Jefferson's War Page 3
“Shall the squadron now at Norfolk be ordered to cruise in the Mediterranean? What shall be the object of the cruise?” Jefferson asked his assembled cabinet members. While the orders already had been given, the president wanted to hear the views of his most trusted advisers.
They all agreed the squadron was needed to project American power and protect commercial interests in the Mediterranean. “The expedition should go forward openly to protect our commerce against the threatened hostilities of Tripoli,” said War Secretary Henry Dearborn. Attorney General Levi Lincoln said the warships should take defensive measures if attacked, but should not hunt down and destroy the enemy. Madison, Gallatin, and Acting Navy Secretary Samuel Smith argued for hot pursuit into enemy harbors.
Gallatin broached the ticklish matter of congressional approval, which hadn’t been sought. With Congress in recess, it would take weeks to assemble the House and Senate, even in an emergency. Gallatin personally thought it unnecessary. If a nation declared war on the United States, didn’t the Constitution authorize the president to direct the public force? And Smith asserted that the president not only had the authority, but was “bound to apply the public force” to defend the republic.
The United States must announce its intentions at the outset, Madison urged. Jefferson agreed that American resolve would be “openly declared to every nation.” He would write Tripoli’s ruler, the bashaw, a letter stating why he was sending a squadron against the bashaw’s nation. “All concur in the expediency of cruise,” Jefferson scrawled in his meeting notes.
The Jefferson administration didn’t know it, for news crossed the Atlantic only as fast as sailing ships, but Tripoli had already declared war on the United States. On May 14, the day before the cabinet meeting, the bashaw had delivered the declaration in Barbary’s usual blunt manner: Soldiers marched to the U.S. consulate in Tripoli and chopped down the flagpole where the Stars and Stripes flew.
It was a propitious time for the United States to settle its Mediterranean affairs. America’s undeclared three-year “Quasi-War” with France had ended only recently, and England and France were poised to resume their seemingly unending war. Against France, America had surprised many close observers by proving to be extremely proficient in waging naval warfare. The Quasi-War, fought almost entirely in the West Indies, accelerated the early development of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy now floated more than thirty ships, a signal achievement considering there had been no U.S. Navy five years before. But its strength would soon be whittled down, for Adams had signed a law in his last hours as president ordering every naval ship sold—all but thirteen frigates. Six were to be kept in active service, the other seven dry-docked.
This suited Jefferson, as thrifty with public money as he was spendthrift with his own, despite his habit of meticulously recording every purchase in his journals. He and other Republicans wanted to “shrink” the federal government after a decade of growth under Washington and Adams and pay off the $83 million national debt. This was the core of the Republican prescription for restoring the fading “Spirit of ‘76,” that romantic vision of a peaceful rural society much like the one to which Cincinnatus returned after saving Rome, whose hallmark would be freedom from government interference. It was the antithesis of the Hamiltonian philosophy subscribed to by Washington and Adams that postulated a powerful central government and an emphasis on commercial manufacturing. Small wonder Republicans heralded Jefferson’s victory which, they believed, would undo the evils of federalism. Yet for all that, Jefferson and the Republicans grudgingly conceded a central government’s utility in one respect: conducting foreign policy. The new United States must speak with one voice—and not as a gaggle of states—to the world to be a prosperous trading nation. A navy, even a diminished one, would guarantee that that voice was listened to.
It would have been difficult to find more dissimilar nations than the United States and the four Barbary States in 1801. Except for its Native American population and a small percentage of Jews, the United States was solidly Christian, while the North African regencies were just as solidly Moslem—and openly hostile toward Christians. The new American republic was a laboratory of Enlightenment ideals, especially freedom, openness, and rationality; the Barbary Powers were medieval, closed, tyrannical, and corrupt. The United States was a new land, perched on the edge of a largely unexplored wilderness; Barbary—the name is derived from the Latin barbarus and Greek barbaros, ancient appellations for foreigners—was a burial ground for Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Byzantines, Goths, Christians, and Moslems. While America dreamed of global markets for its growing profusion of products, the Barbary rulers’ narrow aims hadn’t changed in centuries: to invoke the Koran to extort money from Christian nations.
