Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  The growing split between Federalists and Republicans in Congress complicated matters. Being no longer part of the administration, Jefferson took a somewhat different view of the use of force. In fact, Jefferson’s advocacy of military might in any circumstances was always limited. Force was sometimes justified, but never if it resulted in an expansion of executive power and the sacrifice of republican values. He and other Republicans saw the Federalist military buildup against Algiers as a ploy to enhance presidential power at the expense of liberty. Congressman William Branch Giles of Virginia joined a number of other Republicans in declaring that navies were “very foolish things” that could only lead to heavy taxes and a bloated office-laden European-type government. Better than building frigates at a horrendous expense, the United States should forget about the Mediterranean and protect America’s coastline with some relatively inexpensive gunboats.38

  The Federalists controlled Congress, however, and pushed on with negotiations and the building of the six frigates, some of which ended up being used against the French in the Quasi-War. In 1795 the United States agreed to a humiliating treaty with Algiers that cost a million dollars in tributes and ransoms—an amount equal to 16 percent of federal revenue for the year. The government realized that the frigates would not be ready for several years and that the country stood to gain more from trade in the Mediterranean than the peace treaty cost. As soon as the treaty was ratified in 1796, Congress, confident that there would be no more seizures of American ships, cut back the number of warships to three. The government opened negotiations with Tunis and Tripoli, which had begun seizing American merchantmen. By the end of the decade the United States had treaties with all the Barbary States, but the cost was exorbitant, $1. 25million, over 20 percent of the federal government’s annual budget.39

  Unfortunately, the Barbary States regarded treaties simply as a means of extracting more tributes and presents, and the threats and demands for more money, and the humiliations, continued. Tripoli felt it was not being treated equally with Algiers, and early in March 1801 it declared war on the United States and began seizing American merchant ships.

  President Jefferson came to office several weeks later apparently determined to change American policy. “Nothing will stop the eternal increase of demand from these pirates,” he told Secretary of State Madison in 1801, “but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical and more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing their insolencies.”40 Yet Jefferson’s strict construction of the Constitution made him reluctant to engage the pirates offensively without a formal congressional declaration of war.

  The Federalists, led by Hamilton in the press, pounced on this reluctance and forced the Republican Congress in 1802 to grant the president authority to use all means necessary to defeat the Tripolitan pirates. But the American blockade of Tripoli proved ineffective, mainly because the frigates could not maneuver in the shallow waters of Tripoli’s harbor. At the same time, Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin and the Republicans in the Congress were concerned with the rising cost of maintaining a naval force in the Mediterranean. They feared the possibility of “increasing taxes, encroaching government, temptations to offensive wars, &c,” more than the Barbary pirates.41

  Still, the administration was determined to act, even if only with a minimum expenditure of funds and what President Jefferson referred to as “the smallest force competent” to the mission.42 In 1803 it appointed a new experienced commander for the Mediterranean squadron, Commodore Edward Preble, and sent several small gunboats to the Mediterranean. Before Preble could deploy his new force, the frigate USS Philadelphia and its three-hundred man crew, commanded by twenty-nine-year-old William Bainbridge, was accidentally beached in Tripoli’s harbor and had to surrender to an array of Tripolitan gunboats. The Pasha Yussef Karamanli of Tripoli set his initial demand for ransoming the newly captured American slaves at $1,690,000, more than the entire military budget of the United States.43

  United States naval officers were determined to do something. On February 16, 1804, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and his seventy-man crew entered Tripoli’s harbor under cover of darkness in a disguised vessel with the intention of burning the Philadelphia, thus preventing its being used as a Tripolitan raider. Since the American ship was deep in Tripoli’s harbor, surrounded by a dozen other armed vessels and under the castle’s heavy batteries, it was a dangerous, even foolhardy, mission; but it succeeded admirably, without the single loss of an American. This action, which Lord Nelson called “the most bold and daring act of the age,” turned Decatur into an instant celebrity and inspired extraordinary outbursts of American patriotism. At age twenty-five Decatur became the youngest man commissioned a captain in U.S. naval history.44

  Emboldened by this success, Jefferson sent an even larger squadron to the Mediterranean under the command of Preble’s senior, Samuel Barron, with the aim of punishing Tripoli. The expedition was to be paid for by a special tax on merchants trading in the Mediterranean, which the Federalists charged was an underhanded scheme to get the New England merchants to pay for the purchase of Louisiana. Following the advice of William Eaton, an ex-army captain and former consul to Tunis, the United States government authorized a loose alliance with the pasha of Tripoli’s elder brother, Hamet Karamanli, who hoped to regain the throne his younger brother Yussef had taken from him. According to one historian, this was the U.S. government’s “first overseas covert operation.”45

  In 1805 while the naval squadron besieged Tripoli, Eaton, who had an ambiguous status as an agent of the navy, and the pasha’s brother Hamet marched west from Egypt five hundred miles across the Libyan Desert with a motley force of five hundred Greek, Albanian, and Arab mercenaries and a handful of marines. Their goal was to join up with Captain Isaac Hull and three American cruisers at Derne, the strategic Tripolitan port east of Tripoli. After a successful bombardment, Eaton’s and Hull’s marines took the fort at Derne. (This action later inspired the refrain of the U.S. Marine Corps hymn, “to the shores of Tripoli.”) Before Eaton could move his force against Tripoli, however, he learned that in June 1805 Tobias Lear, consul-general at Algiers, had signed a peace and commercial treaty with Tripoli ending the undeclared war.

