Jefferson's War (9 page)

A better policy would be to dictate peace through the expedient of war, through the agency of a navy. Jefferson gave six reasons, the first three reflecting his idealized vision of America:

Jefferson then performed some dubious math. Building the 150-gun naval fleet he envisioned would cost 450,000 pounds sterling, and maintaining it, he claimed, 45,000 pounds annually—little more than what annual tribute might cost. America should build a small navy, war or no, to protect trade, he reasoned, and keeping it idle would still entail cost—fully half the price of having it patrol the western Mediterranean. Therefore, “we have a right to
say that only twenty-two thousand and five hundred pounds sterling, per annum, should be charged to the Algerine war.”

His sixth reason, “It will be as effectual,” was predicated on his recollection that France once was able to dictate treaty terms to Algiers after a three-month blockade. The United States also could establish a blockade, aided by Naples and Portugal, and perhaps other nations as well.

Adams conceded there were excellent reasons for going to war with the Barbary States. “The resolution to fight them would raise the spirits and courage of our countrymen immediately, and we might obtain the glory of finally breaking up these nests of banditti.” But while glory and fighting spirit were admirable ideals, they were too insubstantial to justify a war that would end only in a purchased peace, and that would harm America more than Barbary. “If We take a Vessell of theirs We get nothing but a bad Vessell fit only to burn, a few Guns and a few Barbarians, whom We may hang or enslave if We will, and the Unfeeling Tyrants whose Subjects they are will think no more of it, than if We had killed so many CatterPillars upon an Apple tree. When they take a Vessell of ours, they not only get a rich Prize, but they enslave the Men and if there is among them a Man of any Rank or Note they demand most exorbitant ransoms for them.” Moreover, “congress will never, or at least not for years, take any such resolution, and in the mean time our trade and honor suffers beyond calculation. We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever. This thought, I fear, is too rugged for our people to bear.” Adams saw all too well that their debate, stimulating as it might be, was of no consequence. “... I perceive that neither force nor money will be applied. Our States are so backward, that they will do nothing for some years.”

Adams's words tellingly described the United States under the weak Articles of Confederation, which emphasized the sovereignty of individuals and states at the expense of the federal government. The Confederation government first had to obtain the approval of nine of the thirteen states before taking any important action. Nine states seldom agreed on anything, even foreign trade, which to a large extent was left up to the individual states, and with chaotic results: states vying with and undercutting one another to snatch foreign markets. The treasury was heavily in debt from the Revolutionary War. In 1785, the government sold the last Continental Navy warship, the
Alliance,
to pay off some of the debt. The Confederation Congress's sole tax, the postage stamp, paid for mail delivery only.

A navy couldn't very well be built with postage stamps.

America's dilemma in the Mediterranean was painfully clear in Philadelphia. George Washington voiced the leaders' frustration. “It seems almost Nugatory to dispute about the best mode of dealing with the Algarines when we have neither money to buy their friendship nor the means of punishing them for their depredations upon our people & trade,” he wrote the Marquis de Lafayette in 1787. “If we could command the latter I should be clearly in sentiments with you and Mr. Jefferson, that chastisement would be more honorouble, and much to be preferred to the purchased friendship of these Barbarians—By me, who perhaps do not understand the policy by which the Maritime powers are actuated, it has ever been considered as reflecting the highest disgrace on them to become tributary to such a banditti, who might for half the sum that is paid them be exterminated from the Earth.”

John Jay, too, longed to wage war on Algiers. “‘I should not be
angry,'” the French ambassador said the foreign secretary told him, “‘if the Algerines came to burn some of our maritime Towns, in order to restore to the United States their former energy, which peace and Commerce have almost destroyed. War alone can bring together the various States, and give a new importance to Congress....'” Jay also confided to Jefferson, “If we act properly, I shall not be very sorry for it. In my Opinion it may lay the Foundation for a Navy, and tend to draw us more closely into a foederal System.”

