Vindication (25 page)

Tom Paine, whom Mary had met at her publisher's in November 1791, was part of Christie's circle. She visited him at an
hôtel
with an elegant façade and long windows, 63 Faubourg Saint-Denis. Mme de Pompadour had lived there, outside the city walls, through the Porte Saint-Denis and up a slow rise–a long but manageable walk from the rue Meslée. Once, Mary dined with Paine and a militant female of a kind she had not encountered before.

Twenty-seven-year-old Anne-Joseph Méricourt from Liège was a failed singer turned courtesan. In that role she had been an immaculate beauty, her short dark hair setting off the creaminess of her perfectly oval face,
with a crown of ribbons, a delicate ruffle about her neck and a rose at her breast. Come the Revolution, she donned Grecian robes or played the role of ‘Théroigne the Amazon'. On 5 October 1789, when she joined the march on Versailles, she arrived in a red riding-coat, astride a black horse, sabre in hand and pistols at the ready. She called for a legion of Amazons to defend Paris and the Revolution, and declared that bearing arms made each woman a citizen.

Women must ‘compete' with men, Théroigne argued. ‘We too wish to gain a civic crown and gain the right to die for liberty, a liberty perhaps dearer to us since our sufferings under despotism have been greater.' To pursue this aim, she founded the Club des Amis de la Loi, yet women did not rush to fight for their country. Mary Wollstonecraft met Théroigne de Méricourt when her fortunes were about to turn.

On 15 May 1793 she was attacked by market-women in red pantaloons and caps who were terrorising the streets. These women, who had marched on Versailles, now supported a mob from a rival club, the militant Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires led by a chocolate-maker's daughter, Pauline Léon–the only club with any chance of winning a popular base amongst the women of Paris. This Jacobin club had recently formed to overthrow the ruling Girondins, who favoured a free market. Girondin supporters like Théroigne were the particular
bête noire
of the market-women, who fought for fixed prices. They advanced on Théroigne while she was making a speech on the Terrasse des Feuillants, stripped her, and bashed her head with stones, leaving her deranged. In her cell at the Salpêtrière asylum, she sat naked, refusing clothes and muttering against her betrayers. Théroigne's mistake was to think that women's rights had ever mattered to the
poissonnières
, whose prime concern was the price of bread. Wollstonecraft judged the lot as ‘the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having the power to assume more than the vices of the other'. She had no truck with violence and never participated in women's revolutionary clubs.

 

As winter advanced into spring and France faced defeat on its borders, the moderates in the Convention were losing ground to the mob rule
deployed by Jacobin leaders, Robespierre, Marat, Danton and Saint-Just. Roland was forced out of office; Mme Roland, whom Mary is said to have visited, was blamed for undue political influence; her salon in the rue de la Harpe was fading, as was that of Mme Condorcet, wife of the deputy who supported the rights of women. Two milieux Mary had joined, those of Christie and Helen Maria Williams, by virtue of being English, were now composed of ‘enemy aliens'. Early in March, she shifted towards a set of Americans who sustained a fluid existence between revolutionists in France and counter-revolutionists in England. Sliding between opposed worlds, they held to the enterprising edge of their own independence. Mary Wollstonecraft's entrée to this milieu came about through the Barlows.

In London, Ruth Barlow was torn between fear of France and English blame of her husband: ‘–here you cannot return at present,' she warned him, ‘–every thing evil is said of you, & I am obliged to avoid company not to hear you abused. I hope you may be provided for in some eligible way in Paris–or what is to become of us.'

Ruth argued once more for what seemed to her the only reasonable course of action: return to America. Barlow's characteristic answer was to pull out all the stops: his wife was good, she was constant, she was his ‘tender friend', and he vowed to love her all his life. No, he could not consent to Ruth's sailing home separately. He relied on fellow-Americans to meet her needs in his absence: Benjamin Jarvis, John Browne Cutting (whose brother, Nathaniel, was consul in Le Havre), and Mark Leavenworth (another Yale graduate whose wife Ruth had introduced to Mary), all part of a network linking the warring cities.

