Jefferson's War (38 page)

Until O‘Bannon stopped the practice, the hungry Marines cut the buttons from their dress uniforms and traded them with Arab women for food, and possibly sexual favors. The women strung the buttons into necklaces and wore them around their necks. Some of the foot soldiers and Bedouin families turned back for lack of adequate food. Hamet killed a pack camel for meat and traded another to the desert Arabs for sheep. He butchered and distributed the mutton to all the troops, now reduced to eating wild fennel and sorrel that they found in ravines, and to foraging for roots and wild vegetables.

Another mutiny flared over the rations. This time, it was the cannoneers. Eaton wearily prepared to quell it—just as the courier returned with news that he had sighted vessels at Bomba. “In an instant the face of everything changed from pensive gloom to inthusiastic gladness.” New life was breathed into the expedition. The mutiny forgotten, the caravan pressed on.

At last they reached Bomba.

 

The empty bay mocked them. There were no ships, there was no one to meet them. The expedition succumbed to its accumulated disappointments and hunger. The bitter Arabs claimed that there had never been any resupply ships expected at Bomba, that the Christian leaders were “imposters and infidels;—and said we had drawn them into that situation with treacherous views.” Powerless to stop it, Eaton watched the expedition breaking up before his eyes. The Arabs laid plans to depart the next morning, brushing aside Eaton's exhortation that they all press on to Derna. Despairing, Eaton and the Christians climbed a hill overlooking the harbor and lit signal fires. They stoked them all night, hoping that Hull was at sea nearby, and would see the fires and come to a rendezvous.

At daybreak on April 15, there still were no ships in sight. Eaton watched helplessly as the Arabs prepared to break camp and return to Egypt. The expedition appeared to be over. One of Hamet's servants climbed the signal hill for a last look at the Mediterranean—and spotted a sail in the distance. It was the Argus. Hull had seen the signal fires during the night. “Language is too poor to paint the joy and exultation which this messenger of life excited in every breast,” wrote Eaton.

 

Hull had reached Bomba April 4, but, finding no one there, he had cruised to Cape Razatin, he told Eaton. Returning to Bomba and still finding no one, he sent a party ashore to determine whether Eaton had been there. When it couldn't find any evidence that he had, the
Argus
had lingered offshore, checking the bay periodically.

Eaton's army spent a restorative week encamped at Bomba. Food and provisions were plentiful. The
Argus
and
Hornet
sent ashore 30 hogsheads of bread; 30 barrels of peas; rice; three hogsheads of brandy and wine; 100 sacks of flour; 10 boxes of oil; a bale of cloth; and $7,000 for Eaton.

After crossing 460 miles of desert in five weeks, the army now faced the critical 60-mile push to Derna. The Americans and Arabs, Greeks and Turks, Tripolitans, and assorted Europeans knew this leg of the journey likely would end in a pitched battle from which they would emerge victorious, or in chains. The marchers rested and ate and drank their fill.

On April 23, they marched out of the parched land where they had spent the last forty-six days and into a wetter region of cultivated fields. Now that the army was in Tripoli, volunteers were joining daily, swelling the expedition's ranks to about 1,000
fighting men as the force advanced toward Derna. Before his men could act on the growing temptation to scavenge from the land, Hamet sent a herald crying throughout the camp: “He who fears God and feels attachment to Hamet Bashaw will be careful to destroy nothing. Let no one touch the growing harvest. He who transgresses this injunction shall lose his right hand!”

 

Yusuf's envoy to Alexandria had returned with intelligence about Eaton and Hamet's expedition. The bashaw had immediately acted to head them off, ordering his chief Mameluke, Hassan Bey, to lead an army toward Egypt to intercept and defeat Hamet. Yusuf had established a regular army only three years earlier, to thwart Hamet and subdue revolts in the interior. By the time Preble attacked Tripoli, the bashaw's army had swelled to 1,500 Turkish mercenaries, 12,000 Arab and Berber cavalry, and thousands of irregulars—25,000 troops in all for Tripoli's defense.

