The liberty and equality that were in Jefferson’s view the natural rights of white American males were threatened by the North African powers, which also rejected his internationalist notions of universal free trade in other nations’ waters.8 From the North Africans’ perspective, these lofty and naive American suppositions only disrupted a business plied profitably in the Mediterranean by both Christians and Muslims since the sixteenth century. Americans, like Europeans before them, had a choice about how to secure access to coveted markets in the eastern Atlantic along the coasts of Spain and Portugal and on the northern Mediterranean littoral. They knew this could be done by purchasing expensive peace settlements with the pirates. But absent this cost of safe passage, they would run the acknowledged risk of the seizure of ships, goods, and civilians, the latter being taken with the express purpose of securing lucrative ransoms for their freedom. This was the customary arrangement, and it took no account of the self-evident rights Americans believed they had secured by breaking from Great Britain.9
Six months after the fruitless negotiations with the ambassador from Tripoli, John Adams, unlike Jefferson, saw the conflict as a religious one. As he wrote Jefferson in July 1786, “The policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet.”10 Jefferson, who had deliberately disestablished Christianity in Virginia, could see the problem at this first stage in the 1780s and early 1790s only in political terms. Even in his private letters, he never emphasized the religious differences of the opposing sides. As a consequence, their respective responses to the crisis differed, amounting to the first major break in what would later evolve into a tempestuous relationship between the two men.
AMERICANS AS CAPTIVES: THE POSSIBILITY OF RANSOM
American captives seized by North African pirates defined themselves as slaves, just as their captors defined them, but the terms of their captivity differed from those of American slavery, although the differences were not always obvious. For one thing, Muslims theoretically distinguished between captivity (asr) and slavery (ubudiyya),11 a Qur’anic distinction, admittedly often lost on captive Americans.12 Also blurring the difference was that Muslims practiced their own race-based enslavement of black West and sub-Saharan Africans; these slaves lost freedom for life, a practice supported by Islam as it was by Judaism and Christianity.
Nevertheless, the captive/slave distinction was ultimately crucial, and Christians captured by Muslim pirates were not considered as slaves, perpetually unfree, but as captives. As people “taken in military or naval encounters between armies or privateers,” they might be exchanged for ransom.13 If their countrymen could raise the money for their release, their freedom could be restored. There is no question that most American captives suffered years of privation, harsh forced labor, intermittent cruelty by their overseers, outbreaks of plague, and death. The captivity they endured was comparable to slavery, although Christian captives were free to practice their faith.14 And they had the hope, at least in principle, of being released, but for many it took years to be ransomed through negotiation and treaty agreements. Some gained their freedom another way: through conversion to Islam.
A few American captives, such as James Cathcart, even prospered as prisoners in North Africa. Beginning in 1785, Cathcart spent eleven years as a captive in Algiers, where he rose from coffee maker to chief Christian clerk of the Muslim ruler. He helped negotiate the treaty that led to his release, arriving back in the United States in a ship he purchased with the money he earned while a prisoner.15 (Cathcart was allowed to run a tavern in prison and retain half the income.)16 He later returned to North Africa as the U.S. consul to Tripoli.17 Richard O’Brien, a ship’s captain also held in Algiers, would later return to that city as the U.S. consul.18
WEST AFRICAN AND NORTH AFRICAN SLAVES: TWO TYPES OF SLAVERY SELDOM COMPARED BY AMERICANS
In contrast to the lot of American prisoners, tens of thousands of West Africans remained in permanent slavery in the United States, a condition that would also trap their progeny for generations. American protests against the enslavement of their countrymen abroad naturally prompted some to object to African slavery at home, but these early dissenters remained in the minority.19 For Jefferson, as for most other Americans, the exclusion of blacks from the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence may have been more than an appeasement of colonies economically dependent on slavery; their view of the races as essentially unequal allowed them to conclude that while white, American captives deserved their freedom, black, West African (and Muslim) slaves did not. Indeed, Jefferson’s thoughts about racial difference emphasize the inferiority of blacks and, ultimately, his resistance to their emancipation.20 Some, including Benjamin Franklin, supported the abolition of all slavery. But Jefferson, though he advocated the abolition of the slave trade in 1776, never considered North African and North American slavery as comparable evils.21 Or as Paul Finkelman observed, Jefferson “willingly went to war to protect whites from enslavement, while retaining his own black slaves.”22 What to us today seems hypocritical did not trouble Jefferson, or indeed most Americans of his day.
