In 1784, the same year that the Betsey was seized by Morocco, Jefferson took his place in Paris as minister plenipotentiary, faced with the task of establishing terms of peace and commerce with the Ottoman Empire, the North African states of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, and sixteen other European countries, negotiations in which, as ambassador to Britain, John Adams would also play a role.62
The next year, Jefferson sent John Adams a draft treaty for the Barbary States, based on his own insights and “the notes Dr. Franklin left me.” “A Treaty of Amity and Commerce” was intended for “the purpose of establishing, peace, friendship and commerce between the United States … and his [foreign Barbary] subjects on the other.”63 It contained twenty-nine articles, more than found in most actual American treaties later in the eighteenth century. The second article, after peace, secured the release of U.S. citizens and property, while the third aimed to ensure that no North African pirates would prey on American shores: “No vessel of his majesty shall make captures or cruise within sight of the coasts of the United States.”64 This provision of Jefferson’s would not survive to the final draft, but it reflected a view shared by other Americans of marauding North African pirates nearby.
In 1786, one Massachusetts newspaper reported that Algerian ships had been sighted in the Caribbean, while four others printed false stories about Algerians actually invading the United States in order to capture Americans.65 The previous year, in the wake of the Algerian seizure of two American ships, three hapless strangers carrying Hebrew documents no one could read were seized in Virginia and summarily deported as possible Algerian spies.66
In his treaty template Jefferson had described the adversaries as “Moorish pirates,” which usually was intended to imply that some were formerly from Spain, though Jefferson used the term to mean indigenous Muslim North Africans—whether Arab or Berber. The original term moro (“dark-skinned”) in Spanish yielded the English equivalent “Moor,” but it was not a term Muslims used to describe themselves, because the European usage fused the faith of a Muslim from Spain or North Africa with a racial implication.67 The term “Barbary” developed much the same way, in this case from “barbarian,” the Greco-Latin pejorative for those who chattered in a foreign, undecipherable tongue.68 In Arabic, the verb barbara would also come to mean talking noisily and confusedly, becoming synonymous with Berber, another pejorative term used to describe indigenous peoples who did not use it to describe themselves.69 Like “Barbary” it denoted otherness (at best) and absence of civilization (at worst).70 As for “barbarian,” it too was a common American designation for the pirates of North Africa, appearing, for instance, in Jefferson’s 1804 presidential address to Congress, in which he explained that “by the sufferings of war” he hoped to “reduce the barbarians of Tripoli to the desire of peace on proper terms.”71 This, however, seems to be his only application of the term to North Africans, though he also used it to describe the Ottoman Turkish presence in Greece.72
Jefferson had drafted his treaty with the intent of establishing peace for “fifty years,” an optimistic hope to be sure.73 As it happened, only Morocco initially accepted this term.74 Had the other North African states done likewise, the peace would have lasted until 1835, twenty years after the end of official hostilities with other North African powers.
ADAMS DESCRIBES THE PRESSING NEED FOR A TREATY WITH NORTH AFRICAN STATES, 1786
In his letter of February 21, 1786, to Jefferson, John Adams describes the pirates of North Africa and their depredations as the most pressing foreign policy problem facing the new nation. Only the year before, two American ships and twenty-one prisoners had been seized by Algiers off the coast of Portugal:
There is nothing to be done in Europe, of half the importance of this, and I dare not communicate to Congress what has passed without your concurrence. What has been already done and expended will be absolutely thrown away and we shall be involved in a universal and horrible war with these Barbary States, which will continue for many years, unless more is done immediately. I am so impressed and distressed with this affair that I will go to New York or to Algiers or first to one and then to the other, if you think it necessary, rather than it should not be brought to a conclusion.75
Adams’s eagerness to negotiate and pay a tribute for peace with the pirates would be supported by Jefferson in his official capacity, but in private he opposed this expediency. Having worked together to forge a final draft of the Declaration of Independence, the two Founders would be divided over how most wisely and economically to protect American interests from piracy.
