Jefferson's War Read online

  Tuesday: One and a half pounds beef, one pound potatoes, 14 ounces bread, two ounces butter, one-half pint spirits.

  Wednesday: One pound pork, 14 ounces bread, two ounces cheese, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint rice.

  Thursday: One a half pounds beef, one pound potatoes, one-half pound flour or Indian meal, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits.

  Friday: One-half pound flour or Indian meal, 14 ounces bread, two ounces butter, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint molasses, one pint rice.

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

  Eaton was bitterly disappointed that Commodore Morris was rapidly proving himself no improvement over Dale. He chafed over the squadron’s inactivity, grumbling to Madison, “Government may as well send quaker meeting-houses to float this sea....” He also was angry with Murray of the Constellation for having refused to reprovision the Gloria at Gibraltar, stripping her of the privateer commission Eaton had awarded her, and even impressing some of her seamen into service on the Constellation. “I beleive you will find you were unauthorized in employing the Ship Gloria on Public account,” Murray had written Eaton. Eaton happened to own the Gloria and had armed her at his own expense with the profits from a trading business he and Cathcart operated on the side. It was accepted practice for American consuls to operate private businesses while representing U.S. interests. Certain consulships, such as those in the West Indies, were particularly coveted because of their opportunities for accumulating great personal wealth. Eaton had some justification for making his own ship a privateer: He used the Gloria to deliver and pick up consular mail at Gibraltar, because the squadron’s warships so rarely stopped in Tunis—over the previous six months, only McNeill had called, and just once. Murray’s high-handedness angered Eaton and revealed his unhappy tendency never to forget a slight.

  Yet Eaton was right about the Mediterranean squadron, whose lackadaisical performance made the Barbary consuls’ jobs all the more difficult. The flimsy blockade and the commodores’ fussy care in avoiding a direct confrontation with the bashaw forced the American consuls in Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco to compensate with a “paper blockade”—refusing to issue passports to any vessels going to Tripoli from their regencies. All of them had been pressured to issue the passports, even threatened. Tunis’s bey had even ridiculed Eaton over the tepid blockade and the unwarlike Dale and Morris. As a former Army captain who knew how to fight and brimmed with ideas about how to bring Tripoli to heel, Eaton could only react with impotent fury to the barbs, painfully aware that the war was being prosecuted lamely. “Our operations of the last and present year produce nothing in effect but additional enemies and national contempt.... The Minister [of Tunis] puffs a whistle in my face, and says; ‘We find it is all a puff! We see how you carry on the war with Tripoli!’ ” The United States risked disgrace, its citizens “dragged to Slavery and goaded to a lingering death under the bastinade of merciless robbers.” Worse, America would have to buy peace “on the terms of an unprincipled, overbearing Bashaw of a wretched dog-kennel.” “If America can yield to this, and look the world in the face without a blush, let her blot the stars from her escutcheon and viel with sack-cloth the sun of her former glory....” Broke and ill, he wanted to go home. His post was “intolerable abuse and personal vexation,” to no lasting purpose. He had wasted four years in Tunis.

  All the consuls were unhappy, even Cathcart in his exile in Leghorn, far from any Barbary ruler. A Barbary consul, he groused, had to put up with humiliation, isolation, threats to life and limb, and “every species of insolence & degradation that a fertile brain’d Mohammetan can invent to render the life of a christian superlatively miserable ... one moment menaced with chains, the next with death & damnation, in a state of constant vigilance concern & perplexity....”

  “Nothing of importance transpired in this quarter,” Morris was able to report complacently to the Navy secretary in November. During the winter of 1802—3, he enjoyed the British social swirl in Malta for several weeks. Finally, in February 1803, he weighed anchor for Tripoli, even though he no longer had seven ships to parade in front of the bashaw; three were headed home. It didn’t matter, for when he reached Tripoli, the weather was too stormy for maneuver or blockade.

  Morris returned to Malta’s pleasures.

  VIII

  FRUSTRATION

  Though a fly in a man’s throat cannot kill him, it will make him vomit.

  —Tunis’s sapitapa

  Twelve months pass’d after I enter’d the Straits before I saw Tripoly.

