V
There is but one language which can be held to these people, and this is terror.
—William Eaton, U.S. consul to Tunis
The Senate ratified the Algerian treaty on March 2, 1796, and on March 15 President Washington unhappily pointed out to Congress that the Naval Establishment Act obliged him to stop work on the frigates. The prospect of a work stoppage concerned him, he confessed, for “the loss which the public would incur might be considerable, from the dissipation of workmen, from certain works or operations being suddenly dropped or left unfinished and from the derangement in the whole system.” By that, he meant the ironworks, shipyards, lumberyards, and foundries employed in frigate building. Its loss might not “comport with the public interest.” Another reason for Washington’s discomfiture was that every penny of the budgeted $688,888 already had been sunk into the frigates, plus another $400,000 in overruns. If the frigate building were aborted with no issue, it would be $1 million wasted. Seeing the point, the Senate overrode the act’s work-stoppage stipulation, authorizing completion of two 44-gun frigates and one 36-gun frigate—the United States, the Constitution, and the Constellation.
A new threat arose—France, upset over the Jay Treaty negotiated with England in 1794. It angered France for what it did, and Republicans in America for what it didn’t do.
Former Foreign Secretary John Jay had attempted to persuade the British to reopen the West Indies to unrestricted American trade—reprising Adams’s 1780s mission. Many American commodities still were barred from West Indies ports, and no American ships were permitted to dock. The Jay Treaty’s major achievement was obtaining most-favored-nation status for American ships trading in Britain, but it failed to loosen up West Indies trade and amazingly conceded to the British the right to seize U.S. goods bound for France. This wasn’t a case of a bumpkin getting fleeced by slick London operators, but a shrewd bet by Washington and his advisers that when the half century of intermittent warfare between England and France ended—whenever that might be—England would be left standing, and not France. Also factored into their thinking was the feeling that America would have to fight England again one day, but that America’s chances of surviving the British onslaught would improve with time; the Jay Treaty pushed back the inevitable war two decades. Knowing that the Republicans would be furious over Jay’s yielding to the English over France, the Washington administration withheld the treaty’s details from Congress. It wasn’t until February 29, 1796, that the administration held its breath and grudgingly released the full treaty. Republicans exploded, accusing Federalists of appeasing America’s old enemy.
France denounced the treaty, claiming it violated the Franco—American alliance forged in 1778 at the height of the Revolutionary War. The French retaliated by adopting the same stance toward American goods bound for Britain that the Jay Treaty granted Britain in regard to France. French privateers began seizing U.S. merchantmen in the West Indies. In just one year, France captured more than 300 U.S. vessels.
Taking office in March 1797 as the second president, John Adams had never disputed the wisdom of creating a U.S. Navy in his exchange of views with Jefferson the decade before. He had agreed with Jefferson that standing up to the Barbary States “would be a good occasion to begin a navy.” But with the Treasury empty and full of misgivings about the American will to wage a distant foreign war, he had advised paying tribute. Now that the United States had money and the beginnings of a navy, he aimed to use both in the nation’s defense against France. “A naval power, next to the militia, is the natural defense of the United States,” he told Congress on May 16, 1797, but “the establishment of a permanent system of naval defense ... can not be formed so speedily and extensively as the present crisis demands.” He asked Congress to give him authority to arm merchantmen, to ready the three new super frigates for sea duty, and to allocate funds to build more warships.
Congress promptly granted him the authority to expand the Navy and disbursed $392,512 for this purpose in March 1798, as the ignominious details of the “XYZ Affair” began leaking out, fanning animosity toward France to fever pitch. Elbridge Gerry, John Marshall, and Charles C. Pinckney, sent to Paris on a peace mission, had met three minor French officials—identified by Adams in subsequent reports only as agents X, Y, and Z. The French envoys haughtily announced negotiations were possible only if their foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, received a $250,000 gift and the United States loaned France $10 million. Pinckney’s forceful reply, “No, no, not a sixpence,” was inflated in the retelling into the ringing “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” which became the national rallying cry of the day. Not long afterward, a French privateer sank a British ship in Charleston harbor, a flagrant violation of neutrality.
