Jefferson's War Read online

  The British had been making trouble for the United States again. Logie, the London consul in Algiers who supposedly had urged the 1785 depredations that resulted in the loss of the Maria and Dauphin, had secretly persuaded the dey to make peace with Portugal, whom the British coveted as an ally against France. It also didn’t hurt—at least from Britain’s standpoint—that the removal of Portugal’s Gibraltar blockade would severely damage American trade. Logie’s machinations proceeded in such velvet silence that until the very last minute, even the Portuguese were unaware he was negotiating on their behalf Yet when the treaty was presented to them as a fait accompli, costing a shocking $3 million, the Portuguese didn’t blink. They signed it in October 1793, and the Algerian corsairs streamed through the Straits of Gibraltar in search of American loot, lending credence to Richard O‘Brien’s wry observation about the Algerians: “Money is the God of Algiers and Mahomet their prophet.”

  News of the treaty rang like a fire bell in the U.S. consulates throughout Spain and Portugal. The consuls flashed word to merchantmen in Spanish and Portuguese ports of the imminent danger. But there was no way to warn ships already at sea that they were sailing into peril.

  Its hold filled with flour, the Polly had cast off from Baltimore and sailed down the Chesapeake in September 1793. Passing the Virginia Capes, the brig, out of Newburyport, Maine, entered the Atlantic, bound for Cadiz. The Atlantic crossing was uneventful until October 25, when the Polly was 100 miles west of Cape St. Vincent, and Captain Samuel Bayley and his eight crewmen spotted a strange vessel. The British ensign fluttering over the stern eased their apprehensions. The English might stop and search the Polly, but not make her a prize—if the stranger really were British, for Algerian corsairs often sailed under false colors. The vessels drew closer, and the ship’s captain and crew could be seen on deck wearing English-style clothing. The Americans relaxed their guard a fatal instant. Then armed men in turbans and robes boiled out onto the main deck. The Polly was caught. Algerian pirates swarmed over Bayley’s ship, rifling clothing, trunks, and cargo holds. In minutes, the Polly’s crewmen were shivering on deck, stripped of their clothing. In their underwear, they were ordered around the deck and up into the chilly rigging to work the canvas.

  When the Americans complained about their inconsiderate treatment, they were rudely acquainted with the facts of their new life. The corsair captain, Rais Hudga Mahomet, said they were lucky to have been permitted underwear. “He answered in very abusive words that we might think ourselves well used that they did not take them,” wrote crewman John Foss. “And he would teach us to work naked. And ordered us immediately to our duty.”

  Off the coasts of Spain and Portugal in the Atlantic, the corsairs had fallen upon American trading vessels like hungry lions. The reports filtering back to the consuls in Spain and Portugal were all bad. The captive ships included the Hope and Minerva from New York; the Prudent and Minerva of Philadelphia; the George of Rhode Island; the Thomas, a Newburyport vessel like the Polly; the Olive Branch, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the Jane of Haverhill, Massachusetts; the Jay of Colchester, Connecticut; the Dispatch of Petersburg, Virginia—counting the Polly, eleven ships with 104 crewmen, making 119 American prisoners of Algiers.

  In Algiers’s dungeons, the stunned prisoners encountered the survivors of the Maria and Dauphin and despaired. The fifteen remaining crewmen were rail-thin from their meager diet, broken in body and sometimes spirit, too. “All my hopes are blasted,” wrote Samuel Calder, master of the Joy, “& whether ever I shall get away from this is entirely uncertain, indeed if I may judge by unfortunate Capt. O‘Brien & Stevens who have been nine years here & most of their Crews are already Dead ... we have no reason but to expect more.”

  But as the newcomers lost hope, the Maria and Dauphin survivors took heart as they scanned the fresh American faces. With so many of her countrymen in chains, America would surely act now.

