III
When the hullowed months have slipped away, then fight associators [idolaters] wherever you may find them; take them and besiege them, and wayluy them at every outpost.
—Koran, Surah 9:5
In July 1785, John Adams settled his wife Abigail and their daughter Nabby into a home on Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair, and optimistically took up his new duties as minister to the Court of St. James. With Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, Adams had negotiated the 1783 Peace of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War. He now harbored modest hopes of wearing down British resistance to becoming a full-fledged trading partner with its former colony. But it soon became painfully apparent that he faced a nearly impossible task. The London press’s report of Adams’s arrival was a harbinger of the reception he would find. “An ambassador from America! Good heavens what a sound!” it sniffed. England was in no mood to restore America to favored trading status, even though the nations were natural commercial allies. The Revolution’s wound to British pride was still too raw to countenance a normal trade relationship. The cool, correct British diplomats kept the new American minister at arm’s length. Adams made his diplomatic rounds dutifully and wrote reports to Foreign Secretary Jay, without much hope of accomplishing anything.
So he must have been pleased when he learned in February 1786 that the new Tripoli ambassador was in London. Here was an opportunity finally to achieve something. Mediterranean affairs were increasingly occupying his attention and that of his Paris counterpart, Thomas Jefferson. In October 1784, a Moroccan corsair had captured the Betsey and her crew of ten American merchant seamen soon after she had sailed from Cadiz, Spain, for Philadelphia, her hold full of salt. Lateen corsair sails had appeared on the horizon, and it wasn’t long before Captain James Erwin’s brig was overtaken. Nine months later, Algerian corsairs operating in the Atlantic had captured the U.S. merchantmen Dauphin and Maria with twenty-one crewmen and passengers. “Our Sufferings are beyond our expressing or your conception,” Richard O‘Brien, the Dauphin’s captain, wrote dolefully to Congress.
Jay already had instructed Adams and Jefferson to make treaties with the Barbary States, authorizing them to pay up to $80,000 in borrowed money from Holland, or wherever they could get credit for the customary presents. However, before the ministers entered any negotiations, they wanted to learn what the European nations were paying, and they almost surely took time to review their small store of facts about the Barbary States.
It was widely known among educated Americans that Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were Moslem states and extorted tribute from Europe through terror. Less well known was the fact that Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis were regencies of the Ottoman Empire, but Morocco was not. The three regencies were ostensibly under the rule of the sultan in Constantinople, but in truth they were virtually autonomous—and remained that way so long as they sent the sultan gifts periodically—and each regency had evolved its own succession. While the Barbary States, with Algiers historically predominant, presented a solid, menacing front to Christian Europe and America, they negotiated treaties independently, competed fiercely with one another and occasionally quarreled over territory, sometimes to the extent of going to war. And, confusingly, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli happened to be the names of the capital cities of their respective countries; Tangier was Morocco’s capital.
At the end of their inquiry into European tributary payments, Jefferson and Adams knew only that the Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Venetians all paid annual tribute—Venice in jewels and gold coins called sequins, and the others in naval stores and ammunition—but not how much. What would it cost for the United States to buy peace? The American diplomats didn’t know. Consequently, by early 1786 the two ministers had not even attempted to open treaty negotiations with any of the Barbary States.
Thus, the Tripolitan ambassador’s arrival presented a rare opportunity that Adams grasped resolutely. Making his embassy rounds one night in early 1786, Adams made a point of stopping at the Tripolitan’s home. He intended only to leave his card and arrange a meeting later. To his surprise, he was immediately ushered before Ambassador Abdrahaman. The plenipotentiary welcomed Adams and begged him to join him by the fire.
The men warmed themselves at the fireplace, puffing on long-stemmed Turkish pipes that they smoked with the bowls resting on the carpet. “It is sufficient to say,” Adams reported to Foreign Secretary Jay, “that his Excellency made many inquiries concerning America, the climate, soil, heat, cold, &c., and observed, ‘it is a very great country, but Tripoli is at war with it.’” Adams protested that America wasn’t ill disposed toward Tripoli, and neither nation had provoked the other. Abdrahaman patiently explained that that was beside the point. Provocation or no, America and Tripoli were at war, until they made peace. “His Excellency replied, that Turkey, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were the sovereigns of the Mediterranean; and that no nation could navigate that sea without a treaty of peace with them; that America must make such treaties with Tripoli first, then with Constantinople, then with Algiers and Morocco, as France, England, and all the other powers of Europe had done.”
