Part One
1
It was 7:00 P.M., and the African night was turning blue-gray beneath the faint light of a crescent moon when the small ship entered the harbor of Tripoli. The two-masted ketch, driven by a light breeze, made a slow, two-and-a-half-hour journey through the cavernous harbor. Visible on deck were half a dozen men in Maltese costume; above them fluttered a British flag. In the distance, at the end of their journey, lay a forbidding stone castle, its ramparts several feet thick and bristling with 115 heavy cannons like needles on a porcupine.
It was February 16, 1804.
By 9:30 P.M. the ketch had reached a strangely stunted vessel, lacking a foremast or sails, anchored directly beneath the castle’s guns. This was the U.S. frigate Philadelphia, which had been captured the previous fall when it had run aground outside the harbor. Most of its crew now languished in Tripolitan prisons, working as slaves breaking rocks while surviving on black bread. The Philadelphia had been part of a flotilla dispatched from America to the distant waters of the Mediterranean to wage war on Tripoli, whose warships preyed on American merchantmen. Losing the Philadelphia had been a cruel blow to America’s hopes—and a big boost to the pasha of Tripoli, whose puny fleet had gained a powerful punch by salvaging the U.S. frigate with its 36 cannons.
Now the Philadelphia was manned by the Pasha’s men. When they saw the small vessel drawing close they shouted out a challenge. As they did so, the Tripolitan crew double-shotted their guns and made ready to fire. The men on board the smaller ship knew that if they gave the wrong answer they would literally be blown out of the water. The pilot declared in Arabic that this was a Maltese trading boat that had lost both its anchors in a recent storm. He asked for permission to tie up for the night next to the Philadelphia.
As he spoke, the small craft edged closer and closer. About 20 feet from the Philadelphia, it coasted to a stop . . . becalmed in the still night air . . . helpless before the guns of the man-of-war. Even across the expanse of two centuries one can almost hear the crew’s intake of breath, their hearts thumping in their chests, but the sailors calmly lowered a small rowboat to tie the two vessels together. The small ship’s crew then grunted and heaved on the rope to draw the two ships side-by-side. As the smaller ship approached the bigger one, the Philadelphia’s Tripolitan sailors finally realized what was going on. A voice screamed, “Americans!”
The pilot of the smaller vessel, a Sicilian named Salvatore Catalano, yelled in panic: “Board, captain, board!” If the crew had taken his advice many would have fallen into the water. But another voice calmly boomed out, “No order to be obeyed but that of the commanding officer!” Lieutenant Stephen Decatur Jr., standing on deck dressed in Maltese costume, waited a few seconds that must have seemed an eternity until his ketch had kissed alongside the Philadelphia. Then he gave his own command: “Board!”
“The effect was truly electric,” recalled a surgeon’s mate under Decatur’s command. “Not a man had been seen or heard to breathe a moment before”—some 70 of them had been hiding in the stifling hold—“at the very next, the boarders hung on the ship’s side like cluster bees; and, in another instant, every man was on board the frigate.”
The ketch had been captured by Decatur from the Tripolitans the previous December, and was now dubbed the Intrepid. She had made a wearying voyage to reach this point, spending a week at sea being tossed and pounded by a heavy storm. Rats and vermin infested the ship and many of the improperly packed provisions had gone bad. But the sailors and marines, volunteers all, had refused to abandon their mission. Now they swarmed aboard their target, careful not to fire a shot that would alert the pasha’s castle. Wielding knives and pikes and cutlasses, the Americans overwhelmed the Tripolitan crew in about 10 minutes. “Poor fellows! About 20 of them were cut to pieces & the rest jumped overboard,” Midshipman Ralph Izard Jr. wrote.
The Americans could perhaps have tried piloting the Philadelphia out of the harbor, but since it did not have any foremast—it had been cut down just before the ship was captured—it would have been tough going. At any rate their orders were to destroy the ship. So the boarders split up into several parties and placed combustibles around the ship. As the wooden hull began to crackle and hiss with the spread of the flames, the Americans jumped back onto the Intrepid in a dense cloud of smoke. The last man aboard was Lieutenant Decatur, who barely managed to outrun the flames roaring out of the hatchways to grab the Intrepid’s rigging at the last second. “It is a miracle that our little vessel escaped the flames, lying within two feet of them & to leeward also!” Izard marveled.
But the Intrepid was hardly home safe. Seeing the tiny ship illuminated by the burning Philadelphia, the Tripolitan gunners in the pasha’s castle and the nearby ships blazed away. Luckily for the Intrepid, their aim was poor and the little vessel was unscathed save for one shot through her topgallant sail. As the Intrepid negotiated its way out of the harbor, the hardy Jack Tars (as sailors were then known) laughed and cheered, admiring the “bonfire” in the southern sky. A midshipman captured the spectacle of the Philadelphia burning: “The flames in the interior illuminated her ports and, ascending her rigging and masts, formed columns of fire, which, meeting the tops, were reflected into beautiful capitals; whilst the occasional discharge of her guns gave an idea of some directing spirit within her.” In its death throes the man-of-war discharged a broadside straight into Tripoli, before breaking loose of its moorings and drifting closer to the castle, where it exploded with a terrifying roar that further shook the nearby city.
The tale of this astonishing feat—burning a captured ship while under the guns of the enemy, and not losing a man in the process—reverberated from one corner of the globe to another, gaining newfound respect for the nascent American navy. Lord Nelson of the Royal Navy called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.” In reward, the Intrepid’s crew received an extra two months’ pay from Congress, and Decatur, just 25 years old, became the youngest person ever promoted to captain, then the navy’s highest rank.
Decatur seems to have stepped out of a storybook. One of the handsomest officers in the navy, he had broad shoulders, a slim waist, curly chestnut hair, and dancing dark brown eyes that ladies found irresistible. His future wife, the daughter of a Virginia merchant, was said to have fallen in love with him merely from seeing a miniature portrait of him. She was not the only one enamored of him. A fellow officer wrote, upon first meeting him, “I had often pictured to myself the form and look of a hero, such as my favorite Homer had delineated; here I saw it embodied.” A marine private testified: “Not a tar, who ever sailed with Decatur, but would almost sacrifice his life for him.”
Decatur was born with salt spray in his veins: His father, Stephen Decatur Sr., had been a famous naval captain of the Revolutionary War and the quasi-war against France. Indeed the elder Decatur had at one time commanded the Philadelphia, the very vessel that his son now burned. The Decaturs were a prominent Philadelphia family, but Stephen was born on January 5, 1779, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where his mother had fled after the British had occupied their hometown during the War of Independence. His mother, Ann, wanted him to be a bishop but an ecclesiastical life was at odds with his nature; contemporaries recalled him “in every scheme of boyish mischief or perilous adventure taking the lead.”
He went to sea late by the standards of the age: He was commissioned a midshipman in 1798, when he was almost 20 years old, after briefly attending the University of Pennsylvania. His decision to leave the university is cloaked in some mystery. Rumor has it that he wanted to leave the country in a hurry after being acquitted of having struck “a woman of doubtful integrity” who subsequently died. Whatever the truth of this charge, we do know that in 1801 he sailed for the Mediterranean, seeking glory and adventure as a 22-year-old first lieutenant aboard the frigate Essex at the start of the Barbary Wars. Needless to say, he found plenty of both.
