Jefferson's War (47 page)

For this grandiose vision to become hard fact, Burr needed generals, and his recruitment of them proved to be the riskiest aspect of his plan. General James Wilkinson was the first to sign on for the Southwest invasion, at least. He was the key to that scheme because he commanded the U.S. Army units in New Orleans that patrolled the Southwest frontier. A friend of Burr's from their Revolutionary War service, Wilkinson also happened to be a Spanish spy—he was listed as Spy No. 13 in the Spanish government's books—and he was as oleaginous as Burr himself. Burr recruited Andrew Jackson, who hated the Spanish, for his plan to seize Texas and Florida. And he attempted to enlist a third general: William Eaton.

At first Eaton was enthusiastic about reprising his Derna desert march with an expedition to Mexico, but he was never entirely comfortable with the plan. The more Burr talked, the more Eaton's uneasiness grew, and Burr just couldn't stop talking. He told Eaton about detaching the western United States. Then, he rashly confided an even more outrageous adventure: marching on Washington. At
this point, Eaton rode to Washington to warn Jefferson personally. During their meeting, Eaton suggested that the president appoint Burr to a remote ministerial post in Europe to get him out of the way. Jefferson could have saved himself and his government a lot of trouble had he done so, or if he had heeded the warnings also given by Jackson, who quit the scheme when he learned Burr didn't plan to stop with Mexico, Texas, and Florida, but intended to abscond with the U.S. territories west of the Allegheny Mountains as well. Inexplicably, Jefferson did nothing.

It wasn't until fall 1806, as Burr gathered his invading “army”—about 100 men and women volunteers—on an island in the Ohio River, that Jefferson at last listened to Eaton's warnings, but only when they were repeated by Postmaster General Gideon Granger. Jefferson issued a nationwide warning that a Western insurgency was afoot. Before long, Burr was run to ground in Mississippi. But sympathizers set him free, and he fled deeper into West Florida. In February 1807, Burr was recaptured in present-day Alabama and brought to Richmond for trial.

 

With so many of the nation's leading men attending Burr's treason trial in Richmond in August 1807—so many that the proceedings were moved from the courthouse to the Virginia House of Delegates—it seemed that the stage was set for Eaton's triumphal rebirth as a patriotic whistle-blower. But fortune no longer smiled on Eaton.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was the presiding judge, an incomparable stroke of luck for Burr, caught red-handed as he was plotting revolution. A staunch Federalist and avowed enemy of Jefferson, Marshall gave Burr wide latitude in leading his defense team and examining witnesses.

As a result, when Eaton took the witness stand, he faced Burr, the best courtroom attorney in the country. Eaton testified that while he knew of no “overt act” by Burr that was treasonous, “concerning Colonel Burr's expressions of treasonable intentions, I know much.” Then Burr went to work on Eaton. When Eaton tried to describe how he warned Jefferson of Burr's scheme, Burr goaded him with insinuations. Perhaps Eaton, too, had been involved, he suggested. Burr pushed Eaton until he exploded: “You spoke of
your
riflemen,
your
infantry,
your
cavalry!” In his anger, Burr's barbed suggestions about Eaton's involvement melded confusedly with villainous portrayals of Wilkinson, and Eaton blurted out, “From the same views you have perhaps mentioned
me!”
The outburst did Eaton no credit and did not help prosecutors.

 

 

Outside the courtroom, Eaton was an all-too-familiar figure in Richmond's taverns. During the four months between his grandjury testimony and Burr's treason trial, everyone heard Eaton's oftrepeated and embellished stories and his rants against Lear, while having plenty of opportunity to witness his heavy drinking and womanizing. “The once redoubted Eaton has dwindled down in the eyes of this sarcastic town into a ridiculous mountebank, strutting about the streets under a tremendous hat, with a Turkish sash over colored clothes when he is not tippling in the taverns,” wrote Harman Blennerhassett, a Burr co-defendant. It went unrecorded whether Eaton performed his sword-twirling trick for his audiences; he had had scant opportunity to use his scimitar while crossing the North African desert and during the Derna fighting. Eaton's behavior wrecked any chance he might have salvaged from his testimony against Burr of securing a government position.

Amazingly, Burr was acquitted. Embittered, Eaton returned to Massachusetts, shocking the Massachusetts legislature by denouncing Chief Justice Marshall in a vituperous floor speech. The Federalists, his former allies, shunned him, and Brimfield ousted him from local office in 1808.

