Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, page 1
SENTINEL
THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE TRIPOLI PIRATES
Brian Kilmeade cohosts Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox & Friends and also hosts the nationally syndicated radio show The Brian Kilmeade Show. He is the author of five books, and he lives on Long Island.
Don Yaeger has written or cowritten twenty-five books, including nine New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
They are the coauthors of the New York Times bestseller George Washington’s Secret Six.
ALSO BY BRIAN KILMEADE AND DON YAEGER
George Washington’s Secret Six
SENTINEL
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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First published in the United States of America by Sentinel 2015
This paperback edition with a new afterword published 2016.
Copyright © 2015, 2016 by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Image 6: Stephen Decatur (1779–1820), by Rembrandt Peale, ca. 1815–1820; oil on canvas; overall: 29 x 23 5/8 in (73.7 x 60 cm); 1867.309, New-York Historical Society
Image 13: The attack made on Tripoli on the 3rd August 1804 . . . ; from PR100 (Maritime File), FF 56—Barbary War; neg #3516, New-York Historical Society
Image 16: Blowing up the fire ship Intrepid; from PR100 (Maritime File), FF 56, FF E, Drawer; Med Naval Battles: Barbary War; neg #90696d, New-York Historical Society
Image 19: General William Eaton and Hamet Qaramanli, On the Desert of Barca, Approaching Derne; from “Memories of a Hundred Years,” p. 60, E173, H16 v. 1; neg #90916d, New-York Historical Society
Image 23: The U.S. Squadron, under Command of Com. Decatur, At Anchor off the City of Algiers, June 30, 1815; from PR100 (Maritime File), box 11, folder 8; neg #90695d, New-York Historical Society
Additional credits appear adjacent to the respective images.
Ebook ISBN: 9780698197411
Design and Map Illustrations by Daniel Lagin
Cover design: Jim Tierney
Cover art: (top) Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1853, photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images; (bottom) Tripolitan War, 1804 by Nathaniel Currier, 1846/Granger, NYC. All rights reserved.
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To my dad, who died way too young, and my mom, who worked way too hard. They taught me from day one that being born in America was like winning the lottery. This story is yet more proof that they were 100 percent right.
—BK
To Jeanette: I adore you. Thanks for encouraging this relationship, making this book happen.
—DY
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY BRIAN KILMEADE AND DON YAEGER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
MAP
CAST OF CHARACTERS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
Unprepared and Unprotected
CHAPTER 1
Americans Abroad
CHAPTER 2
Secretary Jefferson
CHAPTER 3
The Humiliation of the USS George Washington
CHAPTER 4
Jefferson Takes Charge
CHAPTER 5
A Flagpole Falls
CHAPTER 6
The First Flotilla
CHAPTER 7
Skirmish at Sea
CHAPTER 8
Patience Wears Thin
CHAPTER 9
The Doldrums of Summer
CHAPTER 10
The Omens of October
CHAPTER 11
The Philadelphia Disaster
CHAPTER 12
By the Cover of Darkness
CHAPTER 13
The Battle of Tripoli
CHAPTER 14
Opening a New Front
CHAPTER 15
Win in the Desert or Die in the Desert
CHAPTER 16
Endgame
CHAPTER 17
Fair Winds and Following Seas
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
IMAGES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
A NOTE ON SOURCES
INDEX
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Sidi Haji Abdrahaman: Tripolitan Envoy to Great Britain
John Adams: Minister to the Court of St. James’s, later President of the United States
William Bainbridge: Captain, U.S. Navy
Joel Barlow: Consul General to the Barbary States
Samuel Barron: Captain, U.S. Navy, commander of the USS President
Salvador Catalano: Pilot, USS Intrepid
James Leander Cathcart: U.S. Consul to Tripoli
Richard Dale: Captain, U.S. Navy
James Decatur: Lieutenant, U.S. Navy, Gunboat No. 2
Stephen Decatur Jr.: Lieutenant, U.S. Navy
William Eaton: U.S. Consul General to Tunis
Daniel Frazier: Ordinary Seaman, U.S. Navy, Gunboat No. 5
Albert Gallatin: Secretary of the Treasury
Hassan: Dey of Algiers*
Isaac Hull: Captain, U.S. Navy, USS Argus
Martha and Mary (Polly) Jefferson: Daughters of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson: Minister to France, later President of the United States
Ahmed Khorshid: Viceroy of Egypt
Tobias Lear: U.S. Consul General to the Barbary States
James Madison: Secretary of State, later President of the United States
Richard Valentine Morris: Captain, U.S. Navy, commander of the USS Chesapeake
Alexander Murray: Captain, U.S. Navy, commander of the USS Constellation
Bobba Mustapha: Dey of Algiers
Nicholas Nissen: Danish Consul General
Presley Neville O’Bannon: Lieutenant, U.S. Marines
Richard O’Brien: Captain of the Dauphin
Edward Preble: Captain, U.S. Navy, commander of the USS Constitution
Hamet Qaramanli: Brother of Yusuf and rightful heir as Bashaw of Tripoli
Yusuf Qaramanli: Bashaw of Tripoli
Murat Rais: High Admiral, Navy of Tripoli (formerly Peter Lisle)
Mahomet Rous: Admiral, Navy of Tripoli, commander of the Tripoli
Richard Somers: Master Commandant, U.S. Navy, USS Intrepid
Andrew Sterett: Lieutenant, U.S. Navy, commander of the USS Enterprise
Maulay Sulaiman: Sultan of Morocco
George Washington: President of the United States
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is my observation that American history has been for the most part focused on the genius of our founding fathers and not enough on those who fought and died for their ideals. We have written Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates for those men and women who have been forgotten by most, though they were saluted in their day.
