Jefferson's War Read online

  The Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, the year, too, that Holland won independence from Spain after eighty years of war. England, France, Spain, and Holland built towering new men-of-war of 100 guns or more for the next round of hostilities, and kept them in fighting trim by sending them to the Mediterranean when the corsair raids cut too deeply.

  English Admiral Robert Blake reached Tunis in 1655 to negotiate at Oliver Cromwell’s behest. England had recently beaten the Dutch navy and now was busy fighting Spain, which Tunis took as a signal to step up its seizures of English merchant ships. Should Tunis refuse to negotiate, Blake’s orders were to “assault them either by land or sea and fight with, kill and slay all such persons as shall oppose you.”

  The Tunisians stated their bargaining position bluntly by firing on Blake’s ships. Blake sailed to Porto Farina in the Gulf of Tunis to commit mayhem on the corsairs anchored beneath the fortress guns. “The Lord, being pleased to favor us with a gentle breeze which cast the smoke on them ... facilitated our attack.” Blake sank or burned nine Tunisian corsairs with heavy loss of life, at a cost of just 25 English killed and 40 wounded. From Tunis, Blake sailed to Algiers for further “talks.” The sobering news of Blake’s punitive attack on Tunis preceded him, and the pasha was delightfully conciliatory, eagerly reaffirming his nine-year-old treaty with England.

  Blake’s success inspired the other major powers to use force to discourage the unrelenting depredations on their shipping, but they discovered it acted as only a temporary brake on the attacks. Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, backed by a formidable fleet, dictated treaties to Tunis and Algiers in 1661 and liberated Christian prisoners. Ten years later, British Admiral Edward Spragg sailed burning ships—“fireships”—into the anchored Algerian squadron, destroying the cream of the fleet and killing 3,100 sailors. The shocking loss touched off a rebellion. The four janissary chiefs who had ruled Algiers for twelve years were assassinated, and a corsair captain was named the first “dey.” He and his descendants ruled Algiers until France’s invasion in 1830.

  France was the next European power to retaliate against Algiers, whose dey had gone so far as to declare war. In 1682, Admiral Abraham Duquesne appeared off Algiers with orders to destroy the city, unleashing a terrific bombardment that killed 500 people and demolished 50 buildings. His orders executed, Duquesne sailed away without negotiating. The next year, he was back. He shelled the city again. Eager to avert further devastation, Dey Baba Hassen sent Duquesne a boatload of Algerians as hostages and offered to return hundreds of French slaves. But Duquesne wanted 700,000 livres in reparations for French shipping losses. Hassen said he didn’t have the money.

  One of the hostages delivered up by Hassen, Mezzo Morto, assured Duquesne that if he put him ashore he could convince Hassen to meet his terms. There was more to Morto’s plan than what he told the French admiral, who sent Morto to the city in a boat to try his persuasion on the dey. The former hostage proved to be a dynamo of vaulting ambition. He rallied the corsair captains, assassinated Hassen, succeeded him as dey, and then threatened to kill all the French nationals in Algiers with cannon fire if Duquesne didn’t stop the bombardment. Duquesne refused indignantly and ordered the fleet to resume its shelling.

  Morto ordered Père Vacher, the vicar apostolic, to be tied to the mouth of a cannon. The vicar was blown to bits. Algiers’s ramparts were also soon stained with the viscera of other French clergy and nationals. Unmoved by the slaughter, Duquesne continued the shelling, destroying more than 500 homes, several mosques, and a public bath. When Morto displayed a mulishness equal to Duquesne’s and refused to sign a treaty, the French fleet just sailed away, leaving the French nationals’ fate in their Algerian enemies’ hands.

  Five years of hostilities ensued between Algiers and France without any resolution, and the French king Louis XIV sent Admiral Jean d‘Estrées to humble the Algerians. Upon reaching the city, he found Morto still the ruler—and more recalcitrant than ever on the subject of reparations. D’Estrées resumed the bombardment Duquesne had suspended five years earlier. The Algerians responded by blowing to bits with cannons the French consul, the vicar general, and other Frenchmen. D‘Estrées retaliated by executing Turkish captives and floating their bodies ashore. With neither side willing to compromise, d’Estrées also left without a treaty.

