Jefferson's War Page 13
In 1801 the city of Tripoli had 30,000 Moslem and 2,000 Jewish inhabitants, a fraction of the Tripoli regency’s population of roughly 1 million. It was blessed with a hospitable climate, with most days sunny and the air clear. A rocky reef shielded the city from the winter storms. Flowering hibiscus, olives, and palms, sweet jasmine and oleander flourished along the narrow belt of fertile land hugging the coastline. In the countryside, the cultivated fields yielded pomegranates, aloes, tobacco, millet, barley, and watermelons weighing up to 100 pounds. The city itself was a warren of white flat-topped homes hugging narrow, winding streets. Slaves did all the heavy work. Moslem men prayed five times daily and conducted business leisurely under shady trees and in the dim recesses of their shops in their white robes and burnooses while drinking thick black coffee. They ate, smoked, slept, and spent time with their wives and children and entertained themselves with horse- and ostrich-racing and cockfighting.
The bashaw and his ancestors had wielded power in Tripoli since 1711. Hamet the Great founded the Karamanli dynasty by slaughtering the Turkish garrison and then leading a conquering army against the tribal Berbers who occupied the parched accordion hills outside Tripoli and the sandy wastes beyond. After he had subdued them, Hamet smoothed over matters with the Ottoman sultan, whose Tripolitan janissaries lay in fresh graves. This was seldom a problem so long as recognition of the sultan’s suzerainty was accompanied by lavish gifts. Evidently, Hamet paid proper obeisance; the sultan recognized Hamet as Tripoli’s legitimate ruler. During his long reign, Hamet expanded Tripoli’s borders eastward and added the oases to the south, controlling the North African caravan routes. So thoroughly did Hamet cement his power that he occupied the throne long past his prime, until he was blind and had lost much of his authority. In 1745 he killed himself and was succeeded by his son Mohammed and, after him, Mohammed’s son Ali.
When it came time for Ali to name a successor, logically enough he chose Hassan, his eldest son. Yusuf, the ambitious, conniving third son and only twenty at the time, enlisted the middle brother, Hamet, in a plot against Hassan. In front of his mother in the royal palace one day in 1790, Yusuf shot Hassan twice. Then, to make sure Hassan would die, he and his coconspirators stabbed his dying brother up to a hundred times. Public outrage over the coup forced Yusuf to name Hamet the bashaw and to remain in the background.
This arrangement didn’t suit Yusuf for long. He led a revolt and besieged Hamet in the capital city for two years while their father, Ali, vacillated, first supporting one son and then switching allegiance to the other. The chaotic situation didn’t escape the notice of an opportunistic Turkish freebooter named Ali Borghul, who had been watching the civil war from Egypt. In 1793 he suddenly appeared at Tripoli at the head of an army of Turkish mercenaries. He captured the city without firing a shot. Had Borghul been satisfied with this conquest, he might have enjoyed a long tenure, but instead he decided also to seize the island of Jerba—a Tunisian possession. Tunis promptly became a staunch ally of Yusuf’s, enabling him to return to Tripoli with a patriotic army, vowing to free his people from the invader’s yoke. By 1795 Borghul was ousted, and Yusuf and Hamet were back in power, Hamet as bashaw, and Yusuf nominally in charge of maritime affairs.
One day while Hamet was traveling in the countryside, Yusuf made his move. When Hamet returned on July 11, 1795, the city gates were closed to him, and his wife and five children had become Yusuf’s prisoners. Hamet went into exile in Tunis. A few years later, he made the acquaintance of William Eaton, the new U.S. consul. They became friends and then allies.
From his Tunisian consulate, on July 23, 1801, Eaton sent a circular letter to U.S. agents and consuls throughout Europe announcing that the U.S. squadron was blockading Tripoli and asking them to inform the European powers. At this point, the blockade consisted of the President and the Enterprise cruising off the Tripoli coast. The Essex was busy escorting U.S. merchantmen, while the Philadelphia lurked off Gibraltar, waiting for the Meshuda and her consort to emerge. The Tripolitan warships, however, didn’t budge from their anchorage.
