CHAPTER 13

The Battle of Tripoli

I find hand to hand is not child’s play, ’tis kill or be killed.

—Lieutenant Stephen Decatur¹

More than four months passed before anyone in Washington knew anything of the fate of the USS Philadelphia. Since the previous autumn of 1803, mail had accumulated in Malta; letters home from sailors, dispatches from Preble, and consular correspondence remained unsent. Only when Commodore Preble stumbled upon a cache of mail in the charge of a former consul to the bashaw who spoke no English did four great stacks of long-delayed correspondence begin their transatlantic journey in early February.²

That meant President Jefferson learned of the grounding of the USS Philadelphia—but not of its sacrificial fire—on March 19, 1804. It also meant that, for the third winter in a row, despite Preble’s good efforts, only ill tidings reached Washington from the Barbary Coast.

Jefferson’s political enemies used the news of the frigate’s capture like a club. By the end of March, Alexander Hamilton’s New York Evening Post termed it “a practical lesson in Jefferson’s economy”—if there’d been more ships in the Mediterranean, the argument went, the loss could have been averted.³ Rather than disagree, Jefferson went to Congress and made the argument that the bad news meant even more firepower was needed. Within a week, he had authorization to spend a million dollars to supplement the fleet with leased gunboats and two new ships. In addition, a bill was introduced to raise customs duties by 2.5 percent to establish a “Mediterranean Fund” to pay for the war. The House unanimously approved the measure and, the same day, the Senate passed it by a vote of 20 to 5.

Orders went out for four more frigates to sail for the Mediterranean. With almost the entire U.S. Navy in or on its way to service off the North African coast, Jefferson intended “to leave no doubt of our compelling the existing Enemy to submit to our own terms, and of effectually checking any hostile dispositions that might be entertained towards us by any of the other Barbary Powers.”⁴ The President, Congress, Essex, and Constellation would require time to be refitted and provisioned, so the latest fleet—all veteran ships at this point—would not return to the region until summer, but the full force of the United States Navy had finally been mustered.

Behind the scenes, Secretary of State Madison quietly tried to allay the concerns of the families of the 307 Philadelphia men in captivity, offering the “sympathy of the Executive.” But he made no promises. The U.S. government wouldn’t be offering to buy the freedom of Captain Bainbridge and his men anytime soon because “of the encouragement it might hold out to the other Barbary States, and even to Tripoli, to repeat their aggressions.”⁵

Then, like a lightning bolt, the news of Decatur’s successful raid electrified Washington. Word of the burning of the Philadelphia had already shocked Europe. No less a military man than Lord Nelson called Decatur’s exploit “the most bold and daring act of the age.”⁶ On hearing the news, Jefferson promptly awarded his brave lieutenant a captaincy (though Decatur would not learn of his promotion until September), and Congress voted to award Decatur a ceremonial sword and his men two months’ bonus pay. The entire country celebrated. By early June, New Yorkers saw the opening of a silent play, a pantomime entitled Preparations for the Recapture of the Frigate Philadelphia.

Stephen Decatur and his seventy-five-man crew had transformed a humiliation into an act of heroism. For Jefferson, this shift in tides also had a practical meaning. As one Barbary consul told James Madison, “The burning of the Philadelphia, under the Bashaw’s forts . . . is the only occurrence, which has forced them to view the American character with proper respect.”⁷ This was progress, a long-awaited sign that American forces could make a significant difference in the region.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Commodore Preble decided he would give peace one more chance—and he hoped to gain freedom for the men of the Philadelphia. An array of American ships bore up on Tripoli harbor on a June day in 1804. Captain Preble stationed the USSArgus and the USS Enterprise as lookouts to the west. He sent the USS Vixen to the east, along with his newest ship, the Scourge, recently captured from the Tripolitan navy.

Flying a white flag of truce, he ordered his flagship, the USS Constitution, to set sail for the city. At noon on June 13, 1804, anchored where the water was a safe depth of twenty-four fathoms, Preble dispatched a barge carrying Richard O’Brien to present American terms of peace to Bashaw Yusuf Qaramanli. Chief Consul Tobias Lear, unable to leave his post in Algiers, had deputized O’Brien to act as his representative.

As the little vessel neared shore, O’Brien could see some of the Philadelphia’s officers waving their hats at him. He would have liked nothing better than to secure their freedom before the day was over.

