Jefferson's War (50 page)

Barron stewed over his rejection. He wrote a letter on June 19, 1819, accusing Decatur of publicly claiming that “you could insult me with impunity.” Decatur denied it. In October Barron had another grievance: Decatur had forwarded their correspondence to mutual friends in Norfolk with the purpose of alienating them from Barron. Decatur acknowledged sending on the letters, but not the malevolent intent. The men exchanged thirteen letters in all, Barron's becoming progressively more acerbic; he always believed he had been scapegoated for the
Chesapeake
incident, and now he had a target for his bitterness.

 

Finally Barron challenged Decatur to a duel, and Decatur, a veteran of several affairs of honor, accepted. They met at Bladensburg, the site of the disastrous 1814 defense of Washington, on March 22, 1820. They agreed to fire at eight paces, a relatively short distance that was a concession to Barron's nearsightedness. Before taking up their pistols, both men urinated; it was commonly believed that an empty bladder reduced the chance of infection if one was hit. They stepped off the eight paces. Decatur already had decided to aim for Barron's hip, not wanting to kill him but knowing he must wound him in order to end the affair.
The men turned and fired simultaneously. Barron was hit in the thigh, Decatur in the right side. Decatur's wound was mortal, Barron's was not. Decatur died in agony at his home before the next sunrise. The U.S. Navy's brightest spirit, who perhaps more than anyone, had molded its fighting tradition, was gone.

 

Did the United States chastise the Barbary States, as Jefferson so fervently desired, and did it earn Europe's respect? It depends on whether the year is 1805 or 1815.

During the 1801—5 Tripolitan war, the necessary ingredients for lasting peace never coalesced at one time or place: a large force, an aggressive commander, and skilled diplomacy. Morris and Barron demonstrated the futility of assigning a strong naval force to a weak commander. Preble showed that without adequate firepower, a fighting commodore could not deliver a decisive blow. Only when Rodgers took over Barron's squadron and brought it before Tunis with Lear on hand was it used as Jefferson, Madison, and Smith had envisioned, “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations.”

But in 1815, the United States was a battle-hardened naval power, and Decatur was able to parley at “cannon's mouth” and finally win the respect both of Barbary and Europe. What better evidence could there be of Europe's respect than England's attempt to imitate Decatur's success in Algiers?

More importantly, America demonstrated, as Jefferson had hoped, that it was different from Europe and on principle would not truckle to extortionist despots. Jefferson was proven right: Facing down terror worked; Europe showed its new respect by imitating the American example before Barbary's harbor fortresses. It was yet another manifestation of America's revolution against
the established order, another assertion of “American spirit,” whose most passionate advocate was Jefferson.

By sending American ships and fighting men to their first war on foreign soil, fought for the principle of sovereign trading rights, Jefferson was making a statement of national character: the American belief that nations as well as people had a right to freedom from tyranny. America didn't pay obeisance to English kings, and it certainly wouldn't bow to Islamic deys, beys, and bashaws who used their navies as instruments of terror to extort tribute and fill their dungeons with “Christian dogs.”

 

In the Mediterranean, America learned the practicalities of waging a distant war: operating from foreign bases, making short-term alliances, and using local insurgents and indigenous troops—the basic tenets that would serve it in conflicts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Had the United States been unable to use Sicily, Malta, and Gibraltar as resupply and headquarters ports, it would have been virtually impossible to sustain its convoys and blockades, and the hemorrhaging of Mediterranean trade would have continued; as it was, 35 American ships and 700 sailors were captured by the Barbary corsairs between 1784 and 1815. Without Neapolitan gunboats, Preble couldn't have taken the war to Tripoli's harbor in 1804. Hamet and his Tripolitan and Arab supporters made possible Eaton's bold invasion. Without Salvador Catalano, Decatur's “special ops” mission to burn the
Philadelphia
might have run aground on one of Tripoli harbor's notorious shoals.