“Jihad” is derived from the word “jahada,” meaning “to strive.” The Koran exhorts Moslems to strive to purify themselves spiritually and promote Islam in the world. The first is a battle fought and won within the heart by overcoming temptation, and the second is achieved by doing right in the world. In early Koran interpretations, jihad was nonviolent; the believer conquered his urges and peacefully disseminated Islam’s tenets throughout the world. War was permitted only in self-defense. As Islam exploded into a religion of conquest and contended with Christian Europe for territory during the Crusades, jihad took on a new meaning: It became a holy war to impose Moslem hegemony over nonbelievers.
Jihad’s new interpretation became accepted practice in the Moslem world, regulated by a few simple rules. It could not be waged against other Moslem nations. It had to be authorized by an Islamic state’s spiritual leader. Infidels must be forewarned, and offered the opportunity to remain autonomous, if they agreed to pay a tax. Their refusal to pay permitted jihad to be declared, and any captives taken from ships or in battle could be enslaved and ransomed. The Barbary States stuck to this template in their dealings with America and Europe, while blithely ignoring the Koran’s many other strictures on war. Acting as their nations’ temporal and religious leaders, the bashaws, deys, beys, and emperors decided when their corsairs would hunt the European merchant ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. They chose their enemies and fixed the price of ephemeral peace.
II
THE DREADFUL CORSAIRS
“Yield dogs, yield!”
—Barbary pirates’ exhortation before boarding European merchant ships
The seeds of the Barbary States’ long jihad against Christian Europe and, later, America were planted by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain in 1492, the year they sponsored Christopher Columbus’s expedition into the Atlantic to find a western passage to India. The royal couple had grand ambitions for Spain, wishing to bring the entire peninsula under Christian rule. That meant finally crushing the Moors, the descendants of the Islamic conquerors of Iberia in 711.
The Moors were the progeny of invading Arab Moslems and of the North African Berbers whose origins predate the historical record, receding into the primordial mists millennia before Christ. Moslem cavalry pouring out of seventh-century Arabia reached Alexandria in 642 and began embarking on increasingly longer and larger expeditions into the Maghrib, the “land of sunset”—the vast arid region stretching from Egypt to the Atlantic, more than 2,000 miles. In the oceanic sand dunes and craggy hills, the Arabs met and conquered North Africa’s indigenous Berber tribes in bloody clash after sharp, bloody clash, advancing west inexorably. Many Berbers converted to Islam and became staunch Arab allies who assisted in later conquests. By 707, the invaders and their auxiliaries occupied coastal North Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.
During one expedition into the wild, barren land, Arab General Hassan ibn al-Nu‘man al-Ghassani happened upon what remained of Carthage, the Phoenicians’ once-mighty outpost and, later, the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. In 698, it was little more than ruins, occupied by ragged, starving bands living in squalor beside a large gulf. Hassan, a practical, energetic man, envisioned a new city clos
er to the head of the gulf; it would be better protected from the sea and from the rovers hunting easy plunder. It also would be perfectly situated for a shipyard. The city that he built became Tunis. Even as it went up, shipwrights began building a fleet of galleys, the oared ships that had carried merchants, adventurers, and conquerors along the Mediterranean shores for millennia. As the eighth century began, the first Barbary corsairs weighed anchor in Tunis to capture the merchant vessels of European Christians and sack Mediterranean coastal towns.
Before long, the Moslem conquerors were eyeing the towering landmass across the narrow straits from Morocco. The Moslem general, Tarik, gathered an invasion fleet to carry his assault troops across the short stretch of open water to Iberia, the onetime western province of the empires of Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. Iberia was a fabled land of silver and gold mines, fertile farmland and rich cities. For nearly 200 years, the Visigoths, one of the German warrior tribes that had overrun the crumbling Roman Empire and its far-flung provinces, had prospered there, but now the Islamic juggernaut was at their door.
