XIV
From Alexandria to this place there is not a living stream, nor rivulet, nor spring of water.
—William Eaton, in his journal of the expedition
Wherever General Eaton leads, we will follow. If he wants to march us to hell, we’ll gladly go there.... The General always knows what to say and do, in any situation.
—Lieutenant Presley O‘Bannon, USMC, from his account of the desert march
As befitted a commander in chief, William Eaton led the way in a flashy general’s uniform with epaulets. With him were the Marines, also sharp in their blue and scarlet uniforms. The army’s martial appearance then fell off sharply to a hodgepodge of uniforms and castoff raiment from an assortment of armies, and then descended even further to flowing Moslem robes, hats, turbans, and headdresses and drab European civilian attire. The expedition’s officers and Arab cavalry traveled on horseback, while the rest of the army was afoot, their supplies carried on the backs of camels. The army trekked 15 miles during its first day on the march. It camped on a high bluff near the coast and found good water.
The army followed the curve of the Mediterranean shoreline westward, sometimes a day’s march inland, sometimes closer to the sea. It was the same line of march followed by Alexander the Great 2,136 years before, and by previous and subsequent waves of conquerors and wayfarers from the Mediterranean and East: Berbers, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs. During World War II, Rommel and Montgomery would duel along this 40-mile-wide corridor; their operations and supply officers would consult maps of Eaton’s expedition.
The route threaded through arid country that compared favorably with the blazing ocean of sand a day’s march south, but was by no means hospitable. In March and April, temperatures hovered between 90 and 100 degrees by day, and plunged to freezing at night. During the “winds of 50 days” during early spring, fine sand blew continually all day, sometimes rising on great whirlwinds that, when backlit by the sun, resembled moving pillars of fire. The gritty sand got into the eyes and mouth, into weapons and food. When the wind died, clouds of black flies appeared to torment the travelers.
To reach Derna 520 miles away, the sojourners must skirt the Qattara Depression, cross the Desert of Barca, a northern arm of the Libyan Desert, and ascend the rocky Libyan Plateau overlooking the coast. While the region’s meager rainfall supported scruffy vegetation—wildly extravagant compared with the forbidding sands to the south—a journey through the dry country was survivable only if one knew where to find the water. Somehow Eaton always did. Lieutenant Presley O‘Bannon noted with obvious admiration, “General Eaton’s instincts are uncanny.”
The Marines were unsure of Eaton at first because he wasn’t one of them and was prone to grandiosity, which aroused the down-toearth Marines’ suspicions. However, the Marines soon became his staunchest allies. “Wherever General Eaton leads, we will follow,” O‘Bannon wrote. “If he wants to march us to hell, we’ll gladly go there ... The General always knows what to say and do, in any situation.”
Two days into the march, the camel drivers and Arab footmen went on strike. They refused to take another step unless Eaton immediately paid them the money he had promised them at the end of the march: $11 per camel. It turned out that Sheik il Taiib had spread the rumor that the Christians intended to cheat them. Eaton refused to pay. The Arabs refused to march. Eaton ordered the Christians to start back for Alexandria, “threatning to abandon the expedition and their Bashaw, unless the march in advance proceeded immediately.” The camel drivers relented.
Three days later, a courier rode up with the news that Derna had revolted. The governor reportedly was hiding in his castle, and the province awaited Hamet’s triumphal arrival. The electrifying report launched a nearly tragic chain of events. The Arab cavalry fired their weapons into the air in celebration. Hearing the gunfire, the Arab footmen bringing up the rear with the baggage thought the caravan was being attacked by desert nomads. They instantly turned on their Christian escort, intending to kill and rob them in the confusion of the attack before the nomads reached the baggage train. A massacre was narrowly averted by the intervention of a single Arab who insisted they verify they were being attacked before commencing the slaughter. Cooler heads prevailed. The alleged Derna insurrection, it turned out, never occurred.
Chronic theft reached crisis proportions. Barley and provisions disappeared daily. Two days after the near-massacre, Arabs stole all the cheese and a musket, bayonet, and ammunition from the Marines’ tent. Cheese was one thing, weapons another. Thereafter, the Marines safeguarded the muskets by sleeping on top of them.
The army sometimes came upon the faint traces of the region’s ancient conquerors and inhabitants. They drew water from deep Roman wells and cisterns, and at the castle at Massou (now Matruh), they bathed in stone baths built for Cleopatra, and explored a valley dotted with the ruins of ancient gardens and mansions. The vestiges of the irrecoverable past deeply impressed the Americans. At a ruined ancient castle with an immense cistern, Eaton examined scattered, eroded grave markers bearing Turkish and Arabic inscriptions marking the final resting places of Islamic pilgrims, “expressive of little else than an ejaculation.” One of Eaton’s foreign officers found two copper coins “with Greek inscriptions but so effaced as not to be intelligible....”
