XVII
... the weight of misfortune has only increased, and for the first time, am completely abandoned, and by a great nation...
—Hamet Karamanli, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
George Davis reembarked for the Mediterranean in late 1806 with a new title: consul to Tripoli. After his humiliation during the Tunisian crisis of August 1805, he had sailed home, but it wasn’t long before he began to miss the status, privileges, and freedom he had enjoyed in Barbary. The former ship’s doctor reached Gibraltar on September 10, 1806. There he waited for one of the three remaining U.S. warships to take him the rest of the way to Tripoli. Growing impatient, he took passage on a vessel bound for Leghorn. He expected that it would be relatively simple to find a ship to take him from Italy to Tripoli, but it wasn’t. Early 1807 found him still in Leghorn.
The long layover in Leghorn proved lucky in one respect. Davis happened to meet Nicholas Nissen there as the former Danish consul to Tripoli was on his way home. The consul’s devotion to the Philadelphia captives during their nineteen months of imprisonment had been rewarded with a formal expression of gratitude from the U.S. government and a silver urn purchased by the former prisoners. Now Nissen was retiring from the diplomatic corps. He brought Davis up to date on Tripolitan affairs, including the peace treaty, which Davis had not seen. The treaty, he told Davis, contained a secret clause. Nissen knew it did because he had drafted it.
The secret clause was written into the treaty during the last stages of negotiations. With most of the main issues settled, Lear had dutifully raised the question of releasing Hamet’s wife and children, prisoners since the bashaw closed the city gates to his brother ten years before. Here he had touched on a tender subject with Yusuf. The bashaw and his Divan were uneasy about relinquishing their only leverage over Hamet, who, after all, had made it as far as Derna with his ragtag army. But Lear knew he couldn’t sign a treaty that lacked even this small acknowledgment of Hamet’s predicament. The treaty that had seemed such a sure thing suddenly wasn’t so certain—until Nissen made a saving suggestion: a clause permitting the bashaw to retain custody of Hamet’s family for four years, with their release at the end of that period contingent on Hamet’s good behavior. This would technically satisfy Lear’s requirement that Yusuf agree to release Hamet’s family, while giving Yusuf ample time to quell any lingering dissent in his far-flung provinces that conceivably could foster another Hamet insurgency. And, as Nissen noted to his own government a week after the treaty signing, his proposal vouchsafed to the bashaw and Divan “that I had not tried to deceive them,” and incurred a debt on Yusuf’s part that might one day be called in by Nissen’s successor. Lear, Yusuf, and his Divan signed the clause on June 5, 1805, the day after they had formally affixed their names to the main part of the treaty.
The clause was attached to Article 3, which stipulated that America would stop aiding Hamet’s insurgency, withdraw its forces, and persuade Hamet to pull out, and that Yusuf would hand over Hamet’s family if those conditions were met. Lear undoubtedly was aware that the four-year moratorium would be a political red flag when the treaty came before the Senate for ratification. He avoided that problem simply by omitting it from the treaty and never explicitly revealing its existence to anyone in Washington. In his report to Madison on the negotiations, Lear said Yusuf had balked at releasing Hamet’s family, and they then had agreed the bashaw might wait “a period of time” before doing so, to ensure that his brother wouldn’t attempt to revive his insurgency.
Uninformed of the four-year clause, in March 1806 Jefferson’s cabinet weighed restoring the blockade to force the release of Hamet’s still-captive family. “We will not incline from the fulfillment of that article of the treaty,” Jefferson declared. All that prevented the blockade’s revival was the president’s trenchant observation that it very well might constitute an act of war, which would require congressional approval. The Cabinet stayed its own hand for the moment, but if Tripoli didn’t take steps to release Hamet’s family, it planned to lay the matter before Congress.