In 711, Tarik and 7,000 Moslem Berbers alighted from troop transports onto the rock that would bear Tarik’s name—Gebal-Tarik, or Gibraltar. King Roderick summoned his Visigoth warriors to defend their land. The Moslems crushed the larger German army in one day, at Guadalete.
The Moors, as the amalgam of invading Moslem Berbers and later Arab arrivals would become known, prospered in Spain as no people had before or has since. Seville, Cordova, and Granada blossomed into densely populated, prosperous cities where Moslems, Christians, and Jews lived together in harmony. Women enjoyed more freedom and opportunity than they would anywhere else in Europe or the Islamic world for 500 years. As did Moorish males, they attended primary schools, where they learned to read, write, and recite the Koran before being instructed in a trade. Some went on to the universities to study mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, botany, medicine, and law. Literacy soared. Cordova alone boasted seventy libraries that held more than 500,000 books. (In 1800, U.S. libraries held only one tenth that number.) Advanced Moorish trade and agriculture practices created massive wealth and a food surplus that fed a growing urban populace. The Moors filled the cities with marble palaces, graced with their trademark double-horseshoe arches, and with gilded ceilings and doors inlaid with precious jewels.
But Christian power, formerly confined to the northern mountain fastnesses, expanded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Moors’ territories contracted. Isabella and Ferdinand’s marriage united Castile and Aragon. The Moors retreated to Andalusia.
In 1491, at the urging of Catholic clergy, Ferdinand and Isabella laid siege to Granada, Andalusia’s capital. It fell on November 25. The cardinals and bishops beseeched the monarchs to expel the infidel Moors from Spain altogether. The Moors had tolerated Christendom when they were ascendant, but the Christian Inquisition harbored no reciprocal emotion. Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros and his bishops and monsignors soon convinced Isabella to take a hard line and give the defeated Moors of Granada a choice: baptism or exile. It was the same choice Ferdinand and Isabella would give Spain’s unbaptized Jews six months hence, with the result that over 100,000 eventually became exiles. Most Granadan Moors, however, preferred baptism to banishment; by professing a surface conformity, they could preserve their home and family, while secretly practicing the old faith as before—as many of the “converso” Jews did—although Ximenes made it difficult for them to do so, shutting down all the mosques and burning Moorish manuscripts. But the rural Moors were more uncompromising, stubbornly refusing to give up their faith or abandon their holdings. They dug into the fertile hills south of the city, bracing for the worst. It soon came: Ferdinand sent the Spanish army into action against them. The outnumbered rebels surrendered in 1492.
Thousands of exiled Moors who had spurned baptism loaded their possessions onto carts and their own backs and streamed into the port cities under the condemning eyes of the Spanish authorities. The Moors’ forced dispossession began a century of banishments and exile. While a few refugees found sanctuary in Italy, most retraced Tarik’s historic journey, in reverse, across the straits to North Africa—to Barbary, where they were welcomed by their Moslem brethren.
Wanting to avenge their banishment by the Spanish, the Moors found their way to the Barbary shipyards, where their thirst for revenge met a kindred spirit among the corsair captains, always ready to go raiding. Soon more of the long-bowed corsairs than ever plowed the western Mediterranean on raids against coastal Spain. The Moors’ former countrymen, the ones who professed a false allegiance to Christianity, helped guide them to Christian loot and captives. The “little war” against Spain had begun.
The escalating raids alarmed Isabella to the extent that she began contemplating a military expedition against Barbary. She sent spies to find which points were vulnerable to attack, but died in 1504 before mapping an invasion plan. The more cautious Ferdinand favored a containment policy while he concentrated on expanding Spanish trade with Italy. Meanwhile, the Moors’ hatred of Spain festered in the Barbary ports.