This is the story of how a new nation, saddled with war debt and desperate to establish credibility, was challenged by four Muslim powers. Our merchant ships were captured and the crews enslaved. Despite its youth, America would do what established western powers chose not to do: stand up to intimidation and lawlessness.
Tired of Americans being captured and held for ransom, our third president decided to take on the Barbary powers in a war that is barely remembered today but is one that, in many ways, we are still fighting.
In the following pages you will read how Jefferson, the so-called pacifist president, changed George Washington’s and John Adams’s policies to take on this collection of Muslim nations. You will travel alongside the fearless William Eaton as he treks five hundred miles across the desert. You will learn about the leadership of Stephen Decatur and Edward Preble, and about the fighting prowess of Marine lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, just to name a few. You will discover how the Marine Corps emerged as the essential military force it is today. Most important, you will see the challenges Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison faced with the Barbary nations. And you will learn how military strength and the courage of our first generation of Americans led to victory, and ultimately respect in a world of nations that believed—and even hoped—that the American experiment would fail. Because of these brave men, the world would learn that in America failure is not an option.
I love this story and the brave men who secured our freedom. If this book does anything to restore them to America’s memory, it will have succeeded.
—Brian Kilmeade
PROLOGUE
Unprepared and Unprotected
Picture to yourself your Brother Citizens or Unfortunate Countrymen in the Algerian State Prisons or Damned Castile, and starved 2/3rd’s and Naked. . . . Once a Citizen of the United States of America, but at present the Most Miserable Slave in Algiers.
—Richard O’Brien, Diary, February 19, 1790
As a fast-moving ship approached the Dauphin off the coast of Portugal, Captain Richard O’Brien saw no cause for alarm. On this warm July day in 1785, America was at peace, and there were many innocent reasons for a friendly ship to come alongside. Perhaps it was a fellow merchant ship needing information or supplies. Perhaps the ship’s captain wanted to warn him of nearby pirates.
By the time O’Brien realized that the ship did not approach in peace, it was too late. The American ship was no match for the Algerian vessel armed with fourteen cannons. A raiding party with daggers gripped between their teeth swarmed over the sides of the Dauphin. The Algerians vastly outnumbered the American crew and quickly claimed the ship and all its goods in the name of their nation’s leader, the dey of Algiers.
Mercilessly, the pirates stripped O’Brien and his men of shoes, hats, and handkerchiefs, leaving them unprotected from the burning sun during the twelve-day voyage back to the North African coast. On arrival in Algiers, the American captives were paraded through the streets as spectators jeered.
The seamen were issued rough sets of native clothing and two blankets each that were to last for the entire period of captivity, whether it was a few weeks or fifty years. Kept in a slave pen, they slept on a stone floor, gazing into the night sky where the hot stars burned above them like lidless eyes, never blinking. Each night there was a roll call, and any man who failed to respond promptly would be chained to a column and whipped soundly in the morning.
Together with men of another captured ship, the Maria, O’Brien’s Dauphin crew broke rocks in the mountains while wearing iron chains Saturday through Thursday. On Friday, the Muslim holy day, the Christian slaves dragged massive sleds loaded with rubble and dirt nearly two miles to the harbor to be unloaded into the sea to form a breakwater. Their workdays began before the sun rose and, for a few blissfully cool hours, they worked in darkness.
Their diet consisted of stale bread, vinegar from a shared bowl at breakfast and lunch, and, on good days, some ground olives. Water was the one necessity provided with any liberality. As a ship captain, O’Brien was treated somewhat better, but he feared that his men would starve to death.
