Jefferson's War Page 2
The instant he uttered those words, events moved at a gallop. Sterett lowered the British ensign and raised the Stars and Stripes. Enterprise Marines opened fire from the deck and firing platforms aloft, their musket balls clattering like hail on the Tripoli’s deck. The startled corsair crew replied with a partial broadside.
It was 9:00 A.M., August 1, 1801. The first naval battle of the Barbary War had begun.
The Enterprise was outgunned by the Tripoli, but Sterett was confident of his men’s abilities. A demanding skipper, Sterett had drilled the Enterprise’s gunners during the Atlantic crossing until they were fast and accurate. He also knew the Barbary corsairs had notoriously poor gunners; they preferred pistols and steel at close quarters to exchanging broadsides. Sterett was determined that gunnery would determine this battle’s outcome.
The Tripoli edged closer for boarding, and the pirates crowded onto the long bow. The Enterprise‘s Marines, commanded by Lieutenant Enoch S. Lane, shot them down. Then, like a boxer, the Enterprise sidestepped and pummeled the Tripoli with its 6-pounders from 30 yards away.
Twice more the Tripoli tried to close with the Enterprise for boarding, with the same bloody result.
As the combatants’ fire-belching guns flickered in the dense smoke like summer lightning, the Enterprise’s superior gunnery began to tell. The Tripoli‘s decks soon were littered with dead and maimed soldiers and sailors lying beneath smashed, crazily tilted masts. The hull was torn with jagged holes above the waterline.
The Tripoli lowered her flag in surrender. The Enterprise gun crews rushed onto the top deck cheering, only to come under renewed fire from the Tripoli, which had only feigned capitulation.
Sterett ordered another broadside. The roaring cannon fire crashed through the Tripoli‘s hull, spraying the gun crews with deadly splinters. The Marines in the Enterprise’s rigging and on deck shot at everything that moved on the Tripoli‘s spar deck. The screams of the wounded pierced the thick gunsmoke in the lulls between cannonades.
Mahomet Rous struck his flag again, and again Sterett stopped firing. As the Enterprise drifted closer, up went the Tripolitan flag and the corsair’s cannons commenced firing once more.
The livid Sterett ordered the Enterprise to stand off and batter the Tripoli with its cannons. When the flag came down a third time, he told his gunners to lower their cannons and smash the Tripoli‘s hull at the waterline. Sink her, he commanded them.
Mahomet Rous threw his flag into the sea. He was finished.
Still suspicious, Sterett demanded that the captain or another officer come over in a boat.
But the Tripolitans were out of tricks. Their boats were wrecked, all their officers killed or wounded.
Lieutenant David Porter and a small crew rowed to the enemy ship and found the torn deck a charnel house of mangled bodies, body parts, human viscera, and blood.
“The carnage on board was dreadful,” Sterett reported to Dale, “she having 30 men killed and 30 wounded, among the latter was the Captain and first Lieutenant. Her sails, masts and rigging were cut to pieces with 18 shot between wind and water.”
Among the dead was the Tripoli’s surgeon. While the Enterprise’s doctor attended to the enemy wounded, Sterett’s crew cut down the Tripoli’s shattered masts and flung them overboard, along with the corsair’s cannons, cannonballs, powder, muskets, swords, pistols, dirks, and pikes. The Americans raised a stubby makeshift mast and rigged it with a small sail. The wreck limped off toward Tripoli.
Sterett did a damage assessment of his own ship: At the end of a three-hour gunnery duel at pistol-shot range, or about 30 yards, “we have not had a man wounded, and we have sustained no material damage in our hull or rigging.”
Not every battle of the Barbary War would end so well for U.S. forces, yet when it is remembered at all, the 1801—5 war with Tripoli is often recalled as a swashbuckling adventure bookended by America’s two struggles with England. It is easily forgotten because it did not fit any template formed by later U.S. conflicts, waged for union, democracy, territory, or corporate avarice. Yet, in none of those latter-day struggles did principled American outrage and improvised, unorthodox tactics coalesce as they did in the Barbary War.
