Jefferson's War

by Joseph Wheelan

  Omar agreed to all of Decatur and Shaler’s conditions. Six weeks after the squadron’s departure from New York, and sixteen days after its arrival in the Mediterranean, Decatur had brought the war to an end.

  The treaty was the best made with Algiers by a Christian nation in more than 200 years. “It has been dictated at the mouths of our cannon,” Decatur proudly wrote to Navy Secretary Benjamin W Crowninshield on July 5, and “has been conceded to the losses which Algiers has sustained and to the dread of still greater evils apprehended.”

  Lieutenant John Shubrick was given command of the Epervier and dispatched to Washington with the new treaty and the Edwin captain and crew. The sloop-of-war passed Gibraltar on July 12 and never was seen or heard from again. The ship and crew might have perished in a hurricane that blew up in the western Atlantic about the time the Epervier would have reached the East Coast. Lost were the Epervier crew, the Edwin crewmen and captain, and Master Commandant William Lewis and Lieutenant B. J. Neale, who had recently married sisters and had been granted home leave to visit them.

  Algiers wasn’t the only Barbary State that had been seduced by Britain’s cocky predictions of victory over America during the recent war. Early in 1815, the American privateer Abellino had brought several English prizes into Tunis and Tripoli, supposed neutrals in the war. The prizes should have been secure in the neutral ports, but Tunis and Tripoli had permitted British cruisers to retake them—two from Tunis and two from Tripoli—over the protests of U.S. consuls. Decatur learned of the violations only when he reached Barbary; the Madison administration had been unaware of the neutrality violations when Decatur embarked from New York, so he had no instructions to guide him. The commodore took it upon himself to square matters.

  The squadron entered Tunis harbor July 26. Through U.S. consul M. M. Noah, Decatur demanded that the bey pay him $46,000 in reparations. If he failed to do so within twelve hours, the U.S. squadron would go into action against him. As the bey and his officers conferred, an adviser reminded the bey that Decatur was the brash young officer of eleven years earlier who had burned the Philadelphia. Then Noah led the bey to a window and pointed out the Guerriere and Macedonian in the harbor. Both had once belonged to the supposedly invincible Royal Navy, he said—until America had taken them from Britain. The bey studied the ships through his telescope, and thoughtfully stroked his beard with a tortoiseshell comb, turning over in his mind this new evidence of U.S. power. Then he paid the $46,000.

  Decatur’s next stop was Tripoli, where he said reparations would cost $30,000. Yusuf, still the bashaw after twenty years, refused curtly. He manned his batteries and assembled 20,000 troops for action. Then the news arrived of the capitulation of Algiers and Tunis, and Yusuf had a swift change of heart. He sent Decatur a counterproposal of $25,000. Decatur said this was acceptable, but only if Yusuf also would release ten Christian captives. This met the bashaw’s approval. Decatur, who had a long memory, selected two Danes and a Sicilian family of eight for release: the Danes to repay Denmark for Nicholas Nissen’s services, and the Sicilians for the Two Sicilies’ loan of the gunboats to Commodore Preble all those years ago. To celebrate the renewal of American-Tripolitan amity, the Guerriere’s band played “Hail Columbia” on the Tripoli quay.

  Decatur transported the grateful Danes to Naples and the Sicilians to Messina, and sailed on alone to Spain. Lookouts sighted seven Algerian warships one day. Decatur cleared the Guerriere for action, savoring the prospect of a good fight should the Algerians not have learned of the new treaty or chose to disregard it. The Algerians wisely let the Guerriere pass unmolested.

  Bainbridge’s squadron reached Gibraltar on September 29, after Decatur already had settled affairs with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Together, he and Decatur headed the most powerful U.S. Mediterranean squadron until that time: eighteen ships, including Bainbridge’s 74-gun ship-of-the-line Independence, where a future naval hero, David Farragut, was serving his apprenticeship as a fourteen-year-old midshipman. But the squadron’s business was finished in Barbary, and most of the warships sailed for America on October 7.

