XVIII
Algiers, July 1812
“My policy and my views are to increase, not to diminish the number of my American slaves; and not for a million dollars would I release them. ”
—Hadji Ali, Algiers’s dey, to U.S. Consul M. M. Noah
If our small naval force can operate freely in the sea, Algiers will be humbled to the dust ...
—Consul General Tobias Lear, in a letter to Secretary of State James Monroe
Laden with military stores to satisfy the United States’ tributary obligations, the Alleghany disgorged muskets, shot, gunpowder, timber for masts, and cable onto Algiers’s waterfront. The 1795 treaty had withstood the Tripolitan war and Algerian revolts and regime changes. It was the only U.S. agreement that still required annual tribute payments. Over the treaty’s life, the United States had paid Algiers $500,000 or more in tribute, gifts, and military stores: $21,600 worth of military supplies each year, $17,000 in biennial gifts to the dey’s officers, and $20,000 each time a new consul arrived in Algiers. Even in 1795, the weapons and ship supplies Algiers demanded had cost more than $21,600, and with inflation over the next seventeen years the stores’ value had soared. This partly explained why the United States often fell behind in its tribute deliveries and then offered to square accounts with cash.
Hadji Ali, the aged, fierce dey, watched as the military stores were trundled from the Alleghany’s hold to Algiers’s wharf. Hadji had been listening to Great Britain’s blandishments and was poised to turn the clock back twenty years on Algiers-U.S. relations. The British foreign minister recently had written Hadji a letter pledging England’s warm friendship and protection. While Algiers was threatened by no nation at the moment, Britain, which within weeks would be at war with America, implied that England’s future enemy might become Algiers’s, too. The British minister blustered that “the American flag would be swept from the seas, the contemptible navy of the United States annihilated, and its maritime arsenals reduced to a heap of ruins.” Hadji believed him. If Hadji had to choose allies in the coming war, there was no question that it would be England and her mighty navy. And he knew he had to exploit every means at hand to keep his throne. This policy had enabled him to rule longer than any of the deys who had come along after Mustafa Hamouda was deposed in 1805. The janissaries had assassinated Mustafa’s successor, Hamet Bashaw, in 1808, and the new dey, Ali Cogia, was deposed five months later by Barbary’s favored method of effecting a succession: the silken strangulation cord. Hadji had ruled since then. In the interests of prolonging his tenure and his life, Hadji stopped the unloading of the Alleghany.
He complained that the shipment of tribute contained too little gunpowder and cable, and ordered it sent back. In its place, he demanded an instant substitution payment of $27,000 cash. He brusquely informed Lear that as soon as he paid it, he must pack up and leave Algiers. This came as a rude shock to Lear, who hadn’t foreseen expulsion, although he had been conscious of the steady erosion of respect for America during the Navy’s long absence from the Mediterranean, going on five years now. Lear tried desperately to avert the diplomatic breach that now confronted him, while arguing that $27,000 wasn’t what the treaty stipulated as annual tribute. Hadji smoothly explained that he observed the briefer Ramadan year, not the Gregorian 365-day year. Since 1795, the additional Ramadan calendar days and weeks had added up, and they now must be reckoned with. Pay the $27,000 now, the dey warned, or he would seize the Alleghany and enslave its crew and every American in Algiers. If Lear paid, the Americans would have three days to leave. Lear wangled a twoday extension, but nothing more. Lacking $27,000 in ready cash, he was forced to borrow from the Bacri money house—it had survived David Coen Bacri’s beheading a year earlier—and agreed to pay a stiff 25 percent premium.
Lear, his wife and son, and three other American residents of Algiers sailed away on the Alleghany on July 25. The ship happened to reach Gibraltar simultaneously with the news that America had declared war on England. The British instantly took possession of the brig, clapped the crewmen in irons, and sent them to England on a prison ship. Lear and his family were permitted to sail to Cadiz and then home. As he sat down to write his report to Secretary of State James Monroe, Lear predicted that America one day would avenge Algiers’s abusive treatment and rid itself of tribute “and an imperious and piratical depredation on their commerce. If our small naval force can operate freely in the sea, Algiers will be humbled to the dust....”