Preble’s charge to O’Brien sounded simple: “to endeavor to ransom our unfortunate Countrymen, and if the bashaw should desire it, to establish Peace.”⁸ Lear had authorized a larger payment, but Preble specified what he thought were reasonable terms. O’Brien was instructed to offer $40,000 in ransom, along with a $10,000 “present” (that is, bribe) for the prime minister and others. A treaty of peace might be entered into, but, Preble told O’Brien, “I cannot pay one cent for Peace.”⁹ Payment for ransom was a stretch as it was.

The bashaw’s representatives kept O’Brien waiting for an hour on the beach. “The Tyrant,” as Preble called the Tripolitan ruler, still beside himself at the burning of the Philadelphia within sight of his own castle, refused to see O’Brien and rejected the offer relayed to him out of hand. He was insulted by the offer; it was so much less than he had imagined, and he suspected the Americans’ real motive was espionage. Thinking O’Brien might be gathering intelligence about the city and its armaments, he refused permission for the American consul to enter the town and forbade him to meet with Captain Bainbridge or visit the other prisoners. He did not allow clothing to be sent ashore for the captives, and his men dropped the white flag of truce as soon as O’Brien returned to the Constitution.

The conclusion was clear. Once again, as Preble confided to his diary, we “must endeavor to beat & distress his savage highness into a disposition more favourable to our views than what he at present possesses.”¹⁰ Persuasion and pacifism had not worked. The Americans would have to speak to the bashaw in a way that would force him to respond reasonably. That, Preble believed, was something a bombardment could certainly do.

Meanwhile, at home, the news of the Philadelphia had been good for William Eaton’s pet cause. After his expulsion by the bey of Tunis in early March 1803, Eaton had returned to the United States. On arrival at Boston in May, he visited his wife in the central Massachusetts town of Brimfield; they had been separated by an ocean for four and a half years. By June, however, he was striding the streets of the nation’s capital, “urg[ing] the administration to the adoption of more vigorous measures against Tripoli.”¹¹

More than anything, Eaton wanted to persuade the powers that be to support his plan to replace Bashaw Yusuf on Tripoli’s throne with the exiled Hamet Qaramanli. He also wanted to be the leader of the expedition that would land in Alexandria, join Hamet, and march to Derne, as Preble schemed. Eaton was the driving force on the American side, writing to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, detailing his case and meeting with Secretary of State Madison. In a meeting with the president’s cabinet, Eaton thought Jefferson “civil” and his attorney general “grave” as he “endeavored to enforce conviction . . . of the necessity of meeting the aggressions of Barbary by retaliation.”¹² The secretary of war was skeptical, but the secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, was won over. Growing cautiously optimistic, Eaton commissioned a custom scimitar to be fashioned for himself of the finest Spanish steel. He also ordered tents, saddles, and cooking equipment. He wanted to be ready.¹³

Eaton had at least one ally in Preble, but for a time nothing had happened. With the congressional session at an end, Eaton traveled north. He spent much of the summer and fall tending to his hardscrabble New England farm. During the next congressional session, however, he returned to Washington. If at first he again found many of those he met indifferent to him, the news of the loss of the USS Philadelphia shifted the balance. Suddenly, there were ears in Washington more attuned to his ideas. On March 30, 1804, eleven days after the shocking news of the frigate’s grounding but not her destruction had reached American shores, Eaton was “engaged to take the management of an Enterprize on the coast of Barbary.”¹⁴

The long, sticky summer that followed proved eventful for the young nation. The exploration team led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began its journey up the Missouri River. In July, Alexander Hamilton was shot and killed in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr, and the further conflict in Europe provoked by Napoleon had America’s foreign affairs in a state of uncertainty.

As for President Jefferson, he was dealing with his own personal tragedy. His beloved Mary, whom he had nicknamed “Polly” so long ago and whose safety upon the seas had made the matter of Barbary piracy personal, died in childbirth in April. Her father and her husband were both at her deathbed, and she was buried beside her mother on the grounds of Monticello. Jefferson was deeply affected by Polly’s passing. “My loss is great indeed,” he wrote to a friend in June. “Others may lose of their abundance, but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had. . . . The hope with which I had looked forward to the moment when, resigning public cares to younger hands, I was to retire to that domestic comfort from which the last great step is to be taken, is fearfully blighted.”¹⁵

Jefferson was nearing the end of his first term as president and eyeing a second one, but his passion for life and zeal for leadership had been extinguished with Polly’s death. Former first lady Abigail Adams, wife of Jefferson’s friend and rival John Adams, broke the years-long silence between the two families by sending her deepest condolences. The gesture proved to be the first step in mending the friendship that had been so deeply—and some thought irreconcilably—damaged during the contentious election of 1800.

