Jefferson's War Page 7
In the meantime, he impulsively displayed his benevolence toward America by sending the Betsey’s crewmen to the Atlantic port of Mogadore and giving them the run of the city, instead of sending them into slavery. He also instructed his corsairs not to capture any more American merchant ships, but “to show them every favour, due to the most friendly powers; being fully determined to do much, when an opportunity offers.” By July 1785 he had decided to release the Betsey and her crew, although no U.S. envoy had yet appeared in Tangier. Sidi Muhammad’s long wait ended in 1786, with Thomas Barclay’s arrival. The envoy and the emperor quickly concluded the best treaty America would make in Barbary in thirty years: $10,000 in presents and no annual tribute.
Algiers showed no compunction to deliver up the Dauphin and Maria and their twenty-one crewmen, so John Lamb, a Norwich, Connecticut, merchant and sea captain, was dispatched to ransom them. Ignorant of the dey’s capacity for greed, Adams and Jefferson instructed Lamb to spend no more than $200 per man, laughably inadequate when it turned out Algiers wanted $3,000 each. Unsurprisingly, Lamb’s mission was a disaster. With the report on his failed effort, Lamb passed along even more disturbing news: that Algiers had seized the ships possibly at the urging of Charles Logie, England’s consul in Algiers. Lamb it turned out, hadn’t been a paragon of diplomacy himself while in Algiers, but had ill-advisedly confided in Logie. Richard O‘Brien, master of the Dauphin and a future U.S. consul to Algiers, wrote to Jefferson that Logie “I believe got all his [Lamb’s] secrets from him.” Moreover, he had also spoken with open contempt of France and Spain—in “the most vulgar language that it is with pain we see him so unworthy of this commission and the cloth he wore.”
Britain’s antipathy toward American trade in the Mediterranean was no secret. English businessmen liked to think of Algerian piracy as a cornerstone of their Mediterranean trade. “If there were no Algiers, England ought to build one,” Adams had reported them saying in 1783. Lord Sheffield expanded on this theme in Observations on the commerce of the American States the same year. He shrewdly recognized the vital importance to Britain of the “carrying trade”—the ability to transport goods from all countries in English merchant ships—as well as the threat to it posed by America. For these reasons, the Algerian pirates were a godsend. “That the Barbary States are advantageous to the maritime powers is certain. If they were suppressed, the little States of Italy, &c. would have much more of the carrying trade.” As for the Americans, Lord Sheffield believed that without Britain’s navy as a bulwark, they were defenseless against the corsairs and must abandon any plans to establish a thriving Mediterranean trade, for, as he put it dismissively, “... they cannot pretend to a navy.”
After Lamb’s failure in Algiers, Jefferson appealed to the Mathurins, the Redemptionist order. They had recently ransomed 300 Frenchmen from Algiers at $500 apiece. The friars’ success encouraged Jefferson in the wildly optimistic belief that they might be able to gain the American captives’ freedom for $200, by acting as a disinterested third party. Willing to make the attempt, the Mathurins said the ploy had a slim chance of working only if the U.S. government pretended a complete lack of concern for the prisoners’ welfare, and cut off the trickle of extra cash it was sending the consuls in Portugal and Spain who, in turn, had slipped it to the captives through the Spanish consul in Algiers. The money paid for extra clothing and food. When the payments stopped, the captives were forced back on a semistarvation diet and had to wear thin, ragged garments. They implored Congress, Jefferson, and Adams to resume the stipends.
The captives’ renewed suffering was to no good purpose, for the Algerians were unwilling to lower their ransom price; slaves happened to be in scarce supply at the time. Jefferson raised the sum he was willing to pay to $550 per captive, but by then the situation had changed altogether. Amid the French Revolution’s early rumblings, the Mathurins, fixtures in Barbary for nearly 200 years, recalled all the friars to France. Soon, the vast landholdings that had sustained the Mathurins’ merciful enterprises through the centuries were confiscated, and the good friars were seen no more in North Africa.
For a public man, Thomas Jefferson was remarkably reticent and shrank from confrontations, letting Madison fight many of his battles for him while he watched from the wings. But when his ideals were affronted, Jefferson was capable of retaliating ruthlessly.