Then, in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, the United States found itself in a new war much like the one two centuries earlier. As will be seen, the war that President Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. Navy, and the Marine Corps waged against Moslem Tripoli—led by Edward Preble, William Eaton, Stephen Decatur, Jr., Andrew Sterett, and Presley O‘Bannon—was not so different from today’s war on terror. In truth, the Barbary War was America’s first war on terror.
Separated by 200 years, the conflicts might at first seem to have little in common other than Moslem adversaries who targeted American civilians. The Barbary States wielded terror in the name of Islam for mercenary purposes, not to advance a political agenda, the goal of Al-Qaeda and its allies. Their depredations did not occur in New York or Washington, but in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, against “infidel” civilian contractors transporting goods on sailing ships. Yet, it was terror nonetheless, prosecuted cynically in the name of Islamic “jihad,” Al-Qaeda’s pretext for hijacking jetliners and crashing them into highly visible symbols of U.S. power. America’s response in 1801 was the same as today: “to repel force by force,” as Jefferson put it succinctly.
Tripoli and its three Northwest Africa neighbors—Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco—had preyed on Christian Europe since the early 1600s. Their corsair fleets had relentlessly attacked, killed, maimed, and enslaved civilians on the high seas, robbing them of their ships and merchandise. The Barbary States coerced ransom and protection money from Europe and, in exchange, permitted the European powers to trade without interference in the western Mediterranean—until the next time the Barbary States unleashed their pirate fleets.
The European nations meekly signed the debasing treaties and scrupulously bribed the bashaws, beys, deys, and emperors with cash, weapons, and ships, while the Barbary States unscrupulously broke every agreement. Only upon the greatest provocation did Europe attempt to assert its right to an unmolested trade without payment. These sporadic naval expeditions sometimes met limited success, but never caused lasting change. In 1801 the Barbary terror, although creaky with age, still commanded payments from Europe equaling $5 million in today’s currency.
The enigmatic Thomas Jefferson stood up to the pirate states with a small squadron a fraction the size of Europe’s vast fleets. Within days of his inauguration as the third U.S. president, without congressional or public debate of any kind, Jefferson ordered four warships to sail to coastal Northwest Africa and blockade and attack any Barbary State that was at war with America. By the time the squadron reached the Mediterranean in early July 1801, Tripoli already had declared war.
While Jefferson’s surprising action doesn’t square with the conventional “pacifist” image of the third U.S. president, the fact is he was a complicated and sometimes vindictive man with a long memory. And he had not forgotten his frustrating meeting with a Tripolitan ambassador in London two decades earlier, or his failure to organize a European coalition to blockade the Northwest African states.
Jefferson’s war pitted a modern republic with a free-trade, entrepreneurial creed against a medieval autocracy whose credo was piracy and terror. It matched an ostensibly Christian nation against an avowed Islamic one that professed to despise Christians. A disciplined naval force of “super frigates” faced a loosely organized fleet of pirate corsairs.
Yet both America and Tripoli shared a common belief in naval armament as a means of realizing their diverging ambitions. Jefferson was convinced that a strong navy—paradoxical considering his overall philosophy of a minimalist central government—was essential to a thriving foreign trade. Tripoli’s bashaw, or ruler, Yusuf Karamanli, believed that with a strong navy, Tripoli could supplant Algiers as the preeminent Barbary naval power, and feast on the bustling com
merce Jefferson envisioned.
Fought for strong principles by an idealistic new republic, the Barbary War was an audacious action for a constitutional government scarcely twelve years old and only twenty years removed from its war of independence. The war in North Africa marked the first time that U.S. troops planted the Stars and Stripes on a hostile foreign shore.
