CHAPTER 10

The Omens of October

The President is extremely desirous that the United States should have peace and free commercial intercourse with all the states of Barbary . . . but is determined neither to purchase or maintain that peace and intercourse by submitting to treatment dishonorable to our country.

—Commodore Edward Preble, September 13, 1803

Appalled at how poorly Morris had performed, Jefferson took great care in appointing his next commander. He needed a man of both diplomatic tact and courage, a leader who would take initiative and press for his country’s best interests. Jefferson’s patience with both the pirates and incompetent American leadership had worn thin. It was time for action, so he would appoint a man of action: Edward Preble.

At age forty, Edward Preble had spent more of his years at sea than on land. At sixteen, after announcing to his father that he had hoed his last row of potatoes, he had shipped out on a privateer he spotted in the harbor. He gained a midshipman’s warrant in 1779, serving aboard the Massachusetts state navy frigate Protector during the Revolution. Although he barely survived a bout of typhoid fever contracted aboard the prison ship Jersey after his capture by the Royal Navy, he gained financial success following the war as a captain and owner of a merchant ship. With the establishment of the U.S. Navy, he sought a commission and, in 1798, President John Adams made him a lieutenant. Two years later he gained his captaincy and, as master of the USS Essex, spent a full year sailing the frigate across the Pacific Ocean to Jakarta to escort a convoy of merchantmen home.

Preble was not an easygoing captain. When his Barbary Coast orders came through in 1803, Preble supervised the refitting of his ship. While waiting for the repairs to finish, he found time to write elaborate standing orders—107 of them, something of a record. One forbade “blasphemy, profanity, and all species of obscenity.” Another instructed officers to learn the names of their men (there were four hundred aboard). But beyond the specifics, one more general message came through clearly: this was no pleasure cruise.

Preble’s fair skin had been made ruddy by his years at sea, and he combed his graying hair forward in an unsuccessful effort to conceal his baldness. But his intense blue eyes and his sometimes impatient manner—he suffered from chronic ulcers—conveyed as clearly as his orders did that Preble expected his officers and crew to sail a tight, highly disciplined ship.

From Boston’s Long Wharf, Edward Preble readied to sail for the Barbary Coast. With his departure imminent, he wrote to his sweetheart, Mary Deering, expressing his devout hope that “we may again meet and be long happy in each other’s society.”¹ Unlike Mrs. Morris, his predecessor’s spouse, the woman Preble loved would remain at home, back in Portland, Maine.

In the months to come Preble would demonstrate that he could not be more different from Morris. He would not hesitate to put himself and his just-refitted frigate, the USS Constitution, in the line of fire.

• • •

When the USS Constitution set out on August 12, 1803, she sailed with light but often unfavorable winds, which would make for a calm but long crossing. Preble may have been impatient with the speed, but the uneventful twenty-nine-day sail also meant the captain could become better acquainted with his principal passengers, Colonel and Mrs. Tobias Lear. The colonel was President Jefferson’s new appointee to the post of consul general at Algiers following O’Brien’s retirement.

Like Preble, Lear grew up on the New England coast, hailing from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Though Lear bore the honorary title Colonel, granted him by George Washington, he could claim no experience as either soldier or sailor. He spent the closing years of the Revolution at Harvard, graduating in 1783, and it was at the recommendation of that college’s president that he had been hired for a domestic position at a large Virginia plantation. The job had been the making of the somber, awkward young man with the long nose and lantern jaw.

He was to tutor two grandchildren being raised by an aging Virginia couple and to handle the voluminous correspondence of the man of the house. That tall, broad-shouldered patriarch—known to his family as “The General”—happened to be the former commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington.

Though of well-established Yankee stock, Lear became a virtual member of the Washington family after his arrival in 1786. He dined with the Washingtons. He had his socks darned and his clothes washed by Mount Vernon’s house slaves. When Washington became president in 1789, Lear was charged with making the domestic arrangements in lower Manhattan, the nation’s temporary capital, before Martha arrived along with her grandchildren. Lear kept the household accounts, managing the Washingtons’ private purse.