By the time he had returned home from North Africa, Decatur was being fêted and celebrated across the land, making him “America’s first nineteenth-century military hero.” It is no exaggeration to say that his exploits, by helping to kindle the flames of patriotism, helped forge a new nation out of 13 former colonies not long united under one flag.
Today Decatur is remembered, if at all, for coining the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.” (What he actually said, in a toast, was: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”) The Barbary Wars in which he made his name are all but forgotten, save as the subject of children’s stories about pirates and the first line of the Marine Corps anthem (“to the shores of Tripoli”). Yet they deserve to be disinterred from the grave of history, for it was because of these wars that the United States gained a navy and a marine corps and a role on the world stage.
Barbary Coast
At the turn of the nineteenth century, there were four states—Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—situated on the northern edge of Africa along what Europeans called the Barbary Coast (from the Greek word for foreigners) and Arabs knew as al-Maghrib (the West). Morocco was and is an independent country ruled by the Alawite dynasty. The sovereigns of the other Barbary states were variously styled as bey or dey or pasha, all Turkish honorifics, and since the sixteenth century they had professed nominal loyalty to the sultan in Constantinople, but in practice, given the weakness of the Ottoman Empire by the eighteenth century, they were largely masters of their own fate.
MAP 1.1North Africa, circa 1800
To finance their governments they would routinely declare war on a European state and set either naval vessels or privateers to seize enemy shipping. This was a lucrative business: Captured cargoes and captives were auctioned off to the highest bidder, the latter being sent to flourishing slave markets unless they were wealthy enough to ransom their release. Although piracy had declined by the eighteenth century from its heyday in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when Algiers alone held 30,000 Christian captives—it was still the foundation upon which the Maghrib states built flourishing and sophisticated civilizations. Many European states too had held Muslim slaves in years past, though this practice was dying out by the eighteenth century; America of course continued to hold many African slaves of its own, a few Muslims among them.
It is tempting to compare the Barbary States to modern Islamist states that preach and practice jihad against infidel unbelievers. It is a temptation best resisted. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire and its North African tributaries were not particularly xenophobic nor especially fundamentalist. By the standards of the day, they were uncommonly cosmopolitan and tolerant in many respects, offering more protection than did many European states to flourishing Jewish communities that played a prominent role in their commercial affairs. Ali Karamanli, pasha of Tripoli from 1754 to 1795, was even said to have been much influenced by his Jewish mistress, a corpulent woman known as “Queen Esther.”
It is also tempting to speak of the Barbary “pirates,” as contemporary Europeans and Americans did, but in reality the corsairs of North Africa were no more—and no less—piratical than Sir Francis Drake or Sir John Hawkins, two of the more illustrious figures in English naval history, both of whom operated as privateers, using the authority given them by letters of marque to seize enemy shipping. Americans also resorted to privateers to harass their foes; the U.S. government was so attached to this practice that it refused to sign the 1856 Declaration of Paris outlawing privateering as a weapon of war. As in the American and British navies, the Barbary rulers gave captains and crews a portion of the “prize money” captured by their ships. The difference is that in Europe and America the legally sanctioned capture of enemy merchantmen typically served some larger state purpose; it was not an end unto itself, as it became for the Ottoman regencies.
The European states occasionally attacked the Barbary States but usually found it more convenient to buy them off. Starting with Cromwell’s England in 1646, the Europeans chose to ransom their hostages and buy “passports” to allow their ships free passage in the Mediterranean. The British, French, and Dutch also encouraged the Barbary corsairs to target ships belonging to their enemies. Until 1776, American ships were protected by English tribute and the Royal Navy. As many as 100 American merchantmen made annual voyages to the Mediterranean, carrying salted fish, flour, lumber, sugar, and other goods, which they traded for lemons, oranges, figs, olive oil, and opium, among other valuable items. After the Revolution, the enterprising merchants of New England tried to reestablish this lucrative trade but found it dangerous going.
Morocco captured and then released the U.S merchantman Betsey in 1784. The following year Algerian corsairs swooped down on the Maria and the Dauphin. Eleven more American ships were seized by the Algerians in the summer of 1793 after Portugal ended its war on Algiers, which had kept Barbary ships from slipping past the Straits of Gibraltar. More than 100 Americans became captives of the dey of Algiers—triggering a debate in the newly established Congress about whether it was time to build a navy. John D. Foss, a young sailor captured aboard the brig Polly in 1793, described a hard life in Algerian prisons. His captivity began when 100 Algerians swarmed his ship, stripped the crew down to their underwear and took the nine Americans back to the city of Algiers, where they were paraded before jeering crowds and presented to Dey Hassan Pasha, who crowed, “Now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.”
They did not literally eat rocks but they did have to work as slaves, breaking and hauling rocks while clanging around in 40 pounds of chains. Along with 600 other prisoners, they were housed in a dingy fortress, made to sleep on the stone floor, and fed nothing but vinegar and bread that, Foss complained, “was so sour that a person must be almost starving before he can eat it.” Slaves who were found guilty of malingering could expect up to 200 bastinadoes—whacks on the feet with a five-foot cane. A slave who spoke disrespectfully to a Muslim could be roasted alive, crucified, or impaled (a stake was driven through the anus until it came out at the back of the neck). A special agony was reserved for a slave who killed a Muslim—he would be cast over the city walls and left to dangle on giant iron hooks for days before expiring of his wounds.
Other captives were better treated. James Leander Cathcart, captured at age 17 on the Maria in 1785, spent 11 years in Algerian captivity. He progressed from palace gardener to coffeegie (coffee brewer) to various clerical positions and finally became chief Christian secretary to the dey. Although he was bastinadoed on occasion, his situation “was very tolerable.” Indeed he bought several taverns and made so much money that he was able to purchase a ship to take him back to the United States, before returning to North Africa as an American diplomat.
But it was not Cathcart’s story (never published in his lifetime) that captured popular imagination in the U.S. Rather American public opinion was inflamed by the books and letters produced by Foss and other captives, chronicling what Foss vividly described as “the many hellish tortures and punishments these piratical sea-rovers invent and inflict on the unfortunate Christian who may by chance unhappily fall into their hands.”
Drifting Toward War
Opinion was divided in the U.S. about how to handle the Barbary hostage crisis. Thomas Jefferson, when he was minister to Paris in 1785, thought it would be “best to effect a peace through the medium of war.” But John Adams, minister to London, argued that paying ransom would be cheaper: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Soaring maritime insurance rates due to Algiers’s seizure of 11 American merchantmen in 1793 finally inclined President George Washington toward the martial approach.
But the young Republic had nothing to fight with. All of the Continental Navy’s 35 warships had been destroyed or captured during the Revolution, and the new federal government had refused to maintain a standing military force in peacetime, viewing it as a threat to the people’s liberties and billfolds. A bitter debate now raged in Congress over whether to create a navy. Ironically, considering their leaders’ views on how to deal with the Barbary pirates, Jefferson’s Republican Party opposed the proposal, while Adams’s Federalists supported it. It was only by the narrowest of margins that parsimonious lawmakers authorized the construction of six ships at a cost of $688,888.82. President George Washington signed the bill on March 27, 1794, the birthday of the United States Navy, which was called into being—we should remember—to fight a small, undeclared war halfway around the world.