If the names of Preble, Decatur, Eaton, and Sterett spur any recognition at this remove of two centuries, they might conjure images of sideburned men in ruffled shirts and jackets, frozen in a pose of noble alertness, or a crimson-tinged battle scene with wooden sailing ships belching fire. Through the gray gunsmoke haze, shadowy minarets rise above a whitewashed Mediterranean port.
But those fading portraits do not begin to do justice to the flesh-and-blood fighting men or their war, unlike any America has fought—until today, in the shadow of the bloody terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During the Barbary War, naval officers led nighttime commando missions into the heart of Tripoli’s harbor to destroy the enemy’s ability to continue the war—once with spectacular success, once with tragic consequences. Key intelligence was transmitted to naval leaders from inside the bashaw’s own castle fortress by code and “invisible ink.” Temporary alliances and native insurgents supplied equipment and manpower at critical times. And the indomitable William Eaton, a precursor of the twenty-first-century special-forces operative, cobbled together an army of mercenaries, insurgents, native troops, and Arab cavalry to launch a surprise invasion.
The Barbary War posed all the difficulties of waging a distant conflict against a wily enemy that wouldn’t come out and fight: the need to find and operate from bases supplied by friendly nations; no ready reinforcements; a maddening lag in communications with Washington; and, as a consequence of the last, the constant threat of command inertia. But resourceful commanders overcame these obstacles and forced the enemy to draw upon all of his defensive capacity. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps demonstrated that they were up to the challenges of a far-flung war and were the equal, ship-for-ship and man-for-man, of any nation—and indispensable to projecting U.S. power.
The first naval heroes of the nineteenth century emerged from the Barbary War, as did the practice of training young officers during limited wars for larger conflicts later. The Mediterranean squadron served as a “nursery” for the young naval officers who would fight the War of 1812. The first U.S. military monument, located at the U.S. Naval Academy behind Preble Hall, is dedicated to the six naval officers killed in the Barbary War.
The war shaped the Navy’s expeditionary tradition and established the precedent of simultaneously using diplomacy and military force—in the words of Navy Secretary Robert Smith, “Holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations”—to achieve limited objectives.
While the Barbary War resembles today’s war on terror tactically and strategically, it resonates most deeply in its assertion of free trade, human rights, and freedom from tyranny and terror. To defend those principles, Jefferson was willing to send a largely untried squadron across the Atlantic to go to war with a people whose customs, history, and religion were alien to the early American experience.
In 1801 as in 2001, there was never any question that the reasons for fighting were worth the price. The United States did not hesitate to go to war for its closely held beliefs, as America’s enemies have come to learn since 1775.
I
THE “PACIFIST” PRESIDENT
Hashington, D.C., 1801
The motives pleading for war rather than tribute are numerous and honorable, those opposing them mean and short-sighted.
—Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1785
Nothing in Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration speech March 4 had foreshadowed his decision to embark the United States on its first war on foreign soil, in Moslem Northwest Africa. The address’s brief nod to foreign affairs was decidedly unhawkish: “Peace, commerce & honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson was more intent on healing the still-raw wounds of the unsurpassedly vituperous recent presidential campaign, celebrated by the victorious Republicans as the “Revolution of 1800.” “We are all federalists, we are all republicans,” he had declared in a soft voice that barely carried beyond the front row of the Senate chamber; his aversion to making speeches kept him off rostrums all but once during the next eight years—the exception was his second inauguration.
The 1800 campaign was the summit of the virulent debate between Republicans and Federalists that had raged throughout the 1790s over government’s role in completing the Revolution of 1776. The two most prominent surviving founding fathers, Vice President Jefferson and President John Adams, had found themselves in the vanguard of rival political parties with diverging philosophies on this all-important issue. The pendulum had swung away from Adams’s Federalists in 1800, and the disgruntled president had left Washington on the 4:00 A.M. stage on Inauguration Day so he would not have to witness the ascent of his former friend to the office from which Adams had been sent packing.
