America, the Barbary Pirates, and Obama’s Abuse of History
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. —Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775
TIA Daily
June 30, 2009
In his speech in Cairo on June 4 directed to the Muslim world at large, President Barack Obama proposed “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” a new relationship “based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.” Determined to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear,” the president contended that ” America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”
“As a student of history,” the president offered historic examples of peaceful and mutually beneficial relations between the United States and Muslim nations that might serve as a basis for this “new beginning.” He said:
I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America ’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco . In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States .
President Obama’s historical claims served less to enlighten his audience about the past than to conceal inconvenient facts which do not suit his rosy characterization of Islam and its relations with the early American republic.
Over the centuries preceding the American Revolution, Morocco and the other Muslim Barbary States of North Africa claimed the Mediterranean Sea as their own. Pirates operating freely out of North African ports, with the encouragement of Muslims rulers, seized European ships and used their “infidel” passengers and crews as hostages held for ransom or as slaves condemned to lives of hard labor and corporal punishment. From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, about one million Europeans (including American colonists) endured enslavement in the Muslim world. (Giles Milton, White Gold, p. 271)
With the exception of Britain , which preferred reprisal to bribery, Europe’s monarchical nations paid annual tribute to the Barbary States in return for the free passage of their merchant ships in the Mediterranean .
Britain’s regulatory laws forbade its thirteen American Colonies from trading directly with nations outside of the British Empire; the desire for freedom of trade in the Mediterranean Sea was one factor in America ’s decision to declare independence from King George III. With loss of protection by the British Navy, though, American ships entering the Mediterranean became vulnerable to Muslim piracy.
So many American merchant ships flocked to Tangiers that Congress requested recognition of US independence from the Sultan of Morocco. On December 20, 1777, Sultan Sidi Mohammad ben Abdullah al-Qatib granted recognition and accordingly forbade his own pirates from attacking American merchant ships headed for Moroccan ports. President Obama did not mention that, when Congress did not move quickly enough in signing a formal treaty with Morocco , the Sultan began seizing American ships and crews in October 1784. (Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, pp. 20-22, 28)
Espousing an “erect and independent attitude” toward foreign powers, America ’s minister to France , Thomas Jefferson, urged Congress to appropriate $2 million for a navy and then retaliate militarily against the Barbary States . Having so recently ended its costly war with Britain , Congress was loath to enter another war, and it lacked the revenue to raise and sustain a navy. Rather than spend $2 million on a navy, Congress allocated $70,000 to pay the Dey of Algiers ransom money for the release of American hostages. In February 1785, the Algerian potentate greeted this offer with additional demands for money. (Power, Faith, and Fantasy, pp. 24-25)
In June 1786, Jefferson advocated war against the Barbary States . Instead, Congress instructed him and the US minister to Britain , John Adams, to negotiate a settlement with Morocco . Jefferson and Adams offered Sultan Sidi Mohammad a bribe of $20,000 in return for the release of a US ship, its crew, and a treaty of peace. The Sultan accepted these terms and released the ship as agreed—and it was immediately captured by the Barbary State of Tunis. The other pirate states learned from Morocco ’s example to seize American persons and property and hold them until Congress offered money for “peace.”
Congress directed Adams to negotiate with the Pasha of Tripoli, Abd al-Rahman. The pasha demanded that Congress pay $1 million per year to Tripoli and Tunis (about one tenth of the federal government’s annual budget) for the privilege of navigating the Mediterranean . Thinking a war against the Barbary Pirates “too rugged for our people to bear,” Adams reluctantly proposed an annual tribute of 200,000 pounds in return for peace.
Abd al Rahman rejected the offer and renewed his demand for $1 million, explaining to Adams the principle behind the Barbary States ‘ policy of attacking European and American shipping:
It was…written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [Muslims'] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. (Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 27)
George Washington considered the exchange of tribute for peace to be utter folly. He had no illusions about the “purchased friendship of these barbarians.” He wrote the Marquis de Lafayette in 1786: “Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence.” He wrote Lafayette the following year that it was “the highest disgrace” to pay tribute to the Barbary Pirates, “who might for half the sum that is paid them be exterminated from the earth.”
In 1790, the sultan of Morocco died, and his successor resumed piracy against the Christian world in violation of Morocco ’s treaty with the United States . (White Gold, p. 271) Beset with pleas from American captives in North Africa, Jefferson again recommended war against the Barbary Pirates in December 1790. The Senate rejected his proposal and earmarked $140,000 for tribute—which Jefferson , as President Washington’s secretary of state, had to deliver, to his disgust. (Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 33)
In 1795, the Dey of Algiers signed a treaty of peace with the United States —in return for $650,000 in bribes. Tunis and Tripoli were, in the words of historian Michael Oren, “quick to follow Algiers ‘ example of first attacking the Americans and then negotiating with them from an advantage.” Tripoli seized three ships and Tunis seized one. In 1796, the US negotiated the Treaty of Tripoli, which the Senate unanimously approved and President Adams signed in 1797. (Power, Faith, and Fantasy, pp. 36-38)
As President Obama quoted in part, Article 11 of the treaty included the liberal statement that “[a]s the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen.” But the pasha of Tripoli held no such liberal, enlightened opinions himself, having expressed to Adams ten years before his obligation as a Muslim to make holy war on the infidels until they acknowledge Islam’s authority over them.
During the Adams presidency, the US government sent 20% of its annual revenues to pay protection money to the Barbary States . Perversely, the Senate cited these costly treaties as proof that peace could be achieved through diplomacy rather than war—and as reason to cut the president’s budget for building warships. (Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 38)
The first three of the six frigates commissioned by Congress came on line in March 1799. When Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801, he discontinued the payment of tribute to the Barbary States . Tripoli declared war on the US , seizing the USS Philadelphia and its 305 crewmen in 1803. In a daring nighttime operation, Stephen Decatur recaptured and burned the Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor. In 1805, the US Marines landed “on the shores of Tripoli ” to retaliate for Barbary attacks. The expedition was suspended when President Jefferson reached a peace agreement with the pasha.
In 1815, President Madison dispatched the fleet to the Mediterranean on a campaign against Algiers , Tripoli , and Tunis . Having used the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic trade in black slaves, the British Prime Minister Lord Castlereagh redirected it against the Mediterranean trade in white slaves in 1816. The British fleet attacked the Dey of Algiers in August 1816 and leveled his capital, killing 2,000 Algerians at a loss of 141 British dead. The Dey surrendered unconditionally and granted all demands, including the release of a thousand captives and the permanent abolition of Christian slavery. Where centuries of tribute and concessions had failed, war swiftly ended the depredations of the Barbary Pirates. (White Gold, pp. 271-276)
The British seamen who turned their cannons on the fortresses of Muslim slavers on the West Coast of Africa—let alone President Lincoln and the Union Army—would have been surprised to hear President Obama claim in his Cairo address that, “[f]or centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves,” but “it was not violence that won full and equal rights.” He appears as self-blinded to the righteous violence used by the US government to free blacks from American slavery as he is to the wrongful violence used by the Barbary States to enslave white Americans and Europeans.
In the case of both Barbary piracy and Civil War emancipation, the historical facts do not affirm the wisdom of Obama’s political goal: achieving peace with hostile Muslim powers through the “open hand” of diplomacy. To justify a diplomatic initiative with America ’s professed enemies, the president has created a false history that obscures the clear lessons of the past. As a “student of history,” President Obama has a great deal yet to learn.
J. Patrick Mullins is assistant professor of history at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia.
