XV
Dorna, Saturday April 27, 1805
I shall see you tomorrow in a way of your choice.
—William Eaton in a letter to Mustifa Bey, governor of Derna
My head or yours.
—Mustifa Bey
Hidden in the sparsely wooded hills overlooking the city, Eaton, Hamet, and their officers studied the white buildings and palm trees fringing the harbor. With upwards of 10,000 inhabitants, Derna was Tripoli’s second-largest city. Bananas, dates, grapes, melons, oranges, and plums flourished in the city’s orchards and irrigated gardens, whose cultivation dated to the 1493 arrival of the Moors exiled from Spain. To the north, the Mediterranean’s sparkling blue waters stretched to the horizon. Mussolini would call Derna “the pearl of the Mediterranean,” but other visitors, immune to its charms, were oppressed by its isolation and the air of desolation bestowed by the endless sea and the nearby hills.
Derna was the administrative and military hub of Cyrenaica, Tripoli’s distant eastern province and traditionally its most restive, as a result of its 500-mile remove from the capital across stretches of hostile territory. Its nomadic Berber and Bedouin tribesmen remained largely outside Yusuf’s authority. Hundreds of them had rallied to Hamet’s standard, swelling his ranks to 1,000 fighting men. Derna itself was only nominally in the bashaw’s camp and just as liable to switch sides.
After Eaton, Hamet, and their army occupied the hills overlooking the provincial capital on April 26, Eaton scouted the enemy defenses with a small mounted force and gathered intelligence from dissident city chiefs. What he learned was not reassuring. The city was defended by at least 800 government troops, a shore battery of eight 9-pounders and a 10-inch howitzer on the terrace of the governor’s palace. A third of the populace was firmly in Yusuf’s camp, and most of them lived in the city’s southeast district. They had fortified that area of the city by cutting firing ports in the walls of the homes. In the northeastern sector, defenders had thrown up breastworks tying in with the buildings. The chiefs warned Eaton that he would have difficulty dislodging the troops because they knew that if they held out, Yusuf’s 1,200 cavalry and infantry would relieve them in a day or two. This information made Eaton eager to attack as soon as possible, but disheartened Hamet. “I thought the Bashaw wished himself back to Egypt,” Eaton noted drily in his journal.
After reconnoitering Derna and seeing to his army’s disposition for the night, Eaton joined Lieutenant Isaac Hull on the Argus, and they mapped out a battle plan for the next day. Eaton spent the night on the brig and awakened the following morning with the fatalistic thought that this day might well be his last. Before boating ashore to rejoin his army, he left instructions for doling out his personal effects in the event that he was killed in battle. Hull would get his cloak and smallsword; Captain James Barron, his Damascus saber; his stepson, Eli Danielson, his gold watch and chain; and Charles Wadsworth, his estate executor back in America, was to receive the rest.
Derna’s defenders and the assault troops in the hills tensely watched Lieutenant John Dent maneuver the Nautilus close to shore east of Derna with the two 24-pound carronades Eaton had requested. They were landed at an awkward spot, at the foot of a sheer 20-foot-high rock. The cannoneers rigged a block and tackle, but inching just one of the carronades up the escarpment was so time-consuming that Eaton decided to leave the other one behind.
Mustifa Bey, Derna’s governor, had spurned Eaton’s one attempt to avoid battle. Eaton had offered Mustifa a position in Hamet’s future government if he granted the expeditionary force passage through his city and permitted it to buy supplies. “I shall see you tomorrow in a way of your choice,” Eaton wrote in closing. The messenger returned with the governor’s answer, scrawled on Eaton’s letter:
My head or yours
Mustifa
Eaton deployed his forces. All was in readiness.
At 1:30 P.M., the two armies began to pepper one another with small-arms and cannon fire. By 2:00, this overture had swelled to a roar along Derna’s well-defended southeast corner, opposite which Lieutenant O‘Bannon commanded the Marines, the sixty cannoneers and Greeks, and a couple of dozen Arab foot soldiers. Derna’s harbor batteries fired at the three U.S. ships in the harbor. Blue-gray smoke hung over the battlements and harbor. Hamet whirled off with his Arab cavalry to seize an old castle overlooking the southwest part of town.
The Argus, Hornet, and Nautilus drew themselves up 100 yards from the city and opened up with their 9-pounders, and over the next forty-five minutes silenced the waterside batteries, one by one. However, the gunners facing O‘Bannon’s men kept up a withering fire that drowned out Eaton’s lone carronade that was firing shrapnel at the defenders. The heavy musket and cannon fire began to rattle Eaton’s men. Then the carronade crew shot away the rammer, the long wooden stave for pushing shot, wad, and cartridge down the bore, and the gun fell silent. Raked by artillery and musket fire from hundreds of enemy troops, and with their one fieldpiece out of commission, O’Bannon’s European and Arab foot soldiers were on the verge of bolting.