The Spanish cardinals and bishops would settle for nothing less than the extirpation of every last crumb of Moorish culture. With some justification, Spanish Christians believed the Moriscos, as the surviving Moors who had submitted to baptism were now called, constituted a “fifth column” in the deadly struggle between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe that had begun in earnest with the Crusades. Spain clamped down on them. The clergy wasn’t fooled by their baptismal-font conversions. They pressured Ferdinand’s grandson and successor, Charles V, to issue an edict requiring the Moriscos to speak only Spanish and to abandon their native costumes, their Moslem names, and their public baths. Moslems, Jews, heretics, and nonbelievers of every stripe all would soon experience far worse treatment as the Inquisition honed its inhuman instruments of persecution and torture, such as the rack and stake, but this was how it began in Spain, with intolerance of cultural diversity. Charles signed the edict, but it was his son, Philip II, who carried it out. In 1567, Philip ordered the Moorish baths pulled down, as well as a host of other punitive measures intended to eradicate Morisco culture. The next year, the Moriscos rebelled. War swept Andalusia. The Morisco rebels made the Sierra Nevada Mountains their headquarters. The Spanish exulted in the opportunity to destroy the Moors.
Given command of the Spanish forces was Philip’s gifted twenty-two-year-old half brother, Don Juan of Austria. Destined for renown at the epic naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, Don Juan ruthlessly clamped down on the Moriscos, soldiers and civilians alike. Spanish troops burned homes and farms, massacred women and children. The Moriscos retaliated in kind. But by May 1570, the Moriscos were finished. Fifty thousand were enslaved, or exiled to North Africa.
The remaining Moriscos began leaving Spain in large numbers, seeing that they, too, would be driven out eventually. The emigration continued for decades more. Between 1492 and 1610, three million Moors left or were forced into exile from Spain, settling mainly in Algiers, but also in Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli.
Barbary swelled with new naval recruits eager to make war on Christendom, which had deprived them of their country, homes, and livelihoods. By the early seventeenth century, the Barbary corsairs were raiding every western Mediterranean Christian shore with impunity and roving the Atlantic as far north as Iceland.
Before the pirate ships took aim on Europe, the theater of the long war between the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires shifted from the gates of Vienna to the western Mediterranean. The Ottomans had been invited into Algiers in the sixteenth century to drive out the Spanish troops sent by Ferdinand and Cardinal Ximenes to stop the corsair raids. With a foothold in the region, Sultan Suleiman dreamed of an Ottoman-controlled sea from Gibraltar to the Levant. He combined his eastern Mediterranean fleet with the Barbary corsairs and set out to crush Christian resistance. Charles V, who besides being Spain’s king was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, met the Ott
oman challenge with a Holy Roman coalition navy.
For fifty years, the behemoths struggled for naval dominance and struck at one another’s western Mediterranean strongholds, with neither able to deliver a decisive blow. Charles’s attempted invasion of Algiers in 1541 was wrecked by storms; Suleiman’s assault on Malta in 1565 was stopped by the doughty Knights of St. John and timely reinforcements. Tunis changed hands several times. In 1571, the Holy Roman fleet commanded by Don Juan met the Ottoman navy at Lepanto in Greece’s Gulf of Corinth in one of history’s titanic naval battles, involving 542 ships and more than 150,000 troops and oarsmen. Spanish gunpowder and firearms carried the day, giving the Christians a seemingly momentous victory. But a year later, the Ottomans were at sea with an even larger fleet.
Matters closer to home began to absorb both imperial powers’ energies. Spain had gone bankrupt and was trying to suppress the rebellious Dutch. Constantinople was convulsed by a power struggle after Suleiman’s death, and the Ottomans faced a new threat from Persia. In 1580, the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires signed a truce. Christian and Ottoman war fleets disappeared from the western Mediterranean.