By the time Adams finally laid all the details of the XYZ Affair before the Federalist-controlled Congress, legislators were ready to act. Congress’s pent-up hostility toward France over the 300 ship captures and the XYZ Affair burst forth in a torrent of legislation to stem the Jacobin threat. It changed the U.S. military and began America’s transformation into a naval power. Congress created a Navy Department; authorized construction of twelve 22-gun ships, ten small vessels, and cannon foundries; approved twelve more ships of 20—24 guns each; suspended commerce with France and authorized seizure of French privateers “hovering” off the U.S. coast; sanctioned completion of the last of the original six frigates, the President, Congress, and Chesapeake; and authorized Adams to accept up to twenty-four warships built with money raised from the public during subscription drives. The drives were enormously successful, tapping into the rabid anti-French sentiment predominant in most areas. The Navy acquired the frigates Essex from Essex County, Massachusetts, the John Adams from Charleston, and the Philadelphia and the New York from the cities for which they were named. As an exclamation point to this flood of martial legislation, Congress created the U.S. Marine Corps on July 11, 1798. It was a second act for America’s “soldiers of the sea,” whose training and hierarchy mirrored the British Marines, crack shipboard and assault troops first organized in 1664. During the Revolutionary War, Continental Marines—perhaps 50 officers and 2,000 enlisted men altogether—had served on American warships through 1784, but they disbanded along with the rest of the Continental military establishment. Today, the Marine Corps observes as its birthday the date of the Continental Marine Corps’ establishment: November 10, 1775.
Having acted decisively to defend the homeland’s waters against the enemy without, Congress turned somewhat hysterically to quelling threats from within, a perilous business indeed, as latter-day defenders of the republic have found out in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Congress amended the Naturalization Act to extend the residency requirement for citizenship to fourteen years from five years. The new Alien Act empowered the president for two years to deport aliens he deemed dangerous, and the Alien Enemies Act permitted the arrest and deportation of male aliens from enemy nations. The Logan Act made it a high misdemeanor for U.S. citizens to parley with foreign powers without government sanction, a slap at Dr. George Logan’s quixotic one-man mission to France. Then came the Sedition Act, the most dangerous of all: Any written or verbal criticism of the government, its policies, or officers could be prosecuted in federal court as a criminal libel. Outraged free-speech advocates poured into the streets of Philadelphia. Troops had to be called out to break up fights between Republicans and Federalists. The successful Federalist blitz proved to be a Pyrrhic victory; the backlash splintered the party and in 1800 cost the party the White House and control of Congress. It would never regain either.
The Lesser Antilles parenthetically close off the eastern Caribbean against the Atlantic in a sweeping curve from Puerto Rico to Venezuela. These tiny islands were the West’s trading crossroad, where the raw goods of the Americas found their way into ships from Spain, France, England, Holland, and Portugal. It was where America and France fought their naval war, beginning in November 1798.
The 20-gun Montezuma, 18-gun Norfolk, and 14-gun Retaliation were cruising off Guadeloupe when they spotted two ships sailing west. The Montezuma and Norfolk took off in pursuit. The Retaliation, commanded by Lieutenant William Bainbridge, stayed behind to watch some unidentified ships off to the east that Bainbridge was sure were British. He was wrong; they were large French frigates—the 40-gun L‘Insurgente, and the 44-gun Voluntaire. The French pounced, and Bainbridge struck his flag, surrendering—the first of the bad luck that would dog his naval career. When he was questioned by the French about the two ships they had seen with the Retaliation, Bainbridge exaggerated their size, and the French decided it would be unwise to pursue them.
U.S. warships were ordered to seize and destroy French commerce. Navy Secretary Stoddert dispatched twenty-one more, divided into four squadrons commanded by John Barry, Thomas Truxtun, Thomas Tingey, and Stephen Decatur, Sr., whose son would become one of the nineteenth century’s first naval heroes. Two squadrons cruised in the Lesser Antilles and two near Cuba, hunting French merchantmen and convoying American merchantmen. Convoy duty could be enervating, especially for young naval officers craving combat, but the merchants welcomed the escorts. Besides protecting their investments, they brought down insurance rates, which had soared after the initial French seizures.