Eaton knew he must attack now or lose control of his men. He and O‘Bannon exhorted the motley force of just over sixty men, clad in Marine Corps garb, scraps of uniforms from European armies, civilian clothing, and Arab robes, to follow them. Eaton’s army surged across the open ground toward the walled city, bayonets flashing.
The defenders outnumbered the attackers ten to one and had the advantage of being able to fire from behind walls. But the brazen frontal assault threw them into a panic. They got off a ragged volley, abandoned their positions and beat a pell-mell retreat into the city. They stopped to fire from behind walls and palm trees, thinning the ranks of Eaton’s assault troops. But Eaton’s men kept coming. Suddenly Eaton clutched his left wrist and lagged behind, hit by a musket ball.
O‘Bannon took charge, aided by Midshipman George Mann of the Argus. The assault force cleared the batteries of enemy with bayonets and small-arms fire. O’Bannon and his Marines lowered the bashaw’s ensign and ran up the American flag over the ramparts—the first time the Stars and Stripes was planted on a hostile foreign shore by U.S. troops. Cheers erupted from Eaton’s men and the sailors on the three U.S. warships.
The Americans turned around the enemy’s cannons, already loaded and primed, and opened fire on the retreating government soldiers running through the city streets. The warships joined in with supporting fire as Hamet’s cavalry charged in from the opposite side, pinching the defenders between the two attacking forces. A little after 4:00 P.M., Hamet and his force burst into the governor’s palace, and resistance ended.
While no work of military genius, the storming of Derna was the first decisive American victory of the Barbary War. It was a heavy blow to the bashaw’s hopes for a quick, lucrative treaty, and an amazing personal triumph for Eaton. At the head of a mutinous army, Eaton had crossed 520 miles of forbidding desert and wrested Tripoli’s second city from a large armed force waiting behind prepared fortifications, at a cost of just two dead—Marine Privates John Whitten and Edward Seward—and a dozen wounded, Eaton among them.
Derna made O‘Bannon the U.S. Marine Corps’s first hero. In years to come, the Marines’ pivotal role at Derna would be immortalized by the anonymous lyricist who penned the words “to the shores of Tripoli,” one of the two named battles in “The Marine’s Hymn.” O’Bannon later accepted a scimitar from Hamet as thanks, and it remains the model for the ceremonial sword still issued to Marine officers. Despite all the encomiums, O‘Bannon resigned his commission two years later, frustrated over not being promoted to captain; the Marine Corps was authorized to have only four, and the slots all were filled. He moved to Kentucky, where he became a community leader and served in the legislature. He died on September 12, 1850. The headstone over his remains, moved by the state to Frankfort in 1920, misstates his rank but accords him the laurels he had earned: “The Hero of Derne Tripoli Northern Africa April 27, 1805. As Captain of the United States Marines He was the First to Plant the American Flag on Foreign Soil.”
Mustifa, Derna’s governor, was trapped in Derna by Eaton’s and Hamet’s converging forces. He hid in a mosque, then in a harem, the most sacrosanct of Moslem sanctuaries. His protector was a sheik who, coincidentally, had sheltered Hamet when Yusuf’s troops had come after him two years before. Now the sheik just as stubbornly denied Hamet and Eaton access to Mustifa, claiming the prerogatives of a Moslem host. The sheik said a breach of hospitality would bring down the “vengeance of God” and “the odium of all mankind.” Eaton threatened him with bombardment and menaced his home with fifty bayonet-wielding Christian troops. The sheik said he preferred bombs to God’s chastisement. “Neither persuasion, bribes nor menace, could prevail on this venerable aged chief to permit the hospitality of his house to be violated,” Eaton wrote wearily. Eaton knew that if he trespassed on the sheik’s protection the entire city would turn against him. He was reduced to plotting ways to lure Mustifa into the open, hoping to capture and trade him for Bainbridge. But Mustifa managed to slip out of Derna and join Yusuf’s troops on May 12.
The next morning, Yusuf’s army counterattacked.
For five days, Hassan Bey’s troops had watched the city from the same hills where Eaton had launched his attack. He had sent spies to try turning the townspeople against Eaton and Hamet, hoping to gain an edge. Well aware of Hassan’s preparations, Eaton and his officers found, as Mustifa had before them, that defending a city of Derna’s size properly would unfortunately require more troops than they had. They would have to depend on manned outposts along the city’s outskirts to alert them to an attack and hope they could respond swiftly and repel whatever came, wherever it might be aimed.
On May 13, Hassan’s troops overran an outpost held by 100 of Hamet’s Arab cavalrymen and raced toward Derna. The Argus’s and Nautilus’s alert gunners opened up. Hamet’s two fieldpieces joined in. But the horsemen raced through the shot and shell fire. At the edge of the city, they ran gantlets of musket fire from O‘Bannon’s infantry and armed Derna sympathizers—among them the sheik who had protected Mustifa so diligently—and charged into the middle of town, straight to the governor’s palace, where Hamet and his entourage had encamped.
