Jefferson's War

by Joseph Wheelan

  The bashaw’s spy from Malta arrived in Tripoli on May 19 with more sobering news: The American squadron, he said, intended to pick up Hamet and his army, capture towns all along the coast, and then attack Tripoli itself. “The Bashaw and his people seemed much agitated,” Cowdery reported. Yusuf locked Hamet’s eldest son in the castle. He also reduced the rations of his domestics and Mamelukes to one meal a day. His money gone, racked by apprehensions, Yusuf confided to Cowdery that if it were possible for him to make peace and give up the Philadelphia captives, he would gladly do it. “He was sensible of the danger he was in from the lowness of his funds and the disaffection of his people.”

  Reports of the Derna triumph were nearly as unwelcome at squadron headquarters in Syracuse. Lear redoubled his planning for a negotiated peace and assisted the ailing Barron in directing his squadron. Barron—or perhaps Lear, for he was making many of the decisions at this point—denied Eaton money, supplies and the 100 Marines he had requested. The Marines might have welcomed the relief from the tedium of blockading and convoying, although they also would have had to sacrifice their generous liberties in the various Mediterranean ports. To Lear’s annoyance, Eaton had succeeded despite everything, even though Barron—or Lear, ghostwriting his letters—was actively discouraging his support for Hamet’s insurgency.

  The first of Barron’s two extraordinary letters on this subject had reached Eaton at Bomba in early April. This letter would have compelled many leaders to abandon the expedition on the spot. But not Eaton, who kept its demoralizing contents to himself and continued on to Derna. “I must withhold my sanction” to any agreement with Hamet, Barron or Lear wrote, unhappy with the convention Eaton and Hamet had signed. “You must be sensible, Sir, that in giving their sanction to a cooperation with the exiled Bashaw, Government did not contemplate the measure as leading necessarily and absolutely to a reinstatement of that Prince in his rights on the regency of Tripoli.... I repeat it, we are only favoring [Hamet] as the instrument to an attainment and not in itself as an object....” Once a peace treaty was signed, “our support to Hamet Bashaw must necessarily be withdrawn.” This wasn’t what Barron had said just months earlier; he had changed the rules. Hamet had become a tool for obtaining a more favorable treaty from the bashaw, a tool that, once used, could be discarded.

  As though realizing he might have gone too far in his hard appraisal of Hamet’s utility, Barron added that his observations shouldn’t “cool your zeal or discourage your expectations.” So much depended upon on-the-spot decisions, he said soothingly, “that I must consider myself rather your Counsellor than your director.” He extended the wan hope that if enough Tripolitans rallied to Hamet’s cause to carry him to Benghazi, Barron might furnish him naval support at Tripoli’s gates. Otherwise, he would have to withdraw his cooperation.

  Eaton’s reply, written two days after Derna’s capture, was full of the steely determination and pragmatism that had carried him through fifty days of mutinies and hardships in the Libyan Desert. Scorning Barron’s calculating support of Hamet, Eaton predicted that “the Enemy will propose terms of Peace with us, the moment he entertains serious apprehensions of his Brother. This may happen at any stage of the War, most likely to rid him of so dangerous a rival, and not only Hamet Bashaw, but every one acting with him, must inevitably fall victims to our economy.” If Yusuf did propose peace and Barron and Lear agreed to it, at the very least, America should place Hamet beyond the bashaw’s reach, in a situation comparable to the one from which he was taken.

  He accused Barron of parsimony with money, men, and supplies. Barron had disbursed only $20,000, while Eaton’s expenses had already reached $30,000. Even so, “we are in possession of the most valuable province of Tripoli.” Ready cash now, he said, would tip the scales decisively in Hamet’s favor, because Tripoli’s failed harvest and Yusuf’s levies had drained the land of resources for either brother. “This is a circumstance favorable to our measures, if we will go to the expence of profiting of it—No Chief, whatever may be the attachment of his followers, can long support Military operations, without the means of subsisting his troops.” Arab troops in particular would switch loyalties to whichever side paid the most, because they are “poor, yet avaricious, and who being accustom’d to despotism, are generally indifferent about the name or person of their despot, provided he imposes no new burdens.” With cash, his army could defeat the bashaw’s army at Derna and march to Tripoli, where, with the squadron’s help, it would drive out Yusuf. “It would very probably be a death blow to the Barbary System.” Conversely, “any accomodation savoring of relaxness would as probably be death to the Navy, and a wound to the National honor.”