Joshua Humphreys, a well-known shipbuilder, and Josiah Fox, an equally prominent maritime architect, were commissioned to design the six frigates. The work of building the ships was carefully allocated to shipyards in many different states in order to maximize political support for the project—a strategy that supporters of arms programs follow to this day. The resulting ships would eventually be hailed as marvels of marine design. Though smaller than ships-of-the-line—the U.S. had none of these behemoths, deploying 60 to 100 guns or more, until 1815—the frigates Humphreys designed were faster and more powerful than comparable vessels in other navies. Three would field 44 guns, the others 36 guns.
But before any of the frigates could be completed, peace broke out. American envoys agreed to pay the dey of Algiers $642,000 along with an annual tribute of arms. The total value of the tribute to Algiers eventually came to more than $1 million, one-sixth of the federal budget. As part of America’s first “arms for hostages” deal, the dey released his Yankee slaves on July 12, 1796—or at least the 88 out of 119 who had survived the ordeal. Similar deals were concluded with the pasha of Tripoli in 1796 (the U.S. paid him $56,486) and the bey of Tunis in 1797 (for $107,000). Congress stopped the building of three frigates and allowed the other three to go forward mainly as a jobs program; the navy’s pork-barrel strategy had paid off. The Washington administration dispatched envoys to the Barbary States. Alas, this policy of appeasement, far from sating the demands of the North African rulers, only whetted their appetite for more.
On September 17, 1800, after a 40-day crossing from Philadelphia, the George Washington, a 24-gun vessel, anchored in Algiers harbor to deliver America’s tribute to the dey. Captain William Bainbridge—one of the unluckiest, or most maladroit, officers in the U.S. fleet—made the mistake of tying up his ship directly underneath the guns of the dey’s castle. He was then summoned to an audience with Dey Bobba Mustapha, who delivered a startling ultimatum: The George Washington must sail under Algiers’s flag to deliver the dey’s embassy and tribute to his nominal master, Sultan Selim III, in Constantinople—or else, the George Washington would be smashed by the dey’s guns and its crew sent into slavery. The dey in essence told Bainbridge: You pay me tribute, by that you become my slaves.
The hapless Bainbridge had no choice but to comply. He even had to hoist the Algerian flag on his masthead. Not only did he take on board $800,000 in coins and jewelry and the dey’s ambassador to Constantinople, but also the ambassador’s suite of 100 black slaves and 60 harem women and a veritable menagerie consisting of “20 Lions 3 Tigers 5 Antelopes 2 Ostriches & 20 Parrots.” This whole noisy, smelly collection was stuffed into the George Washington’s quarters, already cramped with 220 crew members. The only mild revenge Bainbridge exacted during the journey—other than hauling down the Algerian flag—was to tack his ship sharply, forcing all the Muslims to constantly shift directions so that they could address their prayers toward Mecca. But not even the warm reception that the Americans received in Constantinople—where it turned out that nobody had heard of this upstart New World republic before—could make up for the indignity of becoming a messenger service for a foreign potentate. After making a quick return trip to Algiers, Bainbridge sailed for home, arriving in Philadelphia on April 19, 1801.
Even before the George Washington reached home, the new president, Thomas Jefferson, had determined to act on his long-standing desire to take a tough line against the Barbary States. “I know,” he wrote, “that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical & more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing their insolencies.” The humiliation of the George Washington was the final straw; according to Secretary of State James Madison, it “deeply affected the sensibility, not only of the President but of the people of the United States.”
But the Jefferson administration found itself hobbled by its own penny-pinching ways—and by the president’s many contradictions. Like many great men, the red-haired master of Monticello was a bundle of paradoxes. The most obvious, and most widely noted, is that he penned the Declaration of Independence, with its immortal proclamation that “all men are created equal,” at the same time that he held more than 100 blacks in bondage. There were other inconsistencies. He was a critic of a strong federal government and a champion of states’ rights, but as president he would take a sweeping view of his own authority in foreign affairs, even going so far as to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803—an action he admitted was not strictly authorized by the Constitution. And, though a longstanding advocate of vigorous military action against the Barbary pirates, Jefferson was at the same time an opponent of a large ocean-going navy required for such a task, preferring to rely on a fleet of small gunboats best suited for coastal defense.
It was the last of these paradoxes that now caught up with him. The U.S. Navy had briefly swelled in size during the quasi-war against France from 1798 to 1800, but Jefferson and his penny-pinching Treasury secretary, the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, had insisted on trimming it severely in order to pay off the debt and cut taxes. The navy was left with only six frigates. The entire officer corps was reduced to nine captains, 36 lieutenants, and 150 midshipmen.
Even mobilizing this small force was not easy. When Jefferson convened his cabinet to discuss the Barbary situation in May 1801, Attorney General Levi Lincoln objected that only Congress could declare war—and it wasn’t in session. Jefferson declined to call Congress into special session, feeling no need to obtain a declaration of war even though he was about to dispatch the U.S. armed forces on a mission that carried a high likelihood of battle. This master of literary craftsmanship finessed the issue through cleverly worded orders. The U.S. ships sent to the Mediterranean, he declared, would not blockade any state that had not declared war on the U.S. and would not attack unless first attacked. But the navy had permission to use force to protect American merchant shipping as well as to enforce existing treaty obligations. And if, upon reaching the Mediterranean, the U.S. squadron found that one of the Barbary States had declared war on America, it was authorized “to chastise their insolence by sinking, burning or destroying their ships and vessels.”
Jefferson had no way of knowing that immediately after he wrote those orders, one of the Barbary States would commence hostilities. Yusuf Karamanli, the pasha of Tripoli, had been growing more and more restive because he was getting less American tribute than his neighbors. He manifested his displeasure by dispatching one of his polacres—a shallow-drafted vessel typical of the boats used in the Mediterranean—to capture the U.S. merchant brig Catharine. When the U.S. envoy James Leander Cathcart refused the pasha’s demands for more tribute, the aggrieved ruler sent soldiers to the American consulate on May 14, 1801, to chop down the flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes—a traditional method of declaring war in North Africa where wood, of the kind used for flagpoles, was scarce. Thus, even without a declaration of war from Congress (a more limited authorization to use force would be approved later), the U.S. was now committed to its first combat far from home.
The Cautious Commodores
Chosen to command the initial American naval foray into the Mediterranean was Richard Dale, a veteran of the Revolutionary War. At 23, he had been John Paul Jones’s first lieutenant aboard the Bonhomme Richard and had acquitted himself with great valor. But those adventures were decades in the past, and he had grown more cautious with age. He set sail on June 2, 1801, aboard his flagship, the President, one of the elegant 44-gun frigates designed by Joshua Humphreys, leading a squadron that consisted of the 36-gun frigate Philadelphia, the 32-gun frigate Essex, and the 12-gun sloop Enterprise. He reached Tripoli in July and mounted a blockade, one of the more boring and exasperating tasks in a mariner’s life.
