Washington City
If the Congress do not consent that the government shall send a force into the Mediterranean to check the insolence of these scoundrels and to render the United States respectable, I hope they will resolve at their next session to wrest the quiver of arrows from the left talon of the [American] Eagle . . . and substitute a fiddle bow or a cigar in lieu.
—WILLIAM EATON
VISITORS WHO HAD SEEN grandiose maps of the nation’s new capital were flummoxed on arrival, some even asking where Washington City was, while standing in the middle of it. Pennsylvania Avenue was a triumphant three miles long but contained only a handful of unfinished and gargantuan neoclassical buildings. These stood out like bizarre experiments in the swampy greenery, like wishful thinking for a toddler nation. That “Goose Creek” had been renamed the “Tiber” said it all.
No bridge crossed the Potomac, and fewer than 5,000 people lived in the humid district that ex-surveyor George Washington had personally selected because of the site’s commercial potential as a river-and-sea port. (While General George lived, the place was called “Federal City”; the river traffic bonanza never materialized thanks to waterfalls, mudbanks, and dangerous currents at Greenleaf’s Point.) With building going so slowly, land values had crashed, and empty shacks tilted against unfinished brick edifices. “It looks like a deserted city,” wrote one senator. Hunters shot quail near the president’s house. Running water connected to indoor plumbing remained a dream, as did the hope for rows of retail shops. Many of the thirty-four senators stayed at the same overpriced boardinghouses, and often, more politics happened there over ham and peas than at the half-built, wing-less Capitol; entertainment consisted of the Marine Band and itinerant jugglers and actors visiting the Washington Theater; there was little to do there but drink, drink more, talk, or wait for the next government meeting. Congressmen were so exasperated with the discomfort and dullness of the place that they soon introduced a bill to move the nation’s capital to that nearby metropolis, Baltimore.
The unfinished Capitol building in bucolic Washington City, 1800.
Watercolor by William R. Birch.
William Eaton arrived in Washington City on January 10, 1804, a cold Tuesday morning, to plead his case on his expense account and his diplomatic career. He considered himself on a crusade, and he knew that one man—with the nod of his head or the scratch of his pen—could wipe his slate clean: Thomas Jefferson.
Eaton’s journey from Brimfield, Massachusetts, had taken him ten arduous days on horseback, sailboat, and stagecoach. Just as travel along the eastern seaboard remained slow and difficult in the early 1800s, even slower and more fitful was the delivery of news from across the Atlantic.
Word of the Philadelphia disaster, though it had occurred ten weeks earlier, still hadn’t reached America. Winter storms and steady eastward trade winds kept nautical traffic to a crawl. Official Washington remained blissfully unaware that Bashaw Yussef Karamanli of Tripoli now owned 307 American sailor slaves.
It is difficult for a modern reader to conceive just how small and accessible the entire federal government of the United States was under President Thomas Jefferson. The Department of State—today 28,000 employees—then consisted of Secretary of State James Madison and a handful of assistants. Visitors willing to ride to this odd outpost of governance sometimes presented themselves at the door of the president’s house and were rewarded, especially in the mornings, with an immediate audience with Jefferson.
Sometime during the week of January 16, William Eaton walked from his boardinghouse over to the Treasury Department, where he met with Richard Harrison, an auditor. With copious notes and vouchers, Eaton presented his case. In the broad scope of history, the expense account of the consul to Tunis might seem trivial or unimportant, but it certainly wasn’t to William Eaton. His future was on the line here, and his past.
He owed at minimum $22,000, and possibly quite a bit more. The debt would ruin him and his family. The shame of it, coming after his army court-martial and his dismissal from Tunis, would almost certainly crush his career.
The auditor sent a note to Secretary of State James Madison asking him to review material submitted by Eaton. Sometime during the week of February 5, Madison walked over to the president’s house and discussed the matter with Thomas Jefferson. Eaton also paid him a quick visit. In sparse Washington City, all roads eventually led to Thomas Jefferson. The Virginia architect-statesman-farmer had a hand in an uncanny array of decisions from nation-building land purchases to niggling line items on diplomats’ expense accounts.