An example of Jefferson’s capacity for vindictiveness occurred during the War for Independence, when Henry Hamilton, the British commander in Ohio and Kentucky, was captured by Virginia militiamen. The colonists hated Hamilton for reputedly buying scalps from Britain’s Indian allies and encouraging them to commit atrocities. The militia brought him to Williamsburg in chains and before the Virginia governor, Thomas Jefferson.
Under the wartime rules, high-ranking officers commonly were paroled or exchanged. But Hamilton’s actions so incensed Jefferson that he ignored custom and instead ordered him put in irons and denied visitors and even writing materials. Hamilton had surrendered to George Rogers Clark, the leader of the Virginia militia, only after Clark had agreed to certain conditions regarding his treatment. Jefferson refused to honor any of these terms. Threatened by the British with retaliation against American prisoners if Hamilton were not paroled, George Washington appealed to Jefferson—to no avail. Jefferson stubbornly refused to release Hamilton. He held him for a full year before finally paroling him, and only after forcing Hamilton to sign an agreement whose terms Hamilton disputed even as he put his name to it.
Jefferson displayed the same iron vindictiveness after his failure to ransom the Maria and Dauphin crews, casting about for ways to punish the Barbary States. Without his government’s knowledge, he approached the smaller European nations with the idea of forming a confederation to blockade Algiers. Each nation would contribute either a vessel or cash and sit on a committee that would oversee the confederation’s operations. Jefferson believed that with six frigates, half on duty at any given time, Algiers or any other Barbary State could be blockaded efficiently. There had never been a long-term naval coalition like this, but Jefferson was confident it would work, with its ships pouncing on Algerian corsairs when they left port and turning trading vessels away from Algiers. In his secret idealistic heart, Jefferson believed that such a permanent blockade not only would stop Algiers’s attacks on European and U.S. shipping, but would bring about a gun-to-the-head sort of epiphany that would transform the pirate regency into an agrarian nation, possibly resembling the rural republican utopia he envisioned America becoming.
When he consulted the European ministers in Paris about a naval blockading confederation, he found them surprisingly supportive. Portugal, the Two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, Denmark, and Sweden all were interested, but one thing worried them: France. Would France undermine the confederation? As they all well knew, France and England both wanted to suppress commercial competition in the Mediterranean. Jefferson took it upon himself to determine France’s position, but in his own indirect way. While John Adams would have bluntly asked France’s foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, what France would do—and likely would have received an ambiguous or false reply—Jefrerson was subtler: He laid out the confederation scheme for Vergennes and then asked him whether he thought England would interfere. England wouldn’t dare, Vergennes declared. Satisfied by his response that France, too, would not stop the blockade, Jefferson now only needed to obtain the backing of his own government to launch the naval coalition.
Once again, he chose subtlety over directness. One of Jefferson’s virtues was his willingness to let others advance his ideas—even take credit for them—if it improved their chances of being adopted. He placed the coalition proposal in the hands of the Marquis de Lafayette, America’s great French ally and Revolutionary War hero. Jefferson chose Lafayette as the messenger because he feared that if he proposed the coalition to the Confederation Congress, too much would be made of his difference of opinion with Adams over Barbary, and that might overshadow the
plan itself and wreck its chances. With Lafayette as the plan’s advocate—and Lafayette always was willing to take a high-profile position on important issues—the proposal would stand or fall on its merits. Jefferson and Lafayette collaborated on a version to present to Congress.
Lafayette first presented the plan to George Washington, forthrightly addressing the Adams—Jefferson disagreement and neatly disposing of it. “There is betwen Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Adams a diversity of opinion respecting the Algerines. Adams thinks peace should be purchased from them, Mr. Jefferson finds it as cheap and more honourable to cruize against them. I incline to the latter opinion, and think it possible to form an alliance between the United States, Naples, Rome, Venice, Portugal and some other powers, each giving a sum of money not very large, whereby a common armement may distress the Algerines into any terms. Congress ought to give Mr. Jefferson and Adams ample powers to stipulate in their names for such a confederacy.” Washington didn’t stand in Lafayette’s way. In 1787 Virginia formally proposed the coalition to Congress, recommending that Jefferson represent the United States.
