Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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Under the headline “Important State Papers,” President Adams took full responsibility for the treaty on the front page of newspapers from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York.48 His introductory note to the treaty text informed readers that he personally “had caused to be published and issued this Proclamation, commanding a strict observance of the following Treaty; regularly negotiated and ratified.”49
All of these newspapers published the treaty without editorializing, with one exception. William Cobbett, Federalist editor of the Porcupine Gazette of Philadelphia, objected to the treaty’s religious implications, in a paragraph appended to the text in the June 23, 1797, edition:
The eleventh article of this treaty certainly wants some explanation. That “the government of the United States of America is in no sense founded on the Christian religion,” is a declaration that one might have expected from Soliman Kaya, Hassan Bashaw, or the sansculotte Joel Barlow; but it sounds rather oddly from the President and the Senate. If it will admit of satisfactory explanation, it ought to receive it; for it certainly looks a little like trampling upon the cross.50
Cobbett, a Federalist, was in a political bind. He wished to criticize the basic premise that the U.S. government was “in no sense founded on the Christian religion” without criticizing the Federalist president who had negotiated the treaty and the Federalist senators who had already ratified it.51 To him, the article seemed an attack on Christianity, and what he presumed to be the Christian character of his nation. And so he deflected the blame, speculating that Muslim officials in Tripoli or the American diplomat Joel Barlow were responsible for this article of the treaty.52 John Adams had written that even by comparison to Thomas Paine, there “was not a more worthless fellow” than Joel Barlow.53 The article was indeed consistent with Barlow’s views on government and religion, and he likely was involved in crafting it. His ideas, however, were not unique but already well represented in the domestic politics of the United States.54
JOEL BARLOW’S PROBABLE AUTHORSHIP OF ARTICLE 11
Appointed U.S. consul to Algiers in February 1796, Joel Barlow was predictably on hand to sign and verify the final version of the Tripoli treaty in North Africa in January 1797.55 After taking a degree from Yale in 1778, he served as a chaplain during the Revolutionary War. His views of religion changed, however, when he traveled to Europe, where he met Jefferson and Paine and, like them, came to embrace the French Revolution.56
Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe (1792), reveals his aversion to religious violence and hints at his influence on Article 11.57 He decries the millions of deaths in Europe resulting from “persecution of the Christian church,”58 writing that “any mode of worship declared to be national” was antithetical to religious “liberty,” a standard Deist claim.59 He concludes with a declaration about Christianity and the United States that would seem to suggest his influence on Article 11:
In the United States of America there is no church; and this is one of the principal circumstances which distinguish that government from all others that ever existed; it ensures the un-embarrassed exercise of religion, the continuation of public instruction in the science of liberty and happiness, and promises a representative government.60
Clearly, he meant that there was no established Christian faith in the United States, a fact in no way at odds with the free exercise of religion by the varied Protestant Christian majority. In fact, the assertion of the United States as “not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” was already implicitly enshrined in the Constitution’s First Amendment.61
And it had proponents other than Barlow. In 1803, in the midst of Jefferson’s naval conflict with Tripoli, Secretary of State James Madison would also implicitly affirm the principle of Article 11 of the 1797 treaty, which he considered for the purposes of diplomacy with North African rulers a point in favor of the United States as compared with European Christian powers. He wrote the U.S. consul general at Algiers to remind him to press it:
P.S. The universal toleration in matters of religion in most of our States, and the entire want of a power respecting them in the general Government, has as we understand induced the Barbary powers, to view us more favorably than other Christian Nations, who are exclusively so, and with whom these powers consider themselves in perpetual hostility, suspended only at times, by temporary truces. It is recommended to you to avail us of this fact & opinion, as far as it can be used to lessen the unequal condition of the intercourse between us.62
But Madison was not merely being an opportunistic diplomat in 1803, his point being entirely consistent with his earlier attempts to end the establishment of Christianity in Virginia in 1785, and his support of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which passed the following year.
AMERICAN POLITICAL PRECEDENTS FROM THE FOUNDING FOR ARTICLE 11
Even before the U.S. Constitution affirmed that there would be no religious test for federal officeholders and the First Amendment denied any “establishment of religion,” James Madison had promoted a religiously plural vision of the United States not unlike Jefferson’s. While the latter was in France, Madison had cleared the way for the passage of his comrade’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. In 1785 his own brilliant A Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments railed against the proposal that Virginia tax proceeds be allocated to pay for the propagation of Anglican Christianity, the state’s established religion. In the third article of his tract Madison rejects an establishment of any form of Christianity:
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?63
And in the ninth article he argues for universal religious equality:
Because the proposed establishment is a departure from the generous policy, which, offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion, promised a lustre to our country; and an accession to the number of its citizens. What a melancholy mark is the bill of sudden degeneracy? Instead of holding for an Asylum to the persecuted, it is itself a signal of persecution.64
Such was Madison’s appreciation of how inimical any established faith was to his conception of his nation.