  Eaton felt betrayed by the U.S. government, and the war and what Eaton believed was its premature ending became caught up in partisan politics. The Federalists took every opportunity to chastise the Jefferson administration for its hesitancy in going to war against the Barbary States without a congressional declaration of war and for its ill-timed peace. Hamet did not get his throne back, but his family held in hostage was restored to him. The United States refused to pay any tribute to Tripoli, but it did pay a small ransom of sixty thousand dollars in order to get its imprisoned sailors released. Although the cynical European powers played down America’s victory in this Tripolitan war, believing quite correctly that the pirates would ignore any treaty and would soon be back in business, many Americans celebrated it as a vindication of their policy of spreading free trade around the world and as a great victory for liberty over tyranny.

  At the same time, however, many Americans could not ignore the contradiction between the Barbary States’ enslaving seven hundred white sailors and their own country’s enslaving hundreds of thousands of black Africans. As early as 1790 Benjamin Franklin had satirized this hypocrisy, and poets and playwrights juxtaposed the two forms of servitude in their works. Connecticut-born and Dartmouth-educated William Eaton had at once seen the contradiction upon his arrival in Tunis in 1799 as American consul. “Barbary is hell—,” he wrote in his journal. “So, alas, is all America south of Pennsylvania; for oppression, and slavery, and misery, are there.”46

  BUT THIS CONTEST with the Barbary States was just a sideshow; the main act always involved America’s relationship with Great Britain. Getting the British, however, to sign a liberal free trade treaty similar to that with Tripoli was highly unlikely. Not only would such a t
reaty be difficult to achieve, but it was not something that Jefferson really wanted, as events in 1805–1806 revealed.

  Jefferson knew that America’s prosperous trans-Atlantic carrying trade of French and Spanish colonial goods would require governmental protection once war between Britain and France resumed, as it did in 1803. At first Britain seemed more or less willing to continue accepting the legal fiction of the “broken voyage” and America’s carrying trade continued to flourish even though occasional seizures of American ships took place.

  Suddenly in the summer of 1805 the Royal Navy began seizing scores of American merchant ships that assumed they were complying with the principle of the “broken voyage.” Although Britain did not warn the United States of any change in policy, it had been contemplating tightening its treatment of the neutral carrying trade for some time. In the Essex decision in the spring of 1805 a British admiralty appeals court endorsed a change of policy and re-invoked the Rule of 1756 that had forbidden neutrals in time of war from trading within a mercantile empire closed to them in time of peace. By the new doctrine of the “continuous voyage,” American merchants would now have to prove that they actually intended their voyages from the belligerent ports to terminate in the United States; otherwise the enemy goods they carried were liable to seizure.

  This single decision undercut the lucrative trade that had gone on for years with only minor interruptions. By September 1805 Secretary of State Madison reported that America’s merchants were “much alarmed” by the apparent change in British policy, for they had “several millions of property . . . afloat, subject to capture under the doctrine now enforced.” Insurance rates quadrupled, and American merchants faced heavy losses. During the latter half of 1805 merchants in Philadelphia complained of over a hundred seizures, valued at $500,000.47

  Many of the belligerents’ vice-admiralty courts, which passed on the legality of the seizures, were remarkably impartial, but not all. Some of the British prize courts in the West Indies were corrupt and incompetent, and many of their decisions that went against American ship owners were later reversed by the High Court of Appeals in England. Because of these reversals, the actual number of condemnations was perhaps no more than 10 or 20 percent of the number of seizures. James Monroe, America’s minister in London, told Secretary of State Madison in September 1805 that Britain “seeks to tranquillize us by dismissing our vessels in every case that she possibly can.” But the appeals took time, usually four or five years, all the while the seized American ships were tied up in British ports.48

  It was not the actual number of seizures that most irritated Americans; rather it was the British presumption that His Majesty’s government had the right to decide just what American trade should be permitted or not permitted. It seemed to reduce America once again to the status of a colonial dependent. This was the fundamental issue that underlay America’s turbulent relationship with Britain through the entire period of the European wars. Aurora editor William Duane went to the heart of the matter when in March 1807 he asked his readers, “Will you abandon your rights? Will you abandon your independence? Are you willing to become colonies of Great Britain?”49