The brief interregnum ended with another outburst of fractious self-interest that threatened to destroy the expedition. The camel drivers again refused to continue, claiming Hamet had contracted with them to pack the caravan’s provisions only to Massou—and hadn’t paid them anything at the outset of the expedition, as Eaton had been led to believe. They were right; Hamet had made the partial deal and not told Eaton. Eaton promised them cash if they could travel two more days; he hoped to meet desert tribesmen by then and hire a fresh caravan. Eaton gave them his last $533 and $140 borrowed from his Christian soldiers. For the moment, it seemed to satisfy them. But during the night, most of them started back to Egypt. In the morning, only forty camels remained. Their drivers refused to go on, and then they deserted, too, the next day, March 20. At this unhappy juncture, Sheik il Taiib and some of the other chiefs announced they would not march farther until a courier was sent to Bomba to find out whether U.S. vessels had arrived with fresh provisions. A rumor made the rounds, further undermining the army’s morale: that Yusuf had dispatched 800 cavalry and an infantry force to defend Derna, and that it had already passed Benghazi. This report proved mostly accurate.
Eaton responded to the refusals by stopping the Arabs’ rations and threatening to order his Christian troops to occupy the castle and hold out against the Arabs until he could summon a U.S. relief force. The Arabs’ resolve melted. Fifty drivers returned to the caravan with their dromedaries, and the column marched 13 miles to a plateau where they found good cistern water. The next day, they arrived at the desert Arabs’ camp, and 80 mounted warriors joined Hamet, followed a few days later by 150 foot soldiers, with their families and movable goods.
The tribesmen thought the Americans “curiosities ... [and] laughed at the oddity of our dress; gazed at our polished arms with astonishment:—at the same time they observed the greatest deference toward us as bore any distinctive marks of office.” They offered to barter young gazelles and ostriches, but Eaton could offer only rice in exchange. The expedition moved on, its larder reduced to hard bread and rice. Water was scarcer, available only in rock cavities and cisterns now. “From Alexandria to this place there is not a living stream, nor rivulet, nor spring of water.”
A fresh crisis arose. A report that Yusuf’s cavalry was but a few days from Derna caused Hamet and the Arabs to announce they were abandoning the expedition. Eaton, resolute as always, again cut off their rations and met with the Arab chiefs and Hamet. “Despondency sat in every countenance.” Hamet said he would continue, but Sheik il Taiib said he would not until he received assurances that the U.S. vessels were waiting at Bomba.
Until this point, Eaton had shown remarkable restraint in the face of the Arabs’ continual complaints and threats, but now he exploded. “I could not but reproach that chief with want of courage and fidelity.—He had promised much and fulfilled nothing.—I regretted having been acquainted with him:—and should be well satisfied if he would put his menace in execution of returning to Egypt, provided he would not interfere with the dispositions of the other chiefs.” Unaccustomed to being dressed down like this, the stunned sheik stormed from the meeting, “swearing by all the force of his religion to join us no more.” Eaton stopped Hamet from sending an officer after il Taiib to paper over their breach.
The next day, March 27, the sheik left the expedition with half the Arabs. Eaton again rejected Hamet’s pleas to send a messenger after them. “The services of that chief were due to us:—We had paid for them:—and he had pledged his faith to render them with fidelity.” Hamet said he feared the sheik would now support Yusuf. “Let him do it,” Eaton replied. “I like an open enemy better than a treacherous friend.” However, the sheik had second thoughts and returned sheepishly. “You see the influence I have among these people!” he told Eaton, showing him he had brought back all of his men. “Yes,” Eaton wrote in his journal, “and I see also the disgraceful use you make of it.”
Hamet balked now. He retrieved the horses he had given to the expedition’s officers, distributed them among his footmen, and drew off with the Arab cavalry. “Joseph Bashaw’s forces had siezed on all his nerves.” After reproaching Hamet for disloyalty and for flinching from adversity, Eaton marched off with the Europeans and the baggage. Two hours later, Hamet caught up with Eaton, full of praise for Eaton’s firmness and claiming his irresolution had been only a show to appease his followers. Hamet might have overcome his fears temporarily, but the tribal Arabs who had joined the caravan were marching in the other direction to Egypt. Sheik il Taiib had persuaded them to desert. Hamet sent one of his officers, Hamet Gurgies, after them with a detachment, and he returned with the deserters a day later.
Sheiks il Taiib and Mahomet squabbled over $1,500 given them by Hamet, Mahomet swearing he would not continue until he got his money, and then departing with his men. Weary of the sheiks’ querulousness and greed, Eaton spent the day visiting a desert tribe that lived in a nearby castle. The tribesmen examined with amazement the clothing, epaulets, arms, and spurs of the Americans and Europeans. “They were astonished that God should permit people to possess such riches who followed the religion of the devil!”
