What is the provenance and textual history of Joel Barlow’s English translation of the Treaty of Tripoli?
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Executive summary
Joel Barlow served as the American agent who produced the English translation of the 1796 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli; the treaty’s original text in the Department of State files is in Arabic and the English text attributed to Barlow was the version submitted to and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 [1] [2]. For two centuries scholars and activists have accepted Barlow’s English text as the operative treaty while simultaneously disputing its fidelity to the Arabic original, especially the phrasing of Article XI that declares the United States “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” [2] [3] [4].
1. Provenance: who negotiated and who produced the English text
The Tripoli agreement was negotiated under the authority of David Humphreys, who appointed Joel Barlow and Joseph Donaldson as his agents; the instrument was signed in Tripoli on November 4, 1796, certified in Algiers on January 3, 1797, and Humphreys later reviewed and approved the record in Lisbon in February 1797, with the Arabic original preserved in the treaty book and an English translation opposite it bearing Barlow’s hand [1] [2] [5]. Barlow acted as U.S. consul-general in Algiers and certified the signatures and the English rendering, signing and attesting that the English pages were a “true copy” of the Arabic treaty as found in the official treaty book [3] [1].
2. Textual submission and legal standing in the United States
Both the Arabic original and Barlow’s English translation were transmitted to the United States and printed in the official record that Congress considered; the English translation by Barlow was the text submitted to the Senate, printed in American State Papers and the Statutes at Large, and the English version was the one ratified by the Senate and proclaimed in 1797 [2] [1] [6]. Contemporary documentation in the Department of State files shows the Arabic on the right-hand pages and corresponding English translations on the left, each page signed or initialed by Barlow, which has been the practical basis for treating the Barlow English text as the operative instrument in U.S. legal and historical usage [3] [5].
3. The Article XI controversy and questions of fidelity
Article XI in the Barlow English text contains the famous assertion that the U.S. government “is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” a clause widely quoted in debates over church–state relations; however, scholars have long noted that the Arabic manuscript does not contain an identical article and that the passage’s placement and phrasing in Barlow’s English raise questions about whether a letter or different text in the Arabic was transposed or paraphrased in the English rendering [2] [4] [1]. Official reviewers and later scholars described the November 1796 English translation as “extremely erroneous,” and a 1930 State Department–commissioned review and other contemporary translations (including an Italian version used locally) suggested divergences between Barlow’s English and the Arabic text, although most commentators say the treaty’s substantive obligations were not materially altered [3] [7] [1].
4. How historians interpret Barlow’s role and motives
Histories present Barlow as both a negotiator and translator—an American poet-diplomat operating in a multilingual, high-pressure diplomatic environment—and they differ over whether his English was a faithful literal rendering, a negotiated outline he had used at the bargaining table, or an imperfect diplomatic rendition intended to reassure Muslim counterparts about U.S. religious posture [6] [8] [9]. Some historians emphasize procedural facts—that the Senate ratified the English text it received and that most senators could not read Arabic—while others emphasize the textual anomaly: that Article XI as commonly quoted appears in the English record but lacks a like-for-like counterpart in the Arabic folio, leaving the precise provenance of that clause unresolved in the primary documentation [4] [1] [2].
5. Assessment: settled practice, unsettled textual question
The provenance and textual history therefore yield two clear conclusions supported by primary records: the official Arabic original of the 1796 Tripoli treaty exists in U.S. files and Barlow prepared and certified the English translation that the Senate examined and ratified; at the same time, the fidelity of that English rendering—most conspicuously Article XI—has been and remains contested by scholars and by later government reviews, with no universally accepted reconciliation of every difference between the languages in the public record provided here [1] [3] [2]. Where the sources are silent in these excerpts—such as the private drafting process that produced divergence—those details cannot be asserted without further archival evidence beyond the cited materials.