Jefferson's War (43 page)

 

In America, the controversial Tripoli treaty was making waves. Navy Secretary Smith boasted that it was better than any treaty negotiated with Tripoli in 100 years. Certainly it was that. “All Europe is giving us national reputation for this,” he crowed to Preble. But Smith was enough of a realist to foresee the bitter fight looming in Congress over treaty ratification, sarcastically noting, “Our own good folk [critics of the treaty] will be busy in telling the world that we are, in fact, a very contemptible people.” Preble publicly held his tongue, but was among the many who were disappointed with the treaty; privately he lamented “the sacrifice of National honor which has been made by an ignominious negotiation.” The $60,000 ransom stuck fast in the craws of treaty opponents, who asked: Need any ransom have been paid, with Eaton occupying Derna and a large U.S. squadron just a day's sail from Tripoli? Anticipating this argument in his letter to Preble, Smith asserted that the
Philadelphia
prisoners' safety alone justified the treaty. Smith said all the returning former captive officers—this wasn't altogether true—were convinced that Yusuf would have massacred them if Lear had not paid their ransom and Rodgers instead had attacked Tripoli. “The Bashaw said again & again that having killed a father & brother he would not have any scruples in killing a few infidels.” Smith was rehearsing for the donnybrook ahead.

Eighteen U.S. Navy vessels crewed by 2,500 men entered Tunis Bay on July 30, 1805. The United States had never before gathered in one place such a naval force. The forest of masts and crowd of canvas presented a menacing sight. Tunisians watched with awe and fear, expecting a devastating bombardment to commence any hour. The vessels deployed in a long line spanning the harbor mouth, boarding and inspecting the papers of all departing and arriving vessels.

Every U.S. warship in the Mediterranean was present: the frigates
Constitution, Constellation, Essex
, and
John Adams;
the brigs
Siren, Vixen
, and
Franklin;
the schooners
Nautilus
and
Enterprise;
the sloop
Hornet;
and eight U.S.-built gunboats, which weeks before had arrived in the Mediterranean. Ten gunboats in all had recently been completed at shipyards along the East Coast, but Gunboat 1 had to turn back to Charleston with structural problems, and Gunboat 7 vanished during the Atlantic crossing and was never seen again.

After letting the Tunisians absorb the sight of his formidable battle group, Rodgers sent Hamouda Pacha a letter reminding him that he had once said if a U.S. squadron entered his harbor, it would mean war. Did he still mean that? he asked provocatively. He gave the Tunisian leader thirty-six hours to decide: peace or war. If there was no reply, Rodgers would assume the bey meant war and offensive and defensive operations would commence.

Hamouda was in a quandary. He fervently wished to avoid a shooting war he undoubtedly would lose. But if he gave in, he would lose face with the other Christian powers paying him tribute, and that could jeopardize the entire Barbary States' system of terror, robbery, and extortion. He tried to buy time by
reminding Rodgers that he had sent an appeal to Jefferson. Until he received an answer, he planned no warlike actions and intended to honor his treaty with the United States.

This only irritated Rodgers. He imposed a new deadline for Hamouda to decide how matters stood between Tunis and America. Davis piped up unexpectedly that he thought the ultimatum unreasonable. Rodgers slapped him down, “much astonished” that Davis had failed to understand his intentions. The commodore ordered Davis to prepare to leave Tunis. As the clock ticked down to the new deadline, Rodgers added a new condition and threat: The bey must pledge himself to peace in the presence of both the British and French consuls—so he couldn't later deny having done so—or Rodgers would send his ships to capture Tunisian cruisers at sea.

Hamouda refused.

The
Constitution
fired on a brig attempting to leave Tunis, compelling it to turn back. The
Vixen
,
Nautilus
, and
Enterprise
began cruising the waters outside the harbor, stopping every vessel in sight. In an extemporaneous demonstration of U.S. destructiveness, the
Vixen's
officers, during an afternoon of relaxation on an island in Tunis Bay, shot several seals and fowl, and then started a fire that got away from them and burned the entire island.

