Читать книгу The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service 1776–1924. Revised Second Edition - Charles Stuart Kennedy - Страница 7

Several years prior to the deterioration of relations with France that led to outright naval hostilities, the United States had made settlements of sorts with the Barbary States. The pressure on the President and Congress to remedy the intolerable condition was severe and getting worse, when in 1794 the United States entered into a second round of negotiations with Algiers, then the most powerful state on the Barbary Coast. The diplomatic process was slow, difficult, and painful, since it required the payment of tribute. Without this annual “payoff” no American shipping could be safe, no captives released, and no consuls installed. American ships were being taken in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Not only were ships and cargoes lost, but Americans were captured and used as slaves in the Barbary ports.

Responding to the concerns of shipping interests and the pleas of the families of those Americans held as slaves, President Washington authorized David Humphreys, his minister to Portugal, to see what he could do to bring about peace with Algiers and have the American captives released. At the same time Washington asked Congress to authorize the building of a navy, comprising six frigates, in case military force became necessary.

An approach to the Algerians had been made two years earlier in 1792, when Secretary of State Jefferson appointed the Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones, then residing in Paris, to be the consul in Algiers.1 He was authorized to go as high as $25,000 to negotiate a peace agreement with that state, a laughable sum when compared to what it actually cost the United States several years later. But by the time his commission arrived in France, Jones was dead. The commission was then transferred to Consul General Thomas Barclay in Paris, who had previously served as the successful negotiator with Morocco, but he too died before he could set sail for Algiers. The ill-fated commission then devolved upon David Humphreys, minister to Portugal. Humphreys’ attempt to negotiate with the dey of Algiers was a complete failure. According to the Swedish consul acting as intermediary, the dey would not receive Humphreys because of pending peace treaties with the Dutch and Portuguese. That ruler could not afford to be at peace with the United States at the same time.2 The dey needed employment for his corsairs, because if there was no prospect of booty and slaves, they might turn on him. Humphreys conceded at this point.

Two years later Humphreys was to try again, this time with permission to expend up to $800,000 for a treaty and ransom of the American captives, a more realistic sum than the $25,000 allocated before.3 Humphreys recruited Joseph Donaldson to carry on the negotiations in Algiers and Joel Barlow in Paris to help Humphreys get French support. Acting as an intermediary between Donaldson and the dey was a captive slave, James Cathcart, one of the first Americans to fall into the hands of the Algerians. He had been captured in 1785. In fact, Cathcart had been captured twice, once as a young midshipman on an American naval vessel taken by the British in the Revolutionary War. He escaped from the British, but not from the Algerians. He had worked his way up in the slave hierarchy, starting as a keeper in the dey’s zoo, then moving through the clerical ranks. He was manager of the prison tavern until he became chief Christian secretary to the dey.4 Cathcart was fluent in Arabic and privy to the dey’s confidence, which made him a useful ally. He also had a personal stake in the negotiations; he would be one of the first freed if things went well for the American side.

The treaty and ransom for the captives were not cheap; the United States paid a total of $642,500 and an annual tribute of $21,600 in naval stores.5 The treaty, sent back to America, was ratified by the Senate in March 1796 but could not go into effect until the dey had his tribute in hand, to be paid in gold and silver coins. To obtain the money as soon as possible, the dey sent another American slave, Richard O’Brien, to collect it from the Barings, British bankers, who had the note of the United States. Unfortunately, because of the unsettled conditions in Europe at the time, the Barings did not have the necessary specie on hand. O’Brien then went to Humphreys for instructions and was sent scouting for specie among Italian bankers.

The dey threatened to renew hostilities if he did not get his money at once. Joel Barlow, who had been working with Humphreys in Paris, hurried down to Algiers with gifts he had bought on behalf of the United States to present to the dey as part of the treaty; Barbary rulers insisted on their douceurs, lavish “sweeteners” before they would sign any agreement.