“Our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” O’Brien wrote to America’s minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, two weeks after his arrival in Algiers.1 Those sufferings would only get worse. Several of the captives from the Maria and the Dauphin would die in captivity of yellow fever, overwork, and exposure—and in some ways, they were the lucky ones. The ways out of prison for the remaining prisoners were few: convert to Islam, attempt to escape, or wait for their country to negotiate their release. A few of the captives would be ransomed but, for most, their thin blankets wore out as year after year passed and freedom remained out of reach. Richard O’Brien would be ten years a slave.
America had not yet elected its first president, but it already had its first enemy.
CHAPTER 1
Americans Abroad
It is not probable the American States will have a very free trade in the Mediterranean . . . the Americans cannot protect themselves [as] they cannot pretend to [have] a Navy.
—John Baker-Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, Observations of the Commerce of the American States, 1783
In 1785, the same year Richard O’Brien was captured by pirates, Thomas Jefferson learned that all politics, even transatlantic politics, are personal.
He was a widower. The passing of his wife in September 1782 had left him almost beyond consolation, and what little comfort he found was in the company of his daughter Martha, then age ten. The two would take “melancholy rambles” around the large plantation, seeking to evade the grief that haunted them. When Jefferson was offered the appointment as American minister to France, he accepted because he saw an opportunity to escape the sadness that still shadowed him.
Thomas Jefferson had sailed for Europe in the summer of 1784 with Martha at his side; once they reached Paris, he enrolled his daughter in a convent school with many other well-born English-speaking students. There he would be able to see her regularly, but he had been forced to make a more difficult decision regarding Martha’s two sisters. Mary, not yet six, and toddler Lucy Elizabeth, both too young to travel with him across the sea, had been left behind with their “Aunt Eppes,” his late wife’s half sister. The separation was painful, but it was nothing compared with the new heartbreak he experienced just months into his Paris stay when Mrs. Eppes wrote sadly to say that “hooping cough” had taken the life of two-year-old Lucy.1
As a fresh wave of sorrow rolled over him, Jefferson longed for “Polly the Parrot,” as he affectionately called his bright and talkative Mary, to join his household again. The father wrote to his little girl that he and her sister “cannot live without you” and asked her if she would like to join them across the ocean. He promised that joining them in France meant she would learn “to play on the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French.”2
“I long to see you, and hope that you . . . are well,” the now seven-year-old replied. But she added that she had no desire to make the trip, harpsichord or no harpsichord. “I don’t want to go to France,” she stated plainly. “I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes.”3
Jefferson was undaunted and began to plan for her safe travel. Having already lost two dear family members, he did not want to risk losing Polly and looked for ways to reduce the dangers of the journey. He instructed her uncle, Francis Eppes, to select a proven ship for Polly’s crossing. “The vessel should have performed one [transatlantic] voyage at least,” Jefferson ordered, “and must not be more than four or five years old.”4 He worried about the weather and insisted that his daughter travel in the warm months to avoid winter storms. As for supervision, Polly could make the journey, Jefferson advised, “with some good lady passing from America to France, or even England [or] . . . a careful gentleman.”5
Yet an even more intimidating concern worried Jefferson: more frightening than weather or leaky ships was the threat of pirates off North Africa, a region known as the Barbary Coast. The fate of the Dauphin and the Maria was a common one for ships venturing near the area, where the Sahara’s arid coast was divided into four nation-states. Running west to east were the Barbary nations Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, which all fell under the ultimate authority of the Ottoman Empire, seated in present-day Turkey.
The Islamic nations of the Barbary Coast had preyed upon foreign shipping for centuries, attacking ships in international waters both in the Mediterranean and along the northwest coast of Africa and the Iberian peninsula. Even such naval powers as France and Great Britain were not immune, though they chose to deal with the problem by paying annual tributes of “gifts” to Barbary leaders—bribes paid to the Barbary states to persuade the pirates to leave merchant ships from the paying countries alone. But the prices were always changing, and the ships of those nations that did not meet the extortionate demands were not safe from greedy pirates.
To the deeply rational Jefferson, the lawless pirates posed perhaps the greatest danger to his sadly diminished family. He knew what had happened to O’Brien and could not risk a similar fate for his child. As he confided in a letter to brother-in-law Francis Eppes, “My anxieties on this subject could induce me to endless details. . . . The Algerines this fall took two vessels from us and now have twenty-two of our citizens in slavery.” The plight of the men aboard the Maria and the Dauphin haunted him—if their hellish incarceration was terrifying to contemplate, “who can estimate . . . the fate of a child? My mind revolts at the possibility of a capture,” Jefferson wrote. “Unless you hear from myself—not trusting the information of any other person on earth—that peace is made with the Algerines, do not send her but in a vessel of French or English property; for these vessels alone are safe from prize by the barbarians.”6 He knew those two countries paid a very high annual tribute, thereby purchasing safe passage for their vessels.
