Jefferson's War (44 page)

A Senate resolution, never implemented, established a sixsquare-mile township named Derne in an unspecified location, “as a memorial of the conquest of that city forever”—to be parceled among Eaton, Midshipman Mann, Lieutenant O‘Bannon, and the five surviving Marine enlisted men. Massachusetts awarded Eaton 10,000 acres in Maine for his “undaunted courage and brilliant services.” Odes were written to him. One, by Federalist poet Robert Treat Paine, was sung at Boston's General Eaton Fire Society gathering to the tune “God Save the King,” later famous on this side of the Atlantic as the patriotic hymn 'America“:

Eaton reveled in the celebratory dinners and the admiring strangers who bought him drinks in Washington's taverns. It was a welcome release after the long, abstentious months in the desert and at Derna. Eaton made the most of it. In his barroom perorations on the war, he vilified Lear for having denied America a resounding military triumph, and for agreeing to a demeaning ransom when the captives' release might have been obtained without any ransom paid.

 

Federalist congressmen were listening carefully to Eaton's denunciations, seeing a prime opportunity to strike a blow at the Republicans, ascendant for five years now. They flattered and cultivated “the general,” pumping him for information that would help them argue against the Tripoli treaty and give the Republicans a black eye. It promised to be a battle royal. Federalist newspapers already were pillorying the treaty, while the Republican press spun its own tapestry, depicting Hamet as a debauchee “addicted to sordid propensities,” and Yusuf as his antithesis, a man inclined to “elevated centiments .”

Eaton's staunchest allies were Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, the former war secretary who had supported Eaton when he was stationed in Georgia, and Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire. Pickering deplored Lear's treachery; he had “acted contrary to his instructions” and “shamefully betrayed” Hamet. Recalling the mysterious disappearance of the Washington-Jefferson
letters six years earlier, Pickering suggested that circumstance alone “will warrant any surmise unfavourable to Lear; while it will account for J's [Jefferson‘s] solicitudes to vindicate Lear from reproach.”

Between consorting with Federalists and deprecating Lear at every opportunity, Eaton swiftly transformed himself into an enemy of the Jefferson administration. He burned the last bridge to his former benefactors when he distributed copies of his diatribe to Smith to newspapers in Boston and Hartford and put it in a pamphlet circulated in Washington. “The effect has been that the Executive has been probed to the core, every syllable of document drawn from him which could throw light on the subject; and, you have the result—Lear will be impeached,” he crowed. Eaton also continued to harangue Smith, who was trying to ascertain the United States's obligations to Hamet. There were none, Eaton said, but reminded him that America had deceived Hamet—as well as Eaton himself—by pledging to cooperate with him, then using him as “an instrument” and discarding him. “On entering the ground of war with Hamet Bashaw, Mr. O‘Bannon and myself united in a resolution to perish with him before the walls of Tripoli, or to triumph with him within those walls.” It was the same bitter story Eaton was telling anyone who would listen in the taverns where he held court nearly every day.

 

Federalist senators went on the attack over the Tripoli treaty in January 1806, requesting that Jefferson turn over all of his administration's correspondence with Barron, Rodgers, and Eaton, along with Eaton's and Lear's instructions. At the same time, the House examined Eaton's convention with Hamet. Jefferson personally supervised the collection of the letters and
papers, listing all official correspondence, instructions, and commissions pertaining to Tripoli and noting cryptically that only $20,000 was to have been spent on Hamet's expedition and that it wasn't known whether he had been reunited yet with his family. He composed a message to Congress that in a disinterested, lawyerly way explained that Eaton's convention with Hamet was intended to “produce effects favorable to both, without binding either to guaranty the objects of the other,” with Hamet attacking by land and Barron by sea. The convention never committed the United States to restoring Hamet to Tripoli's throne, argued Jefferson. Thus, when Hamet was unable to carry on alone from Derna, the United States was not obligated to land its own troops or to hire Arab soldiers to fight for him.

