Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  At the court of Versailles, Jefferson acted in the role of a commercial attaché, promoting American exports of whale oil, furs, ships, naval stores, potash, grain, livestock, and tobacco. In return, he said, French manufactured goods could be imported into the United States, replacing those previously imported from England. Louis XVI’s foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, was sympathetic, but powerful French mercantile interests were determined to oppose any relaxation of trade barriers. When an August 1784 decree opened the French West Indies to American ships, the competition evoked a furious response from French shipowners. Thus torn, the Vergennes ministry tended to vacillate. “The Ministry are disposed to be firm,” Jefferson told James Monroe, but “there is a point at which they will give way.” As he predicted, American privileges were soon whittled down by countervailing decrees.

  Some of the smaller European powers were willing to expand trade links with the new nation. New agreements were signed with the Dutch, the Swedes, and the Russians. Frederick II of Prussia signed a trade agreement with the United States in July 1785, though he privately said he did not expect the American union to last. Negotiations with Austria and Portugal dragged on for years. In any case, none of these agreements could replace the loss of the British markets. It was increasingly clear that the United States would have to grasp for concessions from its recent enemy. This responsibility fell to John Adams, who received the news that he had been appointed the first American minister to the Court of St. James’s in May 1785.

  The London press greeted the arrival of an ambassador from the former colonies with a chorus of boos. Adams was said to be “pretty fat and flourishing,” an “imposter,” and a “pharisee of liberty.” “An Ambassador from America!” exclaimed the Public Advertiser. “Good heavens what a sound!…This will be such a phenomenon in the Corps Diplomatique that ’tis hard to say which can excite indignation most, the insolence of those who appoint the Character, or the meanness of those who receive [him].”

  Incensed by the attacks on her husband, Abigail Adams vented her spleen in letters to Jefferson. She characterized one newspaper report as “false—if it was not too rough a term for a Lady to use, I would say false as Hell, but I will substitute one not less expressive and say, false as the English.” She was appalled by the boxing matches she witnessed in the streets of her neighborhood, where she had “been repeatedly shocked to see Lads not more than ten years old striped and fighting untill the Blood flowed from every part, enclosed by a circle who were clapping and applauding the conqueror, stimulating them to continue the fight, and forcing every person from the circle who attempted to prevent it.” She associated the brutality of the street hooligans with the invective of the English newspapers. “Bred up with such tempers and principles, who can wonder at the licentiousness of their Manners, and the abuse of their pens?”

  Jefferson commiserated: “I would not give the polite, self-denying, feeling, hospitable, goodhumored people of [France] for ten such races of rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squibbing, carnivorous animals as those among whom you are.” He proposed a tongue-in-cheek explanation for this supposed difference in French and English manners: “I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilization.”

  Shortly after his arrival, Adams was escorted by the thirty-three-year-old Lord Carmarthen, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to be presented to George III at St. James’s Palace. Observing protocol, Adams bowed once upon entering the court chamber, a second time as he reached the middle of the room, and a third time as he stood directly before the king. Adams delivered a short speech, declaring it a “distinguished honor [to] stand in your Majesty’s presence in a diplomatic character,” and said he hoped his mission would restore the “old good nature and the old good humor between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.” The king was visibly emotional, and the meeting was “as gracious and agreeable as the reception given to the Ministers of any other foreign powers.”

  But Adams soon learned that the government of twenty-four-year-old Prime Minister William Pitt had no intention of letting America back into the British trading system. In one of his early meetings at 10 Downing Street, Adams pressed into Lord Carmarthen’s reluctant hands a proposed “Treaty of Commerce,” which would have established reciprocal rights of access for British and American ships. The ministers did not refuse the proposal outright. They stalled, and seemed content to go on stalling indefinitely. Adams began to suspect a conspiracy to reassert British sovereignty over the former colonies. “There is a strong propensity in this people to believe that America is weary of her independence,” he wrote in August, “that she wishes to come back; that the states are in confusion; Congress has lost its authority; the governments of the states have no influence; no laws, no order, poverty, distress, ruin, and wretchedness…. This they love to believe.”