Others did try to persuade Jefferson about the evils of slavery everywhere, including his daughter Martha and his friend the Marquis de Lafayette (d. 1834), French hero of the American Revolutionary War. Martha wrote her father, who was traveling in southern France in 1787, the year after his negotiations in London with the ambassador from Tripoli, that a ship from Virginia en route to Spain had nearly been captured by an Algerian “corser.” Martha explained that after an exchange of fire, the American vessel had prevailed, whereupon the victorious Americans boarded the Algerian vessel, where they “found chains that had been prepared for them.”23 The Americans “made use of them for the Algerians themselves.”24 Martha wrote in great detail about this incident, but it apparently never happened.25 Her inspiration appears to have been her horror at the idea that the Algerians might be sold as slaves in the United States, if they could not be exchanged in Algiers for Christian captives. She worried about both the fate of the Muslim slaves from Algeria in Virginia and their West African counterparts long held in the United States:
Good god have we not enough? I wish with all my soul that the poor negroes were all freed. It greives [sic] my heart when I think that these our fellow creatures should be treated so teribly [sic] as they are by many of our country men.26
Jefferson never responded to his daughter’s anxieties about the evils of American slavery, or the clever way she broached them by telling a story of alleged American captives.27 A little more than a month later, Sally Hemings, the slave who would become Jefferson’s mistress, accompanied Martha’s younger sister to France. Sally joined her brother James, who had served Jefferson in Paris since 1784, where the law would have granted both Sally and James their freedom, if they chose to claim it.28 They never did.29
In February 1786, Lafayette had written John Adams about the issue of slavery while the latter was in London negotiating with the ambassador from Tripoli. America’s involvement in the West African slave trade was, he chided Adams, a travesty committed under “the flag of liberty”:
In the case of my black brethren I feel myself warmly interested, and most decidedly side, so far as respects them, against the white part of mankind. Whatever the complexion of the enslaved, it does not, in my opinion, alter the complexion of the crime which the enslaver commits, a crime blacker than any African face. It is to me a matter of great anxiety and concern, to find this trade is sometimes perpetrated under the flag of liberty, our dear and noble stripes, to which virtue and glory have been constant standard-bearers.30
Adams responded to Lafayette via another correspondent. The letter was dated a few days before Jefferson’s arrival in London in early March. Adams identified slavery as the result of war, part of an African “system” that he believed affected the entire continent: “The idea that captives in war are slaves, is the foundation of the misfortunes of our negroes.” He then
went on to connect American slavers with those Europeans “who pay tribute to the states of Barbary.”31 Adams finally referred to a strategic connection between the North African enslavement of Americans and the American enslavement of West Africans—a connection that in reality did not exist:
I expect that one part of Africa will avenge upon my fellow citizens the injury they do to another by purchasing their captives. Yet I presume we shall be compelled to follow the base example of submission, and pay tribute or make presents, like the rest of Christians, to the mussulmen.32
In conclusion, he urged Lafayette to consider slavery as a problem: “I wish you would take up the whole of this African system, and expose it altogether. Never, never will the slave trade be abolished, while Christian princes abase themselves before the piratical ensigns of Mahomet.”33 Adams was prepared to acknowledge the injustice of enslaving Africans in America, but he deflected the blame to the continent where the Africans had come from and where they were now inflicting a reciprocal injustice on Americans. Underlying the entire ugly business in his understanding was a religious explanation, the evil attending Christian submission to the will of Muslims.
BRITISH POLICY AFTER 1783: THE NEW VULNERABILITY OF AMERICAN SHIPPING
Without British naval protection, Americans learned quickly that their goods, lives, and national values were newly vulnerable to piracy in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. In fact, after 1783, the British found it in their commercial interest to encourage attacks against their upstart former colonists.34 As Lord Sheffield told the House of Commons in 1783, “The Americans cannot pretend to a navy and therefore the great nations should suffer the Barbary pirates as a check on the activities of the smaller Italian states and America.”35 The American diplomat and North African captive Richard O’Brien recognized the zero-sum situation in 1787, when he observed that “those nations at peace with the Barbary States do not wish that any other nation should obtain a peace,” nor should they “reap part of those advantageous branches of commerce in the Mediterranean.”36 And Benjamin Franklin reputedly heard wags about London remark, “If there had been no Algiers, it would be worth England’s while to build one.”37
As ambassador to Britain, John Adams was acutely aware of London’s anti-American predilections. In his first letter to Secretary of State John Jay about the Muslim ambassador from Tripoli, Adams expressed fear of the cooperation between Tripoli with London: “there are not wanting persons in England who will find means to stimulate this African to stir up his countrymen against American vessels.” It was clear to Adams that the Muslim ambassador was in London for one of two reasons: “chiefly with a view to the United States, to draw them into a treaty of peace, which implies tribute, or at least presents; or to obtain aids from England to carry on a war against us.”38
THE ORIGINS OF PIRACY IN NORTH AFRICA: A CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM PRACTICE
