Jefferson's War (45 page)

After protesting that three warships could not possibly protect U.S. Mediterranean trade, Rodgers closed the Syracuse naval hospital, handed command of the shrunken squadron to Captain
Hugh Campbell, and embarked for America in May 1806. Aboard Rodgers's ship was a pair of Barbary broad-tailed sheep. They were for President Jefferson, whose many interests included animal husbandry.

XVII

FULL CIRCLE

—Hamet Karamanli, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson

 

 

 

 

G
eorge Davis reembarked for the Mediterranean in late 1806 with a new title: consul to Tripoli. After his humiliation during the Tunisian crisis of August 1805, he had sailed home, but it wasn't long before he began to miss the status, privileges, and freedom he had enjoyed in Barbary. The former ship's doctor reached Gibraltar on September 10, 1806. There he waited for one of the three remaining U.S. warships to take him the rest of the way to Tripoli. Growing impatient, he took passage on a vessel bound for Leghorn. He expected that it would be relatively simple to find a ship to take him from Italy to Tripoli, but it wasn't. Early 1807 found him still in Leghorn.

The long layover in Leghorn proved lucky in one respect. Davis happened to meet Nicholas Nissen there as the former Danish consul to Tripoli was on his way home. The consul's devotion to the
Philadelphia
captives during their nineteen months of imprisonment had been rewarded with a formal expression of gratitude from
the U.S. government and a silver urn purchased by the former prisoners. Now Nissen was retiring from the diplomatic corps. He brought Davis up to date on Tripolitan affairs, including the peace treaty, which Davis had not seen. The treaty, he told Davis, contained a secret clause. Nissen knew it did because he had drafted it.

 

 

The secret clause was written into the treaty during the last stages of negotiations. With most of the main issues settled, Lear had dutifully raised the question of releasing Hamet's wife and children, prisoners since the bashaw closed the city gates to his brother ten years before. Here he had touched on a tender subject with Yusuf. The bashaw and his Divan were uneasy about relinquishing their only leverage over Hamet, who, after all, had made it as far as Derna with his ragtag army. But Lear knew he couldn't sign a treaty that lacked even this small acknowledgment of Hamet's predicament. The treaty that had seemed such a sure thing suddenly wasn't so certain—until Nissen made a saving suggestion: a clause permitting the bashaw to retain custody of Hamet's family for four years, with their release at the end of that period contingent on Hamet's good behavior. This would technically satisfy Lear's requirement that Yusuf agree to release Hamet's family, while giving Yusuf ample time to quell any lingering dissent in his far-flung provinces that conceivably could foster another Hamet insurgency. And, as Nissen noted to his own government a week after the treaty signing, his proposal vouchsafed to the bashaw and Divan “that I had not tried to deceive them,” and incurred a debt on Yusuf's part that might one day be called in by Nissen's successor. Lear, Yusuf, and his Divan signed the clause on June 5, 1805, the day after they had formally affixed their names to the main part of the treaty.

The clause was attached to Article 3, which stipulated that America would stop aiding Hamet's insurgency, withdraw its forces, and persuade Hamet to pull out, and that Yusuf would hand over Hamet's family if those conditions were met. Lear undoubtedly was aware that the four-year moratorium would be a political red flag when the treaty came before the Senate for ratification. He avoided that problem simply by omitting it from the treaty and never explicitly revealing its existence to anyone in Washington. In his report to Madison on the negotiations, Lear said Yusuf had balked at releasing Hamet's family, and they then had agreed the bashaw might wait “a period of time” before doing so, to ensure that his brother wouldn't attempt to revive his insurgency.

Uninformed of the four-year clause, in March 1806 Jefferson's cabinet weighed restoring the blockade to force the release of Hamet's still-captive family. “We will not incline from the fulfillment of that article of the treaty,” Jefferson declared. All that prevented the blockade's revival was the president's trenchant observation that it very well might constitute an act of war, which would require congressional approval. The Cabinet stayed its own hand for the moment, but if Tripoli didn't take steps to release Hamet's family, it planned to lay the matter before Congress.