Less than three months after negotiating with the ambassador from Tripoli, Adams set about calculating how much it would cost to secure treaties with the Ottoman Turks, Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, and Morocco. He reckoned that half a million pounds sterling, perhaps even two or three hundred thousand pounds, might suffice for all. But he saw the economic damage to the new nation as ultimately greater “if we do not treat.” His reasoning was strictly practical: “Compute six or eight per cent. insurance upon all your exports and imports; compute the total loss of all the Mediterranean and Levant trade; compute the loss of one half your trade to Portugal and Spain.” Adams concluded that alternatives to tribute would cost “at least half a million a year, without protecting your trade; and when you leave off fighting, you must pay as much money as it would now cost you for peace. For £30,000 sterling or as little as £10,000, he reckoned “we can have peace, when a war would sink us annually ten times as much.” Nevertheless, like Jefferson, Adams well understood that paying for peace would mean the imposition of additional taxes upon Americans.76 In debt and without a central government mandate for taxation, the new nation could not raise the revenue. The primary obstacle to establishing peace, for Adams, was fiscal.
JEFFERSON’S DESIRE FOR A MILITARY RESPONSE TO PIRACY, 1784
By contrast to Adams’s analysis, Jefferson’s response to the piracy crisis is another example of his contradictory impulses. As the historian Bernard Bailyn first remarked, Jefferson was “a pacifist in principle,” but he “argued for a retributive war against the piratical Barbary states” as early as 1784, two years before meeting the ambassador from Tripoli.77 In a letter to James Monroe, he describes his attempt in Paris to ascertain the amount “the nations of Europe give to the Barbary states to purchase their peace.” He reported that he could never uncover more than “glimmerings” of payment that “appears to be very considerable.”78
That same year, Jefferson rejected the European precedent of paying for peace, proposing instead the prosecution of war and the creation of a navy:
Surely our people will not give this. Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty. If they refuse, why not go to war with them? Spain, Portugal, Naples and Venice are now at war with them. Every part of the Mediterranean therefore would offer us friendly ports. We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honourable occasion or with a weaker foe? I am of the opinion Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy their commerce: not by attempting bombardments as the Mediterranean states used to do, wherein they act against the whole Barbary force brought to a point, but by constant cruising and cutting them to peices [sic] by peicemeal [sic].79
Jefferson’s resistance to paying “tribute” and his determination to create a navy represented to him an “honourable” option. (By implication, capitulation to piracy by treaty was dishonorable.) Yet Jefferson also carefully calculated the potential dividends of a military action against a “weaker foe,” taking account of multiple “friendly” European ports in the Mediterranean. Nowhere, however, in the course of his considerations, by turns ethical, military, fiscal, and commercial, did he characterize the situation as a conflict between a Christian America and her Muslim adversaries. Affronted by extortion, Jefferson wished to end piracy on principle: He believed in free trade with all nations and, ultimately, peace. And he well understood that the
assault on American interests was based on opportunism born of a sense of territorial privilege, not particular animus toward his country.
It was in fact not the first time Jefferson had considered the problem of piracy. As a Virginia legislator, sometime between the years 1776 and 1779 he revised an English legal precedent of 1699, which he entitled A Bill to Prevent Losses by Pirates, Enemies, and Others on the High Seas. Finally enacted in January 1787, Jefferson’s legislation set terms of compensation for the widows and orphans of men whose lives and goods were lost at sea, with rewards for those who defended their ships against piracy and penalties for those who capitulated without a fight.80 Nowhere did it mention a specific North African pirate threat or ransom for captives; indeed, during the Revolutionary War, when Jefferson drew up the legislation, it was the British who harassed American ships and impressed their crews into the Royal Navy. Piracy was piracy, no matter the perpetrators, and throughout his career Jefferson would consistently take a pragmatic view of the problem, and just as consistently he would see military action as the best answer.
