To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Like their British counterparts, American merchants quickly discovered that there was also an almost unquenchable demand for opium. When Shaw first arrived in Canton, the opium trade from India to China was in the midst of a period of massive, unprecedented expansion as the British sought new products to stabilize their trade balance with Celestial Empire. With no access to the poppy fields of British India, American merchants intent upon following the British lead into the lucrative opium trade were forced to look elsewhere for supplies. Fortunately, a ready supply of opium was found in another area of expanded American trade, the Mediterranean. By the early decades of the nineteenth century American merchants were purchasing more than three-quarters of Turkey’s entire annual opium crop of 150,000 lbs, worth as much as $1 million in China. There were, however, drastic, unforeseen consequences of America’s growing commercial presence in the Mediterranean.26

  Prior to the American Revolution, ships from Britain’s colonies had been able to sail the Mediterranean without peril, sheltered from the ravages of the notorious Barbary corsairs by the might of the British navy. During the course of the war, American ships generally remained free from Barbary predations as well, in part because the Barbary States were unaware that the American colonies had declared independence from Britain, and in part because America’s treaty of alliance with the French provided them with French naval protection. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce signed between France and America in 1778 had charged France with securing “the immunity of the ships, citizens, and goods of the United States, against any attack, violence or depredation of . . . the States of Barbary.” With peace declared, and with formal independence from Britain a reality rather than a claim, American ships lost the shelter of the British Empire. At the same time, the end of the war meant that the French, their coffers emptied and always sensitive to new incursions into their jealously guarded Mediterranean trade, walked away from their obligations to ensure the safety of American ships, reasoning that there was “no advantage to us in procuring for them a tranquil navigation of the Mediterranean.” When Spain made peace with the Barbary States in 1785, all previous protections were lost, and for the first time, American ships became fair game.27

  Most Americans had no conception of this ripple effect of the American Revolution, of the new dangers of Mediterranean trade. American ships had fallen prey to the Barbary corsairs soon after English settlement began—the first recorded capture of an American ship came in 1625, and in 1678 alone fourteen American vessels had been seized—but in the intervening century American shipping had felt little and thought less about this North African scourge. Indeed, Americans had every reason to believe that a new relationship with the Barbary States was close on the horizon. After all, Morocco had been the first nation to formally recognize American independence. In April 1778, Sidi Muhammad, Sultan of Morocco, had contacted Benjamin Franklin through a French intermediary and requested a trade agreement with the United States. Short on allies, Congress responded warmly in 1780, but during the chaos of the war, failed to follow up on the initial contact to formalize the relationship.

  In the wake of the revolution, attempts were made to renew contact through American merchants at the Spanish port of Alicante, but inexperience, delays, and indecision slowed the process to such a degree that Sidi Muhammad decided to jolt the infant nation awake. In 1784, he decided that perhaps the United States needed an incentive to speed up the treaty process. His corsairs at the Atlantic port of Sale were thus tasked with capturing an American ship that could be used as leverage to jump-start the faltering negotiations. By October they had their ship, capturing the Betsy and its crew off Cape St. Vincent as it returned to America from Cadiz.28

  As if the capture of the Betsy and her crew was not bad enough, the British, still stinging from their defeat, wasted no time in informing the other Barbary States of the implications of their former colonies’ independence. Charles Logie, the newly arrived British consul at Algiers, had informed the Dey of Algiers of the war between Britain and the United States, and declared that American shipping was no longer under British protection, that such vessels “were good prizes and wished them success in their attempts to capture those who refused allegiance” to Great Britain. Shortly after receiving Britain’s blessing, the cruisers of Algiers were sent out on the hunt, capturing the Maria, and five days later the Dauphin of Philadelphia.29

  In all, twenty-one American sailors were taken on this first Algerian raid on American shipping. They were brought back to Algiers as hostages, destined to serve as slaves until they were ransomed. Many would remain in slavery for a decade or more, joined by dozens more American captives. Others would be buried there. But at the time, none realized the magnitude of the events they were now swept up in; all were sure that redemption would come soon. As one of the American captives, James Leadner Cathcart, an 18-year-old sailor who had emigrated from Ireland to the American colonies at the age of 8, later explained, in a diatribe full of understandable bitterness, that the captives had “placed the greatest confidence in the generosity” of their country. “I thought it impossible that a nation just emerged from slavery herself would abandon the men who had fought for her independence to an ignominious captivity in Barbary . . . and I hesitate not to assert that no class of men suffered in any degree so much by the consequences attending the American Revolution as those who were captured by the Algerines in 1785.”30

  As early as 1786, it was clear to some in America that something had to be done to redeem the captives and ensure peace with the Barbary States. The former colonies emerged from their struggle with Britain independent, but hardly united and on the brink of financial disaster. The war had taken a heavy toll on American shipping, and as a still largely coastal nation dependent on overseas commerce, the United States desperately needed a rapid recovery of its mercantile trade if it were to avoid bankruptcy and financial disaster. However, with independence came the loss of the well-worn trade networks of the British Empire and the previously vital links to the West Indies. With other avenues of commerce cut off or temporarily disrupted, the Mediterranean, still a free trade zone open to the shipping of all nations, seemed to provide a crucial outlet for American merchants and a source of commodities that could be sold on to consumers in the equally crucial Chinese market. It was thus with a mix of hope and desperation that ships like the Maria and the Dauphin packed their holds with timber, tobacco, sugar, and rum and sailed for the ports of the Mediterranean.