  The punitive expeditions had no enduring effect on the Barbary States’ morale. No sooner would the European men-of-war leave the western Mediterranean than new corsairs would be christened with lambs’ blood and sally forth in search of Christian prizes. A sustained allied blockade such as Jefferson envisioned never seemed to have occurred to Europe’s leaders. “The Terror” became an accepted hazard of conducting foreign trade, much like hurricanes and mutinies, desertions and accidents at sea.

  Holland greatly aided Barbary’s incremental shift to semirespectability by proposing a radical change in its relations with Algiers: a “permanent” treaty with annual tribute. Holland was weary of signing treaties that inevitably were broken, with a consequent loss of men, ships, and cargo, followed by a retributive counterstrike, and finally a new treaty to be broken later. It would be more economical, the pragmatic Dutch reasoned, each year to simply give the dey a cash “present” and “naval stores”—in other words, the masts, cannon, gunpowder, swords, and muskets that enabled the Algerians to continue extorting money from Europe. Of course, the Barbary States didn’t object to their extortion racket’s elevation to a line item in Holland’s annual budget. In 1712 Holland sent Algiers $5,000, ten 24-pound cannons, 25 large masts, 450 barrels of gunpowder, 2,500 cannonballs, and 50 chests of gun barrels and swords—the very weapons of war that Barbary’s rulers needed to extort even more money from Europe.

  Austria, Venice, Naples, Hamburg, Sweden, Denmark, and the other small European trading nations lined up to sign similar treaties. Too weak to fend off the piratical raids on their shipping, they preferred the predictability of annual tribute to the random catastrophic losses inflicted by the corsairs. France and England were contemptuous, as they could afford to be, possessing the war fleets to sporadically compel the Barbary rulers’ respect. Yet even they succumbed quietly to the temptation of buying long-term security with treaties sweetened by lavish presents, the occasional new warship, and plenty of cash.

  The treaties enriched the rulers, but deprived the corsair crews of plunder and the freebooting, roving life they loved. Acutely aware that thousands of idle, brooding seamen, soldiers, and captains were the volatile ingredients of revolution, the rulers broke the treaties deliberately from time to time to keep the corsair crews busy and their captains in loot.

  Algiers perfected the elaborate bit of de rigeur theater that came to attend the rupture of treaties. The dey would peremptorily send for the consul. Fearing the worst, the consul would dutifully present himself and receive a tongue-lashing over a trumped-up slight that the ruler would claim was tantamount to war. Of course, all the consul’s efforts to repair the breach were doomed. Before long, soldiers would march out and chop down the consular flagpole, and out would go the corsairs to hunt down that nation’s merchantmen. Denmark and Sweden, Russia, the two Sicilies and Naples, Venice, and, later, the United States learned to read the signs. A new treaty with one meant another inevitably would find its flagpole on the ground.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, the Barbary States were shadows of their former selves, surviving largely on their reputation. Algiers’s population, thinned by plague and a stagnant economy, had dwindled in the 1780s to 30,000, one-third of the city’s size 150 years earlier; the once-mighty pirate nation’s corsair fleet had shrunk to just ten ships, some unseaworthy; and its slave population hovered around 1,000, a tiny fraction of the 25,000 who thronged Algiers in Father Pierre Dan’s day.

  Yet Europe continued to pay obeisance to the Barbary States’ jihad protection racket as though the regencies’ corsair fleets remained the scourge of old.

  III

  THE NEW NATIO
N AND BARBARY

  When the hullowed months have slipped away, then fight associators [idolaters] wherever you may find them; take them and besiege them, and wayluy them at every outpost.

  —Koran, Surah 9:5

  In July 1785, John Adams settled his wife Abigail and their daughter Nabby into a home on Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair, and optimistically took up his new duties as minister to the Court of St. James. With Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, Adams had negotiated the 1783 Peace of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. He now harbored modest hopes of wearing down British resistance to becoming a full-fledged trading partner with its former colony. But it soon became painfully apparent that he faced a nearly impossible task. The London press’s report of Adams’s arrival was a harbinger of the reception he would find. “An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!” it sniffed. England was in no mood to restore America to favored trading status, even though the nations were natural commercial allies. The Revolution’s wound to British pride was still too raw to countenance a normal trade relationship. The cool, correct British diplomats kept the new American minister at arm’s length. Adams made his diplomatic rounds dutifully and wrote reports to Foreign Secretary Jay, without much hope of accomplishing anything.

