Jefferson's War

by Joseph Wheelan

  A tent was pitched on the castle battery and manned by sentries watching every night for invaders, while Yusuf stepped up his war preparations. Bainbridge and Eaton were right: Tripoli was vulnerable to land attack—and the bashaw knew this in his bones. As Hassan’s army prepared for its long march—Derna was about 500 miles from Tripoli—the American prisoners were put to work hauling ammunition and food to the army’s staging area. Displaying his growing fears of a coup, the bashaw locked up the relatives of his expedition’s officers in the former U.S. consular house, to ensure the loyalty of Hassan’s army. Before the troops departed, a marabout absolved the officers of their sins, according to surgeon Jonathan Cowdery, and assured them of victory.

  Yusuf sent his son-in-law into the countryside to recruit more troops for Tripoli’s defense. He returned empty-handed; the people wouldn’t fight. Yusuf’s levies had been too heavy, with women even stripped of their jewels. The Spanish consul, storing up good favor against the day Spain would find itself on Tripoli’s enemy list, gave the bashaw a shipment of muskets.

  Everyone was certain the city would be attacked in the summer, but Yusuf’s women and children chose to remain in the castle rather than move to the family’s country palace. “They said that if they must be taken, they would rather fall into the hands of the Americans than the Arabs,” Cowdery noted wryly.

  The increasingly flustered bashaw declared to Cowdery that if the Americans forced him to, or if they attacked Tripoli, he would put every American prisoner to death. A few days later, he asked Cowdery how many Marines the United States had. Ten thousand, the ship’s surgeon replied. And troops? “Eighty thousand, said I, are in readiness to march to defend the country, at any moment; and one million of militia are also ready to fight for the liberty and rights of their countrymen!” The bashaw looked very somber.

  As Eaton’s expedition neared Derna, reports reached him that Derna’s governor was fortifying the city and Yusuf’s army was close by. The worried Arab chiefs conferred with Hamet into the night. Eaton was not invited to their consultations.

  The next morning, April 26, Sheiks il Taiib and Mahomet announced they were turning around, and the Bedouins refused to strike their tents. The hours ticked away while Eaton argued with them, painfully aware of all the days lost because of the Arabs’ intractability. Only a day’s march from Derna, they risked losing the race to Yusuf’s army.

  Eaton cajoled, wheedled, and reproached, finally resorting to the unfailing expedient of cold cash. He promised the Arab chiefs $2,000 if they would resume the march. That got them moving again.

  That afternoon, the fiftieth day of the desert march, Eaton’s army reached the heights above Derna.

  Eaton joined a cavalry patrol scouting the city. There was no sign of the bashaw’s troops.

  Unaware that Eaton’s army was poised to strike at Tripoli’s second-largest city, Jefferson and his officials had begun to doubt whether there would ever be an honorable peace with Tripoli. It couldn’t be said that the U.S. government had stinted on committing resources; the $555,862 appropriated for Commodore Dale’s tiny squadron in 1801 had tripled in four years and now sustained twelve ships crewed by 2,000 men. Nor was the problem the blockade or the convoys. The blockade pinched Tripoli at times, and the convoys had denied enemy corsairs a single American prize since the capture of the Franklin in June 1802. On top of these pressures, the bashaw was having to foot the cost of maintaining a large army. But Barron’s squadron, the largest naval force ever deployed by the United States, had not fired on Tripoli in eight months and, without the threat of attack, Yusuf felt no compunction to sue for peace. Frustrated U.S. leaders, including the recently reelected Jefferson, were ready to trim down the Mediterranean squadron to a skeletal blockading force.

  In the bashaw’s castle beside Tripoli’s harbor, the Philadelphia crewmen tried to keep up their spirits, even though they had seen nothing in seven long months to kindle any new hope of liberation; since Preble’s departure the previous September, American warships had only blockaded Tripoli, without once going on the attack. During their seventeen months of captivity, five crewmen had died, and five had converted to Islam and no longer lived in confinement. The remaining 297, officers and men alike, ate and slept in dank, ill-lit dungeons in Yusuf’s castle. Their treatment was no better than before, with the work gangs roughly turned out at first light each morning for hard labor.

