Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Letters from the Mediterranean left no doubt that Preble’s vigorous prosecution of the war had made its mark. For the first time in years, said William Eaton, “an American is no longer ashamed of an American Uniform here…and a Barbary cruiser views an American flag in this sea with as much caution as a skulking debtor does any deputy sheriff in our country.” Pope Pius VII, from his seat in Rome, was said to have framed the war as a clash of civilizations. “The American Commander,” he was quoted as saying of Preble, “with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages!” And Admiral Nelson—in naval circles a higher authority than the pope—was said to have remarked that Decatur’s mission to destroy the Philadelphia was “the most bold and daring act of the age.”

  After three gratifying days in New York, Preble set out on the overland journey to Washington, where he was to debrief the Navy Secretary. He arrived March 4, the day of Jefferson’s second inaugural ceremony. When Preble presented himself at the Navy Office, Secretary Smith immediately walked him across to the White House to call on the commander in chief. Jefferson had already forwarded Preble’s official dispatches to Congress with a cover message lauding “the energy and judgment displayed by this excellent officer, through the whole course of the service lately confided to him.” Congress, in turn, had voted a resolution to award Preble a gold medal, “emblematical of the attacks on the town, batteries, and naval force of Tripoli.” Swords would be presented to each of the officers of the squadron, and the enlisted men would be paid a bonus equivalent to one month’s pay.

  During the two weeks that Preble remained in the capital, he was eagerly sought out by administration officials and members of Congress. He spent several days with Secretary Smith at the Navy Office, poring over maps of the Mediterranean. He dined at the White House with Jefferson on the sixth and at the home of James and Dolley Madison on the twelfth. His return to Maine was a multi-city victory tour: Philadelphia, Trenton, New York, Boston—in each place he was greeted as a national hero. Banquets were given in his honor. In Philadelphia, he stayed with Stephen Decatur’s parents and had his portrait painted by Rembrandt Peale. On arriving in Boston, he was invited to Quincy for an audience with former President Adams. Rumors circulated that he was about to be appointed Secretary of the Navy.

  From New York, Preble sent a hogshead of Marsala wine by coasting vessel to Washington, in care of Robert Smith, to be presented as a gift to the president. In the course of one of their conversations in Washington, Jefferson had expressed curiosity about this wine, which he thought might be comparable to Madeira. As much as the Marsala suited Jefferson’s tastes, however, his sense of probity would not allow him to accept a gift from a military officer. “It is really a painful and embarrassing thing,” he told Robert Smith. “To reject may be supposed to imply impure motives in the offer. To receive leads to horrid abuse.” The president’s tactful solution was to offer Preble a gift of equivalent value. It was a polygraph, or “portable secretary”—a device which made duplicate copies of letters by employing two pens attached to a wooden arm. “I have used one for the last 18 months,” Jefferson told Preble in his letter accompanying the device, “and can truly say that it is an inestimable invention.” Deeply moved, Preble wrote a note of thanks that would have rankled his fellow Federalists had it ever been made public: “I beg leave to assure you of my ardent wishes that Heaven may preserve your health and long continue your valuable life, an honor to our country and to human nature.”

  THOUGH YUSUF’S PUBLIC RHETORIC remained defiant, he no longer entertained any doubts about American resolve. With the reinforcements that had crossed the Atlantic under Commodore Barron’s command, the American naval presence in the Mediterranean was larger than ever before. Like the other Barbary regencies, Tripoli had prospered by extracting tribute from the second-rate maritime powers. It did Yusuf no good to persist in a war against a nation that blockaded his harbor, seized his cruisers, shelled his city, made common cause with his exiled brother, and raised mercenary armies to march against him. Preferring to see this pugnacious enemy go away and leave him alone, he sent out peace feelers the same month Commodore Preble sailed from the Mediterranean.

