From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (18 page)

Never comfortable with what he considered extortion, Jefferson reversed Federalist policy. Like most Westerners, he viewed the Islamic states as hopelessly despotic and oppressive. The actions of these "lawless pirates" violated his standards of civilized behavior and his commitment to free trade. He was certain that appeasement encouraged more outrageous demands. As minister to France and secretary of state he had advocated the use of force to uphold U.S. honor and keep vital shipping lanes
open. "I think it is to our interest to punish the first insult," he insisted, "because an insult unpunished is the parent of many others."
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Upon assuming office, Jefferson found ample reason for reprisal. Annoyed that the United States had not sent its tribute on time and in the amount promised, the dey of Algiers commandeered an American ship, the
George Washington,
and compelled its humiliated captain to undertake a personal tribute mission for him to Turkey. Upset that he was receiving less booty than Algiers and therefore presumably was viewed as inferior, the pasha of Tripoli raised his demands and ceremoniously declared war on the United States by hacking down the flag at the U.S. consulate. The United States was "too high-minded to endure the degradation of others," Jefferson declaimed. Tripoli's demands were "unfounded either in right or compact," and the "style of the demand admitted but one answer."
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Eager to prove to North Africans—and Europeans—that the United States would meet force with force, he dispatched four ships to the Mediterranean to "protect our commerce and chastise their insolence" by "sinking, burning, or destroying their ships and Vessels." Setting a major precedent in terms of executive authority, he did not seek congressional authorization to commit forces abroad, reasoning that war already existed by act of Tripoli.
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The Tripolitan War lasted from 1801 to 1805. Torn between his desire to punish his foes on the one hand and hold down federal expenditures on the other, Jefferson kept the conflict strictly limited and did not provide sufficient forces to patrol a fifteen-hundred-mile coast and "chastise the insolent." His naval commanders faced horrendous logistical problems and consequently displayed understandable caution, provoking an angry president to complain of a "two year sleep." Indecisiveness turned to near disaster in 1803 when the frigate
Philadelphia
ran aground off Tripoli and its captain and crew were held for $3 million ransom.
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His hands freed by the easing of the Louisiana crisis, Jefferson in late 1803 sharply escalated the war. He attempted unsuccessfully to organize an international naval force to curb piracy in the Mediterranean. He dispatched every available ship to the region. In what British naval hero Horatio Lord Nelson called "the most bold and daring act of the age," U.S. sailors slipped through the pasha's heavy defenses without the loss of a
single life and burned the
Philadelphia
. The navy blockaded the coast off Tripoli and bombarded the city itself. In an early example of what would come to be called "mission creep," Jefferson and Madison approved the first U.S. attempt to replace a hostile foreign government. Madison conceded that to "intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries" violated American principles, but, he reasoned, "it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war" to exploit "the enmity and pretenses of others against a common foe."
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With authorization from Washington, the U.S. consul at Tunis, William Eaton, plotted with the pasha's exiled brother to overthrow the government of Tripoli. Assembling a motley force of eight U.S. Marines and some four hundred Greek and Arab adventurers, he marched five hundred miles across the desert and "liberated" Derna, the second most important city of Tripoli.
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The war ended in 1805 on terms less than satisfactory to some Americans. Facing serious embarrassment, even possible military defeat and deposition, the pasha agreed to a commercial treaty without tribute, although he did manage to extort $60,000 to ransom the hostages and secured U.S. agreement to the continued exile of his brother. Some Americans vigorously protested the ransom, insisting that the United States could have dictated terms. Eaton bitterly complained of the abandonment of the unfortunate pretender. By this time, however, the war was costing more than $1 million per year, provoking growing concern from a frugal president and Congress. The pasha's frequent warnings that, having killed his father and brother, he would have no scruples about a "few infidels" evoked concern for the hostages. Despite persistent grumbling, the treaty was approved.
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The Tripolitan War has been dismissed as unimportant, and in strictly practical terms it was.
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It cost far more than the price of tribute. It did not end American difficulties with the Barbary States. When the threat of war with Britain forced U.S. withdrawal from the region in 1807, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli resumed harassment of U.S. shipping. Only after the War of 1812 was the United States, by another show of force, able to secure free passage of the Mediterranean.