Eaton kept to his home and sold some of his Maine acreage to pay his bills. He was held in such low esteem that few would receive him at all, former President John Adams and his son, John Quincy, being notable exceptions. Reclusive, suffering from gout and rheumatism, and drinking heavily, Eaton learned over Christmas 1810 that his beloved stepson, Navy Lieutenant Eli Danielson, who had accompanied him in Egypt as a young midshipman, had been killed in a duel. The sad news sent him into a depression, and he took to his bed.

On June 1, 1811, the indomitable adventurer died. He was only forty-seven.

Eaton's disgrace and obscurity were compassed in the single line in which the Massachusetts
Columbian Centinel
reported his death: “Gen. Eaton, the hero of Derna and the victim of sensibility was entombed at Brimfield on Wednesday last.”

 

Algiers began to act like the piratical Algiers of old. In November 1807, Algerian frigates captured three American merchantmen—the
Eagle
and
Mary Ann
of New York, and the
Violet
of Boston. Captain Ichabod Shiffield and his
Mary Ann
crew didn't go easily. As they approached Algiers as prisoners on their own vessel, the Americans threw four of their Algerian captors overboard, made captives of the rest, and sailed for Naples.

When Lear demanded the release of the
Eagle
and
Violet,
the dey complained that the United States had fallen two years behind
in its tribute payment of naval stores. Lear paid the dey cash to square the overdue account, and the dey released the two vessels. But then he demanded $18,000 indemnity for the prize crew carried off by the
Mary Ann.
Lear paid that, too, certain that if he did not, Algiers would only send out its corsairs to seize more U.S. merchantmen.

Preble, Eaton, and Rodgers had taught Tripoli and Tunis to respect U.S. power, but Algiers had managed to avoid a direct confrontation with the Jefferson administration and the U.S. Navy. As the years passed with no evidence of American naval power in the Mediterranean, Algiers, with Britain's encouragement, grew confident that it had nothing to fear from the new republic across the ocean.

XVIII

EPILOGUE

—Hadji Ali, Algiers's dey, to U.S. Consul M. M. Noah

—Consul General Tobias Lear, in a letter to Secretary of State James Monroe

 

L
aden with military stores to satisfy the United States' tributary obligations, the
Alleghany
disgorged muskets, shot, gunpowder, timber for masts, and cable onto Algiers's waterfront. The 1795 treaty had withstood the Tripolitan war and Algerian revolts and regime changes. It was the only U.S. agreement that still required annual tribute payments. Over the treaty's life, the United States had paid Algiers $500,000 or more in tribute, gifts, and military stores: $21,600 worth of military supplies each year, $17,000 in biennial gifts to the dey's officers, and $20,000 each time a new consul arrived in Algiers. Even in 1795, the weapons and ship supplies Algiers demanded had cost more than $21,600, and with inflation over the next seventeen years the stores' value had soared. This partly explained why the United States often fell behind in its tribute deliveries and then offered to square accounts with cash.

 

Hadji Ali, the aged, fierce dey, watched as the military stores were
trundled from the
Alleghany's
hold to Algiers's wharf. Hadji had been listening to Great Britain's blandishments and was poised to turn the clock back twenty years on Algiers-U.S. relations. The British foreign minister recently had written Hadji a letter pledging England's warm friendship and protection. While Algiers was threatened by no nation at the moment, Britain, which within weeks would be at war with America, implied that England's future enemy might become Algiers's, too. The British minister blustered that “the American flag would be swept from the seas, the contemptible navy of the United States annihilated, and its maritime arsenals reduced to a heap of ruins.” Hadji believed him. If Hadji had to choose allies in the coming war, there was no question that it would be England and her mighty navy. And he knew he had to exploit every means at hand to keep his throne. This policy had enabled him to rule longer than any of the deys who had come along after Mustafa Hamouda was deposed in 1805. The janissaries had assassinated Mustafa's successor, Hamet Bashaw, in 1808, and the new dey, Ali Cogia, was deposed five months later by Barbary's favored method of effecting a succession: the silken strangulation cord. Hadji had ruled since then. In the interests of prolonging his tenure and his life, Hadji stopped the unloading of the
Alleghany.