Before there could be any U.S. retaliation against Algiers, America had to face Britain, the world’s supreme naval power, with more than 600 warships to the U.S. Navy’s 17. In addition to this seemingly insurmountable disadvantage, the U.S. Navy was burdened with the memory of the Revolutionary War, when the British had destroyed or captured 34 of the Continental Navy’s 35 ships, while losing only 5 of their own. And John Paul Jones, dead twenty years now, was responsible for two of the British losses, the Drake and Serapis. But in 1812, the United States had far better ships and the leadership of “Preble’s Boys,” the Barbary War’s junior officers who had risen to commands in the fleet: Isaac Hull, Stephen Decatur, Jr., William Bainbridge, James Lawrence, Isaac Chauncey, David Porter, Charles Stewart, and Thomas Macdonough. As the U.S. Navy’s “super frigates” entered the Atlantic to face the daunting British war fleet, Algerian cruisers prowled the Mediterranean for U.S. merchantmen. Weeks after Lear’s departure from Algiers, the Edwin was snapped up.
On August 12, the Edwin, a brig from Salem, Massachusetts, with Captain George C. Smith and ten crewmen aboard, was captured between Malta and Gibraltar. At about the same time, Algerians stopped a Spanish ship and removed an American, a Mr. Pollard, and he became Algiers’s twelfth American prisoner. They would be the last; the war kept the U.S. merchant fleet home for nearly three years. The Madison administration authorized M. M. Noah, the U.S. consul in Tunis, to offer up to $3,000 ransom per man. Hadji spurned the offer. “My policy and my views are to increase, not to diminish the number of my American slaves; and not for a million dollars would I release them.” Britain, desperate for fresh seamen, offered to buy two of the Edwin crewmen, and Hadji sold the British the two most unproductive prisoners for $2,000 apiece.
Washington threw a naval ball on December 28, 1812, presided over by First Lady Dolley Madison. Hundreds of candles illuminated the battle flags of two British warships, the HMS Guerriere and the HMS Alert, captured during the halcyon first months of the war. At midnight, as the orchestra struck up “Hail Columbia,” a midshipman appeared as if by magic, striding purposefully across the room toward Mrs. Madison. The naval officers and their wives broke into loud cheers when they saw what he was carrying. The midshipman laid the object at the First Lady’s feet. She picked it up and unfolded it. It was a third British battle flag, belonging to the HMS Macedonian. The triumph belonged to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr., and the United States. The idea for the dramatic presentation of the battle flag to the First Lady was Decatur’s, too. Like his frigate’s performance in the Atlantic, Decatur’s bit of theater was a smashing success.
A blend of dash, raw nerve, and perfectly calibrated instincts, Stephen Decatur had first burst into the public consciousness as the electrifying hero of the Philadelphia and the Battle of the Gunboats. He became the U.S. Navy’s youngest captain at twenty-five. Because of his striking good looks, competence, and aura of success, a legend had grown up around him. By 1812, Decatur, for whom cities and towns would be named, was a national celebrity. Arguably the Navy’s best combat officer, he had made a brilliant marriage to intelligent, beautiful Susan Wheeler. They were an extremely well-matched, well-connected Washington couple, with the Madisons among their close friends. Nothing, it seemed, was impossible for Stephen Decatur.
Decatur had met the Macedonian in the middle of the Atlantic about 500 miles west of the Canary Islands on October 25, 1812. The 38-gun British frigate was commanded by Captain John Carden, a peacetime friend of Decatur’s. Because Carden was somewhat of a martinet, the Macedonianhad a reputation as a crack warship. But not only was Carden outgunned by the 44-gun United States, whose 42-pound carronades could wreak havoc at close range, he was facing a gunnery zealot in Decatur, as Carden well knew. Decatur believed gunnery alone could win battles—without need for boarding parties. He and Carden even had debated the subject over dinner and drinks one night in Norfolk. Carden had been happy to point out that Decatur’s view ran counter to established doctrine. While it was true that believing in the primacy of gunnery placed him in the vanguard of naval theory at the time, Decatur was so sure he was right that he put his belief into practice by drilling his United States crew in rapid firing and target practice until they were lethally quick and accurate.
Decatur proceeded to demonstrate his crew’s deadly skill against Carden’s ship when they met in the Atlantic. His gunners, firing two shots for every one shot fired by the Macedonian’s gun crews, flattened the British frigate’s mizzenmast. When the United States got within carronade range, the gunners raked the British frigate’s hull and turned the decks into scenes of appalling slaughter. By the time Carden offered Decatur his sword, there were 105 British killed and wounded, compared with just 12 American casualties.