  Throughout December 1793, reports of the shocking losses, carried by the slow medium of ship and courier, trickled into Philadelphia, a city mourning its dead. Yellow fever had cut down 5,000 of the 30,000 inhabitants of the nation’s capital. The epidemic began in the summer heat; by September, at least 200 people were dying every week. Believing that the fever was spread by contact, Philadelphians stopped shaking hands and walked in the middle of the streets. Businesses closed. “Everyone is getting out of the city who can,” Jefferson wrote on September 11 before leaving for Monticello. The fever had struck down Alexander Hamilton, but he was recovering. President Washington had departed for Mount Vernon, War Secretary Henry Knox for Massachusetts. “When we shall reassemble again may perhaps depend on the course of this malady.” Since antiquity, yellow fever and malaria [Latin for bad air] had been vaguely attributed to heavy, stifling air; consequently, Philadelphia’s sultry summers were thought to be somehow responsible for the 1793 epidemic. It didn’t abate until the November frosts. Doctors valiantly applied their well-meaning but bumbling treatments—bleeding and purging—in trying to save lives, unnecessarily ending some by sapping their patients’ strength. Why such deadly outbreaks began or ended remained mysteries until the great discovery of the lowly mosquito’s essential role more than a hundred years in the future.

  When they reached Algiers, the American captives were crawling with lice, flea-beaten and filthy from their confinement in the verminous Algerian ship holds, where many were transferred after their own vessels were seized. They were herded by soldiers through Algiers’s streets to the dey’s palace. It was a demoralizing trek. “As we passed through the streets, our ears were stunned with the shouts, clapping of hands, and other acclamations of joy from the inhabitants, thanking God for their great success, and victories over so many Christian dogs, and unbelievers, which is the appellation they generally give to all christians,” Foss, the Polly crewman, wrote in the remarkable Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss, Several Years a Prisoner in Algiers, published in 1798. Hassan Pasha extinguished any lingering hopes of the prisoners receiving humane treatment with his chilling greeting: “I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.”

  Hassan’s hard words were prophetic. The captives were organized into slave gangs that blasted and dragged huge rock slabs from the jagged mountains outside the city. Before dawn, their taskmasters rousted them from their miserable sleeping quarters on the damp ground in the city’s prisons and distributed breakfast: a fourounce loaf of black bread with a little vinegar—the thrice-daily ration—and marched them in columns to their soul-murdering workplace in the dusty mountains, each loaded with twenty-fiveto forty-pound ankle chains to make escape impossible.

  The prisoners used gunpowder to blast loose crushing stone slabs all week long, rolling them to the base of the mountains, where they collected in a heap. On Fridays, the Islamic day of rest, Moslem overseers indulged in sport at the Christian slaves’ expense, forcing them to lift the slabs weighing twenty tons or more onto sledges, then harnessing the slaves like mules and driving them the two miles to the quay. The “drivers” flogged their crews in a race to reach the quay first with the most stones. It was a game for the Tripolitans, agony for the Americans. “They are continually beating the slaves with their sticks, and goading them with its end, in which is a small spear, not unlike an ox goad.... If any one chance to faint, and fall down with fatigue, they generally beat them until they are able to rise again.” The massive boulders were loaded at the quay onto barges and transported to the harbor mole, where more slaves dumped them as fill. Slaves did all of Algiers’s heavy lifting. “... every article that is transported from one part of the Marine to another, or from the Marine to the city or from the city to the Marine or elsewhere must be carried by slaves, with poles upon their shoulders.”

  Of all the taskmasters, one named Sherief was the worst. Foss observed that he “never appeared to be in his element, except when he was cruelly punishing some christian captive.” To the Americans’ delight, cosmic justice was mete
d out to Sherief one day in April 1795. Sherief had taken twenty slaves to a city wall to remove a pile of boards, “and having beat several unmercifully without provocation; an American exclaimed in the English Language, which the Turk did not understand, ‘God grant you may die, the first time you offer to abuse another man.”’ With Sherief, that time wasn’t long coming. Only a few minutes later, he swung his stick at a slave who hadn’t moved fast enough. His intended blow was off the mark, and he was thrown off-balance. With satisfaction, Foss described what happened next. “His stick gave him such a sudden jerk, that he fell from the planks, between the planks, and was dashed to pieces.”