To consider the war in such narrow terms badly misses the point. It had enormous psychological and ideological significance for the United States. The effective use of force stimulated the self-pride of the new nation; the exploits of the U.S. Navy and Marines on the "shores of Tripoli" formed an important part of its patriotic folklore. Coming at the same time as the acquisition of Louisiana, it gave Americans a renewed sense of mission and destiny. For some, it became a morality play. They perceived Islamic despotism as the most backward form of governance, depriving people of liberty and the fruits of their labor, restraining progress, and breeding lethargy, misery, poverty and ignorance. They exulted that republican ideals had given them the courage and strength to defeat the "plundering vassals of the tyrannical bashaw," striking a blow for liberty
and
Christianity. Americans had proven themselves, in the words of a contemporary nationalist poet, "a race of beings! of equal spirit to the first of nations." Proud that they rather than the Europeans had taken the lead in chastising the Barbary pirates, Americans were confirmed in their view of themselves as the agents of a new order of justice and freedom. Jefferson even speculated that his nation's success might encourage the European powers to emancipate themselves from that "degrading yoke."
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Jefferson's expansionism represents the fullest expression of his nationalism and republicanism. He shared with others of his generation a keen sense of America's exceptionalism and destiny. "A chosen country," he hailed it in his eloquent first inaugural address, "kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe" with "room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation." He was among the first to envision the extension of the nation's institutions to the Pacific Ocean. "However our present interests may restrain us . . . ," he wrote in 1801, "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will . . . cover the whole northern if not the southern continent with people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws."
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His vision of that "union" was vague, in some ways paradoxical, almost ethereal. He did not foresee the incorporation of this territory into a single political entity. Certain that geography and distance
would inhibit unity and that small, self-governing republics were best suited to preserve individual liberties, he saw rather a series of "distinct but bordering establishments" bound by "relations of blood [and] affection." Formal ties would not be required because such like-minded states, in contrast to Europe, would not be hostile to each other. As president, Jefferson perceived the immediate limits to U.S. expansion, but he was also alert to opportunities to reduce foreign influence on the continent. He used every available instrument, including the threat of war, to enlarge his "empire for liberty."
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A chance to do so to an extent he could not possibly have imagined came with the Louisiana crisis of 1802–3 and the acquisition of a vast new territory. This greatest achievement of Jefferson's presidency is often and rightly regarded as a diplomatic windfall—the result of accident, luck, and the whim of Napoleon Bonaparte—but it also owed much to design. Americans had coveted Louisiana and especially the crucial port of New Orleans since the colonial era. Through commercial and agricultural penetration, the United States had acquired significant influence there by the end of the century. The American presence in Louisiana, combined with Jefferson's shrewd and sometimes belligerent diplomacy, played a part in Napoleon's decision to sell to the United States territory he never occupied.

Throughout the last half of the eighteenth century, Louisiana was a pawn on the chessboard of European politics. Originally claimed by Spain but explored and settled by France, this enormous, uncharted region stretched from the source of the Mississippi to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico and westward along its tributaries to the Rockies. Scattered Indian tribes, with whom Europeans and Americans carried on a lively and lucrative trade in furs, roamed its vast distances. Under French administration, it was sparsely settled and weakly defended. Having lost Canada to Britain in the Seven Years' War, France in 1763 ceded New Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain, which acquired it mainly to keep it from British hands. Dreams of an American empire died hard in France, however, and for the rest of the century some officials pressed for reacquisition of Louisiana.