The expedition wasn’t all hardships, threats, and thievery. The Arabs sometimes staged horsemanship exhibitions, and from O‘Bannon’s tent wafted the cheerful sound of a mountain fiddle. O’Bannon was a native of Faquier County in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills of northern Virginia, and was married to the former Matilda Heard, the granddaughter of the great Revolutionary War hero, General Daniel Morgan, the victor at Cowpens. A Marine for four years, O‘Bannon was twenty-nine, tough and resourceful. He believed in discipline. On the Adams at Gibraltar in 1802, he had expressed disgust with Captain Hugh Campbell’s laxness, reporting to Marine Commandant William Burrows that he “has conducted himself in such a manner as to forfeit the respect of the Officers on Board his own Ship and I believe it extends to all who know him.”
But O‘Bannon had a fun-loving side that reflected his Irish ancestry, and whose outlet was his fiddle. “O’Bannon [is] one of the Happiest fellows Living,” especially when performing for the Spanish ladies at Gibraltar, the same Campbell reported to Burrows. A favorite, whose strains could be heard coming from O‘Bannon’s tent on desert nights, was “Hogs in the Corn.” He also played Irish jigs, and Private Bernard O’Brian sometimes danced to them.
Eaton’s volcanic relationship with the Arab sheiks edged toward an explosion when a delegation of six sheiks demanded more food. The entire army was down to a daily rice ration. Delegation leader Sheik il Taiib warned Eaton that a mutiny was imminent unless he opened up the larder. Eaton ordered them out of his tent and threatened to execute Taiib if there were an uprising. Later, the sheik returned in a conciliatory mood that Eaton reciprocated. “I replied that I required nothing of him by way of reconciliation but truth, fidelity to the Bashaw, pacific conduct among the other chiefs, uniformity and perseverance in this conduct,” Eaton wrote. “These he promised by an oath; and offered me his hand....”
Meanwhile, Hamet was pursuing Sheik Mahomet, who had abandoned the expedition and was on his way back to Egypt. Absent several days, Hamet rode up with the sheik and his party on April 2 after riding 120 miles. The rare display of energy and force by Hamet pleased Eaton immensely. “He rode all night of the 31st and succeeding day in an uncomfortable fall of rain and chilly winds,” Eaton wrote with avuncular pride, and “subsisted his party during the expedition on milk and dates which were occasionally brought him by the desert Arabs.”
The expedition crossed Tripoli’s border, and Eaton felt the need to proclaim his army’s intentions to the Tripolitan people. He was keenly aware that if his message were properly presented, it might swing popular support to Hamet. This was crude psychological warfare. In the twentieth century, it would become an art and science, and U.S. psy-ops officers would leaflet Europe, Vietnam, Kuwait, and Iraq, urging the enemy to give up. But in 1805, psy-ops did not appear in warfare manuals; it was left to the initiative of individual officers. How Eaton came up with the idea isn’t known for certain—perhaps from his infiltration of the Miami tribe, or when he matched wits with the Spanish on the Georgia—Florida frontier.
The proclamation began with Eaton playing the religious card that had worked so well with the Cairo viceroy. American Christianity, he said, was a peaceful religion, “the orthodox faith of Abraham,” and thus a sister faith to Islam. With common ground established, he launched his attack on Yusuf. The bashaw was “a bloodthirsty scoundrel” who had killed one brother “even in his mother’s arms,” and had driven out his other brother, Hamet, while surrounding himself with “hypocrites” and “vagabonds.” Yusuf, he said, had spurned America’s peace overturns and attacked U.S. shipping with pirate ships commanded by
scoundrels who had just escaped from certain Christian countries to evade the punishment which their crimes merited ...
He leads you into war with no advantage to you whatever. He does not hesitate to drench his shores with your blood, provided that he be able to gain money by it! Yes, he scoffs at your sufferings, saying: O what value are these Moors and these Arabs! They are just beasts which belong to me, worth a great deal less than my camels and my asses ...
God has stamped upon his forehead the mark of Cain, the first murderer ... the end of his usurpation and of his cruelty approaches ... The wrath of God has been aroused against the said Joussuf, the treacherous scoundrel.
The United States was committed to Hamet, “a just and merciful prince, who greatly loves his subjects” and who wished to return to the throne and bring peace to Tripoli.
Promising weapons, food, money, and soldiers to help the people of Tripoli overthrow Yusuf, Eaton pledged unwavering personal support: “I shall be always with you until the end of the war and even until you have achieved your glorious mission, in proof of our fidelity and our goodwill.”
It isn’t known how the proclamation was received in Tripoli, but the caravan attracted more desert Arabs now that Hamet was in his native land. By early April, there were 600 to 700 fighting men, with another 500 camp followers and Bedouin families.
Eaton’s feud with the Arab sheiks reached a roaring climax on April 8, when they refused to budge from camp until a courier was sent to Bomba to determine whether Hull had arrived with food. Only six days’ rice ration remained. Eaton argued that with Bomba that many days away, it would be foolhardy to use up their remaining food idly awaiting the courier’s return; they then would have to march to Bomba anyway, and on empty stomachs. The sheiks were unmoved. “If they preferred famine to fatigue they might have the choice,” Eaton told Hamet. He ordered their ration stopped.
