Jefferson's War

by Joseph Wheelan

  The surprise attack revived the fierce hatred of England that had propelled America into the Revolution. If the Royal Navy thought nothing of shooting up an American ship a half day’s sail from her home port, what was to stop it from landing British troops and reasserting the Crown’s hegemony over its former colony? War fever crackled up and down the East Coast and westward into the settlements beyond the Alleghenies. Invasion rumors flew through the seaports. A mob in Norfolk attacked an English sailor. British warships fanned the growing anger and fear by anchoring inside the Virginia Capes and firing indiscriminately at every passing American vessel. Decatur began fitting out four old gunboats to defend the southeast Virginia ports against anticipated British attacks.

  Jefferson closed all U.S. seaports to British ships. In England, U.S. Ambassador James Monroe demanded that the British government apologize and agree to stop its impressment of American seamen. The British were willing to apologize, but unwilling to end impressment. With one significant exception, Jefferson’s Cabinet and the American people were ready to go to war. A U.S. House committee described the Chesapeake attack as “circumstances of indignity and insult, of which there is scarcely to be found a parallel in the history of civilized nations.” “Instant and severe retaliation” was wholly justified.

  But Jefferson didn’t want to fight. Instead, he chose a curious form of reprisal: terminating all U.S. foreign trade and retreating into isolation. Congress approved the infamous Embargo on Christmas Day 1807. Actually Secretary of State Madison’s idea, the Embargo ended all foreign trade and communication; only outbound foreign vessels and authorized U.S. coastal traders were permitted to leave American seaports.

  Later in life, Jefferson seemed to have second thoughts about the Embargo, admitting it cost the United States $50 million in annual exports, while war would have cost only one-third that amount. The strategy rested on the faulty premise that withholding U.S. goods from Europe would hurt Europe more than America. U.S. merchants, however, foresaw that the Embargo would ruin them, while having only a slight effect on England and France, the nations it was designed to hurt the most. America’s bread-and-butter agricultural staples, which were highly dependent on foreign markets, took a severe beating. Wheat tumbled from $2 a bushel to 7 cents. Warehouses bulged with unsold, unshipped tobacco and cotton. One of the few bright spots was America’s finished-goods industry—furniture, clothing, utensils—which thrived as never before in the absence of foreign competition.

  The Embargo was impossible to enforce once merchants decided to violate it with impunity whenever they could. Smugglers operated successfully from the East Coast’s multitude of bays, inlets, and estuaries. A surprising amount of American goods managed to reach Canada and the West Indies despite vigorous blockading by U.S. naval vessels. The Embargo overshadowed Jefferson’s last year as president and his entire second term.

  Smith instructed Campbell to bring home the three warships remaining in the Mediterranean. With foreign trade shut down, there was no reason to maintain a Mediterranean squadron. Campbell emptied the Malta storehouses and filled the holds of the Constitution, Hornet, and Enterprise with the stockpiles. The depots at Syracuse, Leghorn, and Gibraltar were liquidated. In the fall of 1807, the three warships left Barbary.

  America’s Mediterranean naval presence, begun in 1801 with Commodore Richard Dale’s tiny squadron, had ended. It would be eight years before the U.S. Navy would return.

  The Chesapeake’s mortified officers requested a court of inquiry. They wanted to clear their names of any “disgrace which must be attached in the late premature surrender ... without their previous knowledge or consent....” They accused Barron of negligence and failing to resist. Had they not begun proceedings, the Navy Department, shocked by Barron’s failure to put up a fight, surely would have. Smith relieved Barron of his command and gave it to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr.—perhaps the origin of the captains’ tragic blood feud.

  The court of inquiry threw the book at Barron. His guns were unready and ill-equipped. The Marines were supplied cartridges that didn’t fit their weapons. During the forty minutes that elapsed before the Leopard actually opened fire, Barron had failed to call his crew to general quarters. But most damning of all was the court’s conclusion that he struck his flag without a fight; damage to the ship and the crew’s injuries did not warrant the surrender.

  With these findings, the court-martial outcome was foreordained. Barron’s fellow officers found him guilty of negligence of duty and suspended him from the naval service for five years.