 

Hamet and his three dozen or so attendants were subsisting on friends' charity and a $200-a-month stipend authorized grudgingly by Rodgers. The commodore had suggested that Hamet emigrate to the United States, but the prospect of crossing the ocean in a boat terrified Hamet and he refused to go. Yet he was miserable in Syracuse. He fired off appeals to Jefferson, Congress, and “the People of the United States of America.” To Jefferson, he
wrote: “... the weight of misfortune has only increased, and for the first time, am completely abandoned, and by a great nation....” In another letter, he implored, “I beg you to send me some token, in order that I may not remain in the dark.” To Congress, he said, “I have lost my inheritance; my acquisitions; and my fair prospects are lost also.... I had no right to apprehend that my devotion and my complacency would overwhelm me in bottomless ruin.” He had a point: According to Eaton, Hamet was forced to leave behind $50,000 worth of possessions in Derna, in addition to losing his army of Arabs. Eaton estimated he was owed $30,000—$40,000. “I trusted to the faith of a great people,” Hamet wrote pathetically in his open letter to the American people. His appeals were largely ignored, now that the war was over and he was no longer of any use to the United States. Congress paid him $2,400 as a final settlement in June 1806, when the $200 monthly stipend was terminated. Thus Hamet received a total of $6,800 from the United States: a paltry sum for his contribution at Derna, without which an honorable peace would have been impossible.

 

Becoming increasingly restless in Leghorn but still without transport to Tripoli, Davis sailed to Syracuse, which, at least, was closer to Tripoli than Leghorn was. Being in Syracuse also afforded him the opportunity to meet Hamet. It wasn't a pleasant meeting. Hamet harangued Davis about needing more money and his family's continuing captivity. Davis didn't reveal what he had learned about the secret treaty clause, wanting to use this knowledge to somehow force Yusuf to free Hamet's family. Instead, he promised Hamet that he would bring up his family's situation during his first audience with Yusuf. Davis also suggested to
Hamet that reconciling with his brother might be the best means of effecting his family's release.

 

Nine months after leaving the United States, Davis finally reached Tripoli in early May 1807. At his first audience before Yusuf, he raised the subject of Hamet's family, sternly informing the bashaw that his failure to release Hamet's family violated the treaty. He made no mention of the secret clause. Yusuf responded by producing a copy of it and pointing to the four-year grace period. Davis flatly refused to recognize it as a valid part of the treaty. He stuck to that position through nearly a week's worth of talks. By May 12, Davis had worn down the bashaw, who did not wish to renew hostilities with the United States, to the point where he agreed reluctantly to release his brother's family.

But June and July came and went with Hamet's wife and children still in Tripoli. When Davis badgered Yusuf about his failure to carry out his pledge, the bashaw complained that Hamet's supporters in the distant provinces were still giving him trouble. Finally, on August 7, Yusuf cleared Hamet's wife, three sons, and a daughter for departure, but another two months passed before they sailed away on the merchantman
Tartan
to be reunited with Hamet in Syracuse after twelve years.

Davis managed to wring one last concession from the bashaw for Hamet: an unspecified “liberal allowance” to support Hamet's family. Having won this favor from a former enemy, the consul tried his luck with his own government, suggesting that it contribute $1,000 a year. But the United States never gave Hamet another cent.

 

 

 

The Jefferson administration's official position was that it never
was aware of the secret clause until Davis reported the successful outcome of his parley with Yusuf in a June 2 letter to Madison. It is entirely possible that is true, given Lear's tendency to operate independently and the vagueness of the only extant mention of the clause, made by Lear in his letter to Madison two years earlier. For the first time, Jefferson publicly acknowledged the provision's existence on November 11, 1807. He made no excuses; he blamed no one. The announcement caused a brief flurry of consternation in Congress, and the president ordered a reexamination of all of Lear's correspondence to determine whether the consul general had reported the clause and it somehow had been overlooked. The inquiry turned up only Lear's allusive reference of 1805, which had been so fleeting that it evidently had escaped the State Department's notice. “How it happened that the declaration of June 5 [1805] had never come to our attention, cannot with certainty be said,” Jefferson concluded in a memo to the Senate that ended all discussion of the matter.

