Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  In the spring of 1785 Congress passed an ordinance that western lands be surveyed for townships or ‘ranges’ six miles square. Imlay now became a deputy surveyor, with the backing of a surveyor who had been in the same battalion as John Imlay. A week later he received a court order to appear for debt. This didn’t stop him acquiring more and more land, outdoing old Peter Imlay; only, he couldn’t pay for these lands. By December 1786 Gilbert was writing to Boone that he was ‘sincerely sorry it is not in my power to pay [what he owed him], for Such is the embarrassing State of affairs in this Country that I have not been able to recover a pound from all the engagements that have been made me’. It was common for speculations to fail, said William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper), who established Cooperstown at this time on the New York frontier. His own practice was to give settlers a genuine deal to aid their survival. Success would quicken their efforts with dreams for their posterity if the speculator put something back, if he settled with his settlers and saw to their needs.

  Involvement at that level did not occur to Imlay, any more than it occurred to Barlow and the promoters of Scioto. Yet Imlay was not cold to the wilderness; it was not solely a source of gain. He saw it as the paradise of a man finding a simplicity at odds with ‘the distorted and unnatural habits of the Europeans’. This projects a quintessential American drama, from the simplicity of Boone and Cooper’s fictional frontiersman Leatherstocking, to Twain’s innocents abroad, and to the innocence of The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and other American encounters with the corrupt Old World designed by Henry James. Undeniably, it was in Imlay’s interest to present the virtue of American simplicity to the settlers he hoped to attract, but he was not a cynic. It was part of the ambiguity of Imlay that he did partake of the wilderness and feel its transforming power. If he lived out the American myth during his years on the frontier, if afterwards he presented himself as ‘of Kentucky’, embodying for Mary Wollstonecraft the natural man of Rousseau, it was not mere performance. There was a readiness, even innocence, as Imlay plunged into the chaos of land speculation. His temper was sanguine. When he lost money, he hoped a bigger deal or the introduction of ironworks would bring the fortune he was determined to make. So, little was said of wild buffalo, biting insects, and the determination of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh to check settlers’ encroachments, especially after surveyors like Imlay began to act. The Shawnees and Cherokees had been deserted by their British allies, who handed over their lands without consulting them. Imlay underrated their rage: the ‘Indians’, he told prospective settlers, had now ceded their lands ‘as a consideration for former massacres’, and ‘people in the interior settlements pursued their business in as much quiet and safety as they could have done in any part of Europe’. He did not mention armed ex-soldiers shooting at will, and Shawnees in the process of killing or carrying off fifteen hundred settlers in Kentucky.

  Further south, beyond the Tennessee River, lay Spanish territory with its French population and disaffected Americans, including a number of outlaws for whom the ‘trace’ (as buffalo tracks were called before they became roads) to the Spanish border post of Natchez offered a route of escape. It was a refuge for Rachel Robards, who broke the law when she ran away from a brutal husband. In Natchez she lived with future President Andrew Jackson, man and wife in their own eyes but beyond the law. Separatism was a mood Imlay played on, together with the sharpest operator in Kentucky, Colonel Wilkinson, Imlay’s partner in some land deals: one letter from Wilkinson warns a buyer not to ‘expose’ and ‘ruin’ Imlay by pressing for titles to his land unless the buyer wished to lose his claims. When Imlay had to vanish, his properties in Kentucky and New Jersey were administered by top veterans Wilkinson and Lee.

  Wilkinson himself provides a clue to Imlay’s secret life. He was a known secret agent who was daring, plausible, and made loads of money. As a fighter he had proved his worth at the battles of Princeton and Trenton, and Washington–acting as his own spymaster and commandeering a massive 13 per cent of the federal budget for spying–continued to trust him despite rumours that Wilkinson was in the pay of Spain. Wilkinson and Imlay arrived on the frontier in 1784, as alarm spread when the Spanish governor of West Florida and the Louisiana Territory, Esteban Miró, closed the Spanish port of New Orleans, the outlet of the Mississippi, to American boats. Wilkinson, posing as a sympathiser of Spain, warned Miró of an American attack. He appears as number 13 on a roster of the Spanish espionage system with the code name ‘El Brigadier Americano’. Number 24 is Imlay’s associate Colonel Bullet of Kentucky, and number 37’s name, for what it’s worth, is given as ‘Gilberto’. The name is too common to draw conclusions, but it opens up a possible line of enquiry.