  But England’s trade restrictions were founded on something more than spite. They were founded on a cogent understanding of seapower, and its contribution to the prosperity and security of the British Empire. A vast maritime trading establishment—British-built ships manned by British seamen engaged in the overseas “carrying trade”—was understood to be the well-spring from which England’s naval power was drawn. Strict exclusion of foreign ships from British ports, argued Lord Sheffield in one of his many essays on the subject, was the “basis of our great power at sea…if we alter that act, by permitting any state to trade with our islands…we sacrifice the marine of England.” Even Adam Smith, the free market visionary, accepted the principle of commercial exclusion in The Wealth of Nations: “The defence of Great Britain depends very much on the number of its sailors and shipping.”

  The British carrying trade, Adams realized, was the priority that trumped all others at Whitehall. “The words ‘Ship and Sailor’ still turn the Heads of this People,” he told Jefferson. “They grudge to every other People a single ship and a single seaman…. They seem at present to dread American Shipsand Seamen more than any other.” British resistance to free trade measures, he told Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin, was founded on military rather than economic considerations. “Seamen, the navy, the power to strike an awful blow to their enemies at sea, on the first breaking out of a war, are the ideas that prevail above all others.”

  PEACE WITH BRITAIN had removed the threat posed by the Royal Navy to American merchant ships, but it had also left them without the umbrella of protection the Royal Navy had provided before 1776. For the first time, the Stars and Stripes were seen on the high seas and in foreign seaports—but the flag was seen flying only on richly laden and defenseless merchant vessels, never on ships of war. Greedy eyes studied the ships of this new nation the way wolves study sheep. The British let it be known that the Americans no longer enjoyed their protection. The wolves were hungry; the sheep were fat, numerous, and slow; and there was not a shepherd in sight.

  The first attacks took place in the Mediterranean, where piracy had been practiced since the beginning of recorded history. The pirates in this case were from the four Barbary States of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, whose corsairs operated out of ancient seaports along the North African coast. Since the Islamic conquest of North Africa in the eighth century, these dusty, sun-drenched little city-states had pledged nominal allegiance to the Sultan of Turkey, but they were largely autonomous. Nested on the edge of the Mediterranean, with their backs to the North African desert, the Barbary States had little agriculture or industry to sustain them. Their traditional livelihood was piracy, and their traditional victims were the foreign merchant vessels that plied the Mediterranean trade routes close to their shores. Captured crew members were transported back into port in chains, where they were imprisoned, put to hard labor, or sold at slave markets. Women faced the prospect of being raped or sold into private harems. Prisoners who disobeyed or attempted to escape mi
ght be burned alive or impaled. That sub-Saharan Africans were subjected to the same cruelties by white masters in America did not prevent the news of such attacks from creating a sensation in the United States, where they inspired a genre of lurid fiction and plays.

  Because the Barbary societies worshipped Allah and prayed to Mecca five times per day, and because the corsairs often claimed to be at war with all infidels, the conflict was often cast in religious terms. But the real impetus behind Barbary piracy was not religious or political, but economic. The Bashaw of Tripoli freely admitted as much. If he forbade slave raiding, he told an American diplomat, his people would be ruined and he would most likely lose his head. “I do not fear war,” he declared. “It is my trade.”

  By the late eighteenth century, the major European powers could have snuffed out piracy in the Mediterranean without much trouble. Even acting alone, Britain could have put all four Barbary States out of business with two or three powerful naval squadrons combined with the threat of invasion by land. But the Barbary States and their corsairs were tolerated, perhaps even encouraged. From the mid-seventeenth century, a protection racket had evolved, whereby the nations that wished to ensure safe passage for their ships paid annual tribute to each Barbary ruler. In most cases, the decision to pay simply reflected a cold calculation that tribute was cheaper than the cost of constantly defending the vital Mediterranean trade routes. But Britain was playing a more devious game. It saw the ever present threat of Barbary piracy as a check against the growth of economic competition from smaller maritime rivals.