Nothing much happened for the first month. On August 1, 1801, Commodore Dale ordered Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett of the Enterprise to sail off to Malta to bring back fresh water. On the way, Sterrett spotted a sail. He set off in pursuit, hoisting a British flag as he did so. As a ruse de guerre, a “false flag” was considered acceptable deceit in those days, but a captain was honor bound to show his true colors before opening fire. This Sterrett did as soon as he ascertained that the other ship was the 14-gun Tripoli, belonging to the pasha.
The Enterprise rapidly closed in and delivered broadside after broadside with its 12 guns. The Tripoli tried to ram the American ship, but Sterrett skillfully maneuvered away and kept up his withering fire. After more than three hours of combat, the Tripoli’s commander, Rias Mahomet Rous, lowered his flag, but just as Sterrett prepared to accept his surrender he opened fire again. The Tripolitans pulled this trick twice. Sterrett, after almost being lured in, showed no mercy and kept firing until he had smashed the Tripoli’s masts, holed her hull, and raked her deck. When a boarding party from the Enterprise, led by Lieutenant David Porter, finally surveyed the Tripoli they discovered total desolation: Out of 80 crewmen, 30 had been killed and 30 wounded. No one aboard the Enterprise was injured—an amazing testament to the poor quality of Tripolitan marksmanship. Sterrett, forbidden to take prizes because the U.S. was not formally at war, had all of the Tripoli’s arms thrown overboard and her mast chopped down before he allowed the battered ship to limp home.
The pasha was not exactly overjoyed to see his defeated captain. He made Admiral Rous ride through the streets of Tripoli mounted backwards on a jackass, with sheep’s entrails hanging around his neck. For good measure, the admiral received 500 bastinadoes.
By September 1801, Commodore Dale found his supplies exhausted and most of his men nearing the end of their one-year enlistment. He left the Essex and Philadelphia to continue a desultory blockade of Tripoli and sailed home with the President and Enterprise.
President Jefferson realized that Dale had accomplished little and a new squadron would have to be dispatched if he wanted to bring Tripoli to heel. Congress would not grant a declaration of war, just as it had refused to vote one during the quasi-war with France. On February 6, 1802, Congress did, however, pass an act authorizing the president to use all necessary force to protect American shipping overseas. With this carte blanche, Jefferson sent six more ships to the Mediterranean: the 36-gun frigates Constellation and Chesapeake, both of Joshua Humphreys’s design, along with the frigates New York (36 guns), Adams (28), and John Adams (28), and the smaller Enterprise (12). They would join the Essex and Philadelphia, already on station.
After Thomas Truxton refused command of the squadron, Jefferson turned to the next most senior officer, Richard Valentine Morris. He was politically well connected—nephew of Gouverneur Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and brother of a pro-Jefferson congressman from Vermont—but soon proved to be an inept commander.
His expedition got off to an inauspicious start when he sailed aboard the Chesapeake on April 27, 1802, carrying some unusual passengers: his wife, young son, and a black nursemaid. Some sailors took to calling Mrs. Morris “the commoderess.” Women were not unknown aboard fighting ships in those days, usually during port calls; hence the expression “son of a gun,” referring to a baby conceived on the gun deck. But Morris’s decision to bring his family along clearly signaled that fighting was not high on his agenda. Instead he dithered in Gibraltar, enjoying the social life of the British garrison.
While he left Tripoli practically unguarded some of the pasha’s galleys slipped out and snared an American merchant brig. The American envoy to Tunis, William Eaton, a fiery sort, was driven to distraction by Morris’s lassitude. “What have they done but dance and wench?” he demanded.
Morris finally reached Tripoli on May 22, after a fruitless year in the Mediterranean. A few days later the Enterprise, now commanded by Lieutenant Isaac Hull, caught some feluccas—shallow draft transports—laden with grain trying to sneak into Tripoli harbor. About 10 of them became grounded about 35 miles west of Tripoli. Morris sent a small expedition to burn the grain boats—50 sailors and marines under the command of Lieutenant David Porter. This small group of Americans was met by a far larger number of Tripolitans, but they doggedly fought their way up the beach until they could set the fellucas on fire. Porter then directed the retreat, staggering on despite being hit in both thighs. Since half of the grain was eventually saved, the mission was only a limited success. Midshipman Henry Wadsworth (uncle of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) nevertheless declared, “Twas good sport I must confess.” His was a fairly typical attitude among the battle-loving officers of his day; no reluctant warriors were they.
Having failed to bring the pasha to bay with the stick, Commander Morris now tried the carrot. He entered Tripoli on June 7, 1803, under a flag of truce, to negotiate terms, but he balked at the pasha’s demand for $200,000 in tribute plus annual payments of $20,000. Roared the offended pasha: “Then business is at end!” Morris promptly sailed away to Gibraltar to see his newborn son, leaving Captain John Rodgers in charge of the Tripoli blockade. His squadron managed to blow up one polacre trying to run the blockade, but by June 30 Rodgers too had anchored off Malta. On July 11, Morris sailed for America with his family, having achieved nothing. Back home he was censured for his timidity by a court of inquiry and had his captain’s commission revoked.
A Pack of Boys
Jefferson was growing increasingly frustrated with the negligible results produced by his naval expeditions. After two years of war, Tripoli had not budged a bit and respect for American power was at a nadir because of its dithering commodores. At long last the president found the right man for the job. His name was Edward Preble.
Look at the well-known Rembrandt Peale portrait of him and you see a man with dark blue, piercing eyes, a beaky nose, a resolute jaw, and red hair carefully combed over his forehead to conceal a receding hairline. Born in Maine (then part of Massachusetts) in 1761, young Preble found working on the family farm not to his liking and wound up enlisting in the Massachusetts navy as a midshipman. During the War of Independence, he was captured and imprisoned aboard an odious British prison ship anchored in New York harbor, but managed to win his release through family connections. Once the war was over, he became a prosperous merchant captain and eventually a shipowner. When the undeclared war with France broke out in 1798, he was commissioned a lieutenant commander and swiftly rose to captain in the new federal navy, being one of only nine kept on the list after the quasi-war.
He had not joined the fighting in the Mediterranean earlier because of ill health. Preble’s ailments, aggravated by his stay aboard the British prison hulk, were numerous enough for two men: typhoid fever, malaria, consumption (now known as tuberculosis), and a debilitating digestive disorder, probably ulcers, which made him stick to a milk-and-vegetable diet for long stretches of time.
By the time Richard Morris’s expedition to Tripoli was ending in failure, Preble was finally well enough to command again. He received his orders on May 19, 1803: Sail aboard the 44-gun frigate Constitution to lead a squadron in making war on Tripoli. By 10 the next morning Preble was aboard his flagship. He ordered the ship to be retrofitted and made sure the work was done in record time. He also set out to recruit a crew, finding out-of-work foreign seamen the most likely catches. “I do not believe I have twenty native American sailors on board,” he noted.
His officers, appropriately enough for the navy of such a young country, were young themselves. His oldest commander was William Bainbridge, the 30-year-old captain of the Philadelphia. His other officers, the 42-year-old Preble grumbled, were “nothing but a pack of boys.” But these boys would blossom into the victorious captains of the War of 1812: Stephen Decatur Jr., Isaac Hull, David Porter, James Lawrence, William Biddle, and others. Eventually they would be known as “Preble’s Boys,” the American analogue to Horatio Nelson’s “band of brothers.” Their success should not be altogether surprising. Bold new enterprises, whether navies or software companies, tend to be created by those too callow to know any better.
