Jefferson's War

by Joseph Wheelan

  Wide open flings your dungeon-door,

  And leaves ye free from cell and chain,

  The owners of yourselves again.

  Dark as his allies desert-born,

  Soiled with the battle’s stain, and worn

  With the long marches of his band

  Through hottest wastes of rock and sand,

  Scorched by the sun and furnace-breath

  Of the red desert’s wind of death,

  With welcome words and grasping hands,

  The victor and deliverer stands!“

  Barron ordered Hull to bring Eaton and his troops to Syracuse, but Eaton refused to leave Derna until Lear concluded his negotiations. Eaton rightly believed that holding Derna was integral to obtaining an honorable peace. “I cannot reconcile it to a sense of duty to evacuate it,” he told Hull, who didn’t argue. Instead, he cruised off Derna with the Hornet and Argus, ready to give Eaton supporting fire if needed.

  Hassan and Eaton’s armies skirmished in several small, sharp actions during the weeks after the May 13 attack. Eaton led thirty-five Americans and Greeks in a raid against an enemy force twice their size on May 28 and defeated it, killing a captain and five men and taking prisoners. A wave of desertions swept Hassan’s army. So many troops melted away that Hassan’s officers resorted to chaining up the relatives of Arab soldiers to stem the defections. The enemy probed Eaton’s lines on June 3 and was firmly repulsed by Eaton, O‘Bannon, and the Christian troops. During the prelude to that skirmish, O’Bannon had galloped on horseback through the city as citizens called out to him, “Long live our friends & protectors!”

  Hassan’s cavalry and soldiers advanced en masse on Derna on June 10 for a decisive battle. Communications being what they were, neither side knew that the war officially had ended a week earlier. This very day, in fact, the treaty was being debated by the Divan in Tripoli. Bainbridge was allowed the rare privilege of observing the proceedings because he had kept his word and returned to Tripoli when he was permitted to boat out to the squadron during the peace talks. When the Divan deadlocked 4—4, Yusuf broke the tie by removing his signet from his robe, pressing it to the document, and exclaiming, “It is peace!” The treaty ratification was announced with a 21-gun salute from the castle ramparts, returned by the Constitution.

  But the armies facing one another at Derna were unaware of these events. Hamet and his Arab cavalry met the advancing Tripolitans a mile outside Derna. A swirling battle quickly developed, with countless attacks and counterattacks by thousands of troops. From a distance, Eaton watched Hassan’s troops attack repeatedly, each time repulsed by Hamet without the benefit of naval gunfire. The Argus and Hornet were unable to fire over the hills jutting between the shore and the battlefield, try though they did to maneuver into a position where they could support Hamet. But even without supporting fire or reinforcements, Hamet’s cavalry drove off the attackers after four hours, killing 40 to 50 enemy and wounding another 70 while losing 50 to 60 men. Eaton’s battle report brimmed with paternal pride. “The Bashaw deserves the merit of this victory—I had little to do with its arrangement, and could not render him any assistance in arms but from the fire of a single field piece .” Too late, Hamet had proved himself an able leader.

  Eaton’s refusal to evacuate Derna reached Rodgers, who feared it might wreck the peace Lear had just made. “A none compliance will make the responsibility his own: nevertheless, the consequence will be his country’s,” Rodgers wrote tartly to Lear. To “prevent impending mischief,” he dispatched the Constellation to Derna to fetch Eaton. Yusuf, equally concerned about the progress of the expedition to depose him, insisted that his own representative go along.

  Before the frigate left Tripoli, both Rodgers and Lear wrote letters apprising Eaton of the treaty and the need to evacuate Derna immediately. Rodgers bluntly said he wished “no farther hostilities by the forces of the U. States be committed against the said Josuph Bashaw, his subjects or dominions, and that you evacuate and withdraw our forces from Derne, or whatever part of his Teritory this may find you in.”

  Lear diplomatically gave Eaton’s expedition credit for pushing the bashaw into negotiations: “I found that the heroic bravery of our few countrymen at Derne, and the idea that we had a large force and immense supplies at that place, had made a deep impression on the Bashaw.” As he would do unfailingly, Lear carefully distinguished between the Americans’ bravery in battle and what he regarded as the ill-conceived cooperation with Hamet. In any event, the rump alliance was terminated, and if Hamet withdrew from Derna, the bashaw would free family. It was “all that could be done, and I have no doubt but the U. States will, if deserving, place him in a situation as elegible as that in which he was found.”

