Notice sur la vie et les écrits de M. Joël Barlow: Ministre Plénipotentiaire des États-Unis d’Amérique auprès de S.M. l’Empereur des Français

First edition, limited to 500 copies; an association copy of this eulogy to America's National poet, Joel Barlow, gifted by his widow to Count Rumford. American businessman, diplomat, and poet Joel Barlow (1754–1812) studied at Yale, where he developed interests in poetry, moral and political philosophy, and science, but his studies were interrupted by the revolutionary war, during which he became chaplain of the Third Massachussetts Brigade. Barlow continued to write poetry, and secretly became engaged to Ruth Baldwin, 'whose father wished her to select a more practical suitor' (ADNB; the secret engagement was also illegal in Connecticut).

After the war, Barlow opened a printing and stationer's shop in Hartford, CT, considering himself 'destined – if he could only find the right topic – to be the epic poet of the United States' (loc. cit.). In 1787 he published The Vision of Columbus, his epic work on Columbus' discovery of the Americas, which enjoyed a great success. In 1788, as the representative of a short-lived business group that tried to sell Ohio lands to Europeans, Barlow travelled to England and France, and met 'many of the most influential people […] including Thomas Paine, who became a lifelong friend, William Blake, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Mary Wollstonecraft, the marquis the Lafayette, and Brissot de Warville' (loc. cit.). Barlow would stay abroad for seventeen years (one of the few Americans in France at the time), working as a journalist and poet on social and political themes, and propagandist (against monarchic tyranny and for peaceful revolution) amidst and following the French Revolution. He became part of a circle of radical free-thinking writers supported by Joseph Johnson, a London printer and bookseller; collaborated with Paine and William Blake; was granted, with his compatriots George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, French citizenship; was appointed as minister to Algiers in 1796; and became a patron of the arts and sciences when settling in Paris once more in the following year.

Barlow first met Rumford in London on 14 June 1802, while making a brief visit to the city, as he wrote to his friend Robert Fulton: 'I met Count Rumford and he and I were friends in a moment. He told me a great many things new and good, and all the particulars about the Royal Institution. I complimented him liberally and handsomely' (C.B. Todd (ed.), The Life and Letters of Joel Barlow (New York and London, 1886), p. 190). Count Rumford, the Massachusetts-born loyalist Benjamin Thompson, had been forced into exile after the American Revolution, and was considered (together with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) 'the greatest mind America has produced' by Franklin D. Roosevelt (G.I. Brown, Scientist, Soldier, Statesman, Spy: Count Rumford (Stroud, 1999), p. 160). In Bavaria Thompson had been awarded the title of 'Count of the Holy Roman Empire' for his contributions in the field of thermodynamics, and married Antoine Lavoisier's widow, from whom he was later separated.

Upon returning to the politically more friendly United States in 1805 the Barlows, who were friends of Thomas Jefferson's, entered Washington intellectual circles, and Barlow was encouraged to write a history of America while also, notably, proposing a national institution for the arts and sciences. Barlow's diplomatic skills, however, caused President Madison, another friend, to send him back to France, to negotiate a treaty with Napoleon (and obtain his signature), a task which sent Barlow chasing after Napoleon during the Russian campaign, and led to him contracting the pneumonia which would cause his death in Zarnowiec, Poland in 1812.

The Notice is a eulogy on Barlow, the man and his works, followed by an introduction to and text of the first of ten books (i.e. the initial 141 lines) of Barlow's The Columbiad, the 1807 reworking and expansion of his Vision of Columbus, with a parallel French translation. This passage was selected by Konrad Engelbert Oelsner (1764–1828) a friend of Barlow's, who had also been a political correspondent in France during the French Revolution, and was the co-author of the Notice. The other author – and the prime mover behind the Notice – was the French writer, economist, publisher, and emigrant to America Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours. On 10 February 1813 Dupont de Nemours sent manuscript copies of his draft to both James Madison ('the present Chief Magistrate of the United States, [who] appointed Mr. Barlow their minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of France' in 1811) and Thomas Jefferson, who had inspired Barlow in 1805 to engage with 'the plan, which Mr. Jefferson had conceived, of establishing a University at the City of Washington' (contemporary translation of the draft Notice, [https://founders.archives.gov]). In the accompanying letter to Jefferson, Dupont de Nemours wrote: 'I mourn with you the excellent Barlow. I send you a few lines about him that I threw on paper with the help of a very estimable and already famous German [i.e., Oelsner] who knew better than I the early circumstances of his life. This German does not wish to be known. I crossed out the last letters of his name' (translation of letter of 10 February 1813, cf. pp. 612-613 in J. Jefferson Looney (ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. V (Princeton and Oxford, 2008)); the letters were also crossed out in the copy sent to Madison, which survives at the Library of Congress. According to the Bibliographie de l'Empire française (Paris, 1813), 500 copies of the Notice were printed (1280).

This copy of the Notice was sent to Count Rumford by Barlow's widow Ruth and is inscribed (apparently in her hand), 'Count Rumford from Mrs Barlow'. Ruth Barlow features in the eulogy as 'Miss Baldwin of N. Haven, sister to the Senator of that name', with whom the young Barlow formed a 'tie far more interesting to his heart' than his 'friendship[s] of the highest public characters in the nation, both civil and military' (contemporary translation of the draft Notice); and as the recent widow who had responded to the eulogy with Shakespearean verses (which are here reproduced at the end of the eulogy proper, p. 13: 'Grief fills the room…') – in Dupont de Nemours' eyes a grief that was all the more profound as it was silent. In this example of the Notice, there are also two manuscript corrections to errors on pp. 24 and 28 of the English text of the Columbiad in the same hand as the presentation inscription, and therefore presumably also by Ruth Barlow, who would have been very familiar with and invested in her husband's work, and preserving his literary legacy. We have not been able to trace any other association copies of this work in either private or institutional collections.

Barbier 12423 (ascribing the work to Oelsner alone); Sabin 21390.

4to (251 x 203 mm), pp. 31, [1 (blank)]; very small crease at bottom corner of first l., very light foxing along fold line on p. [1]; stitched as issued, folded once [?]for dispatch, uncut; a very fresh, crisp, uncut copy; provenance: Ruth Barlow (née Baldwin, 1756–1818; manuscript corrections in ink on pp. 24 and 28 and presentation inscription on title 'from Mrs Barlow', presenting tract to:) – Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814, physicist and inventor).