  Captain Edward Preble died on August 25, 1807, in the city of his birth, Portland, Maine, ten days after his forty-sixth birthday. Preble’s shaky health had collapsed during a recurrence of the ulcers and assorted stomach ailments that had prevented him from sailing with the first two Mediterranean squadrons. The naval establishment and the nation mourned his death.

  The burning of the Philadelphia and the naval assaults on Tripoli had made Preble one of the war’s larger-than-life figures. His actions were celebrated in paintings and a two-act New York musical, Tars from Tripoli. Congress had struck a gold medal stamped with a relief of the August 3, 1804, bombardment, “a testimony to your Country’s estimation of the important and honorable services rendered by you....” Before Smith was talked out of stepping down as Navy secretary early in Jefferson’s second term, Preble was the rumored successor. Jefferson felt the loss personally, for he and Preble were friends. Once, when Preble sent the president a cask of Mediterranean wine—Jefferson was a wine connoisseur—Jefferson, concerned that the gift might be construed as a sort of bribe, reciprocated by sending Preble a polygraph, a primitive copier consisting of two connected pens.

  Preble was buried in Portland with military honors and bells tolling throughout the city before Washington learned of his death. When it did, flags were lowered to half mast on all frigates in the Navy Yard and at the Marine garrison. Beginning at 12:30 P.M. on September 1, a cannon was fired in the Navy Yard every five minutes until 17 minutes before sunset, when 17 minute guns were fired. To this day, Preble’s name endures on the hulls of naval vessels and on buildings and monuments along the East Coast.

  Another man who missed Preble keenly was William Eaton. He and the commodore were faithful correspondents who agreed on matters of great importance to both: the imperative of using military force against Barbary, and in their opinions about Lear, the Barrons, and Rodgers. While both became national celebrities as a result of their Tripoli exploits, Preble’s fame was the more lasting, although Eaton had reveled in the public adulation as the more modest Preble never had.

  Eaton’s celebrity, however, was on the wane in 1807, with the Barbary War eclipsed by the Chesapeake affair and the Embargo, and Eaton himself having fallen from official and public favor. It was a hard landing after the halcyon days of 1805 and 1806, when testimonial dinners followed one after another and Congress had awarded him a brigadier general’s pension. Eaton had tarnished his reputation with heavy drinking, boasting, and his relentless vilification of Lear and the Jefferson administration. Senator Plumer had warmly embraced Eaton when he and other Federalists were trying to sink the Tripoli treaty, but now was disgusted with him. Eaton was “an imposter . He is continually vaunting of the glory of his expedition ... And yet if the state of that little affair is examined it will be found trivial in its operations and not affording a single prospect of success.”

  One of the few places where Eaton remained a hero was in his hometown, Brimfield, Massachusetts. His loyal neighbors chose him to be justice of the peace of Hampshire County in 1806. They elected him to the Massachusetts legislature in the spring of 1807. He might have passed a quiet middle age among old friends who appreciated him had it not been for Aaron Burr.

  Vice President Burr’s meteoric political career flamed out in July 1804, when he killed Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken, overlooking the Hudson River. He could never run for president, nor would Jefferson—who had thoroughly dis
trusted Burr even before the duel—tolerate him as a running mate. The month before the duel, the 12th Amendment’s ratification had meant the vice president would run as part of a ticket, rather than the office automatically going to the presidential runner-up. With Governor George Clinton of New York as his 1804 running mate, Jefferson crushed Federalist Party candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in the Electoral College, 162—14.

  While high political office was closed to him forever, Burr still was arguably the most brilliant lawyer in the land, a man of vast personal charm who might have amassed a fortune and salvaged his name. However, Burr wasn’t interested in ordinary bourgeois success; his aspirations were Napoleonic. At the head of an army of disaffected frontiersmen, he was certain he could seize the Spanish-occupied Southwest and Mexico, maybe grab Florida, and, in the process, dismember all the U.S. territories west of the Alleghenies for his personal aggrandizement.

  For this grandiose vision to become hard fact, Burr needed generals, and his recruitment of them proved to be the riskiest aspect of his plan. General James Wilkinson was the first to sign on for the Southwest invasion, at least. He was the key to that scheme because he commanded the U.S. Army units in New Orleans that patrolled the Southwest frontier. A friend of Burr’s from their Revolutionary War service, Wilkinson also happened to be a Spanish spy—he was listed as Spy No. 13 in the Spanish government’s books—and he was as oleaginous as Burr himself. Burr recruited Andrew Jackson, who hated the Spanish, for his plan to seize Texas and Florida. And he attempted to enlist a third general: William Eaton.