Decatur brought the prize into New London in January 1813, but then couldn’t put to sea again, as British cruisers were blockading Long Island Sound. After fruitless maneuvering and waiting in vain for an opening to escape to sea, he went to New York in 1814 to take over the frigate President, his unluckiest command ever.
He encountered the same problem in New York that he had in Long Island Sound: British warships blocked the harbor continually. Months passed without a break in the blockade. And then, in January 1815, a storm drove the British ships out to sea. Seizing his chance, Decatur set out in the President. Disaster befell her immediately; she struck a sandbar and hung there for nearly two hours before the crew got her off, with a damaged keel and sprung masts. Decatur tried to return to port, but the tide was against him, and he hugged the Long Island shoreline, waiting for the tide to turn.
British warships, however, returned before the tide. The battered President was compelled to fight. While her maneuverability was crippled, there was nothing wrong with her gunnery. In a two-hour running battle with the 40-gun Endymion, the American gunners mauled the British frigate at long range, forcing her to break off the fight. But the President still was far from port, and three British warships overtook her before she made it safely home. With one-fifth of the President’s crew dead or wounded and three of her five lieutenants gone, Decatur reluctantly struck his flag.
Decatur and his crew were imprisoned in Bermuda until a peace treaty was signed, but that was only a month coming. Upon returning to New London, Decatur expected to be court-martialed for losing the President. But he needn’t have worried; he was as popular as ever. He and his crew received heroes’ welcomes. The U.S. Navy thought so highly of Decatur that even with a court of inquiry pending, he was offered his pick of choice assignments: any shore billet he wished, command of the Guerriere—the British frigate Captain Isaac Hull had captured off Boston in 1812—and a squadron that would sail very soon to the Mediterranean, or command of the new 74-gun man-of-war Washington and a second squadron that would be sent to the Mediterranean later. Decatur wasn’t willing to wait. He accepted command of the tenship squadron and the flagship Guerriere.
Madison was sending the fleet to the Mediterranean to settle up with Algiers. Hadji Ali had declared war in 1814, betting that the British would drub the Americans. On February 23, 1815, just five days after news of the Treaty of Ghent reached Washington, Madison recommended that Congress declare war on Algiers, whose opportunism cried for reprisal.
The U.S. Navy was battle-tested, formidable, and ready for a fresh fight. Its 17-ship fleet of 1812 by 1815 had ballooned to 64 ships mounting 1,500 guns. Algiers hadn’t been idle, either. Its navy had 5 frigates, 6 sloops of war, and a schooner, for a total of 12 ships carrying 360 guns. Its harbor forts were defended by another 220 cannons. That would have been enough to repel the American squadron of 1801, when Commodore Dale entered the Mediterranean with 4 ships, or to give pause to Preble in 1804, when the Constitution was the only American frigate in the sea. But the U.S. Navy had sloughed off its awkward adolescence while fighting the world’s most powerful navy. The fleet’s officers and crews were competent, its frigates big and fast.
Nineteen ships in two squadrons were to go to the Mediterranean under Decatur and Captain William Bainbridge, who had atoned for surrendering the Philadelphia by defeating the heavy frigate HMS Java off Brazil on December 29, 1812. Decatur’s ten ships sailed from New York on May 20, 1815; Bainbridge was to follow from Boston six weeks later.
Aboard the Guerriere was the new Barbary consul general, William Shaler, who was authorized to negotiate peace, as were Decatur and Bainbridge. But the squadron’s officers and men hoped to serve Algiers hot iron and steel first.
The squadron reached Gibraltar on June 15, minus the brig Firefly, forced to turn around with a sprung mast. There was no time to rest and refit at Gibraltar. There were reports that the Algerian squadron, returned to the Mediterranean from cruising in the Atlantic, had just sailed for Cape de Gatt on Spain’s southern coast. Decatur went after the Algerians.
Lookouts sighted several sails off Cape de Gatt the next night. Decatur flashed the signal to the Macedonian, his one-time Britsh prize, and several smaller ships to give chase. By the following morning, the Constellation had spotted a large frigate flying the penndant of Algiers’s admiral, Reis Hammida. The Constellation, Guerriere, and sloops-of-war Epervier and Ontario closed in.
Hammida’s flagship was the 44-gun Meshuda—but not the Tripolitan cruiser of that same name that Commodore Dale had trapped in Gibraltar in 1801. Decatur signaled his harriers to raise British flags, hoping to lure the frigate closer with the false colors of an ally. But the Constellationbumblingly raised the Stars and Stripes instead. The Meshuda, well-crewed and a fast sailer, bolted for the Algerian coast with the four American warships in pursuit.
