I
Hashington, D.C., 1801
The motives pleading for war rather than tribute are numerous and honorable, those opposing them mean and short-sighted.
—Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1785
Nothing in Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration speech March 4 had foreshadowed his decision to embark the United States on its first war on foreign soil, in Moslem Northwest Africa. The address’s brief nod to foreign affairs was decidedly unhawkish: “Peace, commerce & honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson was more intent on healing the still-raw wounds of the unsurpassedly vituperous recent presidential campaign, celebrated by the victorious Republicans as the “Revolution of 1800.” “We are all federalists, we are all republicans,” he had declared in a soft voice that barely carried beyond the front row of the Senate chamber; his aversion to making speeches kept him off rostrums all but once during the next eight years—the exception was his second inauguration.
The 1800 campaign was the summit of the virulent debate between Republicans and Federalists that had raged throughout the 1790s over government’s role in completing the Revolution of 1776. The two most prominent surviving founding fathers, Vice President Jefferson and President John Adams, had found themselves in the vanguard of rival political parties with diverging philosophies on this all-important issue. The pendulum had swung away from Adams’s Federalists in 1800, and the disgruntled president had left Washington on the 4:00 A.M. stage on Inauguration Day so he would not have to witness the ascent of his former friend to the office from which Adams had been sent packing.
The triumphant Jefferson wasn’t going to waste words on foreign policy when his listeners were so anxious to hear him describe what his administration would be like. His election marked the new republic’s first true regime change, unlike the succession by Washington’s vice president and fellow Federalist, Adams. Jefferson pledged fealty to Republican ideals by presiding over “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
At no point did he mention his hardened resolve to smash “The Terror,” shorthand for the long jihad waged in the Mediterranean and Atlantic by the Barbary States against Christian Europe, and now the United States. On this subject, Jefferson had long ago settled upon what he wished to do, and he wasn’t in office three weeks before he acted. Without convening Congress or formally consulting his new cabinet, which was only slowly coming together in the raw new capital of only six months, on March 23 Jefferson issued the astonishing order to ready a squadron of warships to sail to the Mediterranean.
It might seem strange that Jefferson of all the founders—Jefferson, generally regarded as the most pacific of them—was poised to send the new U.S. Navy to war in the Mediterranean. Yet, since the 1780s, he had undeviatingly advocated defiance of the Barbary States, which had wrecked U.S. Mediterranean trade after the Revolutionary War and until the mid-1790s. Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were old hands at state-sponsored terrorism. They had preyed for 200 years on European Christians, living off the loot snatched from coastal raids and ship seizures, and the protection money they were paid for not molesting shipping. Europe always had paid, sending punitive squadrons only when the losses cut too deep, and only to negotiate better extortion terms.
Jefferson fervently believed America had not thrown off one tyrant to bow to a lowlier one. “The motives pleading for war rather than tribute are numerous and honorable, those opposing them mean and short-sighted,” he had written to James Monroe back in 1785. It was at about that time, when Jefferson was minister to France, that he had debated Adams, in those days his friend and counterpart in London, over whether it would be wiser to pay tribute to the Barbary States or to fight them. In words that resonate down to the present day, Jefferson had argued that force was the only sure antidote to terror. While Adams agreed in principle, he said the public wouldn’t support a war. Adams advocated paying. America was unequipped to fight a war, he said, and paying tribute beat the alternative: forgoing a Mediterranean trade altogether.
But Jefferson and Adams were arguing a moot point; America’s federal government had no money under the weak Articles of Confederation either for war or tribute. Consequently, there was just no Mediterranean trade. Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to form a confederation with Europe’s smaller powers to blockade the Barbary States indefinitely. While serving as George Washington’s secretary of state in the early 1790s, he urged Congress to build a navy to go to war against them. America instead negotiated treaties and arms-for-hostages deals with the Barbary States in the mid-1790s. By the time Jefferson became president, those treaties had cost more than $1 million.
In 1801, it appeared Jefferson had been right after all, for the treaties were unraveling. In the last months of the Adams administration, Tripoli issued an ultimatum threatening war in six months if it did not receive a new warship and a new treaty committing the United States to annual tribute. Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco also were unhappy because the gifts, armaments, and naval supplies the United States had promised them every year were late in arriving. The frustrated U.S. consuls had made excuses, pleaded with the rulers for extensions, and had tried to appease them with jewels, ships, cash, and gold. The consuls blamed the delays on the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, moving the capital to Washington, the election. However, Jefferson didn’t intend to make excuses, but to make war.
Two members of Jefferson’s new cabinet were late arriving in Washington. James Madison, Jefferson’s protege, closest confidant and the new secretary of state, was delayed in Virginia settling the estate of his late father, who had died on February 27. The other late arrival was Albert Gallatin, the colorful, brilliant Geneva aristocrat whom Jefferson had named treasury secretary. Gallatin had commanded a regiment under Louis XVI in the French Revolution, and his face bore a vivid scar from a saber duel fought on horseback. It wasn’t until early May that Madison was able to leave Montpelier to assume his duties, and Gallatin didn’t arrive until May 13. Jefferson convened the cabinet two days later to discuss the naval war for which he was readying a squadron at Norfolk and which was to sail in just two weeks.