  Tobias Lear, the U.S. consul designated to negotiate with Tripoli, conveyed the American terms. The United States would pay no money for peace; the peace would have to be permanent; prisoners would be exchanged one for one; ransom would be paid only for the excess number of American prisoners held by Yusuf. On this last point, Lear implicitly agreed to the controversial point that a “token” ransom could be paid to win the safe release of William Bainbridge and the crew of the Philadelphia, and in order to provide Yusuf with a face-saving way out of the war. But when the Tripolitan counterterms were presented in April 1805, they were far in excess of what Lear was willing to consider: $200,000 for peace and ransom. The war would go on.

  Meanwhile, a bitter and potentially deadly feud was playing out in the uppermost ranks of the Mediterranean Squadron, between John Rodgers and the Barron brothers. Throughout most of the winter of 1804–05, Commodore Samuel Barron had been prostrated with a painful liver disease. He could barely lift a pen to write, and remained ashore in Syracuse, convalescing in bed, for months on end. Thus incapacitated, he was in no condition to manage squadron logistics or plan the coming summer campaign against Tripoli, and would have been wise to yield command (at least until his health improved) to his second-in-command, John Rodgers. But Barron preferred to rely upon his younger brother, James (the third-ranking officer in the squadron), as a kind of surrogate commander. The commodore issued orders through James, blurring the chain of command and sending Rodgers into as black a rage as this rage-prone officer had ever experienced. The psychodrama raised the specter of gunplay between the second- and third-ranking officers of the U.S. Mediterranean Squadron during a time when the squadron was actively engaged in a war.

  The issue came to a head in the summer of 1805, when James Barron conveyed to Rodgers, through an intermediary, that “he had heard that [Rodgers] had spoken in a disrespectful manner of his brother’s character, for which aspersion he should call on him to answer in a proper place and time, and that Commodore Barron’s illness prevented him from doing it immediately.” Rodgers replied by calling James Barron a “two-faced Judas,” and said he looked forward to receiving the promised challenge upon returning to America. He added, gratuitously, that if Barron did not follow up with the challenge, “I shall impute it to a want of what no gentleman—one who wears a uniform—should be deficient in,” and pledged that if he did not hear from Barron’s second, he would issue a challenge of his own.

  Fortunately, the antagonists agreed to put off the duel until their responsibilities in the Mediterranean had ended. Later, to get ahead of the story, when both men had returned to America, Rodgers did challenge James Barron. Barron agreed to fight but postponed the encounter because he had himself fallen sick. In the interim, several of their fellow officers intervened and mediated a settlement that would avert the duel. Both men signed a statement agreeing that the matter had been resolved to their mutual honor and satisfaction. For the rest of their lives, however, Rodgers and James Barron continued to share a toxic hatred for each other.

  The 1805 campaign against Tripoli would involve a combined assault by sea and land. Former U.S. consul William Eaton would raise an army in Egypt, which would march across the desert to capture Derna and Benghazi, and from there be transported across the Gulf of Sidra by naval vessels to be landed on the coast, where they would launch the final assault on Tripoli. If the audacious plan proved successful, Yusuf would be deposed and Hamet Karamanli restored to the throne.

  Eaton’s polyglot army comprised eight U.S. Marines, some seventy Greek mercenaries, and about three hundred Arabs and Bedouins. The march from Alexandria was an unruly affair, with the tribesmen repeatedly refusing to carry on unless given additional pay and occasi
onally threatening to massacre their Christian paymasters. But Eaton was able to hold the army together as far west as Derna, where a small squadron under the command of Master Commandant Isaac Hull, comprising the Argus, Nautilus, and Hornet, dropped anchor in the bay to take part in the attack. While Hull’s squadron shelled Derna, Eaton’s troops stormed and captured the town on April 27. The action gave the Marine Corps an important part of its founding mythology and a line in the Marine Hymn: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli / We will fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea.”