  In the lavish castle rooms reserved for the bashaw, Yusuf and his officials disparaged America’s naval war and blockade. If he had three frigates, Yusuf boasted to Cowdery, Tripoli could blockade America as effectively as the Americans had invested Tripolitan ports. “He said he could do it as easily as a frigate and schooner could blockade Tripoli!” Only Preble’s August 3 attack had really shaken the Tripolitans, Nissen said, and “the damage done is absolutely of no consequence,” although a stray musket ball had starred a mirror right where Nissen had been standing in his home minutes before. Nissen recommended to Barron that he concentrate on blockading Tripoli’s eastern ports, where gunpowder was being smuggled from the Levant.

  Despite the bashaw’s boastful talk, the war had drawn down his treasury, forcing him to impose levies that had made his countrymen outside the capital resentful. Yusuf also had borrowed from his neighbors. He owed Tunis $120,000, and his plan to use the Philadelphia as partial payment was consumed in the flames of Stephen Decatur’s incendiaries. The bashaw was counting on America tiring of the war and paying for peace. All of these factors, and Eaton’s presence outside Derna, made April 1805 an excellent time for a decisive naval offensive. A twopronged attack combining Eaton’s army and Barron’s fleet would surely force Yusuf to sign any treaty that would allow him to keep his throne.

  This was what Secretary of State Madison and Navy Secretary Smith had had in mind when they instructed Barron and Consul General Lear to apply military force until America could dictate peace terms. Barron would blockade and “annoy the Enemy,” Smith said, until “it is conceived that no doubt whatever can exist of your coercing Tripoli to a Treaty upon our own Terms.” Lear then could negotiate a treaty “without any price or pecuniary concession whatever,” as Madison put it, with the only permissible expenditure being for the captives’ ransom, up to $500 each, minus trades. Should “adverse events or circumstances ... which are not foreseen here” intervene, and Lear judged “a pecuniary sacrifice preferable to a protraction of the war,” he might pay for peace, but only as a last resort.

  Jefferson was readier to cut his losses in Barbary than Smith’s and Madison’s instructions to Lear and Barron indicated. The orders were drafted after a Cabinet meeting on January 8, 1805, at which Jefferson and his advisers resolved to send “new instructions not to give a dollar for peace,” but “if the enterprise in the spring does not produce peace & delivery of prisoners, ransom them.” Jefferson, however, confided in a letter in March to a longtime Virginia friend, Judge John Tyler, that he intended to scale back America’s commitment to the war even more. If Barron failed to dictate a peace by the end of the summer, he planned to reduce the Mediterranean squadron to a three-ship blockading force to protect U.S. shipping. A continual blockade was better than a bought peace, the president said, and would cost no more than annual tribute. Whatever the outcome, he would never pay tribute to Tripoli because it would invite fresh demands from the other Barbary States. Jefferson believed the United States already had shown the tributary European powers how “to emancipate themselves from that degrading yoke. Should we produce such a revolution there, we shall be amply rewarded for what we have done.”

  Jefferson’s candid letter did not mention Eaton’s clandestine mission.

  Despite all the hopes riding on Barron’s cruise, and Tripoli’s vulnerability to a joint land—sea attack, Barron’s squadron would not be going on the offensive soon. The commodore was fighting for his life in his Syracuse sickbed. Afflicted with liver disease soon after reaching the Mediterranean in the late summer of 1804, by November Ba
rron had made Captain John Rodgers, his second in command, responsible for the squadron’s day-to-day operations. Barron retained overall command of the squadron, optimistically thinking he would turn the corner any week. But his health collapsed. On November 14, Midshipman Henry Allen reported, “It will soon be determined whether he lives or not.” By December 27, Barron could not hold a pen to write a letter. In January, 1805, he hovered near death. Barely surviving that crisis, he remained so weak that his secretary wrote many of his letters for him. April found him still unable to return to his ship.

