Jefferson's War (42 page)

The negotiations were conducted on the
Constitution
over the next several days. Don Joseph and Leon Farfara, a broker and leader of Tripoli's Jewish community, shuttled proposals and counterproposals between Yusuf and Lear, who refused to go ashore until there was a tentative agreement. On May 29, Yusuf reduced his asking price sharply from $200,000 to $130,000. Two days later, Lear made what he said would be his final offer: $60,000 ransom for the
Philadelphia
captives, peace with no price.

The decisive moment was at hand. Was the bashaw serious about peace?

Yusuf sent for Cowdery. Tell Captain Bainbridge, the bashaw said, that their nations were now at peace. When they heard the news, the
Philadelphia's
officers erupted joyously.

 

Nissen replaced Don Joseph as mediator during the final negotiations: for some reason, Yusuf had become dissatisfied with the Spanish consul. Lear hadn't yet gone ashore, so Nissen was still carrying on shuttle diplomacy. A snag developed when Lear suddenly stipulated that the
Philadelphia
prisoners must be released before a treaty was signed, a condition the bashaw found unacceptable. Before the disagreement could do any lasting damage to the negotiations, Nissen and Dghies drafted a counterproposal that Lear accepted immediately: sending Bainbridge aboard the
Constitution
as a goodwill gesture. Now they had to persuade Yusuf to agree to the condition. While he was willing, the Divan balked; it had trouble imagining anyone returning voluntarily to captivity. But when Dghies and Nissen stepped up and personally
guaranteed Bainbridge's return, the Divan reluctantly assented to send him to the American flagship.

Cowdery raced to the castle dungeon with the glad tidings. The crewmen were ecstatic, and some wept with joy. The war was over.

The captives' flinty Tripolitan drivers ended their celebration by setting them to hard labor, flogging many of them.

 

Thousands of people greeted Lear at the crowded Tripoli wharf on June 3. Among them were the
Philadelphia's
officers, released from prison the previous day. “The sight of them so near their freedom was grateful to my soul, and you must form an idea of their feelings; for I cannot describe them.” Yusuf's officers escorted the consul general to the castle. With little ceremony, he and Yusuf signed the treaty ending the Barbary War. Tripoli's forts thundered salutes, answered by the U.S. frigates.

America agreed to pay Tripoli $60,000 and hand over 81 Tripolitan prisoners. In exchange, the 297
Philadelphia
crewmen who had neither turned Turk nor died would go free—a ransom of $277 per man. The United States pledged to withdraw from Derna. Tripoli accepted peace without annual tribute and agreed to release Hamet's family from captivity.

But it would turn out there was more to the latter concession than met the eye.

After they sobered up from celebrating, the
Philadelphia
captives left Tripoli on June 5, happily watching their castle prison of nineteen months and five days recede in their ships' wakes. Two crewmen, however, stayed behind voluntarily: Quartermaster John Wilson, one of the five Americans who had “turned Turk,” and John Ridgely, a
Philadelphia
surgeon like Cowdery. Ridgely elected to remain as U.S. agent to Tripoli until a new consul could
be sent from America. Cowdery departed after a last audience with Yusuf, who had grown attached to him. “I bid the Bashaw a final adieu, at which he seemed much affected.”

An unhappy surprise awaited the four captives besides Wilson who had turned Turk. Wilson understandably had decided to stay in Tripoli instead of returning to the United States with his former shipmates, who despised him for his ill-treatment of them while he was their overseer. The four other converts, however, had chosen to go home. But their decision evidently displeased Yusuf, who might have suspected that the spur behind their conversions was not religious devotion, but a desire to be freed from hard labor and captivity. Instead of being released with their mates, the four were led from the city under guard. They were never seen again.

 

Fifty years later, when Southern slavery was about to plunge the nation into the Civil War, the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote about the Tripoli prisoners and their sufferings in “Derne” in a blanket indictment of all slavery. In the stanzas celebrating the captives' release, Whittier declaimed:

Barron ordered Hull to bring Eaton and his troops to Syracuse, but Eaton refused to leave Derna until Lear concluded his negotiations. Eaton rightly believed that holding Derna was integral to obtaining an honorable peace. “I cannot reconcile it to a sense of duty to evacuate it,” he told Hull, who didn't argue. Instead, he cruised off Derna with the
Hornet
and
Argus,
ready to give Eaton supporting fire if needed.