  At first Eaton was enthusiastic about reprising his Derna desert march with an expedition to Mexico, but he was never entirely comfortable with the plan. The more Burr talked, the more Eaton’s uneasiness grew, and Burr just couldn’t stop talking. He told Eaton about detaching the western United States. Then, he rashly confided an even more outrageous adventure: marching on Washington. At this point, Eaton rode to Washington to warn Jefferson personally. During their meeting, Eaton suggested that the president appoint Burr to a remote ministerial post in Europe to get him out of the way. Jefferson could have saved himself and his government a lot of trouble had he done so, or if he had heeded the warnings also given by Jackson, who quit the scheme when he learned Burr didn’t plan to stop with Mexico, Texas, and Florida, but intended to abscond with the U.S. territories west of the Allegheny Mountains as well. Inexplicably, Jefferson did nothing.

  It wasn’t until fall 1806, as Burr gathered his invading “army”—about 100 men and women volunteers—on an island in the Ohio River, that Jefferson at last listened to Eaton’s warnings, but only when they were repeated by Postmaster General Gideon Granger. Jefferson issued a nationwide warning that a Western insurgency was afoot. Before long, Burr was run to ground in Mississippi. But sympathizers set him free, and he fled deeper into West Florida. In February 1807, Burr was recaptured in present-day Alabama and brought to Richmond for trial.

  With so many of the nation’s leading men attending Burr’s treason trial in Richmond in August 1807—so many that the proceedings were moved from the courthouse to the Virginia House of Delegates—it seemed that the stage was set for Eaton’s triumphal rebirth as a patriotic whistle-blower. But fortune no longer smiled on Eaton.

  Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was the presiding judge, an incomparable stroke of luck for Burr, caught red-handed as he was plotting revolution. A staunch Federalist and avowed enemy of Jefferson, Marshall gave Burr wide latitude in leading his defense team and examining witnesses.

  As a result, when Eaton took the witness stand, he faced Burr, the best courtroom attorney in the country. Eaton testified that while he knew of no “overt act” by Burr that was treasonous, “concerning Colonel Burr’s expressions of treasonable intentions, I know much.” Then Burr went to work on Eaton. When Eaton tried to describe how he warned Jefferson of Burr’s scheme, Burr goaded him with insinuations. Perhaps Eaton, too, had been involved, he suggested. Burr pushed Eaton until he exploded: “You spoke of your riflemen, your infantry, your cavalry!” In his anger, Burr’s barbed suggestions about Eaton’s involvement melded confusedly with villainous portrayals of Wilkinson, and Eaton blurted out, “From the same views you have perhaps mentioned me!”The outburst did Eaton no credit and did not help prosecutors.

  Outside the courtroom, Eaton was an all-too-familiar figure in Richmond’s taverns. During the four months between his grandjury testimony and Burr’s treason trial, everyone heard Eaton’s oftrepeated and embellished stories and his rants against Lear, while having plenty of opportunity to witness his heavy drinking and womanizing. “The once redoubted Eaton has dwindled down in the eyes of this sarcastic town into a ridiculous mountebank, strutting about the streets under a tremendous hat, with a Turkish sash over colored clothes when he is not tippling in the taverns,” wrote Harman Blennerhassett, a Burr co-defendant. It went unrecorded whether Eaton performed his sword-twirling trick for his audiences; he had had scant opportunity to use his scimitar while crossing the North African desert and during the Derna fighting. Eaton’s behavior wrecked any chance he might have salvaged from his testimony against Burr of securing a government position.

  Amazingly, Burr was acquitted. Embittered, Eaton returned to Massachusetts, shocking the Massachusetts legislature by denouncing Chief Justice Marshall in a vituperous floor speech. The Federalists, his former allies, shunned him, and Brimfield ousted him from local office in 1808.