Though Madison had been unable to persuade his neighbor George Washington to sign the Memorial, Washington would independently express his strenuous support of religious freedom for all, including Muslims:
Altho’ no mans Sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are; yet I must confess, that I am not amongst the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making People pay toward the support of that which they profess, if of the denominations of Christians; or declare themselves Jews, Mahomitans, or otherwise, and thereby obtain proper relief.65
Washington knew that the hope of “relief” for non-Christians was small, because they would be forced to pay to support a religion they rejected, and so he wished that “the assessment had never been agitated” and would “die an easy death.”66 He would not, however, go so far as to oppose a probable majority in support of the measure.
But many others did express a wish for an end to a Christian religious establishment in Virginia. One group of Protestant petitioners from Chesterfield County wrote in support of Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance on November 14, 1785. In protesting the payment of teachers of Christianity with state taxes, they argued forcefully for a religiously plural Virginian society: “Let Jews, Mehomitans, and Christians of every Denomination enjoy religious liberty,” and “thrust them not out by establishing the Christian religion lest thereby they become our own enemys and weaken this infant state.”67 Moreover, these Protestant petitioners reminded the Virginia House of Delegates that “it is mens labour in our manufacturies, their services by sea and land that aggrandize our country
and not their creed.”68 Civic contributions, not faith, were the proper standard of belonging for Jews and Muslims, not just Christians. Was this not an early domestic political statement compatible with Article 11 of the Tripoli treaty? Such sentiments had deep roots in European Protestantism, in which from the seventeenth century a significant minority had affirmed that religion was a private matter of conscience, between the believer and God. This relationship must always be exempt from any government control.
Barlow’s contributions to the Tripoli treaty, however objectionable to the editor Cobbett, did not otherwise stir debate, either in the Senate or local newspapers. Having been circulating since Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom of 1779 and Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, they were not unusual in eighteenth-century American thought.
Ironically, although Barlow attested to the accuracy of the treaty’s text, because neither he nor any of his colleagues could read Arabic, he had to rely on European go-betweens to vet the agreement,69 and he probably never knew that Article 11 never existed in an Arabic translation.70 The discrepancy would remain undiscovered until 1930, when a Dutch scholar was hired by the State Department to examine the Arabic document.71 Nevertheless, similarly accepting language about Islam would appear in later treaties with North Africa—in both Arabic and English—endorsed by Thomas Jefferson, and later adopted by James Madison.
JEFFERSON “THE INFIDEL”: ANTI-ISLAMIC RHETORIC, A CHRISTIAN AMERICA, AND THE PRESIDENCY, 1800–1801
President John Adams’s campaign against the challenger Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800 has been termed the first “smear campaign” in American electoral history—and it was the first, but not the last, in which a presidential candidate was accused of being a Muslim.72 The Republican Jefferson’s religious beliefs figured centrally in Federalist attacks, with Jefferson wrongly portrayed as an atheist and, more accurately, a Deist.73 Sometimes he was also called an “infidel,” a term suggesting not only one who has rejected Christianity but also “an adherent of a religion opposed to Christianity,” specifically a Muslim.74 It was a somewhat more subtle application of the tactic pioneered by John Quincy Adams in 1791, with the Federalists using slogans like “God and a religious president” or “Jefferson and no God.”75 The basis for the strategy was to play on the perception that America was a Christian nation and that the danger of a non-Christian president was imminent in Jefferson.76 It remained the worst fear of some Americans that a Muslim infidel might be elected, a possibility that the recently ratified Constitution, lacking a religious test for office, made theoretically possible. Mobilization of voters against Jefferson on grounds of religion was in effect an attempt to enforce such a test, a popular objective now plainly unconstitutional.77
Federalist clergymen were particularly keen to relitigate the religion question in the presidential contest. One Dutch Reformed minister asked, “Would Jews or Mahometans, consistently with their belief, elect a Christian?” Believing that he knew the answer, he insisted that Christians should be no “less zealous and active than they” in seeking to elect John Adams, a true Christian, as president.78
Jefferson’s own words had rendered his Christianity suspect and him vulnerable to this attack. It was his now famous pluralist utterance published fifteen years earlier in Notes on Virginia that his adversaries repeatedly cited: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”79 Historians have pointed out, with a latter-day irony missing in the eighteenth century, that “Jefferson’s much vaunted toleration of all religion proved that he was no true Christian.”80 One irony lost at the time was that Jefferson himself had used the word “infidel” to similar calumnious effect in 1776 against George III. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson decried the king’s support for the slave trade, comparing it to the North African Muslim pirates’ taking of captives: “This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.”81 Jefferson’s words were excised in the final draft, as he explained in his autobiography, in deference to South Carolina and Georgia as well as “our northern brethren” who “had very few slaves themselves” but were “pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”82
The term “infidel” as a synonym for Muslim remained one of the worst insults an American could hurl, whether against the British king or a fellow presidential candidate, from 1776 to 1800—and beyond. In an 1801 letter to a close friend a few months after his inauguration, Jefferson would lament the religious nature of these political slurs: “what an effort, my dear Sir, of bigotry in Politics & Religion have we gone through.”83 As president he would eschew this bigotry whether waging a naval action against Tripoli or making a peace treaty with the same North African nation.
