Jefferson's War Read online

  Moroccan Emperor Soliman Ben Mahomet was pestering U.S. consul James Simpson for a passport for the Meshuda, which was still penned up at Gibraltar. Without a passport issued by an American consul, the Meshuda, as a onetime Tripolitan cruiser of uncertain ownership, could be seized by U.S. warships as a prize the instant it left Gibraltar. Throughout the Tripolitan war, merchants from all the noncombatant North African nations routinely obtained passports from their American consuls to avoid having their vessels boarded by suspicous U.S. naval officers and searched for wartime contraband. But since the Moroccan emperor neither explained how the Meshuda had become Morocco’s, nor what its business would be as a merchant ship, he did not receive a U.S. passport.

  During the American squadron’s Atlantic crossing, the Chesapeakes mainmast came loose just four days out of Hampton Roads. Carpenters discovered 3-inch-deep rot and defective spars, but managed to stabilize the mast so the Chesapeake was able to continue her voyage. Between the impaired mast and poorly packed ballast and cargo, however, the crossing was anything but smooth. “I never was at Sea in so uneasy a Ship, in fact it was with the greatest difficulty we saved our masts from rolling over the side.” After the flagship limped into Gibraltar, the British assisted with repairs.

  The Adams brought Morris’s orders to Gibraltar, and they couldn’t have been clearer. The commodore was to collect Cathcart at Leghorn and appear before Tripoli with the entire squadron. “Holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations, may produce a peaceful disposition towards us in the mind of the Bashaw, and essentially contribute to our obtaining an advantageous treaty with him.” Cathcart had similar instructions from Madison—accompany the squadron to Tripoli and open negotiations with the bashaw, but let him make the first overture, so “awe inspired by a display of our force” could have its effect. Don’t buy a peace, Madison warned. “To buy a peace of Tripoli, is to bid for War with Tunis....” Seldom have such forthright instructions been so utterly disregarded.

  The Moroccan emperor’s irritation over the blockaded Meshuda mounted. Soliman now announced defiantly that he would violate the U.S. blockade by bringing the Meshuda and her consort to Tangier, loading them with grain and then sailing to Tripoli. Certain the emperor intended merely to hand over the warships to Tripoli, Consul Simpson patiently tried to explain that a blockade’s purpose was to keep all ships from entering an enemy port, but Soliman stubbornly insisted on the passports for the Meshuda and the brig. Simpson knew Moroccan corsairs could begin attacking American shipping at any moment if Soliman wasn’t given the passports. He asked Morris, whose authority exceeded his when it came to the blockade, to permit him to issue them, in hopes of averting the unending trouble that would result from captured ships and prisoners, but Morris refused starchily. To no one’s surprise, except possibly Morris’s, the emperor banished Simpson from Tangier and, on June 19, 1802, declared war on the United States.

  Morris notified the Navy secretary he would need more ships to fight both Morocco and Tripoli, but no sooner had he done so than the Moroccan emperor, Soliman, began backpedaling, possibly after considering that it might be unwise to antagonize a nation with five warships so close at hand when he lacked a credible fleet. He invited Simpson to return to Tangier. Simpson silkily reminded the emperor that the United States was sending him 100 gun carriages soon as a gift, and the touch of customary obeisance did the trick—Soliman called off the war, even if he hadn’t altogether given up on the Meshuda. Moroccan crews soon were spotted in Gibraltar readying it and the brig for sea. Morris put a watch on them, wondering how he could legitimately stop the two ships from leaving, for they clearly belonged to Morocco now. The commodore reluctantly instructed Simpson to issue the passports.

  Slow communication between Washington and the Mediterranean kept the two chronically out of step. Handwritten letters and reports crossed the Atlantic on sailing ships in one to three months, depending on whether the trip was “downhill”—sailor vernacular for America to Europe, a one-month voyage—or “uphill,” against the prevailing westerlies, from Europe to America, which could take up to three months. The Navy Department sent the John Adams—a 28-gun frigate like her sister ship, the Adams—and New York to the Mediterranean upon receiving Morris’s appeal for more ships to fight Morocco, and canceled the shipment of 100 gun carriages for Morocco. But by then, Soliman had called off the war. So the gun carriages didn’t arrive as Simpson had promised, and another year went by before they did. When they finally showed up, the goodwill gesture was largely wasted because of the emperor’s vexation over the delay. The John Adams and New York reached the Mediterranean just as Jefferson, Smith, and Madison learned that Soliman had canceled the war.