The war wasn’t all convoys, though; sometimes American warships fought French warships. In the Leeward Islands in February 1799, Truxtun and his 36-gun Constellation encountered L‘Insurgente, one of the ships that had forced Bainbridge to strike his colors. A gale had torn down the big French frigate’s main topmast, and it had no choice but to stand and fight. Making the most of her relative immobility, Truxtun’s gunners aimed withering cannon fire at L’Insurgente‘s rigging and sails. The French fought back gamely. The battle became so intense that a fiery Constellationofficer, Lieutenant Andrew Sterett, killed one of his own men for leaving his post. Sterett described the incident succinctly in a letter home: “One fellow I was obliged to run through the body with my sword, and so put an end to a coward.” After resisting for an hour and a half, the French commander surrendered, with 29 killed and 41 wounded. Aside from the crewman slain for shirking, just 3 Americans were wounded. Sterett’s rash act went unreported in the official account. In February 1800, Truxtun’s Constellation fought a four-hour battle with La Vengeancethat ended in a draw. While the Constellation’s carronades concentrated on La Vengeance’s deck and hull, the French shredded the Constellation’s rigging and took down her mainmast, then somehow managed to limp away.
The Quasi-War ended with the 1800 Treaty of Mortefontaine. France agreed to stop the illegal ship seizures and released the United States from the 1778 French—American alliance formed to fight Britain. The United States dropped its maritime damage claims. During the two-year undeclared war, France captured 159 U.S. merchantmen, but American ships recaptured 100 of them and seized 86 French merchant vessels. While there was no clear victor, the U.S. Navy gained confidence and experience and won nearly every engagement, while losing only the Retaliation.At the war’s end, the Navy had 33 ships afloat, 17 coastal defense vessels and revenue cutters, and more than 5,000 officers and crewmen. Naval power advocates were thrilled that so much had been achieved so quickly. They were certain the U.S. Navy was on its way to great things.
“He was like a huge, shaggy beast, sitting on a low bench, with his hind legs gathered up like a tailor or like a bear,” wrote U.S. consul William Eaton of his first meeting with Algiers’s new dey, Bobba Mustapha. The new American consuls to the Barbary States had reluctantly removed their shoes before padding into the dey’s throne room. “On our approach, he reached out his fore paw, which Consul O‘Brien was obliged to kiss, and we—including four American ship captains—followed his example. The animal at that time seemed to be in a harmless mood. He grinned several times, but made very little noise.”
The February 1799 audience was a courtesy call by the new American consuls in North Africa. Richard O‘Brien, the former captain of the Dauphin, was the new consul general for the Barbary Coast and consul to Algiers, the regency that had enslaved him for eleven years. Eaton was assigned to Tunis and the task of placating Hamouda Pacha, who had been bey for one year. James Cathcart, another eleven-year survivor of Algiers’s bagnio, was the Tripoli consul. Cathcart had mediated and translated during the Algiers—United States negotiations that resulted in the 1795 treaty with Bobba’s predecessor, Hassan Pasha; Hassan had died in 1798.
O‘Brien had arrived first and was on hand to welcome Cathcart and Eaton when the Sophia had docked at the quay in Algiers two weeks earlier. Cathcart and O’Brien disliked one another from their long years as fellow captives. (O‘Brien had tried to block Cathcart’s appointment as Tripoli consul.) They were opposites in temperament, which might have been part of the problem. O’Brien was a composed man who tended to coolness, while Cathcart was a high-tempered former seaman of Irish lineage and limited education, but unlimited resourcefulness. While a captive in Algiers, Cathcart had made a handsome profit running a tavern in the prison while managing to work his way into the dey’s confidence and becoming his secretary.
While Cathcart and O‘Brien weren’t happy to see one another, Bobba surely was cheered by the sight of the Sophia’s three consorts—the Hassan Bashaw, Skjoldebrand, and Lela Eisha; the former two were the brig and schooner he had ordered, and the latter was an appeasing gift from the United States for the delayed tributary naval stores. There should have been a fourth Sophia consort, but the Hero, loaded with overdue naval stores for Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, had been forced to turn back at Jamaica after springing a leak. The chronic delays already had begun to corrode America’s relationship with the rulers of the three Barbary regencies. Bobba, however, was the least agitated of them, having recently received the brand-new Crescent, the frigate promised by the U.S. treaty, with its hold full of treasure: twenty-six barrels brimming with silver dollars, a last installment on the 1795 agreement. Together, ship and cargo were worth roughly $300,000.