Hamet and his three dozen or so attendants were subsisting on friends’ charity and a $200-a-month stipend authorized grudgingly by Rodgers. The commodore had suggested that Hamet emigrate to the United States, but the prospect of crossing the ocean in a boat terrified Hamet and he refused to go. Yet he was miserable in Syracuse. He fired off appeals to Jefferson, Congress, and “the People of the United States of America.” To Jefferson, he wrote: “... the weight of misfortune has only increased, and for the first time, am completely abandoned, and by a great nation....” In another letter, he implored, “I beg you to send me some token, in order that I may not remain in the dark.” To Congress, he said, “I have lost my inheritance; my acquisitions; and my fair prospects are lost also.... I had no right to apprehend that my devotion and my complacency would overwhelm me in bottomless ruin.” He had a point: According to Eaton, Hamet was forced to leave behind $50,000 worth of possessions in Derna, in addition to losing his army of Arabs. Eaton estimated he was owed $30,000—$40,000. “I trusted to the faith of a great people,” Hamet wrote pathetically in his open letter to the American people. His appeals were largely ignored, now that the war was over and he was no longer of any use to the United States. Congress paid him $2,400 as a final settlement in June 1806, when the $200 monthly stipend was terminated. Thus Hamet received a total of $6,800 from the United States: a paltry sum for his contribution at Derna, without which an honorable peace would have been impossible.
Becoming increasingly restless in Leghorn but still without transport to Tripoli, Davis sailed to Syracuse, which, at least, was closer to Tripoli than Leghorn was. Being in Syracuse also afforded him the opportunity to meet Hamet. It wasn’t a pleasant meeting. Hamet harangued Davis about needing more money and his family’s continuing captivity. Davis didn’t reveal what he had learned about the secret treaty clause, wanting to use this knowledge to somehow force Yusuf to free Hamet’s family. Instead, he promised Hamet that he would bring up his family’s situation during his first audience with Yusuf. Davis also suggested to Hamet that reconciling with his brother might be the best means of effecting his family’s release.
Nine months after leaving the United States, Davis finally reached Tripoli in early May 1807. At his first audience before Yusuf, he raised the subject of Hamet’s family, sternly informing the bashaw that his failure to release Hamet’s family violated the treaty. He made no mention of the secret clause. Yusuf responded by producing a copy of it and pointing to the four-year grace period. Davis flatly refused to recognize it as a valid part of the treaty. He stuck to that position through nearly a week’s worth of talks. By May 12, Davis had worn down the bashaw, who did not wish to renew hostilities with the United States, to the point where he agreed reluctantly to release his brother’s family.
But June and July came and went with Hamet’s wife and children still in Tripoli. When Davis badgered Yusuf about his failure to carry out his pledge, the bashaw complained that Hamet’s supporters in the distant provinces were still giving him trouble. Finally, on August 7, Yusuf cleared Hamet’s wife, three sons, and a daughter for departure, but another two months passed before they sailed away on the merchantman Tartan to be reunited with Hamet in Syracuse after twelve years.
Davis managed to wring one last concession from the bashaw for Hamet: an unspecified “liberal allowance” to support Hamet’s family. Having won this favor from a former enemy, the consul tried his luck with his own government, suggesting that it contribute $1,000 a year. But the United States never gave Hamet another cent.
The Jefferson administration’s official position was that it never was aware of the secret clause until Davis reported the successful outcome of his parley with Yusuf in a June 2 letter to Madison. It is entirely possible that is true, given Lear’s tendency to operate independently and the vagueness of the only extant mention of the clause, made by Lear in his letter to Madison two years earlier. For the first time, Jefferson publicly acknowledged the provision’s existence on November 11, 1807. He made no excuses; he blamed no one. The announcement caused a brief flurry of consternation in Congress, and the president ordered a reexamination of all of Lear’s correspondence to determine whether the consul general had reported the clause and it somehow had been overlooked. The inquiry turned up only Lear’s allusive reference of 1805, which had been so fleeting that it evidently had escaped the State Department’s notice. “How it happened that the declaration of June 5 [1805] had never come to our attention, cannot with certainty be said,” Jefferson concluded in a memo to the Senate that ended all discussion of the matter.
Fresh trouble with the Great Powers pushed Barbary affairs into the background. The U.S. Navy may have taught the Barbary States to respect the United States, but not Europe. The warships of Spain, England, and France routinely stopped and searched U.S. merchant ships, sometimes looting and claiming them for prizes. The searches-and-seizures had reached outrageous proportions, but America’s Navy, doughty as it had been at times in Barbary, was no match for the European powers’ men-of-war with their triple gun decks. Prudence dictated forbearance.