  As Eaton had foreseen, the bashaw had begun extending peace feelers as soon as he learned that his brother was on the march. Nissen relayed an overture from Sidi Mahomet Dghies, Tripoli’s foreign secretary. Act quickly, Nissen warned, because Dghies, the only Divan member opposed to war with America in 1801, was now nearly blind and planning to retire to the countryside, where he no longer would be able to influence Yusuf.

  Within days of receiving Nissen’s letter, Lear got one written in lime juice from Bainbridge; as the ranking captive, Bainbridge was in daily contact with Yusuf’s top officials. Peace was negotiable for $120,000, Bainbridge said.

  Lear, too, was stirred to diplomacy by Eaton and Hamet’s success. The Spanish consul in Tripoli, Don Joseph de Souza, had forwarded an unspecific proposal in December to which Lear had not responded. In March, with Eaton on the move, Lear replied. Yes, he said, he would entertain reasonable peace proposals. Don Joseph sent on a proposal from Yusuf: $200,000, and the surrender of all Tripolitan prisoners and property. Don Joseph carefully added that it was only “the ground work of a negotiation.” The sum was too high, groundwork or not, and as Lear confided to Bainbridge, he was unwilling to open negotiations without “the most unequivocal prospect of its being successfull.” He wanted “Peace upon terms which are compatable with the rising Character of our Nation and which will secure a future peace upon honorable and lasting grounds.”

  But that was before the electrifying victory at Derna. Now Lear knew he had to act without delay. Another factor was Barron’s growing realization that his health was not improving and that he soon would have to turn command of the squadron over to Captain John Rodgers. Lear knew the pugnacious Rodgers well enough to see that he might very well send the squadron against Tripoli. The captain once had declared that “his name should be written in blood on the walls of Tripoli” before he would pay a cent for ransom or tribute. While that attitude might bring Yusuf to the negotiating table, Rodgers would win all the laurels and Lear would be denied the diplomatic triumph. If Lear didn’t negotiate now, peace might very well be made through the expedient of war—as Jefferson had intended all along—and with Lear a footnote to Rodgers, as he had been to George Washington.

  Lear told Rodgers that while $200,000 was “totally inadmissible,” it was “much less extravagant than I should have expected.” He was certain Yusuf wished to negotiate; the bashaw was offering unacceptable opening terms only to save face with Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco. When Bainbridge’s letter arrived with $120,000 as the price for peace, Lear’s certainty grew.

  The other Barbary regencies were eager to see the war end. In mid-May, Algiers’s dey wrote a letter to Yusuf wildly asserting that he was “sending” Lear to Tripoli to negotiate a treaty, and urging the bashaw to “renew the peace with him ... as though you were making it with me.” Tunis’s sapitapa offered to mediate personally, but withdrew the offer when the American consul, George Davis, said—inaccurately, as events would show—that the United States would not agree to either ransom or tribute.

  Softened by months of invalidism, Barron now became highly sympathetic to the Philadelphia prisoners’ plight. While the captives always had aroused his sympathy, their welfare never had taken precedence over a peace with honor. Now it did. “I must contend that the liberty and perhaps the lives of
so many valuable & estimable Americans ought not to be sacrificed to points of honor, taken in the abstract.” He offered to send Lear to Tripoli on the Essex whenever he wished, which, of course, was perfectly agreeable to the consul general. “I conceive it my duty to endeavor to Open and bring to a happy issue, a negociation for peace....”