But world events would not stop for Jefferson’s mourning. Eaton’s quest moved forward, with Eaton ordered to act as a liaison with Hamet. Madison wrote to the Barbary chief consul Tobias Lear authorizing the plan, though he did so in his usual cautious fashion. “Of the co-operation of the Elder brother of the Bashaw of Tripoli we are . . . willing to avail ourselves.”¹⁶ Madison also instructed Lear to make available to Eaton $20,000 to carry out the plan.

There were other changes to the American strategy as well. The time had come for another changing of the guard and, after serving honorably and with distinction, Preble was to return home and Commodore Samuel Barron, who had been with the first fleet as the captain of thePhiladelphia two years before her fateful wreck, was to take his place. In his orders to the new squadron commander, the secretary of the navy authorized a plan involving the ex-bashaw—one in which, the secretary advised, “you will, it is believed, find Mr Eaton extremely useful to you.”¹⁷

When, after multiple delays, Commodore Barron’s squadron sailed from Norfolk on July 5, 1804, one of those aboard his flagship was William Eaton, U.S. Navy agent for the Barbary regencies. Eaton’s salary was a modest $1,200 a year and his immediate task was to win Barron’s enthusiastic support before he could throw himself into planning the ground offensive.

He knew he was embarking on the adventure of a lifetime, but he had no idea the extent of the warfare into which he was sailing.

In the Mediterranean, on August 3, 1804, the long-suppressed tension in the bashaw’s harbor broke out into battle.

Commodore Preble had spent much of the previous week dealing with heavy seas off the Tripoli coast where he tried to maintain his blockade. A strong gale brought the month of July to a close, and Preble, with a new assortment of ships at his command, had new worries as well. He knew the schooners accompanying him, the Vixen and Nautilus, were seaworthy, as were the two brigs Argus and Syren, which had been blockading the harbor for many weeks. But he couldn’t be so sure about the six gunboats and the two mortar boats on loan from Sicily, which was now also at war with the bashaw. Preble had reached an understanding to borrow these boats, along with some men to sail them, but he worried whether the flat-bottomed harbor craft could withstand the weather of the open sea.

Somehow, though, they had, and now he would put them to the test in battle.

With the weather clear at last, Preble surveyed his enemy from the deck of the Constitution. Through his spyglass he counted 115 guns mounted on the city’s fortifications. These cannons were supplemented by nineteen gunboats and several small corsairs, all sheltered behind the long line of rocks that, like an immense, submerged stone wall, stood between the American armada in the open sea and the protected harbor. The combined firepower of the American and allied ships—132 guns and 2 mortars—was more or less equal to the Tripolitan guns, but the range of most of Preble’s short-barreled cannonades was limited. Still, Preble felt confident that he and his men could make “[the bashaw’s] old walls rattle about his ears.”¹⁸ All he needed was the opportunity.

Then, at noon on August 3, Preble finally saw his chance to engage the enemy. He observed from his station two miles out to sea that enemy gunboats were coming out from behind the stony barrier reef, leaving them exposed in the open water. He ordered the signal hoisted: Prepare for battle.

With his entire flotilla within hearing distance of his hailing trumpet, the commodore issued his final orders. The brigs and schooners, with the gunboats in tow, were to sail halfway to the stone barrier. From there the gunboats would head for the shore while the four larger ships remained in deeper waters. The bombing ships would take a position west of the town. The Constitution would follow the smaller boats toward the harbor and, on Preble’s signal, the firing would begin.

By two o’clock, the gunboats were under their own power, advancing on the harbor with sails and oars. At two-thirty, the flagship raised a blue flag, followed by a yellow and blue one, and the third and last, red and blue. This was the signal for the battle to begin, and the Constitution, followed by the brigs and schooners, sailed for the harbor.

Fifteen minutes later, the first mortars boomed. Rather than cannonballs, the ships’ guns launched hollow projectiles, packed with charges of gunpowder. Flying in a high arc into the city, some exploded in midair, scattering deadly shrapnel in all directions.

