Jefferson's War (14 page)

U.S. warships were ordered to seize and destroy French commerce. Navy Secretary Stoddert dispatched twenty-one more, divided into four squadrons commanded by John Barry, Thomas Truxtun, Thomas Tingey, and Stephen Decatur, Sr., whose son would become one of the nineteenth century's first naval heroes. Two squadrons cruised in the Lesser Antilles and two near Cuba, hunting French merchantmen and convoying American merchantmen. Convoy duty could be enervating, especially for young naval officers craving combat, but the merchants welcomed the escorts. Besides protecting their investments, they brought down insurance rates, which had soared after the initial French seizures.

The war wasn't all convoys, though; sometimes American warships
fought French warships. In the Leeward Islands in February 1799, Truxtun and his 36-gun
Constellation
encountered
L‘Insurgente,
one of the ships that had forced Bainbridge to strike his colors. A gale had torn down the big French frigate's main topmast, and it had no choice but to stand and fight. Making the most of her relative immobility, Truxtun's gunners aimed withering cannon fire at
L'Insurgente‘
s rigging and sails. The French fought back gamely. The battle became so intense that a fiery
Constellation
officer, Lieutenant Andrew Sterett, killed one of his own men for leaving his post. Sterett described the incident succinctly in a letter home: “One fellow I was obliged to run through the body with my sword, and so put an end to a coward.” After resisting for an hour and a half, the French commander surrendered, with 29 killed and 41 wounded. Aside from the crewman slain for shirking, just 3 Americans were wounded. Sterett's rash act went unreported in the official account. In February 1800, Truxtun's
Constellation
fought a four-hour battle with
La Vengeance
that ended in a draw. While the
Constellation
's carronades concentrated on
La Vengeance'
s deck and hull, the French shredded the
Constellation
's rigging and took down her mainmast, then somehow managed to limp away.

The Quasi-War ended with the 1800 Treaty of Mortefontaine. France agreed to stop the illegal ship seizures and released the United States from the 1778 French—American alliance formed to fight Britain. The United States dropped its maritime damage claims. During the two-year undeclared war, France captured 159 U.S. merchantmen, but American ships recaptured 100 of them and seized 86 French merchant vessels. While there was no clear victor, the U.S. Navy gained confidence and experience and won nearly every engagement, while losing only the
Retaliation.
At the
war's end, the Navy had 33 ships afloat, 17 coastal defense vessels and revenue cutters, and more than 5,000 officers and crewmen. Naval power advocates were thrilled that so much had been achieved so quickly. They were certain the U.S. Navy was on its way to great things.

 

“He was like a huge, shaggy beast, sitting on a low bench, with his hind legs gathered up like a tailor or like a bear,” wrote U.S. consul William Eaton of his first meeting with Algiers's new dey, Bobba Mustapha. The new American consuls to the Barbary States had reluctantly removed their shoes before padding into the dey's throne room. “On our approach, he reached out his fore paw, which Consul O‘Brien was obliged to kiss, and we—including four American ship captains—followed his example. The animal at that time seemed to be in a harmless mood. He grinned several times, but made very little noise.”

The February 1799 audience was a courtesy call by the new American consuls in North Africa. Richard O‘Brien, the former captain of the
Dauphin,
was the new consul general for the Barbary Coast and consul to Algiers, the regency that had enslaved him for eleven years. Eaton was assigned to Tunis and the task of placating Hamouda Pacha, who had been bey for one year. James Cathcart, another eleven-year survivor of Algiers's bagnio, was the Tripoli consul. Cathcart had mediated and translated during the Algiers—United States negotiations that resulted in the 1795 treaty with Bobba's predecessor, Hassan Pasha; Hassan had died in 1798.