  Barron and Lear now made sure that Hamet and Eaton would not upset the anticipated peace talks by marching to Tripoli. In his second letter to Eaton, on May 19, Barron—again, with Lear probably helping him write it—announced the United States would provide only naval support to Hamet, and absolutely no more supplies, manpower, or money. Barron was pulling the plug. “By our resources and by your Enterprize & valor we have placed him at the post from whence he was driven,” Barron observed. But Hamet “must now depend on his own resources & exertions.” Without openly ordering Eaton and his men to evacuate Derna, Barron obliquely instructed them to do so, taking “that line of Conduct most prudent to be adopted in the present posture of affairs.” He made it clear that he had made up his mind and was not open to argument. “Whatever your ideas touching those intentions, I feel that I have already gone to the full extent of my authority.” Lear, Barron told Eaton, was poised to negotiate a peace with Yusuf that also would provide for Hamet, “without sacrificing anything.” Writing to Hull at the same time, the commodore said he expected Eaton, his officers, and the Marines to leave Derna on the Argus.

  Three days later, Barron resigned as squadron commander, and Rodgers took charge, although Eaton would not know this until much later because of the erratic communication medium upon which he and the American command had to rely—warships that happened to be sailing between Derna and Syracuse. It was “a duty which I owe to our Country and to the service in general, but more particularly to the present Squadron.” While Barron was commodore, the largest naval squadron ever sent to war by the United States had not once fired on Tripoli’s fortifications. Barron ensured that Rodgers wouldn’t either, informing him of Lear’s plan to negotiate peace, “for which I am persuaded, that the present moment is eminently favorable & the success of which, I entertain sanguine expectations.”

  It never seemed to have occurred to Barron and Rodgers to follow up on Eaton’s success at Derna with a naval strike on Tripoli, which most likely would have ended the war quickly, without ransom or tribute. Even with everything portending success, as it now did, the Barbary War leaders seemed congenitally unable to act decisively, except for Preble and Eaton. The long-awaited gunboats and bomb vessels—Preble had supervised construction of many of them—were due in the Mediterranean within weeks, and would bring the squadron’s strength to more than twenty vessels. But the contagion of inaction even infected the normally combative Rodgers, who professed the bizarre belief that it would be somehow dishonorable to attack Tripoli, “persecuting an Enemy ... [who] felt himself more than half vanquished.”

  Eaton didn’t tell Hamet of Barron’s decision to abandon him, knowing their small army would dissolve once the news was known. He buried his anger and gnawing worries in supervising the fortification of Fort Enterprize and monitoring the bashaw’s army, swollen to more than 3,000 soldiers—945 cavalry, 1,250 infantry, 350 refugees from Derna, and 500 new recruits.

  Eaton’s force of 1,000 was barely adequate for defending the city and too small for offensive action. Hull and Eaton estimated they would need another 300 to 400 Christian troops for that. Receiving no more funds from Barron, Eaton fed and equipped his troops by bartering whatever Hull could strip from the Argus. Eaton knew there would be no more supplies, no more cash to buy off the Arab sheiks. He kept the knowledge to himself and composed a response to Barron’s letter.

  Eaton didn’t mince words. To leave Hamet “in a more hopeless situation than he left the place” was shameful. Equally dishonorable was to “strike the flag of our Country here in presence of an enemy who have not merited the triumph—at any rate it is a retreat—and a retreat of Americans!” If Barron would invest in Hamet’s army what he intended to spend on a purchased peace, he could decisively defeat the bashaw’s troops outside Derna. Then nothing would stand between Hamet, Tripoli, and the throne. “The total defeat of his forces here would be a fatal blow to his interests.” Conversely, abandoning the expedition would invite tragedy. “You would weep, Sir, were you on the spot, to witness the unbounded confidence placed in the American character here, and to reflect that this confidence shortly sink into contempt and immortal hatred ... havoc and slaughter will be the inevitable consequence—not a soul of them can escape the savage vengeance of the enemy.”

  But by the time Eaton penned these lines, Lear already was in Tripoli, and Barron no longer commanded the Mediterranean squadron.

  Three frigates from Barron and Rodgers’s powerful squadron sailed into Tripoli harbor on May 26. The Essex immediately ran up the truce flag, allaying any fears that might have assailed the bashaw and his officers when they saw the Constitution, President, and Essex and their combined 120 guns in their home waters. The Spanish consul, Don Joseph, came aboard in his mediator role, and the involved diplomatic dance began.