  —U.S. Midshipman Henry Wadsworth

  Eaton’s relationship with Hamouda Pacha deteriorated. They argued more frequently, and their quarrels at times threatened to explode into open enmity. But for the time being, expensive, gaudy gifts put off the day of reckoning. Morris’s squadron delivered gifts to Hamouda worth $43,300: six rifles, their stocks, solid-gold barrels and gold-embossed locks embroidered with battle-axes, pikes, swords, fifes, drums, and bows and arrows. Each rifle came with a matched pair of gold-embossed pistols, jewels, and expensive cloth.

  The bloom of goodwill fostered by the gift giving faded quickly. The bey instructed Eaton to issue him passports so he could trade with Tripoli, the very issue that had led to Morocco’s war declaration. Hamouda believed Tunis had the right to trade with whomever it pleased, blockade or no. Of course, Eaton refused. The fiery argument that ensued ended with the bey’s ordering Eaton to collect his belongings and leave Tunis. Eaton retaliated by refusing to issue any passports at all, to any Tunisian corsair, no matter what its destination. When tempers finally cooled, the bey sent the sapitapa, his commercial agent Hadgi Unis Ben Unis, to Eaton to try to patch up their tattered relationship. Unis did a poor job. He told Eaton the bey really didn’t want war with the United States, only a more amenable consul. He said Tunis wasn’t awed by America; if it came to war, his nation would lay up its large cruisers and send out small ships to harry U.S. shipping. “Though a fly in a man’s throat cannot kill him, it will make him vomit,” he told Eaton.

  The brief rapprochement drew to a quick end when the bey demanded that the United States give him a new brig of war, a demand made “in the uniform spirit of insolence which Christians tolerate in these Regencies,” Eaton reported disgustedly. It wasn’t long before the brig of war grew into a 36-gun frigate. When Eaton refused to relay the request, the bey wrote to Jefferson directly. The frigate, he said, would “add to the high esteem I have for your nation, and would more and more cement the ties of our friendship.” While the bey was making his pitch for the frigate, Unis, the sapitapa, was busy claiming he had been promised a gold-mounted, double-barreled fowling piece. “It is false,” Eaton wrote to Madison.

  The steady accretion of grievances reached critical mass on January 15, 1803, when the Enterprise captured the Tunisian imperial ship Paulina as it attempted to run the blockade. The Paulina’s protesting captain, Lucca Radich, insisted he had intended only to drop passengers in Tripoli; the ship’s cargo was destined for the island of Jerba, which belonged to Tunis. Eaton derided Radich’s sophistry, noting that most ship captains, rather than violate the blockade, also would have dropped the passengers at Jerba, from where they could have reached Tripoli by land without difficulty. Eaton said the ship should go to the prize court in Gibraltar, which would determine whether the vessel was a valid war prize or an improper seizure.

  The bey threatened war if the Paulina and its cargo were not restored and damages paid: “I will indemnify myself in a shorter and more certain way. You know I am at war with Naples and Genoa; I will order my corsairs to make reprisals on your merchant vessels entering those parts.‘” Eaton sent an urgent appeal to Morris in Malta to come to Tunis immediately, and to bring Cathcart with him.

  Obeying Eaton’s summons, Morris brought the Chesapeake, New York, and John Adams into Tunis harbor on February 22. It was the commodore’s first cruise in force to
a Barbary port since his arrival in the western Mediterranean nine months earlier. Unmoved by the sight of the three frigates, the bey sent Morris a letter repeating his threat of war if the Paulina were not handed over to him. After huddling with Morris and Cathcart, Eaton joined them and Captain John Rodgers of the John Adams in a parley at the palace with the bey and sapitapa. Morris insisted the Paulina go to prize court, and the bey demanded immediate adjudication. Morris capitulated quickly. He brought the Paulina’s manifest to the next meeting, and the American and Tunisian officials went over it line by line. It turned out the Tunisians had a legitimate grievance; much of the cargo was not the contraband the Americans had believed it carried. Unis pressed his advantage by demanding more money for items not listed on the manifest. Morris conceded the Tunisians everything. Satisfied the crisis was past, he prepared to leave Tunis.

  But everything wasn’t settled. Soldiers blocked the Americans when they reached the quay. Unis handed Morris a bill for $34,000, the amount that he said Eaton owed him and that Eaton supposedly had promised that Morris would pay when the squadron arrived. Unis announced that Morris would be detained until the bill was paid. The soldiers marched Morris, Eaton, Rodgers, and Cathcart back to house arrest in the consulate, with Eaton strenuously denying having made such a promise and protesting their treatment. Morris angrily blamed Eaton.