  While Eaton prepared to push on to the west, Tobias Lear’s discussions with Yusuf grew more constructive. Yusuf knew that his brother was at the head of a hostile army, just across the Gulf of Sidra—and he knew that the summer would bring another attack from the sea, this time by five frigates instead of one. As the Bashaw confessed to Lear, he cherished no illusions that Tripoli’s defenses could stand against that much force:

  I know that the exertions of your squadron this summer will be sufficient to reduce my capital; but recollect I have upwards of three hundred of your countrymen in my hands; and I candidly tell you that, if you persevere in driving me to the last extremity, I shall retire with them to a castle about ninety miles in the interior of the country, which I have prepared for their confinement and my own security. Money is not my object at present, but a peace on terms that will not disgrace me hereafter.

  The debate among the Americans now hung on the question of whether to agree to pay some modest sum as ransom for the American prisoners. Eaton and others argued strenuously that Yusuf must be forced to capitulate with no such payment at all, that only a total victory would protect the United States against the aggression of the other Barbary States. Lear’s case for a face-saving ransom was bolstered by surreptitious lime juice letters from Bainbridge, reporting that Hamet had no popular following in Tripoli and would be unlikely to hold on to his throne even if the Americans put him on it. Another coup d’état in Tripoli would raise the danger of another war; Lear argued that it was in American interests to leave a chastened Yusuf in power.

  Commodore Barron, swayed by Lear’s reasoning and Bainbridge’s letters, allowed Lear to land at Tripoli under a flag of truce. Five days of negotiations yielded a treaty on June 3, 1805. The United States would make no payment for peace or tribute, but it would pay $60,000 as ransom for the American prisoners. Hamet would be forced to withdraw from Derna. The treaty was signed a few days later in the greatcabin of the Constitution.

  After the military and naval successes of 1804, the treaty that brought the Tripolitan War to an end was disappointing to many Americans. It was the $60,000 ransom payment that really stuck in the craw. “I must say I had expected a treaty of a different character,” said Secretary Smith, on first receiving the news—“And informed as I now am, I wish that such a peace had not been made.” Eaton, Hamet, and the Americans absconded from Derna in the dead of night, escaping to the Constellation in small boats before the tribesmen and mercenaries could learn that they had been sold out. An embittered Eaton would publicly castigate “Aunt Lear,” the Barron brothers, Rodgers, and everyone else he regarded as having been a party to the treaty, and his allies in Congress campaigned against ratification. Preble did not offer a public opinion on the issue, but privately he agreed that the treaty was “ignominious,” and had come at the “sacrifice of national honor.”

  But the disappointment was not so great as to place ratification in doubt. Complaints were aired on the Senate floor, but the chamber voted to approve the treaty in April 1806. The nation was happy to welcome Bainbridge, his officers, and his crew safely home. The treaty reopened the lucrative Mediterranean trade routes. Neither the war nor the peace with Yusuf had placed any real strain on the American economy. The Tripolitan War had been, in the Jeffersonian view of the world, a perfectly acceptable overseas military adventure. It had been conducted on a scale compatible with Albert Gallatin’s severe fiscal limitations; it had given the American people something to celebrate; and it had signaled to the world that the United States was capable of projecting military force in defense of its national interests. Republicans could argue, with some justification, that Jefferson had succeeded where his Federalist predecessors had failed. In his annual message the following December, Jefferson reported: “The states on the coast of Barbary seem generally disposed at present to respect our peace and friendship.”

  For twenty years, Jefferson had spoken of an enduring, international solution to the problem of Barbary piracy. He envisioned a system in which the maritime trading nations would form a coalition to patrol the Mediterranean sea-lanes, each member contributing warships, men, or money in proportion to the value of its Mediterranean trade. Simultaneously, the Barbary States would be offered new trade opportunities to replace the tribute, ransom, and booty on which they had come to depend. It was a high-minded vision, one that did Jefferson credit. He would continue to press it upon his European and American correspondents for years afterward.