Jay shot down the idea, and everyone knew he was right, even Jefferson. The Confederation government, he said, was far too feeble to participate in a federation, handcuffed by the requirement that nine states first approve every important action, and without authority to levy a tax to build a navy. That was the end of Jefferson’s coalition against Algiers. As he put it, Congress “declined an engagement which they were conscious they could not fulfill with punctuality; and so it fell through.”
IV
“A GOOD OCCASION TO BUILD A NAVY”
“I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones. ”
—Algiers Dey Hassan Pasha, greeting American captives in 1793
At the dawn of the new constitutional government, Adams and Jefferson returned to a changed United States. The Constitution’s ratification in 1788 promised better things for the United States, which had limped through the post-Revolution years under the anemic Confederation government with an empty treasury, no military force, and no taxation authority. All of that would change quickly. While neither Jefferson nor Adams was directly involved in drafting the new republic’s framework—Hamilton and Madison were the unlikely collaborators who had seen to that—the government required the services of the two founders, and they sailed home across the Atlantic, Adams to become vice president and Jefferson to be secretary of state.
Nearly four million people lived in the United States in 1790. The most populous region lay south of the Potomac River, with 1.8 million inhabitants, inflated by hundreds of thousands of slaves; one slave equaled three-fifths of a white man under the census’s bizarre calculus. One million people lived in New England, and 958,000 in the Middle Atlantic region.
The economic depression had ended, yet the economy remained flat. The new constitutional government had recently begun taxing distilled liquor and imports, but the taxes so far had produced only a trickle of revenue for the threadbare national treasury. Revolutionary War debt—$71 million in 1791, after all state and federal obligations were tallied—still hung over the government. Trade continued to lag behind pre-Revolution levels: U.S. exports totaled just $20.2 million in 1791, and imports $23 million. Wheat and corn were the top exports. Cotton, which would make the Southern planters rich in fifty years, scarcely registered as an export—just 3,135 bales were shipped in 1791.
Mediterranean trade in 1790 was no better than during the abysmal 1780s, when the United States had neither money nor a navy to forge diplomatic relations with Algiers, Tripoli, or Tunis. The sixteen surviving Maria and Dauphin crewmen—five had died from disease and mistreatment—were no nearer liberation from Algiers’s dungeons, with negotiations stalled since Lamb’s failed 1786 mission.
With Portugal at war with Algiers, U.S. shipping in the Atlantic was safe for the moment; Portuguese cruisers at Gibraltar barred Algerian corsairs from the Atlantic. But everyone knew that an Algiers-Portugal treaty would reopen the shipping lanes to Algerian depredations, imperiling America’s nascent Atlantic trade. The dismal Mediterranean situation inspired no bold government initiatives, or brainstorms by the emerging generation of leaders, wholly absorbed with the business of launching the fledgling constitutional republic. Jefferson, however, was returning to America with an advanced international perspective from his five years in Europe, steadfast in his conviction that war was the only means to achieve a lasting, honorable peace with the Barbary States.
Jefferson never coveted Jay’s foreign secretary position, or any job in George Washington’s administration. He had sailed from France intending to settle his daughters in Virginia and then to return to France as minister, or, preferably, to retire from public life to his diverse, absorbing interests. At forty-six, he had spent half his life in public service and now craved the quiet of his farm and experimenting with crop rotation and hybrids; building, tearing down, and rebuilding Monticello, his lifelong passion; indulging his fascination with gadgets and tinkering; and adding to his massive library, which later, when he became strapped for cash, he would sell to the government. (It became the basis for the Library of Congress.) But Washington and Madison cajoled him into coming to Philadelphia to serve in Washington’s Cabinet as secretary of state. After swallowing his disappointment, Jefferson attended to family matters in Virginia and then headed north to the capital city. At the very least, he would have a bully pulpit for urging action against the Barbary States. He used it for this purpose just weeks after joining the new administration.
The occasion was his December 30, 1790, message to Congress, in which he coolly analyzed the Mediterranean situation and the possible responses to Algiers’s demand for $59,496 ransom for the Maria and Dauphin captives, who by then had been held for five years.