Barlow was one of a series of remarkable Americans who were to serve as consular officers on the Barbary Coast during the early days of the Republic. A graduate of Yale College and a classmate and lifelong friend of Noah Webster, the lexicographer, Barlow was a leading intellectual and a poet well known as a political and social critic of his time. He went to France in 1788 primarily to sell land in Ohio to Frenchmen. He was popular in intellectual circles, both in England and France, but he had little success as a land salesman. Excited by the ferment in France after the Revolution, he wrote several political tracts that led to his being made a French citizen. He even ran, unsuccessfully, for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies.6

David Humphreys, also a Yale graduate and mentor of Barlow’s, sought to draw Barlow back into the orbit of his native country by recruiting his help with the Algerian negotiations. In Algiers Barlow quickly put the treaty process in its proper framework as he reported to the Secretary of State on the dey and his principal officers. He noted that the Algerians’ pattern in making a treaty was to allow the nation to enjoy free navigation for a time, and then make a frivolous or unjust excuse for abrogating the treaty. Thereupon the cycle would recommence with the “offending” nation paying enormous tribute to the dey in order to restore peace and free use of the seas. Even England and France, whose naval strength exempted them from this cycle, deemed it expedient to spend great amounts of money on “occasional presents.”7 It was Barlow’s opinion that no peace with Algiers would last more than seven years.

Despite his justified pessimism about the duration of any peace, Barlow had to deal with the immediate problem. There were about a hundred American captives to be redeemed. If the treaty were rejected due to the lack of specie to pay for it, the cost, Barlow believed, would be greater the next time the Americans came to deal with the dey, and by that time more Americans would have been captured.8 In desperation and responding to hints emanating from the ruler’s court, Barlow offered the dey a thirty-six-gun frigate to be built in America to be “presented to his daughter” if the dey would delay for six months more before abrogating the treaty, with the expectation that the tribute would arrive before that time.9 Barlow made other commitments, including increasing the traditional “consular present” given to the rulers when a new consul arrived from $17,000 to $27,500.10 He won the extension of time and the treaty. The dey got his gold and silver coins, and eventually his daughter became the owner of a brand-new frigate, the Crescent. The American prisoners were released, including Cathcart and O’Brien, and, for the time being, the Algerian corsairs preyed on ships of other nations.

Getting the money to the dey, even when it had been collected from Italian bankers, was not without difficulty. O’Brien, who was still technically a slave of the dey, was finally able to put together the agreed sum and set sail for Algiers, but his ship was captured by a Tripolitan corsair and released only after some delay on the part of the pasha of Tripoli, who must have lusted after his brother ruler’s gold and silver but did not dare to cross him.”11

Barlow’s achievements in signing a treaty with Algiers, obtaining the release of the captive Americans, and gaining permission to have an American consul in residence in Algiers, were significant, but the cost was immense. Ransoms, presents, and other forms of tribute came to almost a million dollars. Even more, a dangerous precedent was set in equipping the dey’s fleet with a powerful frigate. The other rulers of the Barbary States, the emperor, pasha, bey, and dey all had daughters who might want their own frigates. Frigates would figure in future negotiations with other rulers and their successors. A thirty-six-gun frigate was a powerful warship for a small country. The 1794 naval bill Washington had sponsored to give the United States a navy (if the Algerian negotiations broke down) called for four forty-four-gun and two thirty-six-gun frigates, and that was the total navy. What Barlow had done was to arm Algiers better than his own country, since Congress had stipulated that its naval construction was to cease if there was an Algerian peace.

While negotiations were dragging on in Algiers, there was a threat that the peace made with Morocco in 1787 by Thomas Barclay would fall apart. The emperor had died, and after a fight for the succession was followed by his son Mulcy Soliman. The new emperor asked for tribute. The Secretary of State delegated James Simpson, his consul in Gibraltar, to deal with the new ruler. Simpson sailed across the Straits to Morocco with gifts for the emperor, mostly military equipment such as cannons, small arms, and gun powder, but refused to consider annual tribute.12 Good fortune was again on the side of the United States in dealing with Morocco, for the emperor was called away from his negotiations to deal with an insurrection elsewhere in his country. To settle the matter before leaving, the emperor told Simpson: “The Americans, I find, are the Christian nation my father, who is in glory, most esteemed. I am the same with them as my father was; and I trust they will be so with me.”13 He thereupon agreed to the renewal of the favorable 1787 treaty, which did not call for tribute. Simpson was then moved from Gibraltar to Morocco in order that the Americans might have a consular presence there.