 

 

 

Fresh trouble with the Great Powers pushed Barbary affairs into the background. The U.S. Navy may have taught the Barbary States to respect the United States, but not Europe. The warships of Spain, England, and France routinely stopped and searched U.S. merchant ships, sometimes looting and claiming them for prizes. The searches-and-seizures had reached outrageous proportions, but America's Navy, doughty as it had been at times in Barbary, was no match for the European powers' men-of-war with their triple gun decks. Prudence dictated forbearance.

Tensions with Spain lingered over the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and its aftermath. When the Spanish ceded the same territory to France in 1800, France had agreed never to relinquish it
to another nation, Spain claimed. But that promise had lasted only until Napoleon needed money for his wars. Spain also was alarmed by America's designs on West Florida, the long corridor stretching across the Deep South from present-day Florida to the Mississippi River. The land-hungry Jefferson administration had all but concluded that the Louisiana Purchase also compassed West Florida. This was an amazing conclusion, considering that Spain clearly possessed the territory and garrisoned thousands of troops there and in western Louisiana. The Americans' specious rationale was that West Florida belonged to the French until their defeat by England in the Seven Years' War (1756—63), which was followed by France's withdrawal from the territory. But since France had never formally ceded West Florida to anyone, the French could still legitimately transfer the territory to the United States as part of the Louisiana Territory. Not unhappy to see trouble come to its bothersome ally Spain, France did nothing to discourage the Americans' interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase.

Besides the disagreement with Spain, there was the recurring problem of being caught in the middle of England and France's long enmity. Both nations, fearful that their rival might gain an advantage by trading with America, stopped and searched U.S. ships for goods that might benefit the other. The British went to the extent of brazenly anchoring two frigates outside New York harbor, boarding every outgoing vessel and sending captured ships and suspected contraband to prize court in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They also impressed U.S. seamen—1,000 a year on the average, infuriating the Jefferson administration—but the fact was that America's merchant fleet couldn't have operated very long without its own complement of several thousand British sailors. For their
part, the British felt they were justified in taking seamen who were English to begin with. The British detentions, looting, and impressments happened in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Pacific Ocean, even in China, where the British operated much as pirates.

France had been somewhat chastened by the Quasi-War and didn't tread as heavily on U.S. sovereignty as did Britain. But it clearly was dismissive of U.S. power. Citizen Beaussier, the French charge d‘affaires in Tripoli, exemplified this attitude of maddening condescension soon after the release of the
Philadelphia
captives. He claimed that two crewmen were French, and that France was entitled to compensation from the United States for the nineteen months they were imprisoned. This sent the volatile Commodore Rodgers into a fury. In his acid reply, he upbraided Beaussier for “perjury,” and said it was “disgraceful to honor & truth” to think that France would do nothing for the two while they were captives, but now was justified in demanding redress. The claim died a quick death.

Undoubtedly the European warships dwarfed the American frigates, but the aura of invincibility that invested their fleets sometimes had unfortunate results. In August 1806 in the Straits of Gibraltar, several Spanish gunboats without provocation attacked the
Enterprise,
which under Lieutenant Andrew Sterrett had shredded the
Tripoli
five years earlier. The
Enterprise's
current skipper was the tough, competent Lieutenant David Porter, wounded in coastal skirmishes at Tripoli, an alumnus of the
Philadelphia
and destined for future greatness in the War of 1812. Porter tried to avoid a fight even as the gunboats bore in on his schooner with their guns blazing. He hoisted the U.S. colors, thinking the Spanish might have mistaken his ship for a British
vessel. The Spanish came on, still firing. Porter tried hailing them. They kept coming, behind volleys of grape and sheeting musket fire. It was abundantly clear that the gunboats intended to board the
Enterprise.
Porter ordered his gunners and Marines to give the Spanish everything they had. The blast of withering fire littered the gunboats' decks with dead and wounded. The
Enterprise
gunners reloaded and began a continuous fire. The gunboats, their decks slick with their crews' blood, slewed about as the casualties piled up. Then they turned and ran for the Spanish shore, with the
Enterprise
now in hot pursuit, cannons booming. Only when the gunboats reached the protection of the Spanish coastal batteries did Porter veer off, hoping he had dispensed “a useful lesson to them,” not to provoke neutral vessels, particularly U.S. warships.