 

Years before the Abdrahaman meeting, before the capture of the three American merchantmen by Morocco and Algiers, Jefferson had advocated building a navy to stand up to the Barbary States. As was to be his lifelong habit, Jefferson shared his ideas with his fellow Virginians, confidants and proteges, James Madison and James Monroe. “We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce,” he wrote to Madison in November 1784. “Can we begin it on a more honourable occasion or with a weaker foe? I am of opinion [John] Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy their commerce; not by attempting bombardments as the Mediterranean states do ... but by constant cruising and cutting them to peices by peicemeal.” He confided his private assay of the Barbary States' naval strength to Monroe. “These pyrates are contemptibly weak,” he concluded. Morocco, he said, had four or five frigates of 18 or 20 guns. Tripoli floated a single frigate, and Tunis, three or four, every one of them “small & worthless.” Algiers was more formidable with 16 ships carrying 22 to 52 guns. He was decidedly unimpressed with them all. “... the vessels of all these powers are wretched in the last degree, being mostly built of the discordant peices of
other vessels which they take & pull asunder.” War, as he would repeatedly declare, was the only currency besides bribes and tribute that the Barbary States respected. He neatly summarized his thoughts on the subject in a striking aphorism: “A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”

 

Odd as it may seem, Morocco's seizure of the
Betsey
wasn't so much an act of war as a cry for attention. Emperor Sidi Muhammad ibn Abd Allah, arguably the mildest, wisest Barbary ruler at the time, had had a rooting interest in the upstart colonists during the Revolutionary War, a strange attitude for a monarch. For years, he had anticipated diplomatic relations with the American republic. Back in 1780, with the war's outcome by no means decided, the emperor had told U.S. consuls from Spain that if America won independence from England, he wished to sign a treaty. It was more than just a pecuniary interest; Sidi Muhammad genuinely wanted to be one of the first rulers to recognize the new nation.

Sidi Muhammad grew impatient when four years passed without a U.S. envoy arriving in Tangier. In 1784 he ordered his corsairs to seize American shipping, extremely scarce in the Mediterranean that year. The
Betsey
was taken in October. Alcaid Driss, the emperor's secretary, explained to William Carmichael, interim U.S. charge d‘affaires in Madrid, in December that America had brought the misfortune on itself by disregarding Sidi Muhammad. “It is not surprising then that he should use his rights, in such sort however that the Vessel with its Crew shall be returned provided that Congress thinks proper to send as soon as possible a Charge d'Affaires or Consul for the purpose of making peace with this August African Monarch.” The emperor anticipated an envoy bearing generous gifts.

In the meantime, he impulsively displayed his benevolence toward America by sending the
Betsey
's crewmen to the Atlantic port of Mogadore and giving them the run of the city, instead of sending them into slavery. He also instructed his corsairs not to capture any more American merchant ships, but “to show them every favour, due to the most friendly powers; being fully determined to do much, when an opportunity offers.” By July 1785 he had decided to release the
Betsey
and her crew, although no U.S. envoy had yet appeared in Tangier. Sidi Muhammad's long wait ended in 1786, with Thomas Barclay's arrival. The envoy and the emperor quickly concluded the best treaty America would make in Barbary in thirty years: $10,000 in presents and no annual tribute.

 

Algiers showed no compunction to deliver up the
Dauphin
and
Maria
and their twenty-one crewmen, so John Lamb, a Norwich, Connecticut, merchant and sea captain, was dispatched to ransom them. Ignorant of the dey's capacity for greed, Adams and Jefferson instructed Lamb to spend no more than $200 per man, laughably inadequate when it turned out Algiers wanted $3,000 each. Unsurprisingly, Lamb's mission was a disaster. With the report on his failed effort, Lamb passed along even more disturbing news: that Algiers had seized the ships possibly at the urging of Charles Logie, England's consul in Algiers. Lamb it turned out, hadn't been a paragon of diplomacy himself while in Algiers, but had ill-advisedly confided in Logie. Richard O‘Brien, master of the
Dauphin
and a future U.S. consul to Algiers, wrote to Jefferson that Logie “I believe got all his [Lamb's] secrets from him.” Moreover, he had also spoken with open contempt of France and Spain—in “the most vulgar language that it is with pain we see him so unworthy of this commission and the cloth he wore.”