Americans also had designs on the Spanish colony. The United States early mastered the arts of infiltration and subversion and first employed with Spanish Louisiana the tactics later successfully used in the Floridas, Texas, California, and Hawaii. As early as the Revolution, restless frontiersmen began to filter into Louisiana. The reliance of trans-Appalachian
settlers on the Mississippi River and New Orleans quickened interest in the region. Spain's refusal to grant access to the river provoked talk of secession or a war of conquest. Pinckney's Treaty temporarily eased the problem and sharply expanded American influence in Spanish territory. Flatboats loaded with foodstuffs, tobacco, and whiskey and skillfully maneuvered by the wild river men—the "half-horse, half-alligators" of popular legend—floated down the Mississippi in droves. By the end of the century, the United States dominated commerce at the port of New Orleans. Encouraged at times by their own government, at times by the Spanish, who saw them as a buffer against a possible British invasion from Canada, and often acting on their own, American settlers continued to drift into Louisiana. Although living on foreign soil, they retained allegiance to the United States and displayed open contempt for their nominal rulers. In some areas, they composed a majority of the population, in others an unassimilable minority compared by increasingly nervous Spanish officials to the "Goths at the gates of Rome."
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Some even ventured illegally into upper Louisiana west of the Mississippi River. By the time Jefferson took office, Americans were actually taking control of territory under nominal European jurisdiction.
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As long as Louisiana remained in the hands of "feeble" Spain, Americans were content to be patient, and Jefferson was certain that in time the United States would acquire it "piece by piece." Should it be taken by a stronger power, however, a "profound reconsideration" of U.S. policy would be necessary.
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Jefferson's fears were soon realized. Upon becoming First Consul in 1799, Napoleon took up long dormant schemes to restore French grandeur in North America. Persuaded that an empire composed of the Floridas, Louisiana, and the Caribbean sugar islands would enrich his treasury, enhance his prestige, undermine British trade, and give him leverage against the United States, he set out to relieve Spain of its colonies. In the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1800), Spain relinquished costly and increasingly vulnerable Louisiana for a piece of European territory, but it refused to give up the Floridas and extracted from Napoleon a pledge not to transfer his new possession to a third party. Once peace was established in Europe in 1801, Napoleon dispatched a military expedition to regain control of rebellious Saint-Domingue. His next move was to occupy New Orleans.

Bonaparte's maneuvers sent shock waves across the Atlantic. Rumors of French acquisition of Louisiana began to reach America as early as the spring of 1801. Subsequent confirmation of the retrocession provoked an immediate and nervous response. "This little event of France possessing herself of Louisiana . . . ," Jefferson wrote a friend in April 1802, "is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides of the Atlantic and involve in its effects their highest destinies."
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Through unofficial emissaries, he dispatched stern warnings to France. "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy," he admonished. Should France take possession of New Orleans, the United States would have no choice but to "marry" itself to the "British fleet and nation" and use the outbreak of war in Europe as an excuse to take Louisiana by force.
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To threaten war over territory to which the United States had no claim and that had been exchanged in a perfectly legal manner was, to say the least, extraordinary. Given Jefferson's history of Anglophobia, the prospect of an alliance with Britain was perhaps even more so. Justifying his position on the dubious grounds that "natural law" entitled Americans to security and the free navigation of rivers adjoining their territory, he softened the threat by suggesting that France could avert war by ceding New Orleans to the United States.

Sudden revocation in October 1802 of Americans' rights to deposit goods at New Orleans for transshipment to other ports without duty inflamed an already tense situation. Spain had delayed executing the treaty. Spanish officials in New Orleans sought to curb the rampant and costly American smuggling, but most Americans saw the sinister hand of Bonaparte behind what they viewed as a pretext for French seizure of the port. Westerners demanded war. To embarrass the administration and fulfill their old expansionist designs, Federalists joined forces. "It belongs of right to the United States to regulate the future destiny of North America," one Federalist newspaper declared. Anxious to undercut the opposition and resolve the crisis without war, Jefferson combined continued threats with diplomacy. He reiterated earlier warnings that French occupation of Louisiana could bring war and backed them by mobilizing forces along the frontier. Under the guise of a "scientific expedition," he ordered Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to reconnoiter upper Louisiana and the Missouri River valley, in part to gain intelligence about Spanish military power. In January 1803, he dispatched to Paris as his
special envoy James Monroe, a man respected in the West, authorizing him to purchase New Orleans and the Floridas (which he mistakenly assumed had also been transferred to France). If that failed, Monroe was to proceed to London to discuss an alliance. "On the event of this mission, depends the future destinies of this republic," Monroe himself exclaimed. Toasts drunk to the departing envoy revealed the bellicose mood of the nation: "Peace, if peace is honorable; war, if war is necessary."
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