  In Washington, everyone applauded the peace dictated at “cannon’s mouth.” President Madison laid the new Algerian treaty before the Senate for ratification on December 6, and it won swift approval, with no objections to the terms Decatur and Shaler had dictated: favored-nation status, no tribute, the release of American captives. Congress expressed its gratitude to the squadron by appropriating $100,000 as indemnification for the Meshuda and Estedio, to be distributed to the naval crews who captured them.

  Britain tried to capitalize on Decatur’s success in the fall of 1815. Lord Exmouth sailed to Algiers with six men-of-war, two frigates, three sloops-of-war, a bomb ship, and several transports. Omar, by then regretting the peace he had made with America, was unwilling to concede anything. Exmouth wound up agreeing to pay nearly $400,000 to free 12,000 Neapolitan and Sardinian captives.

  This wasn’t exactly what the Admiralty had in mind when it dispatched Exmouth to the Mediterranean. But the British treaty did wonders for Omar’s confidence after his unhappy encounter with Decatur, so much so that when Shaler presented him the next April with the Senate-ratified 1815 treaty, Omar rejected it. Decatur had returned the Meshuda, but the dey still hadn’t gotten back the Estedio. Therefore, Omar said, the treaty was void. He waved off Shaler’s explanation for the brig’s absence: U.S. consuls still were negotiating her release with Spain, where she was floating in Cartagena harbor.

  Shaler lowered the U.S. consular flag and went aboard the Java, where Captain Oliver Hazard Perry prepared for a night attack on Algiers, supported by the frigates United States and Constellation and the 18-gun sloops-of-war Erie and Ontario. The five warships drew up in front of the mole, with boats ready for 1,200 volunteers to launch an amphibious assault. The alarmed dey declared a truce and invited Shaler to return. The squadron withdrew. But then, in a letter to President Madison, Omar proposed a return to the 1795 treaty—to annual tribute payments.

  The British government was so incensed with the outcome of Lord Exmouth’s negotiations in Algiers that it sent him back as joint commander of a powerful Anglo—Dutch fleet with Dutch Admiral van Cappellen. On August 27, 1816, the warships assembled outside Algiers harbor. Whether by accident or design, an Algerian gun fired on them. The English and Dutch replied with a massive bombardment. When the firing stopped, the British and Dutch had discharged 34,000 rounds and inflicted 883 casualties, all but wiping out the Algerian navy and wrecking the city fortifications and residential areas. Exmouth and van Cappellen forced the dey to free 1,200 prisoners and to agree to abolish Christian slavery forever.

  While Algiers was still rebuilding its shattered navy and city, Commodore Isaac Chauncey and the 74-gun man-of-war Washington, accompanied by six warships, appeared in Algiers harbor in October. More menacing Christian warships was the last thing the dey and his officers wished to see after Exmouth’s devastating attack. Shaler, who had witnessed the bombardment and whose home was heavily damaged, reassured Omar that for the moment the squadron was only making a show of force, but it would return. Shaler sailed with Chauncey and the squadron to Gibraltar to await orders from the State Department.

  They returned to Algiers in December 1816. The Spanish finally had handed over the Estedio, so Omar no longer had a good reason to reject the 1815 treaty. Shaler delivered a letter from President Madison to the dey. The United States would fight before it would pay Algiers tribute again, the president wrote. “It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute.” Should there have been any mistaking Madison’s message, Chauncey and Shaler added their own ultimatum. With both the Meshuda and Estedio in Algiers’s possession again, all outstanding debts were canceled and the 1815 treaty now must be accepted. “The undersigned believe it to be their duty to assure his Highness that the above conditions will not be departed from; thus leaving to the Regency of
Algiers the choice between peace and war. The United States, while anxious to maintain the former, are prepared to meet the latter.”

  With his navy in shambles from the Anglo—Dutch attack, Omar had no choice but to sign the treaty. He imposed a single condition: that Shaler sign a statement that Omar had agreed to the treaty only to avoid war with the United States. Shaler’s affidavit extended Omar’s tenuous reign less than a year: He was assassinated in September 1817.

