Vindication (27 page)

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'.

Imlay also confronts rape in marriage. The fictional Lord B—‘considered women merely as a domestic machine, necessary only as they are an embellishment to their house, and the only means by which their family can be perpetuated'. His wife resolves ‘never to enter the bed of my Lord B—again; for his conduct to her that morning, after coming to her two hours after midnight in a state of intoxication, was too gross for a woman of spirit and delicacy to forget…[To comply again would be,] after the treatment she had received, a most ignominious prostitution.' Lady B's ‘prostitution' dramatises the case for divorce reform. The ‘man of honor' doesn't just talk of morals; he puts them into practice. Whether Imlay himself followed his principles remains to be seen, but as principles go, he was sure to please.

 

When Genêt reached America, he set about enlisting enthusiastic frontiersmen for an assault on Spanish Florida. But he did it so flagrantly that
Washington was forced, on 19 April, to put an end to his activities with a reassertion of American neutrality. Jefferson, as Secretary of State, concluded (or, for diplomatic reasons, pretended to conclude) that Genêt was not representing the policy of his government, and asked for his recall. Since Genêt was seen to be an appointment of Brissot, this weakened Brissot's position. Robespierre was to use the Genêt Affair to justify Brissot's execution. It could be argued that Genêt and Brissot were puppets of Imlay and Barlow, whose names do not appear in the diplomatic crossfire that cut off their Louisiana scheme.

Washington soothed relations with Spain when he spoke publicly of prosecuting American participants in this plot. Vice-President Adams sent his wife Abigail a rhyme about the unidentified secret agents behind it all:

The conspirators in Paris were undismayed, since they were already on to their next scheme. Colonel Benjamin Hichborn of Massachusetts had proposed they use American neutrality in order to ship goods between warring countries. Scores of ships were doing this. The American Minister in London, Mr Pinckney, protested repeatedly over the British navy's retaliation against American shipping. So these were risky ventures–useful, though, for spying.

Barlow continued to use Mary Wollstonecraft as a draw for his wife. ‘Mary writes to have you come here & take lodgings with her at Meudon 5 miles from town. She really loves you very much. Her sweetheart affair goes on well. Don't say a word of it to any creature.' Mary herself wrote four letters to Ruth in quick succession, the last on 7 May (none has survived). Barlow sent his final letter to Ruth on 10 June: ‘Mary is much disappointed & grieved at your not having come…I think she loves [you above] all other creatures.' Ruth then crossed the Channel.

Despite her husband's assurance that Paris was safe and quiet, Ruth arrived
just as the Terror took over. On 2 June the moderates had been detained in their lodgings; on 13 June they were imprisoned; and on 28 July declared traitors. Brissot was amongst them, as was leading feminist Olympe de Gouges, who had set out her
Rights of Woman
to match, point for point, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. ‘Men!' she exclaims. ‘Are you capable of justice? It is a woman who asks the question.' She wished to be ‘a man of state' and demanded women's suffrage as well as the abolition of the slave trade, workshops for the unemployed and a national theatre for women. The immediate cause of her arrest was disseminating anti-Jacobin pamphlets, which she continued to manage from prison until her execution.

During this time, the names of enemy aliens had to be chalked on the doors where they lived. Mary could not endanger the Fillietaz family by her continued presence. In May she had found a post for Bess in Geneva, and applied for a pass in order to join her. A pass was not forthcoming, and Bess decided against Switzerland as too expensive, but significant here is Mary's willingness to leave France. It seems that her romance was at this point no more than romance. There is no sign of Imlay's intervention. If they were sleeping together, Imlay would have made a plan to keep her safe–he was a great instigator of plans. In any case, for Mary to leap into bed with an admirer without a serious understanding would have been out of character, inconsistent with the modesty and sexual caution she expressed in the
Rights of Woman
. It had expanded on her earlier warning against women's susceptibility to flirts and rakes, the residue of her own encounters with Joshua Waterhouse and Neptune Blood. If her first plan had worked, she would have left the country that May, and possibly not seen Imlay again.

As it was, her alternative was to find lodgings outside Paris. Plan number two, to live with Ruth at Meudon, was once again not designed to promote an affair with Imlay. Meudon is likely to have been the subject of her four urgent letters to Ruth in London. It was only when Ruth's intentions remained too uncertain that Mary accepted a third solution, offered by her hosts: she took refuge in a cottage at Neuilly-sur-Seine, north of the Bois de Boulogne beyond the city wall. It was a cottage belonging to or tended by an elderly gardener who worked for the Fillietaz family. He plied Mary
with home-grown fruit and warned against her taste for solitary walks in the wooded lanes leading to the river.

Here, Mary lived quietly and happily from June to August. She had begun to write a ‘great book' on the French Revolution, ‘great' because she resolved ‘to trace the hidden springs and secret mechanism, which have put in motion a revolution, the most important that has ever been recorded in the annals of man'. That summer of 1793 she explored the deserted Versailles, with its fading phantoms. Nothing testifies more hauntingly to the evanescence of the past in the present context of the Terror:

So Mary's days were filled with the history of the present, enlivened by visits from Imlay, his face flushed with expectation as he came to meet her through the
barrière
at Longchamps (one of the guarded exits from the walled Paris). Long afterwards, she would remember the approach of his ‘barrier face' as she waited on the far side, holding up a basket of grapes. ‘Dear girl,' he called her, with lips ‘softer than soft'.

‘I am confident my heart has found peace in your bosom,' she said. ‘Cherish me with that dignified tenderness, which I have only found in you.' So she recalls him by night in the light of her candle; seals him in the folds of her paper; repeats his parting phrase, ‘God bless you.' She was often alone, even ‘quite lonely'. Imlay's visits may have been fewer than we have come to imagine. Business came first.

The first shipping ventures were disastrous. Cargo that Barlow sent to New York on a ship called the
Hannah
turned out to be illegal. A court case ensued, and judgement went against the captain, a man called Parrot. Sixteen years later Parrot finally tracked down Barlow, who had to arrange a reimbursement of $20,000. It's hard to fit Barlow's humorous intimacy,
his warmth towards Mary, his love for Ruth, with this irresponsible distance from the small man who's caught and tried and pays the price. Yet it fits the irresponsibility of the Scioto scam.