  The Americans’ inhuman labors might have earned them their daily twelve ounces of bread, but not shelter for the night. They had to pay for that. If they didn’t, they had to sleep on the ground in the bagnio’s open courtyard, which was enclosed by the squalid, tiered rooms where the paying prisoners were allowed to sleep on the floor. Slaves caught sleeping indoors without paying were chained to a pillar every night until they did.

  The Americans especially dreaded the end of Ramadan, a time of feasting for the Moslems—and near-starvation for the captives. During the monthlong Ramadan fast, the Moslems eschewed eating, smoking, or drinking between sunup and sundown. When it ended, they celebrated with two days of feasting. The captives were required to give their taskmasters presents and then were locked in the bagnio while the Moslems ate and drank. To underscore their lowly status as despised Christians, the slaves’ meager daily ration was slashed from three tiny loaves to one.

  The Algerians’ “tenderest mercies toward Christian captives,” Foss wrote, “are the most extreme cruelties; and who are taught by the Religion of Mahomet (if that can be called a Religion which leads men to the commission of such horrid and bloody deeds) to persecute all its opposers.” While terrible indeed were Barbary’s capital punishments, the base currency of discipline was the bastinado, painful but nonlethal. The prisoner’s hands were tied behind him, and he was laid on his stomach. Loops attached to long poles were wrapped around his feet, which then were drawn up by the poles. When all was in readiness, the prisoner was beaten on the soles of his feet and his buttocks with inch-diameter poles, the number of lashes ranging from a dozen or two for mild or imagined infractions into the hundreds for serious offenses. Fourteen slaves caught attempting to escape from Algiers late in 1793 were each administered five hundred bastinados and loaded with fifty pounds of chain, attached to a seventy-pound weight. Bowed beneath their crushing burden, they ate, slept, and toiled in the quarry with the seventy pounds balanced on their shoulders. The breakout leader was beheaded, an arguably more humane punishment, and more merciful than the Moslems’ array of other capital punishments reserved for Christians— impalement, burning, or being flung onto the sharp hooks projecting from the city walls, to die in agony over days.

  Moslems who committed capital crimes were usually strangled at a wall reserved for this purpose. They sat on the ground between two holes a neck-width apart. Rope was fed through one hole, around the victim’s neck, and out the other hole. The executioner, seated on the other side of the wall, twisted the knotted rope ends around a stick until the victim died.

  The massive Algerian raid prompted Congress for the first time to seriously consider establishing a navy, but the issue, as many like it in the future, divided representatives along geographical lines. Rural Southern Republicans opposed any foreign entanglements or standing military force, while Northern Federalists believed a navy was indispensable to a vigorous foreign trade. After lurking behind a dozen debates for a decade without breaking cover, the subject finally was out in the open in 1794. For the first time, nothing prevented Congress from acting. Tariff and whiskey tax revenues were streaming into the U.S. Treasury, and there was money for a navy if Congress elected to build one.

  One measure above all was responsible for the improved revenue situation: the Merchant Marine Act of July 4, 1789, the so-called “second Declaration of Independence.” Its 10 percent tariff differential favoring goods carried by American ships caused merchant tonnage to soar from 123,893 in 1789 to 529,471 in 1795. In 1789 only 17 percent of imports and 30 percent of exports were carried in U.S. ships; by 1795, U.S. ships carried 92 percent of imports and 88 percent of exports. Consequently, shipyards were booming up and down the East Coast. While U.S. ports were enjoying their first postcolonial boom, Eli Whitney was patenting the cotton gin, which soon would enable the South also to join in the prosperity.