A tent was pitched on the castle battery and manned by sentries watching every night for invaders, while Yusuf stepped up his war preparations. Bainbridge and Eaton were right: Tripoli was vulnerable to land attack—and the bashaw knew this in his bones. As Hassan's army prepared for its long march—Derna was about 500 miles from Tripoli—the American prisoners were put to work hauling ammunition and food to the army's staging area. Displaying his growing fears of a coup, the bashaw locked up the relatives of his expedition's officers in the former U.S. consular house, to ensure the loyalty of Hassan's army. Before the troops departed, a marabout absolved the officers of their sins, according to surgeon Jonathan Cowdery, and assured them of victory.

Yusuf sent his son-in-law into the countryside to recruit more
troops for Tripoli's defense. He returned empty-handed; the people wouldn't fight. Yusuf's levies had been too heavy, with women even stripped of their jewels. The Spanish consul, storing up good favor against the day Spain would find itself on Tripoli's enemy list, gave the bashaw a shipment of muskets.

Everyone was certain the city would be attacked in the summer, but Yusuf's women and children chose to remain in the castle rather than move to the family's country palace. “They said that if they must be taken, they would rather fall into the hands of the Americans than the Arabs,” Cowdery noted wryly.

The increasingly flustered bashaw declared to Cowdery that if the Americans forced him to, or if they attacked Tripoli, he would put every American prisoner to death. A few days later, he asked Cowdery how many Marines the United States had. Ten thousand, the ship's surgeon replied. And troops? “Eighty thousand, said I, are in readiness to march to defend the country, at any moment; and one million of militia are also ready to fight for the liberty and rights of their countrymen!” The bashaw looked very somber.

 

As Eaton's expedition neared Derna, reports reached him that Derna's governor was fortifying the city and Yusuf's army was close by. The worried Arab chiefs conferred with Hamet into the night. Eaton was not invited to their consultations.

The next morning, April 26, Sheiks il Taiib and Mahomet announced they were turning around, and the Bedouins refused to strike their tents. The hours ticked away while Eaton argued with them, painfully aware of all the days lost because of the Arabs' intractability. Only a day's march from Derna, they risked losing the race to Yusuf's army.

Eaton cajoled, wheedled, and reproached, finally resorting to the unfailing expedient of cold cash. He promised the Arab chiefs $2,000 if they would resume the march. That got them moving again.

That afternoon, the fiftieth day of the desert march, Eaton's army reached the heights above Derna.

Eaton joined a cavalry patrol scouting the city. There was no sign of the bashaw's troops.

 

Unaware that Eaton's army was poised to strike at Tripoli's second-largest city, Jefferson and his officials had begun to doubt whether there would ever be an honorable peace with Tripoli. It couldn't be said that the U.S. government had stinted on committing resources; the $555,862 appropriated for Commodore Dale's tiny squadron in 1801 had tripled in four years and now sustained twelve ships crewed by 2,000 men. Nor was the problem the blockade or the convoys. The blockade pinched Tripoli at times, and the convoys had denied enemy corsairs a single American prize since the capture of the
Franklin
in June 1802. On top of these pressures, the bashaw was having to foot the cost of maintaining a large army. But Barron's squadron, the largest naval force ever deployed by the United States, had not fired on Tripoli in eight months and, without the threat of attack, Yusuf felt no compunction to sue for peace. Frustrated U.S. leaders, including the recently reelected Jefferson, were ready to trim down the Mediterranean squadron to a skeletal blockading force.

In the bashaw's castle beside Tripoli's harbor, the
Philadelphia
crewmen tried to keep up their spirits, even though they had seen nothing in seven long months to kindle any new hope of liberation; since Preble's departure the previous September, American
warships had only blockaded Tripoli, without once going on the attack. During their seventeen months of captivity, five crewmen had died, and five had converted to Islam and no longer lived in confinement. The remaining 297, officers and men alike, ate and slept in dank, ill-lit dungeons in Yusuf's castle. Their treatment was no better than before, with the work gangs roughly turned out at first light each morning for hard labor.