The consuls’ quayside salutations quickly faded as an imbroglio that had festered in the Sophia‘s tight accommodations during the long ocean voyage suddenly erupted on the Algiers dock. Betsy Robeson, the twenty-year-old companion to Cathcart’s new bride, the former Jane Woodside, announced she wanted to return to America and to have nothing more to do with the Cathcarts. The young woman appealed to O’Brien for protection until her return trip could be arranged. Whatever happened during the Atlantic crossing to alienate Miss Robeson remains a minor mystery. But Cathcart’s propensity for crude language and his explosive verbal abusiveness likely contributed to Ms. Robeson’s decision to sever relations, and there also might have been an unwelcome romantic overture. What happened next was abundantly clear: O‘Brien’s temporary guardianship over Miss Robeson blossomed into a blazing courtship. Six weeks later, Miss Robeson became Mrs. O’Brien. The strange affair permanently poisoned relations between Cathcart and O‘Brien.
A divided American diplomatic mission was a poor footing upon which to begin establishing amity with the notoriously fractious Barbary States. While it was hardly ruinous, it would complicate matters for Eaton, suddenly thrust into the role of go-between.
Iconoclast and maverick, brilliant and mercurial, William Eaton was a most unique consul, destined for glory when he arrived in Barbary two weeks shy of his thirty-fourth birthday. Described in later years as a small Andrew Jackson because of his quick temper and pugnacity, Eaton was born in 1764, one of thirteen children of a Woodstock, Connecticut, farmer. As a child, Eaton was a voracious reader, and never was interested in farming. He said later in life that Plutarch’s Lives, the book that had taught Henry Knox about naval warfare, had also influenced him powerfully. When he was 15, he enlisted in the Continental Army, where he spent an uneventful three years, never seeing action but rising to sergeant-major rank. After the War of Independence, he taught school for a few years and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Dartmouth College, where he showed an affinity for languages. His education completed, he became clerk of the Vermont House of Delegates. So far the arc of his life followed the conventional path of a bright patriot bound for modest achievements.
In the House of Delegates, Eaton’s natural charm and gift for lobbying emerged, and he might have embarked on a comfortable political career had he not been restless, ambitious, and adventurous.
In 1792 Eaton rejoined the Army, accepting a captain’s commission under Major General “Mad Anthony” Wayne. While training in Massachusetts, he met Eliza Danielson, the fortyish widow of Brigadier General Timothy Danielson, a Revolutionary War militia leader. They married, and he became the stepfather of two teenage children before he marched off with Wayne’s army to campaign in the Ohio Valley against the Miami Indians.
The assignment was life-changing. For the first time, Eaton was able to observe firsthand a man he thought worthy of emulation. Eaton wrote of Wayne:
He endured fatigue and hardship with a fortitude uncommon to men of his years. I have seen him in the most severe night of the winter of ‘94, sleep on the ground like his fellow soldier; and walk around his camp at four in the morning, with the vigilance of a sentinel.... When in danger, he is in his element; and never shows so good advantage as when leading a charge. His name is better in an action, or in an enemy’s country, than a brigade of undisciplined levies.
Wayne assigned Eaton to the American Legion, an early specialoperations unit. Eaton learned guerrilla warfare, rapid movement, living off the land, and Indian languages. He infiltrated the Miami villages and gathered intelligence. Perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, Wayne promoted Eaton to deputy commander, and they became close friends. Wayne entrusted Fort Recovery to Eaton’s charge while Wayne pursued the enemy into the forests, a sharp disappointment for Eaton. As things turned out, he had little time to brood; the Miami outmaneuvered Wayne and attacked Fort Recovery. For seven desperate hours, Eaton and his men repelled frenzied attacks by 500 Indians. Finally they gave up and melted back into the thick woods. Wayne gave Eaton permanent command of the fort as a reward, and this time Eaton missed the campaign’s climactic battle—Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers, which forced the Miamis’ capitulation.
With hostilities ended in the Ohio Valley, the War Department assigned Eaton to Georgia. He patrolled the troubled Florida border, where the Spanish tried to keep the Indian tribes stirred up against the Georgians. Colonel Henry Gaither, Eaton’s commander, grew to dislike Eaton. Perhaps he was jealous of Eaton’s pipeline to War Secretary Timothy Pickering, with whom Eaton corresponded directly. He also might have been irritated by the Georgia legislature awarding Eaton land and honorary Georgia membership in appreciation for keeping peace along the St. Mary’s River. Gaither court-martialed Eaton for insubordination and for allegedly selling government supplies to the Indians for personal gain. While Eaton was cleared of both charges, his Georgia assignment and Army career ended.