  Eaton kept to his home and sold some of his Maine acreage to pay his bills. He was held in such low esteem that few would receive him at all, former President John Adams and his son, John Quincy, being notable exceptions. Reclusive, suffering from gout and rheumatism, and drinking heavily, Eaton learned over Christmas 1810 that his beloved stepson, Navy Lieutenant Eli Danielson, who had accompanied him in Egypt as a young midshipman, had been killed in a duel. The sad news sent him into a depression, and he took to his bed.

  On June 1, 1811, the indomitable adventurer died. He was only forty-seven.

  Eaton’s disgrace and obscurity were compassed in the single line in which the Massachusetts Columbian Centinel reported his death: “Gen. Eaton, the hero of Derna and the victim of sensibility was entombed at Brimfield on Wednesday last.”

  Algiers began to act like the piratical Algiers of old. In November 1807, Algerian frigates captured three American merchantmen—the Eagle and Mary Ann of New York, and the Violet of Boston. Captain Ichabod Shiffield and his Mary Ann crew didn’t go easily. As they approached Algiers as prisoners on their own vessel, the Americans threw four of their Algerian captors overboard, made captives of the rest, and sailed for Naples.

  When Lear demanded the release of the Eagle and Violet, the dey complained that the United States had fallen two years behind in its tribute payment of naval stores. Lear paid the dey cash to square the overdue account, and the dey released the two vessels. But then he demanded $18,000 indemnity for the prize crew carried off by the Mary Ann. Lear paid that, too, certain that if he did not, Algiers would only send out its corsairs to seize more U.S. merchantmen.

  Preble, Eaton, and Rodgers had taught Tripoli and Tunis to respect U.S. power, but Algiers had managed to avoid a direct confrontation with the Jefferson administration and the U.S. Navy. As the years passed with no evidence of American naval power in the Mediterranean, Algiers, with Britain’s encouragement, grew confident that it had nothing to fear from the new republic across the ocean.

  XVIII

  EPILOGUE

  Algiers, July 1812

  “My policy and my views are to increase, not to diminish the number of my American slaves; and not for a million dollars would I release them. ”

  —Hadji Ali, Algiers’s dey, to U.S. Consul M. M. Noah

  If our small naval force can operate freely in the sea, Algiers will be humbled to the dust ...

  —Consul General Tobias Lear, in a letter to Secretary of State James Monroe

  Laden with military stores to
satisfy the United States’ tributary obligations, the Alleghany disgorged muskets, shot, gunpowder, timber for masts, and cable onto Algiers’s waterfront. The 1795 treaty had withstood the Tripolitan war and Algerian revolts and regime changes. It was the only U.S. agreement that still required annual tribute payments. Over the treaty’s life, the United States had paid Algiers $500,000 or more in tribute, gifts, and military stores: $21,600 worth of military supplies each year, $17,000 in biennial gifts to the dey’s officers, and $20,000 each time a new consul arrived in Algiers. Even in 1795, the weapons and ship supplies Algiers demanded had cost more than $21,600, and with inflation over the next seventeen years the stores’ value had soared. This partly explained why the United States often fell behind in its tribute deliveries and then offered to square accounts with cash.

  Hadji Ali, the aged, fierce dey, watched as the military stores were trundled from the Alleghany’s hold to Algiers’s wharf. Hadji had been listening to Great Britain’s blandishments and was poised to turn the clock back twenty years on Algiers-U.S. relations. The British foreign minister recently had written Hadji a letter pledging England’s warm friendship and protection. While Algiers was threatened by no nation at the moment, Britain, which within weeks would be at war with America, implied that England’s future enemy might become Algiers’s, too. The British minister blustered that “the American flag would be swept from the seas, the contemptible navy of the United States annihilated, and its maritime arsenals reduced to a heap of ruins.” Hadji believed him. If Hadji had to choose allies in the coming war, there was no question that it would be England and her mighty navy. And he knew he had to exploit every means at hand to keep his throne. This policy had enabled him to rule longer than any of the deys who had come along after Mustafa Hamouda was deposed in 1805. The janissaries had assassinated Mustafa’s successor, Hamet Bashaw, in 1808, and the new dey, Ali Cogia, was deposed five months later by Barbary’s favored method of effecting a succession: the silken strangulation cord. Hadji had ruled since then. In the interests of prolonging his tenure and his life, Hadji stopped the unloading of the Alleghany.