Hassan and Eaton's armies skirmished in several small, sharp actions during the weeks after the May 13 attack. Eaton led thirty-five Americans and Greeks in a raid against an enemy force twice their size on May 28 and defeated it, killing a captain and five men and taking prisoners. A wave of desertions swept Hassan's army. So many troops melted away that Hassan's officers resorted to chaining up the relatives of Arab soldiers to stem the defections. The enemy probed Eaton's lines on June 3 and was firmly repulsed by Eaton, O‘Bannon, and the Christian troops. During the prelude to that skirmish, O'Bannon had galloped on horseback through the city as citizens called out to him, “Long live our friends & protectors!”

Hassan's cavalry and soldiers advanced en masse on Derna on June 10 for a decisive battle. Communications being what they were, neither side knew that the war officially had ended a week earlier. This very day, in fact, the treaty was being debated by the Divan in Tripoli. Bainbridge was allowed the rare privilege of observing the proceedings because he had kept his word and returned to Tripoli when he was permitted to boat out to the squadron during the peace talks. When the Divan deadlocked
4—4, Yusuf broke the tie by removing his signet from his robe, pressing it to the document, and exclaiming, “It is peace!” The treaty ratification was announced with a 21-gun salute from the castle ramparts, returned by the
Constitution.

But the armies facing one another at Derna were unaware of these events. Hamet and his Arab cavalry met the advancing Tripolitans a mile outside Derna. A swirling battle quickly developed, with countless attacks and counterattacks by thousands of troops. From a distance, Eaton watched Hassan's troops attack repeatedly, each time repulsed by Hamet without the benefit of naval gunfire. The Argus and Hornet were unable to fire over the hills jutting between the shore and the battlefield, try though they did to maneuver into a position where they could support Hamet. But even without supporting fire or reinforcements, Hamet's cavalry drove off the attackers after four hours, killing 40 to 50 enemy and wounding another 70 while losing 50 to 60 men. Eaton's battle report brimmed with paternal pride. “The Bashaw deserves the merit of this victory—I had little to do with its arrangement, and could not render him any assistance in arms but from the fire of a single field piece .” Too late, Hamet had proved himself an able leader.

 

 

 

Eaton's refusal to evacuate Derna reached Rodgers, who feared it might wreck the peace Lear had just made. “A none compliance will make the responsibility his own: nevertheless, the consequence will be his country's,” Rodgers wrote tartly to Lear. To “prevent impending mischief,” he dispatched the
Constellation
to Derna to fetch Eaton. Yusuf, equally concerned about the progress of the expedition to depose him, insisted that his own representative go along.

Before the frigate left Tripoli, both Rodgers and Lear wrote letters apprising Eaton of the treaty and the need to evacuate Derna immediately. Rodgers bluntly said he wished “no farther hostilities by the forces of the U. States be committed against the said Josuph Bashaw, his subjects or dominions, and that you evacuate and withdraw our forces from Derne, or whatever part of his Teritory this may find you in.”

Lear diplomatically gave Eaton's expedition credit for pushing the bashaw into negotiations: “I found that the heroic bravery of our few countrymen at Derne, and the idea that we had a large force and immense supplies at that place, had made a deep impression on the Bashaw.” As he would do unfailingly, Lear carefully distinguished between the Americans' bravery in battle and what he regarded as the ill-conceived cooperation with Hamet. In any event, the rump alliance was terminated, and if Hamet withdrew from Derna, the bashaw would free family. It was “all that could be done, and I have no doubt but the U. States will, if deserving, place him in a situation as elegible as that in which he was found.”

In this matter, however, Lear was not forthright.