  So he must have been pleased when he learned in February 1786 that the new Tripoli ambassador was in London. Here was an opportunity finally to achieve something. Mediterranean affairs were increasingly occupying his attention and that of his Paris counterpart, Thomas Jefferson. In October 1784, a Moroccan corsair had captured the Betsey and her crew of ten American merchant seamen soon after she had sailed from Cadiz, Spain, for Philadelphia, her hold full of salt. Lateen corsair sails had appeared on the horizon, and it wasn’t long before Captain James Erwin’s brig was overtaken. Nine months later, Algerian corsairs operating in the Atlantic had captured the U.S. merchantmen Dauphin and Maria with twenty-one crewmen and passengers. “Our Sufferings are beyond our expressing or your conception,” Richard O‘Brien, the Dauphin’s captain, wrote dolefully to Congress.

  Jay already had instructed Adams and Jefferson to make treaties with the Barbary States, authorizing them to pay up to $80,000 in borrowed money from Holland, or wherever they could get credit for the customary presents. However, before the ministers entered any negotiations, they wanted to learn what the European nations were paying, and they almost surely took time to review their small store of facts about the Barbary States.

  It was widely known among educated Americans that Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were Moslem states and extorted tribute from Europe through terror. Less well known was the fact that Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis were regencies of the Ottoman Empire, but Morocco was not. The three regencies were ostensibly under the rule of the sultan in Constantinople, but in truth they were virtually autonomous—and remained that way so long as they sent the sultan gifts periodically—and each regency had evolved its own succession. While the Barbary States, with Algiers historically predominant, presented a solid, menacing front to Christian Europe and America, they negotiated treaties independently, competed fiercely with one another and occasionally quarreled over territory, sometimes to the extent of going to war. And, confusingly, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli happened to be the names of the capital cities of their respective countries; Tangier was Morocco’s capital.

  At the end of their inquiry into European tributary payments, Jefferson and Adams knew only that the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Venetians all paid annual tribute—Venice in jewels and gold coins called sequins, and the others in naval stores and ammunition—but not how much. What would it cost for the United States to buy peace? The American diplomats didn’t know. Consequently, by early 1786 the two ministers had not even attempted to open treaty negotiations with any of the Barbary States.

  Thus, the Tripolitan ambassador’s arrival presented a rare opportunity that Adams grasped resolutely. Making his embassy rounds one night in early 1786, Adams made a point of stopping at the Tripolitan’s home. He intended only to leave his card and arrange a meeting later. To his surprise, he was immediately ushered before Ambassador Abdrahaman. The plenipotentiary welcomed Adams and begged him to join him by the fire.

  The men warmed themselves at the fireplace, puffing on long-stemmed Turkish pipes that they smoked with the bowls resting on the carpet. “It is sufficient to say,” Adams reported to Foreign Secretary Jay, “that his Excellency made many inquiries concerning America, the climate, soil, heat, cold, &c., and observed, ‘it is a very great country, but Tripoli is at war with it.’” Adams protested that America wasn’t ill disposed toward Tripoli, and neither nation had provoked the other. Abdrahaman patiently explained that that was beside the point. Provocation or no, America and Tripoli were at war, until they made peace. “His Excellency replied, that Turkey, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were the sovereigns of the Mediterranean; and that no nation could navigate that sea without a treaty of peace with them; that America must make such treaties with Tripoli first, then with Constantinople, then with Algiers and Morocco, as France, England, and all the other powers of Europe had done.”