O‘Brien had arrived first and was on hand to welcome Cathcart and Eaton when the
Sophia
had docked at the quay in Algiers two weeks earlier. Cathcart and O'Brien disliked one another from their long years as fellow captives. (O‘Brien had tried to block
Cathcart's appointment as Tripoli consul.) They were opposites in temperament, which might have been part of the problem. O'Brien was a composed man who tended to coolness, while Cathcart was a high-tempered former seaman of Irish lineage and limited education, but unlimited resourcefulness. While a captive in Algiers, Cathcart had made a handsome profit running a tavern in the prison while managing to work his way into the dey's confidence and becoming his secretary.

While Cathcart and O‘Brien weren't happy to see one another, Bobba surely was cheered by the sight of the
Sophia
's three consorts—the
Hassan Bashaw, Skjoldebrand,
and
Lela Eisha;
the former two were the brig and schooner he had ordered, and the latter was an appeasing gift from the United States for the delayed tributary naval stores. There should have been a fourth
Sophia
consort, but the
Hero,
loaded with overdue naval stores for Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, had been forced to turn back at Jamaica after springing a leak. The chronic delays already had begun to corrode America's relationship with the rulers of the three Barbary regencies. Bobba, however, was the least agitated of them, having recently received the brand-new
Crescent,
the frigate promised by the U.S. treaty, with its hold full of treasure: twenty-six barrels brimming with silver dollars, a last installment on the 1795 agreement. Together, ship and cargo were worth roughly $300,000.

The consuls' quayside salutations quickly faded as an imbroglio that had festered in the
Sophia‘
s tight accommodations during the long ocean voyage suddenly erupted on the Algiers dock. Betsy Robeson, the twenty-year-old companion to Cathcart's new bride, the former Jane Woodside, announced she wanted to return to America and to have nothing more to do with the Cathcarts. The young woman appealed to O'Brien for protection until her return
trip could be arranged. Whatever happened during the Atlantic crossing to alienate Miss Robeson remains a minor mystery. But Cathcart's propensity for crude language and his explosive verbal abusiveness likely contributed to Ms. Robeson's decision to sever relations, and there also might have been an unwelcome romantic overture. What happened next was abundantly clear: O‘Brien's temporary guardianship over Miss Robeson blossomed into a blazing courtship. Six weeks later, Miss Robeson became Mrs. O'Brien. The strange affair permanently poisoned relations between Cathcart and O‘Brien.

A divided American diplomatic mission was a poor footing upon which to begin establishing amity with the notoriously fractious Barbary States. While it was hardly ruinous, it would complicate matters for Eaton, suddenly thrust into the role of go-between.

 

Iconoclast and maverick, brilliant and mercurial, William Eaton was a most unique consul, destined for glory when he arrived in Barbary two weeks shy of his thirty-fourth birthday. Described in later years as a small Andrew Jackson because of his quick temper and pugnacity, Eaton was born in 1764, one of thirteen children of a Woodstock, Connecticut, farmer. As a child, Eaton was a voracious reader, and never was interested in farming. He said later in life that Plutarch's
Lives,
the book that had taught Henry Knox about naval warfare, had also influenced him powerfully. When he was 15, he enlisted in the Continental Army, where he spent an uneventful three years, never seeing action but rising to sergeant-major rank. After the War of Independence, he taught school for a few years and earned a bachelor of arts degree from Dartmouth College, where he showed an affinity for languages. His
education completed, he became clerk of the Vermont House of Delegates. So far the arc of his life followed the conventional path of a bright patriot bound for modest achievements.

In the House of Delegates, Eaton's natural charm and gift for lobbying emerged, and he might have embarked on a comfortable political career had he not been restless, ambitious, and adventurous.

In 1792 Eaton rejoined the Army, accepting a captain's commission under Major General “Mad Anthony” Wayne. While training in Massachusetts, he met Eliza Danielson, the fortyish widow of Brigadier General Timothy Danielson, a Revolutionary War militia leader. They married, and he became the stepfather of two teenage children before he marched off with Wayne's army to campaign in the Ohio Valley against the Miami Indians.