In 1786, the depressed U.S. economy could have used the stimulus of Mediterranean commerce. But with the Continental Navy disbanded and without treaties with Barbary, American merchants didn’t dare risk it, even though they had hoped that reviving the pre-Revolution trade with Greece, Italy, and the Levant would compensate for the disappointing trading partners that England and France had turned out to be. They hadn’t foreseen the consequences in the Mediterranean of throwing off the British yoke: Exposing themselves to the Barbary corsairs without the shield of British treaties and passports backed by Royal Navy guns, or U.S. treaties or guns, for that matter. Even with England’s protection, there had been losses. In 1678, New York City churchgoers raised ransom money to free eleven American captives in Algiers. In 1698, during another New York collection to ransom more slaves, so many donations were made that the surplus helped pay for the erection of Trinity Church on Wall Street and Broadway. While at times even British passports were no safeguard against the Barbary rovers, they had enabled American merchants to conduct business in the Mediterranean for more than a century.
In the years leading to the Revolution, an average of 100 American ships transported 20,000 tons of goods annually to Mediterranean ports. Among the commodities traded there were Southern rice and lumber, grain and flour from the middle colonies, and New England rum and fish. Mediterranean markets consumed one-sixth of America’s wheat exports and one-fourth of its exported fish. The Revolution dammed the stream of U.S. raw goods that flowed to the Mediterranean, and the postwar years were no better, with America lacking treaties. Richard Harrison, a Maryland merchant who was acting U.S. agent in Cadiz, urged Foreign Affairs Secretary Robert Livingston in 1783 to emphasize to Congress the importance of friendly relations with Barbary. “Our Commerce to Lisbon, this port & the Medeterranian must become very important, & these Freebooters will have in their power, & very probably in their Inclination, to molest it greatly.” Harrison said England or France would never intervene with the Barbary States on America’s behalf. “It is not [in] their Interest that our Navigation should become so extensive & free ...” In that one sentence, Harrison had neatly summarized the other major obstacle blocking the path to a lucrative U.S. trade in the Mediterranean.
In 1782 Livingston had instructed Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. minister in Paris, to make contact with representatives from the Barbary States. It was “a favorable moment for making ourselves known to them,” he said, what with the Moroccan emperor’s recent coolness toward Great Britain and France’s unusual warmth toward the United States. But absorbed in Paris’s pleasures, Franklin let the favorable moment pass without acting. No American envoys appeared in the Barbary states in 1783 or 1784.
With an entourage of robed attendants, Abdrahaman, the Tripolitan ambassador, swept into Adams’s Grosvenor Square residence three days after their congenial fireside conversation. He had come for the express purpose of pressuring Adams to sign a peace treaty quickly. Having planted the idea during the initial meeting, Abdrahaman wanted to fan the embers. A treaty would enrich both Tripoli’s bashaw and Abdrahaman himself He warned that if America procrastinated, merchantmen and their crews might be seized, complicating treaty negotiations with tedious ransom discussions. And war must be avoided because it would be so terrible. “A war between Christian and Christian was mild, and prisoners, on either side, were treated with humanity; but a war between Turk and Christian was horrible, and prisoners were sold into slavery,” Adams wrote, in reconstructing Abdrahaman’s words for Jay. “Although he was himself a mussulman [Moslem], he must still say he thought it a very rigid law; but, as he could not alter it, he was desirous of preventing its operation, or, at least, of softening it, as far as his influence extended.” The Tripolitan was pleased when Adams told him he had authority to negotiate a treaty, and as soon as he had departed, Adams dispatched a messenger to Jefferson in Paris, summoning him to a parley with Adams and Abdrahaman.