  Unlike Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the World Trade Center and Pentagon terror attacks sixty years later, Algiers’s brazen piracy didn’t cause the Republicans and Federalists to paper over their ideological differences. The Senate was 17—13 Federalist-controlled; the House, where the issue would be decided, was 57—48 Republican. As a result, even the question of naming a nine-man committee to make recommendations about a naval force resulted in a close House vote: 46—44 to proceed.

  The navy debate began on Friday, February 7, 1794, when the committee chairman, Thomas Fitzsimons of Pennsylvania, read a resolution recommending a six-frigate naval force. The debate lasted a month, with James Madison, the Republicans’ point man and Jefferson’s closest confidant, leading the navy opponents, who were Southerners for the most part. Notably absent was Jefferson, who had resigned from Washington’s Cabinet and left Philadelphia a month earlier with all his possessions, bound for Monticello and retirement—but only temporary retirement, as events would prove. His timely departure spared him the discomfort of having to choose between his Republican allies and a cherished project: building a navy.

  Six frigates were too few, and yet the timetable for building them was too long to meet the current crisis, Madison argued. He proposed that the money for a navy instead be spent on a treaty with Algiers. He reasoned that the Algiers—Portugal truce likely would be broken before a U.S. navy was afloat, and, if negotiations with Algiers failed, America could use the treaty money to pay Portuguese warships to protect U.S. merchantmen.

  Fitzsimons said it was presumptuous of Madison to so casually dismiss his committee’s long and careful study of the issue. Algiers, he said, jeopardized all the recent advances in American trade, even its trade in commodities as prosaic as salt. Two million bushels of salt were imported from Europe each year, and if Algiers’s warships curtailed that commerce, it would cost $1 more per bushel to import it from elsewhere, or $2 million—three times the $660,000 estimated cost of building a frigate navy. The similarly inflated cost of other commodities would ratchet the total severalfold, making a navy seem like a bargain by comparison. Benjamin Goodhue of Massachusetts attempted to knock down Madison’s assertion that six frigates couldn’t stand up to Algiers’s navy; the committee, he said, had studied intelligence reports showing the force was adequate to the purpose. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts made alarmist predictions about what would happen if Congress failed to act. “Our commerce is on the point of being annihilated, and unless an armament is fitted out, we may very soon expect the Algerines on the coast of America.”

  The Republicans fell back to their second line of defense, the British question, another fault line between them and the Federalists, who wished to reestablish friendly relations with their former mother country. The Republicans, who with good reason distrusted Britain, favored closer ties with France, although the French Revolution’s excesses were beginning to dampen the enthusiasm of even Francophiles. Britain, said John Nicholas of Virginia, not only had brokered the Algiers—Portugal truce, but had tried to discourage the Portuguese from convoying American merchantmen. Other Republicans warned that Britain would continue secretly to encourage Algiers to prey on American trade to prevent U.S. goods from reaching Britain’s enemy, France. “Algiers was but the instrument, Britain was the cause,” said William Giles of Virginia. Madison asserted that if America built a navy, Britain would urge Algiers to harass U.S. shipping. “In the same way that they give underhand assistance to the Indians, they wo
uld give it to the Algerines, rather than hazard an open war.”

  British interference was not well documented, argued Congressman William Vans Murray of Maryland, and it would be foolhardy for America to depend on Portugal for protection. “It would create a disgraceful dependence on a foreign power, and weaken the spirit of our marine; whereas, if you fit out frigates, you employ your money in nourishing the roots of your own industry; you encourage your own shipbuilding, lumber and victualing business.” A U.S. squadron could blockade Gibraltar without fear of being confronted by Algiers’s navy, because the corsairs “wanted plunder, not glory; when they discovered they had to get the first by hard fighting, they would listen to peace, accompanied by money.”

  The House passed the momentous Act to Provide a Naval Armament, 50—39, with congressmen from the rural South and West opposed and able at the last minute to attach an important amendment. Peace negotiations must be pursued with Algiers while shipbuilding went forward, and if a treaty were signed, construction must cease. President Washington signed the act into law on March 27, 1794. It allocated $688,888.82 for six frigates mounting at least 32 guns each.