When Jefferson talked to either Eaton or Madison, he towered over the other man. Jefferson stood a lanky 6'2", and at age sixty, his often unkempt hair had frizzled from reddish to gray and framed a pale, freckled, sun-damaged face and often parched lips. Thomas Jefferson, though raised as landed gentry, was now notorious for his slovenly dress, for his common-man refusal to don ceremonial garb. Instead, visitors such as Senator William Plumer (Federalist, New Hampshire) observed that the president often opted to greet guests in down-at-heel slippers, an untidy red undervest, and corduroy long pants, and that his white shirts were often stained. He rarely tied back, groomed, or powdered his unruly hair. A British diplomat that year compared Jefferson’s appearance to that of a “tall, large-boned farmer” but added that Jefferson was “good natured, frank and rather friendly.” In one-on-one conversation, the widower favored a stream-of-consciousness delivery that one senator described as “loose and rambling” but full of “information” and “even brilliant sentiments.” A prodigious scholar, his 6,487-volume personal library would one day form the basis of the Library of Congress.
Jefferson, at that moment in 1804 at the end of his first term, was riding extremely high, thanks to the just finalized Louisiana Purchase from France. In effect Jefferson, the negotiator, had acquired far more territory than Napoleon, the conqueror. Whiskey toasts at Stelle’s Hotel on Capitol Square echoed far into the night.
William Eaton had picked an especially bad time to come to Jefferson, cap in hand, to ask to be released from his debts. The president had consistently preached “economy” (then a buzzword for “fiscal responsibility”) so as to pay off the $75 million in Revolutionary War debts, to which would now be added $15 million for his huge western land purchase.
At first glance, Eaton and Jefferson made a very odd couple. Jefferson was a tall thin Virginian; Eaton a fairly short muscular New Englander. Jefferson, as governor of Virginia, was forced to flee the British and held a lifelong distrust of large standing armies and navies. Eaton, a career army officer before his diplomatic appointment, deeply resented the dearth of captaincies in the U.S. Army. Jefferson spoke softly, thoughtfully. Eaton often ranted. Jefferson’s letters reveal a serene intelligence, filled with articulate lawyerly arguments. Eaton’s letters pack passion, bombast, sarcasm. Eaton was a friend of the Federalists and had been appointed consul by the Federalist administration of John Adams; Jefferson was a Republican, deeply wounded by recent Federalist gutter attacks in the press.
However, the two men shared a few traits: an enormous love of country and a sense of disgust at the actions of the Barbary powers of North Africa. “I am an enemy to all these douceurs, tributes and humiliations,” Jefferson had once written to Madison. “I know nothing will stop the eternal increase from these pirates but the presence of an armed force.” But Jefferson’s “economy” at times prevented him from ample military spending. An internal tug-of-war, not his first, slowed Jefferson, the would-be warrior.
On Wednesday, February 8, 1804, the Virginian reviewed Eaton’s expense accounts and drafted a long unflattering letter to him. Jefferson devoted two handwritten pages to analyzing Eaton’s two biggest expense items. The president’s training decades earlier in the law served him well. Jefferson eviscerated the idea that Eaton as a consul—for no matter how patriotic a cause—could commission and hire his own armed merchant ship, Gloria, to act as part of the U.S. Navy. “Only the Legislature [Congress] can add to or diminish our naval force,” wrote Jefferson, who added that the Executive Branch would “carry its indulgence to the utmost” and allow Eaton’s expenses for the Gloria when delivering important government messages.
Jefferson was even more dismissive of the $10,000 that Eaton was tricked into giving to the prime minister of Tunis. Eaton had promised the man a bribe if he would help overthrow the ruler of Tripoli, a bribe that would be paid only if the United States’s ally, Hamet, mounted the throne. Since Hamet never gained power, Eaton argued, the minister had no right to claim an extra $10,000 during a business transaction. Jefferson regarded the matter as a private business dispute and offered—very cold comfort indeed—that Eaton’s successor as consul to Tunis would “lend [his] aid in recovering the money . . . but this is the utmost to which [the United States] are bound.”
Jefferson finished the letter, tamped it dry, then abruptly changed his mind and decided not to send it. He apparently didn’t relish a head-to-head confrontation with Eaton, since he had other means available. Three days later, Secretary of State Madison delivered an almost identical message to the Treasury auditor, who in turn relayed it to Eaton, who became furious.