Preble set sail aboard the Constitution on August 12, 1803, the rest of his squadron—the heavy frigate Philadelphia (36), three 12-gun schooners (Enterprise, Nautilus, Vixen), and two 16-gun brigs (Argus and Syren)—having already set out. Though his men would soon develop great admiration for their commanding officer, Preble was not well liked to begin with. He was a martinet, a tyrant of the quarterdeck, whose myriad diseases had not improved his disposition. He drove his men hard, lashing errant seamen with the cat-o’-nine-tails and errant officers with an even more potent weapon—his tongue. Wrote Midshipman Charles Morris: “A very violent and easily excited temper was one of the prominent characteristics of Commodore Preble, from the undue expression of which, when he was greatly excited, no officer could escape. Irresolution, no less than contradiction, was an offense in his eyes, and decision of action as well as obedience of orders was necessary to preserve his favorable opinion.”
The men’s opinions of their imperious commander improved remarkably just as they were nearing Gibraltar. Late one night the Constitution encountered an unknown sail. Preble hailed the stranger, who refused to answer. He then warned: “If a proper answer is not returned, I will fire a shot into you!”
A voice from the other ship announced that she was His Majesty’s Ship Donegal, 84 guns, and demanded that Preble send a boat out to meet her.
Preble shot back: “This is the United States ship Constitution, 44 guns, Edward Preble, an American commodore, who will be damned before he sends his boat on board of any vessel!” Then he theatrically called out: “Blow your matches, boys!”
Hearing the signal to open fire, the other captain sheepishly sent over his own boat and explained that his ship was actually the HMS Maidstone, a 32-gun frigate that had been caught unawares by the Constitution.
Preble’s men were impressed by his unflinching attitude toward danger. And he made clear that his bellicosity was not limited to the British. Wrote Preble, “The Moors are a designing, artful, treacherous set of villains and nothing will keep them so quiet as a respectable naval force near them.”
He quickly acted on that belief during a confrontation with Emperor Muley Soliman of Morocco, who had hitherto been friendly to the U.S. but was now making belligerent noises. When he was presented to the emperor, Preble refused to take off his sword or kneel.
“Are you not in fear of being arrested?” the emperor inquired.
“No, sir. If you presume to do that, my squadron in full view will lay your batteries, your castles and your city in ruins.”
Preble’s unwavering attitude proved a powerful stimulant to peace. The emperor apologized for any affronts to American ships and reratified the friendship treaty his father had signed with the U.S. in 1768. Morocco had been removed as a threat from the American rear as the navy pressed its attack on Tripoli.14
But before Preble could reach Tripoli, he received disastrous news from a passing British frigate: The Philadelphia had been captured. Her skipper was William Bainbridge, the Bad Luck Billy who had previously commanded the George Washington during her ignominious voyage to and from Algiers. At 9 A.M. on October 31, 1803, the Philadelphia, which had been blockading Tripoli alone, spotted a sail to the west and gave chase. Two hours later, still in full pursuit, the ship ran aground on the treacherous Kaliusa Reef, not indicated on Bainbridge’s charts. The crew desperately jettisoned water kegs, anchors, and anything else they could find. They even cut down the foremast. But still the ship was stuck fast. The Philadelphia lay at the mercy of Tripolitan gunboats swarming around her like jackals pouncing on a wounded wildebeest. Bainbridge called a meeting of his officers and they unanimously decided to surrender rather than die fighting. Before giving up the ship, Bainbridge ordered holes drilled in the bottom to scuttle her. Then the 307 officers and men were ferried ashore, stripped of everything save underwear, and presented before a gloating pasha.
They would spend the next 20 months in Tripoli, hostages of the pasha. The crew members were imprisoned in an old warehouse and made to work as slaves, with nothing but black bread, olive oil, and couscous to eat, and a stone floor for a bed. They were not, however, physically harmed. The officers were much better treated at first—a cause of no small resentment among the crew. They were housed in the spacious old U.S. consulate, and, wrote ship’s surgeon Jonathan Cowdery, “we were supplied with fresh provisions that were tolerably good,” including camel meat. The officers were even allowed to take escorted jaunts around the countryside, acting for all the world like pleasure travelers. Dr. Cowdery, who ministered to the pasha and his family, became a special favorite of Tripoli’s ruler, who “sent word that I should have any thing I wanted, free of expense.”
From their comfortable quarters, the officers witnessed a dismaying sight not long after arriving in Tripoli: A storm lifted the Philadelphia off the reef. Tripolitan carpenters plugged the holes, while divers recovered its guns, anchors, and other implements tossed overboard. The ship was fully salvaged and made operational again. Bainbridge apprised Preble of this development in secret writing—lemon juice diluted with water that became visible when heated. He urged Preble to do everything within his power to destroy the ship, lest it wreak havoc on the American fleet and commerce.
Although a naval court of inquiry later cleared Bainbridge of any wrongdoing, Preble in private seethed over the captain’s surrender. “If it had not been for the capture of the Philadelphia, I have no doubt, but we should have had peace with Tripoli in the Spring,” Preble wrote. “But I have no hopes of such an event.” Instead he had to concentrate his resources on destroying the Philadelphia. He gave the coveted job of commanding the Intrepid to Stephen Decatur Jr., who had eagerly volunteered. Accompanying the Intrepid was the Syren, commanded by Lieutenant Charles Stewart, which, as it happens, never got a chance to see action because Decatur chose to proceed alone rather than risk losing the element of surprise.
By Sunday, February 19, 1804, Intrepid and Syren had been gone two long weeks—far longer than necessary for a round-trip to Tripoli—and Preble was getting anxious in his Syracuse headquarters. He feared the two small ships had been lost in the gale that had recently shaken the Mediterranean. At 10 A.M. two ships hove into sight of Syracuse harbor. The Constitution hoisted a signal flag to the Syren—a maritime way of asking, “Well???” All eyes in the harbor turned for anxious moments to the Syren until it hoisted its reply, signifying that the ships’ business had been successfully completed.
While gratifying, the destruction of the Philadelphia had hardly won the war. Preble concluded that continuing the blockade would be unlikely to produce results. The commodore decided to press the attack against Tripoli. Since he knew that his larger ships could not get close enough to do much damage, he went to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (also at war with Tripoli) and borrowed six gunboats and two bomb-throwing ketches. Preble assembled his armada before Tripoli on July 25 to face a formidable target, a thick-walled city of minarets and white-bleached houses defended by 25,000 troops and 115 cannons in addition to the pasha’s navy.