Tensions with Spain lingered over the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and its aftermath. When the Spanish ceded the same territory to France in 1800, France had agreed never to relinquish it to another nation, Spain claimed. But that promise had lasted only until Napoleon needed money for his wars. Spain also was alarmed by America’s designs on West Florida, the long corridor stretching across the Deep South from present-day Florida to the Mississippi River. The land-hungry Jefferson administration had all but concluded that the Louisiana Purchase also compassed West Florida. This was an amazing conclusion, considering that Spain clearly possessed the territory and garrisoned thousands of troops there and in western Louisiana. The Americans’ specious rationale was that West Florida belonged to the French until their defeat by England in the Seven Years’ War (1756—63), which was followed by France’s withdrawal from the territory. But since France had never formally ceded West Florida to anyone, the French could still legitimately transfer the territory to the United States as part of the Louisiana Territory. Not unhappy to see trouble come to its bothersome ally Spain, France did nothing to discourage the Americans’ interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase.
Besides the disagreement with Spain, there was the recurring problem of being caught in the middle of England and France’s long enmity. Both nations, fearful that their rival might gain an advantage by trading with America, stopped and searched U.S. ships for goods that might benefit the other. The British went to the extent of brazenly anchoring two frigates outside New York harbor, boarding every outgoing vessel and sending captured ships and suspected contraband to prize court in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They also impressed U.S. seamen—1,000 a year on the average, infuriating the Jefferson administration—but the fact was that America’s merchant fleet couldn’t have operated very long without its own complement of several thousand British sailors. For their part, the British felt they were justified in taking seamen who were English to begin with. The British detentions, looting, and impressments happened in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Pacific Ocean, even in China, where the British operated much as pirates.
France had been somewhat chastened by the Quasi-War and didn’t tread as heavily on U.S. sovereignty as did Britain. But it clearly was dismissive of U.S. power. Citizen Beaussier, the French charge d‘affaires in Tripoli, exemplified this attitude of maddening condescension soon after the release of the Philadelphia captives. He claimed that two crewmen were French, and that France was entitled to compensation from the United States for the nineteen months they were imprisoned. This sent the volatile Commodore Rodgers into a fury. In his acid reply, he upbraided Beaussier for “perjury,” and said it was “disgraceful to honor & truth” to think that France would do nothing for the two while they were captives, but now was justified in demanding redress. The claim died a quick death.
Undoubtedly the European warships dwarfed the American frigates, but the aura of invincibility that invested their fleets sometimes had unfortunate results. In August 1806 in the Straits of Gibraltar, several Spanish gunboats without provocation attacked the Enterprise, which under Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett had shredded the Tripoli five years earlier. The Enterprise’s current skipper was the tough, competent Lieutenant David Porter, wounded in coastal skirmishes at Tripoli, an alumnus of the Philadelphia and destined for future greatness in the War of 1812. Porter tried to avoid a fight even as the gunboats bore in on his schooner with their guns blazing. He hoisted the U.S. colors, thinking the Spanish might have mistaken his ship for a British vessel. The Spanish came on, still firing. Porter tried hailing them. They kept coming, behind volleys of grape and sheeting musket fire. It was abundantly clear that the gunboats intended to board the Enterprise. Porter ordered his gunners and Marines to give the Spanish everything they had. The blast of withering fire littered the gunboats’ decks with dead and wounded. The Enterprise gunners reloaded and began a continuous fire. The gunboats, their decks slick with their crews’ blood, slewed about as the casualties piled up. Then they turned and ran for the Spanish shore, with the Enterprise now in hot pursuit, cannons booming. Only when the gunboats reached the protection of the Spanish coastal batteries did Porter veer off, hoping he had dispensed “a useful lesson to them,” not to provoke neutral vessels, particularly U.S. warships.
With tensions running high between America and the Great Powers, Navy Secretary Smith reduced the Mediterranean squadron from three ships to two to hold down costs and to keep as many warships home as possible for coastal defense. He dispatched the Chesapeake, under Captain James Barron, and the sloop Wasp to relieve the Constitution, Enterprise, and Siren. The Wasp was to sail by way of England and the Chesapeake to go straight to Gibraltar.
James Barron seldom visited the Chesapeake in the weeks before she left Hampton Roads. Had he done so more often, he might have noticed her appalling unreadiness for sea. Likewise, he might have taken to heart British demands to turn over three supposed deserters from the HMS Melampus, and he might have noted how British hostility toward him spiked when he ignored those demands.