The fighting U.S. Navy that stopped Britain in 1812 was forged in the Mediterranean under Preble. The brief Quasi-War with France had blooded it, but the rising generation of junior
officers needed more seasoning. The “super frigates” served as the war colleges of Decatur, Bainbridge, Porter, Stewart, and Hull—“Preble's Boys.” When they finished their education in the Mediterranean, they were ready to test themselves against the world's preeminent naval power, and then to return to Barbary in 1815 as seasoned veterans eager to punish Algiers.

The Barbary War convinced Congress and the American people that the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were indispensable. Aided by low casualties—little more than 30 killed—and the emergence of a pantheon of war heroes, the seafaring services were safe from Congress's budget ax. Preble, Decatur, Eaton, and O‘Bannon entered the American lexicon, and their stories were still being told by candlelight in farmhouses fifty years later. If congressmen needed a better argument, they only had to look to the prosperous Mediterranean trade made possible by U.S. Navy convoys. While the Navy's future was now secure, the Marine Corps periodically was targeted by government cost-cutters; it escaped extinction during the post—World War II downsizing campaign largely because of its demonstrated readiness at the outbreak of the Korean War, when its “Fire Brigade” stopped the invading North Koreans at the Naktong River.

 

The punitive expeditions of 1815 and 1816 ended Algiers's long reign as a major Mediterranean power. The old Ottoman regency no longer struck terror into England, France, Spain, and the United States. Finally, after 400 years, trade in the Mediterranean became truly free.

It happened sooner rather than later because of Thomas Jefferson. “I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams when they debated the respective merits of war and tribute.

Jefferson's unshakable faith in the supreme revolutionary principle—freedom from tyranny wherever it might be found, and in whatever form—caused the western Mediterranean to be swept clean of the marauding corsairs.

No longer would merchant ship captains anxiously scan the flat horizon for the long-prowed ships of plunder flying under lateen sails.

Jefferson and his fighting sailors and Marines had freed America and Europe from The Terror.

NOTES

xvii. “Curly-haired and fair”:
Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers
, 6 vols. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), vol. 1, portrait facing p. 582.

xvii. “Canvas rustled above him”: Ibid., p. 540.

xvii. “The
Enterprise
was sailing”: Ibid., p. 535.

xviii. “Above the
Enterprise‘s
”: Ibid., p. 503.

xviii. “The Enterprise was the third”: Henry B. Culver, Forty Famous Ships (New York: Garden City Publishing Co. Inc., 1938), pp. 181—4.

xviii. “Later, after she was”: Howard I. Chapelle,
The History of the American Sailing Navy
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1935), p. 101.

xviii. “By then, she”: Culver, p. 181.

xviii. “Before the
Enterprise”: Naval Documents,
vol. 1, p. 534.

xix. “The
Tripoli
edged closer”: Ibid., pp. 537-9 (
National Intelligencer
story); A. B. C. Whipple,
To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines
(New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1991), pp. 79-80; Glenn Tucker,
Dawn Like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy
(Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1963), pp. 141-6.

xxi. “‘The carnage on board”':
Naval Documents,
vol. 1, p. 537.

xxi. “While the
Enterprise's
doctor”: Ibid., pp. 538-9 (
National Intelligencer
story).

xxi. “Sterrett did a damage”: Ibid., p. 537.

xxv. “‘Holding out the olive Branch'”:
Naval Documents,
vol. 2, p. 130.

1. “‘Peace, commerce & honest'”: Paul Leicester Ford, ed.,
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
10 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1892-9), vol. 8, pp. 2-5.

1. “a soft voice”: Nathan Schachner,
Thomas Jefferson: A Biography
(New York: Thomas Yoseloff Ltd., 1951), p. 661; Ford, vol. 8, pp. 3-4.

2. “the disgruntled president”: David McCullough,
John Adams
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 565.

2. “‘a wise and frugal'”: Ford, vol. 8, pp. 3-4.

2. “Jefferson issued the”:
Naval Documents,
vol. 1, p. 486.

3. “‘The motives pleading'”: John P. Foley, ed.,
The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia,
2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1900), p. 83.

4. “Two members of Jefferson‘s”:
Thomas Jefferson papers at the Library of Congress
. June 11, 1801, letter to Wilson Cary Nicholas.

4. “James Madison, Jefferson‘s”:
The Papers of James Madison. Secretary of State Series
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 1-2.

4. “The other late arrival”: Henry Adams,
The Life of Albert Gallatin
(New York: Peter Smith, 1879), p. 1.

5. “‘Shall the squadron'”:
Thomas Jefferson notes on Cabinet meetings, May—June 1801
(Library of Congress).

6. “The Navy now floated”: William M. Fowler, Jr.,
Jack Tars and Commodores: The American Navy, 1783
—
1815
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984), p. 60.

6. “the $83 million”: E. James Ferguson, ed.,
Selected Writings of Albert Gallatin
(Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1967), pp. 208—9.

8. “‘Jihad' is derived”: Robert Wuthnow, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion
(Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1998), pp. 425—6.

8. “As Islam exploded”: Ibid.

8. “Jihad's new interpretation”: Ibid.

8. “Their refusal to pay”: McClintock and Strong,
The Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature
(World Wide Web), vol. VI, p. 417.

8. “The Barbary States stuck”: Muhammad Abdel Haleem,
Understanding the Qur‘an: Themes and Style
(London, New York: I. B. Tauris, Publishers, 1999), pp. 61—3.

9. “The Moors were”: Jamil M. Abun-Nasr,
A History of the Maghrib
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 7.

9. “the Maghrib, the ‘land of sunset'”: Ibid., p. 1.

10. “During one expedition”: Charles-André Julien,
History of North Africa
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 13.

10. “the first Barbary corsairs”: Tucker, pp. 48-9.

11. “King Roderick”: Stanley Lane-Poole,
The Barbary Corsairs
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1901), p. 14.

11. “The Moors, as the”: Stanley Lane-Poole,
The Moors in Spain
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1911), pp. vii-ix.

11. “In 1800, U.S. libraries”: Henry Adams,
History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
(New York: A&CBoni, 1930), vol. 1, p. 61.

12. “In 1491, at”: Lane-Poole,
The Moors in Spain,
pp. 270-1.

12. “Most Granadan Moors preferred”: Ibid., p. 272.

12. “While a few refugees”: John B. Wolf,
The Barbary Coast: Algiers Under the Turks, 1500
—
1830
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979), pp. 5—6; Will and Ariel Durant,
The Story of Civilization,
11 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1935-75), vol. 6, pp. 217-8, 696.

13. “The ‘little war”': Ellen G. Friedman,
Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age
(Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. xiv.

13. “The escalating raids”: Wolf, pp. 4—5; Julien, p. 242; Lane-Poole,
Barbary Corsairs,
pp. 8—10.

13. “Spanish Christians believed”: Lane-Poole,
Moors in Spain,
pp. 273-80.

14. “Charles signed the edict”: Ibid.

14. “Given command of”: Ibid.

14. “Between 1492 and 1610”: Ibid.

15. “In 1580, the Holy”: Friedman, p. xxii.

16. “The shipyards of Tunis”: Wolf, p. 143; Lane-Poole,
Barbary Corsairs,
pp. 219—21.

16. “Hundreds of English”: Samuel C. Chew,
The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance
(New York: Octagon Books Inc., 1965), p. 350.

16. “they brought with them”: Wolf, p. 145.

17. “Coming upon a”: Lane-Poole,
Barbary Corsairs,
p. 225.

17. “It was usually over”: Ibid., p. 193.

17. “Murad Reis, a legendary”: Ibid., pp. 226—33.

17. “800 raiders”: Ibid.

17. “Corsairs appeared off”: Ibid.

17. “Between 1613 and 1622”: Wolf, p. 190.

17. “Four hundred English ships”: Lane-Poole,
Barbary Corsairs,
p. 266.