  In this matter, however, Lear was not forthright.

  After the second counterattack, Eaton told Hamet about Barron’s decision to cut off supplies and money to the expedition and to recall American personnel. Experienced as he was at losing, Hamet immediately grasped his situation’s hopelessness, but not without some bitterness. “He answers that, even with supplies, it would be fruitless for him to attempt to prosecute the war with his brother after you have withdrawn your squadron from the coast,” Eaton wrote to Barron. “He emphatically says that To abandon him here is not to cooperate with him, but with his rival!”

  When the Constellation reached Derna, Eaton glumly read the letters from Lear and Rodgers and resigned himself to abandoning Derna and the grand expedition upon which he had pinned such high hopes. But evacuation would be tricky. A withdrawal in the face of a large enemy force invited slaughter unless it were executed with the greatest cunning and skill. Eaton told the Constellation’s commander, Captain Hugh Campbell, that he would leave Derna the next day, June 13.

  Above all, Eaton well knew, the evacuation had to proceed in the greatest secrecy. If Hassan learned of it, he would attack when Eaton’s forces were most vulnerable, and it would be a bloodbath. How would he do it? He hit upon a bold subterfuge: He made everyone, including his own men, believe he was planning an attack. He sent extra ammunition and rations to his Arab troops. He deployed scouts to pinpoint enemy troop dispositions. He ordered his soldiers to shed their heavy baggage so they would be more mobile. But as soon as darkness fell, Eaton stationed Marine patrols in Derna to keep people away from the waterfront. Boats from the Constellation slipped up to the docks and embarked the cannoneers, European soldiers, and fieldpieces, then Hamet and his retinue, and finally, Eaton, O‘Bannon, and the Marines.

  As the last boats pulled away from the wharf, the townspeople and Arab troops rushed the waterfront, “some calling on the Bashaw—some on me—Some uttering shrieks—some execrations,” Eaton reported. They descended on Fort Enterprize, stripping it of the tents and horses Eaton had left behind. By daybreak, the Arabs had vanished into the mountains, along with many of the town’s inhabitants and “every living animal fit for subsistence or burthen which belonged to the place.”

  The bashaw’s envoy went ashore with letters offering amnesty to the people of Derna, provided they promised to be loyal to Yusuf, but the unhappy citizenry was in no mood for it. They vowed to fight the bashaw’s troops. Eaton watched the spectacle with sadness and anger. “This moment we drop them ... into the hands of this enemy for no other crime but too much confidence in us!” Hamet, he noted glumly, “falls from the most flattering prospects of a Kingdom to beggary!”

  Eaton’s mission was ended. With little of the rancor that would consume him later, he reported to Rodgers: “Our peace with Tripoli is certainly more favorable—and, seperately considered, more honorable than any peace obtained by any Christian nation with a Barbary regency at any period within a hundred years: but it might have been more favorable and more honorable.”

  He requested passage home to America.

  XVI

  AFTERMATH

  If War is his object, I shall be obliged to meet it.

  —Commodore John Rodgers, referring to Bey Hamouda Pa
cha of Tunis, in a letter to George Davis, U.S. charge d‘affaires in Tunis

  I fear we stopped too short.

  —William Eaton, in a letter to Thomas Dwight

  Hamouda Pacha was threatening war. He wanted back the xebec and two Neapolitan prizes that Rodgers had caught as they tried to run the American blockade of Tripoli in early May. Commodore John Rodgers had landed the Barbary crews back in Tunis, but refused to return the vessels. Charge d’Affaires George Davis had done his best to deflect the bey’s litany of demands while Rodgers and Lear ended the Tripolitan war. The impatient bey even had written directly to Jefferson, warning that only the president’s previous assurances that he wanted peace with Tunis were preventing war now. Then, for weeks, the bey and Rodgers had exchanged demands, refusals, and threats.