  Gilbert Imlay disappears from the start of 1787 until 1792. He lets it be known that he has left for Europe at the end of 1786, but this remains unproved. The only sign of him is his grant of a deed for two thousand acres of Kentucky land on 27 December 1789, and a further deal in 1791, but unlike other grantors, Imlay gives no address. One clue lurks in a batch of spy-letters: a letter from Wilkinson asks the Spanish governor in West Florida to remember him affectionately to ‘Gilberto’. So, did Gilbert Imlay slip across the south-west and follow the trace through ‘Indian’ territory to Spanish Florida, operating there as a spy, as well as hiding to evade prosecution for debt (like Barlow after the collapse of Scioto)? At a guess, he played a double game, posing as a Spanish spy to reinforce Wilkinson’s successful efforts to soothe the Spanish governor with an illusion of influence, while at the same time acting as an agent provocateur on behalf of the US to foment separatism from Spain during a phase when the vast Louisiana Territory was prey to contesting imperial powers.

  Wilkinson now put together a band of confidential agents who would sell Louisiana land to western Americans (encouraged by handouts from Spain) who would then, he promised Miró, ‘constitute a Barrier against the encroachments of Great Britain or the United States’. Yet the upshot was, in effect, the encroachment of the US on Spanish lands–at Spanish expense. In all, Wilkinson extracted over thirty thousand dollars from the weak governor of what Spain regarded as a minor colonial outpost.

  Since 1785 a French spy, one D’Argès, had been planted at the Falls of Ohio. French interest in Louisiana raised its head in 1787, reinforced by Brissot after his visit to the United States. Wilkinson danced his way into a minuet with France who wished to regain the Louisiana Territory from Spain. These contesting powers had their eye also on the uncertain fate of the adjacent region of Kentucky. During the 1780s there were no fewer than nine US conventions over the issue of Kentucky’s independence from external control.

  Great Britain, yet another of the contesting powers, had dispatched its own spy, Colonel Conelly, to Louisville in 1788. In addition to the dance Wilkinson led Spain and France, he also flirted with a Britain keen to invite trade agreements that could detach Kentucky from the United States, and lure it into its sphere of influence–though less inclined to offer Wilkinson the regular pension he received from Spain. Early in 1792, the British Foreign Secretary was warned that Wilkinson (newly appointed by Washington as second-in-command of the American army) was moving frontiersmen to advance on Spanish territory. During this year America won Kentucky when it entered the Union. In this same year, Imlay reemerged as an author in London.

  He approached Debrett, publisher of the guide to the peerage. The social prestige of Debrett suggests that Imlay–of whom no portrait exists–could blend his frontier image with the manners of the Imlay Mansion. His generation of army officers modelled themselves on Washington: the calm dignity, the sturdy conviction, with no look of the revolutionary.

  Imlay claimed to have written A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792) in the backwoods which is its subject. Though this claim is usually discounted (because of the smokescreen of his supposed departure for Europe five years earlier), we don’t have to read far into the book to see that Imlay had to be telling t
he truth. Its local detail is so abundant, its measurements and figures so precise, that it would be impossible to write such a book from memory alone. The book went into three editions during the 1790s. A publisher, Kegan Paul, reading it nearly a century later, saw ‘a model of what a monograph on a new country should be. It is at once clear, full, and condensed…Its language throughout shows an educated accomplished man.’ Imlay projects a vision of two Americas: the genuine America in the West as distinct from European colonisation of eastern States, a belief in the West as ‘the centre of the earth…at once the emporium and protectors of the world’.

  As much as it was in the interest of the States to acquire the central plains, it was not in their interest to tussle with Spain, nor to infringe their neutrality. Following the failure of Wilkinson’s attempt to advance on Spanish territory in January 1792, the next best move would be for an ally–France–to wrest these lands from Spain. This, conceivably, was the situation when, in December 1792, Imlay set out two secret plans for the capture of the Louisiana Territory, and registered them with Louis Otto (son-in-law of his acquaintance St Jean de Crèvecoeur) in the French Foreign Office.