But Barron didn’t observe any of those developments, because he wasn’t with his ship. Virginia was his home state, and he was well connected there. Not only was his older brother, Commodore Samuel Barron, one of the highest-ranking naval officers, but their father, James Barron, Sr., was a bona fide war hero. As commander of the Commonwealth of Virginia Navy during the Revolution, the elder Barron had intercepted a letter being carried up Chesapeake Bay to Maryland Governor Robert Eden from Lord George Germain, British secretary of state for the colonies. The letter contained a gleaming nugget of intelligence: a British plan to strike in the Southern colonies. Barron immediately alerted all Southern ports and the commanders of the colonists’ coastal fortifications. Not long afterward, Sir Peter Parker appeared with a British invasion force off Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. The defenders were ready for him and repelled his attack. The distractions arising from his being the scion of a famous Virginia military family produced fatal results for James Barron and his crew.
At 6:00 A.M. on June 22, 1807, the Chesapeake glided out of Hampton Roads with her 370 officers and crewmen still struggling to ready her for sea. The crew had never fired the Chesapeake’s 38 guns. They couldn’t have if they wanted to. Heaps of lumber clogged the gun deck, few of the powder horns had been filled, and some of the guns were not even secured in their carriages. The disorder evident everywhere made her perilously vulnerable to attack, but battle was the last thing on Barron’s mind. He was counting on a peaceful voyage to Gibraltar to give his officers time to put everything in order and train the crew in gunnery. But they already had run out of time.
The Chesapeake passed British men-of-war at Lynnhaven Bay on their first day out. Signals flashed among the British warships, and one of them eased into the Atlantic ahead of the American frigate. That afternoon, 10 miles off Cape Henry, Barron spotted the British ship, the 50-gun HMS Leopard. She didn’t appear to be going anywhere in particular, but, in fact, to be waiting for the Chesapeake. The commander, Captain Salisbury Pryce Humphries, sent over an officer. He presented Barron with the orders Humphries intended to carry out: to search the Chesapeake for three deserters. As Barron scrawled a reply—he knew of no such men; his recruiters were instructed not to enlist British deserters—Barron’s officers noticed that the Leopard had opened her gun ports and the cannons’ tampions had been removed. They excitedly reported these ominous developments to Barron. The captain instructed Master Commandant Charles Gordon to send his men to quarters quietly. But before they could clear the gun decks or strike a match, the Leopard fired a broadside. As the Chesapeake crew frantically tried to clear for action, four more broadsides followed. Then, before his stunned crew could fire a single shot, Barron struck his colors. Three Americans were dead, and eighteen were wounded, including Barron. It had all taken just twenty minutes.
Barron chivalrously offered to surrender his frigate as a prize, but Humphries was interested only in the alleged deserters. His officers removed the three and a fourth man, while Humphries deplored the loss of life and wished matters “might have been adjusted more amicably.” The Leopardthen sailed away. The Chesapeake limped back to Hampton Roads. She would never see Mediterranean duty, nor would the Wasp.
The surprise attack revived the fierce hatred of England that had propelled America into the Revolution. If the Royal Navy thought nothing of shooting up an American ship a half day’s sail from her home port, what was to stop it from landing British troops and reasserting the Crown’s hegemony over its former colony? War fever crackled up and down the East Coast and westward into the settlements beyond the Alleghenies. Invasion rumors flew through the seaports. A mob in Norfolk attacked an English sailor. British warships fanned the growing anger and fear by anchoring inside the Virginia Capes and firing indiscriminately at every passing American vessel. Decatur began fitting out four old gunboats to defend the southeast Virginia ports against anticipated British attacks.
Jefferson closed all U.S. seaports to British ships. In England, U.S. Ambassador James Monroe demanded that the British government apologize and agree to stop its impressment of American seamen. The British were willing to apologize, but unwilling to end impressment. With one significant exception, Jefferson’s Cabinet and the American people were ready to go to war. A U.S. House committee described the Chesapeake attack as “circumstances of indignity and insult, of which there is scarcely to be found a parallel in the history of civilized nations.” “Instant and severe retaliation” was wholly justified.
But Jefferson didn’t want to fight. Instead, he chose a curious form of reprisal: terminating all U.S. foreign trade and retreating into isolation. Congress approved the infamous Embargo on Christmas Day 1807. Actually Secretary of State Madison’s idea, the Embargo ended all foreign trade and communication; only outbound foreign vessels and authorized U.S. coastal traders were permitted to leave American seaports.
