Jefferson's War (19 page)

A combination of winter gales, paperwork, and bad luck spoiled Dale's December leave-taking, and 1802 still found him in the western Mediterranean. En route to Toulon to have the
President's
bottom checked for wormholes and rot, the Port Mahon harbor pilot ran the flagship onto a rock. Then Dale and his crew were quarantined for fifteen days.

 

If not a fighting commander, Dale was certainly efficient. He kept his squadron humming with paperwork and errands, and he was impatient with sloppy subordinates. Captain Daniel McNeill, whose frigate
Boston
had joined the squadron after delivering the new U.S. ambassador to France, was the opposite: administratively loose, but combative. Inevitably, the men clashed. McNeill gave Dale ample cause. To avoid quarantine in Toulon, McNeill had told the French authorities he had been to no other ports recently, when he had been to several. Dale rebuked McNeill angrily when he found out. Before the memory of that lapse of integrity had faded, McNeill was in trouble again. He sailed from Malaga minus three lieutenants, the ship's purser, and three other crewmen—all still ashore. As though to compensate for leaving Malaga with too few crewmen, at Toulon he sailed with three French officers and the
President's
parson. They had come aboard for supper, overstayed, and awakened the next morning to find
themselves under sail. “I hope you will be more particular in your enquirys on Board, when you are about to sail from any place,” Dale fumed at McNeill. “You can have but little idea what trouble and displeasure it gives, and the consequence of leaving Officers behind, and taking, Officers of other Nations away contrary to their expectations.” He asked Robert Smith, the new Navy secretary, to cashier McNeill.

But before his recall, McNeill revealed his virtues as a vigorous, able blockader, capturing four Tunisian coastal vessels trying to smuggle grain and oil to Tripoli. He then joined Swedish blockaders in repelling a squadron of Tripolitan corsairs and shot away the mast of a Tripolitan gunboat in Tripoli harbor. His solo accomplishments exceeded the rest of the squadron's combined achievements, chief of which was the capture of a Greek ship off Tripoli with twenty-one Tripolitan soldiers, fourteen merchants, five women, and a child.

Thinking ahead to when a future squadron might seriously prosecute the war, Dale generously freed the prisoners in Tripoli, thinking he was ensuring a reciprocal gesture in the event Tripoli captured Americans in the future. Then, as though having second thoughts about appearing too soft, Dale asked Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli and a loyal American friend, to inform the bashaw, “He is much mistaken in the character of the Americans, if he thinks they are to be Frighten'd. They love peace, but it must be an Honorable one....” Unimpressed by either Dale's bluster or his generosity, Yusuf deemed the forty-one freed captives would be worth the release of exactly six Americans. The remainder of Dale's tame cruise furnished no opportunities to find out whether the bashaw would honor the pledge.

Richard Valentine Morris wasn't a seasoned combat officer like Dale or Truxtun, but Thomas Jefferson owed much to his family. Richard's brother, Lewis Robert Morris, was a Vermont congressman when the cliffhanger 1800 presidential election, which culminated in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, came before the U.S. House for resolution. Over the tense days of congressional balloting, resulting in tie after tie, Morris steadily voted for Burr, keeping the Vermont delegation's vote split evenly between Burr and Jefferson. But on the thirty-sixth ballot, Morris abruptly abstained, swinging Vermont to Jefferson and handing him the presidency. While no conclusive evidence suggests that Morris's selection as commodore was a quid pro quo, it may well have been.

Morris evidently anticipated an uneventful tour of duty in the Mediterranean. He brought along his wife, his baby son Gerard, and the family maid, Sal. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wives and paramours often accompanied officers to sea, but seldom on warships bound for a war zone. As a consequence of his bringing his family, Morris's ship became known as a “happy” ship and not a “tight” one, and his own, personal comfort became more important to him than his mission. Navy Secretary Smith had been only too happy to grant Mrs. Morris permission to sail with her husband. “Immediately upon receiving it,” Smith informed the commodore in April 1802, “I wrote to her complying with her request.” Smith's eagerness to please very possibly stemmed from the fact that his first choice for the job—Truxtun again—had backed out at the last minute.

Truxtun had accepted the appointment initially, but, as the squadron's sailing date neared, he revived his old complaint, the one that had caused him to refuse command a year earlier: He wanted
a captain to command his flagship so he could devote himself exclusively to squadron operations. It was a reasonable request: freed from daily management of a frigate and its 300 men, he could dedicate himself wholly to prosecuting the war. But the rest of his request wasn't so reasonable: unless his stipulation were granted, he would resign from the Navy. Smith disliked ultimatums from his captains. “The condition, Sir, is impossible,” he shot back. No extra captains were available because of the Navy's force reduction. “As this must have been known to you—I cannot but consider your notification as absolute.”

Truxtun was out of the Navy.

 

Morris's squadron assembled piecemeal at Gibraltar. The 36-gun
Constellation,
commanded by Captain Alexander Murray, arrived on April 28; the 36-gun
Chesapeake
under Morris came in on May 25; and the 28-gun
Adams,
under Captain Hugh Campbell, on July 21. Morris's other ships—the
Enterprise,
with Sterett still in charge, and the
Boston
—were already there.

Gibraltar vibrated with rumors of war, between France and England, and, at various times, between America and each of the Barbary States. The bashaw was sending five corsairs into the Mediterranean in defiance of the blockade. Algiers had sent twelve corsairs against Portugal and already had captured a frigate, boarding it so quickly the crew hadn't had time to unlock the ship's arms lockers. Forced to fight with handspikes, seventy-two Portuguese crewmen died before the ship was surrendered.