Hamet now displayed his constitutional gutlessness by announcing that he was turning back. The expedition’s simmering tensions came to a full boil. The Arabs prepared to make a grab for the provisions. Eaton and O‘Bannon mustered the Christian troops in front of the food tent with loaded muskets. The far more numerous Arabs advanced, stopping just yards away from the Christians’ dressed ranks. For a full hour, the armed allies confronted one another with loaded guns and swords. Finally Hamet pitched his tent to show he was remaining with the expedition. He persuaded the Arabs to dismount.
Eaton then made a nearly fatal mistake. He gave the order for the Christian troops, still in ranks, to perform the manual of arms, evidently thinking this would be a good time for them to hold their daily practice. “The Christians are preparing to fire on us!” the Arabs shouted when they heard the clash of muskets. Two hundred mounted their horses and charged on the gallop, stopping at the last possible instant and withdrawing a short distance. Still on their horses, the Arabs pointed out all the Christian officers and aimed their weapons at them. “Fire!” they cried. But some of Hamet’s officers bellowed simultaneously, “For God’s sake do not fire! The Christians are our friends!” Miraculously, no one fired.
The Christians began to lose their nerve. Soon only Eaton, O‘Bannon and his Marines, Peck, Richard Farquhar, Selim Aga, his lieutenants, and two Greek officers faced the mutinous Arabs. Eaton, unarmed, advanced toward Hamet, exhorting him to avert a slaughter. Dozens of Arab muskets were aimed at his chest. Hamet looked distracted. Eaton tried to address the cavalrymen, but they drowned him out with their shouts.
Eaton began to berate the Arabs in a loud voice and in their own tongue. He said they were “women” who were afraid of battle. “The General continued to revile them until I thought he would lose his voice,” said O‘Bannon. “Then, all at once, his manner changed, and now he sounded joyous.” He shouted words of encouragement, and some of the Arabs cheered.
The standoff ended when several Arab chiefs and some of Hamet’s lieutenants rode between the two sides with drawn sabers and drove back the Arabs. Eaton sternly pulled Hamet aside. Had he forgotten the expedition’s purpose and that they were all supposed to be allies? “He relented:—called me his friend & protector:—said he was too soon heated:—and followed me to my tent, giving orders at the same time to his Arabs to disperse.”
Later, O‘Bannon scolded Eaton for rashly mingling with the mutinous Arabs while unarmed. With a laugh, Eaton raised the sleeves of his robe to reveal a pair of bone-handled throwing knives strapped to his wrists. “A slight tug at the handle of either knife would have brought the weapon instantly into his hand.”
Eaton sent a fast courier ahead to Bomba to look for Hull while the army pushed on. Christians and Arabs alike were down to their last reserves of strength, subsisting on a daily cup of rice and a half-ration of water. Captain Selim Comb augmented their pinched diet with a wildcat: 5 feet long, sable color, with black ears and nose and a dark-brindled tail. His greyhound had chased it down in the desert. “It was cooked, and it eat very well.” There was never enough water to slake their raging thirst. At one stop, the soldiers and camp followers crowded around a well of filthy water, jostling one another to wet their lips. The pushing caused a horse to tumble down the slope to the well, taking two people with him. Halting on April 9 at a cistern, the marchers found two dead men in the water, Moslem pilgrims murdered by bandits. “We were obliged nevertheless to use the water,” observed Eaton.
Until O‘Bannon stopped the practice, the hungry Marines cut the buttons from their dress uniforms and traded them with Arab women for food, and possibly sexual favors. The women strung the buttons into necklaces and wore them around their necks. Some of the foot soldiers and Bedouin families turned back for lack of adequate food. Hamet killed a pack camel for meat and traded another to the desert Arabs for sheep. He butchered and distributed the mutton to all the troops, now reduced to eating wild fennel and sorrel that they found in ravines, and to foraging for roots and wild vegetables.
Another mutiny flared over the rations. This time, it was the cannoneers. Eaton wearily prepared to quell it—just as the courier returned with news that he had sighted vessels at Bomba. “In an instant the face of everything changed from pensive gloom to inthusiastic gladness.” New life was breathed into the expedition. The mutiny forgotten, the caravan pressed on.
At last they reached Bomba.
The empty bay mocked them. There were no ships, there was no one to meet them. The expedition succumbed to its accumulated disappointments and hunger. The bitter Arabs claimed that there had never been any resupply ships expected at Bomba, that the Christian leaders were “imposters and infidels;—and said we had drawn them into that situation with treacherous views.” Powerless to stop it, Eaton watched the expedition breaking up before his eyes. The Arabs laid plans to depart the next morning, brushing aside Eaton’s exhortation that they all press on to Derna. Despairing, Eaton and the Christians climbed a hill overlooking the harbor and lit signal fires. They stoked them all night, hoping that Hull was at sea nearby, and would see the fires and come to a rendezvous.
