The Joeliad
How an early American poet went from selling fraudulent land deeds to striking a powerful blow for freedom of religion.
Toward the end of my post on Korah, I mention Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, which states that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” It occurred to me this morning that I had no idea who actually wrote that line. So that’s been my project today.
Now, to be clear, the “it is not in Heaven”/death of the author principle is in full effect here: the intent of the writer is not part of our civic religion. What makes that line part of our scripture is that it was read and ratified unanimously in the Senate and signed by the President, who added a signing statement saying that all Americans should learn and abide by all of its articles. And remember, this was right after the founding. These ratifiers and signatories were there at the founding. The President who signed it was John Adams. The text, as read and signed, is sanctified both by process and by its status as a primary source. The intent of the text’s author is not.
That said, after a bit of Google Books searching, I’m pretty sure I know what the intent was, and it’s like exactly what I wanted it to be.
The Original
The original treaty was written in Arabic. It’s not clear to me who actually wrote it. I was hoping for a Muslim hero in this particular story, but awkwardly the strongest candidate I’ve been able to find is Naphtali ben Moses, part of the Busnach dynasty of Algerian-Jewish traders and civil servants. Naphtali was trying to run a business, but got dragged into politics. This was partially because the government wanted their Minister of Jewish Affairs to be actually Jewish, but it was more about the French refusing to pay their debts. During his wars of conquest, Napoleon had been importing Algerian food. In today’s money, he now owed something like 65 million dollars to Naphtali’s company. The company itself hadn’t been able to afford to give him so much credit, and so had borrowed money in turn from the Algerian government. This gave the government and Naphtali a common interest in collecting.
Negotiations went poorly. The French kept saying they’d pay up as soon as things got politically stable. The issue, decades of French political instability later, lead to a French invasion, after the Algerian head of state hit the French ambassador with a fly swatter while discussing the debt. Whether he was aiming for a fly or a Frenchman depends on which side is telling the story. This eventually led to France conquering the country, thereby settling the debt. History is real stupid sometimes.
I’d put fairly low odds on Naphtali being the author of the original treaty. He may have ghostwritten a letter that is quoted wholesale in it, and he probably indirectly or directly gave advice. Tripoli, in this and subsequent treaties, was very careful to always get paid in advance. But my guess is that I’m just being limited by my reliance on English and French language sources, which put a Eurocentric filter on this African story.
At any rate, people generally seem to feel that the original treaty didn’t include an analogue to the line that I’m interested in, and that it was introduced as part of the translation process. This suggests the most likely author of that line is the English-speaking member of the translation team, American poet Joel Barlow.
Joel Falls In With A Weird Crowd
While the French were cheating Naphtali, Naphtali’s future opposite number was busy cheating the French. A Connecticut Yankee, Barlow had come to France to sell American land to French investors on behalf of the Scioto Company. As he may or may not have known, the Scioto Company did not, in fact, own the land it was selling. When a wave of French settlers arrived and discovered they’d been had, the new U.S. government took pity on them and gave them some free land, which is why there’s a Gallia County in Ohio.
Barlow successfully plead ignorance. He soon fell in with the French Revolution, briefly serving in the revolutionary government before the Reign of Terror drove him, his wife Ruth, and his friend, fellow expat Thomas Paine, away to England. Paine had been inconveniently in prison during the publication of The Age of Reason, so Barlow helped get the first volume out.
In England, they sought out Joseph Johnson, a publisher who had helped get revolutionary books into print. Johnson offered to help them meet other radical thinkers, including other authors he was publishing, at one of his dinner parties. Johnson hosted a lot of these. Over simple, vegetable-heavy meals, with rice pudding for dessert, the guests would have meandering philosophical conversations, jumping from politics to religion to science. I want to go to there.
Alas, I cannot. But when Johnson put out the word that Paine would be there, two good friends of the blog were both willing and able. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had each read Paine’s work, and were both eager to talk to him. Godwin wanted to learn from the master, while Wollstonecraft was there to DESTROY him with FACTS and LOGIC. They met at the dinner, took an instant dislike to each other, and later married.
Barlow and Godwin were quicker to bond. Godwin’s diary records more than 20 conversations they had, in addition to reading each other’s work. His failed attempts to tersely summarize their conversations are a little funny to me—one reads “talk of property, marriage & immortality”. Reading Barlow’s prose, it’s clear they had a heavy influence on each other.