  The negotiations were conducted on the Constitution over the next several days. Don Joseph and Leon Farfara, a broker and leader of Tripoli’s Jewish community, shuttled proposals and counterproposals between Yusuf and Lear, who refused to go ashore until there was a tentative agreement. On May 29, Yusuf reduced his asking price sharply from $200,000 to $130,000. Two days later, Lear made what he said would be his final offer: $60,000 ransom for the Philadelphia captives, peace with no price.

  The decisive moment was at hand. Was the bashaw serious about peace?

  Yusuf sent for Cowdery. Tell Captain Bainbridge, the bashaw said, that their nations were now at peace. When they heard the news, the Philadelphia’s officers erupted joyously.

  Nissen replaced Don Joseph as mediator during the final negotiations: for some reason, Yusuf had become dissatisfied with the Spanish consul. Lear hadn’t yet gone ashore, so Nissen was still carrying on shuttle diplomacy. A snag developed when Lear suddenly stipulated that the Philadelphia prisoners must be released before a treaty was signed, a condition the bashaw found unacceptable. Before the disagreement could do any lasting damage to the negotiations, Nissen and Dghies drafted a counterproposal that Lear accepted immediately: sending Bainbridge aboard the Constitution as a goodwill gesture. Now they had to persuade Yusuf to agree to the condition. While he was willing, the Divan balked; it had trouble imagining anyone returning voluntarily to captivity. But when Dghies and Nissen stepped up and personally guaranteed Bainbridge’s return, the Divan reluctantly assented to send him to the American flagship.

  Cowdery raced to the castle dungeon with the glad tidings. The crewmen were ecstatic, and some wept with joy. The war was over.

  The captives’ flinty Tripolitan drivers ended their celebration by setting them to hard labor, flogging many of them.

  Thousands of people greeted Lear at the crowded Tripoli wharf on June 3. Among them were the Philadelphia’s officers, released from prison the previous day. “The sight of them so near their freedom was grateful to my soul, and you must form an idea of their feelings; for I cannot describe them.” Yusuf’s officers escorted the consul general to the castle. With little ceremony, he and Yusuf signed the treaty ending the Barbary War. Tripoli’s forts thundered salutes, answered by the U.S. frigates.

  America agreed to pay Tripoli $60,000 and hand over 81 Tripolitan prisoners. In exchange, the 297 Philadelphia crewmen who had neither turned Turk nor died would go free—a ransom of $277 per man. The United States pledged to withdraw from Derna. Tripoli accepted peace without annual tribute and agreed to release Hamet’s family from captivity.

  But it would turn out there was more to the latter concession than met the eye.

  After they sobered up from celebrating, the Philadelphia captives left Tripoli on June 5, happily watching their castle prison of nineteen months and five days recede in their ships’ wake
s. Two crewmen, however, stayed behind voluntarily: Quartermaster John Wilson, one of the five Americans who had “turned Turk,” and John Ridgely, a Philadelphia surgeon like Cowdery. Ridgely elected to remain as U.S. agent to Tripoli until a new consul could be sent from America. Cowdery departed after a last audience with Yusuf, who had grown attached to him. “I bid the Bashaw a final adieu, at which he seemed much affected.”

  An unhappy surprise awaited the four captives besides Wilson who had turned Turk. Wilson understandably had decided to stay in Tripoli instead of returning to the United States with his former shipmates, who despised him for his ill-treatment of them while he was their overseer. The four other converts, however, had chosen to go home. But their decision evidently displeased Yusuf, who might have suspected that the spur behind their conversions was not religious devotion, but a desire to be freed from hard labor and captivity. Instead of being released with their mates, the four were led from the city under guard. They were never seen again.

  Fifty years later, when Southern slavery was about to plunge the nation into the Civil War, the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about the Tripoli prisoners and their sufferings in “Derne” in a blanket indictment of all slavery. In the stanzas celebrating the captives’ release, Whittier declaimed:In sullen wrath the conquered Moor