  From the 1790s through 1815 it was the Republicans alone who celebrated the Declaration of Independence and toasted as its author their leader, whom Joel Barlow called “the immortal Jefferson.” The Republicans honored the Declaration, however, not for its promotion of individual rights and equality, as would be the case for all political parties after 1815, but for its denunciation of the British monarchy and its assertion that the new nation had assumed a “separate and equal Station . . . among the Powers of the Earth”—something the Republicans thought the Anglophilic Federalists were reluctant to acknowledge. Indeed, as late as 1823 Jefferson was still fulminating over the way the Federalists treated the Declaration, seeing it, he said, “as being a libel on the government of England . . . [that] should now be buried in utter oblivion to spare the feelings of our English friends and Angloman fellow citizens.”50

  The most humiliating grievance for Americans, the one that made them seem still under the thumb of the former mother country, was the British impressment of American seamen, a practice that John Quincy Adams labeled an “authorized system of kidnapping upon the ocean.”51 British captains of warships often stopped and inspected American commercial vessels even in American waters to see if there were any British subjects among the sailors. Such actions, said Jefferson, threatened American sovereignty. “We cannot be respected by France as a neutral nation, nor by the world ourselves as an independent one,” he told Madison in 1804, “if we do not take effectual measures to support, at every risk, our authority in our own harbors.”52 The actual numbers of sailors that Britain impressed from American ships over this war period are unknown, the British admitting to more than three thousand, the Americans claiming at least double that figure.

  The issue was serious and seemingly beyond compromise as long as Britain was in its life-or-death struggle with France. Since the Royal Navy needed to recruit at least thirty thousand to forty thousand new seamen every year, it relied heavily on impressing not only British subjects in their own seaports but also those who had deserted to the American merchant marine—a not insignificant number. According to estimates made by Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin, nine thousand of the twenty-four thousand sailors on American ships were actually British subjects—a figure, admitted Gallatin, that “was larger than we had figured.”53 With the Royal Navy seeming to be the sole obstacle to Napoleon’s invasion of the British Isles, the British government naturally sought to get these sailors back and to discourage future deserters. It thus authorized its naval officers to board American merchant ships and impress into the British navy seamen who they believed were His Majesty’s subjects and who lacked documents proving they were American citizens.

  The British never claimed the right to impress American citizens, but since British and American sailors looked and sounded so much alike, aggressive British naval officers often made mistakes that might take years to correct. Although the United States did not employ press gangs to supply seamen for its navy, it never denied the right of the Royal Navy to impress British sailors on American ships in British ports. It did, however, deny Britain’s authority to board American ships to impress men on the high seas. For their part, the British never admitted the right of the United States to do to them what they did to the United States; they never conceded the right of American naval officers to board British ships to impress American deserters—not that there were many of them. This discrepancy is what made impressment seem to the Americans to be an act of British neocolonialism.

  The problem grew out of the British denial of the right of British subjects to expatriate and become citizens of another country. But, of course, despite the feelings of some Republicans that “man is born free” and “may remove out of the limits of these United States” at will, some Americans, especially in the judiciary, were not all that clear about the right of American citizens to expatriate either.54 But the United States did offer immigrants a relatively easy route to naturalized citizenship—inconsistent as that may have been with some judges’ denial of the right of expatriation. Consequently, both nations often claimed the same persons as their own legitimate subjects or citizens.55

  Neither Britain nor the United States could give way on the issue. It is easy to explain the British need to maintain impressment, which had become vital to Britain’s security in its titanic struggle with Napoleon. But the Americans’ fixation on impressment is not as easily explained. However brutal, the practice did not endanger the Americans’ national security nor did the loss of even several thousand sailors threaten the existence of their navy or their merchant fleet. Since Americans did not deny the right of the British to search American ships for contraband goods, why, it was argued, could they not allow a search for British deserters—especially since, as Gallatin pointed out, over a third of American sailors were in fact British subjec
ts?

  Yet for most Americans, though not for most Federalists, none of this mattered. Impressment remained for most Republicans the rawest and most contentious issue dividing the United States and Britain. It was always first on the list of American complaints against British practices, and its abolition was always the sine quanon in negotiations with Britain. Although after 1808 the Republican leaders tended to place impressment behind neutral rights as a source of grievance, in the end they made it the most important of the reasons Americans went to war in 1812 against the former mother country.

  Since most Americans, so British in heritage, language, and looks, could never be sure of their own national identity, they were acutely sensitive to any effort to blur the distinction between themselves and the British—something the Federalists were increasingly doing. The Federalist Monthly Anthology denied that there was any such thing as Americanness. Benjamin Rush in 1805 thought that most of the Federalists in Pennsylvania, “a majority of the old and wealthy native citizens,” were “still Englishmen in their hearts.” Indeed, Rush went so far as to say that Americans had “no national character, and however much we may boast of it, there are very few true Americans in the United States.”56

  Since a suffocating trans-Atlantic Englishness existed everywhere in the Americans’ culture, it is not surprising that the Republicans came to see the British impressment of American sailors as a glaring example of America’s lack of independence as a nation. The practice aroused so much anger precisely because it threw into the faces of the Americans the ambiguous and fluid nature of their national identity.