On August 3, 1804, the weather finally cleared and at 2:30 P.M. Preble’s flagship, the Constitution, hoisted a flag signaling that battle was to commence. The ketches moved in to bombard the city with their 13-inch brass mortars. Meanwhile the six Sicilian gunboats—formed in two squadrons, one led by Captain Stephen Decatur Jr., the other by Lieutenant Richard Somers—engaged the enemy’s 19 gunboats. Decatur, as usual, showed the most pluck. His men peppered a Tripolitan gunboat with grapeshot and musket balls, then to the astonishment of the enemy, they borrowed a page from Tripolitan tactics and closed in to board the enemy. “I always thought we could lick them in their own way,” Decatur later wrote. He proved as good as his word. Decatur leaped aboard the enemy gunboat with 19 sailors. Wielding cutlasses, axes, dirks, pistols, and tomahawks, the Americans took the boat in 10 minutes of savage hand-to-hand combat with 36 Tripolitans. Three of the Americans were wounded; 16 Tripolitans were killed and 15 wounded. “Some of the Turks died like men,” Decatur wrote disdainfully, “but much the greater number like women.”
Just as Decatur had secured his prize, he received a blow more stunning than any delivered by an enemy’s sword. His brother, Lieutenant James Decatur, had commanded another gunboat. James had been fighting a Tripolitan boat that had struck its flag, but when James boarded her, the captain shot him in the head. Upon hearing the news of his brother’s death, Stephen Decatur went into a frenzy. Or, as an early biographer put it more grandly, he was seized by “noble indignation at such base treachery.”
Most of his men were still aboard the captured Tripolitan gunboat, so with only nine crew members Decatur went in pursuit of his brother’s killer. He found a Tripolitan boat (the right one? who knows?) and boarded her, fighting his way to the captain to commence a mano-a-mano struggle. The gigantic Tripolitan lunged with an iron boarding pike, snapping the American’s cutlass. Decatur parried the next thrust with his right arm, tearing the weapon out of his own wound and managing with a sudden jerk to wrest it away from his foe. The two commanders fell to the deck grappling with each other, Decatur on top. Another Tripolitan tried to hit Decatur on the head with a scimitar, but a seaman already wounded in both arms interposed his own skull instead and saved Decatur’s life. In the next instant, the Tripolitan captain flipped his weaker adversary and pinned him on the deck with his left hand while with his right hand he prepared to plunge home a yataghan (short knife). The American captain desperately grabbed the Tripolitan’s thrusting arm with one hand while with the other he reached into his pantaloon pocket, whipped out a pistol, and, wrapping his arm around the captain, fired into his back. “It was just like Decatur,” a brother officer marveled. “The chances were ten to one that the bullet would pass through both their bodies, but luckily it met a bone and the huge barbarian rolled off dead.” Thus Decatur had captured his second prize of the day, this time overcoming 24 Tripolitans without losing an American life.
Decatur’s bravery that day was matched, if not exceeded, by another officer. Lieutenant John Trippe, just 19 years old, was in command of the sixth gunboat. With 10 sailors, he boarded a Tripolitan vessel. Just as they got aboard, the two ships began drifting apart. The 11 Americans were facing 36 well-armed defenders. It was, as Commodore Preble put it, “conquer or perish.” Both sides fought with fierce abandon. As the American lieutenant was about to have his head cleaved open by a Tripolitan, Marine Sergeant Jonathan Meredith bayoneted the enemy sailor. Trippe then grabbed a pike to face the Tripolitan captain, a stout, gallant fellow who wielded a scimitar and had sworn on the Koran to win or die. Trippe suffered 10 scimitar wounds, but he kept advancing. The captain struck him a powerful blow—his eleventh wound—and knocked him to his knees. Trippe ended the battle, and saved his own life, by jabbing his pike into his opponent’s genitals, a move not often seen in Errol Flynn movies. The Americans wound up carrying the boat, their third prize of the day. Trippe cried whenever he recalled the event later, so deeply did he regret having to kill the courageous enemy captain who had refused to surrender.
Decatur gathered up the three prizes seized by his squadron and returned to the Constitution. “I have brought you three of the enemy’s gunboats, sir,” the bloodstained warrior proudly announced to Preble.
“Three, sir!” the commodore barked. “Where are the rest of them?”
Though Preble later apologized for his outburst, his frustration was understandable. Only Trippe and Decatur had achieved much. While three other enemy gunboats had been sunk, some of the American vessels never even engaged the enemy. And it was hard to tell what damage the bomb ketches had done to the city. The engagement was hardly decisive. Preble offered the pasha $50,000 ransom for his hostages and when this was turned down, mounted another bold but ultimately futile assault on the city.
Preble had already shown more offensive flair than any of his predecessors, so he was stunned by the arrival of the frigate John Adams on the night of August 7, 1804, bearing news, some welcome—President Jefferson had decided to send five more frigates to the Mediterranean—and some not: Samuel Barron, a captain senior to Preble, would take command of the squadron. Jefferson had no idea when he made the appointment how aggressive Preble had been. In his private journal, Preble wrote that “how much my feelings are lacerated [by] this supercedure at the moment of victory cannot be described and can only be felt by an officer placed in my mortifying position.”
But Barron had not yet arrived in the Mediterranean and, wrote Preble, “I hope to finish the war with Tripoli first.” He upped the ante, ultimately offering $110,000 for the American hostages, but since the pasha’s initial demand had been for $1.69 million, no deal was worked out. He mounted another series of attacks on Tripoli on August 25, August 28, and September 28, 1804, even bringing in the Constitution to pound the city with broadside after broadside. But the stone and mud buildings of the capital were not easily damaged. “Such attempts served rather to encourage than intimidate the Tripolitans,” wrote Dr. Cowdery, one of the Philadelphia prisoners, “and the Bashaw [pasha] was in high spirits on the occasion.”
As a final, desperate measure, Preble recalled the Intrepid, the ship that had burned the Philadelphia, to service. He had her packed with tons of explosives and sent sailing into Tripoli harbor. Her all-volunteer crew of 13 men was supposed to dock her alongside the pasha’s fortress and then make their escape just before the fireship blew up. The Intrepid disappeared into the fog of the harbor at 8 P.M. on September 3. At 9:47 P.M. the ship mysteriously blew up far short of its target, killing all aboard. Midshipman Robert T. Spence described the sight: “Every thing wrapped in dead silence made the explosion loud, and terrible, the fuses of the shells, burning in the air, shone like so many planets, a vast stream of fire, which appeared ascending to heaven portrayed the walls to our view.” What caused the explosion has never been determined, though Preble believed, based on scant evidence, that the crew had blown up their ship rather than risk capture by the Tripolitans.
Before Preble could try anything else, Commodore Barron arrived on the scene. Thus it may be said that Preble’s expedition ended not with a whimper but with a bang. News of his exploits preceded him home, and by the time Preble arrived back in America he was a national hero. He retired to Portland, Maine, where he made apple cider and built a mansion before dying three years later at age 46. He had not had long to savor the fruits of success.
The Man Who Would Be Pasha
Samuel Barron was even sicker than Preble but considerably less enterprising. He spent most of his time in the Mediterranean fighting liver disease in the naval hospital at Syracuse. Although he now commanded the largest fleet in the young Republic’s history—five frigates along with seven smaller ships—he refused to commit it to battle. Instead he kept up a desultory blockade of Tripoli. The initiative now shifted to an early-day Lawrence of Arabia named William Eaton, who had arrived back in the Mediterranean with Barron in the summer of 1804.