But Murad Reis and his 366 crewmen on the Meshuda were growing desperate. The British Gibraltar government, friendlier toward American warships than Tripolitan cruisers, was refusing him provisions, and the hungry crew of the Meshudu’s 14-gun companion brig had mutinied and gone ashore. There they broke into a bakery and ate the sweepings. Murad unbent his cruisers’ sails and threatened the crew of a moored Ragusean ship with war on their Sicilian province if they didn’t take the Tripolitans across the Strait to North Africa. The Raguseans reluctantly ferried them to Morocco. Murad, happily rid of his rebellious crew, took a separate passage on a British merchant ship to Malta in November. Soon he was back in Tripoli. Only after the Tripolitans had left Gibraltar did the Philadelphia’s officers learn that they had abandoned their ships.
Commodore Richard Dale’s first inkling that a ship from his squadron had decisively beaten a Tripolitan warship in battle was when his flagship, the President, encountered a hulk drifting toward North Africa under a dwarfish, tattered sail. When hailed by the Americans, the wounded captain said they were Tunisians. His 14-gun cruiser, he said, had been shot up by a 24-gun French corvette off Malta. Dale gave him a compass and let him go, certain the ship was Tripolitan, not Tunisian.
It wasn’t long before his suspicions were confirmed by Lieutenant Andrew Sterett, upon his return on the Enterprise with fresh water from Malta. Sterett excitedly described his schooner’s smashing victory on August 1 over the Tripoli. During a three-hour gunnery battle on the high seas, the Enterprise had coolly emasculated her adversary, despite the Tripoli’s two-gun advantage over Sterett’s ship. When it was over, thirty Tripolitan dead littered the enemy cruiser’s decks, her masts were smashed, and her sails were shredded, while the Americans had sustained no casualties and no ship damage. After attending to the thirty wounded Tripolitans, who included all the ship’s officers, the Americans had erected a stubby sail and sent the Tripoli on her way back to port. This was the very hulk that Dale had encountered.
With the aid of the compass supplied by Dale, the Tripoli’s wounded captain, Mahomet Rous, and the surviving crew members managed to reach the city of Tripoli. News of the shattering defeat spread quickly through the narrow streets and cafés, finally arriving in the palace.
The furious bashaw ordered Mahomet Rous mounted backward on a jackass. With sheep entrails draped around his neck, he was paraded through the city streets and jeered and hooted by his countrymen. Then he was punished with 500 bastinados.
From Washington to Naples, Americans toasted the Enterprise’s brutal dismemberment of the Tripoli. Sterett was awarded a ceremonial sword and recommended for promotion to captain; the Enterprise’s ninety-four Navy crewmen and Marines received a month’s extra wages.
The victory inspired a play, The Tripoli Prize, or American Tars on an English Shore. New York audiences loudly cheered its debut in November 1802, although reviewer Washington Irving derided its implausible story line: A storm blows the Enterprise and Tripoli from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, where the American captain’s son falls in love with an English girl, but then realizes after a climactic sea battle that duty comes before love.
In a congratulatory letter, Jefferson warmly noted that Sterett had “first taught our countrymen that they were more than equal to the pirates of the Mediterranean,” and affirmed his steadfast determination to rid the Mediterranean of The Terror:Too long, for the honor of nations, have those Barbarians been suffered to trample on the sacred faith of treaties, on the rights and laws of human nature! You have shown to your countrymen that the enemy cannot meet bravery and skill united. In proving to them that our past condescensions were from a love of peace, not a dread of them, you have deserved well of your country, and have merited the high esteem and consideration of which I have now the pleasure of assuring you.
Sterett’s promotion, however, ran aground on the Naval Reduction Act, which had left the
Navy only nine captaincies, all filled at the moment. Before the war ended, Sterett would unhappily resign from the Navy when Stephen Decatur, Jr. was promoted to captain ahead of him.
The Enterprise skipper’s bitter disappointment might have been the first instance of dashed expectations by American fighting men in Barbary, but it certainly would not be the last.
Nor would this be the last time the Barbary War’s combatants would try to gain an advantage over one another by feigning surrender and flying false colors—ploys as old and new as war itself. As commanders well know, deception and surprise can win battles against a more numerous or better-armed enemy. Americans and Tripolitans would both use trickery when it suited them.
VII
THE WAR THAT WASN’T
Government may as well send quaker meeting-houses to float this sea ...