  Lear’s influence over Barron and the squadron’s operations waxed with Barron’s waning health. At a distance of 200 years, his motives are unclear, although they most likely included a strong dose of ambition mingled with the belief that diplomacy should conclude the war. Lear had spent his adult life amid the republic’s founders and the towering events attending its birth, but never as a participant. He was George Washington’s close friend and represented him in business affairs. After Washington died in 1799, Lear became a diplomat, but at forty-three he had not yet made his mark or his fortune, and hoped to do so in Barbary.

  Whatever his motives, Lear openly criticized Eaton’s scheme to build an insurgency around Hamet Karamanli and drive his brother Yusuf from Tripoli. “... I should place much more confidence in the continuance of a peace with the present Bashaw, if he is well beaten into it, then I should with the other, if he should be placed on the throne by our means.”

  Tobias Lear had been Barbary’s consul general for nearly two years. In his portrait from that time, he appears as an oval-faced man with large, intelligent eyes and a pointed nose, clad in an army officer’s coat, with a sedentary man’s double chin. Lear often signed his correspondence “Colonel Lear,” proud of the rank Washington had given him during the Quasi-War with France. Washington, picked to command American ground forces, had named Lear his chief aide. Washington’s army never took the field because the French didn’t send an army to North America; the Quasi-War was fought at sea. Lear, however, signed his correspondence with his titular rank for the rest of his days.

  He had devoted nearly his entire adult life to America’s first family. In May 1786 the twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate became George Washington’s personal secretary and moved to Mount Vernon. Over the years, he became more of a family member than employee, particularly after making two of Washington’s nieces his second and third wives, after his first died in Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow-fever epidemic. As Washington’s personal secretary, he handled correspondence, kept the family books, tutored the children, attended to Washington’s varied business interests, and dined every day with the family. He followed Washington to New York and Philadelphia when he became president.

  At the beginning of Washington’s second term, Lear struck out on his own, hoping to make a fortune through business and land speculation in the new capital city being built on the Potomac. He continued to act as Washington’s business agent and sent him letters full of shrewd observations whenever he traveled. He also served as a director of the Potomack Company, organized by Washington and other businessmen to make the Potomac River a commercial pipeline to the heartland.

  In December 1799, when the ex-president was dying of pneumonia at Mount Vernon, it was Lear who held his hand as he uttered his last words. (Washington told him not to put him in his burial vault until he had been dead three days, just for good measure.) Washington’s will granted Lear rent-free tenancy for life at Walnut Hill Farm at Mount Vernon.

  Yet, during all his years with George Washington, the repository of all the early United States’ hopes, Lear was an observer, not a participant. Only once had he been a central player in his own right, and it had not redounded to his credit. Lear was blamed for the sensational disappearance of all the correspondence between Washington and Jefferson from 1797 until Washington’s death two years later.

  This was significant because Washington and Jefferson, fellow Virginians and Revolution patriots and friends for twenty years, had quarreled bitterly in 1797 and had exchanged several sharp letters. The disappearance of the copies undoubtedly made of Washington’s letters to Jefferson and Jefferson’s replies to Washington—while they were in Lear’s possession—erased all traces of their angry exchange. Of course, none of the letters turned up among Jefferson’s papers because Jefferson’s indiscretion had caused the rupture in their friendship in the first place, and the letters would have reflected poorly on him.

  Jefferson, as did all Republicans, had vilified the Jay Treaty as a dirty piece of bootlicking by Anglophile Federalists. But unfortunately, Jefferson also vented his unhappiness in a blistering letter to Philip Mazzei, a former Monticello neighbor who had moved back to his native Italy. Through circuitous means, the letter unexpectedly found its way into print in the United States, and a storm erupted. The catalyst was Jefferson’s thinly veiled reference to Washington, already a national icon, in the line, “men who were Samsons in the field & Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”

  Jefferson was disconcerted by the letter’s publication, and Washington was furious. The breach that opened up between the two old friends wasn’t helped by the accusations that flew in a subsequent exchange of heated letters. Only one survived Washington’s death. In it, Washington expressed outrage over the “grossest and most invidious misrepresentations” of his administration’s actions.

