David Bailie Warden

With the defeat of the uprising, Warden was repudiated by his Bangor presbytery. Rather than seek a new licence to preach, in New York he found employment as teacher, first as principal of the Columbia Academy, at Kinderhook, and in 1801 head tutor at nearby Kingston Academy in Ulster county. He also tutored the family of John Armstrong Jr.. When in 1806 President Jefferson appointed the Revolutionary War general Minister to court of Napoleon, Warden accompanied him as legation secretary to Paris.

In 1808 Jefferson appointed Warden consul pro tempore, but despite loyalty shown in defense of his employer when attacked by Federalist press, in September 1810 Armstrong relieved Warden of his duties, two days before relinquishing his own position.[7]

In the United States, Jefferson interceded with his successor in the White House, James Madison, on behalf of Warden whom he described as "a perfectly good humored, inoffensive man, a man of science and I observe a great favorite of those of Paris… ".[8] He was also favoured by Eliza Parke Curtis, granddaughter of George Washington and a close friend of Dolly Madison, the President's wife. Further support was offered by the network United Irish exiles, among them Thomas Addis Emmet, William MacNeven and John Chambers, and on other Ulster Presbyterian immigrants who had been significant to Democratic-Republican electoral successes in major eastern cities.[9][7]

In August 1811 Warden returned to Paris as Consul.[10] A year later, Madison added the duries of “Agent of American Prize-causes”:[11] Warden was to assist with deluge of claims from American shippers, merchants and insurers arising from the zealous enforcement at sea of the Napoleon's Continental System of embargo against Britain.[12] Warden found the new ambassador, Joel Barlow, more sympathetic: Barlow had lived in Paris under the Republic and had been a friend of Thomas Paine.[7]

When, at the end of 1812, Barlow unexpectedly died, Warden succeeded in having himself recognised by the French foreign minister, the duc de Bassano, as American "consul general". The arrogation of office did not sit well with rivals in the service, or with the incoming ambassador. William H. Crawford found himself having to contend with a subordinate who dined with de Bassano, socialised with Empress Joséphine and attended theatre with the Empress Marie Louise. Notwithstanding his haste in getting his credentials recognised by the newly returned Bourbons, in August 1814 Warden was dismissed. He never again held diplomatic appointment.[12]

In 1810, Warden had not won friends in the Madison administration with his translation of the principal abolitionist reference in France, Henri Grégoire's De la Littérature Des Nègres (1808). In his preface Warden noted that, "ardent" in their desire to amass riches, Europeans "affected to believe, that the black color of the negro was sufficient excuse ... to treat him worse than a brute". But Grégoire had "proven by facts, that blacks not only possess talents, but also those nobler virtues that elevate man in the scale of being" so that for the loss of their liberty there can be no just argument or compensation. From Glasgow University Warden recalled the insistence of his teacher, John Millar, that any bargain entered into at the cost of liberty is unequal and "ought to be broken".[13]

Remaining in France, in 1813 Warden published his first book, On the Origin, Nature, Progress and Influence of Consular Establishments. It circulated widely in diplomatic circles, and has been classed as a "pioneering" contribution to "the emergence of doctrinal views and a specialist literature on international law".[14]

Warden protested the tendency of American merchants to regard his consular services as an extension of their own network of foreign correspondents and factors; as a device for recovering losses and gaining competitive advantage but without the corresponding costs of commission. The fixation with commerce was in general to be regretted. Instead of "softening" animosities, commerce had become a source of international and social division.[15]

At the shrine of commerce, the ruling powers of different countries have sacrificed the most solemn principles, and individuals, by a sort of Circean enchantment, have been transformed into monsters divested of everything that constitutes the social man. Nothing can be conceived more mean, selfish or contracted, than the mind of a person whose sentiments and thoughts are regulated by the balance of profit and loss.[15]

He regretted, in particular that the republican character of Americans had been tarnished by the "insatiable and indiscriminate pursuit of objects of traffic".