At daybreak on April 15, there still were no ships in sight. Eaton watched helplessly as the Arabs prepared to break camp and return to Egypt. The expedition appeared to be over. One of Hamet’s servants climbed the signal hill for a last look at the Mediterranean—and spotted a sail in the distance. It was the Argus. Hull had seen the signal fires during the night. “Language is too poor to paint the joy and exultation which this messenger of life excited in every breast,” wrote Eaton.
Hull had reached Bomba April 4, but, finding no one there, he had cruised to Cape Razatin, he told Eaton. Returning to Bomba and still finding no one, he sent a party ashore to determine whether Eaton had been there. When it couldn’t find any evidence that he had, the Argus had lingered offshore, checking the bay periodically.
Eaton’s army spent a restorative week encamped at Bomba. Food and provisions were plentiful. The Argus and Hornet sent ashore 30 hogsheads of bread; 30 barrels of peas; rice; three hogsheads of brandy and wine; 100 sacks of flour; 10 boxes of oil; a bale of cloth; and $7,000 for Eaton.
After crossing 460 miles of desert in five weeks, the army now faced the critical 60-mile push to Derna. The Americans and Arabs, Greeks and Turks, Tripolitans, and assorted Europeans knew this leg of the journey likely would end in a pitched battle from which they would emerge victorious, or in chains. The marchers rested and ate and drank their fill.
On April 23, they marched out of the parched land where they had spent the last forty-six days and into a wetter region of cultivated fields. Now that the army was in Tripoli, volunteers were joining daily, swelling the expedition’s ranks to about 1,000 fighting men as the force advanced toward Derna. Before his men could act on the growing temptation to scavenge from the land, Hamet sent a herald crying throughout the camp: “He who fears God and feels attachment to Hamet Bashaw will be careful to destroy nothing. Let no one touch the growing harvest. He who transgresses this injunction shall lose his right hand!”
Yusuf’s envoy to Alexandria had returned with intelligence about Eaton and Hamet’s expedition. The bashaw had immediately acted to head them off, ordering his chief Mameluke, Hassan Bey, to lead an army toward Egypt to intercept and defeat Hamet. Yusuf had established a regular army only three years earlier, to thwart Hamet and subdue revolts in the interior. By the time Preble attacked Tripoli, the bashaw’s army had swelled to 1,500 Turkish mercenaries, 12,000 Arab and Berber cavalry, and thousands of irregulars—25,000 troops in all for Tripoli’s defense.
A tent was pitched on the castle battery and manned by sentries watching every night for invaders, while Yusuf stepped up his war preparations. Bainbridge and Eaton were right: Tripoli was vulnerable to land attack—and the bashaw knew this in his bones. As Hassan’s army prepared for its long march—Derna was about 500 miles from Tripoli—the American prisoners were put to work hauling ammunition and food to the army’s staging area. Displaying his growing fears of a coup, the bashaw locked up the relatives of his expedition’s officers in the former U.S. consular house, to ensure the loyalty of Hassan’s army. Before the troops departed, a marabout absolved the officers of their sins, according to surgeon Jonathan Cowdery, and assured them of victory.
Yusuf sent his son-in-law into the countryside to recruit more troops for Tripoli’s defense. He returned empty-handed; the people wouldn’t fight. Yusuf’s levies had been too heavy, with women even stripped of their jewels. The Spanish consul, storing up good favor against the day Spain would find itself on Tripoli’s enemy list, gave the bashaw a shipment of muskets.
Everyone was certain the city would be attacked in the summer, but Yusuf’s women and children chose to remain in the castle rather than move to the family’s country palace. “They said that if they must be taken, they would rather fall into the hands of the Americans than the Arabs,” Cowdery noted wryly.
The increasingly flustered bashaw declared to Cowdery that if the Americans forced him to, or if they attacked Tripoli, he would put every American prisoner to death. A few days later, he asked Cowdery how many Marines the United States had. Ten thousand, the ship’s surgeon replied. And troops? “Eighty thousand, said I, are in readiness to march to defend the country, at any moment; and one million of militia are also ready to fight for the liberty and rights of their countrymen!” The bashaw looked very somber.
As Eaton’s expedition neared Derna, reports reached him that Derna’s governor was fortifying the city and Yusuf’s army was close by. The worried Arab chiefs conferred with Hamet into the night. Eaton was not invited to their consultations.
The next morning, April 26, Sheiks il Taiib and Mahomet announced they were turning around, and the Bedouins refused to strike their tents. The hours ticked away while Eaton argued with them, painfully aware of all the days lost because of the Arabs’ intractability. Only a day’s march from Derna, they risked losing the race to Yusuf’s army.
Eaton cajoled, wheedled, and reproached, finally resorting to the unfailing expedient of cold cash. He promised the Arab chiefs $2,000 if they would resume the march. That got them moving again.
That afternoon, the fiftieth day of the desert march, Eaton’s army reached the heights above Derna.
Eaton joined a cavalry patrol scouting the city. There was no sign of the bashaw’s troops.