Shipbuilding, the whaling industry, and Southern agriculture suffered particularly during the grinding economic malaise following independence. The shipyards had built British ships before the war, but now were idled; the British were building their own ships at home. The whaling fleet had been nearly obliterated by the Royal Navy during the war. What’s more, France and Britain were restricting whale and fish-product imports, ostensibly to cultivate their own maritime industries, but also to use the fisheries for training fresh seamen for the expected resumption of their unending war with each other.
Southern agriculture had not yet recovered from marauding British troops and the savage partisan war between loyalists and patriots. More than 50,000 slaves had slipped away during the fighting, many ending up in the disease-ridden refugee camps established by the British Army in the Southern colonies. There, they died by the thousands of smallpox and fever; Jefferson himself lost 27 of his slaves this way. With fewer slaves to harvest the tobacco and rice, planters cut back their acreage. Rice exports told the story: in 1770—73, a total of 277.1 million pounds; in 1783—86, just 128.3 million pounds.
But a worse brake on exports was Britain’s unfriendly trade policy. Before the Revolution, colonial merchants had grown rich trading in the British West Indies. Now only American goods transported on English ships were admitted; goods on U.S. ships were turned away. Adams ambitiously proposed a new agreement that would have opened not only the British West Indies, but Canada, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland to American products transported by American ships. The British were politely uninterested. Jefferson estimated British trade restrictions during the 1780s cost the United States 800 to 900 shiploads of goods, with a proportionate deficit in seamen, shipwrights, and shipbuilding.
High hopes were pinned on France, America’s great war ally, becoming its great peacetime trade partner, obviating the need for more generous British agreements. The French, however, lacked the financial wherewithal to extend credit—a critical component that had never been a problem with English merchants. Without credit, U.S. merchants, lacking cash to make the purchases outright, were unable to buy finished goods in France to sell in America. A lesser impediment to a robust U.S.—French trade alliance was the American consumer’s preference for English products, a consequence of long familiarity. There were other barriers as well: the high French protective trade tariffs, and French certainty that American merchants would only use the profits from any trade with France to pay off their debts to France’s enemy, England.
Frustrated by the British and French, U.S. merchants pursued alternative markets in Asia and along the Baltic Sea. American tobacco, flour, and rum were prized in the chilly northern principalities, and the merchantmen returned from the Baltic laden with iron; duck cloth, a durable cotton fabric; and hemp. But the Baltic commerce was only modestly successful. China, however, fired American businessmen’s imaginations with its potentially huge market. The trick was finding commodities the Chinese desired. The Empress of China cast off from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1784 on its historic voyage to Canton bearing the shimmering hopes of businessmen who thought they had hit upon an ingenious solution to the conundrum of Chinese consumerism. The Empress was loaded with finished New England goods, which were bartered for furs in Vancouver and sandalwood in Hawaii. Chinese merchants snapped up their furs and sandalwood, encouraging U.S. merchants to expand their Oriental speculations to India and Indonesia. But for all their trouble the merchants were disappointed when their efforts scarcely dented the lost trade with Britain.
Jefferson reached the Adams home in the last damp, blustery days of winter, his scientist’s curiosity piqued by the prospect of meeting a Barbary “musselman” in the flesh. The novelty wore off quickly after the three ministers sat down together at Abdrahaman’s home, and the Tripolitan gave them a matter-of-fact disquisition on temporary peace and “perpetual peace,” and their respective costs. Temporary peace was good for one year, he said, and would cost 12,500 guineas, plus a 10 percent commission for Abdrahaman, or roughly $66,000 in all. Perpetual peace—supposedly everlasting, yet, as they all well knew, anything but that—was a bargain in the long run, he said. It would cost 30,000 guineas, plus the customary 10 percent commission, or a total of about $160,000. Abdrahaman reminded them politely that a state of war existed between their nations until America bought its peace. Jefferson and Adams were aghast at the figures he had quoted; Jay had authorized them to borrow only $80,000 for treaties with all the Barbary States. Abdrahaman went on to inform them that Tunis would demand a similar payment, but Algiers, the most powerful corsair regency, would probably expect more, plus ransom for the twenty-one captives from the Maria and Dauphin. He did not mention Morocco, the fourth Barbary State.