Through strenuous sailing, tacking, and trimming, the Constellation tried to make up for her blunder, slowly closing the distance to the flying Meshuda. Soon, the Constellation was within range with her bow guns, and opened fire. The Meshuda veered off to the northeast and raced flat-out for Cartagena, Spain. But she couldn’t shake her three other pursuers. The Guerriere, Epervier, and Ontario boxed her in expertly.
As a boy, Hammida had arrived penniless in Algiers from his birthplace in the rugged Jurjura Range of Adrar Budfel—the “Mountain of Snow,” where he was reared among the Berber Kabyle tribe. He signed on as a sailor and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Through brains, drive, and ability, he had risen through the ranks of the Algerian navy to become grand admiral. Now, hemmed in by four warships crewed by battle-hardened veterans, he faced a supreme test.
Using all of his cunning, Hammida tried to break out of the trap, but the Americans foiled him. Badly wounded when the Constellation raked the Meshuda’s quarterdeck, he continued to give orders while propped on a divan, bleeding. Then the Ontario crossed the Meshudds bow, and the Guerriere gave her two broadsides that wreaked awful carnage. Hammida was cut in half with a 42-pounder.
Master Commandant John Downes boldly brought his 18-gun Epervier in close and blasted the Meshuda with nine broadsides, and the Algerians struck their flag. Thirty Algerians, including the grand admiral, lay dead on the Meshudds decks. Four hundred six of their fellow crewmen, many of them wounded, became American prisoners. Enemy fire killed only one American and wounded three others; a bursting gun on the Guerrierewas deadlier, killing three crewmen and wounding seven. Just two days after reaching the Mediterranean, Decatur’s squadron had sliced off the Algerian navy’s head.
Two days later, June 19, the squadron spotted a warship off Cape Palos. It took to its heels, spurring the Americans to action. The Epervier, Spark, Torch, and Spitfire gave chase, and soon were in a running gun battle with what they could see was an Algerian brig. In shoal water off the Spanish coast, she ran aground. Some of the crew took to their boats and headed for shore, and the Americans sank one of them. Navy crewmen seized the 22-gun Estedio. Twenty-three bodies were strewn about her decks, and eighty crewmen were taken prisoner. The prisoners and prize were sent to Cartagena. The squadron turned back toward Algiers to confront the dey.
Months earlier, Omar the Terrible had succeeded Hadji, and his short tenure had been rocky. Locusts ravaged the countryside, and Omar had inherited wars with America and Holland. On June 28, nine U.S. warships massed outside Algiers harbor, and Omar knew that his tribulations were just beginning.
Decatur raised a white flag and the Swedish pennant, a signal for the Swedish consul, John Norderling, to whom the expelled Lear had entrusted U.S. affairs, to boat to the Guerriere under a flag of truce. Norderling was accompanied by the captain of the port. Decatur asked the captain where the Algerian squadron had gone. When the captain smugly replied that it undoubtedly was in a safe port somewhere, Decatur informed him the Meshuda and Estedio were now American prizes. The port captain didn’t believe him—until Decatur produced a Meshuda prisoner, a lieutenant, who described the captures of the Meshuda and Estedio, and Hammida’s gory death. Decatur recorded the port captain’s reaction to the news: “The impression made by these events was visible and deep.”
Norderling delivered a letter to the dey from President Madison, announcing that America was at war with Algiers, yet expressing a desire for peace, but not on the old terms of tribute and bribes: “... peace, to be durable, must be founded on stipulations equally beneficial to both parties, the one claiming nothing which it is not willing to grant the other; and on this basis alone will its attainment or preservation by this government be desirable.” A second letter, drafted by Decatur and Shaler, stated they would negotiate only on equal terms and would not obligate the United States to pay any tribute.
The dey invited them ashore to negotiate, but Decatur and Shaler said negotiations must be conducted on the Guerriere. They formally outlined to Norderling and the port captain the treaty terms that would be acceptable to them: abolition of tribute forever; release by both parties of all American and Algerian prisoners; $10,000 compensation for the Edwin and other confiscated American property; and freedom for any Christian slave who managed to escape to an American warship. Captives in any future U.S.—Algerian war would be prisoners of war, and not slaves.