The attackers intended to storm the palace and capture Hamet, knowing this was the surest way to end the threat to their bashaw. One final surge into the palace, and the expedition and all of Eaton’s and Hamet’s hopes would perish.
And then a well-aimed shot from one of the ships landed dead among Yusuf’s cavalrymen in the palace courtyard, horribly mangling two of them before their shocked companions. The attackers’ nerve abandoned them. They wheeled around suddenly and tore off into the countryside, harried by cannon and musket fire. It had been a close call, reminding Eaton and Hamet of their tenuous hold on Derna, but it also was a scalding experience for Hassan’s soldiers, who had lost 28 killed and 56 wounded, of whom 11 later died of their wounds. Eaton’s troops suffered 14 killed and wounded.
With Hassan rocked back on his heels, Eaton turned to the pressing problem of how to replenish his alarmingly low stocks of bread, rice, coffee, sugar, and ammunition. Hull had no additional supplies and no cash to buy them, owing to Barron’s tightfistedness toward Eaton, but Hull was eager to help Eaton if he could. They hit on the desperate contingency of bartering the Argus’s prize goods for meat in Derna. “A humiliating traffic, but we have no cash,” Eaton noted tersely in his journal. On May 20, Hamet implored Hull to give him $300 to pay off his Arab chiefs, who were threatening to switch sides and join Yusuf’s army. Hull didn’t have the money. But he loyally offered to turn his cannons on the town and destroy every house if the people of Derna showed ingratitude to Hamet. Finally, touched by Hamet’s “very low spirits,” Hull stripped his ship of goods and equipment to help him meet the emergency and buy food and supplies.
Hassan’s 350 Tripolitans, 200—300 Arab cavalry, and 300 desert Arab foot soldiers began readying for another attack. Worried that he might not be able to fend them off this time, Eaton proposed a preemptive night strike on their camp three miles from town. Hamet’s Arabs said they did not fight at night. So they waited.
Hassan also was having trouble inducing his soldiers to attack. After the bloody debacle of May 13, they were wary of charging into the city again. They complained of the way the Americans fought, firing “enormous balls that carried away a man and his camel at once, or rushed on them with bayonets without giving them time to load their muskets.” Hassan tried to motivate his soldiers with bribes and bounties: $6,000 to anyone who killed Eaton, twice that sum if he were captured alive, and $30 for every Christian killed. They were unmoved. Hassan’s officers began collecting camels to serve as “traveling breastworks.” But the Arabs objected to their camels being used in this manner, and the project was abandoned.
In Derna, confidence in Eaton’s leadership soared. His officers were inspired to draft and sign a loyalty pledge. “Everything assures us of complete victory under your command. We are only waiting for the moment to win this glory, and to fall on the enemy. ... We swear that we shall follow you and that we shall fight unto death.” O‘Bannon, Mann, the remaining Farquhar, Selim Comb, and two other officers signed the pledge. Eaton himself was so pleased with the expedition’s success that he took to calling his camp in Derna “Fort Enterprize” .
The afternoon of May 21, the sea breeze shifted to the south, and the air became suffocatingly hot and dusty. Then, a towering column of swirling sand rose from the desert. Three miles long, it approached rapidly. “Heated dust, which resembled the smoke of a conflagration ... turned the sun in appearance to melted copper ... We were distressed for breath:—the lungs contracted:—blood heated like a fever....” For days, all military plans were held in abeyance while the sirocco blew. The searing desert wind warped the white pine boards of Eaton’s folding table, and the covers of his books were seared and wrinkled as though they had lain too close to a roaring fire. Standing water burned fingers when touched. Eaton’s troops stopped working on the fortifications because the stones they were using became too hot to handle. “The heated dust penetrated everything through our garments:—and indeed seemed to choak the pores of the skin,” noted Eaton. “It had a singular effect on my wound, giving it the painful sensations of a fresh burn.” At sea, the blowing sand coated the Argus’s rigging and spars. Hull noted that it was only “with difficulty we could look to windward without getting our Eyes put out with dust.”
While Eaton’s army was on the march to Derna, reports about the expedition’s progress, sometimes weeks old because of slow communications, had begun to reach Yusuf’s castle, causing growing alarm. The Americans, the bashaw complained bitterly, had raised the stakes from tribute to his very throne. He vowed to Cowdery that he would raise them even higher. “He swore by the prophet of Mecca, that if the Americans brought his brother against him, he would burn to death all the American prisoners except me.” Cowdery would be spared, Yusuf said, because he had saved the life of his sick child. The bashaw communicated the same sentiments to Bainbridge, bellicosely threatening to strike the United States “in the most tender part.” When news of Derna’s capture reached Tripoli, “the greatest terror and consternation reigned,” noted Marine Second Lieutenant Wallace W Wormeley, one of the Philadelphia captives. Yusuf convened the Divan, Tripoli’s council of state, in an emergency session, announcing that he wished to execute the American prisoners. But the Divan had no stomach for a bloody massacre and postponed taking any action.
