This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Were President Trump that way inclined, he might usefully ginger up his speeches with references to The Columbiad, a grandiloquent poem of 8,350 lines in nine volumes written by Joel Barlow and published in 1807. It is an American Aeneid, a national epic that takes in the young country’s past, its struggle against British sovereignty, and envisages its shimmering future. Here is the story of making America great the first time round.
Barlow was an ardent republican who fought in the War of Independence and believed that “American civilisation was world civilisation”. Nevertheless, in 1792 he became a French citizen and was elected to the National Assembly. It was in Paris that he met another American republican, the painter John Vanderlyn.
Vanderlyn (1775–1852) had been born at Kingston on the Hudson. Whilst he was a child, the British had razed the town to the ground: he had, therefore, no love for “Haughty Britannia”. At 21, the future vice-president, Aaron Burr, sent him to study in Paris, where the Revolution was still playing out. There, Barlow asked him to contribute illustrations for The Columbiad.
Book six of the poem contained the brutal and tragic story of Jane McRea, a young woman of Irish and Scottish descent who was engaged to an officer in the British Army, Lieutenant David Jones.
In 1777, Jane was in territory held by the patriots as her fiancé headed south with the army commanded by General John Burgoyne — “Gentleman Johnny” — aiming for Fort Edward, 50 miles north of Albany. Jones arranged for two Huron warriors, Duluth and LeLoup, serving as auxiliaries with the army to fetch Jane and escort her to him at the British camp.
What then happened is unclear and reports, all heavily tinged with racial stereotypes, vary. What is certain is that Jane was killed, either by a tomahawk blow or by a bullet, and scalped.
Vanderlyn conjured up a Classical history painting set in the New World
For Barlow, as for many others, this was an illustration of British ruthlessness: savages in the service of the oppressors killing an innocent, beautiful and white American-born woman for money.
Vanderlyn saw the potential in this horrific episode. The dominant style in French art at that moment was Neoclassicism, in which scenes of Greek and Roman history could offer edifying moral lessons. So Vanderlyn put his training to good use and conjured up a Classical history painting set in the New World.
Vanderlyn exhibited his picture at the Paris Salon of 1804 under the loaded title A Young Woman Slaughtered by Two Savages in the Service of the English During the American War. The message of British perfidy and indigenous brutality was clear. It is a clever amalgam. The poses of the two Hurons and the doomed Jane are taken from antique statuary such as the Borghese Gladiator and the Dying Niobid. Jane’s dress, her wedding dress, some say, echoes Classical garb.
The killing is arranged as a frieze, a variation of an episode depicted in the Amazon frieze of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, with intimations too of Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women that had been exhibited in 1799. To leaven this learning, the warriors’ faces are contorted with bloodlust, whilst Jane looks up imploringly. In real life she had black hair; Vanderlyn rendered it golden to highlight her innocence. Meanwhile, one breast is bared for an added frisson. In the background, a distraught Jones runs towards the action — too late to save his wife-to-be from her grisly fate. Here is a mix of the Iliad and the penny dreadful.
Whatever the exact circumstances, Jane’s murder was co-opted by the republican side to spread the anti-British message. The American general Horatio Gates wrote to his counterpart Burgoyne accusing him of being directly responsible for the murder of “a young lady lovely to the sight” who was “scalped and mangled in the most shocking manner”: his letter was widely reprinted in sympathetic newspapers. Meanwhile, in England, Jane was invoked in Parliament by Edmund Burke, John Wilkes and William Pitt.
An illustration of Vanderlyn’s painting, however, was not in the end used in The Columbiad. Nevertheless, back in America he pursued his path as a patriot artist: he painted Niagara Falls to show his countrymen one of the natural wonders with which their land was blessed; he painted the portraits of seven presidents and vice-presidents; and he also agitated for the establishment of a national gallery of art to inspire and instruct America’s young painters.
He was bitterly disappointed when his efforts met with institutional indifference: “to think there is not one member in either house of Congress that takes interest enough in Art … to become its champion, is a sorry circumstance for the age and country,” he lamented. But he was cursed with a condescending manner that alienated patrons, and he spent the last 30 years of his life in increasing poverty.
With her death, Jane became an American martyr — her story informed James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans — but even so her indignities were not over. Her body was buried no fewer than three times and when she was disinterred in 2003 it was found that her head was missing.