  There were four thousand men, Imlay claimed, burning with the Fire of Liberty and incensed with Spain’s violation of their rights, who would leap to arms against the oppressor. On 25 January 1793 the Comité de Défense Générale (precursor to the Committee of Public Safety) asked Brissot to present a report on the feasibility of the proposed expedition against Spain’s colony. Imlay, who knew the terrain, was to have the help of General Francisco di Miranda, a Venezuelan who had fought in the War of Independence.

  In February a new French Minister to the United States, Citizen Edmond Charles Genêt, was dispatched with instructions to pursue Imlay’s plan and extend the Revolution to far-flung subjects of Spain who were said to be panting for its principles. His instructions were to stir up frontiersmen, secrètement, to bring independence to the Louisianais. They were to sweep down the Mississippi into Spanish territory and take New Orleans at the mouth of the river, where a small French fleet would lie in wait to back the invasion. In the meantime, on 7 March, France declared war on Spain.

  Later that month, Imlay pressed his plan with a letter of introduction to Brissot from Thomas Cooper. Imlay was, as always, well connected. Cooper, an Oxford graduate, was a radical cotton manufacturer in Manchester, a small man with a large wedge of a head, brilliant in conversation and terrifying in controversy, who published with Joseph Johnson and supported Mary Wollstonecraft. ‘Let the defenders of male despotism answer (if they can) the Rights of Woman,’ he had challenged Burke. As emissary from the democratic clubs of England to affiliated clubs in France, he enjoyed the status of French citizen. Brissot used Cooper’s support of Imlay to pressure the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Le Brun, that if ce Capitaine (Imlay) and his cohorts did not leave within fifteen days, they would have to give up the enterprise.

  A committee was formed to forward the expedition, with none other than Joel Barlow top of the list–chosen to lend his lustre as a thinker devoted to the cause of liberty in both the American and the French Revolutions. It can’t be a coincidence that Barlow returned to Paris just two days before France declared war on Spain. He was not merely a figurehead: a document in the archives of the French foreign ministry, dated March 1793, describes him as a person ‘to whom one might entrust the general direction [of the coup] under Genêt and the handling of the groundwork’. He did undertake some hush-hush work, for on 21 March he refers to ‘a bundle’ which, if not collected by an unnamed secret agent, Ruth was to place in their baggage for America.

  Barlow and Imlay wanted land as the spoil of war, but this private motive blends with public-minded intentions to be of use to France and the Revolution, and of use, too, to their own country by keeping the outlet of the Mississippi open to American trade. There was a third motive. If the Mississippi expedition went through, Barlow would be able to offer Ruth an advantageous return to America with expenses paid by France. Of course, so secret a plot could not be communicated in letters. He said, it ‘will suit you my love much better & me too, because it will carry us both home upon a good mission’. That much he could tell her. He also dwells on the friendship of Mary Wollstonecraft.

  ‘W[ollstonecraft] expresses the greatest love for my dearest,’ he had said on 6 March. He saw her within a day of his arrival in Paris, and again on the 18th: ‘Mrs W. speaks of you with more affection than you can imagine. I never knew her praise any person so much. What is the reason? It is not to flatter me, for she never flatters any one. Why is it that she loves you? Is it because she has found out that every body else loves you? It is well to be in the mode, but I thought her of a more independent spirit.’

  Barlow put further pressure on Ruth by travelling to collect her at Boulogne, but still, she did not come. Frustrated, because he didn’t dare to enter England, he wrote to her on 5 April: ‘Mrs W[ollstonecraft] was exceedingly disappointed to see me return without my dearest. I told you before how she loves you. She never loved any body so well.’ Ten days later, he reproached Ruth once more, making light of the rising Terror: the obsession with security, the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which sent its victims to the guillotine, the curfews, the bread riots in the market, the casual violence in the streets. Far away in Wales, Bess Wollstonecraft was taunted ‘that Miss W[ollstonecraft] is massacred before this’. At this very time Barlow reassures Ruth: ‘you would have been perfectly safe here…Mrs W[ollstonecraft] is exceedingly affectionate to you.’ On 19 April, ‘Mary is exceedingly distressed at your last letter to think you are not to come here. She writes you today, she wrote a long letter before which it seems you have not got.’