Later in life, Jefferson seemed to have second thoughts about the Embargo, admitting it cost the United States $50 million in annual exports, while war would have cost only one-third that amount. The strategy rested on the faulty premise that withholding U.S. goods from Europe would hurt Europe more than America. U.S. merchants, however, foresaw that the Embargo would ruin them, while having only a slight effect on England and France, the nations it was designed to hurt the most. America’s bread-and-butter agricultural staples, which were highly dependent on foreign markets, took a severe beating. Wheat tumbled from $2 a bushel to 7 cents. Warehouses bulged with unsold, unshipped tobacco and cotton. One of the few bright spots was America’s finished-goods industry—furniture, clothing, utensils—which thrived as never before in the absence of foreign competition.
The Embargo was impossible to enforce once merchants decided to violate it with impunity whenever they could. Smugglers operated successfully from the East Coast’s multitude of bays, inlets, and estuaries. A surprising amount of American goods managed to reach Canada and the West Indies despite vigorous blockading by U.S. naval vessels. The Embargo overshadowed Jefferson’s last year as president and his entire second term.
Smith instructed Campbell to bring home the three warships remaining in the Mediterranean. With foreign trade shut down, there was no reason to maintain a Mediterranean squadron. Campbell emptied the Malta storehouses and filled the holds of the Constitution, Hornet, and Enterprisewith the stockpiles. The depots at Syracuse, Leghorn, and Gibraltar were liquidated. In the fall of 1807, the three warships left Barbary.
America’s Mediterranean naval presence, begun in 1801 with Commodore Richard Dale’s tiny squadron, had ended. It would be eight years before the U.S. Navy would return.
The Chesapeake’s mortified officers requested a court of inquiry. They wanted to clear their names of any “disgrace which must be attached in the late premature surrender ... without their previous knowledge or consent....” They accused Barron of negligence and failing to resist. Had they not begun proceedings, the Navy Department, shocked by Barron’s failure to put up a fight, surely would have. Smith relieved Barron of his command and gave it to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr.—perhaps the origin of the captains’ tragic blood feud.
The court of inquiry threw the book at Barron. His guns were unready and ill-equipped. The Marines were supplied cartridges that didn’t fit their weapons. During the forty minutes that elapsed before the Leopard actually opened fire, Barron had failed to call his crew to general quarters. But most damning of all was the court’s conclusion that he struck his flag without a fight; damage to the ship and the crew’s injuries did not warrant the surrender.
With these findings, the court-martial outcome was foreordained. Barron’s fellow officers found him guilty of negligence of duty and suspended him from the naval service for five years.
Captain Edward Preble died on August 25, 1807, in the city of his birth, Portland, Maine, ten days after his forty-sixth birthday. Preble’s shaky health had collapsed during a recurrence of the ulcers and assorted stomach ailments that had prevented him from sailing with the first two Mediterranean squadrons. The naval establishment and the nation mourned his death.
The burning of the Philadelphia and the naval assaults on Tripoli had made Preble one of the war’s larger-than-life figures. His actions were celebrated in paintings and a two-act New York musical, Tars from Tripoli. Congress had struck a gold medal stamped with a relief of the August 3, 1804, bombardment, “a testimony to your Country’s estimation of the important and honorable services rendered by you....” Before Smith was talked out of stepping down as Navy secretary early in Jefferson’s second term, Preble was the rumored successor. Jefferson felt the loss personally, for he and Preble were friends. Once, when Preble sent the president a cask of Mediterranean wine—Jefferson was a wine connoisseur—Jefferson, concerned that the gift might be construed as a sort of bribe, reciprocated by sending Preble a polygraph, a primitive copier consisting of two connected pens.
Preble was buried in Portland with military honors and bells tolling throughout the city before Washington learned of his death. When it did, flags were lowered to half mast on all frigates in the Navy Yard and at the Marine garrison. Beginning at 12:30 P.M. on September 1, a cannon was fired in the Navy Yard every five minutes until 17 minutes before sunset, when 17 minute guns were fired. To this day, Preble’s name endures on the hulls of naval vessels and on buildings and monuments along the East Coast.