Eaton went to Philadelphia to wait for his officer’s commission to expire. In what turned out to be a piece of career-making good luck, the government put him to work as a counterespionage agent. Eaton trapped and arrested a spy, then fed false information to the Spanish that resulted in a new, favorable treaty between Spain and the United States. The grateful Adams administration wanted to know how it could reward Eaton for his service, and he had a ready answer. In Georgia and while waiting out his commission in Philadelphia, he had developed a passion for the Arab world. He had read and reread the Koran and everything else he could find on Islam, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Dreaming of one day visiting the Levant, he even had taught himself some Arabic. He told the Adams administration he would be happy to be named consul to Tunis.
Eaton’s jubilation at receiving his dream assignment faded quickly once he settled in at Tunis, where right away he began to renegotiate two annoying provisions of the 1797 treaty that the U.S. Senate had refused to approve. The first required the United States to send Tunis a barrel of gunpowder each time Tunis’s fortress guns saluted an arriving American ship. Tunis was generous with its salutes, and gunpowder was expensive. The second provision was more serious: It allowed Tunis at any time to commandeer any U.S. merchantman, so long as paid what decided was a fair price. Eaton raised the treaty issues during his initial meeting with Hamouda Pacha, sending the bey into a rant about the delayed naval stores, which had been aboard the leaky Hero, and evoking a demand for more weapons and money, as well as a ship, which Eaton rejected. The Hero‘s ruined cargo, being replaced in the United States, soured the relationship between Eaton and the bey for months.
Eaton managed to renegotiate the objectionable treaty provisions, excising the article permitting the Tunisians to commandeer U.S. merchantmen and compromising on the cannon salutes: A Tunisian cannon salute still would require payment of a barrel of gunpowder, but could be answered by an American salute, for a similar payment. The salutes would cancel out one another. But the bey continued to badger Eaton about the delayed naval stores.
Eaton’s outrage over the Barbary rulers’ imperiousness soon began to boil over in his correspondence. The obsequiousness expected of the foreign consuls was particularly galling when he considered the caliber of the North African ruling class: “Not much shall be feared nor expected from a people whose principal ministers, principal merchants and principal generals consume day after day in the same company smoking tobacco and playing at chess,” he wrote to Pickering. “While the citizens and soldiers are sauntering in rags, sleeping against walls, or praying away their lives under the shrines of departed saints—Such is the military, and such the industry of Barbary—yet to the shame of humanity they dictate terms to powerful nations!!!”
Eaton also disliked and distrusted Joseph Etienne Famin, the French trader who, at Joel Barlow’s request, had midwifed the original U.S. treaty with Tunis. As Eaton built up his own network of contacts in Tunis, he became convinced Famin was systematically undercutting the United States with the bey and advising the bey’s chief minister, the sapitapa, about how to squeeze more money from America.
Eaton initially tried to ignore and shun Famin, but fate set them on a trajectory toward collision. The master of the U.S. merchantman Lizzie one day complained to Eaton that Famin had solicited a $1,000 bribe from him, claiming he could help him circumvent the Tunisian taxes on his cargo. Eaton was certain that Famin would have kept the bribe money, informed the sapitapa that the Lizzie was cheating him on taxes, and gotten the master thrown in prison, thereby winning points with the dey. And Eaton would have had to use his own money to free him. As he and the Lizzie‘s master walked through Tunis’s streets together talking, Eaton’s anger grew.
They unexpectedly encountered Famin, and Eaton confronted him with the Lizzie master’s allegations. Famin told him to mind his own business. Eaton’s quick temper flared. Snatching a whip from a mule-cart driver, he began horsewhipping Famin in the street, before a crowd of Tunisians. Bleeding and utterly humiliated, the Frenchman finally managed to crawl away on his hands and knees. He went straight to the sapitapa. The bey summoned Eaton and Famin to explain what had happened. The articulate Eaton was better prepared, even quoting Famin as having referred to the bey’s prime minister and his officers as “thieves and robbers.” The bey sent Famin away and invited Eaton to dine with him.