Having made a new Algerian treaty and having renewed the Moroccan treaty, the United States turned next to the Barbary state of Tripoli. President Washington commissioned David Humphreys to negotiate the treaty. Humphreys passed the commission to Joseph Donaldson and Joel Barlow, who in turn commissioned O’Brien, the recently released slave of the dey of Algiers.

Richard O’Brien was born in Maine, but as a child his family took him to Ireland. When his father, died he went to sea at an early age and during the American Revolution served both on as a privateer and in the Continental navy as a lieutenant. After the war he became the master of a ship out of Philadelphia, which was captured in 1785 by the Algerians. As with Cathcart, his fellow slave, O’Brien worked his way into the esteem of his Algerian masters, becoming a supervisor in the port’s naval yard.14 During the negotiations with the United States the dey trusted O’Brien’s integrity and sent him to Europe to bring home the tribute.

In bargaining with the pasha in Tripoli, O’Brien drew upon all the skills he had acquired in his ten years of captivity in Algiers. The Tripolitan ruler was familiar with the dey’s success in extracting money from the Americans, but did not have as powerful a fleet of corsairs or nearly as many American prisoners as the Algerian. A treaty in 1796 was agreed upon at a cost to the United States of approximately $57,000.15 Although the negotiation seemed cheap, compared to the nearly one million dollars paid to the Algerians, the treaty with Tripoli soon collapsed. For years the United Slates engaged in an off-and-on war with Tripoli.

Barlow, the American consul in Algiers, took on the negotiations with the bey of Tunis, who rejected Barlow’s offer of as much as $80,000 to conclude a peace, but through an intermediary an agreement was reached at a cost to the United States of about $107,000. There were problems with parts of the treaty and in 1798 the Senate required certain modifications. The negotiators tasked with settling the American objections to the treaty were James Cathcart, now the new American consul to Tripoli, and William Eaton, a new man to the Barbary Coast, who had been appointed consul to Tunis. After much haggling, Cathcart and Eaton received the dey’s reluctant agreement to alterations in the Tunisian treaty, which the Senate approved in 1800.16

The year 1800 saw U.S. consuls established in Morocco, Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis and the Barbary corsairs under instructions to refrain from capturing American ships. The work of the American consuls on the Barbary Coast, however, remained difficult. Joel Barlow had left Algiers, succeeded by Richard O’Brien as supervising consul general for the Barbary States. The Barbary rulers were not comfortable with Cathcart and O’Brien, who, because of their years of slavery, were far more knowledgeable about Barbary ways than their European consular counterparts. Both spoke fluent Arabic and presumably knew some embarrassing secrets, which made them formidable representatives of the United States. The two ex-slaves turned consuls detested each other. O’Brien was a rough-and-ready, self-educated seafaring man who had worked his way up in the dey’s shipyards, while Cathcart, better educated, had risen in the ruler’s administrative ranks as a clerk. Eaton and Cathcart looked down upon O’Brien; having him as their consul general did not enhance the relationship among the three, especially as both Eaton and Cathcart had hot tempers and were difficult to work with.17 The tension created by their relative social positions was not lessened when O’Brien married an Englishwoman who had been a maidservant in Cathcart’s household.18

The work of the consuls was difficult since peace treaty commitments rested lightly with the Barbary rulers. They were continually testing the Americans and the consuls of other nations to see what they could extract from them as tribute or gifts. Going to war with a nation was a purely economic decision; a pretext could always be found. As the youngest maritime nation and with almost no navy, the United States was a particular target for the whims of the various rulers, agreeing to stiff tribute payments, especially to Algiers. There were a growing number of American merchant ships ripe for the plucking in the Mediterranean and the approaching waters.

