 Catherine died in 1813 and he married Mary Chester Smith in 1814 and they had two children, Mary Elizabeth Barber Whitman and John Starr Barber.Barber was a member of the Connecticut State House of Representatives in 1818.He was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the Seventeenth Congress, an Adams-Clay Republican to the Eighteenth, an Adams candidate to the Nineteenth and Twentieth, and an Anti-Jacksonian to the Twenty-first through the Twenty-third Congresses, serving from March 4, 1821 to March 3, 1835.