  But Jefferson also knew perfectly well that the nations of Europe had never shown much interest in a coalition response to the North African question, even while at peace. There was not the remotest possibility they would do so while at war. America was not a great power, and could not take on, single-handed, a project to transform this distant and culturally alien part of the world. A decade later, in 1815, Stephen Decatur would lead a mission to put an end to Barbary piracy once and for all. But in the interim, and for as long as Jefferson remained in office, the United States would do what other maritime nations had done in the Mediterranean for centuries. Diplomats would seek the best deals they could get, employing a deft combination of threats and bribes. They would keep the sea-lanes open to American ships, while allowing the violence of Barbary to fall on others.

  ENTERING THE MIDDLE YEARS of his presidency, Jefferson found himself at the height of his power. The nation was riding a wave of prosperity, created largely by the phenomenal expansion of its shipping and trade. Maritime commerce brought vast private fortunes into the cities, simultaneously benefiting farmers by driving up prices of exported foodstuffs. If there was ever a doubt that America prospered by European misery, it was dispelled by the performance of the American economy between 1801 and 1807. For fourteen months between March 1802 and May 1803, the European war was placed on hold by the abortive Peace of Amiens. As a direct consequence, American exports (including re-exports) fell from $93 million in 1801 to $56 million in 1803. After the resumption of war, exports rose to $78 million in 1804, $96 million in 1805, and peaked at $108 million in 1807. The American shipbuilding industry boomed as it never had before, with more than 100,000 tons of new shipping built and launched in each of three consecutive years—1804, 1805, and 1806.

  Booming trade filled the treasury with customs revenue, surpassing Treasury Secretary Gallatin’s most sanguine expectations. The windfalls allowed for the elimination of unpopular internal taxes while simultaneously permitting Gallatin to meet his aggressive debt-reduction goals. The unexpected costs of the Tripolitan War were absorbed without difficulty. In 1803, Jefferson executed the largest real estate transaction in American history by acquiring the 800,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory from France. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the territory of the United States while resolving a potential source of instability and conflict on the western border. With the treasury awash in revenue, Gallatin managed to raise the $11.25 million cash payment required to complete the transaction without asking Congress for new taxes.

  The opposition Federalists were as bitter and intractable as ever, but their great political and intellectual leader, Alexander Hamilton, was dead, and the party had been so badly routed at the polls that its survival seemed doubtful. Before 1800, the Federalists had controlled both houses of Congress, each with decisive majorities; but after being pulverized consecutively in the elections of 1800, 1802, and 1804, they found themselves outnumbered by a margin of 27–7 in the Se
nate and 114–28 in the House. In 1804, Jefferson was reelected in one of the most lopsided presidential contests in American history. Running against South Carolinian Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, he polled 162 electoral votes to Pinckney’s 14, winning every state but Delaware and Connecticut. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire, one of a handful of surviving Federalists in Washington, confided in his diary: “I think myself, federalism can never rise again.”

  In his second inaugural address, Jefferson reminded his countrymen of all the reasons they had supported his party. The Republicans had promised peace, prosperity, and an end to internal taxes. In 1805, the country was at peace, it was prosperous, and “it may be the pleasure and pride of an American to ask, what farmer, what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States?”

  Jefferson was often seen riding his horse through the streets of Washington, unaccompanied by servants or guards. (His carriage left the White House stables only when his daughters were visiting.) He rode to church on Sunday, to the Great Falls of the Potomac, to the wooded bluffs above the Anacostia River, and to the shops of the “Center Market” between Seventh and Ninth Streets. His account books show that the president attended scientific lectures, horse races, theater performances, and on one occasion (three days before Christmas 1806) a tightrope act. He was an inveterate shopper. On any given afternoon, a customer in a shop on Capitol Hill or Georgetown might glance out the window and see the president of the United States climbing down from his saddle, and (as one said) “fastening his horse’s bridle himself to the shop doors.”