The triumphant Jefferson wasn’t going to waste words on foreign policy when his listeners were so anxious to hear him describe what his administration would be like. His election marked the new republic’s first true regime change, unlike the succession by Washington’s vice president and fellow Federalist, Adams. Jefferson pledged fealty to Republican ideals by presiding over “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
At no point did he mention his hardened resolve to smash “The Terror,” shorthand for the long jihad waged in the Mediterranean and Atlantic by the Barbary States against Christian Europe, and now the United States. On this subject, Jefferson had long ago settled upon what he wished to do, and he wasn’t in office three weeks before he acted. Without convening Congress or formally consulting his new cabinet, which was only slowly coming together in the raw new capital of only six months, on March 23 Jefferson issued the astonishing order to ready a squadron of warships to sail to the Mediterranean.
It might seem strange that Jefferson of all the founders—Jefferson, generally regarded as the most pacific of them—was poised to send the new U.S. Navy to war in the Mediterranean. Yet, since the 1780s, he had undeviatingly advocated defiance of the Barbary States, which had wrecked U.S. Mediterranean trade after the Revolutionary War and until the mid-1790s. Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were old hands at state-sponsored terrorism. They had preyed for 200 years on European Christians, living off the loot snatched from coastal raids and ship seizures, and the protection money they were paid for not molesting shipping. Europe always had paid, sending punitive squadrons only when the losses cut too deep, and only to negotiate better extortion terms.
Jefferson fervently believed America had not thrown off one tyrant to bow to a lowlier one. “The motives pleading for war rather than tribute are numerous and honorable, those opposing them mean and short-sighted,” he had written to James Monroe back in 1785. It was at about that time, when Jefferson was minister to France, that he had debated Adams, in those days his friend and counterpart in London, over whether it would be wiser to pay tribute to the Barbary States or to fight them. In words that resonate down to the present day, Jefferson had argued that force was the only sure antidote to terror. While Adams agreed in principle, he said the public wouldn’t support a war. Adams advocated paying. America was unequipped to fight a war, he said, and paying tribute beat the alternative: forgoing a Mediterranean trade altogether.
But Jefferson and Adams were arguing a moot point; America’s federal government had no money under the weak Articles of Confederation either for war or tribute. Consequently, there was just no Mediterranean trade. Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to form a confederation with Europe’s smalle
r powers to blockade the Barbary States indefinitely. While serving as George Washington’s secretary of state in the early 1790s, he urged Congress to build a navy to go to war against them. America instead negotiated treaties and arms-for-hostages deals with the Barbary States in the mid-1790s. By the time Jefferson became president, those treaties had cost more than $1 million.
In 1801, it appeared Jefferson had been right after all, for the treaties were unraveling. In the last months of the Adams administration, Tripoli issued an ultimatum threatening war in six months if it did not receive a new warship and a new treaty committing the United States to annual tribute. Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco also were unhappy because the gifts, armaments, and naval supplies the United States had promised them every year were late in arriving. The frustrated U.S. consuls had made excuses, pleaded with the rulers for extensions, and had tried to appease them with jewels, ships, cash, and gold. The consuls blamed the delays on the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, moving the capital to Washington, the election. However, Jefferson didn’t intend to make excuses, but to make war.
Two members of Jefferson’s new cabinet were late arriving in Washington. James Madison, Jefferson’s protege, closest confidant and the new secretary of state, was delayed in Virginia settling the estate of his late father, who had died on February 27. The other late arrival was Albert Gallatin, the colorful, brilliant Geneva aristocrat whom Jefferson had named treasury secretary. Gallatin had commanded a regiment under Louis XVI in the French Revolution, and his face bore a vivid scar from a saber duel fought on horseback. It wasn’t until early May that Madison was able to leave Montpelier to assume his duties, and Gallatin didn’t arrive until May 13. Jefferson convened the cabinet two days later to discuss the naval war for which he was readying a squadron at Norfolk and which was to sail in just two weeks.