JEFFERSON’S MILITARY ACTION AGAINST TRIPOLI, 1801–5
It would be the country’s first conflict with a foreign power, the first, too, with an Islamic one, but Congress would never declare war. Having failed to reach terms for peace with Tripoli fifteen years earlier, Jefferson and his cabinet voted on May 15, 1801, to send a squadron of four vessels to the Mediterranean. They had received reports that Tripoli was demanding payment of tribute above the sums that America had been paying for peace under the treaty President Adams had signed in 1797.84 What Jefferson did not know was that the day before, Yusuf Qaramanli, Tripoli’s ruler, had ceremoniously declared war by cutting down the U.S. flag from his citadel.85
Although some American historians have presumed that the so-called First Barbary War was prompted by Jefferson’s desire to end piracy for good, by 1801 Tripoli had in fact seized only two American vessels, far fewer than the more powerful Algiers.86 And Pasha Yusuf Qaramanli had quickly released the American ships and their crews. It seems likelier that hostilities first arose on the other side, the first American peace treaty with Tripoli having sown the seeds of a military conflict that would stretch across Jefferson’s first term.87 American diplomats seem to have misread Tripoli’s grievances, its annoyance at being perceived as subservient to Algiers and therefore not worthy of the same tribute. Tripoli also claimed that America was in arrears on payment required by treaty.
Like Jefferson, Qaramanli had ambitions of launching a strong navy; he expanded his fleet from nineteen armed ships in 1803 to twenty-four by the end of the conflict with the United States in 1805.88 Each of Tripoli’s vessels was commanded by a ra’is, or captain, and manned by a crew of twenty to thirty men. Captains were of Turkish, Berber, or Arab origin. Some, including, Murad Ra’is (the former Peter Leslie), admiral of the fleet, were European Christian renegades who had converted to Islam. Leslie had been a mutineer of Scottish origin, who avoided a British court-martial by joining Tripoli’s navy in 1794. A year later, he was appointed admiral.89
For the next four years, American naval vessels attempted to blockade and bombard Tripoli, without decisive success.90 In the first year, Jefferson was able to coordinate American naval forces with Sweden’s, in just the sort of multilateral arrangement he’d proposed as a diplomat in France. Nevertheless, despite the capture of a Tripolitan ship early in 1801, the blockade failed, owing in part to the intervention of other North African states.91 By 1802, Jefferson could still not secure a declaration of war from Congress, but he did win more official support for the military defense of American commerce.92
In 1803, a new force of seven American vessels began to patrol the Mediterranean.93 It included the thirty-six-gun warship Philadelphia, which was seized with her crew of 307, having accidentally run aground on a reef in Tripoli harbor while chasing an enemy ship on October 31.94 After a year of captivity, Jonathan Cowdery, the ship’s doctor, reported that five men had died, while another few had “turned Turks”—adopted Islam to regain their freedom.95 Rather than allow the pirates to use the captured American ship, on February 16, 1804, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and a few of his men managed to burn the Philadel
phia, a daring feat that would garner praise from no less august a seaman than Britain’s Admiral Nelson.96 But the Philadelphia’s demise did nothing to end the captivity of her languishing crew, much less the war with Tripoli.
Jefferson tried a new strategy when he appointed the diplomat William Eaton to begin negotiations with Ahmed—or as he was known then to Americans, “Hamet”—Qaramanli, Tripoli’s deposed ruler and the brother of Pasha Yusuf.97 From exile in Cairo, Hamet pledged to participate in the siege of Tripoli’s port city of Derna, from which point would be launched the conquest of Tripoli and his return to power as a ruler friendly to U.S. interests. Thus had Thomas Jefferson ordered the first American covert attempt at a coup d’état against a foreign power.
Eaton directed the five-hundred-mile trek through the Libyan Desert from Alexandria, Egypt, to Derna, Libya. His forces included ten U.S. soldiers, who never actually made it “to the shores of Tripoli,” as extolled by the Marine Corps anthem, as well as various mercenaries: three hundred Arabs, thirty-eight Greeks, and members of other nationalities.98 On April 25, 1804, Eaton’s force took Derna as it was also being bombarded by three U.S. ships.99 But in the meantime, Yusuf Qaramanli had hastily made terms with the Americans, dashing Hamet’s ambitions to rule once again and forcing Eaton to withdraw.
Jefferson was praised for prosecuting a successful war overall, but criticized vociferously by the Federalists, members of the navy, and his own envoy, Eaton, for failing to press the U.S. advantage with the capture of Tripoli, which might have put an end to tribute. By June 4, 1805, the United States would finally negotiate a $60,000 ransom for all prisoners, far less than the $3 million the pasha had initially demanded, with the understanding that there be no further payments.100 If Jefferson did not end the practice of tribute for peace, he did at least prove that the United States would resist North African aggression militarily. The threat of piracy would not abate fully until after the U.S. Navy won a final battle with Algerian forces in June 1815, during the presidency of James Madison, but Jefferson’s policy of armed resistance certainly marked the beginning of the end.101