Omar did not want to fight the American squadron, but knew if he conceded all of Shaler and Decatur’s demands without receiving anything in return, he might well feel the silk strangulation cord tightening around his own throat. He said he would agree to the terms if the Meshuda and Estediowere returned. Shaler and Decatur did not object. As far as they could see, the vessels would be of no use to the United States; it was doubtful whether they would even survive an Atlantic crossing. They would return the vessels, they said, but not as part of the treaty. Omar had to sign the treaty before he would get back his ships.
The dey requested a three-hour truce to think about it. Decatur emphatically said no. “Not a minute; if your squadron appears in sight before the treaty is actually signed by the Dey; and the prisoners sent off, ours would capture them.” Only when a boat left shore flying a white flag and with the Edwin’s crew aboard would Decatur suspend hostilities, he said. As the dey was chewing over this uncompromising response, American ships spotted an Algerian corvette in the distance, filled with Turkish soldiers from Tunis. Decatur ordered the squadron into action. The corvette and the Americans’ preparations evidently were witnessed by the dey’s officers as well, because at that moment a boat set out across the harbor, with a white flag fluttering. The Edwin prisoners were aboard.
Omar agreed to all of Decatur and Shaler’s conditions. Six weeks after the squadron’s departure from New York, and sixteen days after its arrival in the Mediterranean, Decatur had brought the war to an end.
The treaty was the best made with Algiers by a Christian nation in more than 200 years. “It has been dictated at the mouths of our cannon,” Decatur proudly wrote to Navy Secretary Benjamin W Crowninshield on July 5, and “has been conceded to the losses which Algiers has sustained and to the dread of still greater evils apprehended.”
Lieutenant John Shubrick was given command of the Epervier and dispatched to Washington with the new treaty and the Edwin captain and crew. The sloop-of-war passed Gibraltar on July 12 and never was seen or heard from again. The ship and crew might have perished in a hurricane that blew up in the western Atlantic about the time the Epervier would have reached the East Coast. Lost were the Epervier crew, the Edwin crewmen and captain, and Master Commandant William Lewis and Lieutenant B. J. Neale, who had recently married sisters and had been granted home leave to visit them.
Algiers wasn’t the only Barbary State that had been seduced by Britain’s cocky predictions of victory over America during the recent war. Early in 1815, the American privateer Abellino had brought several English prizes into Tunis and Tripoli, supposed neutrals in the war. The prizes should have been secure in the neutral ports, but Tunis and Tripoli had permitted British cruisers to retake them—two from Tunis and two from Tripoli—over the protests of U.S. consuls. Decatur learned of the violations only when he reached Barbary; the Madison administration had been unaware of the neutrality violations when Decatur embarked from New York, so he had no instructions to guide him. The commodore took it upon himself to square matters.
The squadron entered Tunis harbor July 26. Through U.S. consul M. M. Noah, Decatur demanded that the bey pay him $46,000 in reparations. If he failed to do so within twelve hours, the U.S. squadron would go into action against him. As the bey and his officers conferred, an adviser reminded the bey that Decatur was the brash young officer of eleven years earlier who had burned the Philadelphia. Then Noah led the bey to a window and pointed out the Guerriere and Macedonian in the harbor. Both had once belonged to the supposedly invincible Royal Navy, he said—until America had taken them from Britain. The bey studied the ships through his telescope, and thoughtfully stroked his beard with a tortoiseshell comb, turning over in his mind this new evidence of U.S. power. Then he paid the $46,000.
Decatur’s next stop was Tripoli, where he said reparations would cost $30,000. Yusuf, still the bashaw after twenty years, refused curtly. He manned his batteries and assembled 20,000 troops for action. Then the news arrived of the capitulation of Algiers and Tunis, and Yusuf had a swift change of heart. He sent Decatur a counterproposal of $25,000. Decatur said this was acceptable, but only if Yusuf also would release ten Christian captives. This met the bashaw’s approval. Decatur, who had a long memory, selected two Danes and a Sicilian family of eight for release: the Danes to repay Denmark for Nicholas Nissen’s services, and the Sicilians for the Two Sicilies’ loan of the gunboats to Commodore Preble all those years ago. To celebrate the renewal of American-Tripolitan amity, the Guerriere’s band played “Hail Columbia” on the Tripoli quay.
Decatur transported the grateful Danes to Naples and the Sicilians to Messina, and sailed on alone to Spain. Lookouts sighted seven Algerian warships one day. Decatur cleared the Guerriere for action, savoring the prospect of a good fight should the Algerians not have learned of the new treaty or chose to disregard it. The Algerians wisely let the Guerriere pass unmolested.