O‘Brien and Cathcart believed that, with encouragement, the Barbary States gradually would embrace legitimate trade and abandon piracy. Eaton, however, was convinced Barbary would never change willingly. “The United States set out wrongly, and have proceeded so. ... There is but one language which can be held to these people, and this is terror. ” Congress must “send a force into these seas, at least to check the insolence of these scoundrels and to render themselves respectable.” If America’s elected officials would not resolve to fight Barbary, “I hope they will resolve at their next session to wrest the quiverofarrows from the left talon of the eagle, in their arms, and substitute a fiddlebow or a segar in lieu. ”
O‘Brien and Cathcart came around to Eaton’s bleak view after a wearing, frustrating year of attempting to placate the dey and bashaw, respectively. The demands never ceased. For example, Bobba Mustapha expected to be paid $20,000 in silver upon the appointment of a new consul. On his birthday, he looked forward to a gift of $17,000 in hard cash. And that amount was deemed a fitting present for his eldest son’s birthday, too, and for each of the various Moslem holidays.
Eaton, whose fraying relationship with the bey was now punctuated by shouting matches, believed that France and England were instigating the trouble. He forwarded what evidence he could gather to Pickering. “I don’t pray often, but on this occasion I pray devoutly that the armies of Europe may bleed each other till they faint with the loss of blood.”
In the nick of time for Eaton, the repaired Hero arrived in Tunis in April 1800 with masts, gunpowder, cannons, and small arms. Tensions eased temporarily between Tunis and America. The bey, however, wished to be at war with some nation; his corsair crews were restless. The shadow fell on Denmark, whose treaty also pledged annual tribute of naval stores. Unfortunately for Denmark, its naval stores arrived after America’s. The bey found them to be inferior and left them to rot on Tunis’s docks. Tunisian soldiers chopped down the flagpole at the Danish consulate. Freshly armed with new American cannons, ammunition, and powder, Tunisian corsairs sailed into the Mediterranean to hunt Danish merchantmen, bagging eight, with cargo and crews worth millions of dollars. The Danish ship captains despaired over their heavy losses.
Eaton came to their rescue, buying six of the seized vessels on credit. He restored the ships to their captains at cost, his good deed earning him the Danish king’s gratitude. But the Danes got the message delivered by the Tunisian corsairs and signed a new, more generous treaty in August 1800.
Eaton and O‘Brien’s troubles in Algiers and Tunis paled beside Cathcart’s problems in Tripoli. Cathcart and Bashaw Yusuf Karamanli had never really established a rapport, and now their relations had become acrimonious and accusatory. While the Barbary States invariably presented a unified front to the Europeans and Americans, they nursed rivalries among themselves, and the bashaw was unhappy that America regarded Algiers as the preeminent Barbary power, when Yusuf believed his growing navy made Tripoli the equal of Algiers. Yusuf wanted a new treaty with the United States.
At Cathcart’s first meeting with him, Yusuf had indifferently pushed aside the new consul’s carefully chosen presents—a diamondstudded gold watch, diamond rings, handkerchiefs, and eight silver snuffboxes, among other choice items, valued at $3,000. Yusuf wanted to know where the naval stores and the brig were that America had promised. It was the first Cathcart had heard of a promised brig. Brian McDonough, British consul in Tripoli, informed Cathcart that O‘Brien indeed had pledged to deliver a brig during the Tripolitan—U.S. treaty negotiations. When it became apparent to Yusuf that no amount of bullying was going to induce Cathcart to produce a brig and naval stores he did not have, Yusuf said he would settle for $18,000 cash for the brig and $25,000 for the naval stores. McDonough bargained the bashaw down to $18,000 for both, and Cathcart paid, borrowing at high interest from Yusuf’s banker, Leon Farfara.
Some of Cathcart’s problems with the bashaw were of his own making. When news of George Washington’s death reached Barbary in 1800, O‘Brien and Eaton wisely suppressed it. O’Brien went to the length of canvassing Algiers for American newspapers carrying the news and confiscating them. Eaton saluted Washington’s passing with a black armband, but when the bey asked about it, he would say only that a friend had died. Both knew better than to furnish the rulers with any reason for demanding more gifts, which even a death could prompt. Cathcart, however, lowered the Tripoli consulate flag to half-staff. He instructed U.S. ships in Tripoli harbor to lower their flags, too, and to fire a 21-gun salute. When the bashaw discovered the reason, he demanded a $10,000 gift to help console him for Washington’s death.
Yusuf complained unceasingly about his treaty to Cathcart and to anyone who would listen. In a letter to President Adams, he made the thinly veiled threat that Tripoli would remain at peace with America, “provided you are willing to treat us as you do the two other Regencies, without any difference being made between us.” Parity meant a frigate like Algiers’s 36-gun Crescent. It also meant a new treaty requiring America to pay annual tribute similar to what Algiers was receiving.