The newly independent United States was not the most lucrative and therefore not the primary target of Islamic piracy. Nor was there a long-standing religious hostility toward American Christians among Muslims in North Africa. With independence, the United States simply became the latest in a long line of countries vulnerable to piracy. Americans now faced a problem that the Europeans first encountered in the sixteenth century, but at that time they too were also engaged in piracy and the enslavement of their captives. As Nabil Matar first asserted, “That the Barbary corsairs captured thousands of Europeans is not in question; but then, the Europeans captured and enslaved more.”39 And if one counts American slavery, Americans also captured and enslaved more Muslims than Muslim pirates seized in North Africa: tens of thousands (at top count) as against roughly seven hundred.40
Ironically, North African piracy in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic began as a desperate measure to repulse a Spanish invasion of Muslim territory. After Ferdinand and Isabella conquered and expelled the last Islamic dynasty in Spain in 1492, the Spanish went on to capture and enslave nearly one hundred thousand Muslims in their own lands in the sixteenth century.41 The action was rationalized under the Catholic doctrine of just war, by which they acknowledged an Islamic parallel: “This is according to the custom in taking captives which is done between Muslims and Christians.”42
Even after the Ottomans seized Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, these cities, as well as others in Morocco, still suffered Spanish military incursions. With the backing of the Catholic rulers of Spain, Archbishop Jiménez de Cisneros established numerous presidios, or fortifications, along the North African coast, seizing Oran in 1509 and Tripoli in 1510. The Spanish would hold the former post until 1791, though they could not retain the latter.43
During the Spanish siege of Oran, in present-day Algeria, four thousand Muslims were killed and more than eight thousand taken as slaves. When Tripoli fell, fifteen thousand Muslims were captured.44 All of these Muslims were sold in European slave markets. In 1511, King Ferdinand levied a “50 percent surtax on Algiers’s woolen imports” for the express purpose of funding “Spain’s North African expeditions of conquest.” Apart from subsidizing Spanish belligerence, the surtax undermined the North African economy, which was traditionally based on agriculture, commerce, and the export of “black slaves, Barbary horses, salted fish, leather hides, salt, wax, grain, olive oil, and dates.” It was both to fight back the invaders and to recoup some of these economic losses that Algiers, along with Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco, turned to piracy.45
Some historians have underscored that in the seventeenth century both North African and European “pirates” (or more accurately, “corsairs”) were not free agents but employed by their respective governments, to which they returned a percentage of the profit on ships and captives seized.46 Indeed, several of the most famous and successful corsair captains did not begin life as Muslims; a number were actually European, often English renegades.47 But all North African corsairs, no matter their ethnic origin, were organized by local rulers into guilds, which evolved into major state industries at their height. Among the four Barbary States, Algiers profited most, emerging as the most powerful.48 Thus, as Frank Lambert has observed, European aggression “transformed Algiers and other Barbary powers … from commercial to pirate states.”49
But the Islamic lands were not alone in thriving on state-sponsored criminality: the Christian dominions did so throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Among those from Catholic countries, which seized Muslim slaves in the Mediterranean with the support of the pope, the Knights of St. John of Malta were particularly known until their destruction by Napoleon.50 But there were others sponsored by the British, French, and small northern and southern Italian principalities, who also engaged in privateering and the enslavement of Muslim captives.51 Religion, not race or ethnicity, defined this form of slavery, with Muslim pirates functioning much like European and American privateers, sailing the Atlantic and Mediterranean in search of enemy ships and their crews to seize as prizes.52 The English, though not least in profiting from such activity—having enacted the Prize Act in 1708, resulting in “the highest level of privateering activity” in both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic53—were vocal about condemning others, reserving the derogatory term “pirate” for “the buccaneers of the Caribbean” and all Muslims.54 In practice it was a distinction without a difference.
JEFFERSON AND ADAMS: WAR OR “TRIBUTE”
In October 1784, the American merchant ship Betsey was seized by Moroccan pirates on the orders of Sultan Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, who ruled from 1757 to 1790.55 The sultan was piqued because Morocco had been the first country to recognize American independence in 1778, but the United States had ignored this overture and failed to send an envoy to establish a treaty of peace.56 Jefferson acknowledged this delay, but would not lay the blame on Congress, citing only “unlucky incidents.” He was happy to report in an August 1785 letter that the Moroccan ruler had released all American prisoners as a gesture of goodwill
even before a treaty could be arranged. At the time Jefferson could rightly claim that the Betsey was “the only vessel ever taken from us by any of the states of Barbary.”57 But she would not be the last. Between 1784 and 1816, thirty-six merchant ships and one American naval vessel would be captured by North African states.58
Jefferson and John Adams would finally sign the peace with Morocco in 1787.59 But two years earlier Jefferson confided in a private letter his bitterness at the prospect. He wrote that the sultan “is ready to receive us into the number of his tributaries,” a state of subjection he deemed unworthy of “a free people,” and likely to weaken the country’s standing not only in the eyes of “pyrates” but also “the nations of Europe.”60 In August 1785, Jefferson cast the problem succinctly, in both pecuniary and principled terms: “You will probably find the tribute to all these powers make such a proportion of the federal taxes as that every man will feel them sensibly when he pays those taxes. The question is whether their peace or war will be cheapest? But it is a question which should be addressed to our Honour as well as our Avarice?”61 It was more than a patriot’s opinion.
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