—William Eaton
“We find it is all a puff! We see how you carry on the war with Tripoli!”
—Tunisian minister assessing U.S. lack of aggression to William Eaton
For the next two years, the Mediterranean squadron scrupulously avoided Tripoli harbor. Commodore Dale and his successor, Richard Valentine Morris, gave many reasons for their dilatoriness: It was too late in the season for offensive operations, they lacked the warships to be successful, they were too busy convoying. When they weren’t convoying or blockading, they were shuttling mail, food, and water. Wheat, guns, and corsairs leaked through the porous blockade. After watching this purposeful busyness for a year and a half, Yusuf and Murad Reis concluded that the United States was just another mercantile nation, like Sweden, Denmark, and Naples, that could be bullied into paying tribute. This wasn’t the outcome Jefferson had envisioned when he set out to chastise the North African regencies.
Dale perversely interpreted his orders to mean he couldn’t attack Tripoli, but only defend U.S. interests and capture enemy corsairs at sea. So, instead of gathering his meager force for a climactic battle in Tripoli harbor, he dispersed it. The Essex convoyed merchantmen; the President and Enterprise blockaded; and the Philadelphia waited outside Gibraltar Bay for Murad to show. Dale complained there weren’t enough ships for a proper blockade, much less to confront Tripoli. An effective blockade would require two frigates, two sloops of war, and a small bomb vessel to shell the town. In that assessment, he was remarkably accurate, but it evidently never occurred to him that he might bring his entire squadron before Tripoli, beard the bashaw, and end the war.
In truth, his heart was never in the cruise. By October, just three months into his cruise, he was talking of suspending the blockade and going home. “I don’t expect there will be any great Necessity of your being at sea this Winter,” he wrote to Barron. The Tripolitan corsairs stayed in port during the stormy months between October and March. “You will take a look now and then into Tripoli, to let that fellow see and know that you are on the look out for him.” Between convoy duty and occasionally appearing off Tripoli to keep up the appearance of a blockade, the weeks would fly “until you are releaved by some Ship of the next Squadron that is to come out, which I suppose to be soon....” Dale made plans to depart for home in early December, even though his deployment supposedly was for a full year.
While overly modest about his squadron’s prospects, Dale was ebullient about his successor’s, provided he was permitted to attack Tripoli—the commodore tenaciously clung to his belief that he was not—and if he were given enough vessels to prevail. As early as August 1801, only a month after reaching Gibraltar, he was predicting that his successor, presumably with more ships than he, would pressure Tripoli, “and now and then heave a few shells into the Town,” until the bashaw sued for peace the following summer. “There never was, nor will there be again, for some time to come so favourable an opportunity for the United States to Establish a lasting reputation, for its flag in those seas.” And without a drop of irony, he declared that his squadron already had proven to the world “what the Government of the United States can do.”
A combination of winter gales, paperwork, and bad luck spoiled Dale’s December leave-taking, and 1802 still found him in the western Mediterranean. En route to Toulon to have the President’s bottom checked for wormholes and rot, the Port Mahon harbor pilot ran the flagship onto a rock. Then Dale and his crew were quarantined for fifteen days.
If not a fighting commander, Dale was certainly efficient. He kept his squadron humming with paperwork and errands, and he was impatient with sloppy subordinates. Captain Daniel McNeill, whose frigate Boston had joined the squadron after delivering the new U.S. ambassador to France, was the opposite: administratively loose, but combative. Inevitably, the men clashed. McNeill gave Dale ample cause. To avoid quarantine in Toulon, McNeill had told the French authorities he had been to no other ports recently, when he had been to several. Dale rebuked McNeill angrily when he found out. Before the memory of that lapse of integrity had faded, McNeill was in trouble again. He sailed from Malaga minus three lieutenants, the ship’s purser, and three other crewmen—all still ashore. As though to compensate for leaving Malaga with too few crewmen, at Toulon he sailed with three French officers and the President’s parson. They had come aboard for supper, overstayed, and awakened the next morning to find themselves under sail. “I hope you will be more particular in your enquirys on Board, when you are about to sail from any place,” Dale fumed at McNeill. “You can have but little idea what trouble and displeasure it gives, and the consequence of leaving Officers behind, and taking, Officers of other Nations away contrary to their expectations.” He asked Robert Smith, the new Navy secretary, to cashier McNeill.