  By the mid-1780s, 100 American ships and 1,200 American sailors carried 20,000 tons of sugar, flour, rice, salted fish, and lumber to ports in the Mediterranean each year, returning with cargoes of wine, lemons, oranges, figs, opium, and olive oil. In July 1785, two American ships, the Maria and the Dauphin, were seized by Algerian corsairs. Twenty-two crewmen were transported to Algiers and thrown into dungeons among the slaves of other nations. They were dressed in coarse cloths, given a single dirty blanket each, and fed a daily ration of 15 ounces of bread. Most were set to work as ship riggers, longshoremen, porters, and draft animals. Some were forced to carry rocks and timber along a nine-mile path into the hills outside the city, dragging their chains and manacles behind them on the ground. They were often beaten or whipped, and always in fear for their lives. American leaders came under pressure to strike back at the pirates, to rescue their enslaved countrymen, and to prevent further attacks.

  The captives wrote to Thomas Jefferson, while he was stationed in Paris, begging him to raise funds to ransom them. “Our sufferings is beyond our expressing or your conception,” one wrote. “Hoping your Honor will be pleased to represent our grievances to Congress. Hoping they will take such measures as to tend to our speedy redemption.” The plight of the captives, wrote Jefferson, left him “absolutely suspended between indignation and impotence.” He asked the French government for assistance. Vergennes agreed to mediate with the Dey of Algiers, but insisted that America would have to follow the example of all the European maritime powers and pay tribute to the Barbary States. And since America had no naval force in the Mediterranean to protect its shipping, Vergennes added, that price was likely to be high: “Money and fear are the only two agents at Algiers.”

  Negotiations did not bear fruit. The Dey of Algiers demanded a huge payment in exchange for a peace treaty (the amount was never actually fixed, but would have run to hundreds of thousands of dollars) and a separate ransom of $59,496 for the release of twenty-two Americans held as prisoner. The sums demanded seemed impossibly large, and would be followed by similar demands from the other Barbary powers. Congress was unlikely to authorize such enormous sums; it was doubtful that the Congress could scrape up that much cash even if it wished. Negotiations dragged on; the captives remained enslaved; and American ships steered clear of the Mediterranean.

  Although Algiers was the largest and most powerful of the Barbary powers, the Mediterranean would not be safe for American ships unless there were bilateral peace treaties with each of the four rulers. In February 1786, Adams met with the Tripolitan ambassador in London. The meeting was a farce, Adams told Jefferson, but he could not resist sharing his amusement as “the Ridicule of it was real and the Drollery inevitable.” Knocking on the door of the residence one evening, intending only to leave his card, Adams was greeted by a servant who announced that the ambassador was at home and would receive Adams at once. He was shown into a drawing room, introduced to the ambassador, and seated in an armchair before a fire. The ambassador spoke no English, but the two men were able to communicate in broken Italian and French. While they were getting comfortable, a servant brought two pipes. The stem of the pipe offered to Adams was two yards long—“fit for a Walking Cane”—and to smoke it he was obliged to rest the bowl on the floor. In this position he

  Smoaked in aweful Pomp, reciprocating Whiff for Whiff with his Excellency, untill Coffee was brought in. His Excellency took a Cup after I had taken one, and alternately Sipped at his Coffee and whiffed at his Tobacco, and I wished he would take a Pinch in turn from his Snuff box for Variety; and I followed the Example with Such Exactness and Solemnity that the two secretaries appeared in Raptures, and the superiour of them who speaks a few Words of French cryed out in Ecstasy, “Monsieur, vous êtes un Turk!”

  With the initial courtesies behind them, the ambassador turned to business. America and Tripoli, he said, were at war. Adams, holding his cool, replied that he was “Sorry to hear that…. [I] had not heard of any war with Tripoli.” The ambassador explained that Tripoli considered itself at war with all Christian nations until a bilateral peace treaty had been signed between them. Such a peace could be arranged, he added, at the bargain price of “30,000 Guineas for his Employers and £3,000 for himself…and this must be paid in Cash on the delivery of the treaty signed by his sovereign.”