President Washington trusted Lear to be his eyes and ears, to report back after “mixing with people in different walks, high and low, of different descriptions and of different political sentiments . . . have afforded you an extensive range for observation and comparison.”² From 1786 until the general’s unexpected death in 1799, Lear remained a trusted member of Washington’s circle. It was Lear, standing at Washington’s bedside in December, who heard Washington preparing to die. “I am just going,” Washington said softly, his throat constricted by the infection that would take his life. Then he offered a last instruction to his trusted secretary regarding his burial. And it was Lear who was said to have burned angry correspondence between Washington and Jefferson.

The whispers about Lear weren’t just about the rumored destruction of the letters. There were hints that Lear wasn’t quite aboveboard in his dealings with Washington’s tenants. And his obvious ambition and close relationships with the most powerful people in the land didn’t help dispel the rumors.

If Jefferson felt he owed Lear for the rumored destruction of damning letters, he did not acknowledge it. But during his years as secretary of state, Jefferson had had regular exchanges with Lear, often in person at the president’s house. Soon after Washington’s death, Jefferson had named Lear to serve as consul in Santo Domingo. On his return from that post, Jefferson turned to him to lead the negotiations on the Barbary Coast.

Just days before the Constitution sailed, the secretary of the navy had advised Preble, “Your experience in affairs and your good sense and the tried merits of Mr. Lear all conspire to persuade me that you and he will move in the most perfect harmony.”³ The man of war and the seeker of treaties had become collaborators. It was their task to sort out the mess, militarily and diplomatically. They were to do, in short, whatever it took along the Barbary Coast. They spent the transatlantic voyage planning accordingly.

A surprise awaited Preble and Lear in Gibraltar Bay. William Bainbridge, whose ship, the USS Philadelphia, was anchored in Gibraltar, informed Preble that Tripoli wasn’t their only sworn enemy. After confronting a strange ship at sea, Bainbridge had discovered that it carried a kidnapped American crew and orders from the sultan of Morocco to capture American assets. Adding insult to injury, the sultan had obtained Murat Rais’s old ship, the Meshuda, and returned her to Tripoli. With Morocco joining Algiers and Tripoli in the hostilities, Tunis was the only Barbary state not at war with the Americans, and even that peace looked shaky.

Fortunately for Preble, his squadron was also growing by the day. In addition to the Constitution and the Philadelphia, three more frigates arrived in port: the Adams, the John Adams, and the New York. Preble also had new options that neither Dale nor Morris had had. Congress had enacted new legislation empowering President Jefferson to add to the U.S. Navy four warships, smaller and quicker than the older ones, which had been too large to get close to shore and too slow to catch up with the pirates. Construction on the Vixen, the Syren, the Argus, and the Nautilusbegan immediately, and the Vixen was ready in time to join Preble’s convoy.

Preble saw his challenges escalating, but his orders—direct from the secretary of the navy—gave him leeway to do what he thought right. “We therefore leave you unrestrained in your movements,” the secretary had written, “and at liberty to pursue the dictates of your own judgment.”⁴He had a freedom Dale had lacked—and the courage that Morris had refused to exercise.

After deliberations with Lear, Preble decided to proceed on two fronts. First, Preble and most of his squadron would present a great show of force at Morocco. He didn’t want to expand the war—he could hardly attack Tripoli if his forces were badly divided—but he couldn’t afford to ignore this new antagonist, either. He wanted his Moroccan challengers to think he was spoiling for a fight; that might lead to a quick settlement that would then free him up to focus his energies on the threats posed elsewhere in the region. Like President Jefferson, he was convinced that “nothing will keep the [Villains] so quiet as a respectable naval force near them.”⁵ If a show of power was required, he was there to provide it.

While he took care of Morocco, Preble issued orders to Bainbridge and the Philadelphia to sail to Tripoli. They were to aid American vessels along the way, and all pirate ships encountered were to be attacked and captured. Then, together with the Vixen, the Philadelphia was to proceed to Tripoli to blockade that port and to attack the enemy by whatever means.