Besides being at war with the United States, Algiers also was in the midst of hostilities with Russia, Austria, Portugal, Naples, Sardinia, Genoa, and Malta, and was temporarily at peace with France, Spain, England, Venice, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark. None had bought peace cheaply, Jefferson pointed out carefully. Spain’s peace had cost a staggering $3 million to $5 million, plus $100,000 annual tribute; the ghosts of the exiled Moriscos must have shouted for joy. The treaties signed by the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Venetians committed each to yearly payments of $24,000 to $30,000, while Britain’s “presents” to the Barbary rulers ran to $280,000 a year. It went without saying that those sums were beyond the cash-poor United States’s resources.
He laid out the alternatives in the Mediterranean. For liberating the captives under the current circumstances, they boiled down to ransom or a prisoner exchange, but he added discouragingly that the Algerians often were loath to trade even one Christian for five or six Moors. The long-range policy options were more intriguing. The United States could risk trade in the Mediterranean without treaties and simply ransom future captives. It could buy peace through treaties and tribute. “For this, we have the example of rich and powerful nations, in this instance counting their interest more than their honor,” he said scornfully.
He then dangled a third option, obviously his preference: “to repel force by force.” He warned that once Portugal made peace with Algiers, the corsairs bottled up in the Mediterranean for five years would come after American Atlantic shipping. What would the United States do then, without a navy? A stable Mediterranean trade depended on America’s beginning a navy, he said, estimating its initial cost at $400,000 and an annual expense of $125,000 to maintain it. Congress listened to Jefferson’s message with little enthusiasm, although a Senate resolution was drafted to establish a navy when finances permitted. But the resolution died in committee.
Jefferson wracked his brain for creative ways to strike back at Barbary without going deeper into debt and came up with a scheme that would pay for itself while applying pressure on Algiers. His “Proposal to Use Force against the Barbary States” called for three frigates to be deployed against Algerian ships in the western
Mediterranean. They also would capture Turkish and Greek vessels in the Levant, answering seizures with seizures. The Moslem captives would be sold in the slave mart in Malta, just as Christian captives were sold in Algiers—an interesting proposition from a man who favored eventual emancipation of all U.S. slaves (but not in his lifetime) and a ban on importing new slaves. The losses would impel the Ottoman sultan to pressure Algiers to make peace with the United States and release the hostages, Jefferson expostulated. The retaliatory attacks would command the Moslems’ grudging respect and enable Americans to obtain a treaty without presents or tribute, while recovering the captives and their ships, and earning the regard of the other Barbary States. Jefferson warned that Congress must act swiftly before Algiers and Portugal made peace and Algerian corsairs poured into the Atlantic. His unconventional plan evoked no congressional response.
After Washington’s second inauguration in 1793, Jefferson ardently wished to leave government and begin his postponed retreat into private life in Virginia. Washington persuaded him to hang on for six months while he sought a successor, but when fall arrived with no replacement in sight, his longing for a quiet rural retirement won out. Assured that his public life was over, Jefferson departed Philadelphia early in 1794 to immerse himself in the pursuits of a horticulturalist, scholar, inventor, architect, naturalist and philosopher.
A new dey ascended the Algerian throne. Hassan Pasha was the latest in a long line of despots who, nearly as often as they rose to power, were deposed bloodily. Richard O‘Brien, captain of the captured Dauphin, wrote from his seven-year captivity that the timing was ideal for reopening negotiations. American leaders agreed that John Paul Jones, the iconic naval hero of the Revolutionary War, would be an ideal ambassador, commingling diplomacy and the suggestion of force. Jones had spent the previous three years in Russia as Catherine the Great’s admiral, but now was barely scraping by in Paris. He accepted the mission. But before he could embark for Algiers, he died on July 18, 1792. The assignment next was entrusted to Thomas Barclay, who had negotiated the U.S. treaty with Morocco, but he, too, was carried away by illness before reaching Algiers. Finally the commission fell to David Humphreys, the minister to Portugal and Washington’s aide during the war and his early presidency. Humphreys arrived in Algiers in the fall of 1793, just as catastrophe struck.