 

Lear threw the besieged bey a lifeline so that he could extricate himself from his predicament. It perplexed him, Lear noted, that the bey claimed to value the president's friendship, yet refused to meet with Lear, the president's designated representative. The bey grabbed the line and held fast to it. He hadn't realized Lear represented the president; knowing that now, of course he would receive Lear. Rodgers moved back the deadline two days, but it
may as well have been two years, for it was clear there would be no shooting war now.

Hamouda now had an inspiration: He would send an ambassador to Washington to personally argue Tunis's reparations claims for the xebec and the prize vessels. The appeal to higher authority accomplished two things: It automatically imposed a cooling-off period, and it tied the hands of Rodgers, who, as a naval officer bound to the chain of command, couldn't very well deny the bey the right to petition higher-ups. He graciously offered passage to the Tunisian ambassador on one of his frigates. Hamouda responded by granting the United States “most favored nation” trade status, meaning it no longer would have to pay the higher duties Tunis imposed on the lesser nations such as Denmark and Naples, but not on the major powers such as Britain and France. Hamouda also asked Rogers to name a new charge d‘affaires, after coolly observing Davis's distress over his countrymen's aggressiveness and Rodgers's displeasure with him. Davis, still smarting from his treatment by Rodgers and Lear, didn't mind leaving. “After such a degradation, I could not return to the duties of my office,” he sniffed. Rodgers appointed another ship's surgeon, Dr. James Dodge of the
Constitution.
naval surgeons, because of their learning, evidently were regarded as competent substitutediplomats; Dodge was the third named in Barbary since the war began. The Tunisian crisis sputtered to an end.

Rodgers was justifiably proud of the diplomatic victory achieved with his show of naval force: “... I feel satisfied this lesson has not only changed his [the bey‘s] opinion of our Maritime strength, but has caused him to discover more distinctly his own weakness in every sense.” It was the first time the Mediterranean squadron had followed to the letter the instructions
written in 1802 by Smith and Madison of “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations.” Hamouda later insisted in his correspondence with Jefferson that the confrontation was due solely to “the too martial temper” of Rodgers and to Davis's “equivocal conduct.”

 

Fuming over Lear and Barron's abandonment of his expedition, Eaton sailed to Gibraltar to await a berth on a ship bound for America. Before leaving Syracuse, he had paid off his European troops and said good-bye to Hamet, whom he would never see again. Now Eaton began to brood over the war's disappointing outcome, believing that he and Hamet could have marched to Tripoli and forced Yusuf to free the captives. “I fear we stopped too short,” he wrote to Thomas Dwight, a friend in Massachusetts, in June. “I hoped to have stood on to see the temerity of Joseph Bashaw chastized and his perfidy punished. The lesson would have been awful to Barbary—Perhaps another such occasion will never offer.”

As Eaton pondered what had happened, his disappointment metastasized into a black anger directed at one villain: Tobias Lear. He began putting his thoughts on paper. He carefully documented the promises made by Jefferson administration officials before he left Washington, and how they had proved chimerical. This web of broken promises was the framework for a letter to Smith, written during Eaton's Gibraltar layover. Page after accusatory page piled up, each sharper in tone than the one before, until he had composed a 5,000-word screed.

 

Everything changed, he wrote to Smith, when Lear, “a man who had no authorized agency in the war ... intruded himself” into
Barron's confidence. Thus began Eaton's censorious letter. Barron, he wrote, had initially supported his expedition and was aware that “an understanding Subsisted Between the Commander in Chief and myself that I should go forward And exercise Discretionary measures for bringing Hamet Bashaw forward with all his influence in order To Intercept Supplies to the Enemy from the country and to cut off his escape in the rear.” Eaton, Rodgers, and Preble had agreed that after Eaton and Hamet captured Derna and Benghazi, the squadron would transport their army across the Gulf of Sidra to Cape Mensurat, where they would assault Tripoli from the rear while warships attacked from the harbor.