Ruth asked her husband to enclose her letters in those to Mr Leavenworth, ‘as all letters with my name on them are opened'; Barlow preferred to address ‘Mrs Brownlow' at her lodgings at 10 Great Titchfield Street. The war had placed Ruth in a difficult situation: ports were blockaded, frontiers surrounded with armies, and sailing to America increasingly unsafe. It was rare for her to protest, but now she did: ‘I fear my love you did wrong in going to Paris'.

In answer, Barlow outdid himself in his twelfth-anniversary verse for 26 January:

Ruth stood by him. ‘I know your conduct will always be directed by humanity integrity & a desire to promote the good of your fellow creatures.'

‘
Tu m'as enchanté, ma charmante épouse, par ta lettre du 28 janvier
,' Barlow replied. He claimed to fall back on French or Italian for the language of love, but his verse, always in English, is equal to his extravagance, and truer to his playful humour. On 5 March he returned to Paris from Savoy, blithe as ever after failing to be elected to the National Convention.

‘I am not at all disappointed or mortified,' he assured Ruth. ‘Another thing which is better I believe will succeed soon.'

This unnamed ‘thing' was nothing less than to wrest Louisiana from Spain. It was then a vast territory stretching from the southern frontier of Tennessee and the western frontier of the Mississippi across the central plains as far as New Spain in the west. France had ceded this territory to Spain in 1762, and for some years had eyed it regretfully–particularly Brissot, an ex-spy, now a leading deputy of the Convention, who had visited the States in 1788 and involved himself in the Scioto scheme. Barlow, who had recently translated Brissot's
New Travels in the United States
, now offered a plan of action. He was not the first to do so. Ahead of him was a tall, handsome American, verging on forty. His name was Gilbert Imlay and he was an authority on the frontier.

Mary Wollstonecraft met this frontiersman in March–April 1793. At the time, she was in constant touch with Barlow, whose plans for a coup were identical with those of Imlay. Barlow was the first to predict a romance for Mary when, on 19 April, he told Ruth: ‘Between you and me–you must not hint it to her nor to J[ohnso]n nor to any one else–I believe she has got a sweetheart–and that she will finish by going with him to A[meric]a a wife. He is of Kentucky and a very sensible man.'

 

Gilbert Imlay was one of the most enigmatic figures to emerge on the frontier in the 1780s. He had a solid background. Within a generation of arriving in America, the Imlays were rich enough to be gentlemen, and by the time Mary Wollstonecraft crossed Gilbert's path, leading members of his family were living in style in the new-built Imlay Mansion in Allen's Town, New Jersey.

In the 1690s Peter Imlay, a settler from Scotland, had acquired tracts of land in eastern New Jersey. His son sold these lands, and in 1710 a deed records that 480 acres of flat farmland in western New Jersey were sold to ‘Patrick Imlay, Gent', for £330. This became Imlaystown, where a great-grandson, Gilbert, was born in about 1754, the last of three children. Their mother must have died when they were small, as their father took another wife, Mary Holmes, when Gilbert was eight. His elder brother, Robert, settled in Philadelphia as a merchant in the firm of Imlay & Potts. Philadelphia was America's busiest port, with the topgallants of merchantmen looming over Water and Front Streets, and wharves stretching nearly two miles along the river. Here, a cousin, John Imlay, five years older than Gilbert, made his fortune in shipping. His trade lay with the West Indies where he owned a plantation and slaves on the island of St Thomas. It was John Imlay who, in 1787, built the fifteen-room mansion on South Main Street, Allen's Town, a white house with shutters, fanlight, and hand-carved winding stair, in a white-washed village close to Imlaystown. Had Mary Wollstonecraft accompanied Imlay to America, as he and Barlow proposed, the family of her frontiersman might have surprised her, together with their Queen Anne chairs, Chippendale dining-table and high post bed with a canopy to match the wallpaper. It was not the grandeur of the Earl's house in Henrietta Street, but its clean lines and balanced wings have the quiet grace of the domestic architecture of the Early Republic.