  Even though they were not needed against Morocco, Jefferson decided to keep the two additional warships in the Mediterranean. The president’s staunch belief in a navy’s utility had evolved into a philosophy of perpetual naval preparedness. Belying his unyielding opposition to a strong central government, he wanted to build even more ships, and was working with architect Benjamin Latrobe on a blueprint for a roofed dry-dock at Washington Navy Yard where decommissioned warships could be warehoused “in a state of perfect preservation and without expence.” Idle ships would be hoisted out of the water to keep the organism-rich harbor waters from eating away their bottoms, and placed under roofs out of the wet weather that rotted and warped masts and decks. Congress, which supported Jefferson’s financial austerity policies without sharing his enthusiasm for naval preparedness, flinched at the dry-dock’s $417,276 cost, and the plan died.

  No sooner had the Moroccan crisis subsided than Tripoli snatched an American merchantman. Two corsairs had slipped through the blockade in early June, as the American merchant ship Franklin sailed unescorted from Marseilles for St. Thomas with wine, oil, soaps, perfume, and hats. Before the Franklin reached Gibraltar, on June 17, 1802, the corsairs overtook and seized her, with seven crewmen and two passengers. The Frdnklin’s captain, Andrew Morris, and his crewmen owned the unhappy distinction of having become Tripoli’s first U.S. prisoners of war.

  Firing cannon salutes, the corsairs brazenly paraded the Franklin through the blockade, manned by the Constellation and a Swedish frigate, and into Tripoli harbor, as Morris fumed over his countrymen’s inaction. The Tripolitans marched the crew through the city streets past shouting Moslem crowds, jubilant at the sight of captive Christians—a raucous scene that might have been reprised from 1793, 1785, or even 1635. English and French consuls swung into action and quickly gained the release of three crewmen who were British nationals and the two passengers who were French. But Captain Morris and three American crewmen remained captives.

  The absence of a U.S. consul in Tripoli hampered efforts to gain their release, although William Eaton did what he could from Tunis. Eaton tried to open a parley with Murad Reis when he appeared in Tunis, but Murad wouldn’t negotiate or permit Eaton to visit the captives.

  Algiers intervened unexpectedly. Bobba Mustapha reminded Yusuf that in 1801 he had promised one day to release six Americans when Dale had freed the forty-one prisoners from the captured Greek ship. If any proof was needed of Algiers’s continued preeminence among the Barbary regencies, Bobba’s intercession and Yusuf’s response supplied it. On October 11, the freed American captives suddenly showed up in Algiers. Yusuf, however, couldn’t resist levying a small ransom, agreement or no; after all, these were American Christians, and Tripoli was at war with their country. Richard O‘Brien, the U.S. consul general in Algiers, paid the bashaw the $6,500 he demanded.

  Richard Morris might have wrung an honorable peace from the bashaw had he sailed swiftly to Tripoli with Cathcart and negotiated at cannon’s mouth—in other words, followed orders. He did not, even with Navy Secretary Robert Smith prodding him to act in a letter reaching him while he lingered at Gibraltar in the summer of 1802. “Let me at this time urge you to use every exertion to terminate the affair with Tripoli and to
prevent a rupture with any of the other Barbary Powers.”

  Instead, the commodore began to display the indolence that would become the signature of his command. Two and a half months passed before he managed to pry himself away from Gibraltar and the balls and banquets, and the many opportunities to rub elbows with admirals, aristocrats, and diplomats. On August 18, 1802, Morris and the Chesapeake finally sailed from Gibraltar. He did not make for Tripoli, but leisurely escorted U.S. merchantmen in a happy ramble along the southern European coast, touching at many pleasant ports—Malaga, Toulon, and Marseilles—and arriving on October 12 in Leghorn, where he met Richard Cathcart.

