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Gilbert Imlay and the Triangular Trade
Wil Verhoeven
| GILBERT Imlay (1754?–1828?) was a man of many talents and trades. He has been described by one commentator as "unscrupulous, independent, courageous, a dodger of debts to the poor, a deserter, a protector of the helpless, a revolutionist, a man of enlightenment beyond his age, a greedy and treacherous land booster." In his Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America and his epistolary novel, The Emigrants, America's first frontier novel and only Jacobin novel, this former officer of the Continental army impressed British radicals as a champion of abolition and social reform. Yet a series of letters and other documents in the Silas Talbot Papers, which are held at the G. W. Blunt White Library of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, reveal less savory details about Imlay. These documents support the notion that Imlay is perhaps best regarded as an early example of the American con man, trying to survive on the murky margins of a transatlantic world deeply divided by international political rivalry, ideological conflict, and military tension.1 |
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Not long after hostilities between Britain and its American colonies ended, Imlay set out across the Allegheny Mountains to try his luck in the Ohio Valley, probably in the early spring of 1783. As a deputy surveyor for Jefferson County, Imlay was soon deeply invested in the Kentucky land bubble, rubbing shoulders with prominent historical figures—as well as wholesale land jobbers—such as Daniel Boone, General George Rogers Clark, John Filson, Richard Henderson, Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Benjamin Sebastian, and General James Wilkinson.2 Having piled up more debt than he could handle while eluding sheriffs' summonses and court writs, Imlay quietly left the West late in 1785 and disappeared from America sometime during the summer of 1787. No one knows what he did or where he was during the next few years, but evidently he put his Kentucky experiences to good use: in 1792 he turned up in London as the author of the Topographical Description. Following the example of J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Imlay's Topographical Description presents itself on the title page as "a series of letters to a friend in England" (the latter in the preface claims to have passed the author's letters on to the press). The work tapped into an earlier cultural formation of transatlantic pastoralism and agrarian primitivism and was specifically designed to participate in the mighty debate then underway in Britain between supporters and detractors of the French Revolution. It became an immediate best seller. With new and often greatly enlarged editions appearing in 1793 (in London, Dublin, New York, and a German translation in Berlin), 1795 (in London), and 1797 (also in London), the Topographical Description was one of the decade's most widely disseminated and influential books on America's trans-Allegheny West. In 1793 Imlay followed up on its success with The Emigrants. |
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