A serious incident occurred in September 1800 when the American frigate George Washington, fresh from the quasi-war with France, appeared at Algiers, carrying the annual tribute. The dey needed to send an ambassador to Constantinople with gifts to maintain the sultan’s favor. Arrogantly, the dey demanded that the George Washington carry his ambassador with gifts to the Sublime Porte. Consul General O’Brien and Captain William Bainbridge of the frigate at first refused, but the situation was precarious. The George Washington had unsuspectingly moored and was vulnerable if the capricious ruler were to order an attack, which would surely bring an end to the costly peace that had taken so long for the United States to achieve.

Bowing to force majeure, Bainbridge took the Algerian ambassador to Constantinople, flying the Algerian banner instead of the American flag as he entered that port. Still, it was the first U.S. naval vessel to call at that port. When the George Washington returned with the ambassador, Bainbridge prudently anchored out of range of the dey’s batteries. The Jefferson administration, which had recently come to power, quite properly considered the commandeering of the George Washington as a major humiliation to the United States. The Secretary of the Navy warned Consul General O’Brien not to let such a thing happen again.19 American patience was running out.

In the spring of 1801, with the French naval war over, the United States sent its first naval squadron, consisting of four ships under Commodore Richard Dale, to the Mediterranean to show the flag and demonstrate that America was not an eagle without talons. The squadron of observation, as it was termed, arrived at Gibraltar only to learn that the pasha of Tripoli had declared war on the United States. The pasha had increased his demands on Consul Cathcart for more tribute and, getting nowhere, had decided that war would be more profitable. Cathcart reported to the secretary of state that the pasha “declared war against the United States and would take down our flag staff on Thursday the 14th inst. of May 1801. That if I pleased to remain in Tripoli I should be treated with respect but if I pleased I might so go away.”20 Cathcart left after the pasha’s men chopped down the consular flagpole as a symbolic gesture, meaning that a state of war existed between Tripoli and America. The pasha unleashed his corsairs, two of which were shortly trapped in the port of Gibraltar by the arrival of the American squadron of observation.

Before proceeding to Tripoli, Commodore Dale stopped in Tunis. The arrival of the small squadron was fortuitous for Consul Eaton because the dey had been demanding more military equipment and threatening war if he did not get it. The presence of the American frigates stilled the demands for a time.24 Off Tripoli Dale communicated with the pasha through the Danish consul but was unable to settle matters. A few Tripolitans were captured and exchanged for some American prisoners, but when Dale ran short of supplies, he sailed back to Gibraltar. This was to be the pattern for most of the war with Tripoli. Although the pasha did not have the ships to challenge the American fleet, the United States Navy could not keep a tight blockade on Tripoli because of frequent storms and the need to replenish supplies. There were some ship actions when American naval vessels encountered corsairs in the Mediterranean. The United States Navy always triumphed in these skirmishes, but Tripoli was not mortally wounded.

At the beginning of this war, William Eaton in Tunis, declared that Tripoli was blockaded, a declaration that for a time kept Tunisian ships from supplying Tripoli. It soon became apparent that this was only a paper blockade, for Dale’s ships were in Gibraltar. Not only was Eaton bluffing the Tunisians with a blockade that did not exist, he was hatching a plot with Cathcart to unseat the pasha of Tripoli. The pasha’s brother Hamet could claim the rulership if his brother Yusuf were deposed.22 The prospect of using Hamet to get rid of Yusuf was first raised by Eaton and Cathcart in the spring of 1802. Nothing came of the idea at that time, but the seed had been planted back in the new Capitol in Washington.

The Tripolitan war was to drag on until 1805. The American consuls in Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis were busy trying to keep their respective rulers friendly, not an easy task since the sporadic activity of the United States Navy was interfering with their trade with Tripoli. For example, in 1802 the Emperor of Morocco asked the American Consul James Simpson to allow him to send grain to Tripoli since the Moroccans had a surplus and a profit was to be made. Simpson tried to get the naval commander to permit this breach of the less-than-complete blockade. The commodore’s reply was that a blockade was a blockade.23 The Emperor responded with a declaration of war, but withdrew the declaration after receiving presents from the United States. Later, when the blockade was temporarily abandoned, the Emperor was able to ship grain to Tripoli.