  With winter approaching, Morris was loath to forsake Italy’s amenities to cross to Tripoli. It was so late in the season, he wrote to Smith on October 15 in his first report since reaching the Mediterranean, “to render it impossible to appear off Tripoli before January.” Morris confided to Cathcart that he wouldn’t undertake a major operation against Tripoli until May or June.

  It was a missed opportunity for securing favorable peace terms. Reports from Tripoli suggested the bashaw was open to negotiations. O‘Brien had learned the bashaw would settle for $60,000 in cash and $10,000 in presents. For another $30,000, Algiers would mediate. When all the other bribes were paid, the treaty would cost $120,000. O’Brien was confident that it could be signed for less. Yusuf’s openness to a negotiated peace was by no means a testament to the effectiveness of Morris’s blockade. “This year has proved a great deal richer in grains than ever could be expected, so that the Blockade from that Side neither seems to be of much Service... ,” Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli, had reported to Eaton in July. The bashaw’s amenability to talks more likely was due to concern over the U.S. military buildup.

  But the propitious moment passed without Morris’s acting. Sweden made peace with Tripoli for $150,000, plus an $8,000 consular present and $8,000 in annual tribute. The new treaty removed any pressure on Tripoli to negotiate with the United States, now its only enemy. With the rich harvest, Sweden’s cash, and gifts of $40,000 and an 18-gun cruiser from France, the bashaw was confident he could fight a war, endure a blockade, or thwart any coup attempt.

  The commodore and the “commodoress,” as Mrs. Morris was now known among the Chesapeake’s crew, dallied in Leghorn nearly a month. In his journals and letters, Henry Wadsworth, a midshipman on the Chesapeake, displayed the family gift for composition that would reach its zenith in his nephew and namesake, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Young Wadsworth thought highly of Mrs. Morris, describing her as an avid reader who was particularly knowledgeable about geography and history. Yet he couldn’t resist a wry dig at her looks, noting that “her person is not beautiful, or even handsome, but she looks very well in a veil.” She was not the only woman aboard the Chesapeake; the boatswain, carpenter, corporal, and the captain of the forecastle all brought their wives, too. The forecastle captain’s wife, Mrs. James Low, gave birth to a boy in the boatswain’s storeroom.

  Morris’s lethargic cruise left the squadron’s officers and men with plenty of time to get into trouble—chiefly, by drinking and dueling. During the long layover in Leghorn, Marine Captain James McKnight was killed by Navy Lieutenant Richard H. L. Lawson after a simmering feud between the two Constellation officers culminated in McKnight, a seasoned duelist, challenging Lawson. Dueling among American officers was a lethal byproduct of Europe’s Romantic Age, when a gentleman’s honor was more important than life itself. It was so widespread during the early nineteenth century that two-thirds as many U.S. naval officers died on the “field of honor” as were killed in battle. Lawson, who had never dueled, proposed three paces, counting on the brief distance to negate McKnight’s experience. McKnight’s second denounced Lawson as “an assassin” for suggesting such a ridiculously short distance, Lawson called McKnight a coward, and they finally agreed on two pistol shots each at six paces. If both remained standing and their honor still craved satisfaction, they would fight on with cutlasses until it was.

  They trooped ashore. McKnight and Lawson stepped off their six paces, turned and fired simultaneously. McKnight missed, but Lawson’s bullet struck McKnight in the chest, piercing his heart and killing him instantly. Marine Captain Daniel Carmick and other witnesses carried the body to the American Hotel, where they were staying. The staff, anxious to spare the other guests a grisly spectacle, turned the officers away, telling them Leghorn’s coroner needed to conduct a postmortem to determine the cause of death, but they wouldn’t permit it at the hotel. The Americans lugged McKnight to the cemetery, laid him on a raised grave marker, and sent for the coroner.

  The coroner was a by-the-book bureaucrat. Carmick watched in horror as he cut out McKnight’s heart. He asked Carmick to vouch that the ball indeed had passed through it, then began the grotesque hunt for the pistol ball. Carmick protested the dismemberment of his friend, but the coroner and other city officials were not to be dissuaded. Carmick stalked off in disgust. “I left them up to their Armpitts in blood,” he reported to Marine Commandant William Burrows.