ADAMS NEGOTIATES IN LONDON WITH AN AMBASSADOR FROM TRIPOLI, FEBRUARY 1786
Jefferson’s first policy disagreement with John Adams did not prevent him from visiting London to negotiate with the ambassador from Tripoli in March 1786. Adams’s private letters concerning his three prior meetings with the ambassador reveal a wealth of suggestive detail absent from the official report he and Jefferson ultimately sent to their secretary of state. Adams admitted to being “sometime in doubt, whether any Notice Should be taken of the Tripoline Ambassador [Abdurrahman].” Perhaps this feeling explains why nowhere else in his correspondence did Adams even mention the envoy by name, which today would be rendered Abd al-Rahman. Upon learning that the ambassador “made enquiries about me; and expressed surprise that when other foreign ministers visited him, the American had not,” Adams changed his mind about a meeting. Confirmation that the representative was also “a universal and perpetual Ambassador” sealed his decision. Intending only to leave his card on the evening of February 17, 1786, Adams was surprised to find the ambassador at home and immediately “ready to receive me.”81 And so a courtesy call turned into a first attempt at negotiation.
Adams’s vivid letter to Jefferson about this first meeting contains his reflections on the diplomatic problems of language, protocol, and American treaty-making with other Islamic powers. In a severely edited official version of the encounter sent to Secretary John Jay the same day, Adams declared, “It would scarcely be reconcilable to the dignity of congress to read a detail of the ceremonies which attended the conference,” adding that such would be “more proper” as an “amusement … at the New York theatre.”82 But while allowing that the report of the meeting “is to be sure very inconsistent with the Dignity of your Character and mine,” Adams was far more forthright and revealing when he wrote Jefferson.83
With what was perhaps a mixture of pride and relief, Adams wrote, “I was received in State,” a welcome change, no doubt, from the cool reception he’d received at the Court of St. James’s.84 Jefferson would later say of his presentation to the British king and queen that “it was impossible for anything to be more ungracious, than their notice of Mr. Adams and myself.”85 In contrast, “His Excellency,” as Adams referred to the ambassador from Tripoli, cordially sat with him in one of two “great chairs before the fire.” During the interview, Adams noted, “Two secretaries of legation, men of no small consequence,” continued “standing upright in the middle of the room, without daring to sit, during the whole time I was there.”86 Impressed by this feat of endurance, Adams added that they might still be standing there for all he knew.
Lack of a common language proved “the difficulty,” because, wrote Adams, “His Excellency speaks scarcely a word of any European language, except Italian and Lingua Franca in which, you know, I have small pretensions.”87 Lingua Franca, according to the Massachusetts seaman John Foss, who spent four years in Algiers as a captive, was “a kind of dialect, which without being the proper language of any country whatever, has a kind of universal currency all over the Mediterranean, as the channel of information for people, who cannot understand each other through any medium but this.”88
The lack of a common language would be even more troublesome in the eventual process of drafting treaties in both English and Arabic or Ottoman Turkish, the latter being languages only a few U.S. diplomats could speak but not read, let alone write. Treaties with Morocco and Tripoli would be drafted in English and Arabic, sometimes with an Italian version. Those with Algiers and Tunis were drafted in Ottoman Turkish and English. The necessity of relying on foreign diplomats, whether Muslim or Christian, to certify the Arabic or Turkish version as faithful to the English perilously limited what confidence the Americans had in the accuracy of the bilingual treaties they signed.
Adams admitted to Jefferson that he was no linguist, but as he reported to Jefferson, he and the Tripolitan managed “with a pittance of Italian and a few French words.”89 To Secretary Jay, Adams allowed that the meeting was “carried on with much difficulty, but with civility enough on both sides, in a strange mixture of Italian, Lingua Franca, broken French and worse English.”90
For his part Jefferson, who was a linguist, had shown an interest in Arabic (and Persian and Hebrew) as early as 1778. In that year, he first attempted to buy an eight-volume collection of Arabic and Persian poetry by the British scholar Sir William Jones (d. 1794) from a former philosophy professor at William and Mary, who had left Virginia for England during the Revolutionary War.91 But those books would not yet have arrived when he wrote from Paris in March 1785, a year before his negotiations with the ambassador from Tripoli.92 Still, the volumes were eventually added to Jefferson’s library collection on his return from Europe in 1789 and his acquisition of books to further his study of Arabic would continue, his curiosity whetted by access to European book markets—and the continuing problem of piracy.