The assignment was life-changing. For the first time, Eaton was able to observe firsthand a man he thought worthy of emulation. Eaton wrote of Wayne:

Wayne assigned Eaton to the American Legion, an early specialoperations unit. Eaton learned guerrilla warfare, rapid movement,
living off the land, and Indian languages. He infiltrated the Miami villages and gathered intelligence. Perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, Wayne promoted Eaton to deputy commander, and they became close friends. Wayne entrusted Fort Recovery to Eaton's charge while Wayne pursued the enemy into the forests, a sharp disappointment for Eaton. As things turned out, he had little time to brood; the Miami outmaneuvered Wayne and attacked Fort Recovery. For seven desperate hours, Eaton and his men repelled frenzied attacks by 500 Indians. Finally they gave up and melted back into the thick woods. Wayne gave Eaton permanent command of the fort as a reward, and this time Eaton missed the campaign's climactic battle—Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers, which forced the Miamis' capitulation.

With hostilities ended in the Ohio Valley, the War Department assigned Eaton to Georgia. He patrolled the troubled Florida border, where the Spanish tried to keep the Indian tribes stirred up against the Georgians. Colonel Henry Gaither, Eaton's commander, grew to dislike Eaton. Perhaps he was jealous of Eaton's pipeline to War Secretary Timothy Pickering, with whom Eaton corresponded directly. He also might have been irritated by the Georgia legislature awarding Eaton land and honorary Georgia membership in appreciation for keeping peace along the St. Mary's River. Gaither court-martialed Eaton for insubordination and for allegedly selling government supplies to the Indians for personal gain. While Eaton was cleared of both charges, his Georgia assignment and Army career ended.

Eaton went to Philadelphia to wait for his officer's commission to expire. In what turned out to be a piece of career-making good luck, the government put him to work as a counterespionage agent. Eaton trapped and arrested a spy, then fed false information
to the Spanish that resulted in a new, favorable treaty between Spain and the United States. The grateful Adams administration wanted to know how it could reward Eaton for his service, and he had a ready answer. In Georgia and while waiting out his commission in Philadelphia, he had developed a passion for the Arab world. He had read and reread the Koran and everything else he could find on Islam, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Dreaming of one day visiting the Levant, he even had taught himself some Arabic. He told the Adams administration he would be happy to be named consul to Tunis.

 

Eaton's jubilation at receiving his dream assignment faded quickly once he settled in at Tunis, where right away he began to renegotiate two annoying provisions of the 1797 treaty that the U.S. Senate had refused to approve. The first required the United States to send Tunis a barrel of gunpowder each time Tunis's fortress guns saluted an arriving American ship. Tunis was generous with its salutes, and gunpowder was expensive. The second provision was more serious: It allowed Tunis at any time to commandeer any U.S. merchantman, so long as paid what decided was a fair price. Eaton raised the treaty issues during his initial meeting with Hamouda Pacha, sending the bey into a rant about the delayed naval stores, which had been aboard the leaky Hero, and evoking a demand for more weapons and money, as well as a ship, which Eaton rejected. The
Hero‘
s ruined cargo, being replaced in the United States, soured the relationship between Eaton and the bey for months.

Eaton managed to renegotiate the objectionable treaty provisions, excising the article permitting the Tunisians to commandeer U.S. merchantmen and compromising on the cannon salutes: A
Tunisian cannon salute still would require payment of a barrel of gunpowder, but could be answered by an American salute, for a similar payment. The salutes would cancel out one another. But the bey continued to badger Eaton about the delayed naval stores.

Eaton's outrage over the Barbary rulers' imperiousness soon began to boil over in his correspondence. The obsequiousness expected of the foreign consuls was particularly galling when he considered the caliber of the North African ruling class: “Not much shall be feared nor expected from a people whose principal ministers, principal merchants and principal generals consume day after day in the same company smoking tobacco and playing at chess,” he wrote to Pickering. “While the citizens and soldiers are sauntering in rags, sleeping against walls, or praying away their lives under the shrines of departed saints—Such is the military, and such the industry of Barbary—yet to the shame of humanity they dictate terms to powerful nations!!!”