  Yet it was true Eaton had borrowed $22,000 from Unis—to send to Hamet Karamanli, with whom Eaton had entered into a partnership to depose his brother Yusuf, the bashaw of Tripoli. Eaton had promised to repay the loan with money he expected from the U.S. government on the next frigate reaching Tunis. Eaton had added to his debt by borrowing to prop up his faltering shipping business, which traded between Tunis and Italy, where the underemployed Cathcart acted as his agent and kept him informed on the market for North African products—primarily wheat and oil. It was an initially profitable business that had experienced recent setbacks as a result of the U.S. blockade of Tripoli, which had turned Tunisian merchants against the enterprise. The debts to Unis had kept mounting up. Eaton also borrowed to underwrite the quixotic ransom of a Sardinian countess, the ineffably lovely Maria Anna Porcile, saving the young beauty from the seraglio of Tunisian Prime Minister Mustapha Coggia. Eaton’s gallantry was wasted on the girl’s miserly father, who refused to repay Eaton. The girl and her mother remained at Eaton’s home, a consolation for the lonely consul, whose wife and family were back in Massachusetts.

  At their meeting with Hamouda the next day, March 5, 1803, Morris announced he would pay Eaton’s debt from ship funds. But his gracious submission was buried under an avalanche of pent-up grievances between Eaton and the bey and his officials. The torrent of vituperation was unleashed when Eaton, still exasperated about Unis’s mild distortion of his repayment promise, asked the bey if he had ever known him to be deceitful. The bey responded, “The consul is a man of good heart, but wrong head. He is too obstinant and too violent for me.”

  This and all the accumulated aggravations of his consulship loosened Eaton’s tongue. “No wonder my head is bad when I am surrounded by so many impostors,” Eaton shouted, and then accused the bey’s officials of robbing him of his property. His outburst amazed and infuriated the bey and his ministers.

  Cathcart reported what happened next: “‘You are mad,’ says the Minister. ‘Yes, you are Mad’ stuttered the bashaw in a Phrenzy, at the same time curling his Whiskers ... ‘I will turn you out of my Kingdom; tell the Commodore,’ said he, ‘this man is mad ... I won’t permit him to remain here.’ ‘I thank you,’ Eaton replied, ‘I long wanted to go away.’”

  But his debt had to be paid before the Americans could leave. Eaton found a buyer for the Gloria, collecting $7,000, and scraped up $5,000 more by selling off some of his belongings. Morris made up the difference with $22,000 from the Chesapeake’s purse. He appointed Dr. George Davis, the Chesapeake’s surgeon, as temporary consul, and retired to his cabin, a bit dazed by the tumultuous events. The commodore sent the bey a note claiming he was too ill to present Davis in person, but offered his “respects.”

  Morris’s mild reaction to the bey’s outrageous provocations—the detention, the peremptory expulsion of a U.S. consul—mortified Cathcart no end. “Had I commanded the United States Squadron in place of sending this letter I would have sent him a copy of my protest against him for the insult my country suffer’d in my person for this overt act of violence & inform’d him that I should only wait the orders of my government to redress the grievance.” Eaton, who had sparked the entire incident, was equally indignant. “It is unprecedented even in the history of Barbary outrage.”

  The disastrous meeting inspired the notoriously uncommunicative Morris to write his third letter in ten months to the Navy secretary. Had he known he would be held liable for Eaton’s debts, he never would have gone ashore, he complained. He suggested Eaton had conspired with Unis to force the U.S. government to pay his personal debts. Foreshadowing his fate as squadron leader, Morris’s letter crossed a testy communique from Smith upbraiding him for his long silence. “I presume it would be superfluous to remind You of the absolute necessity of your writing frequently and keeping us informed of all your movements.”