The American consuls in the Barbary States and the Mediterranean ports of Spain, France, and Italy came up against an American trait that plagues consuls to this day. Freeborn Americans do not take kindly to officials of their government telling them what to do, even if it is for their own good. The consuls desperately wanted to keep American merchant ships out of the reach of the corsairs from Tripoli and warned them away. Americans held captive in the pasha’s prison would strengthen the pasha’s hand, prolong the war, and make negotiations that much more difficult and expensive. The masters of American ships resented the advice of their consuls and continued to be captured by Tripoli.

There were changes in the consular ranks on the Barbary Coast. In 1802 O’Brien left Algiers, and James Cathcart, more or less at loose ends when he had to leave Tripoli, was named as his replacement. The dey of Algiers would not accept Cathcart, claiming that his character was not suitable, which may have meant that the dey did not want someone as familiar with the Algerian scene as the former chief Christian clerk. When Eaton, who was always difficult, was ordered out of Tunis by the dey because of a dispute over money, he designated George Davis, a doctor off a U.S. naval vessel, to be acting consul. Later the Secretary of State sent Tobias Lear to relieve O’Brien, who remained along with Cathcart as an advisor to the navy.

Lear was experienced, having served as consul at Santo Domingo, replacing Edward Stevens. Prior to his first appointment as consul, Lear had been George Washington’s private secretary for the last seven years of the leader’s life (1792–99). He had the distinction of marrying two of Martha Washington’s nieces (the first niece died prior to his marriage to the second).24

Lear arrived in Algiers at a critical time. Disaster had struck the American cause. In October 1803 the thirty-six-gun frigate Philadelphia ran aground under the guns of the pasha of Tripoli while chasing a Tripolitan ship. The captain was compelled to surrender. The pasha had three hundred American naval officers and seamen as his prisoners and a frigate at his disposal. Later, in a daring exploit, young Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and a small crew of seamen were able to slip past the pasha’s guards and set fire to the Philadelphia, destroying it. But the pasha still had his American captives, an advantage that weighed heavily in later negotiations.

The American fleet made several efforts to bombard the pasha into a peace treaty, but with little success, although the blockade became more effective as the number of American naval ships in the Mediterranean increased. While these actions were taking place, the former consul to Tunis, William Eaton, had turned to the United States (after the dey had expelled him) to push his and Cathcart’s plan for a land campaign against Tripoli, using the pasha’s brother Hamet as the lever. Hamet, however, proved an ineffectual tool on which to base any political scheme or military campaign, for he was indecisive, willing one day to compromise with his brother, ready the next to unseat him.

Eaton was a man of determination who had worked his way up in the small American army, performing some difficult missions that earned him the attention of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, who appointed him consul in Tunis. In the United States, Eaton won the approval of President Jefferson to pursue his plan to use Hamet, but if Samuel Barron, the naval commander in the Mediterranean, thought it practical.

Barron, caught by some of Eaton’s enthusiasm, helped him launch one of the strangest campaigns ever sponsored by the United States. Eaton, now a “naval agent,” landed in Egypt with a squad of U.S. marines, money, and weapons to help recruit an army, which was made up of about 300 Arabs, 38 Greeks, and a few men of other nationalities, giving him a force of around 400. Hamet was reluctantly persuaded to join. The bellicose Eaton then attacked Tripoli from the rear, driving this motley army across 500 miles of almost impassable desert. At one point there was an attempted mutiny; Eaton personally beheaded the ringleaders, which inspired his men to continue the march. His campaign reached a climax when he took the Tripolitan town of Derne from the rear while a squadron of American ships bombarded it from the sea. 25

As a military march this was a magnificent achievement and earned immortality in the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” in the well-known “Marines’ Hymn”. As a military campaign it was a more modest accomplishment; Eaton and his little army were soon besieged in Derne and were dependent on American naval support to keep from being overwhelmed.