Adams and Jefferson argued vainly that America’s basis for relations with other nations was the converse of Tripoli’s: It regarded all nations as friends, and made war only upon provocation. How had the United States provoked Tripoli? they wanted to know. Abdrahaman said they didn’t understand the fine points of Islamic jihad, as it was interpreted in Barbary. He proceeded to illuminate the ministers. “The Ambassador,” Jefferson later wrote to Jay, “answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” The ambassador said the pirate crews were inspired to “the most desperate Valour and Enterprise” by the promise of a slave and an extra share of the loot to the first crewman to board an enemy ship. Merchant ship crews seldom resisted, and Jefferson said Abdrahaman “verily believed the Devil assisted his Countrymen, for they were almost always successful.” Abdrahaman was paraphrasing the Koran’s rules of engagement, as described in the 47th Surah: “Whenever you encounter the ones who disbelieve [during wartime], seize them by their necks until once you have subdued them, then tie them up as prisoners, either in order to release them later on, or also to ask for ransom, until war lays down her burdens.” By first extending peace terms, impossible though they were, Abdrahaman also had satisfied his holy book’s stipulation that Moslems must give enemies the option of war or peace before attacking, a commonly ignored preliminary.
After doing the arithmetic, Jefferson gloomily estimated the United States would have to pay more than $1.3 million to make peace with all the Barbary States and ransom the captives, which meant going to Amsterdam, hat in hand, to request a loan from the Dutch bankers, who usually were willing to extend credit to America. Jay, however, advised against it; it would be improvident to pile on more financial commitments when American credit was shaky as it was, with little to recommend it but the republic’s glorious future, glimmering only faintly through the Revolution’s miasmic aftermath.
Adams and Jefferson were fellow founders of the republic, still in the first, amiable phase of their long relationship, and virtually the only U.S. ministers empowered by Congress to negotiate treaties on America’s behalf Their responsibilities today would occupy hundreds of State Department employees. But in 1786, the United States, with slightly more than 3 million people, had a population scarcely equaling that of present-day Iowa or Connecticut. Its leaders were as well known to one another as members of an exclusive club. Because of the very recent experience of the Revolution, they typically presented a united front to the world, although at times they might disagree among themselves. Thus, no diplomatic meltdown occurred when Jefferson and Adams discovered that they disagreed over how to deal with the Barbary States. Friends since 1775, when they had served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson and edited by his colleagues, Jefferson looked upon Adams, eight years his senior, as a mentor, and Adams regarded Jefferson as a protégé. They were in the habit of sharing their views, and agreed to do so now, in a series of candid letters—Adams the pragmatist favoring tribute, and Jefferson the idealist, war.
Adams observed that the loss of the Mediterranean trade would cost more than tribute, as would war. Therefore, tribute was preferable. In the best Enlightenment fashion, Adams set forth four propositions:
1. Peace could be purchased;
2. Without payment, there could be no peace in the Mediterranean;
3. No actions by Europe would either increase or lower peace’s price; and
4. Delayed negotiations would drive up the price America would ultimately pay.
“From these premises, I conclude it to be the wisest for us to negotiate and pay the necessary sum without loss of time.”
What did Jefferson think? Adams wanted to know. “If you admit them all, do you admit the conclusion? Perhaps you will say, fight them, though it should cost us a great sum to carry on the war, and although, at the end of it, we should have more money to pay as presents. If this is your sentiment, and you can persuade the southern States into it, I dare answer for it that all from Pennsylvania, inclusively northward, would not object. It would be a good occasion to begin a navy.”
This last ringing phrase would resonate through the years. It was odd that the man who uttered it would commonly be mischaracterized as having opposed war with Barbary. Adams was certain America would win once it resolved to fight, “but the difficulty of bringing our people to agree upon it, has ever discouraged me....” It was too bad there was no support for a war, because it would be “heroical and glorious” at a time when “the policy of Christendom has made cowards of all their sailors before the standard of Mahomet.” Realistically, though, there was neither money nor public support for a war, Adams said, concluding that the immediate goal should be to restore the Mediterranean trade and nothing more; its absence was simply too costly. “At present we are sacrificing a million annually, to save one gift of 200,000 pounds. This is not good economy. We might, at this hour, have two hundred ships in the Mediterranean, whose freights alone would be worth 200,000 pounds, besides the influence upon the price of our produce.”