  In this way, from March to June, Barlow repeats Mary’s attachment with an insistence that co-opts her for his plans. Her obvious role was to lure Ruth to Paris; the more novel part was to take off with them, and Imlay, for America.

  As the Louisiana scheme gained momentum in late March and early April, with Ruth packing up in London in preparation for crossing the Atlantic, Mary Wollstonecraft was drawn into the little group as Imlay’s ‘sweetheart’. She had no inkling of the coup in the offing. Imlay pictured for her the fresh green breast of the New World. On the frontier, he liked to say, ‘we feel that dignity nature bestowed upon us at the creation’. He promised a society in which ‘sympathy was regarded as the essence of the human soul’, and envisioned, a hundred years on, the entire continent peopled by republicans. A federal government, Imlay was sure, would be able to introduce the change that must take place for man ‘to resume his pristine dignity’.

  Mary caught fire. As Barlow had predicted, she stood ready to leave for America. There, they would farm, and she hoped to bring her sisters over. In mid-June, Mary hints of her American plan in a letter to Bess: ‘I cannot explain myself excepting just to tell you that I have a plan in my head, it may prove abortive, in which you and Everina are included, if you find it good, that I contemplate with pleasure as a way of bringing us all together again.’

  Mary was dreaming of a frontier home for herself and her sisters. With Charles already there, it would unite four favourite members of her family. The utopian dream of the New World was at its height in the early 1790s when Coleridge planned a community on the banks of the Susquehanna, and persuaded Joseph Priestley and Thomas Cooper to cross the sea, with thousands of others. To a reformer like Mary Wollstonecraft, bent on a new social system, revolutionised America presented a hopeful alternative to the violence of revolutionary France. Imlay epitomised this hope, averse (he said) to violent men who trample on laws and civil authority, to standing armies, and to ‘the contumely and ignorance of men educated with none but military ideas’. To Mary, here was a ‘most worthy man’, confident, cheerful, indestructible. Depression vanished in his presence.

  ‘Whilst you love me,’ she told him, ‘I cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burden almost too heavy to be borne.
’

  At thirty-four she was a virgin, apprehensive of situations that shaded into the wide meaning she gave to prostitution. Her judgements of people had been astute: she had detected vanity in Fuseli and excessive protestation in Barlow’s love-letters. She had warmed to older men of sturdy morals, Dr Price and Joseph Johnson. Here, now, was a man of her own generation who stated morals she could share, especially his abhorrence of slavery as ‘a traffic which disgraced human nature’.

  ‘As to whites being more elegantly formed, as asserted by Mr Jefferson, I must confess that it has never appeared so to me,’ he said. ‘Indeed my admiration has often been arrested in examining [blacks’] proportion, muscular strength, and athletic powers.’ No race is better than another, he added. We are ‘essentially the same in shape and intellect’. He praised the American slave poet Phillis Wheatley; urged women’s right to own and inherit property; and the revised edition of his Topographical Description of the frontier in 1797–showing the Wollstonecraft influence–insists that women should not have to answer to laws they can’t promulgate. He wished for women’s sake to reform divorce law.

  The rights of women are central to Imlay’s novel, The Emigrants, published in London three or four months after he began to pursue Mary Wollstonecraft. The novel joins the issue of injured women to Imlay’s subject of frontier heroics. An English family braves dangers and setbacks on their way from Philadelphia via Pittsburgh to settle in the Ohio country, a sentimental adventure complete with ‘Indians’, capture, rescue and camps in the wilderness–anticipating the frontier fiction of Fenimore Cooper. Unfortunately, Imlay’s is dead on the page with flat characters and inflated emotions; and though the hero’s sexual appetite is unusually blatant for American writing of the period, it comes over as comic–half-reverent, half-gloating voyeurism as a beauty’s breasts heave into view through torn clothes. Unfortunately, the tosh overshadows the moral debates where Imlay comes into his own as a clever, well-read man who concurs with Wollstonecraft’s call for the education of women: ‘few women have had strength of mind equal to burst the bands of prejudice’ by ‘soaring into the regions of science and nature’.