In the lavish castle rooms reserved for the bashaw, Yusuf and his officials disparaged America's naval war and blockade. If he had three frigates, Yusuf boasted to Cowdery, Tripoli could blockade America as effectively as the Americans had invested Tripolitan ports. “He said he could do it as easily as a frigate and schooner could blockade Tripoli!” Only Preble's August 3 attack had really shaken the Tripolitans, Nissen said, and “the damage done is absolutely of no consequence,” although a stray musket ball had starred a mirror right where Nissen had been standing in his home minutes before. Nissen recommended to Barron that he concentrate on blockading Tripoli's eastern ports, where gunpowder was being smuggled from the Levant.

 

Despite the bashaw's boastful talk, the war had drawn down his treasury, forcing him to impose levies that had made his countrymen outside the capital resentful. Yusuf also had borrowed from his neighbors. He owed Tunis $120,000, and his plan to use the
Philadelphia
as partial payment was consumed in the flames of Stephen Decatur's incendiaries. The bashaw was counting on America tiring of the war and paying for peace. All of these factors, and Eaton's presence outside Derna, made April 1805 an excellent time for a decisive naval offensive. A twopronged attack combining Eaton's army and Barron's fleet would
surely force Yusuf to sign any treaty that would allow him to keep his throne.

This was what Secretary of State Madison and Navy Secretary Smith had had in mind when they instructed Barron and Consul General Lear to apply military force until America could dictate peace terms. Barron would blockade and “annoy the Enemy,” Smith said, until “it is conceived that no doubt whatever can exist of your coercing Tripoli to a Treaty upon our own Terms.” Lear then could negotiate a treaty “without any price or pecuniary concession whatever,” as Madison put it, with the only permissible expenditure being for the captives' ransom, up to $500 each, minus trades. Should “adverse events or circumstances ... which are not foreseen here” intervene, and Lear judged “a pecuniary sacrifice preferable to a protraction of the war,” he might pay for peace, but only as a last resort.

Jefferson was readier to cut his losses in Barbary than Smith's and Madison's instructions to Lear and Barron indicated. The orders were drafted after a Cabinet meeting on January 8, 1805, at which Jefferson and his advisers resolved to send “new instructions not to give a dollar for peace,” but “if the enterprise in the spring does not produce peace & delivery of prisoners, ransom them.” Jefferson, however, confided in a letter in March to a longtime Virginia friend, Judge John Tyler, that he intended to scale back America's commitment to the war even more. If Barron failed to dictate a peace by the end of the summer, he planned to reduce the Mediterranean squadron to a three-ship blockading force to protect U.S. shipping. A continual blockade was better than a bought peace, the president said, and would cost no more than annual tribute. Whatever the outcome, he would never pay tribute to Tripoli because it would invite fresh
demands from the other Barbary States. Jefferson believed the United States already had shown the tributary European powers how “to emancipate themselves from that degrading yoke. Should we produce such a revolution there, we shall be amply rewarded for what we have done.”

Jefferson's candid letter did not mention Eaton's clandestine mission.

 

 

 

Despite all the hopes riding on Barron's cruise, and Tripoli's vulnerability to a joint land—sea attack, Barron's squadron would not be going on the offensive soon. The commodore was fighting for his life in his Syracuse sickbed. Afflicted with liver disease soon after reaching the Mediterranean in the late summer of 1804, by November Barron had made Captain John Rodgers, his second in command, responsible for the squadron's day-to-day operations. Barron retained overall command of the squadron, optimistically thinking he would turn the corner any week. But his health collapsed. On November 14, Midshipman Henry Allen reported, “It will soon be determined whether he lives or not.” By December 27, Barron could not hold a pen to write a letter. In January, 1805, he hovered near death. Barely surviving that crisis, he remained so weak that his secretary wrote many of his letters for him. April found him still unable to return to his ship.

Lear's influence over Barron and the squadron's operations waxed with Barron's waning health. At a distance of 200 years, his motives are unclear, although they most likely included a strong dose of ambition mingled with the belief that diplomacy should conclude the war. Lear had spent his adult life amid the republic's founders and the towering events attending its birth, but never as a participant. He was George Washington's close friend and
represented him in business affairs. After Washington died in 1799, Lear became a diplomat, but at forty-three he had not yet made his mark or his fortune, and hoped to do so in Barbary.