Moroccan Emperor Soliman Ben Mahomet was pestering U.S. consul James Simpson for a passport for the
Meshuda,
which was still penned up at Gibraltar. Without a passport issued by an American consul, the
Meshuda,
as a onetime Tripolitan cruiser of
uncertain ownership, could be seized by U.S. warships as a prize the instant it left Gibraltar. Throughout the Tripolitan war, merchants from all the noncombatant North African nations routinely obtained passports from their American consuls to avoid having their vessels boarded by suspicous U.S. naval officers and searched for wartime contraband. But since the Moroccan emperor neither explained how the
Meshuda
had become Morocco's, nor what its business would be as a merchant ship, he did not receive a U.S. passport.

During the American squadron's Atlantic crossing, the
Chesapeakes
mainmast came loose just four days out of Hampton Roads. Carpenters discovered 3-inch-deep rot and defective spars, but managed to stabilize the mast so the
Chesapeake
was able to continue her voyage. Between the impaired mast and poorly packed ballast and cargo, however, the crossing was anything but smooth. “I never was at Sea in so uneasy a Ship, in fact it was with the greatest difficulty we saved our masts from rolling over the side.” After the flagship limped into Gibraltar, the British assisted with repairs.

The
Adams
brought Morris's orders to Gibraltar, and they couldn't have been clearer. The commodore was to collect Cathcart at Leghorn and appear before Tripoli with the entire squadron. “Holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations, may produce a peaceful disposition towards us in the mind of the Bashaw, and essentially contribute to our obtaining an advantageous treaty with him.” Cathcart had similar instructions from Madison—accompany the squadron to Tripoli and open negotiations with the bashaw, but let him make the first overture, so “awe inspired by a display of our force” could have its effect. Don't buy a peace,
Madison warned. “To buy a peace of Tripoli, is to bid for War with Tunis....” Seldom have such forthright instructions been so utterly disregarded.

 

The Moroccan emperor's irritation over the blockaded
Meshuda
mounted. Soliman now announced defiantly that he would violate the U.S. blockade by bringing the
Meshuda
and her consort to Tangier, loading them with grain and then sailing to Tripoli. Certain the emperor intended merely to hand over the warships to Tripoli, Consul Simpson patiently tried to explain that a blockade's purpose was to keep
all
ships from entering an enemy port, but Soliman stubbornly insisted on the passports for the
Meshuda
and the brig. Simpson knew Moroccan corsairs could begin attacking American shipping at any moment if Soliman wasn't given the passports. He asked Morris, whose authority exceeded his when it came to the blockade, to permit him to issue them, in hopes of averting the unending trouble that would result from captured ships and prisoners, but Morris refused starchily. To no one's surprise, except possibly Morris's, the emperor banished Simpson from Tangier and, on June 19, 1802, declared war on the United States.

Morris notified the Navy secretary he would need more ships to fight both Morocco and Tripoli, but no sooner had he done so than the Moroccan emperor, Soliman, began backpedaling, possibly after considering that it might be unwise to antagonize a nation with five warships so close at hand when he lacked a credible fleet. He invited Simpson to return to Tangier. Simpson silkily reminded the emperor that the United States was sending him 100 gun carriages soon as a gift, and the touch of customary obeisance did the trick—Soliman called off the war, even if he hadn't
altogether given up on the
Meshuda.
Moroccan crews soon were spotted in Gibraltar readying it and the brig for sea. Morris put a watch on them, wondering how he could legitimately stop the two ships from leaving, for they clearly belonged to Morocco now. The commodore reluctantly instructed Simpson to issue the passports.

 

Slow communication between Washington and the Mediterranean kept the two chronically out of step. Handwritten letters and reports crossed the Atlantic on sailing ships in one to three months, depending on whether the trip was “downhill”—sailor vernacular for America to Europe, a one-month voyage—or “uphill,” against the prevailing westerlies, from Europe to America, which could take up to three months. The Navy Department sent the
John Adams
—a 28-gun frigate like her sister ship, the
Adams
—and
New York
to the Mediterranean upon receiving Morris's appeal for more ships to fight Morocco, and canceled the shipment of 100 gun carriages for Morocco. But by then, Soliman had called off the war. So the gun carriages didn't arrive as Simpson had promised, and another year went by before they did. When they finally showed up, the goodwill gesture was largely wasted because of the emperor's vexation over the delay. The
John Adams
and
New York
reached the Mediterranean just as Jefferson, Smith, and Madison learned that Soliman had canceled the war.

Even though they were not needed against Morocco, Jefferson decided to keep the two additional warships in the Mediterranean. The president's staunch belief in a navy's utility had evolved into a philosophy of perpetual naval preparedness. Belying his unyielding opposition to a strong central government, he wanted to build even more ships, and was working with architect Benjamin Latrobe on a blueprint for a roofed dry-dock at Washington Navy Yard where
decommissioned warships could be warehoused “in a state of perfect preservation and without expence.” Idle ships would be hoisted out of the water to keep the organism-rich harbor waters from eating away their bottoms, and placed under roofs out of the wet weather that rotted and warped masts and decks. Congress, which supported Jefferson's financial austerity policies without sharing his enthusiasm for naval preparedness, flinched at the dry-dock's $417,276 cost, and the plan died.

 

No sooner had the Moroccan crisis subsided than Tripoli snatched an American merchantman. Two corsairs had slipped through the blockade in early June, as the American merchant ship
Franklin
sailed unescorted from Marseilles for St. Thomas with wine, oil, soaps, perfume, and hats. Before the
Franklin
reached Gibraltar, on June 17, 1802, the corsairs overtook and seized her, with seven crewmen and two passengers. The
Frdnklin's
captain, Andrew Morris, and his crewmen owned the unhappy distinction of having become Tripoli's first U.S. prisoners of war.