  The treaty, America’s last with Algiers, renounced tribute forever. It was signed on December 23, 1816, thirty-one years after Algiers captured the Dauphin and the Maria.

  Never again would the Barbary States trouble America.

  Yusuf and Hamet reconciled briefly in 1809, when the bashaw gave his brother a government position in Derna. For reasons unknown, but most likely a combination of Hamet’s sloth and treachery, he soon incurred Yusuf’s displeasure. By 1811, he and his family once again were on the run to Egypt. They never returned to Tripoli. Hamet was not heard from again.

  The last act of Hamet’s story unfolded in 1832, when a man named Mahommed Bey presented himself to the American consulate in Alexandria, claiming to be Hamet’s eldest son. He requested aid for his destitute family in Cairo. There is no record that he received any.

  In 1835, Yusuf’s son Muhammad attempted to assassinate his father and seize power. After forty years of rule, Yusuf lost control of Tripoli, and it erupted into civil war. The French and British consuls sought the intervention of the Ottoman Empire, which still claimed Tripoli as a regency. The sultan dispatched twenty-two ships and 6,000 troops. Ottoman soldiers arrested Muhammad and his fellow conspirators and snatched the reins of government from Yusuf, who had survived the coup. The Turks ruled Tripoli until Italy occupied it in 1911 and renamed it Libya.

  France invaded Algiers in 1830, but was unable to gain complete control until 1848. In 1851, the French also seized Tunis.

  Stephen Decatur’s seagoing days ended when he returned to the United States from his triumphant expedition to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, more of a hero than ever. Baltimore gave him a silver dinner service, and Philadelphia awarded him a plate dinner service worth $1,020, raised through $10 subscriptions. Amid the rounds of banquets that took him up and down the East Coast, Decatur made the now-famous toast at a dinner in Norfolk: “Our country!” Decatur said, raising his glass. “In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” He stowed away his sea chest forever, joining Captains John Rodgers and David Porter on the Board of Navy Commissioners. His days were filled with paperwork and meetings. With his wife Susan, he built a home and reentered the highpowered Washington social whirl. Yet Decatur missed the sea. “What shall I do?” he wrote a friend in 1818. “We have no war, nor sign of a war, and I shall feel ashamed to die in my bed.”

  That wouldn’t happen. After serving his suspension from the Navy, James Barron submitted an application to command the new 74-gun man-of-war Columbus. Decatur reminded his fellow commissioners of Barron’s negligent command of the Chesapeake in 1807, and also noted that Barron had not sought a ship during the War of 1812, when his services might have been welcomed. Now that the war was over, he was suddenly anxious to return. Barron explained that he was abroad in 1812 and had wanted to return, but lacked money for passage home. Decatur brushed aside his excuse, saying it only demonstrated that he was unresourceful. He blocked Barron’s application.

  Barron stewed over his rejection. He wrote a letter on June 19, 1819, accusing Decatur of publicly claiming that “you could insult me with impunity.” Decatur denied it. In October Barron had another grievance: Decatur had forwarded their correspondence to mutual friends in Norfolk with the purpose of alienating them from Barron. Decatur acknowledged sending on the letters, but not the malevolent intent. The men exchanged thirteen letters in all, Barron’s becoming progressively more acerbic; he always believed he had been scapegoated for the Chesapeake incident, and now he had a target for his bitterness.

  Finally Barron challenged Decatur to a duel, and Decatur, a veteran of several affairs of honor, accepted. They met at Bladensburg, the site of the disastrous 1814 defense of Washington, on March 22, 1820. They agreed to fire at eight paces, a relatively short distance that was a concession to Barron’s nearsightedness. Before taking up their pistols, both men urinated; it was commonly believed that an empty bladder reduced the chance of infection if one was hit. They stepped off the eight paces. Decatur already had decided to aim for Barron’s hip, not wanting to kill him but knowing he must wound him in order to end the affair. The men turned and fired simultaneously. Barron was hit in the thigh, Decatur in the right side. Decatur’s wound was mortal, Barron’s was not. Decatur died in agony at his home before the next sunrise. The U.S. Navy’s brightest spirit, who perhaps more than anyone, had molded its fighting tradition, was gone.