TOBACCO, COFFEE, AND TRIBUTE: TRIPOLI’S AMBASSADOR REVEALS TO ADAMS THAT THEIR TWO COUNTRIES ARE AT WAR
The North African emissary opened his first meeting with Adams by venturing some pleasantries about the comparative merits of American and Tripolitan tobacco. He explained to his American guest that his native tobacco was “too strong,” but diplomatically conceded, “Your American tobacco is better.”93 On this cue, one of the servants “brought two pipes ready filled and lighted.” Adams was given the longer, which he “placed with bowl upon the carpet, for the stem was fit for a walking cane” of “more than two yards in length.”94 By his own admission, “it was long” since he’d smoked a pipe, but Adams matched his host “whiff for whiff” rather than do the “unpardonable” and be thought “wanting in politeness in so ceremonious an interview.”95
They continued smoking until coffee was brought in. Adams wrote Jefferson that he “alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco.”96 One of the two standing secretaries, reported the American, “appeared in raptures,” over Adams’s behavior until “the superior of them who speaks a few words of French cryed out in extacy, ‘Monsieur votes etes un Turk,’ ” or “Mr., you are a Turk!”97 This was meant as the highest form of praise for the American, but one wonders whether Adams appreciated the attendant irony of what was a common pejorative in early American political rhetoric being turned on its head in his honor. With the serving of tobacco and coffee, products from the New World and the Old, “the necessary civilities” had concluded.98 It was time to negotiate.
Politely, the ambassador from Tripoli “asked many questions about America: the soil climate heat and cold, etc., and said it was a very great country.” He then added, “But Tripoli is at war with it.” Adams replied, “Sorry to hear that.” He averred that he “had not heard of any war with Tripoli” and “America had done no injury to Tripoli, committed no hostility; nor had Tripoli done America any injury or committed any hostility against her, that I had heard of.” Abd al-Rahman responded,
“True,” but continued to press his point:
[B]ut there must be a Treaty of Peace. There could be no peace without a treaty. The Turks and Affricans [sic] were the souvereigns [sic] of the Mediterranean, and there could be no navigation there nor peace without treaties of peace. America must treat as France and England did, and all other powers. America must treat with Tripoli and then with Constantinople and then with Algiers and Morocco.99
These assertions, in brief, summed up the view from Tripoli: The Mediterranean was their lake; to sail it freely required a diplomatic agreement and a financial arrangement such as North African powers had demanded for centuries from European countries. It was simply business as usual. The declaration of war was not merely an invitation to sue for peace, but implicitly to pay for it as well. And there was a specific hierarchy of treaty-making to be concluded: Tripoli first (of course), then the Ottoman Turks, to whom nominal suzerainty was still owed by Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers.100
Presenting the American with a French translation of his authorization to make treaties with all European powers, the ambassador, Adams understood, “was ready to treat and make Peace.” Adams reported being asked to return “tomorrow or the next day, or any other day and bring an interpreter. He would hear and propose terms, and write to Tripoli and I might write to America, and each party might accept or refuse them as they should think fit.”101
The matter was urgent to both sides. “How long would it be before one could write to Congress and have an answer,” the ambassador was keen to know. Adams replied that it might take three months, which the ambassador pronounced “too long.” From this impatience, Adams concluded that “his Excellency was more ready and eager to treat than I was as he probably expected to gain more by the treaty.” At the invitation to return straight away, the American demurred, promising to “think of it.” He was convinced that Abd al-Rahman’s demands, when known, would be “higher I fear, than we can venture.”102 And these anxieties would prove well founded.
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