If possible, the Philadelphia crewmen’s treatment worsened. At the height of the sirocco, twenty-five of them were sent with a cart into the countryside to gather timber. After working all day in the dusty, oppressive heat, they were exhausted and thirsty. They asked their Tripolitan driver for permission to drink at a nearby well. The overseer coldly reminded them that they were Christian dogs and deserved no water. Then he beat them with a heavy club.
The bashaw’s spy from Malta arrived in Tripoli on May 19 with more sobering news: The American squadron, he said, intended to pick up Hamet and his army, capture towns all along the coast, and then attack Tripoli itself. “The Bashaw and his people seemed much agitated,” Cowdery reported. Yusuf locked Hamet’s eldest son in the castle. He also reduced the rations of his domestics and Mamelukes to one meal a day. His money gone, racked by apprehensions, Yusuf confided to Cowdery that if it were possible for him to make peace and give up the Philadelphia captives, he would gladly do it. “He was sensible of the danger he was in from the lowness of his funds and the disaffection of his people.”
Reports of the Derna triumph were nearly as unwelcome at squadron headquarters in Syracuse. Lear redoubled his planning for a negotiated peace and assisted the ailing Barron in directing his squadron. Barron—or perhaps Lear, for he was making many of the decisions at this point—denied Eaton money, supplies and the 100 Marines he had requested. The Marines might have welcomed the relief from the tedium of blockading and convoying, although they also would have had to sacrifice their generous liberties in the various Mediterranean ports. To Lear’s annoyance, Eaton had succeeded despite everything, even though Barron—or Lear, ghostwriting his letters—was actively discouraging his support for Hamet’s insurgency.
The first of Barron’s two extraordinary letters on this subject had reached Eaton at Bomba in early April. This letter would have compelled many leaders to abandon the expedition on the spot. But not Eaton, who kept its demoralizing contents to himself and continued on to Derna. “I must withhold my sanction” to any agreement with Hamet, Barron or Lear wrote, unhappy with the convention Eaton and Hamet had signed. “You must be sensible, Sir, that in giving their sanction to a cooperation with the exiled Bashaw, Government did not contemplate the measure as leading necessarily and absolutely to a reinstatement of that Prince in his rights on the regency of Tripoli.... I repeat it, we are only favoring [Hamet] as the instrument to an attainment and not in itself as an object....” Once a peace treaty was signed, “our support to Hamet Bashaw must necessarily be withdrawn.” This wasn’t what Barron had said just months earlier; he had changed the rules. Hamet had become a tool for obtaining a more favorable treaty from the bashaw, a tool that, once used, could be discarded.
As though realizing he might have gone too far in his hard appraisal of Hamet’s utility, Barron added that his observations shouldn’t “cool your zeal or discourage your expectations.” So much depended upon on-the-spot decisions, he said soothingly, “that I must consider myself rather your Counsellor than your director.” He extended the wan hope that if enough Tripolitans rallied to Hamet’s cause to carry him to Benghazi, Barron might furnish him naval support at Tripoli’s gates. Otherwise, he would have to withdraw his cooperation.
Eaton’s reply, written two days after Derna’s capture, was full of the steely determination and pragmatism that had carried him through fifty days of mutinies and hardships in the Libyan Desert. Scorning Barron’s calculating support of Hamet, Eaton predicted that “the Enemy will propose terms of Peace with us, the moment he entertains serious apprehensions of his Brother. This may happen at any stage of the War, most likely to rid him of so dangerous a rival, and not only Hamet Bashaw, but every one acting with him, must inevitably fall victims to our economy.” If Yusuf did propose peace and Barron and Lear agreed to it, at the very least, America should place Hamet beyond the bashaw’s reach, in a situation comparable to the one from which he was taken.
He accused Barron of parsimony with money, men, and supplies. Barron had disbursed only $20,000, while Eaton’s expenses had already reached $30,000. Even so, “we are in possession of the most valuable province of Tripoli.” Ready cash now, he said, would tip the scales decisively in Hamet’s favor, because Tripoli’s failed harvest and Yusuf’s levies had drained the land of resources for either brother. “This is a circumstance favorable to our measures, if we will go to the expence of profiting of it—No Chief, whatever may be the attachment of his followers, can long support Military operations, without the means of subsisting his troops.” Arab troops in particular would switch loyalties to whichever side paid the most, because they are “poor, yet avaricious, and who being accustom’d to despotism, are generally indifferent about the name or person of their despot, provided he imposes no new burdens.” With cash, his army could defeat the bashaw’s army at Derna and march to Tripoli, where, with the squadron’s help, it would drive out Yusuf. “It would very probably be a death blow to the Barbary System.” Conversely, “any accomodation savoring of relaxness would as probably be death to the Navy, and a wound to the National honor.”