But the Federalists interpreted the correspondence to mean that there
had
been an alliance, and it was supposed to have culminated in a land—sea operation before the bashaw's castle. A Senate committee began studying the treaty and the events leading to it. Federalists hoped the panel would take the Republicans down a peg, but it needed Eaton's help. “The present moment were you on the spot would undoubtedly be the most propitious to your obtaining that justice which you have so richly merited from your Country and the World,” the committee chairman, Senator Stephen Row Bradley of Vermont, wrote Eaton. Eaton obliged him, as did the former
Philadelphia
captives, whose testimony didn't always jibe with Smith's assertions that they believed their lives were imperiled by American military operations against the bashaw.

The committee's 472-page report, made public in April 1806, came down hard on Lear. The Tripoli treaty was an “inglorious deed,” and ran counter to the advice of squadron officers. Hamet
could have been placed on Tripoli's throne for a fraction of the $60,000 ransom, and the captives freed without any payment made. Derna never should have been evacuated. Lear was blamed for everything. The consul general, the committee concluded, appears “to have dictated every measure; to have paralised every military operation by sea and land....” The committee didn't blame Barron, ill as he was and, it believed, under Lear's malign influence. The report cited the testimony of Lieutenant John Dent, who said that during the winter of 1804—5 Barron could scarcely “recollect any thing that transpired from one day to another.... It was generally believed by the officers in the Mediterranean that Mr. Lear had a great ascendancy over the commodore in all his measures relative to the squadron.”

The report rejected Lear's claims that the squadron was unfit for action, and that he had acted to protect the
Philadelphia
prisoners' safety. It included Marine Second Lieutenant Wallace W. Wormeley's testimony that in May 1805 Tripoli was “in the most distressed situation,” and Eaton and Hamet, “almost without firing a shot,” might have marched from Derna and captured Tripoli without harm to any prisoner. Wormeley said he believed he still would be locked in the bashaw's castle if Eaton hadn't captured Derna.

Despite all the sound and fury, the report didn't stop the Senate from ratifying the treaty on April 12, nor did it damage Lear's employment; he remained North African consul general through 1812. The Jefferson administration shrugged off the indictment of its North African diplomacy as other events crowded in, one upon the other: trouble with Spain over Florida and western Louisiana in the wake of the momentous Louisiana Purchase; violations of American neutrality by England, France, and Spain. Because of
the distance-imposed time lag between America and the Mediterranean, the treaty controversy was rapidly receding from public consciousness just when Rodgers and Lear were hearing the worst of it. The withering criticism burnished their long friendship from Santo Domingo days, although their reactions diverged, with Lear more pained than angry, and the feistier Rodgers vowing to defend his character against “base scoundrels.”

 

The Tunisian ambassador, Sidi Soliman Melli Melli, arrived in the United States in November 1805 on the
Congress
with four Arabian horses that he presented to the president as gifts. His seriocomic diplomatic visit began with a quick triumph, when Jefferson agreed to pay restitution for the xebec and two prizes. Melli Melli then spent several months enjoying Washington and being gawked at by the public, who had never seen a Mediterranean Moslem in full regalia. His relaxed morals offended the more Puritan-minded congressmen, but the government, wishing to keep him happy, quietly supplied him with women and a $200-a-week allowance, selling the gift horses to defray the cost. Partly to get him out of town and also to impress upon him America's size and strength, Madison sent Melli Melli on a tour of the Eastern cities, with James Cathcart, the former consul in Tripoli, as his guide and escort. Melli Melli caused a sensation wherever he went, with his flowing robes and entourage. In the meantime, Madison and Smith looked around for suitable restitution for the xebec and two prizes, all liquidated in prize court months earlier. They decided upon the brig
Franklin
, which had brought Eaton home from Gibraltar, and to add cash and gifts totaling $10,000 for the bey, sapitapa, Melli Melli, and his entourage.

The
Franklin
turned out to be a poor choice. As Melli Melli correctly pointed out, it had been Tripoli's only U.S. wartime prize, captured in 1802. By coincidence, the bey had come into ownership of it briefly before selling it to some Americans in Trieste. Melli Melli said Hamouda never liked the
Franklin
and would consider it a grave insult to be presented with it again as restitution for the three captured vessels. He refused to accept it, or to sail home on it, which had been the American expectation. He would rather hire a ship instead.