The Tripolitans fired back and the American gunboats responded in kind. The Constitution, now within a mile of Tripoli’s batteries, opened fire with its long guns. The fortress batteries were silenced as the gunners took shelter from the Constitution’s broadsides, though, as the big ship sailed past, the Tripolitans resumed firing. “I most sensibly felt the want of another frigate,” Preble observed later.¹⁹

The USS Constitution served well, despite taking a cannonball to her mainmast. With Preble standing nearby, another blasted one of the ship’s guns; shrapnel shattered a sailor’s arm, but Preble escaped with just torn garments.²⁰ The big frigate and the other larger ships provided covering fire, but the heart of the battle unfolded nearer the waterline. There it was gunboat-to-gunboat and man-to-man.

Within the fortress walls, the American captives could hear little beyond the rumble of guns. On the streets of Tripoli, the townspeople ran for their guns in a scene of excited disorder. At last, the bashaw was getting the full-fledged war he had seemed so keen on provoking for the last three years.

• • •

The American gunboats, although outnumbered nineteen to six, bore down on the enemy’s boats. Stephen Decatur, captaining one gunboat and accompanied by four other gunboats—the sixth lagged behind—fired at two Tripolitan boats at point-blank range until they retreated behind the line of rocks that protected the inner harbor. Sailing off to find other prey, Decatur’s boat, followed by the gunboat commanded by his younger brother James and two other gunboats, headed for a line of five Tripolitan boats moored at the mouth of the harbor’s western passage. After a round of American canister shot and musketry, those boats also pulled back into the harbor.

The little American squadron advanced next on a division of nine enemy vessels to the east. None of these fled as Decatur and his men sailed straight at them, looking to get close enough to board. The Americans wished to turn the Tripolitan tactic back upon them, leaping aboard the enemy vessels and fighting hand-to-hand with pistol, saber, pike, and tomahawk. This tactic did not favor the Americans, as a typical two-dozen-man U.S. Navy crew would be met by up to fifty men aboard a Tripolitan ship. But the numbers didn’t daunt Decatur: “I always thought we could lick them their own way and give them two to one.”²¹

Not long after three o’clock, he had a chance to prove his confidence.

The gunboats closed on the enemy, firing barrage after barrage of round shot. As the Americans neared the westernmost Tripolitan vessel, the enemy fired their pistols but, before they could reload, the Americans clambered from gunwale to gunwale and leapt onto their decks.

Within ten bloody minutes, Decatur’s nineteen men had killed sixteen Tripolitans, wounded fifteen others, and taken the remaining five prisoner. Decatur personally lowered the Tripolitan flag.

• • •

Meanwhile, Lieutenant James Decatur, Stephen’s brother, aimed for the largest of the Tripolitan gunboats and softened up the enemy with intense fire. As his gunboat closed and James Decatur and his men were poised to board, the Tripolitan captain, with a large portion of his crew already dead or wounded by musket and canister fire, ordered his colors struck in surrender.

For a moment, each Decatur brother possessed a prize.

Putting himself at the front of the boarding party, James stepped aboard the captured Tripolitan vessel. As he did so, the treacherous Tripolitan captain shot him at point-blank range.²² The young lieutenant, struck in the forehead, tumbled into the sea between the two craft. As the American crew pulled their commander from the water, the master of the Tripolitan gunboat ordered his crew to pull for their harbor.

A dishonorable act left a brave officer, his life in the balance, bleeding on the deck.

• • •

When Stephen Decatur’s boat, towing a captured ship of its own, happened upon James’s boat, a short time later, the crew informed Stephen that his younger brother was hovering between life and death.

Suddenly, the thrill of battle was gone from Decatur’s eyes, replaced by the cold fury of a man set on revenge. Taking a small crew of eleven men, he set out to chase down the enemy ship that had acted so deceitfully and swore that the murderous captain would find no mercy at his hand. Decatur’s crew, some of whom had been part of the Philadelphia mission, were determined to follow their leader to hell and back, and proved it in the ensuing fight.

Racing through the water, they managed to spot the very ship they sought and swarmed upon it with a shout.

Decatur went for the captain of the enemy ship, a muscular man of imposing height. The American wielded a pike, a wooden pole with an iron spearhead, long a favorite infantry weapon for close combat. His powerful opponent, avoiding the thrust of Decatur’s pike, managed to get one hand, then two, on its wooden shaft. The two men struggled briefly before the stronger Tripolitan wrenched the pike from Decatur’s grasp.

As his adversary turned his own weapon against him, Decatur drew his saber to counter the coming blow. Though he deflected the pike, Decatur’s blade broke at the hilt.

An instant later, his opponent thrust again, aiming for Decatur’s heart. Decatur leapt aside, but the tip of the blade penetrated the flesh of his upper chest. He grappled for the weapon and, as the two men tumbled to the deck, Decatur managed to wrest the weapon from his opponent’s grip and pull the blade from his wound.