To make matters worse, the auditor also tallied a tentative total for Eaton’s accounts, based on Jefferson’s decision. He informed Eaton that he would owe the staggering sum of $40,803. That was twenty years’ salary for a navy captain. If the judgment stood, not only Eaton but his wife, his three stepchildren, his three daughters, would all be ruined.
The bad financial news mirrored even worse personal news. From every scrap of correspondence, it’s clear that Eaton regarded his expense-account ruling as a kind of tribunal for his handling of Barbary Coast affairs. His honor and reputation were on the line. If his expenses were justified, so was his conduct in pulling out all stops to try to launch civil war and overthrow the enemy government in nearby Tripoli and defy these Barbary pirates.
Eaton wasted no time in taking his case directly to Congress. The stroll to the rickety underheated Capitol building took but a minute. Access was almost that easy. At the Eighth Congress, First Session, on February 16, 1804, Eaton addressed a long passionate plea to the Honorable Speaker. He shaped it as a vindication of his diplomatic career; and he could not resist mapping out the course he desperately hoped his country would follow against the Barbary pirates of North Africa.
In the speech, he repeated one name over and over again, like a mantra: “Hamet, Hamet, Hamet.” William Eaton contended that he had incurred the bulk of his expenses while pursuing a secret plot—approved by Secretary of State Madison—to overthrow the anti-American ruler of Tripoli, Bashaw Yussef, and replace him with his older brother, the rightful heir, Hamet. (The man’s correct Arabic name was Ahmet, but Eaton and all Americans called him Hamet.)
Eaton told Congress that he had first met Hamet, then in exile in Tunis, shortly after Tripoli declared war on the United States in May 1801. On the advice of the U.S. consul to Tripoli, James Leander Cathcart, Eaton had explored the idea of plotting with Hamet to restore him to his rightful throne to achieve a long-term payment-free friendship between the two nations. The American motivation was clear: Hamet would swear never to enslave Americans or to demand tribute money; the United States would then have a Moslem ally on the dangerous Barbary Coast. (Hamet had ruled Tripoli briefly in 1795 but had been locked out of his own palace; Yussef, almost a decade later, still held Hamet’s wife and children as hostages in Tripoli.)
Plans for an American-backed civil war remained on a slow simmer. Then early in 1802 while Eaton recuperated from an illness in Leghorn, Italy, he learned that Yussef was plotting Hamet’s death. Yussef intended to lure his brother with the promise of letting him rule two rich provinces, Derne and Bengazi, and then he would kill him. Eaton desperately wanted to rush from Leghorn back to Tunis to warn Hamet, but no ships were heading in that direction. Here is where Eaton’s expenses started to mount. Eaton commissioned his own merchant ship, the Gloria, to take him on the voyage from Leghorn to Tunis, which with contrary winds, took two expensive weeks. He reached Tunis on March 12, 1802, just in time to warn Hamet of the danger of leaving with the forty armed Turkish bodyguards sent by his brother. With Hamet now under his wing, Eaton commissioned his own Gloria to go to Gibraltar to seek the U.S. Navy squadron to inform them of the critical need to aid Hamet immediately.
Eaton was quite optimistic that their Tripoli coup would fly with American navy cannons supporting Hamet’s ground efforts.
Eaton’s Captain Joseph Bounds of the Gloria found Captain Alexander Murray of the U.S. Navy frigate Constellation, freshly arrived from America. Almost without any hesitation for thought, Murray dismissed Eaton’s plan with Hamet as a waste of money. He informed the captain of the Gloria to proceed wherever he liked but not on the business of the United States of America. Eaton, when notified soon after, was both mortified and irate. He felt betrayed by his own government. Murray in his report home called Eaton’s actions “needless expenses” and “extravagances.”
Soon after, Commodore Morris, a cautious man, arrived in Tunis and met with Eaton and with Hamet’s agents. Morris, despite all entreaties, said the American squadron wasn’t ready to attack Tripoli. Eaton said Hamet’s agents wept with disappointment at the delay.
It was then—when the Hamet plot was still alive—that Eaton was banished from Tunis over his debts and that Commodore Morris decided Eaton was a lunatic.
