Jefferson's War (34 page)

Placed at each unmarked grave was a plaque reading,
“Here Lies an Unknown American Sailor Lost from the USS Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor 1804.”

As a U.S. Marine honor guard fired a rifle salute to the gallant commandos, a bugler played “Taps.”

XIII

PLOTTING A REGIME CHANGE

—William Eaton, in a letter to Commodore Samuel Barron

 

 

 

 

T
he
Argus
cast off from Malta's quarantine ground and slipped into the Mediterranean, headed to Levantine ports that never before had seen U.S. warships. Lieutenant Isaac Hull and his crew traveled under two sets of orders. The written orders described a routine convoy of American merchantmen from Alexandria or Smyrna to Malta; the oral ones promised adventure, and they were the operational ones, having come directly from Commodore Samuel Barron. Hull was to proceed to Egypt, as the cover orders stipulated, but with a special passenger, the versatile William Eaton, whom he was to lend every assistance on a top-secret mission: helping Hamet Karamanli assemble an insurgent army to overthrow his brother Yusuf. It was a quixotic assignment befitting Eaton's unique gifts and his metamorphosis from consul to Tunis to “Navy agent for the Barbary Regencies.”

Eaton had lobbied furiously to return to Barbary with troops after his expulsion from Tunis in 1803. Upon his return to the
United States, Eaton had gone straight to Washington, even before going home to his wife Eliza after a four-year absence. There he had complained loudly about Morris's passivity while urging the Jefferson administration to commit troops against Tripoli. He made a special plea to the skeptical Cabinet, with only Navy Secretary Smith willing to give his unconditional support. “The Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn] believes it would be too great an effort and expense to send troops to Barbary, and thinks it both easier and cheaper to pay tribute to the savages, even if it should become necessary to double or treble our tribute payments,” Eaton noted disgustedly before finally going home to Brimfield, Massachusetts. He soon was back in Washington. While the government would not commit troops, it would support an insurgency by Hamet Karamanli, the legitimate ruler of Tripoli.

This proposal was first suggested to Eaton in June 1801 by Richard Cathcart, the former consul to Tripoli. By September, Eaton was pitching it to Madison: “The subjects in general of the reigning bashaw are very discontented and ripe for revolt; they want nothing but confidence in the prospect of success.” While tacitly approving the plan at the time, the secretary of state was squeamish about its underhandedness, possibly recalling the scheming of Spain, France, and England during America's colonial days. Such a conspiracy, he said, “does not accord with the general sentiments or views of the United States, to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries.” But three years of war with Tripoli with no end in sight had made the scheme look appealing to Jefferson. He met privately with Eaton in June 1804, presumably to discuss the plan; there is no record of the meeting. However, Eaton afterward came into 1,000 War Department muskets and his new position in the Navy Department.

The administration's secretiveness and Smith's prudent instructions to Barron reeked of ambivalence: “We have no objection to you availing yourself of his co-operation with you against Tripoli—if you shall upon a full view of the subject after your arrival upon the Station, consider his co-operation expedient. The subject is committed entirely to your discretion.” Should Barron decide to use Hamet, he would find “Mr. Eaton extremely useful to you.” Similarly cautious were Madison's words to Consul General Lear. Madison permitted up to $20,000 to be spent on the Hamet project, but confessed to preferring continued attacks and blockading to the proposed joint operation with the former bashaw, “as the force under the orders of the Commodore is deemed sufficient for any exercise of coercion which the obstinacy of the Bashaw may demand.”

The problem was the flaccid Hamet; he inspired confidence in no one. Thin, pale, and dull-eyed, with pockmarked cheeks, he lacked any personal charisma, and was inclined to every sort of self-indulgence, abetted by the dozens of sycophants in his traveling retinue. He had been an exile for nearly ten years, and few Tripolitans clamored for his return, remembering his singular ineffectiveness as bashaw and cognizant of the fact that in all that time he had been unable even to effect the release of his wife and children from his brother's custody. Among the many disaffected people in the countryside who complained of Yusuf's stiff tax levies to finance his war against America, scarcely anyone mentioned Hamet as a plausible alternative to his brother. Eaton had worked hard to build up Hamet's credibility, which Hamet had just as steadily undermined with his poor judgment. Most notably, he had moved to Tripoli's eastern provincial capital, Derna, at Yusuf's invitation, despite Eaton's warnings that the
bashaw intended to have him killed. In July 1803 Hamet had to flee Derna into Egypt when Yusuf sent troops to kill him.