  Finally Rodgers had had enough. His natural combativeness was aroused over the prospect of hostilities after all the tedious months of cruising off Tripoli. “If War is his object, I shall be obliged to meet it.” He sent the Congress, commanded by Decatur, to Tunis Bay to defend U.S. shipping. The bey responded by announcing he would not grant Lear an audience; Rodgers retorted that the bey would have no choice but to receive Lear, and sent more warships to Tunis. Tensions reached the breaking point when the Vixen boarded and searched a polacre and a gunboat in Tunis Bay. Rodgers gathered his formidable squadron for a display of power.

  In America, the controversial Tripoli treaty was making waves. Navy Secretary Smith boasted that it was better than any treaty negotiated with Tripoli in 100 years. Certainly it was that. “All Europe is giving us national reputation for this,” he crowed to Preble. But Smith was enough of a realist to foresee the bitter fight looming in Congress over treaty ratification, sarcastically noting, “Our own good folk [critics of the treaty] will be busy in telling the world that we are, in fact, a very contemptible people.” Preble publicly held his tongue, but was among the many who were disappointed with the treaty; privately he lamented “the sacrifice of National honor which has been made by an ignominious negotiation.” The $60,000 ransom stuck fast in the craws of treaty opponents, who asked: Need any ransom have been paid, with Eaton occupying Derna and a large U.S. squadron just a day’s sail from Tripoli? Anticipating this argument in his letter to Preble, Smith asserted that the Philadelphia prisoners’ safety alone justified the treaty. Smith said all the returning former captive officers—this wasn’t altogether true—were convinced that Yusuf would have massacred them if Lear had not paid their ransom and Rodgers instead had attacked Tripoli. “The Bashaw said again & again that having killed a father & brother he would not have any scruples in killing a few infidels.” Smith was rehearsing for the donnybrook ahead.

  Eighteen U.S. Navy vessels crewed by 2,500 men entered Tunis Bay on July 30, 1805. The United States had never before gathered in one place such a naval force. The forest of masts and crowd of canvas presented a menacing sight. Tunisians watched with awe and fear, expecting a devastating bombardment to commence any hour. The vessels deployed in a long line spanning the harbor mouth, boarding and inspecting the papers of all departing and arriving vessels.

  Every U.S. warship in the Mediterranean was present: the frigates Constitution, Constellation, Essex, and John Adams; the brigs Siren, Vixen, and Franklin; the schooners Nautilus and Enterprise; the sloop Hornet; and eight U.S.-built gunboats, which weeks before had arrived in the Mediterranean. Ten gunboats in all had recently been completed at shipyards along the East Coast, but Gunboat 1 had to turn back to Charleston with structural problems, and Gunboat 7 vanished during the Atlantic crossing and was never seen again.

  After letting the Tunisians absorb the sight of his formidable battle group, Rodgers sent Hamouda Pacha a letter reminding him that he had once said if a U.S. squadron entered his harbor, it would mean war. Did he still mean that? he asked provocatively. He gave the Tunisian leader thirty-six hours to decide: peace or war. If there was no reply, Rodgers would assume the bey meant war and offensive and defensive operations would commence.

  Hamouda was in a quandary. He fervently wished to avoid a shooting war he undoubtedly would lose. But if he gave in, he would lose face with the other Christian powers paying him tribute, and that could jeopardize the entire Barbary States’ system of terror, robbery, and extortion. He tried to buy time by reminding Rodgers that he had sent an appeal to Jefferson. Until he received an answer, he planned no warlike actions and intended to honor his treaty with the United States.

  This only irritated Rodgers. He imposed a new deadline for Hamouda to decide how matters stood between Tunis and America. Davis piped up unexpectedly that he thought the ultimatum unreasonable. Rodgers slapped him down, “much astonished” that Davis had failed to understand his intentions. The commodore ordered Davis to prepare to leave Tunis. As the clock ticked down to the new deadline, Rodgers added a new condition and threat: The bey must pledge himself to peace in the presence of both the British and French consuls—so he couldn’t later deny having done so—or Rodgers would send his ships to capture Tunisian cruisers at sea.

  Hamouda refused.