While “General” Eaton was conducting his cross-desert campaign, Commodore Barron and Consul General Lear were examining more coldblooded options for peace. To them it became apparent that Hamet was a person too weak to support with any expectation that he could last as a ruler; he would be useless as the keystone for building a foundation of peace. The 300 captives off the Philadelphia were in jeopardy with Yusuf threatening to kill them, which probably was a bluff, but it was unwise to risk so many American lives. For his part, the pasha was ready to come to some sort of an agreement; he found that the Americans were taking his declaration of war far more seriously than had the Europeans. Even worse, the war was dragging on with that madman Eaton attacking from across the desert.

Lear and the Pasha Yusuf, after some negotiations using the Spanish consul in Tripoli as intermediary, reached an agreement in June 1805. The treaty called for the exchange of all prisoners, a payment to Yusuf of $60,000 because he had more Americans than the United States Navy had Tripolitans, and a restoration of peace between the two countries. Included in the treaty was the withdrawal of Eaton’s force from Derne.26 Eaton was angry when he heard of the treaty and the $60,000 to be paid. He felt that with the proper backing he could have taken Tripoli and installed Hamet as the ruler. It is doubtful whether Eaton could have broken the siege of Derne with his unreliable force, marched to Tripoli, and taken it from Yusuf. In his negotiations Lear had made a bad mistake in allowing Yusuf to keep Hamet’s family under his control for at least four more years.27 This clause in the treaty was originally kept secret for good reason, since it virtually abandoned Hamet after he had been dragooned into joining Eaton’s campaign against Yusuf. The peace with Tripoli held, despite the unhappiness of Eaton and others in the United States over the money paid, the chance for further military glory lost, and the desertion of Hamet. George Davis, who had been acting consul in Tunis before he was transferred to Tripoli in 1807, was able to get Harriet’s family released. When Eaton returned to the United States, he denounced the treaty but soon suffered eclipse as American attention turned from the coast of North Africa to problems with Great Britain.28

American relations with the Barbary States after the end of the war with Tripoli in 1805 continued to be troubled. The bey of Tunis threatened war over the seizure of a Tunisian ship trying to run the blockade of Tripoli in the waning days of the war. Lear and the now quite large American squadron in North African waters in an impressive show of strength sailed to Tunis and were able to settle matters peacefully.

After the peace with Tripoli, the United States began to keep its small fleet closer to home because of increasing difficulties caused by Great Britain’s interference with American shipping and the impressments of American seamen. In 1812, as relations between America and Britain moved toward conflict, the dey of Algiers expelled Consul General Lear, claiming that the United States had not lived up to its treaty commitments, and ordered his corsairs to attack American shipping. The timing could not have been worse for the Algerian side, since war had now begun between the United States and Britain, with the British navy picking up almost all American merchantmen in the Mediterranean. An Algerian ship captured one American vessel, the brig Edwin out of Salem, and twelve captives ended up in the dey’s hands. The American consuls in Tunis and Cadiz, with the surprising assistance of the British consul in Algiers, were able to get some of the captives ransomed in 1814, but the rest remained captives until after the war.

Although the British navy had bottled up the much smaller American one in its harbors by the end of the 1812–15 war, the American navy had acquitted itself well in a series of frigate encounters in the earlier part of the war. Most of the United States Navy was intact when hostilities ceased in 1815.

With the conflict with England out of the way, President Madison turned American attention to the dey of Algiers and his fellow Barbary rulers. At Madison’s request Congress declared war on Algiers on 2 March 1815, Commodore Stephen Decatur set sail from New York with a squadron of three frigates, two sloops of war, three brigs, two schooners, and one new consul general to the Barbary States, William Shaler. The consul general designate, a former sea captain in the China trade, had served some years before as the American consul in Havana. He had also been sent on diplomatic missions in Europe during the War of 1812.29 Stephen Decatur was returning with zeal to the scene where he had earned international fame in burning the captive frigate Philadelphia under the guns of the pasha of Tripoli. He would not shrink from the task of bringing the corsair leaders to heel. Madison was sending a tough team to deal with the dey.