Unaware that Eaton’s army was poised to strike at Tripoli’s second-largest city, Jefferson and his officials had begun to doubt whether there would ever be an honorable peace with Tripoli. It couldn’t be said that the U.S. government had stinted on committing resources; the $555,862 appropriated for Commodore Dale’s tiny squadron in 1801 had tripled in four years and now sustained twelve ships crewed by 2,000 men. Nor was the problem the blockade or the convoys. The blockade pinched Tripoli at times, and the convoys had denied enemy corsairs a single American prize since the capture of the Franklin in June 1802. On top of these pressures, the bashaw was having to foot the cost of maintaining a large army. But Barron’s squadron, the largest naval force ever deployed by the United States, had not fired on Tripoli in eight months and, without the threat of attack, Yusuf felt no compunction to sue for peace. Frustrated U.S. leaders, including the recently reelected Jefferson, were ready to trim down the Mediterranean squadron to a skeletal blockading force.
In the bashaw’s castle beside Tripoli’s harbor, the Philadelphia crewmen tried to keep up their spirits, even though they had seen nothing in seven long months to kindle any new hope of liberation; since Preble’s departure the previous September, American warships had only blockaded Tripoli, without once going on the attack. During their seventeen months of captivity, five crewmen had died, and five had converted to Islam and no longer lived in confinement. The remaining 297, officers and men alike, ate and slept in dank, ill-lit dungeons in Yusuf’s castle. Their treatment was no better than before, with the work gangs roughly turned out at first light each morning for hard labor.
In the lavish castle rooms reserved for the bashaw, Yusuf and his officials disparaged America’s naval war and blockade. If he had three frigates, Yusuf boasted to Cowdery, Tripoli could blockade America as effectively as the Americans had invested Tripolitan ports. “He said he could do it as easily as a frigate and schooner could blockade Tripoli!” Only Preble’s August 3 attack had really shaken the Tripolitans, Nissen said, and “the damage done is absolutely of no consequence,” although a stray musket ball had starred a mirror right where Nissen had been standing in his home minutes before. Nissen recommended to Barron that he concentrate on blockading Tripoli’s eastern ports, where gunpowder was being smuggled from the Levant.
Despite the bashaw’s boastful talk, the war had drawn down his treasury, forcing him to impose levies that had made his countrymen outside the capital resentful. Yusuf also had borrowed from his neighbors. He owed Tunis $120,000, and his plan to use the Philadelphia as partial payment was consumed in the flames of Stephen Decatur’s incendiaries. The bashaw was counting on America tiring of the war and paying for peace. All of these factors, and Eaton’s presence outside Derna, made April 1805 an excellent time for a decisive naval offensive. A twopronged attack combining Eaton’s army and Barron’s fleet would surely force Yusuf to sign any treaty that would allow him to keep his throne.
This was what Secretary of State Madison and Navy Secretary Smith had had in mind when they instructed Barron and Consul General Lear to apply military force until America could dictate peace terms. Barron would blockade and “annoy the Enemy,” Smith said, until “it is conceived that no doubt whatever can exist of your coercing Tripoli to a Treaty upon our own Terms.” Lear then could negotiate a treaty “without any price or pecuniary concession whatever,” as Madison put it, with the only permissible expenditure being for the captives’ ransom, up to $500 each, minus trades. Should “adverse events or circumstances ... which are not foreseen here” intervene, and Lear judged “a pecuniary sacrifice preferable to a protraction of the war,” he might pay for peace, but only as a last resort.
Jefferson was readier to cut his losses in Barbary than Smith’s and Madison’s instructions to Lear and Barron indicated. The orders were drafted after a Cabinet meeting on January 8, 1805, at which Jefferson and his advisers resolved to send “new instructions not to give a dollar for peace,” but “if the enterprise in the spring does not produce peace & delivery of prisoners, ransom them.” Jefferson, however, confided in a letter in March to a longtime Virginia friend, Judge John Tyler, that he intended to scale back America’s commitment to the war even more. If Barron failed to dictate a peace by the end of the summer, he planned to reduce the Mediterranean squadron to a three-ship blockading force to protect U.S. shipping. A continual blockade was better than a bought peace, the president said, and would cost no more than annual tribute. Whatever the outcome, he would never pay tribute to Tripoli because it would invite fresh demands from the other Barbary States. Jefferson believed the United States already had shown the tributary European powers how “to emancipate themselves from that degrading yoke. Should we produce such a revolution there, we shall be amply rewarded for what we have done.”
Jefferson’s candid letter did not mention Eaton’s clandestine mission.
Despite all the hopes riding on Barron’s cruise, and Tripoli’s vulnerability to a joint land—sea attack, Barron’s squadron would not be going on the offensive soon. The commodore was fighting for his life in his Syracuse sickbed. Afflicted with liver disease soon after reaching the Mediterranean in the late summer of 1804, by November Barron had made Captain John Rodgers, his second in command, responsible for the squadron’s day-to-day operations. Barron retained overall command of the squadron, optimistically thinking he would turn the corner any week. But his health collapsed. On November 14, Midshipman Henry Allen reported, “It will soon be determined whether he lives or not.” By December 27, Barron could not hold a pen to write a letter. In January, 1805, he hovered near death. Barely surviving that crisis, he remained so weak that his secretary wrote many of his letters for him. April found him still unable to return to his ship.