Eaton was aware of Hamet's failings and the good reasons for the government's tepidness toward the operation. But like Bainbridge, Eaton believed that only a ground campaign would force Yusuf to make an honorable peace. With Dearborn opposed to committing U.S. troops, Hamet represented the one hope of attacking Tripoli with a land force and America's winning peace on its terms. Because of his brief tenure as bashaw a decade earlier, Hamet still was familiar to Tripolitans, although not especially beloved. More importantly, Eaton believed Hamet would be loyal to the United States if it helped him snatch the throne from his brother Yusuf. Eaton said that organizing an expedition around Hamet was the difference between “taking a vicious horse by the heels” and having one with a bridle already in its mouth, its reins ready to seize. The expedition would be the capstone of Eaton's life.

After obtaining Jefferson's blessing for the Hamet alliance, Eaton dispatched his stepson, Eli Danielson, to Philadelphia and New York to withdraw money that Eaton had made in land speculation to augment whatever government funds he would get. Danielson purchased tents, saddles, and cooking gear, and Eaton ordered a scimitar from a New York smith, to be made of Toledo steel.

 

 

 

Eaton knew the Navy neither supported his plan nor him personally. Some of the Navy's antipathy toward him dated to Morris's detention in Tunis, for which Eaton still was blamed by naval officers. They also had closed ranks against Eaton because of his complaints about Captain Alexander Murray. Bainbridge, Murray, Morris, and Barron all disparaged Eaton's project at various times,
although Murray came around after meeting Hamet on Malta. He even transported Hamet to his short-lived government position at Derna. Significantly, Preble, the most aggressive commodore to command the Mediterranean squadron, supported the plan, but he had now been superseded by Barron.

Eaton worked hard to win over Barron during their long Atlantic crossing on the
President.
The trouble wasn't just Eaton, it was Hamet's unsuitability, and it also was the Navy's secondary role. Barron initially refused to advance Eaton cash, arms, or ammunition, and turned Eaton down when he tried to raise money by seeking reimbursement for the ransom he had paid for Anna Maria Porcile. Eaton argued that he was owed the ransom money because the U.S. government had made him release her before he was able to collect from her father. Eaton complained to Smith that he had to get an advance on his salary—$1,000, nearly a full year's pay—so that he could hire mercenaries and buy provisions. “If my project succeed, the government will take the benefit of a
miracle
,” he wrote exasperatedly to Smith, in a letter asking that a $50,000 fund be established at Malta for the operation. (It never was.) He vowed to personally fulfill the promises made to Hamet, even if his government did not. “If it fail, government sacrifices nothing; though my family may feel a sacrifice.” While Barron eventually loosened the purse strings, it would never be enough to satisfy Eaton.

Yet Barron followed Smith's orders dutifully, although choosing to interpret them in the narrowest sense that obligated him to commit the fewest resources. Hull's verbal orders, which the lieutenant later recited in a sworn statement, stated that Hamet would receive the squadron's support at Derna or Benghazi, “and I will take the most effectual measures with the forces under my
Command for co-operating with him against the usurper, his brother; and for reestablishing him in the regency of Tripoli.” But this was before Barron was laid low by a liver infection that nearly killed him and, consequently, fell under the spell of advisers such as Lear who opposed the government's support of Hamet and favored a quick, negotiated settlement with the bashaw.

Eaton, however, was determined to overcome all obstacles, formidable though they would be. To Preble, whom he admired for his bold attacks on Tripoli and whom he considered a friend, he described the result he hoped to effect through his alliance with Hamet. “How Glorious would be the exhibition to see our fellow citizens, in captivity at Tripoli, march in triumph from a dungeon to their tyrant's palace and display there the flag of the United States.”