Decatur’s squadron, arriving off Gibraltar, captured the flagship and one other ship of the Algerian fleet and took more than 400 Algerians captive.30 When the American fleet anchored off the harbor of Algiers, the new dey found the defenses of his port in disrepair and what was left of his navy in poor shape; he was ready to listen to whatever Decatur and Shaler had to propose. The Americans demanded that all tributes cease, that all American prisoners be released without ransom, and that the dey pay an indemnity of $10,000 for seizing the Edwin in 1812. The dey would get back the prisoners and ships taken by the United States. The very idea that a Barbary ruler should actually pay indemnification was unprecedented, but forced to yield to superior power, the dey signed the treaty, and Shaler landed to take up his duties as consul general. He was to remain at the difficult post in Algiers for twelve years.

Decatur then took his fleet to Tunis and after consulting with the consul there, Mordecai Noah,31 demanded of the dey $46,000 in indemnity because, during the War of 1812, the dey had permitted the British navy to retake prizes brought into the supposedly neutral port of Tunis by American privateers. The dey of Tunis was as reluctant as the dey of Algiers to pay money to a Christian power, but he paid, and Decatur sailed to Tripoli with his fleet. During the British-American War the pasha had allowed American prizes to be retaken, and Decatur, with obvious relish, forced Yusuf to pay $25,000 and release some Christian captives.32

When the War of 1812 began, the British assured the dey of Algiers that they would sweep the American navy from the seas and that the Algerians had nothing to worry about in helping England. Three years later Decatur appeared with his flagship, the Guerriere, a former British frigate captured in a famous duel with the Constitution during 1812. The dey reportedly said to the British consul in Algiers: “You told us that the Americans would be swept from the seas in six months by your navy, and now they make war upon us with some of your own vessels which they have taken.”33

In 1816 the Algerian dey tried to change the unfavorable treaty concluded with Decatur and revert to the 1795 agreement that provided for tribute. He expelled the American consul general. Time, however, had run out for the Barbary corsairs, not only because the United States Navy was on the prowl, but because the end of the wars between England and France after the battle of Waterloo lessened the European tolerance for the rapacious acts of the corsairs. A large British-Dutch fleet in July 1816 bombarded Algiers, destroying most of its ships and the port area. The dey was forced to release all his Christian captives and abolish Christian slavery. Later in the same year Consul General Shaler returned to Algiers supported by a naval show of force and was able to make the dey accept Decatur’s treaty. As far as the United States was concerned, the power of the Barbary rulers had been broken, and Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers became backwater port cities where American consuls’ main worry was the plague and not the men of the pasha, or dey coming to the consulate to chop down the flagpole.

After 300 years of dominating the North African coast, the Barbary rulers were brought into line by a country across the Atlantic that did not even have a navy until the turn of the century, and had seemed willing to pay tribute rather than fight. In a short fifteen years, from 1800 to 1815, a former American consul had led an expedition across an impassable desert and taken one of their towns, and an American fleet had dictated a harsh peace including indemnities. These North African potentates found that the United States was different from European nations in that it did not encourage corsairs to attack commercial rivals. Tribute was bribery and was perhaps more repugnant to the Americans than to the sophisticated Europeans. Moral indignation was a powerful motivating force for the American naval commodores and consuls, a force Barbary rulers never quite understood.

During the time that relations with the Barbary States were of major concern to the United States, consuls were appointed for their demonstrated merit and accomplishments, not for domestic political reasons. This was a state of affairs that would not continue as partisan politics became predominant. The appointments of Cathcart and O’Brien brought into the consular service the two Americans most knowledgeable about the Barbary Coast. Joel Barlow was already a major intellectual figure at the time of his appointment, and while there could have been reasonable concern that he might be too sophisticated for Barbary tastes, he proved to be a tough negotiator. Tobias Lear had already served as a consul in a difficult post and was familiar with the political scene before he came to Algiers. William Eaton won his spurs in the army and was known as a bold and resourceful leader. William Shaler served as a consul in Havana and had diplomatic experience in Europe before going to North Africa. While these men did not always get on well together, they were as professional a team as any nation could have sent to such a trouble spot.