Jefferson replied with one of the most eloquent letters that he ever wrote. “I acknowledge, I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war,” he began. “Though it is a question with which we have nothing to do, yet as you propose some discussion of it, I shall trouble you with my reasons.” He agreed with Adams’s first three propositions. “As to the fourth, that the longer the negotiation is delayed, the larger will be the demand; this will depend on the intermediate captures: if they are many and rich, the price may be raised; if few and poor, it will be lessened.”
A better policy would be to dictate peace through the expedient of war, through the agency of a navy. Jefferson gave six reasons, the first three reflecting his idealized vision of America:
1. Justice is in favor of this opinion.
2. Honor favors it.
3. It will procure us respect in Europe; and respect is a safeguard to interest.
4. It will arm the Federal head with the safest of all the instruments of coercion over its delinquent members, and prevent it from using what would be less safe. I think that so far, you go with me. But in the next steps, we shall differ.
5. I think it least expensive.
Jefferson then performed some dubious math. Building the 150-gun naval fleet he envisioned would cost 450,000 pounds sterling, and maintaining it, he claimed, 45,000 pounds annually—little more than what annual tribute might cost. America should build a small navy, war or no, to protect trade, he reasoned, and keeping it idle would still entail cost—fully half the price of having it patrol the western Mediterranean. Therefore, “we have a right to say that only twenty-two thousand and five hundred pounds sterling, per annum, should be charged to the Algerine war.”
His sixth reason, “It will be as effectual,” was predicated on his recollection that France once was able to dictate treaty terms to Algiers after a three-month blockade. The United States also could establish a blockade, aided by Naples and Portugal, and perhaps other nations as well.
Adams conceded there were excellent reasons for going to war with the Barbary States. “The resolution to fight them would raise the spirits and courage of our countrymen immediately, and we might obtain the glory of finally breaking up these nests of banditti.” But while glory and fighting spirit were admirable ideals, they were too insubstantial to justify a war that would end only in a purchased peace, and that would harm America more than Barbary. “If We take a Vessell of theirs We get nothing but a bad Vessell fit only to burn, a few Guns and a few Barbarians, whom We may hang or enslave if We will, and the Unfeeling Tyrants whose Subjects they are will think no more of it, than if We had killed so many CatterPillars upon an Apple tree. When they take a Vessell of ours, they not only get a rich Prize, but they enslave the Men and if there is among them a Man of any Rank or Note they demand most exorbitant ransoms for them.” Moreover, “congress will never, or at least not for years, take any such resolution, and in the mean time our trade and honor suffers beyond calculation. We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever. This thought, I fear, is too rugged for our people to bear.” Adams saw all too well that their debate, stimulating as it might be, was of no consequence. “... I perceive that neither force nor money will be applied. Our States are so backward, that they will do nothing for some years.”
Adams’s words tellingly described the United States under the weak Articles of Confederation, which emphasized the sovereignty of individuals and states at the expense of the federal government. The Confederation government first had to obtain the approval of nine of the thirteen states before taking any important action. Nine states seldom agreed on anything, even foreign trade, which to a large extent was left up to the individual states, and with chaotic results: states vying with and undercutting one another to snatch foreign markets. The treasury was heavily in debt from the Revolutionary War. In 1785, the government sold the last Continental Navy warship, the Alliance, to pay off some of the debt. The Confederation Congress’s sole tax, the postage stamp, paid for mail delivery only.
A navy couldn’t very well be built with postage stamps.