[U]nfortunately, the opinion, however ill-founded, is almost universal that every American is more or less engaged in foreign or domestic trade or barter; and the noble and independent spirit of the country is believed to be avaricious and commercial.[15]

It was many years before the State Department would heed Warden's argument that for a consul "to be useful to his country in arts, sciences and manufactures, [he]must have no commercial engagements", that his salary be commensurate with his situation, and that he needed to be as much a cultural agent as a commercial one.[15][16]

Warden's observations on politics, literature, medicine (in 1806, he formally enrolled in the Ecole de Medicine de Paris), chemistry, natural science, and education resulted in a wide correspondence with, among others, Alexander von Humboldt, Joel Roberts Poinsett, Alexander Dallas Bache, the Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Washington Irving and Thomas Jefferson.[17][18] In 1809 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

In France, as a friend of leading French writers and intellectuals, Warden offered assistance to visiting scholars from America providing a bridge between the European and American intellectual communities. In 1819 his publication, in three volumes, of A Statistical, Political and Historical Account of the United States of America helped secure his election in 1826 as a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences, Morales et Politiques.[19][20] The publishers of the encyclopedic series, L'art de vérifier les dates, commissioned him to research the volumes on North and South America in 1821; these ran to ten volumes and were written over thirteen years.[21]

Alexis de Tocqueville visited Warden in Paris before embarking on his travels in United States in 1831. His Democracy in America may owe something to Warden's perceptions.[7] It is possible that they also discussed Ireland from which de Tocqueville was to report in 1835, finding conditions for the majority not at all improved from those against which Warden had revolted forty years before.[22]

Warden himself never returned to Ireland, although others who left under the same circumstances as himself did so with impunity. When in the United States he had shared articles from Irish journals, including the Belfast Monthly Magazine produced by the initiator of the United Irish movement, William Drennan,[7] and he maintained an Irish correspondence.

On the title pages of his published works, Warden credited himself a member of the Belfast Literary Society. But the mutual interest was the natural sciences: he had been elected in Belfast on the basis of an American journal he had kept on weather, disease, and meteorological phenomena.[23]

Ireland, which after the union with Great Britain had seen the birth of a new, overwhelmingly Catholic, national movement under Daniel O'Connell, was not a subject of Warden's later research and commentary. Hailing him on his death in 1847 an "incarnation of a people", Honoré de Balzac noted that for twenty years O'Connell's name had filled the press of Europe as no man since Napoleon. [24] Yet of this there seems no record in Warden's extensive, wide ranging, correspondence.[25]

• 1810: (Translator) Henri Grégoire, An enquiry concerning the intellectual and moral faculties, and literature of Negroes. Brooklyn, Thomas Kirk.
• 1813: On the Origin, Nature, Progress and Influence of Consular Establishments. Paris, Smith, Rue Montmorency.
• 1816: Chorographical and Statistical Description of the District of Columbia. Paris, Smith, Rue Montmorency
• 1819: A Statistical, Political, and Historical Account of the United States of North America 3 vols., A. Constable and Co, Edinburgh; T. Wardle, Philadelphia.
• 1820: Bibliotheca America Septentirionalis. Paris, L'imprimerie de Nouzou
• 1825: Description Geographique et Historique du Bresil, Paris, Madame Huzard.
• 1827: Recherches sur les antiquités de l'Amérique Septentrionale. Paris, Everat, Imprimeur-Libraire.
• 1829: Notice Biographique Sur Le Général Jackson, Président Des États-Unis de l'Amérique Septentrionale, Barrois Aine-Libraire
• 1831: Bibliotheca Americana: Being a Choice Collection of Books Relating to North and South America and the West-Indies. Paris
• 1832-1844:L'art de vérifier les dates des faits historiques, des chartes, des chroniques et autres anciens monuments, depuis la naissance de Notre-Seigneur, Vols. [33-37 and 39-44] written under the running title "Chronologie historique de l'Amerique." Paris, Moreau imprimeur.