  Though he was able to laugh at the rituals of tribute diplomacy, Adams reached the sober opinion: “it to be wisest for Us to negotiate and pay the necessary Sum, without Loss of Time.” Fighting the corsairs, he told Jefferson, would only compound the economic losses to the United States: “We might at this hour have two hundred ships in the Mediterranean, whose Freight alone would be worth two hundred Thousand Pounds, besides its Influence upon the Price of our Produce.” Recalling America’s recent naval debacle, Adams doubted the Congress would vote to send warships to the Mediterranean. The tribute system, he reminded Jefferson, had been in place long before the United States arrived on the scene: “The Policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet. It would be heroical and glorious in Us to restore Courage to ours. I doubt not we could accomplish it, if we should set about it in earnest. But the Difficulty of bringing our People to agree upon it has ever discouraged me.”

  But Jefferson was taking a different tack. He told Adams he believed that “it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war.” He laid out his reasons: “I. Justice is in favor of this opinion. 2. Honor favors it. 3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safe-guard to interest.” Based on the best intelligence he could obtain, Jefferson estimated Algiers’s aggregate fleet strength at no more than twelve xebecs and four galleys, and Algiers was the strongest of the four powers. The corsairs’ vessels, designed for quick strikes against lightly armed merchant ships, would be easily overpowered by conventional European warships. Algerian crews could be captured and perhaps exchanged for the American captives. Jefferson proposed building a fleet with aggregate force of 150 guns, estimating the initial cost at £450,000 and the subsequent annual expenses at £45,000.

  Responding three weeks later, Adams acknowledged that Jefferson’s arguments were “great and weighty.” But Adams did not believe the American people or their leaders were ready either to rebuild the navy or to fight a war in the Mediterranean. “We ought not to fight them at all,” he wrote, “unless we determine to fight them forever. This thought is,
I fear, too rugged for our People to bear.” The more likely outcome, Adams predicted, would be that the United States would fight for years at great expense, only to pay for peace in the end. He concluded with the pessimistic thought that the entire debate was irrelevant. Congress was so weak and indecisive, he told Jefferson, that it would not be capable of doing anything at all about the Barbary threat: “I perceive that neither Force nor Money will be applied…your Plan of fighting will no more be adopted than mine of negotiating.” No effective response to the problem was possible, short of sweeping constitutional reform to correct the deficiencies of American government.

  WRITING YEARS LATER, John Quincy Adams—John and Abigail’s son, sixth president of the United States—stressed the historical importance of the partnership between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. “The mutual influence of these two mighty minds upon each other,” he wrote, “is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world, and in which…the future historian may discover the solution of much of our national history not otherwise easily accountable.”

  Known to his family and longtime friends as “little Jemmy,” Madison was barely five and a half feet tall and weighed less than 140 pounds. He habitually dressed all in black, giving him the look of a physician or a schoolmaster. He spoke in a low voice and carried himself with a grave scholarly reserve. Those who did not know him well found him cold and uninteresting, but in small groups of trusted friends, he revealed a dry wit and even a fondness for off-color humor.

  Born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Virginia, Madison had grown up on a 5,000-acre tobacco plantation in Orange County. Before turning eleven, he finished every book in his father’s private library. A Scottish tutor was hired to live on the plantation and teach him Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, history, philosophy, theology, and law. Late in life, remembering his tutor, Madison would pronounce: “All I have been in life I owe largely to that man.” At age nineteen he traveled north to the college at Princeton, New Jersey, where he compressed three years of work into two, graduating in September 1771. Returning to Virginia, Madison was elected to the convention that declared the state independent of Great Britain, and became a close friend and adviser to Governor Thomas Jefferson. He was elected to the Continental Congress in March 1780. When sworn in, he was its youngest member.