But Barron's illness had left him helplessly under the spell of the “Machiavellian Commissioner.” Lear viewed Hamet as only a lever for obtaining a quick negotiated peace. Lear had ordered Eaton's withdrawal from Derna even before he left Malta to begin negotiations. It was Lear who had withheld supplies and reinforcements from Eaton, while Barron's squadron passively cruised off Tripoli, never attacking or planning offensive action. Eaton complained about being denied the 100 Marines he had requested: “... it did not require a greater latitude of discretion to indulge them the permission to fight at Derne than to furlough them on parties of pleasure at Catania—and they must have subsisted cheaper on the coast than at any port in Italy.” With Derna in American hands, two to three months might have been spent in planning and coordinating a crushing land—sea attack that would have resulted in Tripoli's capture. But Lear instead made a hasty treaty while claiming that offensive operations would have jeopardized the Philadelphia captives' lives—a claim Eaton disputed. “Man seldom mediates vengeance when disolution glares him in the face....” He pointed out that awful threats also had been
made against the captives before Preble bombarded Tripoli in 1804—and were never carried out. “The terrible bashaw's first care was to provide for his own safety and he uniformly took refuge in his gardens or in his Bomb-proof and all experience has taught us that the more rougly he was handled and the nearer danger approached him the more tractable he has been rendered.” He wondered whether Lear had even considered exchanging Derna and its 12,000—15,000 Tripolitan citizens for the 300
Philadelphia
captives. “Tripoli was in our power and with no verry extraordinary effort it might have been also in our hands.”

He derided Lear's professed preference for Yusuf over Hamet. “Was Mr. Lear sent out to co-operate with Joseph Bashaw?” If parricide, fratricide, piracy, and broken treaties are hallmarks of an able ruler, “Mr. Lear has chosen the fittest of the two brothers for his man of confidence.” He acidly criticized the Arabs' abandonment at Derna. “This is the first instance I ever heard of a religious test being required to entitle a soldier to his rations.” And, in a burst of caustic verse, he sneered at Lear's praise for the Americans' bravery at Derna, “a military compliment from the provisional colonel Lear. A colonel/Who never set a squadron in the field/Nor the division of a battle Knows/More than a spinster.” Lear's peace treaty was “a wound on our national dignity” that cried for an official inquiry; from it, honor “recoils and humanity Bleeds,” he wrote.

During his weeks-long Atlantic crossing on the
Constellation,
Eaton touched up his fiery, rambling letter. Normally convivial, Eaton spent much of the trip alone in his cabin, or on deck, gazing at the sea.

 

 

 

Eaton and the
Philadelphia
captives received heroes' welcomes in America. Bainbridge had returned on September 10 with 117
fellow crewmen after a court of inquiry presided over by Eaton on the
President
at Syracuse found him blameless for the loss of the
Philadelphia.
Yet, some still hadn't forgiven him for surrendering his ship without firing a shot.

Eaton, however, was embraced without reservations by one and all. Dinner invitations arrived in a flood for the man of the hour, from everyone from President Jefferson to congressmen to old War Department friends. At a testimonial dinner in Richmond attended by Chief Justice John Marshall, Eaton was honored for leading “the Spartan band who spread the glory of the American arms where the American name was not known.” Newspapers referred to him as “the modern Africanus,” and as a latter-day Alexander or Belisarius. “General Eaton is the inheritor of the mantle of Alexander of Great!” gushed Dr. Francisco Mendrici, who had aided Eaton in Egypt, in a widely quoted panegyric. “The sands of the desert part before him, and the mountains melt away. He conquers all that lies in his path!” Addressing Eaton, Preble warmly added that he had “astonished not only your country but the world.” Had he received the money, supplies, and naval support that he requested, “what would you not have done!”