  Murray, the Constellation’s aged, nearly deaf commander, had been unaware of the feud that had gone on right under his nose until McKnight’s death came to his attention. He displayed his violent disapproval of dueling by arresting Lawson for murder and forbidding military honors at McKnight’s burial. Murray and Morris also both boycotted the service. Carmick wrote to Burrows, “I thought he [Murray] was rather unreasonable in desiring that there be inscribed on his Tombstone; ‘That he had fallen victim to a false idea of Honor.”’ McKnight was buried near the gravesite of the British satirist Tobias Smollett, who died in Leghorn in 1771 after finishing his epistolary novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.

  Before the squadron left Leghorn, there was another tragedy. Carmick was returning to his ship with Lieutenant Sterett when some crewmen tried to catch the boat as it was pulling out. Sterett refused to wait for them, deciding to teach the sailors a lesson on promptness. They appropriated a barge. It overturned in the harbor’s chop, and four sailors drowned.

  The squadron idled in Livonine for a pleasant spell. At length it weighed anchor for Naples, with Wadsworth writing contentedly, “Yesterday we left Livonine with as much pleasure as we enter’d it, for 20, or 30 days will generally satiate us with any place.”

  Another duel caused an international incident. At Malta, where the New York had put in to wait out a storm, Midshipman Joseph Bainbridge, the younger brother of Captain William Bainbridge, was on liberty in Valletta when he had a run-in with a Mr. Cochran, secretary to Malta’s governor, Sir Alexander Ball. Cochran tried to pick a fight with the American to impress his British officer companions. After being taunted and jostled repeatedly, Bainbridge finally flattened Cochran. The governor’s secretary threw down a challenge. Concerned about Bainbridge’s inexperience, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., Bainbridge’s shipmate and an experienced duelist—he would die in a duel in 1820 with the New York’s current commander, Captain James Barron—volunteered as Bainbridge’s second. Decatur demanded that the duel be fought at four paces. The men exchanged first shots. Cochran missed his, and Bainbridge blew off Cochran’s hat. The men reloaded and fired again. This time Bainbridge was dead accurate: Cochran “reciev’d the ball in his head and instantly died,” wrote Wadsworth. Alexander Ball, furious over losing his secretary, ordered Barron to turn over Bainbridge and Decatur to Maltese authorities for prosecution. Barron ignored the demand. The New York sailed with Bainbridge and Decatur. A Navy investigation exonerated the two, but they were sent home.

  While Morris rambled among the western Mediterranean’s friendly ports, support for the war was growing back home. Congress empowered the president to prosecute the war without declaring it formally. This was at Madison’s urging; he believed the Tripoli war was too distant for effective congressional oversight. Congress also authorized armed vessels to make prizes of Tripolitan ships and, if needed, the commissioning of privateers. Navy enlistments
were extended from one year to two.

  Early in 1803, Navy Secretary Smith asked Congress for $96,000 for four warships of 14 to 16 guns, and $12,000 for eight gunboats. Naval officers and consuls had complained for a year and a half that the super frigates’ deeper drafts hamstrung them as blockaders; they could not pursue shore-hugging small craft into the shallow harbors divoting the Tripolitan coast. Schooners, sloops, and gunboats were needed to chase blockade runners right into their hideouts. Eager to show its support, Congress gave Smith $50,000 to build up to fifteen gunboats, and granted his $96,000 request for the small ships. Construction of the four warships began immediately.

  The Navy Department also began standardizing the operation of its ships, officers, and men, issuing new rules covering everything from uniforms to discipline, shipboard duties to shipboard menus. The fleet’s diet left much to be desired when measured against later standards. Smith recommended a ration heavy on protein, carbohydrates, and liquor, with occasional vegetables to ward off scurvy:Sunday: One and a half pounds of beef, one-half pound flour or Indian meal, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint molasses.

  Monday: One pound pork, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint peas.