Eaton, not surprisingly, was furious over what he perceived as the U.S. Navy’s lackadaisical approach to the Tripoli war and Commodore Morris’s and Captain Murray’s disdain for his Hamet scheme. As he now pointed out in his speech to the House, “It may be asserted, without vanity or exaggeration, that my arrangements with the rival Bashaw did more to harass the enemy in 1802 than the entire operation of our squadron.”
Eaton, never one to flick at an enemy when he could pound one, added that during Morris’s seventeen months as commodore, Morris spent “only 19 days before the enemy’s port!” (Thomas Hooper, a marine lieutenant, had secretly supplied Eaton with that information.) “The very commander who recoils at the prodigality of seeing a single ship employed in the prosecution of a measure which might have decided the fate of the enemy . . . seems wholly unconcerned at having employed the whole operative naval force of the United States an entire year in the Mediterranean, attending the travels of a woman!”
Mrs. Morris—who accompanied her husband along with their young son Gerard and his nursemaid Sal—was nicknamed throughout the fleet as the “Commodoress.” A catty midshipman noted in his diary that the book-loving lady “looks very well in a veil.” Eaton once groused in an official report to Secretary of State Madison: “Who, except an American, would ever propose to himself to bring a wife to war against the ferocious savages of Barbary?” He added caustically that next time: “I would recommend to the Govt of the US to station a comp.y of comedians and a seraglio before the enemy’s port.”
(Within six weeks of Eaton’s speech, Commodore Morris would be brought up before a Court of Inquiry.)
Eaton contended that he had incurred all these major expenses for his country, in an attempt to bring Hamet to the throne. He couldn’t resist adding, “The project with Hamet is still feasible.”
Now Eaton worked up a good lather.
Let my fellow-citizens be persuaded that there is no borne [limit] to the avarice of the Barbary princes; like the insatiable grave, they can never have enough. Consign them the revenues of the United States as the price of peace, they would still tax our labors for more veritable expressions of friendship. But it is a humiliating consideration to the industrious citizen, the sweat of whose brow supports him with bread, that a tithe from his hard earnings must go to purchase oil of roses to perfume a pirate’s beard!
It is true that Denmark and Sweden (and even the United States, following their example) gratuitously furnish almost all their materials for ship-building and munitions of war; besides the valuable jewels and large sums of money we are continually paying into their hands for their forebearance, and for the occasional ransom of captives. . . . Without these resources they would soon sink under their own ignorance and want of means to become mischievous. Why this humiliation? Why furnish them the means to cut our own throats?
A seventeenth-century Barbary war galley with slaves manning the oars.
Eaton concluded: “If the expenses of the measures I have conducted, for which I thought myself authorized to apply public funds, should be admitted to my credit, there may be a small balance due to me from the United States. If not, I am at once a bankrupt and a beggar—net product of the earnings of almost five years’ exile!”
The House of Representatives relayed Eaton’s speech and supporting documents to the Committee of Claims. Two weeks later, on February 29, John Cotton Smith (Federalist, Connecticut), a descendant of Cotton Mather, delivered an assessment to the House. He praised Eaton for making a “well-founded claim for his sacrifices and expenditures in the public service,” but Smith said that the committee believed that the Executive Branch “is both enabled and disposed to render him complete justice.” The Committee of Claims’s Smith concluded that Eaton’s petition was “premature” and that “legislative interference” should be withheld.
They had kicked Eaton back to Treasury and back to James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who had already nixed the key expense items. Eaton was between a rock and a pair of tight-fisted Republicans. This impatient man faced more lobbying and more delays. It was hard to imagine what could save William Eaton at this point.
Then news arrived that Tripoli had captured the USS Philadelphia, and 307 Americans were now slaves on the coast of Barbary.
The news had traveled fitfully indeed. The Boston Columbian Centinel broke the story on March 10, having received it from an American merchant ship that had departed February 3 from Cadiz, Spain, carrying a weeks-old London newspaper that had run an item from Italy datelined December 25. Now the shocking report spread down the eastern seaboard of the United States. The New York Evening Post picked it up on March 14, quoting from a letter carried aboard that merchant ship. “The officers [of the Philadelphia] are said to be treated with humanity but it is said the crew were stript immediately on their landing, even to a single shirt, and that they are on short allowance.”