As Yusuf lobbied for better terms, he quietly allowed his corsairs to slip the leash. In July 1800, the 18-gun Tripolitan polacre Tripolino—a brig-size corsair—captured the New York brig Catherine, bound for Leghorn with a cargo valued at $50,000. The Tripolitan crew boarded, searched, and stripped the brig of everything of value, then brought it into Tripoli. It was intended as a strong warning only. Yusuf released the ship, crew, and cargo in October. But in unmistakable language, he said that if he did not get the treaty he wanted within six months, Tripoli would be at war with the United States. Cathcart grimly foresaw “the necessity of sending a sufficient force into this Sea to repel the Bashaw’s demand....”
William Bainbridge’s Retaliation was the only American warship captured by the French during the Quasi-War, but Bainbridge’s career had not suffered for it—he remained one of the infant Navy’s foremost rising young officers. A lieutenant when he surrendered his flag to the L‘Insurgenteand Voluntaire, Bainbridge in 1800 was a captain, and the skipper of the 24-gun frigate George Washington, one of the merchantmen converted into warships during the hasty outfitting for the French war.
Bainbridge and the George Washington sailed into Algiers harbor in September 1800, the first Mediterranean port of call paid by a U.S. warship. The George Washington‘s cargo included gunpowder, sugar, coffee, and herring—and a late tribute payment for the dey. Bainbridge never dreamed what Bobba Mustapha had in store for him.
The dey had displeased the sultan by signing a treaty with France while the Turks were fighting Napoleon in Egypt and Syria. The sultan’s unhappiness rightly made Bobba nervous, for while Algiers was arguably the supreme Barbary power, the Ottoman fleet and janissaries could easily crush Bobba’s forces and depose him if it came to that. Bobba needed to placate the sultan. And that’s where the George Washington and Bainbridge came into play.
After the diplomatic protocols had been observed, Bobba dropped his bombshell: He wanted Bainbridge to transport Bobba’s presents and bribe money on the George Washington to the sultan in Constantinople. Deeply shocked, Bainbridge said he could never do that. No U.S. warship would serve as a delivery service for another nation, he said emphatically. Bobba delicately pointed out that the George Washington happened to be moored beneath the city’s fortress cannons, which could blow the American frigate out of the water in minutes.
Bainbridge could see that escape was impossible. Rebuking himself bitterly for having brought his warship so close to the batteries, he acquiesced reluctantly to the dey’s “request,” displaying his knack of foreseeing the worst and giving up before it came to pass. He was certain that his submission to this affront to U.S. honor would doom his career.
The George Washington sailed for Constantinople on October 19, looking like Noah’s ark. Besides its 130 crewmen, the frigate carried the Algerian ambassador and his suite of 100 attendants; 100 black slaves; 4 horses; 150 sheep; 25 cattle; 4 lions; 4 tigers; 4 antelope; 12 parrots; and money and regalia worth nearly $1 million. It also flew the Algerian flag—another indignity Bainbridge and his crew were forced to bear. Once they were out of sight of Algiers, Bainbridge lowered the Algerian colors and raised the Stars and Stripes. The menagerie staggered across the Mediterranean, the decks so crowded that crewmen were able to maneuver the ship only with difficulty.
The Americans took pleasure in tacking into the wind whenever the Moslems prostrated themselves facing east toward Mecca, as they were required to do five times a day. This forced the worshipers to change position incessantly so they always faced approximately east, toward Mecca. The constant shifting about was doubly irksome because they could never be entirely sure whether they were really facing east. They solved the problem by posting a Moslem beside the ship’s compass to call out directions.
Bainbridge sailed through the Dardanelles, around the Golden Horn and into Constantinople with the dey’s presents. The Turks had never seen the American flag before. It puzzled them at first, but they were impressed by its design. When they discovered that the frigate belonged to a mysterious new nation thousands of miles away, the sultan’s officers rolled out the red carpet and gave Bainbridge and his officers the run of the exotic Ottoman capital. Bainbridge reciprocated their courtesies by inviting the Turkish officials to dinner on the George Washington. Throughout the meal, the Americans poured water from pitchers positioned at the corners of the table, explaining to their guests that each contained water from a different continent: Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.
