Sherry Chandler

Gilbert Imlay

Gilbert Imlay is a fascinating character. Idealistic enough to have won Mary Wollstonecraft and fathered her first child, opportunistic (or at least connected) enough to have moved through the height of the French Terror with impunity, he seems to me emblematic of imperialist America. Lyndall Gordon, in Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (HarperCollins 2005), calls him a type of Gatsby. I tend to think more of The Quiet American. And perhaps those two are aspects of the same thing. Certainly Imlay was in the middle of what was going on in post-Revolutionary Kentucky – and apparently in post-Revolutionary France.

Imlay was born into a wealthy Colonial family with land in New Jersey and shipping interests in Philadelphia. He was apparently well-enough educated, presentable enough, to move through all levels of European society. Although some of his family remained British Loyalists, he signed on in 1777 as a lieutenant in the Continental Army. He was omitted from his regiment, however, in 1778 and didn’t re-surface until after the war. There is some evidence that he was a turncoat; his family’s records list him as a British soldier. But Gordon speculates that he may have been one of Washington’s double agents. No taint of betrayal follows him.

Imlay turns up again in 1783, speculating on land in Kentucky. He bought thousands of acres but ran into money troubles and stiffed even Daniel Boone (for the price of 2000 prime acres). Running from his creditors, Imlay passed title for the Boone land to General James Wilkinson, a prime mover in the Spanish Conspiracy, and went to ground again. Gordon speculates that once again Imlay may have been playing the double agent, this time for Wilkinson in his (possibly pretence of) efforts to align Kentucky with Spain. It was Wilkinson who, acting independently and illegally, opened the port of New Orleans for river trade from Kentucky in 1787, with a nice monopoly for himself. The opening of this market was extremely important to settlement in Kentucky. Previously all potential trade goods had to be carried back across the mountains in some way. During this period, Spain, England, and France all thought Kentucky was at play and there seem to have been spies and agents everywhere.

In 1792, Kentucky joined the Union and Gilbert Imlay surfaced again, this time in London, passing himself off as a Kentuckian and flogging a book that he claimed to have written while he was in the wilderness: A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America. Robert Hare, in his introduction to the facsimile edition of The Emigrants (Gainesville, FL: Scholarly Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964), calls A Topical Description “one of the most successful travel books of its time.” It went through two London editions, a Dublin and an American edition, and a translation into German.

By 1793, both Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft were in Paris and the Reign of Terror was beginning. By August 1793, Mary was pregnant and the guillotine was working overtime. Again Gordon finds implications that Imlay was working as a double agent. He was definitely trying to make his fortune as a blockade runner and still involved in the schemes involving Louisiana. Wollstonecraft wanted to establish a utopian settlement in the New World. Imlay may have been considerably more ambitious than that.

Though his dealings in France are somewhat mysterious, he was well connected and, by registering her as his wife with the American ambassador, was able to offer Wollstonecraft protection at a time when British citizens were being arrested and executed. (This included Tom Paine, who escaped the guillotine by a fluke.) Their daughter, Francis (Fanny) Imlay, was born in LeHavre on May 10, 1794. By 1796, the affair was over, Wollstonecraft was involved with William Godwin, and Imlay had disappeared from history. According to Hare:

Except for a record on a tombstone on the Isle of Jersey that a man named Gilbert Imlay died in 1828, no information about him since the desertion [of Wollstonecraft] has been found.

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