As Eaton had foreseen, the bashaw had begun extending peace feelers as soon as he learned that his brother was on the march. Nissen relayed an overture from Sidi Mahomet Dghies, Tripoli’s foreign secretary. Act quickly, Nissen warned, because Dghies, the only Divan member opposed to war with America in 1801, was now nearly blind and planning to retire to the countryside, where he no longer would be able to influence Yusuf.
Within days of receiving Nissen’s letter, Lear got one written in lime juice from Bainbridge; as the ranking captive, Bainbridge was in daily contact with Yusuf’s top officials. Peace was negotiable for $120,000, Bainbridge said.
Lear, too, was stirred to diplomacy by Eaton and Hamet’s success. The Spanish consul in Tripoli, Don Joseph de Souza, had forwarded an unspecific proposal in December to which Lear had not responded. In March, with Eaton on the move, Lear replied. Yes, he said, he would entertain reasonable peace proposals. Don Joseph sent on a proposal from Yusuf: $200,000, and the surrender of all Tripolitan prisoners and property. Don Joseph carefully added that it was only “the ground work of a negotiation.” The sum was too high, groundwork or not, and as Lear confided to Bainbridge, he was unwilling to open negotiations without “the most unequivocal prospect of its being successfull.” He wanted “Peace upon terms which are compatable with the rising Character of our Nation and which will secure a future peace upon honorable and lasting grounds.”
But that was before the electrifying victory at Derna. Now Lear knew he had to act without delay. Another factor was Barron’s growing realization that his health was not improving and that he soon would have to turn command of the squadron over to Captain John Rodgers. Lear knew the pugnacious Rodgers well enough to see that he might very well send the squadron against Tripoli. The captain once had declared that “his name should be written in blood on the walls of Tripoli” before he would pay a cent for ransom or tribute. While that attitude might bring Yusuf to the negotiating table, Rodgers would win all the laurels and Lear would be denied the diplomatic triumph. If Lear didn’t negotiate now, peace might very well be made through the expedient of war—as Jefferson had intended all along—and with Lear a footnote to Rodgers, as he had been to George Washington.
Lear told Rodgers that while $200,000 was “totally inadmissible,” it was “much less extravagant than I should have expected.” He was certain Yusuf wished to negotiate; the bashaw was offering unacceptable opening terms only to save face with Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco. When Bainbridge’s letter arrived with $120,000 as the price for peace, Lear’s certainty grew.
The other Barbary regencies were eager to see the war end. In mid-May, Algiers’s dey wrote a letter to Yusuf wildly asserting that he was “sending” Lear to Tripoli to negotiate a treaty, and urging the bashaw to “renew the peace with him ... as though you were making it with me.” Tunis’s sapitapa offered to mediate personally, but withdrew the offer when the American consul, George Davis, said—inaccurately, as events would show—that the United States would not agree to either ransom or tribute.
Softened by months of invalidism, Barron now became highly sympathetic to the Philadelphia prisoners’ plight. While the captives always had aroused his sympathy, their welfare never had taken precedence over a peace with honor. Now it did. “I must contend that the liberty and perhaps the lives of so many valuable & estimable Americans ought not to be sacrificed to points of honor, taken in the abstract.” He offered to send Lear to Tripoli on the Essex whenever he wished, which, of course, was perfectly agreeable to the consul general. “I conceive it my duty to endeavor to Open and bring to a happy issue, a negociation for peace....”
Barron and Lear now made sure that Hamet and Eaton would not upset the anticipated peace talks by marching to Tripoli. In his second letter to Eaton, on May 19, Barron—again, with Lear probably helping him write it—announced the United States would provide only naval support to Hamet, and absolutely no more supplies, manpower, or money. Barron was pulling the plug. “By our resources and by your Enterprize & valor we have placed him at the post from whence he was driven,” Barron observed. But Hamet “must now depend on his own resources & exertions.” Without openly ordering Eaton and his men to evacuate Derna, Barron obliquely instructed them to do so, taking “that line of Conduct most prudent to be adopted in the present posture of affairs.” He made it clear that he had made up his mind and was not open to argument. “Whatever your ideas touching those intentions, I feel that I have already gone to the full extent of my authority.” Lear, Barron told Eaton, was poised to negotiate a peace with Yusuf that also would provide for Hamet, “without sacrificing anything.” Writing to Hull at the same time, the commodore said he expected Eaton, his officers, and the Marines to leave Derna on the Argus.