The gifts for the bey and sapitapa were unloaded from the
Franklin
in Boston, the ambassador's embarkation point, while Melli Melli hunted for a merchantman to take him back to Tunis. The complication made Melli Melli quarrelsome, difficult, and intolerable to Cathcart, who was notoriously shorttempered himself. His irksome companion, Cathcart complained, was “a very mean, suspicious, avaricious character; bias'd by nothing but self interest, devoid of every sense of delicacy, and the sooner we get rid of him entirely the better.” Melli Melli chartered the
Two Brothers
and, to Cathcart's relief, sailed home in September 1806. The long voyage mellowed his temper and perhaps gave him time to savor his pleasant memories of America and the profusion of gifts riding in the
Two Brothers'
hold: coffee, china, chocolate, furniture, rum, and four brass fieldpieces with cartridges. By the time he reached Tunis, he was full of enthusiasm about his visit to the United States. Satisfied with Melli Melli's report and visibly pleased with the cash and the gifts, the bey reaffirmed Tunis's previous treaty with America.

 

 

 

Lear returned to Algiers, which was reeling from a coup, a civil
war, and a war with Tunis. The upheaval had begun in the summer of 1805, when rioters in the city of Algiers burned the “Jewish Directory”—the banking house of Bacris and Busnah—and murdered the Jewish proprietor, Naphthali Busnah. At Busnah's funeral, a mob massacred many of the mourners and wrecked the Jewish quarter. Then, in a continuation of the mayhem, Turkish soldiers assassinated the dey and his prime minister. They made the late dey's principal secretary the new dey. Some Algerian provinces took advantage of the anarchy and seceded, one of them allying with Tunis. Algiers and Tunis went to war. They fought through the winter of 1805—6, while Algiers also was trying to brutally suppress uprisings in Oran. On Christmas Day 1805, Lear witnessed the arrival of a small vessel from Oran bearing a grisly cargo: the heads of 600 Algerian rebels and “a vast number of Ears of the Insurgents.... They take off the Heads of the Slain and the Ears of the Prisoners, which they send as a proof of their Victory.”

Through all the turmoil, Lear somehow managed to stay on excellent terms with the Algerian government. So highly was Lear regarded by the dey and his officers that when Rodgers paid a last, formal visit to Algiers in May 1806 before leaving for home, the dey permitted Rodgers to wear his sword during his royal audience. The stubborn Rodgers had told the dey's aide he would not see the dey without his sword. It was unprecedented for a Christian to be granted this privilege.

 

With all the Barbary States now at peace with the United States, Jefferson thought it no longer necessary for twenty warships to patrol the western Mediterranean. The frigates, brigs, and schooners, and the eight gunboats and two new bomb vessels that
had joined the squadron in 1805 were ordered to sail home—all but the
Constitution, Siren,
and
Enterprise.

The Tripolitan war had cost just $3.6 million, but Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, who kept an iron grip on the federal purse strings, was still harping on Republican frugality, although Jefferson no longer was. For nine straight years, Gallatin diligently cut the federal debt each year by $2 million to $8 million, so that by 1809, when Madison became president, the $83 million debt in 1801 had been pared to $42 million, despite the expense of the Tripoli War and the $15 million Louisiana Purchase. Even with revenues increasing steadily, Gallatin was not seduced into reckless spending by the prospect of surpluses.

But the thrifty Gallatin and Navy Secretary Smith were becoming strikingly out of step with Jefferson, who had made a sharp turn toward a more Federalist-style government. In December 1806, he asked Congress to build a nationwide system of roads and canals, a national university, and coastal fortifications. It was hard to believe this was the same Jefferson who six years earlier had said the federal government should collect taxes, deliver mail, and maintain a navy to protect trade—and leave everything else to the states. Gallatin, however, had remained true to the Republican creed, as had the Southern Republicans, who were caught up in a retrograde movement to recapture the “Spirit of 1800.” They opposed spending money on forts and on more ships. They preferred gunboats because they were cheaper than stone fortifications, and, they wrongly believed, better suited for coastal defense than brigs and schooners.