But before his recall, McNeill revealed his virtues as a vigorous, able blockader, capturing four Tunisian coastal vessels trying to smuggle grain and oil to Tripoli. He then joined Swedish blockaders in repelling a squadron of Tripolitan corsairs and shot away the mast of a Tripolitan gunboat in Tripoli harbor. His solo accomplishments exceeded the rest of the squadron’s combined achievements, chief of which was the capture of a Greek ship off Tripoli with twenty-one Tripolitan soldiers, fourteen merchants, five women, and a child.
Thinking ahead to when a future squadron might seriously prosecute the war, Dale generously freed the prisoners in Tripoli, thinking he was ensuring a reciprocal gesture in the event Tripoli captured Americans in the future. Then, as though having second thoughts about appearing too soft, Dale asked Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli and a loyal American friend, to inform the bashaw, “He is much mistaken in the character of the Americans, if he thinks they are to be Frighten’d. They love peace, but it must be an Honorable one....” Unimpressed by either Dale’s bluster or his generosity, Yusuf deemed the forty-one freed captives would be worth the release of exactly six Americans. The remainder of Dale’s tame cruise furnished no opportunities to find out whether the bashaw would honor the pledge.
Richard Valentine Morris wasn’t a seasoned combat officer like Dale or Truxtun, but Thomas Jefferson owed much to his family. Richard’s brother, Lewis Robert Morris, was a Vermont congressman when the cliffhanger 1800 presidential election, which culminated in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, came before the U.S. House for resolution. Over the tense days of congressional balloting, resulting in tie after tie, Morris steadily voted for Burr, keeping the Vermont delegation’s vote split evenly between Burr and Jefferson. But on the thirty-sixth ballot, Morris abruptly abstained, swinging Vermont to Jefferson and handing him the presidency. While no conclusive evidence suggests that Morris’s selection as commodore was a quid pro quo, it may well have been.
Morris evidently anticipated an uneventful tour of duty in the Mediterranean. He brought along his wife, his baby son Gerard, and the family maid, Sal. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wives and paramours often accompanied officers to sea, but seldom on warships bound for a war zone. As a consequence of his bringing his family, Morris’s ship became known as a “happy” ship and not a “tight” one, and hi
s own, personal comfort became more important to him than his mission. Navy Secretary Smith had been only too happy to grant Mrs. Morris permission to sail with her husband. “Immediately upon receiving it,” Smith informed the commodore in April 1802, “I wrote to her complying with her request.” Smith’s eagerness to please very possibly stemmed from the fact that his first choice for the job—Truxtun again—had backed out at the last minute.
Truxtun had accepted the appointment initially, but, as the squadron’s sailing date neared, he revived his old complaint, the one that had caused him to refuse command a year earlier: He wanted a captain to command his flagship so he could devote himself exclusively to squadron operations. It was a reasonable request: freed from daily management of a frigate and its 300 men, he could dedicate himself wholly to prosecuting the war. But the rest of his request wasn’t so reasonable: unless his stipulation were granted, he would resign from the Navy. Smith disliked ultimatums from his captains. “The condition, Sir, is impossible,” he shot back. No extra captains were available because of the Navy’s force reduction. “As this must have been known to you—I cannot but consider your notification as absolute.”
Truxtun was out of the Navy.
Morris’s squadron assembled piecemeal at Gibraltar. The 36-gun Constellation, commanded by Captain Alexander Murray, arrived on April 28; the 36-gun Chesapeake under Morris came in on May 25; and the 28-gun Adams, under Captain Hugh Campbell, on July 21. Morris’s other ships—the Enterprise, with Sterett still in charge, and the Boston—were already there.
Gibraltar vibrated with rumors of war, between France and England, and, at various times, between America and each of the Barbary States. The bashaw was sending five corsairs into the Mediterranean in defiance of the blockade. Algiers had sent twelve corsairs against Portugal and already had captured a frigate, boarding it so quickly the crew hadn’t had time to unlock the ship’s arms lockers. Forced to fight with handspikes, seventy-two Portuguese crewmen died before the ship was surrendered.