When the sultan of Morocco finally returned from a journey two weeks later, the full force of the U.S. Navy was on display in Tangier Harbor. Before the sultan’s eyes was an intimidating vista of raw naval power—the American guns, numbering well over 150 cannons, could likely pound the city’s crumbling stone castle and sink every vessel in the harbor.

Preble had avoided falling into a trap as Bainbridge had done with the USS George Washington. From his commanding position looking in on Tangier, he could choose a tactic that was both direct and deferential.

From his position well outside the range of the sultan’s cannons, Preble exchanged letters with that ruler. The two men agreed upon a meeting, and two days before the date the sultan sent gifts from shore: ten bulls, twenty sheep, and four dozen fowl arrived for distribution to the U.S. Navy ships. Moroccan troops and horses were paraded on the shore in an impressive show. The sultan himself made his way to the end of the stone breakwater to view the American ships through a telescope mounted on a tripod. Already he was much more deferential than Barbary leaders had been earlier in the face of smaller displays of power.

When the day of reckoning came—October 10—the American ships had for almost a week been kept in readiness for battle; as Preble noted in his diary, “All hands Slept at quarters.”⁶ As agreed, Preble himself would go ashore, but he would not arrive in the company of a large delegation. Instead, his party would consist of only himself, Consul Tobias Lear, and two midshipmen serving as aides.

At eleven o’clock, the four men prepared to go ashore, but before they did, Preble issued clear instructions. “If the least injury is offered to my person,” he ordered those who remained aboard the ships, “immediately attack the batteries, the castle, the city and the troops, regardless of my personal safety.”⁷

At one o’clock, the American delegation was summoned to the castle. The walk through the town did not impress Lear, and he noted the “very narrow and dirty streets [and] the wretched appearance of the inhabitants. . . . There appear to be no shops, no trade—nothing to please the eye or amuse the fancy.”⁸ On reaching the castle, the Americans were ushered through a double file of guards, but Preble found that the sultan sat not on a throne but on the stone steps in a castle courtyard. One of the midshipmen reported his disappointment at the sight. “I had connected with the idea of Emperor of Morocco, something grand,” he wrote to his mother back in South Carolina, “but what was my disappointment at seeing a small man, wrapped up in a woolen heik or cloak.”⁹

Faced with Preble’s overwhelming navy, the sultan seemed almost apologetic. He regretted the hostilities, he said through an interpreter. His country was at peace with the United States, and he would honor the treaty his father had made in 1786. He promised to punish Alcady Hashash, the Tangier governor who had ordered the attacks on the American ships. He would see to it that the captains of the pirate vessels paid dearly, too.

Then the sultan listened as Preble “endeavored to impress on his mind the advantages of a free commercial intercourse . . . and that the revenues of the Emperor arising from that source, would be much greater than any thing they could expect if at war with us.”¹⁰ It was an American argument, a case made for free trade. And the sultan, confronted with America’s newfound strength, was paying attention.

The following day, the sultan produced a letter for Jefferson. “Know Ye that all the Treaties entered into between the two nations, remain as they were,” the sultan wrote.¹¹ Several more days were required to exchange and translate the documents that made the understanding official, but the pressure was off.

Commodore Edward Preble had achieved a significant victory without firing a shot. Just as remarkable, tribute had neither been paid nor promised. Preble put it simply in writing home to Mary Deering in Maine once he had returned to Gibraltar: “An honorable peace is established.”¹² A clear show of force, backed up by a genuine threat, had resulted in harmony between the nations.

Now, the commodore and the consul had to focus their energies on Bashaw Yusuf and the troublesome Tripolitans. Preble had promised Bainbridge that more force would follow him and the Philadelphia after the matter of Morocco had been resolved, and he prepared to keep his word. But neither man could know that the commodore had ordered the Philadelphia to embark on what would be its last voyage.