 

 

 

The
Argus
arrived at Alexandria on November 25, 1804, firing a 17-gun salute—the world's newest republic paying its first official visit to one of the oldest cities still extant. Founded in 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, Alexandria had been ruled at various times by Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, and Ottomans. The Americans gazed in wonder at the ancient and medieval buildings, mosques and homes ranged on the hills to the south of the harbor, and the city's 6,000 residents gazed back at the Americans with intense curiosity.

In the backwash of the Napoleonic wars, Egypt's 4 million inhabitants were convulsed in 1804 by civil war and anarchy. Napoleon's lightning invasion in 1798 was launched with the intent of adding a colony and providing a forward base for a campaign against British India. French troops quickly captured Alexandria and moved on to Cairo, defended by the Mamelukes,
former Ottoman slaves of Kurdish, Turkish, and Circassian descent whose power in Egypt now rivaled the Ottomans. The Mamelukes fielded a formidable cavalry—“Let the Franks come; we shall crush them beneath our horses' hooves!” a Mameluke prince reportedly exclaimed—but they were overmatched against the French, whose artillery and firepower were decisive at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798. The French took control of all of Egypt.

Then disaster struck on August 1, 1798, when the French fleet, anchored in Abukir Bay at Alexandria, was annihilated by Lord Horatio Nelson. With Napoleon and his army stranded and blockaded by the British fleet, the Turks readied invasion armies to reclaim Egypt. But the shrewd Napoleon thwarted them by launching a preemptive strike against Turkish forces massing in Syria and later wiping out a Turk army landed at Abukir Bay. Then, in 1799, he slipped away to France, leaving his army behind. The British and Turks regrouped. In 1801 they attacked and defeated the French. Turkey's sultan reasserted his sovereignty over Egypt, but in reality this only marked the commencement of a death struggle for supremacy between the Mamelukes and Ottomans that would last a decade. In the lawless countryside, rival armies and ragged bands of deserters and highwaymen pillaged and murdered without check. The only guarantors of safety were arms and numbers.

Into this chaotic mix waded Eaton and a handful of able men—Marine Lieutenant Presley O‘Bannon, Richard Farquhar, Lieutenant Joshua Blake, Midshipman George Mann, Eaton's stepson, Eli Danielson, two seamen, and a Marine enlisted man. They had to find Hamet before there could be any march into the Tripoli regency 300 miles to the west, and they did not know where
Hamet was. The search party boarded a cutter at Alexandria and sailed to the mouth of the Nile River at Rosetta, about 20 miles northeast of Alexandria. While waiting for the tide to carry them into the Nile, they walked on a beach where French and British troops had fought in 1801. It was “covered with human Skeletons, ghastly monuments of the Savage influence of avarice and ambition on the human mind,” observed Eaton.

They started up the Nile for Cairo, a river journey of more than 100 miles, hoping to learn from the Ottoman viceroy, Ahmed Pasha Khorshid, where Hamet might be. By this time, Eaton had seventeen well-armed men with him, thanks to the kindness of the British agent at Cairo, Major E. Misset, who had loaned Eaton his secretary and several men for the journey.

 

William Eaton arguably was America's first modern intelligence operative, as the appellation later would apply to agents who gathered information in hostile territory and then analyzed and acted on it. A striking blue-eyed man of slightly above average height, Eaton was both a thinking man and a man of action. Above all, he possessed the ability to concentrate his force on a single object. Well-educated and articulate, he was fluent in at least four Arabic dialects, all learned during his Barbary consulship. He also could speak four American Indian languages, and at Dartmouth had studied French, Latin, and Greek. His prodigious daily output of letters and journal entries rivaled any diplomat's. He also happened to be a crack rifle shot, could hit a target with a knife thrown from 80 feet, and was an expert with the scimitar, a weapon that had captivated him during his early days in Tunis; he had mastered the art of twirling it over his head—a trick few besides the janissaries of Constantinople could perform proficiently.