Three days later, Barron resigned as squadron commander, and Rodgers took charge, although Eaton would not know this until much later because of the erratic communication medium upon which he and the American command had to rely—warships that happened to be sailing between Derna and Syracuse. It was “a duty which I owe to our Country and to the service in general, but more particularly to the present Squadron.” While Barron was commodore, the largest naval squadron ever sent to war by the United States had not once fired on Tripoli’s fortifications. Barron ensured that Rodgers wouldn’t either, informing him of Lear’s plan to negotiate peace, “for which I am persuaded, that the present moment is eminently favorable & the success of which, I entertain sanguine expectations.”
It never seemed to have occurred to Barron and Rodgers to follow up on Eaton’s success at Derna with a naval strike on Tripoli, which most likely would have ended the war quickly, without ransom or tribute. Even with everything portending success, as it now did, the Barbary War leaders seemed congenitally unable to act decisively, except for Preble and Eaton. The long-awaited gunboats and bomb vessels—Preble had supervised construction of many of them—were due in the Mediterranean within weeks, and would bring the squadron’s strength to more than twenty vessels. But the contagion of inaction even infected the normally combative Rodgers, who professed the bizarre belief that it would be somehow dishonorable to attack Tripoli, “persecuting an Enemy ... [who] felt himself more than half vanquished.”
Eaton didn’t tell Hamet of Barron’s decision to abandon him, knowing their small army would dissolve once the news was known. He buried his anger and gnawing worries in supervising the fortification of Fort Enterprize and monitoring the bashaw’s army, swollen to more than 3,000 soldiers—945 cavalry, 1,250 infantry, 350 refugees from Derna, and 500 new recruits.
Eaton’s force of 1,000 was barely adequate for defending the city and too small for offensive action. Hull and Eaton estimated they would need another 300 to 400 Christian troops for that. Receiving no more funds from Barron, Eaton fed and equipped his troops by bartering whatever Hull could strip from the Argus. Eaton knew there would be no more supplies, no more cash to buy off the Arab sheiks. He kept the knowledge to himself and composed a response to Barron’s letter.
Eaton didn’t mince words. To leave Hamet “in a more hopeless situation than he left the place” was shameful. Equally dishonorable was to “strike the flag of our Country here in presence of an enemy who have not merited the triumph—at any rate it is a retreat—and a retreat of Americans!” If Barron would invest in Hamet’s army what he intended to spend on a purchased peace, he could decisively defeat the bashaw’s troops outside Derna. Then nothing would stand between Hamet, Tripoli, and the throne. “The total defeat of his forces here would be a fatal blow to his interests.” Conversely, abandoning the expedition would invite tragedy. “You would weep, Sir, were you on the spot, to witness the unbounded confidence placed in the American character here, and to reflect that this confidence shortly sink into contempt and immortal hatred ... havoc and slaughter will be the inevitable consequence—not a soul of them can escape the savage vengeance of the enemy.”
But by the time Eaton penned these lines, Lear already was in Tripoli, and Barron no longer commanded the Mediterranean squadron.
Three frigates from Barron and Rodgers’s powerful squadron sailed into Tripoli harbor on May 26. The Essex immediately ran up the truce flag, allaying any fears that might have assailed the bashaw and his officers when they saw the Constitution, President, and Essex and their combined 120 guns in their home waters. The Spanish consul, Don Joseph, came aboard in his mediator role, and the involved diplomatic dance began.
The negotiations were conducted on the Constitution over the next several days. Don Joseph and Leon Farfara, a broker and leader of Tripoli’s Jewish community, shuttled proposals and counterproposals between Yusuf and Lear, who refused to go ashore until there was a tentative agreement. On May 29, Yusuf reduced his asking price sharply from $200,000 to $130,000. Two days later, Lear made what he said would be his final offer: $60,000 ransom for the Philadelphia captives, peace with no price.
The decisive moment was at hand. Was the bashaw serious about peace?
Yusuf sent for Cowdery. Tell Captain Bainbridge, the bashaw said, that their nations were now at peace. When they heard the news, the Philadelphia’s officers erupted joyously.
Nissen replaced Don Joseph as mediator during the final negotiations: for some reason, Yusuf had become dissatisfied with the Spanish consul. Lear hadn’t yet gone ashore, so Nissen was still carrying on shuttle diplomacy. A snag developed when Lear suddenly stipulated that the Philadelphiaprisoners must be released before a treaty was signed, a condition the bashaw found unacceptable. Before the disagreement could do any lasting damage to the negotiations, Nissen and Dghies drafted a counterproposal that Lear accepted immediately: sending Bainbridge aboard the Constitutionas a goodwill gesture. Now they had to persuade Yusuf to agree to the condition. While he was willing, the Divan balked; it had trouble imagining anyone returning voluntarily to captivity. But when Dghies and Nissen stepped up and personally guaranteed Bainbridge’s return, the Divan reluctantly assented to send him to the American flagship.
