Desiring to be the Republic’s first great poet, but having rather to settle as its first great diplomat, Joel Barlow contracted pneumonia somewhere outside of Zarnowiec, Poland in 1812, the year that Napoleon was routed in Russia; there he fell into unconsciousness and died the day after Christmas, entombed at the brown wood-timbered Church of the Nativity of Our Lady, very far from his beloved Hartford. Other than perhaps his name on a plaque at the State Department, and his Washington DC estate Kalorama, which gave its name to that tony neighborhood a few dozen blocks north of Foggy Bottom, Barlow is a ghost of the early Republic.