The pike clattered out of reach.

Their hands now empty of weapons, the two men rolled and wrestled. The Tripolitan reached for a slim dagger that hung at his waist and a Tripolitan sailor, seeing his commander in a life-and-death embrace on the deck, raised his sword to strike Decatur.

The American was as good as dead, but as the Tripolitan’s scimitar arced toward Decatur’s exposed skull, a sailor named Daniel Frazier, already wounded in the fight, launched himself into the path of the blade, taking the blow for his captain. Frazier sustained a deep head wound, but the captains fought on.

Though weakened by the wound in his bloodied shoulder, Decatur held his opponent’s blade away from his throat. With his other hand, he felt for his own pocket—and his pistol. Grasping the gun, he cocked it and, twisting the barrel away from himself, pulled the trigger.

When the ball ripped into his abdomen, the Tripolitan’s body went slack.

Decatur had won this contest. But the victory—the Tripolitan gunboat was his—was soon diminished by word of his brother’s condition.

• • •

By four-thirty Preble, noting a change in the wind, signaled his ships to retire from the action. Within fifteen minutes, all his vessels were out of range of the Tripolitan guns.

As evening fell, the fates of both Daniel Frazier and James Decatur hung in the balance. Despite his own wounds, Stephen Decatur stayed all night at his brother’s side. When dawn broke, Frazier was still clinging to life but James’s body was committed to the sea. According to his brother’s first biographer, Stephen said upon the expiration of his brother, “I would rather see him thus than living with an cloud upon his conduct.”²³

Though another lieutenant suffered severe saber wounds, James Decatur was the only American killed. Just eleven men were wounded, and the man who had sacrificed himself for Decatur, Daniel Frazier, recovered from his wounds. An exact enemy casualty count was unknown, but the dead numbered at least fifty, the wounded perhaps double that.

In two and a half hours of fighting and bombardment, the Tripolitans lost six gunboats. The shore batteries sustained some damage, but the fifty mortar shells thrown into the town had inflicted little damage. Though a good day for Preble, this had been far from an absolute victory. More than exploding mortar shells and a few dead pirates would be required to persuade the bashaw to consider peace.

• • •

For weeks, Preble did his considerable best to annoy the Tripolitans from the sea. His fleet bombarded the city from the west on August 7, but the results were disappointing. Most of the bombs landed well away from the bashaw’s castle. Preble’s forces sustained a painful loss when one of the captured gunboats exploded and killed ten American crewmen.

August 7 was also the day that Preble learned he was being replaced by Commodore Barron. Preble was mortified, though it made sense that the senior officer would take command, and he decided to return to America once the new commodore arrived. But until then he would continue his duty. On the night of August 24, Preble dispatched the gunboats to pound the city. He inflicted little damage on the bashaw’s defenses, although, unknown to Preble, a cannonball crashed through one wall of Captain Bainbridge’s room. He had been asleep in his bed but the ball ricocheted off another wall before pulling off the prisoner’s bedclothes. Cut and bruised by falling masonry, Bainbridge sustained no serious injury, though a deep ankle wound left him limping for some weeks.

Another nighttime bombardment on August 28 sank another gunboat, but with the supply of ammunition running low and Barron expected any day, the fleet needed a new strategy. Preble decided that the USS Intrepid would once again take center stage in what was likely his closing scene in the war with Tripoli. If he could not end the war, he might at least shock the bashaw into negotiation.

Since conveying Decatur and his men on their February mission to the captured Philadelphia, the Intrepid had been a transport, ferrying water and provisions from Syracuse. Now, however, Preble decided to dispatch the former Mastico again into the dangers of Tripoli harbor. But this time, the Intrepid would not return.

Preble personally supervised the conversion of the little ship into an “infernal machine.” Using wooden planks, the squadron’s men stowed five tons of powder below her deck. Stacked above on the ship’s deck were one hundred thirteen-inch and fifty nine-inch shells, together with iron scraps and pig iron ballast. The ship had become a floating bomb.

The gunners calculated that, after being lit, fuses would give the crew eleven minutes to make their getaway. A small room in the stern of the ship was filled with kindling and other combustibles. It was to be set afire to discourage Tripolitan boarders as the Americans made their escape in the two fastest rowing boats in the squadron, pulling for the harbor entrance and the Nautilus just beyond.