  Almost overnight, American ships became a frequent sight in the Mediterranean. By the beginning of the 1780s, as much as one-fifth of American exports, carried by as many as a hundred ships, were bound for the Middle Sea. To Europeans with long experience in the trade, the sea and its ports seemed to be choked with a plague of Americans, haggling for capers, raisins, figs, and, above all, Turkish opium. As one British merchant complained, “there is hardly a petty harbor . . . but you will find a Yankee . . . driving a hard bargain with the natives.”31

  The growing ubiquity of American merchants, however, placed a bright target on their backs. After the revolution ended, the Barbary States wasted little time introducing the Americans to the costs of doing business in the Mediterranean. Back home, Americans were outraged by the news of the capture of their ships, but their rage was entirely impotent and the outcry came to nothing. The Barbary States respected two things, and two things only, gold and guns, and in the years after the revolution, America had neither. During the war, the States had been able to cobble together some semblance of a navy, but it was disbanded when the fighting ended. The Articles of Confederation, the document that governed the hardly united States, made anathema the very existence of a national navy during times of peace, for fear that such a force might become a tool of federal tyranny. Even if the States had wanted to create a navy, the Articles made it nearly impossible to raise the required funds by placing barriers in the way of national taxation. For many Americans, the creation of a navy was perceived to b
e a dangerous, and overly expensive project. With no navy, and no real prospect of one on the horizon, American ships were sitting ducks for the Barbary pirates.

  As the trade linking the United States to the Mediterranean and China expanded, and the importance of these networks to the American economy grew, so too did the realization that piracy threatened to upend this fragile, interwoven system of commerce, and indeed threatened the entire economy of a country just setting out on the path to prosperity. The Barbary corsairs thus not only imperiled the vital Mediterranean trade but, by cutting off supplies of Turkish opium, they also undermined the China trade. It was becoming increasingly evident that North African piracy posed a threat to two of the emerging tent-poles of American commerce at the very moment when these were needed most. According to one outspoken advocate of free trade, “our commerce is on the point of being annihilated, and, unless an armament is fitted out, we may very soon expect the Algerines on the coast of America.”32

  By 1797, treaties had been signed with all four of the Barbary States, and the surviving American captives released. But without the threat of military force, the terms had been ruinous. Peace had cost about $1.25 million and, going forward, as much as 20 per cent of U.S. government revenue would go toward tribute payments to Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis. The situation was unsustainable. To make matters worse, the United States had fundamentally misunderstood the role of peace treaties for the Barbary States. Their economies relied heavily on the proceeds of piracy and on the bribes and tributes paid by European nations to secure peace. This meant that if the Barbary States were to remain solvent, they needed an endless series of wars and treaties. It did them little good to remain at peace with any given nation for very long, and sooner or later they always broke their treaties to ensure further bribes and tributes. Thus, while the United States considered the matter closed by 1797, the Barbary States were merely biding their time, waiting for another cycle of piracy, war, and treaty. In the end it would take force and two further wars—with Tripoli between 1801 and 1805, and with Algiers in 1815—to finally break the cycle and free American ships from Barbary predation for good. In the meantime, Britain had seized the commercial initiative in both the Mediterranean and China.33

  By March 1794, Samuel Shaw was more than ready to leave China. The trading season at Canton was over, and after four globe-spanning voyages in ten years, the appeal of hearth and home beckoned with a rising strength impossible to ignore. He had been ill for months, but the prospect of seeing his young family buoyed his spirits and made him eager to depart. With war still raging between Britain and revolutionary France, and pirates always a possibility, it was agreed that, for safety’s sake, the American vessel would convoy with a British squadron just returned from an embassy to the Qianlong Emperor. They had come to terms with their British brethren in the years since the revolution, once more becoming trading partners as well as rivals, and besides, any friend was valuable on the perilous seas. Shaw spent most of the journey in his cabin, his feverish eyes staring at a miniature of his wife Hannah, whom he had married in 1792 on a brief visit home. He hoped to see her in the flesh soon, but ten weeks out from Canton, as they approached the Cape of Good Hope, he took a turn for the worse. The ship’s surgeon, James Dodge, did all he could, but was not above seeking the opinions of Dr. Macrea from the Hindostan and Dr. Gillion, Lord Macartney’s own surgeon, from the Lion. But there was little to be done. Shaw himself seemed to realize this, and taking one final look at the portrait at the foot of his berth, he sighed aloud and said, “God’s will be done.” Shortly after, he slipped away, dying on May 30, 1794.34