Two months after leaving Algiers, the George Washington returned, lighter, less congested, and bearing a chilly letter from the sultan demanding more money from Bobba within sixty days. Bainbridge wisely anchored far from the fortress cannons this time, so he could no longer be forced to serve as the dey’s courier. When Bobba requested that the warship shuttle the additional tribute back to Constantinople and Bainbridge again refused, the dey was powerless to make him change his mind.
If Jefferson had misgivings about sending warships to the Mediterranean, they evaporated when he learned soon after taking office about the George Washington‘s ordeal. “The sending to Constantinople [of] the national ship of war the George Washington, by force, under the Algerine flag, and for such a purpose, has deeply affected the sensibility, not only of the President, but of the people of the United States,” Madison informed O’Brien. It demanded “a vindication of the national honor.”
Eaton agreed wholeheartedly. He was astonished at Bainbridge’s meek submission to Bobba’s demands. “I would have lost the peace, and been empaled myself rather than yielded this concession. Nothing but blood can blot the impression.... Will nothing rouse my country?”
News of the George Washington incident flashed through the other Barbary regencies, with the unfortunate consequence that they became bolder in their own demands. Tunis’s bey, Hamouda Pacha, told Eaton he wanted an American ship to carry Tunisian goods to Marseilles. Eaton reminded the bey that they had agreed to eliminate the treaty provision permitting him to commandeer U.S. ships. Eaton warned that if the dey persisted, he would order the ship to sail to America instead of Marseilles, and there the matter would be settled by the U.S. government. Eaton’s threat deflated the bey’s truculence to the point where he offered to pay $4,000 to use the merchant ship. Seeing that he had won, but needing to allow the bey to save face, Eaton accepted the offer. For all his griping about the bey, Eaton had to concede that Hamouda was more reasonable than Yusuf or Bobba Mustapha. “He seldom robs a man without first creating a pretext. He has some ideas of justice and [is] not wholly destitute of a sense of shame.”
Bainbridge returned to the United States with letters from Cathcart, Eaton, and O‘Brien—all urging that a naval force be sent to Barbary, all hinting at tendering their resignations. Particularly disheartening was Cathcart’s portrayal of the grave situation developing in Tripoli, where the bashaw had become so openly hostile toward Cathcart that Eaton was asked to try parleying. But Yusuf denied Eaton an audience after he traveled to Tripoli and appeared at the palace. The rejection undoubtedly colored Eaton’s unflattering first impression of the bashaw: “He was a large, vulgar beast, with filthy fingernails and a robe so spotted with spilt food and coffee that it was difficult to distinguish the original color of the garment.” “He is a cur who can be disciplined only with the whip.”
Bobba Mustapha wrote to the bashaw urging moderation. But his intercession really was only a pretext for extorting more presents from O‘Brien, who was told the letter wouldn’t be sent unless gifts were forthcoming. One of Bobba’s officers helpfully supplied a list of what the dey had in mind: two pieces of muslin, two handkerchiefs, twelve finely woven pieces of cloth, two caftans, two pieces of Holland linen, thirty pounds of sugar, and a sack of coffee. The total came to $503. O’Brien dutifully went about gathering up the bribe, and then the dey threw in a last-minute request for a watch and ring. The dey sent the letter to the bashaw, but it did no good.
Cathcart knew Yusuf wasn’t bluffing when he released the Catherine in October 1800 with the warning that he would be at war with America in six months if he didn’t get a new warship and a new treaty. His foreboding deepened with each passing month. On January 3, 1801, he took the highly unusual step of issuing a warning to U.S. representatives throughout the western Mediterranean that Tripoli was poised to declare war. The catalyst was Sweden’s new treaty, which meant Tripoli soon would need a new enemy. Sweden had agreed to pay $250,000 for peace and to ransom Swedish captives, plus $20,000 in annual tribute. The Swedes believed they had no choice if they wished to have an unmolested Mediterranean trade; of particular concern was the 3,000 tons of salt they imported from the region each year.
Cathcart’s communique to the U.S. diplomats bristled with pessimism. “I have every reason to suppose the same terms will be demanded from the United States of America and that our fellow Citizens will be captured in order to ensure our compliance with the said degrading, humiliating and dishonorable terms.”
Consuls and agents, he said, should inform U.S. merchant captains of the situation so they “may fly the impending danger.”