; the rest of us did not. Moreover, tho I still admired her range, I no longer found her physically appealing. When Barlow — horrified by the dangerous game I had been playing with my assignats —urged me to accompany him on a diplomatic mission to Algiers at the year’s end (I mean Gregorian 1795), I accepted with relief.

Here began my firsthand schooling in international politics & intrigue. Whilst we moved down the Rhone & then thro Catalonia towards Alicante & Algiers, chatting of Don Quixote & buying new presents for the Dey, Hassan Bashaw (to add to the $27,000 consular gift we carried with us!), Barlow explain’d the manifold delicacy of our mission as it had been set forth to him by his new friend James Monroe, Washington’s minister to France. The Barbary pirates, over the 10 years past, had seized a number of U. States merchant vessels, confiscated the hulls & cargoes, & made slaves of the crews. The American public — and U. States shipping interests, principally in New England — were indignant. France & England were either indifferent or privately content: they had no love themselves for the troublesome corsairs & could at any time have employ’d their navies to rid the Mediterranean of them. But they prefer’d to bribe the Dey to spare their own vessels, & thus, in effect, to harass their American competition, along with the Danes, Swedes, Dutch, Portuguese, Venetians, & cet. On the other hand, they fear’d, as did Washington, that enough such incidents would oblige or justify the construction of a large American navy, just as retaliatory attacks by the Indians had “justified” the extension of “our” army ever farther west of the Appalachians. To be sure, many U. States interests desired just that, & so were in a sense obliged to the Barbary pirates for rousing public opinion to their cause, and did not want them prematurely put down or bought off! Even Washington, suspicious as he was of New England Federalist shippers, and opposed in principle to standing professional armies & navies (as chancres on the economy & chiefest dangers to the peace they were supposed to ensure), had to acknowledge that nothing so strengthen’d the fragile Union as an apparent menace from beyond its borders. He also fear’d (said Barlow) that the anti-slavery or merely anti-Southern interests above Mason’s & Dixon’s Line would make factional propaganda out of the Dey’s enslavement of more than 100 white Yankee sailors. Barlow himself was of a mind to add a passage on the subject to the 8th Book of his revised Columbiad.

For the present, then, Washington had no alternative but to buy the prisoners’ freedom & negotiate with the Dey a humiliating bribe for sparing our ships in the future. The only apparent issue was the size of the ransom & bribe: even pro-Navy interests in the U. States were divided betwixt those who believed that a ruinously large payment would make the construction of warships seem an economizing measure, and those who fear’d that too large a figure would leave nothing in the Treasury to build a navy with. Behind that lay the covert question, whether the treaty negotiation should be expeditious or deliberately prolong’d. A quick settlement might be a high settlement — the Dey was asking $800,000—and (or but) would reduce the opportunity to exploit the occasion for building a navy & for propagandizing against African slavery &/or for national unity. It would also, of course, gratify the captured sailors & their families. Prolong’d negotiation might result in a better bargain, but (or and) it would also afford time to build and man warships, & cet. It could also — for better or worse, depending on one’s larger strategy — incite the capricious Dey to seize more of “our” ships, raise his ransom price, perhaps even break off negotiations altogether. In short, as many interests in both America & Europe would be pleased to see Barlow’s mission fail as would be gratified by its success.