  His friend Thomas Randall, who had accompanied him on all his voyages, sent a letter to Hannah, informing her of her husband’s death and eulogizing his character. But the panegyrics were not reserved for friends. Obituaries appeared in many newspapers singing his praises, with one christening him “an ornament of his country.” They could already sense the momentous role Samuel Shaw had played in the history of their young nation, but if they had been able to glimpse the future, the praise might have reached an even higher pitch. In the years after Shaw’s first voyage on the Empress of China, America’s trade with China boomed, filling the pockets of many men who would go on to form important mercantile and commercial dynasties: including Jacob Astor and Warren Delano, progenitors of the Astor and Delano-Roosevelt fortunes. But the country as a whole was enriched as well. The expansion of the China trade led to a boom in shipbuilding and all the attendant industries needed to float a merchant fleet and process its commerce. In the search for commodities to trade for Chinese tea, America began to explore its continent’s Pacific coast in search of furs, speeding up the settlement of the American West. American ships also began to traverse the Mediterranean in greater numbers to purchase Turkish opium for the Chinese market, thus playing an important role in the two wars with the piratical Barbary States that did so much to bind together a fractured country and announce her arrival among the powers of the earth. The need for America’s merchants to purchase their own tea had started America down the path of empire.

  As the American consul lay dying in his cabin, his British counterpart could not help dwelling on the failures of his own mission. He too had come to China with great need and high hopes for the future of his country’s trade with the Celestial Kingdom. After the American War the British economy, and the East India Company that was such a central part of it, had been in a shambles, but the stubborn refusal of the Qianlong Emperor to see British reason, to realize the new world that was dawning, had scuppered his lofty ambitions. Now, as he returned home in defeat, all he could do was imagine the consequences of China’s intransigence. The Chinese had made opaque promises of “greater indulgence and favor,” but none of their concrete aims. “If the Court of Pekin[g] is not really sincere,” Macartney wondered, “can they possibly expect to feed us long with promises? Can they be ignorant that a couple of English frigates would be an overmatch for the whole naval force of their empire, that in half a summer they could totally destroy all the navigation of their coasts and reduce the inhabitants of the maritime provinces . . . to absolute famine?” If China were to “interdict us their commerce,” Macartney imagined, the China trade could as easily be captured and forced open with a few ships and a small force from British India. There would be consequences of course, but “the breaking-up of the power of China” would in the end, benefit Britain, who would “rise superior over every competitor” on the back of her “riches and the genius and spirit of her people.”35

  It was a prescient thought, but the growing opium trade was already having a profound effect. The proceeds from the China trade, the wealth created from the trade in tea and opium, flowed into the coffers of the East India Company just at the moment when they were most desperately needed to fund the expansion and administration of British India, a new empire built on a new triangle trade. And this narcotics trade was encouraged by the views created by the accounts of Macartney’s mission, presenting a stereotype of an inflexible, backward kingdom that turned British hearts and minds against the Chinese, helped to justify a distasteful trade, and made it easier to feed a growing addiction and ignore the repeated pleas of China’s rulers to stop the trade. But if this rationalization helped to enrich one empire, it would drive another to its knees. As the opium flooded into China in the nineteenth century, it became cheaper and more widely available, creating an epidemic with disastrous consequences for millions.

  Though in 1794 he still hoped for a diplomatic solution, Macartney would get his war with China. By 1839, the social and physical corrosion of British and American opium had become too much to bear. The Daoguang Emperor once more refused to legalize opium, and instead seized over 2.5 million pounds of opium and closed Canton to foreign trade. The British responded by invading to reopen trade by force, touching off the first of two Opium Wars that would fatally undermine Chinese sovereignty, to say nothing of Chinese public health.

 
But all this was in the future. For now, Lord Macartney was still connected to the corridors of power; the failure of the China mission was merely one isolated failure in a decorated imperial career. In 1796, he would be appointed British Governor of the Cape Colony, captured from the Dutch in 1795, fourteen years after the first mission to take it had been intercepted by Admiral de Suffren at Porto Praya. John Barrow would follow Macartney to Africa as the new governor’s private secretary, exploring deep into the interior of southern Africa on a mission to reconcile the Dutch Boer settlers with the native Africans, before returning to Britain to take up a fruitful career as Secretary of the Admiralty. From this post he would sponsor and encourage numerous scientific expeditions to the Arctic including those of John Ross, William Perry, and John Franklin. Barrow, Alaska and the Barrow Strait are named for him. It was China that was the making of him. Once more the effects of the American Revolution had rippled out from the Atlantic, aiding the expansion of the British Empire, and undermining its imperial rivals.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION MADE

  1. The Times, March 27, 1811.

  2. “Aborigines Want Remains Returned,” Canberra Times, January 30, 1988.

  3. Morning Post, May 29, 1794; “Aborigines Want Remains Returned,” Canberra Times, January 30, 1988; “A Campaign to Bring Home Australia’s First ‘Ambassador,’ ” Canberra Times, February 9, 1991.

  4. Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2006); Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (New York, 2005); Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York, 2017); Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York, 2016).