Bainbridge’s squadron reached Gibraltar on September 29, after Decatur already had settled affairs with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Together, he and Decatur headed the most powerful U.S. Mediterranean squadron until that time: eighteen ships, including Bainbridge’s 74-gun ship-of-the-line Independence, where a future naval hero, David Farragut, was serving his apprenticeship as a fourteen-year-old midshipman. But the squadron’s business was finished in Barbary, and most of the warships sailed for America on October 7.
In Washington, everyone applauded the peace dictated at “cannon’s mouth.” President Madison laid the new Algerian treaty before the Senate for ratification on December 6, and it won swift approval, with no objections to the terms Decatur and Shaler had dictated: favored-nation status, no tribute, the release of American captives. Congress expressed its gratitude to the squadron by appropriating $100,000 as indemnification for the Meshuda and Estedio, to be distributed to the naval crews who captured them.
Britain tried to capitalize on Decatur’s success in the fall of 1815. Lord Exmouth sailed to Algiers with six men-of-war, two frigates, three sloops-of-war, a bomb ship, and several transports. Omar, by then regretting the peace he had made with America, was unwilling to concede anything. Exmouth wound up agreeing to pay nearly $400,000 to free 12,000 Neapolitan and Sardinian captives.
This wasn’t exactly what the Admiralty had in mind when it dispatched Exmouth to the Mediterranean. But the British treaty did wonders for Omar’s confidence after his unhappy encounter with Decatur, so much so that when Shaler presented him the next April with the Senate-ratified 1815 treaty, Omar rejected it. Decatur had returned the Meshuda, but the dey still hadn’t gotten back the Estedio. Therefore, Omar said, the treaty was void. He waved off Shaler’s explanation for the brig’s absence: U.S. consuls still were negotiating her release with Spain, where she was floating in Cartagena harbor.
Shaler lowered the U.S. consular flag and went aboard the Java, where Captain Oliver Hazard Perry prepared for a night attack on Algiers, supported by the frigates United States and Constellation and the 18-gun sloops-of-war Erie and Ontario. The five warships drew up in front of the mole, with boats ready for 1,200 volunteers to launch an amphibious assault. The alarmed dey declared a truce and invited Shaler to return. The squadron withdrew. But then, in a letter to President Madison, Omar proposed a return to the 1795 treaty—to annual tribute payments.
The British government was so incensed with the outcome of Lord Exmouth’s negotiations in Algiers that it sent him back as joint commander of a powerful Anglo—Dutch fleet with Dutch Admiral van Cappellen. On August 27, 1816, the warships assembled outside Algiers harbor. Whether by accident or design, an Algerian gun fired on them. The English and Dutch replied with a massive bombardment. When the firing stopped, the British and Dutch had discharged 34,000 rounds and inflicted 883 casualties, all but wiping out the Algerian navy and wrecking the city fortifications and residential areas. Exmouth and van Cappellen forced the dey to free 1,200 prisoners and to agree to abolish Christian slavery forever.
While Algiers was still rebuilding its shattered navy and city, Commodore Isaac Chauncey and the 74-gun man-of-war Washington, accompanied by six warships, appeared in Algiers harbor in October. More menacing Christian warships was the last thing the dey and his officers wished to see after Exmouth’s devastating attack. Shaler, who had witnessed the bombardment and whose home was heavily damaged, reassured Omar that for the moment the squadron was only making a show of force, but it would return. Shaler sailed with Chauncey and the squadron to Gibraltar to await orders from the State Department.
They returned to Algiers in December 1816. The Spanish finally had handed over the Estedio, so Omar no longer had a good reason to reject the 1815 treaty. Shaler delivered a letter from President Madison to the dey. The United States would fight before it would pay Algiers tribute again, the president wrote. “It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute.” Should there have been any mistaking Madison’s message, Chauncey and Shaler added their own ultimatum. With both the Meshuda and Estedio in Algiers’s possession again, all outstanding debts were canceled and the 1815 treaty now must be accepted. “The undersigned believe it to be their duty to assure his Highness that the above conditions will not be departed from; thus leaving to the Regency of Algiers the choice between peace and war. The United States, while anxious to maintain the former, are prepared to meet the latter.”