Another man who missed Preble keenly was William Eaton. He and the commodore were faithful correspondents who agreed on matters of great importance to both: the imperative of using military force against Barbary, and in their opinions about Lear, the Barrons, and Rodgers. While both became national celebrities as a result of their Tripoli exploits, Preble’s fame was the more lasting, although Eaton had reveled in the public adulation as the more modest Preble never had.
Eaton’s celebrity, however, was on the wane in 1807, with the Barbary War eclipsed by the Chesapeake affair and the Embargo, and Eaton himself having fallen from official and public favor. It was a hard landing after the halcyon days of 1805 and 1806, when testimonial dinners followed one after another and Congress had awarded him a brigadier general’s pension. Eaton had tarnished his reputation with heavy drinking, boasting, and his relentless vilification of Lear and the Jefferson administration. Senator Plumer had warmly embraced Eaton when he and other Federalists were trying to sink the Tripoli treaty, but now was disgusted with him. Eaton was “an imposter . He is continually vaunting of the glory of his expedition ... And yet if the state of that little affair is examined it will be found trivial in its operations and not affording a single prospect of success.”
One of the few places where Eaton remained a hero was in his hometown, Brimfield, Massachusetts. His loyal neighbors chose him to be justice of the peace of Hampshire County in 1806. They elected him to the Massachusetts legislature in the spring of 1807. He might have passed a quiet middle age among old friends who appreciated him had it not been for Aaron Burr.
Vice President Burr’s meteoric political career flamed out in July 1804, when he killed Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken, overlooking the Hudson River. He could never run for president, nor would Jefferson—who had thoroughly distrusted Burr even before the duel—tolerate him as a running mate. The month before the duel, the 12th Amendment’s ratification had meant the vice president would run as part of a ticket, rather than the office automatically going to the presidential runner-up. With Governor George Clinton of New York as his 1804 running mate, Jefferson crushed Federalist Party candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the Electoral College, 162—14.
While high political office was closed to him forever, Burr still was arguably the most brilliant lawyer in the land, a man of vast personal charm who might have amassed a fortune and salvaged his name. However, Burr wasn’t interested in ordinary bourgeois success; his aspirations were Napoleonic. At the head of an army of disaffected frontiersmen, he was certain he could seize the Spanish-occupied Southwest and Mexico, maybe grab Florida, and, in the process, dismember all the U.S. territories west of the Alleghenies for his personal aggrandizement.
For this grandiose vision to become hard fact, Burr needed generals, and his recruitment of them proved to be the riskiest aspect of his plan. General James Wilkinson was the first to sign on for the Southwest invasion, at least. He was the key to that scheme because he commanded the U.S. Army units in New Orleans that patrolled the Southwest frontier. A friend of Burr’s from their Revolutionary War service, Wilkinson also happened to be a Spanish spy—he was listed as Spy No. 13 in the Spanish government’s books—and he was as oleaginous as Burr himself. Burr recruited Andrew Jackson, who hated the Spanish, for his plan to seize Texas and Florida. And he attempted to enlist a third general: William Eaton.
At first Eaton was enthusiastic about reprising his Derna desert march with an expedition to Mexico, but he was never entirely comfortable with the plan. The more Burr talked, the more Eaton’s uneasiness grew, and Burr just couldn’t stop talking. He told Eaton about detaching the western United States. Then, he rashly confided an even more outrageous adventure: marching on Washington. At this point, Eaton rode to Washington to warn Jefferson personally. During their meeting, Eaton suggested that the president appoint Burr to a remote ministerial post in Europe to get him out of the way. Jefferson could have saved himself and his government a lot of trouble had he done so, or if he had heeded the warnings also given by Jackson, who quit the scheme when he learned Burr didn’t plan to stop with Mexico, Texas, and Florida, but intended to abscond with the U.S. territories west of the Allegheny Mountains as well. Inexplicably, Jefferson did nothing.
It wasn’t until fall 1806, as Burr gathered his invading “army”—about 100 men and women volunteers—on an island in the Ohio River, that Jefferson at last listened to Eaton’s warnings, but only when they were repeated by Postmaster General Gideon Granger. Jefferson issued a nationwide warning that a Western insurgency was afoot. Before long, Burr was run to ground in Mississippi. But sympathizers set him free, and he fled deeper into West Florida. In February 1807, Burr was recaptured in present-day Alabama and brought to Richmond for trial.