He complained that the shipment of tribute contained too little gunpowder and cable, and ordered it sent back. In its place, he demanded an instant substitution payment of $27,000 cash. He brusquely informed Lear that as soon as he paid it, he must pack up and leave Algiers. This came as a rude shock to Lear, who hadn't foreseen expulsion, although he had been conscious of the steady erosion of respect for America during the Navy's long absence from the Mediterranean, going on five years now. Lear
tried desperately to avert the diplomatic breach that now confronted him, while arguing that $27,000 wasn't what the treaty stipulated as annual tribute. Hadji smoothly explained that he observed the briefer Ramadan year, not the Gregorian 365-day year. Since 1795, the additional Ramadan calendar days and weeks had added up, and they now must be reckoned with. Pay the $27,000 now, the dey warned, or he would seize the
Alleghany
and enslave its crew and every American in Algiers. If Lear paid, the Americans would have three days to leave. Lear wangled a twoday extension, but nothing more. Lacking $27,000 in ready cash, he was forced to borrow from the Bacri money house—it had survived David Coen Bacri's beheading a year earlier—and agreed to pay a stiff 25 percent premium.

Lear, his wife and son, and three other American residents of Algiers sailed away on the
Alleghany
on July 25. The ship happened to reach Gibraltar simultaneously with the news that America had declared war on England. The British instantly took possession of the brig, clapped the crewmen in irons, and sent them to England on a prison ship. Lear and his family were permitted to sail to Cadiz and then home. As he sat down to write his report to Secretary of State James Monroe, Lear predicted that America one day would avenge Algiers's abusive treatment and rid itself of tribute “and an imperious and piratical depredation on their commerce. If our small naval force can operate freely in the sea,
Algiers will be humbled to the dust....”

 

Before there could be any U.S. retaliation against Algiers, America had to face Britain, the world's supreme naval power, with more than 600 warships to the U.S. Navy's 17. In addition to this seemingly insurmountable disadvantage, the U.S. Navy was burdened
with the memory of the Revolutionary War, when the British had destroyed or captured 34 of the Continental Navy's 35 ships, while losing only 5 of their own. And John Paul Jones, dead twenty years now, was responsible for two of the British losses, the
Drake
and
Serapis.
But in 1812, the United States had far better ships and the leadership of “Preble's Boys,” the Barbary War's junior officers who had risen to commands in the fleet: Isaac Hull, Stephen Decatur, Jr., William Bainbridge, James Lawrence, Isaac Chauncey, David Porter, Charles Stewart, and Thomas Macdonough. As the U.S. Navy's “super frigates” entered the Atlantic to face the daunting British war fleet, Algerian cruisers prowled the Mediterranean for U.S. merchantmen. Weeks after Lear's departure from Algiers, the
Edwin
was snapped up.

 

On August 12, the
Edwin,
a brig from Salem, Massachusetts, with Captain George C. Smith and ten crewmen aboard, was captured between Malta and Gibraltar. At about the same time, Algerians stopped a Spanish ship and removed an American, a Mr. Pollard, and he became Algiers's twelfth American prisoner. They would be the last; the war kept the U.S. merchant fleet home for nearly three years. The Madison administration authorized M. M. Noah, the U.S. consul in Tunis, to offer up to $3,000 ransom per man. Hadji spurned the offer. “My policy and my views are to increase, not to diminish the number of my American slaves; and not for a million dollars would I release them.” Britain, desperate for fresh seamen, offered to buy two of the
Edwin
crewmen, and Hadji sold the British the two most unproductive prisoners for $2,000 apiece.

 

Washington threw a naval ball on December 28, 1812, presided
over by First Lady Dolley Madison. Hundreds of candles illuminated the battle flags of two British warships, the HMS
Guerriere
and the HMS
Alert,
captured during the halcyon first months of the war. At midnight, as the orchestra struck up “Hail Columbia,” a midshipman appeared as if by magic, striding purposefully across the room toward Mrs. Madison. The naval officers and their wives broke into loud cheers when they saw what he was carrying. The midshipman laid the object at the First Lady's feet. She picked it up and unfolded it. It was a third British battle flag, belonging to the HMS
Macedonian.
The triumph belonged to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr., and the
United States.
The idea for the dramatic presentation of the battle flag to the First Lady was Decatur's, too. Like his frigate's performance in the Atlantic, Decatur's bit of theater was a smashing success.