Wollstonecraft, meanwhile, bonded with Barlow’s wife. Godwin’s diary soon starts recording sharing meals and philosophy with Barlow and Wollstonecraft together. Wollstonecraft wasn’t super into Joel, but that seems to be mainly due to him being happily married, a situation she considered impossible for anyone and therefore a sign of dishonesty in a man. His love letters to his wife were too well-written, she felt, to be genuine. Still, she trusted Ruth, and she knew that Joel was kind, mild-mannered, and radical. When the Barlows moved back to America, she asked them to take her younger brother Charles with them.
The Columbiad
Things got hot for Barlow in England too, this time because Johnson had published Barlow’s no-punches-pulled revolutionary tract Advice to the Privileged Orders, which the government immediately un-published. Barlow left for the land of free speech, as Johnson fantasized about doing but never did.
Barlow continued to write from the heart, but in the brand-new United States, this was never going to get him into trouble—he was a patriot. His most famous work is an epic poem, written in the style of ancient epic poetry like The Iliad, as was a popular conceit at the time. The Columbiad, which alternates between mythic poetry and explanatory prose, was inspired by yet another attempt to re-contextualize the Moses/Korah conflict. As a Christian, Barlow didn’t want Moses to be the villain, but as the author of the God Save the King parody God Save the Guillotine, Barlow had trouble with Moses’s authoritarianism. The solution he liked was to imagine that Moses had perfect precognitive power. He knew exactly what would follow from all of his actions, and the ends justified the means.
Barlow:
These systems appear to have been formed with an express design to prevent all future improvement in knowledge, or enlargement of the human mind; and to fix those nations forever in a state of ignorance, superstition and barbarism.
…
Moses must be vindicated upon this idea, that the divine moral law, which was designed, at a future period, to regulate and harmonize the whole human race, must be preserved in that nation, which was to give birth to the Saviour of mankind. If we allow him to have had a prophetic knowledge of these events, his institutions may be pronounced unexceptionable in every part.
If Moses was vindicated by a vision, Barlow thought, then think of what a glorious vision Christopher Columbus might have received. Columbus, Barlow thought, was under-appreciated. There was no Columbus Day yet, even though there was a Cortez Day, and Barlow hated Cortez. Also, somehow we’d ended up naming the entire continent, not after Columbus, but after wannabe-Columbus Amerigo Vespucci. So he wrote his book, originally titled The Vision of Columbus, to raise him to the stature of a mythic hero.
In a moment of despair, Columbus is comforted by a vision delivered by God, complete with rhyming voiceover.
Now lift thine eye. O’er Europe’s circling rounds,
Where kings contending claim their bordering bounds,
Behold in light, the nations slowly rise,
Like trembling vapours in the morning skies.
And so on, and on, and on, extrapolating out Barlow’s optimistic predictions for the future impact of America.
Already taught, thou know'st the fame that waits
His rising seat in thy confederate states.
There stands the model, thence he long shall draw
His forms of policy, his traits of law;
Each land shall imitate, each nation join
The well-based brotherhood, the league divine,
Extend its empire with the circling sun,
And band the peopled globe beneath its federal zone.
There’s also a very long diversion to talk about the founding of Peru, in both poetry and prose, and how awesome the Inca were in general. Barlow and I really would’ve gotten along, opinions about Columbus aside. It’s honestly hard for me not to just start writing about the Inca now. But I did have a point I was getting to!
Federalist Religion
Historians have a comically hard time describing Barlow’s religious views. I’ve seen him described as an atheist, a Deist, and an advocate for a new, one-world religion to be adopted by everyone. To me, though, it’s pretty simple, laid out in black and white at the very end of his epic poem.
He open'd calm the universal cause,
To give each realm its limit and its laws,
Bid the last breath of tired contention cease,
And bind all regions in the leagues of peace;
Till one confederate, condependent sway
Spread with the sun and bound the walks of day,
One centred system, one all-ruling soul
Live thro the parts and regulate the whole.
Barlow was a Federalist. Possibly the purest form of Federalist there was. He didn’t only want the United States to have both a strong central government and diverse, partially autonomous states. He also wanted religion to work like that.
Tho different creeds their priestly robes denote,
Their orders various and their rites remote,
Yet one their voice, their labors all combined,
Lights of the world and friends of humankind.
My bro Joel, with whom I am forming a parasocial relationship in record time, says basically the same thing in his very banned book Advice to the Privileged Orders that I said in my Korah essay—Jesus is great, every church or state that calls itself Christian is a perversion of Jesus’s word, Constantine was a brutal tyrant and his union of church and state should be seen only in that light. Both religion and government ought to be the servants of the people. The union of church and state perverts both—they begin to serve each other instead. Barlow states explicitly that church and state should always be separate. So he’s clearly not, contra to how some read him, calling for a one world government to impose a new global religion. He’s rather calling for a religious movement to parallel the secular one. Just as the various states united, while maintaining their individual characters, so should the various faiths recognize the shared humanism at their core and start to see themselves as federated.
