Jefferson's War (3 page)

The enigmatic Thomas Jefferson stood up to the pirate states with a small squadron a fraction the size of Europe's vast fleets. Within days of his inauguration as the third U.S. president, without congressional or public debate of any kind, Jefferson ordered four warships to sail to coastal Northwest Africa and blockade and attack any Barbary State that was at war with America. By the time the squadron reached the Mediterranean in early July 1801, Tripoli already had declared war.

While Jefferson's surprising action doesn't square with the conventional “pacifist” image of the third U.S. president, the fact is he was a complicated and sometimes vindictive man with a long memory. And he had not forgotten his frustrating meeting with a Tripolitan ambassador in London two decades earlier, or his failure to organize a European coalition to blockade the Northwest African states.

Jefferson's war pitted a modern republic with a free-trade, entrepreneurial creed against a medieval autocracy whose credo was piracy and terror. It matched an ostensibly Christian nation against an avowed Islamic one that professed to despise Christians. A disciplined naval force of “super frigates” faced a loosely organized fleet of pirate corsairs.

Yet both America and Tripoli shared a common belief in naval
armament as a means of realizing their diverging ambitions. Jefferson was convinced that a strong navy—paradoxical considering his overall philosophy of a minimalist central government—was essential to a thriving foreign trade. Tripoli's bashaw, or ruler, Yusuf Karamanli, believed that with a strong navy, Tripoli could supplant Algiers as the preeminent Barbary naval power, and feast on the bustling commerce Jefferson envisioned.

Fought for strong principles by an idealistic new republic, the Barbary War was an audacious action for a constitutional government scarcely twelve years old and only twenty years removed from its war of independence. The war in North Africa marked the first time that U.S. troops planted the Stars and Stripes on a hostile foreign shore.

If the names of Preble, Decatur, Eaton, and Sterett spur any recognition at this remove of two centuries, they might conjure images of sideburned men in ruffled shirts and jackets, frozen in a pose of noble alertness, or a crimson-tinged battle scene with wooden sailing ships belching fire. Through the gray gunsmoke haze, shadowy minarets rise above a whitewashed Mediterranean port.

But those fading portraits do not begin to do justice to the flesh-and-blood fighting men or their war, unlike any America has fought—until today, in the shadow of the bloody terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During the Barbary War, naval officers led nighttime commando missions into the heart of Tripoli's harbor to destroy the enemy's ability to continue the war—once with spectacular success, once with tragic consequences. Key intelligence was transmitted to naval leaders from inside the bashaw's own castle fortress by code and “invisible ink.” Temporary alliances and native insurgents supplied equipment
and manpower at critical times. And the indomitable William Eaton, a precursor of the twenty-first-century special-forces operative, cobbled together an army of mercenaries, insurgents, native troops, and Arab cavalry to launch a surprise invasion.

The Barbary War posed all the difficulties of waging a distant conflict against a wily enemy that wouldn't come out and fight: the need to find and operate from bases supplied by friendly nations; no ready reinforcements; a maddening lag in communications with Washington; and, as a consequence of the last, the constant threat of command inertia. But resourceful commanders overcame these obstacles and forced the enemy to draw upon all of his defensive capacity. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps demonstrated that they were up to the challenges of a far-flung war and were the equal, ship-for-ship and man-for-man, of any nation—and indispensable to projecting U.S. power.

The first naval heroes of the nineteenth century emerged from the Barbary War, as did the practice of training young officers during limited wars for larger conflicts later. The Mediterranean squadron served as a “nursery” for the young naval officers who would fight the War of 1812. The first U.S. military monument, located at the U.S. Naval Academy behind Preble Hall, is dedicated to the six naval officers killed in the Barbary War.

The war shaped the Navy's expeditionary tradition and established the precedent of simultaneously using diplomacy and military force—in the words of Navy Secretary Robert Smith, “Holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations”—to achieve limited objectives.

While the Barbary War resembles today's war on terror tactically and strategically, it resonates most deeply in its assertion of
free trade, human rights, and freedom from tyranny and terror. To defend those principles, Jefferson was willing to send a largely untried squadron across the Atlantic to go to war with a people whose customs, history, and religion were alien to the early American experience.

In 1801 as in 2001, there was never any question that the reasons for fighting were worth the price. The United States did not hesitate to go to war for its closely held beliefs, as America's enemies have come to learn since 1775.

I

THE “PACIFIST” PRESIDENT

—Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1785

 

 

 

 

N
othing in Thomas Jefferson's inauguration speech March 4 had foreshadowed his decision to embark the United States on its first war on foreign soil, in Moslem Northwest Africa. The address's brief nod to foreign affairs was decidedly unhawkish: “Peace, commerce & honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” Jefferson was more intent on healing the still-raw wounds of the unsurpassedly vituperous recent presidential campaign, celebrated by the victorious Republicans as the “Revolution of 1800.” “We are all federalists, we are all republicans,” he had declared in a soft voice that barely carried beyond the front row of the Senate chamber; his aversion to making speeches kept him off rostrums all but once during the next eight years—the exception was his second inauguration.

The 1800 campaign was the summit of the virulent debate between Republicans and Federalists that had raged throughout the 1790s over government's role in completing the Revolution of
1776. The two most prominent surviving founding fathers, Vice President Jefferson and President John Adams, had found themselves in the vanguard of rival political parties with diverging philosophies on this all-important issue. The pendulum had swung away from Adams's Federalists in 1800, and the disgruntled president had left Washington on the 4:00 A.M. stage on Inauguration Day so he would not have to witness the ascent of his former friend to the office from which Adams had been sent packing.

The triumphant Jefferson wasn't going to waste words on foreign policy when his listeners were so anxious to hear him describe what his administration would be like. His election marked the new republic's first true regime change, unlike the succession by Washington's vice president and fellow Federalist, Adams. Jefferson pledged fealty to Republican ideals by presiding over “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

At no point did he mention his hardened resolve to smash “The Terror,” shorthand for the long jihad waged in the Mediterranean and Atlantic by the Barbary States against Christian Europe, and now the United States. On this subject, Jefferson had long ago settled upon what he wished to do, and he wasn't in office three weeks before he acted. Without convening Congress or formally consulting his new cabinet, which was only slowly coming together in the raw new capital of only six months, on March 23 Jefferson issued the astonishing order to ready a squadron of warships to sail to the Mediterranean.

It might seem strange that Jefferson of all the founders—Jefferson, generally regarded as the most pacific of them—was poised to send the new U.S. Navy to war in the Mediterranean. Yet, since the 1780s, he had undeviatingly advocated defiance of the Barbary States, which had wrecked U.S. Mediterranean trade after the Revolutionary War and until the mid-1790s. Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were old hands at state-sponsored terrorism. They had preyed for 200 years on European Christians, living off the loot snatched from coastal raids and ship seizures, and the protection money they were paid for not molesting shipping. Europe always had paid, sending punitive squadrons only when the losses cut too deep, and only to negotiate better extortion terms.