With so many of the nation’s leading men attending Burr’s treason trial in Richmond in August 1807—so many that the proceedings were moved from the courthouse to the Virginia House of Delegates—it seemed that the stage was set for Eaton’s triumphal rebirth as a patriotic whistle-blower. But fortune no longer smiled on Eaton.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was the presiding judge, an incomparable stroke of luck for Burr, caught red-handed as he was plotting revolution. A staunch Federalist and avowed enemy of Jefferson, Marshall gave Burr wide latitude in leading his defense team and examining witnesses.
As a result, when Eaton took the witness stand, he faced Burr, the best courtroom attorney in the country. Eaton testified that while he knew of no “overt act” by Burr that was treasonous, “concerning Colonel Burr’s expressions of treasonable intentions, I know much.” Then Burr went to work on Eaton. When Eaton tried to describe how he warned Jefferson of Burr’s scheme, Burr goaded him with insinuations. Perhaps Eaton, too, had been involved, he suggested. Burr pushed Eaton until he exploded: “You spoke of your riflemen, your infantry, your cavalry!” In his anger, Burr’s barbed suggestions about Eaton’s involvement melded confusedly with villainous portrayals of Wilkinson, and Eaton blurted out, “From the same views you have perhaps mentioned me!”The outburst did Eaton no credit and did not help prosecutors.
Outside the courtroom, Eaton was an all-too-familiar figure in Richmond’s taverns. During the four months between his grandjury testimony and Burr’s treason trial, everyone heard Eaton’s oftrepeated and embellished stories and his rants against Lear, while having plenty of opportunity to witness his heavy drinking and womanizing. “The once redoubted Eaton has dwindled down in the eyes of this sarcastic town into a ridiculous mountebank, strutting about the streets under a tremendous hat, with a Turkish sash over colored clothes when he is not tippling in the taverns,” wrote Harman Blennerhassett, a Burr co-defendant. It went unrecorded whether Eaton performed his sword-twirling trick for his audiences; he had had scant opportunity to use his scimitar while crossing the North African desert and during the Derna fighting. Eaton’s behavior wrecked any chance he might have salvaged from his testimony against Burr of securing a government position.
Amazingly, Burr was acquitted. Embittered, Eaton returned to Massachusetts, shocking the Massachusetts legislature by denouncing Chief Justice Marshall in a vituperous floor speech. The Federalists, his former allies, shunned him, and Brimfield ousted him from local office in 1808.
Eaton kept to his home and sold some of his Maine acreage to pay his bills. He was held in such low esteem that few would receive him at all, former President John Adams and his son, John Quincy, being notable exceptions. Reclusive, suffering from gout and rheumatism, and drinking heavily, Eaton learned over Christmas 1810 that his beloved stepson, Navy Lieutenant Eli Danielson, who had accompanied him in Egypt as a young midshipman, had been killed in a duel. The sad news sent him into a depression, and he took to his bed.
On June 1, 1811, the indomitable adventurer died. He was only forty-seven.
Eaton’s disgrace and obscurity were compassed in the single line in which the Massachusetts Columbian Centinel reported his death: “Gen. Eaton, the hero of Derna and the victim of sensibility was entombed at Brimfield on Wednesday last.”
Algiers began to act like the piratical Algiers of old. In November 1807, Algerian frigates captured three American merchantmen—the Eagle and Mary Ann of New York, and the Violet of Boston. Captain Ichabod Shiffield and his Mary Ann crew didn’t go easily. As they approached Algiers as prisoners on their own vessel, the Americans threw four of their Algerian captors overboard, made captives of the rest, and sailed for Naples.
When Lear demanded the release of the Eagle and Violet, the dey complained that the United States had fallen two years behind in its tribute payment of naval stores. Lear paid the dey cash to square the overdue account, and the dey released the two vessels. But then he demanded $18,000 indemnity for the prize crew carried off by the Mary Ann. Lear paid that, too, certain that if he did not, Algiers would only send out its corsairs to seize more U.S. merchantmen.
Preble, Eaton, and Rodgers had taught Tripoli and Tunis to respect U.S. power, but Algiers had managed to avoid a direct confrontation with the Jefferson administration and the U.S. Navy. As the years passed with no evidence of American naval power in the Mediterranean, Algiers, with Britain’s encouragement, grew confident that it had nothing to fear from the new republic across the ocean.