Britain's antipathy toward American trade in the Mediterranean was no secret. English businessmen liked to think of Algerian piracy as a cornerstone of their Mediterranean trade. “If there were no Algiers, England ought to build one,” Adams had reported them saying in 1783. Lord Sheffield expanded on this theme in
Observations on the commerce of the American States
the same year. He shrewdly recognized the vital importance to Britain of the “carrying trade”—the ability to transport goods from all countries in English merchant ships—as well as the threat to it posed by America. For these reasons, the Algerian pirates were a godsend. “That the Barbary States are advantageous to the maritime powers is certain. If they were suppressed, the little States of Italy, &c. would have much more of the carrying trade.” As for the Americans, Lord Sheffield believed that without Britain's navy as a bulwark, they were defenseless against the corsairs and must abandon any plans to establish a thriving Mediterranean trade, for, as he put it dismissively, “... they cannot pretend to a navy.”

After Lamb's failure in Algiers, Jefferson appealed to the Mathurins, the Redemptionist order. They had recently ransomed 300 Frenchmen from Algiers at $500 apiece. The friars' success encouraged Jefferson in the wildly optimistic belief that they might be able to gain the American captives' freedom for $200, by acting as a disinterested third party. Willing to make the attempt, the Mathurins said the ploy had a slim chance of working only if the U.S. government pretended a complete lack of concern for the prisoners' welfare, and cut off the trickle of extra cash it was sending the consuls in Portugal and Spain who, in turn, had slipped it to the captives through the Spanish consul in Algiers. The money paid for extra clothing and food. When the payments stopped, the captives were forced back on a semistarvation diet
and had to wear thin, ragged garments. They implored Congress, Jefferson, and Adams to resume the stipends.

The captives' renewed suffering was to no good purpose, for the Algerians were unwilling to lower their ransom price; slaves happened to be in scarce supply at the time. Jefferson raised the sum he was willing to pay to $550 per captive, but by then the situation had changed altogether. Amid the French Revolution's early rumblings, the Mathurins, fixtures in Barbary for nearly 200 years, recalled all the friars to France. Soon, the vast landholdings that had sustained the Mathurins' merciful enterprises through the centuries were confiscated, and the good friars were seen no more in North Africa.

 

 

For a public man, Thomas Jefferson was remarkably reticent and shrank from confrontations, letting Madison fight many of his battles for him while he watched from the wings. But when his ideals were affronted, Jefferson was capable of retaliating ruthlessly.

An example of Jefferson's capacity for vindictiveness occurred during the War for Independence, when Henry Hamilton, the British commander in Ohio and Kentucky, was captured by Virginia militiamen. The colonists hated Hamilton for reputedly buying scalps from Britain's Indian allies and encouraging them to commit atrocities. The militia brought him to Williamsburg in chains and before the Virginia governor, Thomas Jefferson.

Under the wartime rules, high-ranking officers commonly were paroled or exchanged. But Hamilton's actions so incensed Jefferson that he ignored custom and instead ordered him put in irons and denied visitors and even writing materials. Hamilton had surrendered to George Rogers Clark, the leader of the Virginia
militia, only after Clark had agreed to certain conditions regarding his treatment. Jefferson refused to honor any of these terms. Threatened by the British with retaliation against American prisoners if Hamilton were not paroled, George Washington appealed to Jefferson—to no avail. Jefferson stubbornly refused to release Hamilton. He held him for a full year before finally paroling him, and only after forcing Hamilton to sign an agreement whose terms Hamilton disputed even as he put his name to it.