The fleet continued an on-again, off-again bombardment of Tripoli into early September, waiting for perfect conditions. Then, on September 3, at eight o’clock in the evening, the Intrepid slipped her cable and sailed for Tripoli.

No moon lit her way and, powered by a moderate breeze, she glided swiftly toward the harbor. The Nautilus accompanied her to a distance of some seven hundred yards from the western mouth of the harbor, then stopped to wait at a distance.

The Intrepid’s Captain Richard Somers and his crew were on their own in the starry night. Their mission was dangerous—their ship was a tinderbox, after all—but they carried another burden. The blockaded Tripolitans were probably running low on gunpowder. If, by some misfortune, the Intrepid were to fall into their hands, its large stores of ammunition could prolong the war. Knowing this must not happen, Somers had asked that no volunteer accompany him who would not be willing, in the event the enemy should board the Intrepid, to “put a match to the magazine, and blow themselves and their enemies up together.”²⁴

The men aboard the Nautilus watched as the Intrepid made way toward Tripoli. As the minutes passed, the smaller ship, barely discernible in the dim light, seemed to be entering the harbor passage. Then two gunshots were heard. Were they alarm guns fired from the Tripolitan batteries? Silence followed, and the crew of the Nautilus waited anxiously.

For ten minutes, the only sound to be heard was the lapping of the waves.

Then, at 9:47 p.m. according to the Constitution’s log, a blaze of light suddenly illuminated the sky and the towers, minarets, and castellated walls of Tripoli. An instant later, a deafening explosion of sound struck the American ships, its concussion shaking even the Constitution six miles out to sea.

A different, more profound silence fell.

The lookouts on the Nautilus strained their eyes, hoping to see Somers and his men stroking for safety in their two boats. From his more distant anchorage, Preble studied the sky anxiously, praying to spot a rocket, the agreed-upon signal that Somers and his men had escaped the harbor. The sky remained an unbroken black.

With the sunrise, the three ships Preble sent to stand offshore reported that the fort appeared undamaged, the Tripolitan navy intact.

Finally the remains of her hull were spotted, the keel and ribs of the Intrepid grounded just outside the rocky barrier. The ship had exploded well short of the bashaw’s castle, for reasons that could not be known (a sniper’s bullet? an accidental spark? the powder touched off by Somers when a Tripolitan boarding party neared?). Even before the bashaw permitted Captain Bainbridge to view the remains of “six persons in a most mangled and burnt condition lying on the shore,”²⁵ it became clear there could be no survivors.

Preble’s final attempt to persuade the bashaw to surrender had failed.

On September 9, the USS President and USS Constellation were sighted as Preble’s flagship cruised off the Tripoli coast. Preble ordered his pennant struck. With the arrival of Commodore Samuel Barron, Preble officially ceased being squadron commander, and his thoughts turned to home.

“Commodore Barron’s arrival to supersede me in the command of the fleet has determined me to return,” a dispirited Preble wrote to Mary.²⁶ Yet before departing, he would spend many hours in conference with Barron. And in attendance at some of those briefings would be William Eaton, who had sailed with Barron. A favored topic of conversation between the three men was Eaton’s proposal to aid Hamet Qaramanli.

Eaton helped assure Preble that, although he was being displaced by Barron, he could go home with his head held high. Although Edward Preble would not remain in the Mediterranean to see the war through to its close, in his time of service in the Maghreb he had established a negotiated peace with Morocco. During his service as commodore, his men had demonstrated a new and remarkable fighting prowess. Even if he had not achieved the larger victory he hoped for, Preble’s service in the region was another honorable chapter in his distinguished career.

When Preble did finally arrive in Washington on March 4, 1805, he received a well-deserved hero’s welcome. Despite his disappointment with his own performance, there was no way to term his Barbary tour anything but a success. He’d taken the fight to Tripoli, destroyed pirate vessels, and made sure the Philadelphia wasn’t used against the United States. Recognizing his achievements, the president welcomed him as an honored guest, and he was celebrated at the home of the secretary of state, as well as at dinners in Philadelphia, Trenton, and Boston. Congress ordered a medal struck with his likeness. For his valiant efforts and sound strategies off the Barbary Coast, he had become an American legend.

The Americans were still riding high on Preble’s and Decatur’s successes, but there was one fact they couldn’t ignore: though America’s sea victories had won respect and concessions from some of the Barbary states, Tripoli was still unrepentantly hostile. In the months that followed Preble’s return, the president and his advisers began to turn their hopes toward Eaton’s plan. Perhaps a land war and accompanying coup could finally solve the Tripoli problem.