  John Marshall, the first U.S. Supreme Court chief justice and the era’s leading Federalist, discovered the strange gap in the men’s correspondence when he took possession of Washington’s papers in early 1801—from Lear, who had them to himself for a year. (Marshall based his masterful, four-volume Washington biography on these papers.) Lear said nothing to Marshall about the gap. Later, however, he acknowledged to Alexander Hamilton and others that he had destroyed letters Washington would never have wished to be made public.

  But Lear might have acted for more selfish reasons than concern for Washington’s posterity. In The Checkered Career of Tobias Lear, historian Ray Brighton suggests there might have been a quid pro quo between Lear and Jefferson, who was running for president when Lear had possession of the papers. Publication of the letters very likely would have cost Jefferson the election, which he only managed to win on the thirty-sixth ballot in the U.S. House, after an Electoral College tie with Aaron Burr.

  Lear and Jefferson had been friends since Jefferson’s years in Washington’s Cabinet, and Lear privately agreed with Jefferson’s Republican views. He also needed a job that paid well, for his unlucky business speculation in the new capital had plunged him deeply into debt.

  While it will never be known whether Lear and Jefferson had an agreement about the letters, Jefferson and Madison made sure Lear had a government job for the rest of his short, eventful life. (In 1814 Lear saved the Army’s records when the British burned Washington. Two years later, he committed suicide.)

  Within weeks of Jefferson’s inauguration, Lear was appointed to his first job: consul to Santo Domingo. This was a coveted post, because opportunities abounded for getting rich in the West Indies trade. But Lear happened to arrive during the tumultuous aftermath of a slave rebellion and was expelled months later when French troops invaded.

  As consul general for the Barbary States, he had hoped to establish a reputation and accumulate wealth, but the war had afforded him a chance for neither.

  Early in 1805, Lear temporarily moved from Algiers to Malta so he could be close to Tripoli if an opportunity arose for a parley. He was eager to negotiate a peace, no matter what Eaton and Hamet accomplished. The shortest distance to his goal was through Barron, who lay helplessly ill in Syracuse. Lear shuttled between Malta and Syracuse, making sure nothing—such as a naval offensive—upset his plan for a diplomatic settlement. He also systematically undermined Hamet’s credibility with Barron. Eaton had so favorably impressed the commodore during their Atlantic crossing that at the beginning of 1805, Barr
on had pledged to cooperate with Eaton and Hamet and to restore Hamet as bashaw. Lear, aware that if their desert expedition dethroned Yusuf his own efforts would inevitably become expendable, or, at best, secondary, inexorably turned the commodore against Hamet and Eaton.

  He had to tread carefully because he didn’t want to come across to Barron as a crank, and because no one really knew what the president had agreed to when he met with Eaton the previous year. So he took cover in others’ opinions, such as those of Nissen, who assayed the damage caused by Preble’s attacks as “very inconsiderable.” And there was Bainbridge, who in his letters from captivity clearly opposed any action that would jeopardize his crew’s safety or extend its captivity. Bainbridge also thought little of Eaton’s expedition, or of Hamet, a “poor effeminate refugee ... who had not spirit enough to retain his situation when placed in it,” and who had “wandered an Exile far from Country, Wife & Children for more than 8 years without disturbing the Regency of Tripoli.” Bainbridge, who had plenty of idle time to ponder the Tripoli situation, had concluded that blockading was futile. As he saw it, America had three options: bombard Tripoli and seek terms immediately; capture the city with an army; or “abandon us entirely to the hard fate which serving our Country plunged us into.”

  Lear also pounced on Richard Farquhar’s bitter complaints about Eaton after Eaton expelled him from Alexandria for embezzling expedition funds. “He writes to the Commodore that Mr E. is a madman,” Lear gleefully told Captain John Rodgers, a friend from his brief Santo Domingo consulship. “He has quarreled with the Ex-Bashaw &c &c &c, We are in daily expectation of more authentic accounts from that quarter; but I make no calculation in our favour from that source.” Lear never identified the source, and nothing more came of the matter.