By the late eighteenth century the Imlay clan stretched from western New Jersey across the Pennsylvania border to the newly independent capital of Philadelphia. The papers the Imlays preserved are almost all accounts. No deal was too minute to be recorded; no bit of ribbon unpriced, along with great cargoes of beef and sugar. The odd surviving
letter is purely functional. No flicker of character comes through these transactions, apart from pride in commerce and the orderliness of settled enterprise.

During the American Revolution, New Jersey was the site of more battles than any other state: three of the most decisive, Trenton, Princeton and Monmouth, were fought near Gilbert's home. The area was largely Loyalist (loyal to the Crown), including an Imlay cousin who was imprisoned in New York by American forces. Eight other Imlays, including Gilbert's father (imprisoned by the British), fought on the American side. In January 1777 Gilbert, aged twenty-two, joined up as 1st lieutenant and paymaster in Colonel David Forman's Regiment of Continental Troops. Four months later, he persuaded seven out of eleven Loyalist prisoners to change sides and join his regiment. Surprise attacks leading to American victories at Trenton and Princeton were helped by secret agents paid by Washington to cross the lines carrying goods for sale. The spy as salesman: this is how some daring young men of Imlay's generation developed a commercial face.

Imlay had signed up for the duration of the war, so it may seem odd that after only a year and a half, in July 1778, he was ‘omitted' from his regiment. A common suggestion is that he was wounded in the battle of Monmouth at the end of June, but a wounded man would have returned to his regiment after his recovery. Imlay bore no subsequent signs of injury. A more likely explanation may lie in the fact that the month of Imlay's ‘omission' coincides with Washington's formation of a new intelligence service. It's conceivable that Imlay's initiative and success in converting Loyalists to the revolutionary cause could have led to an appointment as secret agent moving between the lines close to home. This would explain his disappearance for the remainder of the war (apart from one sighting of him in the capital, fashionably dressed). Washington acted as his own effective spymaster. His spies were sworn to permanent secrecy so that some remained unrecognised. If Imlay did serve his country in this way it would explain his disappearance, and also a quality Mary warmed to in his character, an easy dignity. After the war he reappeared as ‘Captain' Imlay. It's thought the rank was bogus, yet not one of
the high-ranking officers who were his postwar associates ever questioned it.
*

Imlay surfaced in 1783. The peace of 1783 between the United States and Britain left the frontier open to American settlement, and Imlay was speculating in Kentucky land as early as April of that year. His earliest deals were with Isaac Hite, who never recovered what Imlay owed him. On one day, 11 November, Imlay acquired vast tracts amounting to 17,400 acres, on the Licking River in Fayette County. At the time there were expanding settlements at Lexington and Louisville, but Kentucky was not yet a state; it was largely wilderness reached via a narrow, rocky track passable only by packhorse. In 1775 Daniel Boone, prime pathfinder of the frontier, had hacked this track through a gap in the north–south chain of the Allegheny Mountains. Boone was a legendary frontiersman, shaking off the trammels of civilisation, a fighter and one-time prisoner of the Native Americans who learnt their lore. Nine or so years after Boone broke through the Cumberland Gap, Imlay appropriated ten thousand of Boone's loveliest acres, near Limestone, worth at the time £2000. This was the bond Imlay offered Boone, entranced, he said, by the balmy climate on the far side of the Gap, the azure sky, the flowers, the gentle breezes, the birds singing ‘in unison with love and nature'. His paean to a new Eden was like Barlow's promotion of Scioto, except that Imlay had inspected it in person.

He took an alternative route, travelling from Pittsburgh in March 1784, a journey of five days on a flatboat down the Ohio River as it flowed towards the Mississippi. His arrival and quick plunge into the ferment of
land speculation are registered on a scrap of rough paper recently acquired by the Beinecke Library. It's a scrawled note in a looped hand, sent from the furthest outpost of the frontier, on the western edge of Kentucky, to the New Jersey commander Colonel Henry (‘Light Foot Harry') Lee who was now settled in Lexington: