Jefferson's War (8 page)

In 1782 Livingston had instructed Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. minister in Paris, to make contact with representatives from the Barbary States. It was “a favorable moment for making ourselves known to them,” he said, what with the Moroccan emperor's recent coolness toward Great Britain and France's unusual warmth toward the United States. But absorbed in Paris's pleasures, Franklin let the favorable moment pass without
acting. No American envoys appeared in the Barbary states in 1783 or 1784.

 

 

With an entourage of robed attendants, Abdrahaman, the Tripolitan ambassador, swept into Adams's Grosvenor Square residence three days after their congenial fireside conversation. He had come for the express purpose of pressuring Adams to sign a peace treaty quickly. Having planted the idea during the initial meeting, Abdrahaman wanted to fan the embers. A treaty would enrich both Tripoli's bashaw and Abdrahaman himself He warned that if America procrastinated, merchantmen and their crews might be seized, complicating treaty negotiations with tedious ransom discussions. And war must be avoided because it would be so terrible. “A war between Christian and Christian was mild, and prisoners, on either side, were treated with humanity; but a war between Turk and Christian was horrible, and prisoners were sold into slavery,” Adams wrote, in reconstructing Abdrahaman's words for Jay. “Although he was himself a mussulman [Moslem], he must still say he thought it a very rigid law; but, as he could not alter it, he was desirous of preventing its operation, or, at least, of softening it, as far as his influence extended.” The Tripolitan was pleased when Adams told him he had authority to negotiate a treaty, and as soon as he had departed, Adams dispatched a messenger to Jefferson in Paris, summoning him to a parley with Adams and Abdrahaman.

 

 

 

Shipbuilding, the whaling industry, and Southern agriculture suffered particularly during the grinding economic malaise following independence. The shipyards had built British ships before the war, but now were idled; the British were building their own ships
at home. The whaling fleet had been nearly obliterated by the Royal Navy during the war. What's more, France and Britain were restricting whale and fish-product imports, ostensibly to cultivate their own maritime industries, but also to use the fisheries for training fresh seamen for the expected resumption of their unending war with each other.

Southern agriculture had not yet recovered from marauding British troops and the savage partisan war between loyalists and patriots. More than 50,000 slaves had slipped away during the fighting, many ending up in the disease-ridden refugee camps established by the British Army in the Southern colonies. There, they died by the thousands of smallpox and fever; Jefferson himself lost 27 of his slaves this way. With fewer slaves to harvest the tobacco and rice, planters cut back their acreage. Rice exports told the story: in 1770—73, a total of 277.1 million pounds; in 1783—86, just 128.3 million pounds.

But a worse brake on exports was Britain's unfriendly trade policy. Before the Revolution, colonial merchants had grown rich trading in the British West Indies. Now only American goods transported on English ships were admitted; goods on U.S. ships were turned away. Adams ambitiously proposed a new agreement that would have opened not only the British West Indies, but Canada, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland to American products transported by American ships. The British were politely uninterested. Jefferson estimated British trade restrictions during the 1780s cost the United States 800 to 900 shiploads of goods, with a proportionate deficit in seamen, shipwrights, and shipbuilding.

High hopes were pinned on France, America's great war ally, becoming its great peacetime trade partner, obviating the need for more generous British agreements. The French, however, lacked
the financial wherewithal to extend credit—a critical component that had never been a problem with English merchants. Without credit, U.S. merchants, lacking cash to make the purchases outright, were unable to buy finished goods in France to sell in America. A lesser impediment to a robust U.S.—French trade alliance was the American consumer's preference for English products, a consequence of long familiarity. There were other barriers as well: the high French protective trade tariffs, and French certainty that American merchants would only use the profits from any trade with France to pay off their debts to France's enemy, England.

Frustrated by the British and French, U.S. merchants pursued alternative markets in Asia and along the Baltic Sea. American tobacco, flour, and rum were prized in the chilly northern principalities, and the merchantmen returned from the Baltic laden with iron; duck cloth, a durable cotton fabric; and hemp. But the Baltic commerce was only modestly successful. China, however, fired American businessmen's imaginations with its potentially huge market. The trick was finding commodities the Chinese desired. The
Empress of China
cast off from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1784 on its historic voyage to Canton bearing the shimmering hopes of businessmen who thought they had hit upon an ingenious solution to the conundrum of Chinese consumerism. The Empress was loaded with finished New England goods, which were bartered for furs in Vancouver and sandalwood in Hawaii. Chinese merchants snapped up their furs and sandalwood, encouraging U.S. merchants to expand their Oriental speculations to India and Indonesia. But for all their trouble the merchants were disappointed when their efforts scarcely dented the lost trade with Britain.

 

Jefferson reached the Adams home in the last damp, blustery
days of winter, his scientist's curiosity piqued by the prospect of meeting a Barbary “musselman” in the flesh. The novelty wore off quickly after the three ministers sat down together at Abdrahaman's home, and the Tripolitan gave them a matter-of-fact disquisition on temporary peace and “perpetual peace,” and their respective costs. Temporary peace was good for one year, he said, and would cost 12,500 guineas, plus a 10 percent commission for Abdrahaman, or roughly $66,000 in all. Perpetual peace—supposedly everlasting, yet, as they all well knew, anything but that—was a bargain in the long run, he said. It would cost 30,000 guineas, plus the customary 10 percent commission, or a total of about $160,000. Abdrahaman reminded them politely that a state of war existed between their nations until America bought its peace. Jefferson and Adams were aghast at the figures he had quoted; Jay had authorized them to borrow only $80,000 for treaties with
all
the Barbary States. Abdrahaman went on to inform them that Tunis would demand a similar payment, but Algiers, the most powerful corsair regency, would probably expect more, plus ransom for the twenty-one captives from the
Maria
and
Dauphin.
He did not mention Morocco, the fourth Barbary State.

Adams and Jefferson argued vainly that America's basis for relations with other nations was the converse of Tripoli's: It regarded all nations as friends, and made war only upon provocation. How had the United States provoked Tripoli? they wanted to know. Abdrahaman said they didn't understand the fine points of Islamic jihad, as it was interpreted in Barbary. He proceeded to illuminate the ministers. “The Ambassador,” Jefferson later wrote to Jay, “answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not
have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” The ambassador said the pirate crews were inspired to “the most desperate Valour and Enterprise” by the promise of a slave and an extra share of the loot to the first crewman to board an enemy ship. Merchant ship crews seldom resisted, and Jefferson said Abdrahaman “verily believed the Devil assisted his Countrymen, for they were almost always successful.” Abdrahaman was paraphrasing the Koran's rules of engagement, as described in the 47th Surah: “Whenever you encounter the ones who disbelieve [during wartime], seize them by their necks until once you have subdued them, then tie them up as prisoners, either in order to release them later on, or also to ask for ransom, until war lays down her burdens.” By first extending peace terms, impossible though they were, Abdrahaman also had satisfied his holy book's stipulation that Moslems must give enemies the option of war or peace before attacking, a commonly ignored preliminary.

After doing the arithmetic, Jefferson gloomily estimated the United States would have to pay more than $1.3 million to make peace with all the Barbary States and ransom the captives, which meant going to Amsterdam, hat in hand, to request a loan from the Dutch bankers, who usually were willing to extend credit to America. Jay, however, advised against it; it would be improvident to pile on more financial commitments when American credit was shaky as it was, with little to recommend it but the republic's glorious future, glimmering only faintly through the Revolution's miasmic aftermath.

Adams and Jefferson were fellow founders of the republic, still in the first, amiable phase of their long relationship, and virtually the only U.S. ministers empowered by Congress to negotiate treaties on America's behalf Their responsibilities today would occupy hundreds of State Department employees. But in 1786, the United States, with slightly more than 3 million people, had a population scarcely equaling that of present-day Iowa or Connecticut. Its leaders were as well known to one another as members of an exclusive club. Because of the very recent experience of the Revolution, they typically presented a united front to the world, although at times they might disagree among themselves. Thus, no diplomatic meltdown occurred when Jefferson and Adams discovered that they disagreed over how to deal with the Barbary States. Friends since 1775, when they had served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson and edited by his colleagues, Jefferson looked upon Adams, eight years his senior, as a mentor, and Adams regarded Jefferson as a protégé. They were in the habit of sharing their views, and agreed to do so now, in a series of candid letters—Adams the pragmatist favoring tribute, and Jefferson the idealist, war.

Adams observed that the loss of the Mediterranean trade would cost more than tribute, as would war. Therefore, tribute was preferable. In the best Enlightenment fashion, Adams set forth four propositions:

“From these premises, I conclude it to be the wisest for us to negotiate and pay the necessary sum without loss of time.”

What did Jefferson think? Adams wanted to know. “If you admit them all, do you admit the conclusion? Perhaps you will say, fight them, though it should cost us a great sum to carry on the war, and although, at the end of it, we should have more money to pay as presents. If this is your sentiment, and you can persuade the southern States into it, I dare answer for it that all from Pennsylvania, inclusively northward, would not object. It would be a good occasion to begin a navy.”

This last ringing phrase would resonate through the years. It was odd that the man who uttered it would commonly be mischaracterized as having opposed war with Barbary. Adams was certain America would win once it resolved to fight, “but the difficulty of bringing our people to agree upon it, has ever discouraged me....” It was too bad there was no support for a war, because it would be “heroical and glorious” at a time when “the policy of Christendom has made cowards of all their sailors before the standard of Mahomet.” Realistically, though, there was neither money nor public support for a war, Adams said, concluding that the immediate goal should be to restore the Mediterranean trade and nothing more; its absence was simply too costly. “At present we are sacrificing a million annually, to save one gift of 200,000 pounds. This is not good economy. We might, at this hour, have two hundred ships in the Mediterranean, whose freights alone would be worth 200,000 pounds, besides the influence upon the price of our produce.”

Jefferson replied with one of the most eloquent letters that he ever wrote. “I acknowledge, I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war,” he began. “Though it is a question with which we have nothing to do, yet as you propose some discussion of it, I shall trouble you with my reasons.” He agreed with Adams's first three propositions. “As to the fourth, that the longer the negotiation is delayed, the larger will be the demand; this will depend on the intermediate captures: if they are many and rich, the price may be raised; if few and poor, it will be lessened.”