With his navy in shambles from the Anglo—Dutch attack, Omar had no choice but to sign the treaty. He imposed a single condition: that Shaler sign a statement that Omar had agreed to the treaty only to avoid war with the United States. Shaler’s affidavit extended Omar’s tenuous reign less than a year: He was assassinated in September 1817.
The treaty, America’s last with Algiers, renounced tribute forever. It was signed on December 23, 1816, thirty-one years after Algiers captured the Dauphin and the Maria.
Never again would the Barbary States trouble America.
Yusuf and Hamet reconciled briefly in 1809, when the bashaw gave his brother a government position in Derna. For reasons unknown, but most likely a combination of Hamet’s sloth and treachery, he soon incurred Yusuf’s displeasure. By 1811, he and his family once again were on the run to Egypt. They never returned to Tripoli. Hamet was not heard from again.
The last act of Hamet’s story unfolded in 1832, when a man named Mahommed Bey presented himself to the American consulate in Alexandria, claiming to be Hamet’s eldest son. He requested aid for his destitute family in Cairo. There is no record that he received any.
In 1835, Yusuf’s son Muhammad attempted to assassinate his father and seize power. After forty years of rule, Yusuf lost control of Tripoli, and it erupted into civil war. The French and British consuls sought the intervention of the Ottoman Empire, which still claimed Tripoli as a regency. The sultan dispatched twenty-two ships and 6,000 troops. Ottoman soldiers arrested Muhammad and his fellow conspirators and snatched the reins of government from Yusuf, who had survived the coup. The Turks ruled Tripoli until Italy occupied it in 1911 and renamed it Libya.
France invaded Algiers in 1830, but was unable to gain complete control until 1848. In 1851, the French also seized Tunis.
Stephen Decatur’s seagoing days ended when he returned to the United States from his triumphant expedition to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, more of a hero than ever. Baltimore gave him a silver dinner service, and Philadelphia awarded him a plate dinner service worth $1,020, raised through $10 subscriptions. Amid the rounds of banquets that took him up and down the East Coast, Decatur made the now-famous toast at a dinner in Norfolk: “Our country!” Decatur said, raising his glass. “In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” He stowed away his sea chest forever, joining Captains John Rodgers and David Porter on the Board of Navy Commissioners. His days were filled with paperwork and meetings. With his wife Susan, he built a home and reentered the highpowered Washington social whirl. Yet Decatur missed the sea. “What shall I do?” he wrote a friend in 1818. “We have no war, nor sign of a war, and I shall feel ashamed to die in my bed.”
That wouldn’t happen. After serving his suspension from the Navy, James Barron submitted an application to command the new 74-gun man-of-war Columbus. Decatur reminded his fellow commissioners of Barron’s negligent command of the Chesapeake in 1807, and also noted that Barron had not sought a ship during the War of 1812, when his services might have been welcomed. Now that the war was over, he was suddenly anxious to return. Barron explained that he was abroad in 1812 and had wanted to return, but lacked money for passage home. Decatur brushed aside his excuse, saying it only demonstrated that he was unresourceful. He blocked Barron’s application.
Barron stewed over his rejection. He wrote a letter on June 19, 1819, accusing Decatur of publicly claiming that “you could insult me with impunity.” Decatur denied it. In October Barron had another grievance: Decatur had forwarded their correspondence to mutual friends in Norfolk with the purpose of alienating them from Barron. Decatur acknowledged sending on the letters, but not the malevolent intent. The men exchanged thirteen letters in all, Barron’s becoming progressively more acerbic; he always believed he had been scapegoated for the Chesapeake incident, and now he had a target for his bitterness.
Finally Barron challenged Decatur to a duel, and Decatur, a veteran of several affairs of honor, accepted. They met at Bladensburg, the site of the disastrous 1814 defense of Washington, on March 22, 1820. They agreed to fire at eight paces, a relatively short distance that was a concession to Barron’s nearsightedness. Before taking up their pistols, both men urinated; it was commonly believed that an empty bladder reduced the chance of infection if one was hit. They stepped off the eight paces. Decatur already had decided to aim for Barron’s hip, not wanting to kill him but knowing he must wound him in order to end the affair. The men turned and fired simultaneously. Barron was hit in the thigh, Decatur in the right side. Decatur’s wound was mortal, Barron’s was not. Decatur died in agony at his home before the next sunrise. The U.S. Navy’s brightest spirit, who perhaps more than anyone, had molded its fighting tradition, was gone.