“Shall the squadron now at Norfolk be ordered to cruise in the Mediterranean? What shall be the object of the cruise?” Jefferson asked his assembled cabinet members. While the orders already had been given, the president wanted to hear the views of his most trusted advisers.
They all agreed the squadron was needed to project American power and protect commercial interests in the Mediterranean. “The expedition should go forward openly to protect our commerce against the threatened hostilities of Tripoli,” said War Secretary Henry Dearborn. Attorney General Levi Lincoln said the warships should take defensive measures if attacked, but should not hunt down and destroy the enemy. Madison, Gallatin, and Acting Navy Secretary Samuel Smith argued for hot pursuit into enemy harbors.
Gallatin broached the ticklish matter of congressional approval, which hadn’t been sought. With Congress in recess, it would take weeks to assemble the House and Senate, even in an emergency. Gallatin personally thought it unnecessary. If a nation declared war on the United States, didn’t the Constitution authorize the president to direct the public force? And Smith asserted that the president not only had the authority, but was “bound to apply the public force” to defend the republic.
The United States must announce its intentions at the outset, Madison urged. Jefferson agreed that American resolve would be “openly declared to every nation.” He would write Tripoli’s ruler, the bashaw, a letter stating why he was sending a squadron against the bashaw’s nation. “All concur in the expediency of cruise,” Jefferson scrawled in his meeting notes.
The Jefferson administration didn’t know it, for news crossed the Atlantic only as fast as sailing ships, but Tripoli had already declared war on the United States. On May 14, the day before the cabinet meeting, the bashaw had delivered the declaration in Barbary’s usual blunt manner: Soldiers marched to the U.S. consulate in Tripoli and chopped down the flagpole where the Stars and Stripes flew.
It was a propitious time for the United States to settle its Mediterranean affairs. America’s undeclared three-year “Quasi-War” with France had ended only recently, and England and France were poised to resume their seemingly unending war. Against France, America had surprised many close observers by proving to be extremely proficient in waging naval warfare. The Quasi-War, fought almost entirely in the West Indies, accelerated the early development of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy now floated more than thirty ships, a signal achievement considering there had been no U.S. Navy five years before. But its strength would soon be whittled down, for Adams had signed a law in his last hours as president ordering every naval ship sold—all but thirteen frigates. Six were to be kept in active service, the other seven dry-docked.
This suited Jefferson, as thrifty with public money as he was spendthrift with his own, despite his habit of meticulously recording every purchase in his journals. He and other Republicans wanted to “shrink” the federal government after a decade of growth under Washington and Adams and pay off the $83 million national debt. This was the core of the Republican prescription for restoring the fading “Spirit of ‘76,” that romantic vision of a peaceful rural society much like the one to which Cincinnatus returned after saving Rome, whose hallmark would be freedom from government interference. It was the antithesis of the Hamiltonian philosophy subscribed to by Washington and Adams that postulated a powerful central government and an emphasis on commercial manufacturing. Small wonder Republicans heralded Jefferson’s victory which, they believed, would undo the evils of federalism. Yet for all that, Jefferson and the Republicans grudgingly conceded a central government’s utility in one respect: conducting foreign policy. The new United States must speak with one voice—and not as a gaggle of states—to the world to be a prosperous trading nation. A navy, even a diminished one, would guarantee that that voice was listened to.
It would have been difficult to find more dissimilar nations than the United States and the four Barbary States in 1801. Except for its Native American population and a small percentage of Jews, the United States was solidly Christian, while the North African regencies were just as solidly Moslem—and openly hostile toward Christians. The new American republic was a laboratory of Enlightenment ideals, especially freedom, openness, and rationality; the Barbary Powers were medieval, closed, tyrannical, and corrupt. The United States was a new land, perched on the edge of a largely unexplored wilderness; Barbary—the name is derived from the Latin barbarus and Greek barbaros, ancient appellations for foreigners—was a burial ground for Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Byzantines, Goths, Christians, and Moslems. While America dreamed of global markets for its growing profusion of products, the Barbary rulers’ narrow aims hadn’t changed in centuries: to invoke the Koran to extort money from Christian nations.
“Jihad” is derived from the word “jahada,” meaning “to strive.” The Koran exhorts Moslems to strive to purify themselves spiritually and promote Islam in the world. The first is a battle fought and won within the heart by overcoming temptation, and the second is achieved by doing right in the world. In early Koran interpretations, jihad was nonviolent; the believer conquered his urges and peacefully disseminated Islam’s tenets throughout the world. War was permitted only in self-defense. As Islam exploded into a religion of conquest and contended with Christian Europe for territory during the Crusades, jihad took on a new meaning: It became a holy war to impose Moslem hegemony over nonbelievers.
Jihad’s new interpretation became accepted practice in the Moslem world, regulated by a few simple rules. It could not be waged against other Moslem nations. It had to be authorized by an Islamic state’s spiritual leader. Infidels must be forewarned, and offered the opportunity to remain autonomous, if they agreed to pay a tax. Their refusal to pay permitted jihad to be declared, and any captives taken from ships or in battle could be enslaved and ransomed. The Barbary States stuck to this template in their dealings with America and Europe, while blithely ignoring the Koran’s many other strictures on war. Acting as their nations’ temporal and religious leaders, the bashaws, deys, beys, and emperors decided when their corsairs would hunt the European merchant ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. They chose their enemies and fixed the price of ephemeral peace.