  Morris sailed to Algiers next. Madison and Smith wanted him to offer Bobba Mustapha $30,000 cash in lieu of the naval stores America still owed him. Things went no better than they had in Tunis. The dey refused the $30,000; he needed weapons and naval stores—not cash—to outfit his corsairs for jihad. Morris then introduced Cathcart as the new U.S. consul general succeeding Richard O‘Brien. Bobba, who had stated flatly to Jefferson months earlier that he would reject Cathcart if he were named consul in Algiers, now did so. “His character does not Suit us as we know wherever he had remained that he has created difficulties and brought on a war.” The snub prompted Cathcart to snidely suggest to Madison that he persuade O’Brien to stay on in Algiers, because he “is literally the echo of the Jewish Sanhedrim who are the Creatures of the Dey.” Time and distance hadn’t diminished Cathcart’s hatred of O‘Brien.

  The two Mediterranean squadrons’ accumulated disappointments and failures at last attracted the censorious scrutiny of Jefferson and his officials. With the federal budget shaping up, they were free to devote more attention to the Tripoli war. And now they wondered why it was dragging on without any decisive action. Eaton and Murray, now back in Washington, filled the ears of Jefferson and his Cabinet members with complaints about Morris’s leisurely cruise. Fearing the Barbary States would perceive America to be weak and ineffectual, Jefferson, Madison, and Smith decided to send another force to the Mediterranean that would include the new brigs and schooners nearing completion in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. Given sailing orders were the 16-gun brig Siren, commanded by Lieutenant Charles Stewart; the 12-gun schooner Vixen, under Lieutenant John Smith; and the 16-gun brig Argus, skippered by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., the first command in what would become a celebrated career. Lieutenant Richard Somers was ordered to take charge of the 12-gun Nautilus, a Baltimore merchant ship, and convert it to a schooner. Stewart, Decatur, and Somers, inseparable friends since they were children in Philadelphia, would make their marks in the Mediterranean.

  Dale, the Navy’s senior captain, was named squadron commander again. Navy Secretary Smith evidently never entertained second thoughts about Dale’s uninspired leadership of the first squadron, and neither did Dale, who thought he deserved a promotion to admiral. Weary of his senior officers’ demands, Smith reminded Dale frostily there was no such rank in the Navy and then read him the riot act: “... from the tenor of your letter, I perceive that it is also necessary to state to you, that no Officer of the Navy can consistently be allowed to decline at his will & pleasure a service to which he may be ordered by the President.” Dale’s resignation was accepted promptly.

  Edward Preble got the command instead, a lucky break for the feisty Preble and the Navy. Preble, who had had to refuse commissions in the two earlier squadr
ons because of stomach ailments, was sufficiently recovered to serve, and he did not levy conditions. He was ordered to refit the 44-gun Constitution as his flagship. He found her rotting in Boston Harbor and spent much of the summer of 1803 making repairs. The Constitution, four schooners and brigs, the Enterprise, and the 36-gun Philadelphia gave Preble command of two frigates and five smaller ships. His appointment as commodore was dated May 14, 1803, exactly two years from the day that the bashaw’s soldiers chopped down the U.S. consulate flagpole.

  Unaware that he was about to be replaced, Morris at last decided to bring the squadron before Tripoli, after first changing flagships—moving to the New York and sending the Chesapeake back to the United States. Over Cathcart’s protests that only he was authorized to negotiate a treaty with Tripoli, Morris put him on the Adams to Leghorn with a vague promise to summon him if needed. Actually, Morris intended to handle negotiations himself.

  The first of the misfortunes and miscues that would pursue Morris during the remainder of his cruise now beset him. While the New York was crossing the western Mediterranean, a massive explosion in a storeroom killed 14 officers and men, blew down bulkheads, and ignited a roaring fire that crept toward the magazines and barrels of gunpowder, threatening the annihilation of the ship and her company. Working feverishly side by side, officers and crew fought the blaze with wet blankets and water buckets, teetering on the edge of an inferno. The ship was saved after an hour-and-a-half battle, inspired by Lieutenants David Porter’s and Isaac Chauncey’s desperate acts of bravery in the smoky belowdeck passageways, where they stopped the fire from spreading to the powder magazines.

  The remnants of Morris’s squadron assembled off Tripoli in May 1803. “Twelve months pass’d after I enter’d the Straits before I saw Tripoly,” Wadsworth noted drily. “The Chesapeak return’d to America without seeing her enemies’ Port.” But now, the frigates New York, John Adams and Adams, and the schooner Enterprise were all blockading Tripoli. It was the largest display of U.S. naval power in two years of war.