Cowdery raced to the castle dungeon with the glad tidings. The crewmen were ecstatic, and some wept with joy. The war was over.
The captives’ flinty Tripolitan drivers ended their celebration by setting them to hard labor, flogging many of them.
Thousands of people greeted Lear at the crowded Tripoli wharf on June 3. Among them were the Philadelphia’s officers, released from prison the previous day. “The sight of them so near their freedom was grateful to my soul, and you must form an idea of their feelings; for I cannot describe them.” Yusuf’s officers escorted the consul general to the castle. With little ceremony, he and Yusuf signed the treaty ending the Barbary War. Tripoli’s forts thundered salutes, answered by the U.S. frigates.
America agreed to pay Tripoli $60,000 and hand over 81 Tripolitan prisoners. In exchange, the 297 Philadelphia crewmen who had neither turned Turk nor died would go free—a ransom of $277 per man. The United States pledged to withdraw from Derna. Tripoli accepted peace without annual tribute and agreed to release Hamet’s family from captivity.
But it would turn out there was more to the latter concession than met the eye.
After they sobered up from celebrating, the Philadelphia captives left Tripoli on June 5, happily watching their castle prison of nineteen months and five days recede in their ships’ wakes. Two crewmen, however, stayed behind voluntarily: Quartermaster John Wilson, one of the five Americans who had “turned Turk,” and John Ridgely, a Philadelphia surgeon like Cowdery. Ridgely elected to remain as U.S. agent to Tripoli until a new consul could be sent from America. Cowdery departed after a last audience with Yusuf, who had grown attached to him. “I bid the Bashaw a final adieu, at which he seemed much affected.”
An unhappy surprise awaited the four captives besides Wilson who had turned Turk. Wilson understandably had decided to stay in Tripoli instead of returning to the United States with his former shipmates, who despised him for his ill-treatment of them while he was their overseer. The four other converts, however, had chosen to go home. But their decision evidently displeased Yusuf, who might have suspected that the spur behind their conversions was not religious devotion, but a desire to be freed from hard labor and captivity. Instead of being released with their mates, the four were led from the city under guard. They were never seen again.
Fifty years later, when Southern slavery was about to plunge the nation into the Civil War, the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about the Tripoli prisoners and their sufferings in “Derne” in a blanket indictment of all slavery. In the stanzas celebrating the captives’ release, Whittier declaimed:
In sullen wrath the conquered Moor
Wide open flings your dungeon-door,
And leaves ye free from cell and chain,
The owners of yourselves again.
Dark as his allies desert-born,
Soiled with the battle’s stain, and worn
With the long marches of his band
Through hottest wastes of rock and sand,
Scorched by the sun and furnace-breath
Of the red desert’s wind of death,
With welcome words and grasping hands,
The victor and deliverer stands!“
Barron ordered Hull to bring Eaton and his troops to Syracuse, but Eaton refused to leave Derna until Lear concluded his negotiations. Eaton rightly believed that holding Derna was integral to obtaining an honorable peace. “I cannot reconcile it to a sense of duty to evacuate it,” he told Hull, who didn’t argue. Instead, he cruised off Derna with the Hornet and Argus, ready to give Eaton supporting fire if needed.
Hassan and Eaton’s armies skirmished in several small, sharp actions during the weeks after the May 13 attack. Eaton led thirty-five Americans and Greeks in a raid against an enemy force twice their size on May 28 and defeated it, killing a captain and five men and taking prisoners. A wave of desertions swept Hassan’s army. So many troops melted away that Hassan’s officers resorted to chaining up the relatives of Arab soldiers to stem the defections. The enemy probed Eaton’s lines on June 3 and was firmly repulsed by Eaton, O‘Bannon, and the Christian troops. During the prelude to that skirmish, O’Bannon had galloped on horseback through the city as citizens called out to him, “Long live our friends & protectors!”
Hassan’s cavalry and soldiers advanced en masse on Derna on June 10 for a decisive battle. Communications being what they were, neither side knew that the war officially had ended a week earlier. This very day, in fact, the treaty was being debated by the Divan in Tripoli. Bainbridge was allowed the rare privilege of observing the proceedings because he had kept his word and returned to Tripoli when he was permitted to boat out to the squadron during the peace talks. When the Divan deadlocked 4—4, Yusuf broke the tie by removing his signet from his robe, pressing it to the document, and exclaiming, “It is peace!” The treaty ratification was announced with a 21-gun salute from the castle ramparts, returned by the Constitution.