  Did the United States chastise the Barbary States, as Jefferson so fervently desired, and did it earn Europe’s respect? It depends on whether the year is 1805 or 1815.

  During the 1801—5 Tripolitan war, the necessary ingredients for lasting peace never coalesced at one time or place: a large force, an aggressive commander, and skilled diplomacy. Morris and Barron demonstrated the futility of assigning a strong naval force to a weak commander. Preble showed that without adequate firepower, a fighting commodore could not deliver a decisive blow. Only when Rodgers took over Barron’s squadron and brought it before Tunis with Lear on hand was it used as Jefferson, Madison, and Smith had envisioned, “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations.”

  But in 1815, the United States was a battle-hardened naval power, and Decatur was able to parley at “cannon’s mouth” and finally win the respect both of Barbary and Europe. What better evidence could there be of Europe’s respect than England’s attempt to imitate Decatur’s success in Algiers?

  More importantly, America demonstrated, as Jefferson had hoped, that it was different from Europe and on principle would not truckle to extortionist despots. Jefferson was proven right: Facing down terror worked; Europe showed its new respect by imitating the American example before Barbary’s harbor fortresses. It was yet another manifestation of America’s revolution against the established order, another assertion of “American spirit,” whose most passionate advocate was Jefferson.

  By sending American ships and fighting men to their first war on foreign soil, fought for the principle of sovereign trading rights, Jefferson was making a statement of national character: the American belief that nations as well as people had a right to freedom from tyranny. America didn’t pay obeisance to English kings, and it certainly wouldn’t bow to Islamic deys, beys, and bashaws who used their navies as instruments of terror to extort tribute and fill their dungeons with “Christian dogs.”

  In the Mediterranean, America learned the practicalities of waging a distant war: operating from foreign bases, making short-term alliances, and using local insurgents and indigenous troops—the basic tenets that would serve it in conflicts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Had the United States been unable to use Sicily, Malta, and Gibraltar as resupply and headquarters ports, it would have been virtually impossible to sustain its convoys and blockades, and the hemorrhaging of Mediterranean trade would have continued; as it was, 35 American ships and 700 sailors were captured by the Barbary corsairs between 1784 and 1815. Without Neapolitan gunboats, Preble couldn’t have taken the war to Tripoli’s harbor in 1804. Hamet and his Tripolitan and Arab supporters made possible Eaton’s bold invasion. Without Salvador Catalano, Decatur’s “special ops” mission to burn the Philadelphia might have run aground on one of Tripoli harbor’s notorious shoals.

  The fighting U.S. Navy that stopped Britain in 1812 was forged in the Mediterranean under Preble. The brief Quasi-War with France had blooded it, but the rising generation of junior officers needed more seasoning. The “super frigates” serv
ed as the war colleges of Decatur, Bainbridge, Porter, Stewart, and Hull—“Preble’s Boys.” When they finished their education in the Mediterranean, they were ready to test themselves against the world’s preeminent naval power, and then to return to Barbary in 1815 as seasoned veterans eager to punish Algiers.

  The Barbary War convinced Congress and the American people that the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were indispensable. Aided by low casualties—little more than 30 killed—and the emergence of a pantheon of war heroes, the seafaring services were safe from Congress’s budget ax. Preble, Decatur, Eaton, and O‘Bannon entered the American lexicon, and their stories were still being told by candlelight in farmhouses fifty years later. If congressmen needed a better argument, they only had to look to the prosperous Mediterranean trade made possible by U.S. Navy convoys. While the Navy’s future was now secure, the Marine Corps periodically was targeted by government cost-cutters; it escaped extinction during the post—World War II downsizing campaign largely because of its demonstrated readiness at the outbreak of the Korean War, when its “Fire Brigade” stopped the invading North Koreans at the Naktong River.

  The punitive expeditions of 1815 and 1816 ended Algiers’s long reign as a major Mediterranean power. The old Ottoman regency no longer struck terror into England, France, Spain, and the United States. Finally, after 400 years, trade in the Mediterranean became truly free.