Did the United States chastise the Barbary States, as Jefferson so fervently desired, and did it earn Europe’s respect? It depends on whether the year is 1805 or 1815.
During the 1801—5 Tripolitan war, the necessary ingredients for lasting peace never coalesced at one time or place: a large force, an aggressive commander, and skilled diplomacy. Morris and Barron demonstrated the futility of assigning a strong naval force to a weak commander. Preble showed that without adequate firepower, a fighting commodore could not deliver a decisive blow. Only when Rodgers took over Barron’s squadron and brought it before Tunis with Lear on hand was it used as Jefferson, Madison, and Smith had envisioned, “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations.”
But in 1815, the United States was a battle-hardened naval power, and Decatur was able to parley at “cannon’s mouth” and finally win the respect both of Barbary and Europe. What better evidence could there be of Europe’s respect than England’s attempt to imitate Decatur’s success in Algiers?
More importantly, America demonstrated, as Jefferson had hoped, that it was different from Europe and on principle would not truckle to extortionist despots. Jefferson was proven right: Facing down terror worked; Europe showed its new respect by imitating the American example before Barbary’s harbor fortresses. It was yet another manifestation of America’s revolution against the established order, another assertion of “American spirit,” whose most passionate advocate was Jefferson.
By sending American ships and fighting men to their first war on foreign soil, fought for the principle of sovereign trading rights, Jefferson was making a statement of national character: the American belief that nations as well as people had a right to freedom from tyranny. America didn’t pay obeisance to English kings, and it certainly wouldn’t bow to Islamic deys, beys, and bashaws who used their navies as instruments of terror to extort tribute and fill their dungeons with “Christian dogs.”
In the Mediterranean, America learned the practicalities of waging a distant war: operating from foreign bases, making short-term alliances, and using local insurgents and indigenous troops—the basic tenets that would serve it in conflicts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Had the United States been unable to use Sicily, Malta, and Gibraltar as resupply and headquarters ports, it would have been virtually impossible to sustain its convoys and blockades, and the hemorrhaging of Mediterranean trade would have continued; as it was, 35 American ships and 700 sailors were captured by the Barbary corsairs between 1784 and 1815. Without Neapolitan gunboats, Preble couldn’t have taken the war to Tripoli’s harbor in 1804. Hamet and his Tripolitan and Arab supporters made possible Eaton’s bold invasion. Without Salvador Catalano, Decatur’s “special ops” mission to burn the Philadelphia might have run aground on one of Tripoli harbor’s notorious shoals.
The fighting U.S. Navy that stopped Britain in 1812 was forged in the Mediterranean under Preble. The brief Quasi-War with France had blooded it, but the rising generation of junior officers needed more seasoning. The “super frigates” served as the war colleges of Decatur, Bainbridge, Porter, Stewart, and Hull—“Preble’s Boys.” When they finished their education in the Mediterranean, they were ready to test themselves against the world’s preeminent naval power, and then to return to Barbary in 1815 as seasoned veterans eager to punish Algiers.
The Barbary War convinced Congress and the American people that the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were indispensable. Aided by low casualties—little more than 30 killed—and the emergence of a pantheon of war heroes, the seafaring services were safe from Congress’s budget ax. Preble, Decatur, Eaton, and O‘Bannon entered the American lexicon, and their stories were still being told by candlelight in farmhouses fifty years later. If congressmen needed a better argument, they only had to look to the prosperous Mediterranean trade made possible by U.S. Navy convoys. While the Navy’s future was now secure, the Marine Corps periodically was targeted by government cost-cutters; it escaped extinction during the post—World War II downsizing campaign largely because of its demonstrated readiness at the outbreak of the Korean War, when its “Fire Brigade” stopped the invading North Koreans at the Naktong River.
The punitive expeditions of 1815 and 1816 ended Algiers’s long reign as a major Mediterranean power. The old Ottoman regency no longer struck terror into England, France, Spain, and the United States. Finally, after 400 years, trade in the Mediterranean became truly free.
It happened sooner rather than later because of Thomas Jefferson. “I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams when they debated the respective merits of war and tribute.
Jefferson’s unshakable faith in the supreme revolutionary principle—freedom from tyranny wherever it might be found, and in whatever form—caused the western Mediterranean to be swept clean of the marauding corsairs.
No longer would merchant ship captains anxiously scan the flat horizon for the long-prowed ships of plunder flying under lateen sails.
Jefferson and his fighting sailors and Marines had freed America and Europe from The Terror.