 

After the second counterattack, Eaton told Hamet about Barron's decision to cut off supplies and money to the expedition and to recall American personnel. Experienced as he was at losing, Hamet immediately grasped his situation's hopelessness, but not without some bitterness. “He answers that, even with supplies, it would be fruitless for him to attempt to prosecute the war with his brother after you have withdrawn your squadron from the coast,” Eaton wrote to Barron. “He emphatically says that To abandon him here is not to cooperate with him, but with his rival!”

When the
Constellation
reached Derna, Eaton glumly read the
letters from Lear and Rodgers and resigned himself to abandoning Derna and the grand expedition upon which he had pinned such high hopes. But evacuation would be tricky. A withdrawal in the face of a large enemy force invited slaughter unless it were executed with the greatest cunning and skill. Eaton told the
Constellation's
commander, Captain Hugh Campbell, that he would leave Derna the next day, June 13.

 

 

Above all, Eaton well knew, the evacuation had to proceed in the greatest secrecy. If Hassan learned of it, he would attack when Eaton's forces were most vulnerable, and it would be a bloodbath. How would he do it? He hit upon a bold subterfuge: He made everyone, including his own men, believe he was planning an attack. He sent extra ammunition and rations to his Arab troops. He deployed scouts to pinpoint enemy troop dispositions. He ordered his soldiers to shed their heavy baggage so they would be more mobile. But as soon as darkness fell, Eaton stationed Marine patrols in Derna to keep people away from the waterfront. Boats from the
Constellation
slipped up to the docks and embarked the cannoneers, European soldiers, and fieldpieces, then Hamet and his retinue, and finally, Eaton, O‘Bannon, and the Marines.

As the last boats pulled away from the wharf, the townspeople and Arab troops rushed the waterfront, “some calling on the Bashaw—some on me—Some uttering shrieks—some execrations,” Eaton reported. They descended on Fort Enterprize, stripping it of the tents and horses Eaton had left behind. By daybreak, the Arabs had vanished into the mountains, along with many of the town's inhabitants and “every living animal fit for subsistence or burthen which belonged to the place.”

The bashaw's envoy went ashore with letters offering amnesty
to the people of Derna, provided they promised to be loyal to Yusuf, but the unhappy citizenry was in no mood for it. They vowed to fight the bashaw's troops. Eaton watched the spectacle with sadness and anger. “This moment we drop them ... into the hands of this enemy for no other crime but too much confidence in us!” Hamet, he noted glumly, “falls from the most flattering prospects of a Kingdom to beggary!”

Eaton's mission was ended. With little of the rancor that would consume him later, he reported to Rodgers: “Our peace with Tripoli is certainly more favorable—and, seperately considered, more honorable than any peace obtained by any Christian nation with a Barbary regency at any period within a hundred years: but it might have been more favorable and more honorable.”

He requested passage home to America.

XVI

AFTERMATH

—Commodore John Rodgers, referring to Bey Hamouda Pacha of Tunis, in a letter to George Davis, U.S. charge d‘affaires in Tunis

—William Eaton, in a letter to Thomas Dwight

 

 

 

H
amouda Pacha was threatening war. He wanted back the xebec and two Neapolitan prizes that Rodgers had caught as they tried to run the American blockade of Tripoli in early May. Commodore John Rodgers had landed the Barbary crews back in Tunis, but refused to return the vessels. Charge d'Affaires George Davis had done his best to deflect the bey's litany of demands while Rodgers and Lear ended the Tripolitan war. The impatient bey even had written directly to Jefferson, warning that only the president's previous assurances that he wanted peace with Tunis were preventing war now. Then, for weeks, the bey and Rodgers had exchanged demands, refusals, and threats.

Finally Rodgers had had enough. His natural combativeness was aroused over the prospect of hostilities after all the tedious months of cruising off Tripoli. “If War is his object, I shall be obliged to meet it.” He sent the
Congress,
commanded by Decatur, to Tunis Bay to defend U.S. shipping. The bey responded by
announcing he would not grant Lear an audience; Rodgers retorted that the bey would have no choice but to receive Lear, and sent more warships to Tunis. Tensions reached the breaking point when the
Vixen
boarded and searched a polacre and a gunboat in Tunis Bay. Rodgers gathered his formidable squadron for a display of power.