But the armies facing one another at Derna were unaware of these events. Hamet and his Arab cavalry met the advancing Tripolitans a mile outside Derna. A swirling battle quickly developed, with countless attacks and counterattacks by thousands of troops. From a distance, Eaton watched Hassan’s troops attack repeatedly, each time repulsed by Hamet without the benefit of naval gunfire. The Argus and Hornet were unable to fire over the hills jutting between the shore and the battlefield, try though they did to maneuver into a position where they could support Hamet. But even without supporting fire or reinforcements, Hamet’s cavalry drove off the attackers after four hours, killing 40 to 50 enemy and wounding another 70 while losing 50 to 60 men. Eaton’s battle report brimmed with paternal pride. “The Bashaw deserves the merit of this victory—I had little to do with its arrangement, and could not render him any assistance in arms but from the fire of a single field piece .” Too late, Hamet had proved himself an able leader.
Eaton’s refusal to evacuate Derna reached Rodgers, who feared it might wreck the peace Lear had just made. “A none compliance will make the responsibility his own: nevertheless, the consequence will be his country’s,” Rodgers wrote tartly to Lear. To “prevent impending mischief,” he dispatched the Constellation to Derna to fetch Eaton. Yusuf, equally concerned about the progress of the expedition to depose him, insisted that his own representative go along.
Before the frigate left Tripoli, both Rodgers and Lear wrote letters apprising Eaton of the treaty and the need to evacuate Derna immediately. Rodgers bluntly said he wished “no farther hostilities by the forces of the U. States be committed against the said Josuph Bashaw, his subjects or dominions, and that you evacuate and withdraw our forces from Derne, or whatever part of his Teritory this may find you in.”
Lear diplomatically gave Eaton’s expedition credit for pushing the bashaw into negotiations: “I found that the heroic bravery of our few countrymen at Derne, and the idea that we had a large force and immense supplies at that place, had made a deep impression on the Bashaw.” As he would do unfailingly, Lear carefully distinguished between the Americans’ bravery in battle and what he regarded as the ill-conceived cooperation with Hamet. In any event, the rump alliance was terminated, and if Hamet withdrew from Derna, the bashaw would free family. It was “all that could be done, and I have no doubt but the U. States will, if deserving, place him in a situation as elegible as that in which he was found.”
In this matter, however, Lear was not forthright.
After the second counterattack, Eaton told Hamet about Barron’s decision to cut off supplies and money to the expedition and to recall American personnel. Experienced as he was at losing, Hamet immediately grasped his situation’s hopelessness, but not without some bitterness. “He answers that, even with supplies, it would be fruitless for him to attempt to prosecute the war with his brother after you have withdrawn your squadron from the coast,” Eaton wrote to Barron. “He emphatically says that To abandon him here is not to cooperate with him, but with his rival!”
When the Constellation reached Derna, Eaton glumly read the letters from Lear and Rodgers and resigned himself to abandoning Derna and the grand expedition upon which he had pinned such high hopes. But evacuation would be tricky. A withdrawal in the face of a large enemy force invited slaughter unless it were executed with the greatest cunning and skill. Eaton told the Constellation’s commander, Captain Hugh Campbell, that he would leave Derna the next day, June 13.
Above all, Eaton well knew, the evacuation had to proceed in the greatest secrecy. If Hassan learned of it, he would attack when Eaton’s forces were most vulnerable, and it would be a bloodbath. How would he do it? He hit upon a bold subterfuge: He made everyone, including his own men, believe he was planning an attack. He sent extra ammunition and rations to his Arab troops. He deployed scouts to pinpoint enemy troop dispositions. He ordered his soldiers to shed their heavy baggage so they would be more mobile. But as soon as darkness fell, Eaton stationed Marine patrols in Derna to keep people away from the waterfront. Boats from the Constellation slipped up to the docks and embarked the cannoneers, European soldiers, and fieldpieces, then Hamet and his retinue, and finally, Eaton, O‘Bannon, and the Marines.
As the last boats pulled away from the wharf, the townspeople and Arab troops rushed the waterfront, “some calling on the Bashaw—some on me—Some uttering shrieks—some execrations,” Eaton reported. They descended on Fort Enterprize, stripping it of the tents and horses Eaton had left behind. By daybreak, the Arabs had vanished into the mountains, along with many of the town’s inhabitants and “every living animal fit for subsistence or burthen which belonged to the place.”
The bashaw’s envoy went ashore with letters offering amnesty to the people of Derna, provided they promised to be loyal to Yusuf, but the unhappy citizenry was in no mood for it. They vowed to fight the bashaw’s troops. Eaton watched the spectacle with sadness and anger. “This moment we drop them ... into the hands of this enemy for no other crime but too much confidence in us!” Hamet, he noted glumly, “falls from the most flattering prospects of a Kingdom to beggary!”
Eaton’s mission was ended. With little of the rancor that would consume him later, he reported to Rodgers: “Our peace with Tripoli is certainly more favorable—and, seperately considered, more honorable than any peace obtained by any Christian nation with a Barbary regency at any period within a hundred years: but it might have been more favorable and more honorable.”
He requested passage home to America.