America’s dilemma in the Mediterranean was painfully clear in Philadelphia. George Washington voiced the leaders’ frustration. “It seems almost Nugatory to dispute about the best mode of dealing with the Algarines when we have neither money to buy their friendship nor the means of punishing them for their depredations upon our people & trade,” he wrote the Marquis de Lafayette in 1787. “If we could command the latter I should be clearly in sentiments with you and Mr. Jefferson, that chastisement would be more honorouble, and much to be preferred to the purchased friendship of these Barbarians—By me, who perhaps do not understand the policy by which the Maritime powers are actuated, it has ever been considered as reflecting the highest disgrace on them to become tributary to such a banditti, who might for half the sum that is paid them be exterminated from the Earth.”
John Jay, too, longed to wage war on Algiers. “‘I should not be angry,’” the French ambassador said the foreign secretary told him, “‘if the Algerines came to burn some of our maritime Towns, in order to restore to the United States their former energy, which peace and Commerce have almost destroyed. War alone can bring together the various States, and give a new importance to Congress....’” Jay also confided to Jefferson, “If we act properly, I shall not be very sorry for it. In my Opinion it may lay the Foundation for a Navy, and tend to draw us more closely into a foederal System.”
Years before the Abdrahaman meeting, before the capture of the three American merchantmen by Morocco and Algiers, Jefferson had advocated building a navy to stand up to the Barbary States. As was to be his lifelong habit, Jefferson shared his ideas with his fellow Virginians, confidants and proteges, James Madison and James Monroe. “We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce,” he wrote to Madison in November 1784. “Can we begin it on a more honourable occasion or with a weaker foe? I am of opinion [John] Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy their commerce; not by attempting bombardments as the Mediterranean states do ... but by constant cruising and cutting them to peices by peicemeal.” He confided his private assay of the Barbary States’ naval strength to Monroe. “These pyrates are contemptibly weak,” he concluded. Morocco, he said, had four or five frigates of 18 or 20 guns. Tripoli floated a single frigate, and Tunis, three or four, every one of them “small & worthless.” Algiers was more formidable with 16 ships carrying 22 to 52 guns. He was decidedly unimpressed with them all. “... the vessels of all these powers are wretched in the last degree, being mostly built of the discordant peices of other vessels which they take & pull asunder.” War, as he would repeatedly declare, was the only currency besides bribes and tribute that the Barbary States respected. He neatly summarized his thoughts on the subject in a striking aphorism: “A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”
Odd as it may seem, Morocco’s seizure of the Betsey wasn’t so much an act of war as a cry for attention. Emperor Sidi Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, arguably the mildest, wisest Barbary ruler at the time, had had a rooting interest in the upstart colonists during the Revolutionary War, a strange attitude for a monarch. For years, he had anticipated diplomatic relations with the American republic. Back in 1780, with the war’s outcome by no means decided, the emperor had told U.S. consuls from Spain that if America won independence from England, he wished to sign a treaty. It was more than just a pecuniary interest; Sidi Muhammad genuinely wanted to be one of the first rulers to recognize the new nation.
Sidi Muhammad grew impatient when four years passed without a U.S. envoy arriving in Tangier. In 1784 he ordered his corsairs to seize American shipping, extremely scarce in the Mediterranean that year. The Betsey was taken in October. Alcaid Driss, the emperor’s secretary, explained to William Carmichael, interim U.S. charge d‘affaires in Madrid, in December that America had brought the misfortune on itself by disregarding Sidi Muhammad. “It is not surprising then that he should use his rights, in such sort however that the Vessel with its Crew shall be returned provided that Congress thinks proper to send as soon as possible a Charge d’Affaires or Consul for the purpose of making peace with this August African Monarch.” The emperor anticipated an envoy bearing generous gifts.
In the meantime, he impulsively displayed his benevolence toward America by sending the Betsey’s crewmen to the Atlantic port of Mogadore and giving them the run of the city, instead of sending them into slavery. He also instructed his corsairs not to capture any more American merchant ships, but “to show them every favour, due to the most friendly powers; being fully determined to do much, when an opportunity offers.” By July 1785 he had decided to release the Betsey and her crew, although no U.S. envoy had yet appeared in Tangier. Sidi Muhammad’s long wait ended in 1786, with Thomas Barclay’s arrival. The envoy and the emperor quickly concluded the best treaty America would make in Barbary in thirty years: $10,000 in presents and no annual tribute.