  The Constitution fired on a brig attempting to leave Tunis, compelling it to turn back. The Vixen, Nautilus, and Enterprise began cruising the waters outside the harbor, stopping every vessel in sight. In an extemporaneous demonstration of U.S. destructiveness, the Vixen’s officers, during an afternoon of relaxation on an island in Tunis Bay, shot several seals and fowl, and then started a fire that got away from them and burned the entire island.

  Lear threw the besieged bey a lifeline so that he could extricate himself from his predicament. It perplexed him, Lear noted, that the bey claimed to value the president’s friendship, yet refused to meet with Lear, the president’s designated representative. The bey grabbed the line and held fast to it. He hadn’t realized Lear represented the president; knowing that now, of course he would receive Lear. Rodgers moved back the deadline two days, but it may as well have been two years, for it was clear there would be no shooting war now.

  Hamouda now had an inspiration: He would send an ambassador to Washington to personally argue Tunis’s reparations claims for the xebec and the prize vessels. The appeal to higher authority accomplished two things: It automatically imposed a cooling-off period, and it tied the hands of Rodgers, who, as a naval officer bound to the chain of command, couldn’t very well deny the bey the right to petition higher-ups. He graciously offered passage to the Tunisian ambassador on one of his frigates. Hamouda responded by granting the United States “most favored nation” trade status, meaning it no longer would have to pay the higher duties Tunis imposed on the lesser nations such as Denmark and Naples, but not on the major powers such as Britain and France. Hamouda also asked Rogers to name a new charge d‘affaires, after coolly observing Davis’s distress over his countrymen’s aggressiveness and Rodgers’s displeasure with him. Davis, still smarting from his treatment by Rodgers and Lear, didn’t mind leaving. “After such a degradation, I could not return to the duties of my office,” he sniffed. Rodgers appointed another ship’s surgeon, Dr. James Dodge of the Constitution. naval surgeons, because of their learning, evidently were regarded as competent substitutediplomats; Dodge was the third named in Barbary since the war began. The Tunisian crisis sputtered to an end.

  Rodgers was justifiably proud of the diplomatic victory achieved with his show of naval force: “... I feel satisfied this lesson has not only changed his [the bey‘s] opinion of our Maritime strength, but has caused him to discover more distinctly his own weakness in every sense.” It was the first time the Mediterranean squadron had followed to the letter the instructions written in 1802 by Smith and Madison of “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations.” Hamouda later insisted in his correspondence with Jefferson that the confrontation was due solely to “the too martial temper” of Rodgers and to Davis’s “equivocal conduct.”

  Fuming over Lear and Barron’s abandonment of his expedition, Eato
n sailed to Gibraltar to await a berth on a ship bound for America. Before leaving Syracuse, he had paid off his European troops and said good-bye to Hamet, whom he would never see again. Now Eaton began to brood over the war’s disappointing outcome, believing that he and Hamet could have marched to Tripoli and forced Yusuf to free the captives. “I fear we stopped too short,” he wrote to Thomas Dwight, a friend in Massachusetts, in June. “I hoped to have stood on to see the temerity of Joseph Bashaw chastized and his perfidy punished. The lesson would have been awful to Barbary—Perhaps another such occasion will never offer.”

  As Eaton pondered what had happened, his disappointment metastasized into a black anger directed at one villain: Tobias Lear. He began putting his thoughts on paper. He carefully documented the promises made by Jefferson administration officials before he left Washington, and how they had proved chimerical. This web of broken promises was the framework for a letter to Smith, written during Eaton’s Gibraltar layover. Page after accusatory page piled up, each sharper in tone than the one before, until he had composed a 5,000-word screed.

  Everything changed, he wrote to Smith, when Lear, “a man who had no authorized agency in the war ... intruded himself” into Barron’s confidence. Thus began Eaton’s censorious letter. Barron, he wrote, had initially supported his expedition and was aware that “an understanding Subsisted Between the Commander in Chief and myself that I should go forward And exercise Discretionary measures for bringing Hamet Bashaw forward with all his influence in order To Intercept Supplies to the Enemy from the country and to cut off his escape in the rear.” Eaton, Rodgers, and Preble had agreed that after Eaton and Hamet captured Derna and Benghazi, the squadron would transport their army across the Gulf of Sidra to Cape Mensurat, where they would assault Tripoli from the rear while warships attacked from the harbor.