As far as I know, there isn’t a consensus term for this attitude, although ecumenism comes close. Call it federated humanist ecumenism, maybe. Plus separation of church and state, with guaranteed freedom of religion.
Barlow still saw everything through the lens of the Abrahamic religions. He didn’t share my feeling that Roman polytheism was basically the right answer for them, seeing any kind of polytheism as evidence of “corruption.” As his comments about Moses and Jesus show, his Christianity survived contact with the Enlightenment. But he saw establishment Christianity as a blight on the faith, a source of war, and an ongoing threat to the revolution. Then he lucked into a way of fixing that.
Boss Battle
Barlow was drafted into his country’s government almost immediately after returning to it. His ideology was aligned with that of the dominant Federalist party, lots of people claimed to have read his epic poem about America, he’d lived in multiple countries, and he’d even had a government job in France. In that unique moment, there weren’t a lot of people more qualified than him. And when the Barbary piracy crisis arose, all of those people were busy and/or scared of being enslaved by pirates. So they made Barlow the ambassador to Algiers, and sent him to go sort it out.
That’s why, when it came time to write the English-language version of the Treaty meant to put an end to the violence, Barlow was the one in the room. This was his opportunity to contribute to the epic. All his life, he’d been unwittingly preparing for this moment. He had to translate the treaty faithfully, so that both sides were signing the same legally binding document. But the original had a small section that wasn’t in legalese, just internal commentary that wasn’t of interest to Americans. So that gave him a tiny bit of blank space to write in. He had just a few lines to write something that simultaneously felt like it belonged in the treaty, wouldn’t offend either government, and would ensure a pluralist America for all time.
But Barlow had trained with the greatest revolutionary authors of the age. He’d written his own agenda into pastiches of the styles of ancient sages and modern adversaries. He’d written his way out of danger of imprisonment by two different kings and a Robespierre. He had this.
Article 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Muslims; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohammedan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
It’s perfect. It’s honestly far better written than the Bill of Rights, which is full of impossible-to-honor terms and manages to call for the right to bear arms to be both “well-regulated” and “unabridged” in the same sentence, to our eternal confusion. Article 11 leaves no room for misinterpretation (not that people haven’t tried). It mixes present, past, and future tenses without any dangling participles to make it ambiguous which is which. And yet it manages to express multiple things at the same time. It serves the treaty by declaring that the United States will not use religion as a casus belli. It serves his political agenda by ensuring that separation of church and state, as a simple declaration of fact, will be endorsed by the U.S. Congress. Even Jefferson had never managed that. It serves his cultural agenda with the “in any sense” clause and the “no character of enmity” bit—providing ammunition against those who in the future would call for internal or external hegemony for the dominant culture of the U.S. And it can’t be undone! It puts a description of the founding of the U.S. on a document to be signed by the founders. That’s not something that can be repealed, superseded or amended by later generations.
Where other writers would have tried to smuggle in a message through ambiguous language, or injected a blatant editorial that would be edited away, Joel Barlow just…found the right words.
It’s nowhere near powerful enough to preserve pluralism in the United States. It’s just the strongest possible language that would have achieved consensus. Its only force today is whatever we choose to give it. The rest of the fight is up to us.
Bonus: Korah in Paine
Thomas Paine’s Christianity did not survive contact with the Enlightenment, which made the problem of Korah easier for him than for Barlow. He wrote a poem about Korah, because of course he did.
The poem gives one version of the story, from Korah’s perspective, claiming that it’s merely translating the words of “a Jew of Venice”. I imagine most Christian readers assumed that was a lie. But the poem really is a translation, into a form parodying the Ballad of Chevy Chase, of a passage from the Midrash Tehillim. This commentary (probably) didn’t actually come from Venice, but it was republished there in the 16th century, so I’m guessing that’s how Paine found it.
Paine translates it fairly (if you’ll pardon the word) faithfully, and without commentary. He trusts that in the cultural context of his audience, and with his irreverent choice of medium, the words of the ancient rabbis would be read as a condemnation of religion, taxation without representation, and so forth. It’s not a particularly witty poem, but it’s a witty trick to pull.
Paine is faithful to the original, that is, up until the last stanza, where he resolves the problem of Korah to his own complete satisfaction.
But Aaron called an earthquake up,
And fire from out the sky;
And all the consolation is-
The Bible tells a lie.