Lear’s influence over Barron and the squadron’s operations waxed with Barron’s waning health. At a distance of 200 years, his motives are unclear, although they most likely included a strong dose of ambition mingled with the belief that diplomacy should conclude the war. Lear had spent his adult life amid the republic’s founders and the towering events attending its birth, but never as a participant. He was George Washington’s close friend and represented him in business affairs. After Washington died in 1799, Lear became a diplomat, but at forty-three he had not yet made his mark or his fortune, and hoped to do so in Barbary.
Whatever his motives, Lear openly criticized Eaton’s scheme to build an insurgency around Hamet Karamanli and drive his brother Yusuf from Tripoli. “... I should place much more confidence in the continuance of a peace with the present Bashaw, if he is well beaten into it, then I should with the other, if he should be placed on the throne by our means.”
Tobias Lear had been Barbary’s consul general for nearly two years. In his portrait from that time, he appears as an oval-faced man with large, intelligent eyes and a pointed nose, clad in an army officer’s coat, with a sedentary man’s double chin. Lear often signed his correspondence “Colonel Lear,” proud of the rank Washington had given him during the Quasi-War with France. Washington, picked to command American ground forces, had named Lear his chief aide. Washington’s army never took the field because the French didn’t send an army to North America; the Quasi-War was fought at sea. Lear, however, signed his correspondence with his titular rank for the rest of his days.
He had devoted nearly his entire adult life to America’s first family. In May 1786 the twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate became George Washington’s personal secretary and moved to Mount Vernon. Over the years, he became more of a family member than employee, particularly after making two of Washington’s nieces his second and third wives, after his first died in Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow-fever epidemic. As Washington’s personal secretary, he handled correspondence, kept the family books, tutored the children, attended to Washington’s varied business interests, and dined every day with the family. He followed Washington to New York and Philadelphia when he became president.
At the beginning of Washington’s second term, Lear struck out on his own, hoping to make a fortune through business and land speculation in the new capital city being built on the Potomac. He continued to act as Washington’s business agent and sent him letters full of shrewd observations whenever he traveled. He also served as a director of the Potomack Company, organized by Washington and other businessmen to make the Potomac River a commercial pipeline to the heartland.
In December 1799, when the ex-president was dying of pneumonia at Mount Vernon, it was Lear who held his hand as he uttered his last words. (Washington told him not to put him in his burial vault until he had been dead three days, just for good measure.) Washington’s will granted Lear rent-free tenancy for life at Walnut Hill Farm at Mount Vernon.
Yet, during all his years with George Washington, the repository of all the early United States’ hopes, Lear was an observer, not a participant. Only once had he been a central player in his own right, and it had not redounded to his credit. Lear was blamed for the sensational disappearance of all the correspondence between Washington and Jefferson from 1797 until Washington’s death two years later.
This was significant because Washington and Jefferson, fellow Virginians and Revolution patriots and friends for twenty years, had quarreled bitterly in 1797 and had exchanged several sharp letters. The disappearance of the copies undoubtedly made of Washington’s letters to Jefferson and Jefferson’s replies to Washington—while they were in Lear’s possession—erased all traces of their angry exchange. Of course, none of the letters turned up among Jefferson’s papers because Jefferson’s indiscretion had caused the rupture in their friendship in the first place, and the letters would have reflected poorly on him.
Jefferson, as did all Republicans, had vilified the Jay Treaty as a dirty piece of bootlicking by Anglophile Federalists. But unfortunately, Jefferson also vented his unhappiness in a blistering letter to Philip Mazzei, a former Monticello neighbor who had moved back to his native Italy. Through circuitous means, the letter unexpectedly found its way into print in the United States, and a storm erupted. The catalyst was Jefferson’s thinly veiled reference to Washington, already a national icon, in the line, “men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”
Jefferson was disconcerted by the letter’s publication, and Washington was furious. The breach that opened up between the two old friends wasn’t helped by the accusations that flew in a subsequent exchange of heated letters. Only one survived Washington’s death. In it, Washington expressed outrage over the “grossest and most invidious misrepresentations” of his administration’s actions.
John Marshall, the first U.S. Supreme Court chief justice and the era’s leading Federalist, discovered the strange gap in the men’s correspondence when he took possession of Washington’s papers in early 1801—from Lear, who had them to himself for a year. (Marshall based his masterful, four-volume Washington biography on these papers.) Lear said nothing to Marshall about the gap. Later, however, he acknowledged to Alexander Hamilton and others that he had destroyed letters Washington would never have wished to be made public.