Algiers showed no compunction to deliver up the Dauphin and Maria and their twenty-one crewmen, so John Lamb, a Norwich, Connecticut, merchant and sea captain, was dispatched to ransom them. Ignorant of the dey’s capacity for greed, Adams and Jefferson instructed Lamb to spend no more than $200 per man, laughably inadequate when it turned out Algiers wanted $3,000 each. Unsurprisingly, Lamb’s mission was a disaster. With the report on his failed effort, Lamb passed along even more disturbing news: that Algiers had seized the ships possibly at the urging of Charles Logie, England’s consul in Algiers. Lamb it turned out, hadn’t been a paragon of diplomacy himself while in Algiers, but had ill-advisedly confided in Logie. Richard O‘Brien, master of the Dauphin and a future U.S. consul to Algiers, wrote to Jefferson that Logie “I believe got all his [Lamb’s] secrets from him.” Moreover, he had also spoken with open contempt of France and Spain—in “the most vulgar language that it is with pain we see him so unworthy of this commission and the cloth he wore.”
Britain’s antipathy toward American trade in the Mediterranean was no secret. English businessmen liked to think of Algerian piracy as a cornerstone of their Mediterranean trade. “If there were no Algiers, England ought to build one,” Adams had reported them saying in 1783. Lord Sheffield expanded on this theme in Observations on the commerce of the American States the same year. He shrewdly recognized the vital importance to Britain of the “carrying trade”—the ability to transport goods from all countries in English merchant ships—as well as the threat to it posed by America. For these reasons, the Algerian pirates were a godsend. “That the Barbary States are advantageous to the maritime powers is certain. If they were suppressed, the little States of Italy, &c. would have much more of the carrying trade.” As for the Americans, Lord Sheffield believed that without Britain’s navy as a bulwark, they were defenseless against the corsairs and must abandon any plans to establish a thriving Mediterranean trade, for, as he put it dismissively, “... they cannot pretend to a navy.”
After Lamb’s failure in Algiers, Jefferson appealed to the Mathurins, the Redemptionist order. They had recently ransomed 300 Frenchmen from Algiers at $500 apiece. The friars’ success encouraged Jefferson in the wildly optimistic belief that they might be able to gain the American captives’ freedom for $200, by acting as a disinterested third party. Willing to make the attempt, the Mathurins said the ploy had a slim chance of working only if the U.S. government pretended a complete lack of concern for the prisoners’ welfare, and cut off the trickle of extra cash it was sending the consuls in Portugal and Spain who, in turn, had slipped it to the captives through the Spanish consul in Algiers. The money paid for extra clothing and food. When the payments stopped, the captives were forced back on a semistarvation diet and had to wear thin, ragged garments. They implored Congress, Jefferson, and Adams to resume the stipends.
The captives’ renewed suffering was to no good purpose, for the Algerians were unwilling to lower their ransom price; slaves happened to be in scarce supply at the time. Jefferson raised the sum he was willing to pay to $550 per captive, but by then the situation had changed altogether. Amid the French Revolution’s early rumblings, the Mathurins, fixtures in Barbary for nearly 200 years, recalled all the friars to France. Soon, the vast landholdings that had sustained the Mathurins’ merciful enterprises through the centuries were confiscated, and the good friars were seen no more in North Africa.
For a public man, Thomas Jefferson was remarkably reticent and shrank from confrontations, letting Madison fight many of his battles for him while he watched from the wings. But when his ideals were affronted, Jefferson was capable of retaliating ruthlessly.
An example of Jefferson’s capacity for vindictiveness occurred during the War for Independence, when Henry Hamilton, the British commander in Ohio and Kentucky, was captured by Virginia militiamen. The colonists hated Hamilton for reputedly buying scalps from Britain’s Indian allies and encouraging them to commit atrocities. The militia brought him to Williamsburg in chains and before the Virginia governor, Thomas Jefferson.