The 40-year-old Eaton, son of a Connecticut farmer, had run away from home at 16 and, lying about his age, enlisted in the state militia to fight the British. He left the army as a sergeant, went to Dartmouth, and married a well-to-do (if homely) widow. Eventually he got a captain’s commission in the new federal army and fought Indians under General Anthony Wayne in Ohio. Impetuous, headstrong, stubborn, fiery, Eaton possessed all the qualities necessary to be a first-rate leader—and a poor follower. He wound up being court-martialed for insubordination and misusing army funds. Though cleared of the charges, he left the army and the country, finding a job in 1799 as the new U.S. consul to Tunis. Eaton was one of the most undiplomatic diplomats ever; his approach to the Barbary States was more martial than that of most U.S. naval commanders, with the exception of Preble.
It was in Tunis that he met Hamid Karamanli, older brother of Yusuf Karamanli, pasha of neighboring Tripoli. The Karamanli dynasty, founded by an Ottoman cavalry commander, had ruled since 1711. The youngest son of the previous pasha, Yusuf had acceded to the throne by shooting his eldest brother to death in front of their mother. Hamid, the other brother, was out of the capital when this occurred and he prudently fled to the neighboring state of Tunis. Here he met Eaton and they began plotting together to overthrow Yusuf and end Tripoli’s war against America. Finally expelled from Tunis, Eaton sailed home to the U.S. to win support for this project. He promised that if placed on the throne Hamid would not only free the hostages but “always remain the faithful friend of the United States.” Although most of the military establishment thought this project was too reckless, President Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison secretly gave Eaton the go-ahead.
This was to be the first of many times that an American president would plot to overthrow a foreign government—a dangerous game but one that the Jefferson administration found as hard to pass up as many of its successors would. Wrote Madison: “Although it does not accord with the general sentiments or views of the United States to intermiddle in the domestic contests of other countries, it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to turn to their advantage, the enmity and pretensions of others against a common foe.”
Hamid and Eaton set up camp outside Alexandria, Egypt, and proceeded to recruit whatever mercenaries they could find among the dregs of the city. The resulting expedition was one of the motliest armies ever assembled under the Stars and Stripes. There were some 70 Christian mercenaries, one of whom claimed to be the bastard son of Marie Antoinette’s chambermaid, joined by 90 Arabs (a number that would swell as the expedition progressed) and more than 100 camels. Besides Eaton, who now styled himself a general in Hamid’s army and took to wearing bedouin robes, there were only nine other Americans: a midshipman from the Argus and seven marines commanded by First Lieutenant Presley Neville O’Bannon, a tough, resourceful Irish-American from the mountains of Virginia who was much devoted to his commander. “Wherever General Eaton leads, we will follow,” said he. “If he wants us to march to hell, we’ll gladly go there.”
Eaton did not ask anyone to march to Hades, but his appointed destination was not much more inviting: Derna, Tripoli’s second city, located 500 miles away across the desert. Eaton figured that this would be a good jumping-off point to march on the capital city of Tripoli, another 500 miles to the west. Riding an Arab stallion and waving a scimitar, Eaton led the expedition out of Egypt on March 8, 1805.
The march across the Libyan desert is not an easy one even for an army with modern equipment, as General Montgomery’s British 8th Army discovered when it covered roughly the same route during World War II. Eaton did it with nothing speedier than a horse. Although the temperatures were moderate during the springtime, sandstorms pummeled the group as they moved forward at a pace of some 20 miles a day. To add to their problems, the Christians and Muslims were constantly at each other’s throats, mutinies among the Arabs being an almost daily occurrence.
By early April of 1805 supplies were running out, with Eaton reporting that “our only provisions [are] a handful of rice and two biscuits a day.” They were reduced to eating the rice raw, lacking water in which to boil it. At one point, the Arabs tried to storm the supply tent and were barely held off by the marines and some Greek artillerymen wielding the expedition’s lone cannon. Even Hamid talked of going back, but the expedition was driven forward by Eaton’s indomitable will. In his frustration Eaton raged that the Arabs “have no sense of patriotism, truth nor honor,” though he did praise their “savage independence of soul.”
Despite some desertions, more bedouin came into camp, so that eventually the expedition swelled to 600–700 fighting men, along with hundreds of camp followers. Finally, with the expedition out of water, the men marched over some hills on April 15, 1804, and saw before them the Gulf of Bomba sparkling in the Mediterranean sun. Here they restocked provisions from the USS Argus and prepared for a final push to Derna, 60 miles away. On April 25 they reached that walled city, defended by 800 of Pasha Yusuf’s loyalists. Word spread that another army was marching from Tripoli to reinforce the garrison. They had no time to waste.
Eaton immediately sent an ultimatum demanding Derna’s surrender. Its governor made a memorable reply: “My head or yours.” The attack took place on April 27, 1804, with three newly arrived U.S. warships firing broadsides into Derna’s fort. Eaton was wounded in the battle but managed to drive off the defenders. At 3:30 P.M., the Stars and Stripes was hoisted for the first time in North Africa, or indeed in any part of the Old World.
Eleven days later, Pasha Yusuf’s army, 3,000 men commanded by Hassan Bey, finally arrived before Derna and placed Hamid’s forces under siege. But Hamid’s and Eaton’s men managed to hold off two determined attacks. Victory was in sight when the frigate Constellation appeared, like a clap of thunder from a clear blue sky, bearing bad news: The war against Tripoli was over.
Peace had been negotiated by Tobias Lear, formerly George Washington’s private secretary, now Jefferson’s special envoy. The president had been losing faith in the ability of force to compel the pasha to terms. Colonel Lear and Commodore Barron argued that the U.S. should not be supporting Hamid. In their view, the pretender was weak and unreliable and would never be accepted by his own people. Moreover, Yusuf was threatening to retreat into the interior and kill his hostages if Hamid’s force got too close to Tripoli. Jefferson decided to let Lear make the pasha an offer he could not refuse.
Although Lear opposed the Eaton expedition all along, he was able to negotiate a treaty only after the fall of Derna, which scared Yusuf into yielding. News of his brother’s progress left the pasha “much agitated,” reported Dr. Cowdery of the Philadelphia, and “he heartily repented for not accepting the terms of peace last offered by our country.” The pasha agreed to a ransom of $60,000 for the Philadelphia crew—not only far below his initial demand of $1.69 million but less than the amount he had previously rejected, pre-Derna, from Preble. (A number of scholars have argued that, had Lear waited a little longer, the U.S. could have avoided paying ransom altogether.) Of the Philadelphia’s original crew of 307, 296 were released; six had died during captivity and five had gone “Turk.” (When they heard of the crew’s imminent release, four of the five Americans who had sworn fealty to Islam tried to switch back, but an irate Yusuf marched them away never to be seen again. The other Americans lodged no complaint.)
Captain Hugh Campbell of the Constitution now had orders to take Eaton, the marines, and Hamid away from Derna. A furious Eaton had to break the news to the others; Hamid was crushed. They could not tell the rest of their followers for fear that a panic would ensue during which they would all get slaughtered. On the evening of June 12, 1805, the Americans sneaked out of Derna, rowing out to the Constitution, with Hamid and a small entourage. As word spread of their departure their followers melted into the countryside and Yusuf’s forces reoccupied the town.