  In 1786, the depressed U.S. economy could have used the stimulus of Mediterranean commerce. But with the Continental Navy disbanded and without treaties with Barbary, American merchants didn’t dare risk it, even though they had hoped that reviving the pre-Revolution trade with Greece, Italy, and the Levant would compensate for the disappointing trading partners that England and France had turned out to be. They hadn’t foreseen the consequences in the Mediterranean of throwing off the British yoke: Exposing themselves to the Barbary corsairs without the shield of British treaties and passports backed by Royal Navy guns, or U.S. treaties or guns, for that matter. Even with England’s protection, there had been losses. In 1678, New York City churchgoers raised ransom money to free eleven American captives in Algiers. In 1698, during another New York collection to ransom more slaves, so many donations were made that the surplus helped pay for the erection of Trinity Church on Wall Street and Broadway. While at times even British passports were no safeguard against the Barbary rovers, they had enabled American merchants to conduct business in the Mediterranean for more than a century.

  In the years leading to the Revolution, an average of 100 American ships transported 20,000 tons of goods annually to Mediterranean ports. Among the commodities traded there were Southern rice and lumber, grain and flour from the middle colonies, and New England rum and fish. Mediterranean markets consumed one-sixth of America’s wheat exports and one-fourth of its exported fish. The Revolution dammed the stream of U.S. raw goods that flowed to the Mediterranean, and the postwar years were no better, with America lacking treaties. Richard Harrison, a Maryland merchant who was acting U.S. agent in Cadiz, urged Foreign Affairs Secretary Robert Livingston in 1783 to emphasize to Congress the importance of friendly relations with Barbary. “Our Commerce to Lisbon, this port & the Medeterranian must become very important, & these Freebooters will have in their power, & very probably in their Inclination, to molest it greatly.” Harrison said England or France would never intervene with the Barbary States on America’s behalf. “It is not [in] their Interest that our Navigation should become so extensive & free ...” In that one sentence, Harrison had neatly summarized the other major obstacle blocking the path to a lucrative U.S. trade in the Mediterranean.

  In 1782 Livingston had instructed Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. minister in Paris, to make contact with representatives from the Barbary States. It was “a favorable moment for making ourselves known to them,” he said, what with the Moroccan emperor’s recent coolness toward Great Britain and France’s unusual warmth toward the United States. But absorbed in Paris’s pleasures, Franklin let the favorable moment pass without acting. No American envoys appeared in the Barbary states in 1783 or 1784.

  With an entourage of robed attendants, Abdrahaman, the Tripolitan ambassador, swept into Adams’s Grosvenor Square residence three days after their congeni
al fireside conversation. He had come for the express purpose of pressuring Adams to sign a peace treaty quickly. Having planted the idea during the initial meeting, Abdrahaman wanted to fan the embers. A treaty would enrich both Tripoli’s bashaw and Abdrahaman himself He warned that if America procrastinated, merchantmen and their crews might be seized, complicating treaty negotiations with tedious ransom discussions. And war must be avoided because it would be so terrible. “A war between Christian and Christian was mild, and prisoners, on either side, were treated with humanity; but a war between Turk and Christian was horrible, and prisoners were sold into slavery,” Adams wrote, in reconstructing Abdrahaman’s words for Jay. “Although he was himself a mussulman [Moslem], he must still say he thought it a very rigid law; but, as he could not alter it, he was desirous of preventing its operation, or, at least, of softening it, as far as his influence extended.” The Tripolitan was pleased when Adams told him he had authority to negotiate a treaty, and as soon as he had departed, Adams dispatched a messenger to Jefferson in Paris, summoning him to a parley with Adams and Abdrahaman.

  Shipbuilding, the whaling industry, and Southern agriculture suffered particularly during the grinding economic malaise following independence. The shipyards had built British ships before the war, but now were idled; the British were building their own ships at home. The whaling fleet had been nearly obliterated by the Royal Navy during the war. What’s more, France and Britain were restricting whale and fish-product imports, ostensibly to cultivate their own maritime industries, but also to use the fisheries for training fresh seamen for the expected resumption of their unending war with each other.

  Southern agriculture had not yet recovered from marauding British troops and the savage partisan war between loyalists and patriots. More than 50,000 slaves had slipped away during the fighting, many ending up in the disease-ridden refugee camps established by the British Army in the Southern colonies. There, they died by the thousands of smallpox and fever; Jefferson himself lost 27 of his slaves this way. With fewer slaves to harvest the tobacco and rice, planters cut back their acreage. Rice exports told the story: in 1770—73, a total of 277.1 million pounds; in 1783—86, just 128.3 million pounds.