Under the wartime rules, high-ranking officers commonly were paroled or exchanged. But Hamilton’s actions so incensed Jefferson that he ignored custom and instead ordered him put in irons and denied visitors and even writing materials. Hamilton had surrendered to George Rogers Clark, the leader of the Virginia militia, only after Clark had agreed to certain conditions regarding his treatment. Jefferson refused to honor any of these terms. Threatened by the British with retaliation against American prisoners if Hamilton were not paroled, George Washington appealed to Jefferson—to no avail. Jefferson stubbornly refused to release Hamilton. He held him for a full year before finally paroling him, and only after forcing Hamilton to sign an agreement whose terms Hamilton disputed even as he put his name to it.
Jefferson displayed the same iron vindictiveness after his failure to ransom the Maria and Dauphin crews, casting about for ways to punish the Barbary States. Without his government’s knowledge, he approached the smaller European nations with the idea of forming a confederation to blockade Algiers. Each nation would contribute either a vessel or cash and sit on a committee that would oversee the confederation’s operations. Jefferson believed that with six frigates, half on duty at any given time, Algiers or any other Barbary State could be blockaded efficiently. There had never been a long-term naval coalition like this, but Jefferson was confident it would work, with its ships pouncing on Algerian corsairs when they left port and turning trading vessels away from Algiers. In his secret idealistic heart, Jefferson believed that such a permanent blockade not only would stop Algiers’s attacks on European and U.S. shipping, but would bring about a gun-to-the-head sort of epiphany that would transform the pirate regency into an agrarian nation, possibly resembling the rural republican utopia he envisioned America becoming.
When he consulted the European ministers in Paris about a naval blockading confederation, he found them surprisingly supportive. Portugal, the Two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, Denmark, and Sweden all were interested, but one thing worried them: France. Would France undermine the confederation? As they all well knew, France and England both wanted to suppress commercial competition in the Mediterranean. Jefferson took it upon himself to determine France’s position, but in his own indirect way. While John Adams would have bluntly asked France’s foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, what France would do—and likely would have received an ambiguous or false reply—Jefrerson was subtler: He laid out the confederation scheme for Vergennes and then asked him whether he thought England would interfere. England wouldn’t dare, Vergennes declared. Satisfied by his response that France, too, would not stop the blockade, Jefferson now only needed to obtain the backing of his own government to launch the naval coalition.
Once again, he chose subtlety over directness. One of Jefferson’s virtues was his willingness to let others advance his ideas—even take credit for them—if it improved their chances of being adopted. He placed the coalition proposal in the hands of the Marquis de Lafayette, America’s great French ally and Revolutionary War hero. Jefferson chose Lafayette as the messenger because he feared that if he proposed the coalition to the Confederation Congress, too much would be made of his difference of opinion with Adams over Barbary, and that might overshadow the plan itself and wreck its chances. With Lafayette as the plan’s advocate—and Lafayette always was willing to take a high-profile position on important issues—the proposal would stand or fall on its merits. Jefferson and Lafayette collaborated on a version to present to Congress.
Lafayette first presented the plan to George Washington, forthrightly addressing the Adams—Jefferson disagreement and neatly disposing of it. “There is betwen Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Adams a diversity of opinion respecting the Algerines. Adams thinks peace should be purchased from them, Mr. Jefferson finds it as cheap and more honourable to cruize against them. I incline to the latter opinion, and think it possible to form an alliance between the United States, Naples, Rome, Venice, Portugal and some other powers, each giving a sum of money not very large, whereby a common armement may distress the Algerines into any terms. Congress ought to give Mr. Jefferson and Adams ample powers to stipulate in their names for such a confederacy.” Washington didn’t stand in Lafayette’s way. In 1787 Virginia formally proposed the coalition to Congress, recommending that Jefferson represent the United States.
Jay shot down the idea, and everyone knew he was right, even Jefferson. The Confederation government, he said, was far too feeble to participate in a federation, handcuffed by the requirement that nine states first approve every important action, and without authority to levy a tax to build a navy. That was the end of Jefferson’s coalition against Algiers. As he put it, Congress “declined an engagement which they were conscious they could not fulfill with punctuality; and so it fell through.”