Eaton boiled over with anger at what he viewed as a sellout of his men and America’s allies. He would have been angrier still had he known about a secret codicil to the treaty with Tripoli: Yusuf was allowed to keep Hamid’s family for several years as hostages to his continuing good behavior. Even without knowing of this secret provision, Eaton raged, “Our too credulous ally is sacrificed to a policy, at the recollection of which, honor recoils, and humanity bleeds.” It would not be the last time the U.S. would be charged with selling out putative allies, whether Hungarians in 1956 or Kurds in 1992. The only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy, it is sometimes said, is being its friend.
Commodore Barron had become too sick to exercise command; he never did order a shot fired in anger during his tenure. He turned over control of the U.S. fleet to Captain John Rodgers, who now faced a threat of war from Tunis. Rodgers resolved the situation simply enough by sailing his formidable armada—16 warships—into Tunis and giving the bey 36 hours to choose peace or war. The bey quickly capitulated and agreed to favorable terms for trade with the U.S. He even sent an ambassador to Washington, where the diplomat was lavishly entertained, including government-provided prostitutes that Secretary of State James Madison drolly justified as “appropriations for foreign intercourse.”
Having tamed Tunis and treated with Tripoli, the American flotilla sailed home, leaving only three ships in the Mediterranean.
Back home, William Eaton was greeted as a hero, Tobias Lear as practically a traitor. The Barbary general roundly and shrilly denounced the treaty to anyone who would listen. Hamid, for his part, complained of “no article in my favor, no provision for me and my family, and no remuneration for the advantages I had foregone in trusting to American honor.” A guilt-ridden Congress voted Hamid $2,400 plus a $200 monthly allowance, though the lawmakers reluctantly ratified the unpopular Tripoli treaty as a fait accompli. Eaton too got an award from Congress but he was not satisfied. He became a nuisance, hanging around the Capitol, buttonholing congressmen to complain about the treaty, even accusing Lear and by extension Jefferson of “treason against the character of the nation.”
Having worn out his welcome in Washington City, Eaton returned to Massachusetts and served one term in the state legislature. He became mixed up with Aaron Burr’s wild plot to take over the Louisiana territory, then turned against Burr and had his credibility shredded during Burr’s trial for treason, where he was the main government witness (Burr was acquitted). By the time he died on June 1, 1811, Eaton was a 47-year-old invalid, drinking heavily, hobbled by gout and rheumatism, having long since faded into “obscurity and uselessness,” as he himself acknowledged. The same fiery temperament that made him so adept at guerrilla warfare made him unsuited for civilian life.
1815
The naval commanders of the Barbary Wars—Bainbridge, Hull, Decatur, Porter, and the rest—went on to distinguish themselves during the War of 1812. The frigates built to defeat the corsairs performed admirably against the Royal Navy. As soon as the Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24, 1814, ending hostilities with Britain, James Madison, now president, turned his attention to dealing with leftover business with the Barbary States. In the years since 1805, Algiers in particular had been a thorn in America’s side, seizing several merchantmen and demanding more and more tribute. In 1814 the dey of Algiers had sided with Britain and declared war on America. Now it was time for a reckoning.
Congress voted a declaration of war against Algiers. Two powerful squadrons were organized, one commanded by Stephen Decatur Jr., the other by William Bainbridge. Once again, Decatur outshone his rivals. He sailed first on May 20, 1815, aboard the Guerriere, a 44-gun frigate. His 10 warships caught the Algerian ship Mashuda, 46 guns, in the Mediterranean on June 17, 1815. Decatur immediately closed in for the kill. His men-of-war fired broadside after broadside, cutting the Algerian commander in half and clearing his decks. The corsair hauled down its flag after 30 men had been killed and more than 130 wounded; 406 were taken prisoner. Only one American was killed and three wounded. Two days later Decatur captured an Algerian brig.
On June 28, Decatur’s squadron sailed majestically into Algiers harbor. The commodore laid out his terms starting with the end of the tribute that America had been paying since 1796. “If you insist in receiving powder as a tribute,” Decatur warned, “you must expect to receive balls with it.” The cowed bey, a Turk named Omar the Aga, tried to stall for time, but Decatur told him to either accept the terms or face the consequences. He accepted. The bey released 10 American prisoners and paid the United States $10,000 in compensation. Decatur next sailed to Tunis and performed the same trick, winning $46,000 in compensation. Final stop: Tripoli, where Yusuf Karamanli was still on the throne. He agreed to pay the U.S. $25,000 and release 10 European captives (he did not have any Americans). The only American unhappy about the outcome was Commodore William Bainbridge, who grumbled, “I have been deprived of the opportunity of either fighting or negotiating.”
“To Conquer Upon the Sea”
During the Barbary Wars, 35 American sailors and marines had been killed in action; 64 were wounded. There was also the pecuniary cost: Just between 1802 and 1806 the U.S. had spent $3 million fighting Tripoli. As Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin had suggested at the time, it would have been cheaper, at least in the short term, simply to pay off the North African states. But the naval operations had established an important principle—freedom of the seas—and helped end for all time the threat to commercial shipping from the corsairs.
Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the European states turned their attention to expanding their empires, and the independence of the North African states was soon imperiled. In 1816, Britain and the Netherlands sent a fleet to bombard Algiers and compel a treaty promising to end “piracy” forever; 14 years later France invaded Algiers and made it part of its empire. Tunisia was conquered by France and became a protectorate in 1881. Morocco did not fall into European hands until 1912. Yusuf Karamanli, a canny survivor, hung on in Tripoli until 1835 when the Ottomans seized power directly; they were replaced by the Italian empire in 1911. Tripoli would not become a threat to international order again until the 1970s, when, now known as Libya, it became a prime sponsor of terrorism under Muammar Gadhafi.
Stephen Decatur Jr., the great hero of the Barbary Wars, suffered a melancholy end. In 1807 he sat as part of the court-martial that found Captain James Barron guilty of negligence for allowing his ship, the Chesapeake, to be taken without a shot by HMS Leopard. As a member of the Board of Naval Commissioners, Decatur resisted Barron’s efforts to be reinstated in the service. An exchange of increasingly vituperative letters followed. Barron challenged Decatur to a duel; Decatur accepted the challenge. They met at Bladensburg, Maryland, on the damp, cold morning of March 22, 1820. It was pistols at eight paces. The two commodores fired simultaneously. Both men were wounded but only Decatur died. He was just 41. His last words, reported a witness, were “that he did not so much regret his death itself, as he deplored the manner of it; had it found him on the quarter-deck, it would have been welcome.”
Though Decatur died young, he left an enduring legacy—and not only in the 20 towns named after him. With Decatur and a handful of others in the lead, the United States had taken its first uncertain steps toward becoming the world’s policeman, the protector of commercial shipping, and upholder of international laws against piracy and other transgressions. In the nineteenth century, America could be no more than a junior partner to the Royal Navy, but the seeds of American power had been sown. They would be reaped in the centuries ahead. As Archibald Robbins, an American sailor shipwrecked in Africa in 1815, later wrote: “The mention of Tripoli calls up the proud recollection of the infancy of the American Navy. It was upon the coast of that country, that Americans began to learn how to conquer upon the sea.”