But Lear might have acted for more selfish reasons than concern for Washington’s posterity. In The Checkered Career of Tobias Lear, historian Ray Brighton suggests there might have been a quid pro quo between Lear and Jefferson, who was running for president when Lear had possession of the papers. Publication of the letters very likely would have cost Jefferson the election, which he only managed to win on the thirty-sixth ballot in the U.S. House, after an Electoral College tie with Aaron Burr.
Lear and Jefferson had been friends since Jefferson’s years in Washington’s Cabinet, and Lear privately agreed with Jefferson’s Republican views. He also needed a job that paid well, for his unlucky business speculation in the new capital had plunged him deeply into debt.
While it will never be known whether Lear and Jefferson had an agreement about the letters, Jefferson and Madison made sure Lear had a government job for the rest of his short, eventful life. (In 1814 Lear saved the Army’s records when the British burned Washington. Two years later, he committed suicide.)
Within weeks of Jefferson’s inauguration, Lear was appointed to his first job: consul to Santo Domingo. This was a coveted post, because opportunities abounded for getting rich in the West Indies trade. But Lear happened to arrive during the tumultuous aftermath of a slave rebellion and was expelled months later when French troops invaded.
As consul general for the Barbary States, he had hoped to establish a reputation and accumulate wealth, but the war had afforded him a chance for neither.
Early in 1805, Lear temporarily moved from Algiers to Malta so he could be close to Tripoli if an opportunity arose for a parley. He was eager to negotiate a peace, no matter what Eaton and Hamet accomplished. The shortest distance to his goal was through Barron, who lay helplessly ill in Syracuse. Lear shuttled between Malta and Syracuse, making sure nothing—such as a naval offensive—upset his plan for a diplomatic settlement. He also systematically undermined Hamet’s credibility with Barron. Eaton had so favorably impressed the commodore during their Atlantic crossing that at the beginning of 1805, Barron had pledged to cooperate with Eaton and Hamet and to restore Hamet as bashaw. Lear, aware that if their desert expedition dethroned Yusuf his own efforts would inevitably become expendable, or, at best, secondary, inexorably turned the commodore against Hamet and Eaton.
He had to tread carefully because he didn’t want to come across to Barron as a crank, and because no one really knew what the president had agreed to when he met with Eaton the previous year. So he took cover in others’ opinions, such as those of Nissen, who assayed the damage caused by Preble’s attacks as “very inconsiderable.” And there was Bainbridge, who in his letters from captivity clearly opposed any action that would jeopardize his crew’s safety or extend its captivity. Bainbridge also thought little of Eaton’s expedition, or of Hamet, a “poor effeminate refugee ... who had not spirit enough to retain his situation when placed in it,” and who had “wandered an Exile far from Country, Wife & Children for more than 8 years without disturbing the Regency of Tripoli.” Bainbridge, who had plenty of idle time to ponder the Tripoli situation, had concluded that blockading was futile. As he saw it, America had three options: bombard Tripoli and seek terms immediately; capture the city with an army; or “abandon us entirely to the hard fate which serving our Country plunged us into.”
Lear also pounced on Richard Farquhar’s bitter complaints about Eaton after Eaton expelled him from Alexandria for embezzling expedition funds. “He writes to the Commodore that Mr E. is a madman,” Lear gleefully told Captain John Rodgers, a friend from his brief Santo Domingo consulship. “He has quarreled with the Ex-Bashaw &c &c &c, We are in daily expectation of more authentic accounts from that quarter; but I make no calculation in our favour from that source.” Lear never identified the source, and nothing more came of the matter.
By the spring of 1805, as Eaton’s expedition was pushing deep into eastern Tripoli, Barron was beginning to sound like Lear on the subject of Hamet: “I confess that my hopes from a Cooperation with him are less sanguine than they were.” He attributed his changed outlook to recent information “from persons well acquainted with the Bashaw [Hamet] of his Character & Conduct.” In other words, Lear. No report from Eaton had yet arrived to change Barron’s thinking about the overland campaign. But Lear’s influence over Barron—who, although invalided, still clung to his authority as regional commander to conduct the war as he saw fit—was nearly absolute after the commodore’s long months of illness. Barron confessed to Lear that his newfound lack of confidence in Hamet, coupled with the expedition’s cost and overly ambitious goals, “compel me to relinquish the plan.”
Barron also anticipated every conceivable drawback and obstacle whenever he weighed bringing his naval force into action against Tripoli. An attack was ill-advised without gunboats, the only vessels that could safely navigate the shallow harbor, and he had been unable to procure any from Naples or Venice. He was unsure when ten being built in the United States would arrive. The enlistment period of Preble’s squadron began expiring in early autumn, “an important period in our Arrangements.” Three frigates needed refitting. Under the circumstances, Barron made no plans to bring his large squadron against Tripoli.
The situation was rich in its circuitous irony. With Barron disinclined to launch a naval attack, Lear had to depend on the very force he was trying so hard to discredit—Eaton and Hamet’s army, encamped on the heights above Derna—to force Yusuf to sign an honorable peace for which Lear could then claim credit.