Americans were appalled. This military fiasco and sudden hostage crisis brought the war home; the event clearly ranked among the nation’s worst disasters since the founding of the country.
Wasting no time, President Jefferson on Tuesday, March 20, addressed Congress with a call to arms, asking them to “increase our force and enlarge our expenses in the Mediterranean.” The National Intelligencer, which everyone knew acted as the house organ for Jefferson, ran a prominent item, headlined “Millions for Defense, but not a Cent for Tribute.” The piece countered the criticism of the Federalists that Jefferson and his Republicans were weak-kneed on military matters and boasted: “It is thus the present administration evinces its patriotism, and its energy; not by vain vaunting of prowess; but by actions, which will show the world that while the wish of the American nation is peace, she will not hesitate for a moment to make that power feel the vengeance of her arms, that dares, in violation of justice, to invade her rights.”
On Monday, March 26, the Senate hopped aboard the war effort, voting to increase import duties by 2.5 percent to raise $900,000 to send another squadron to the Mediterranean.
Navy ships would come out of drydock. Captains, lingering bored on half pay, would dust off uniforms. Stockyards would start salting beef for the long voyages. Preachers would sermonize about ransoming the prisoners.
On this same Monday, William Eaton sought out Thomas Jefferson at one of the most unusual populist rallies ever held in this country, a huge open-to-the-public party in a Senate meeting room.
Festivities began when servants carried in a “Mammoth Loaf” of bread, baked from an entire barrel of flour, and delivered it along with a large sirloin of roast beef and beer, wine, and hard cider.
(The significance of the “Mammoth Loaf” was that two years earlier, the women of a small town in Massachusetts had sent the president a 1,200-pound cheese to celebrate his tolerance of religious choice. The Federalists had tried to spoof Jefferson, dubbing the gift “Mammoth Cheese” since a Jefferson-funded archaeologist had recently unearthed the bones of a woolly mammoth in New York City. The joke backfired when Americans everywhere embraced the cheese as a fitting symbol of American hard work and political ideas.)
Now, the navy baker had made a Mammoth Loaf to help finish the Mammoth Cheese, of which large chunks still remained. At the stroke of noon, “people of all classes & colors from the President of the United States to the meanest vilest Virginia slave,” as one New England senator put it, crowded into the Capitol for dinner. Jefferson, in scruffy common-man clothes, pulled out a jackknife from his pocket and cut off a hunk of roast beef and some bread to eat and even had a drink of liquor. Apparently more than one drink; he was overheard comparing “the drunken frolic to the sacrament of the Lord’s supper.” The party continued after the dinner hour, and some senators sent the sergeant at arms to demand silence. One humorless senator, a former military officer, yelled at the mob, “If ever you are again guilty of the like, you shall be punished—I will inflict it—The Navy shall be brought up & kill you outright.”
Eaton during that chaotic afternoon was able to corner Jefferson just long enough to set up a meeting for four days later at the president’s house. On Friday, March 30, with war fever still lingering in the air like cannon smoke, Eaton finally got a chance for redemption. The president and his Cabinet, having waited for meddlesome Congress to leave town, authorized Eaton to go on a secret “enterprise” to the Barbary Coast, to aid the legitimate sovereign Hamet in attacking Tripoli by land. Eaton’s ultimate goal would be to free the American captives, impose terms of peace, and secure an ally in that dangerous region. “The President and his Cabinet Council . . . formed sanguine hopes of its success,” assessed Eaton later. This mission represented a dream assignment for Eaton, a chance to prove to the doubting politicians and navy men that backing Hamet would not only solve the Tripoli problem but also send a loud message of defiance along the entire Barbary Coast. According to Eaton, the president agreed to send to Hamet “on the score of a loan,” some field artillery, one thousand pistols and muskets, and $40,000. The loan angle was very Jeffersonian in its economy; if Hamet succeeded, he would be expected to repay the debt.
Sending an American operative to abet civil war in a foreign country is not something thoughtful men such as Jefferson or Madison would do lightly. Madison in an earlier letter to Eaton, then consul in Tunis, had revealed some of the administration’s logic. “Although it does not accord with the general sentiments or views of the United States to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries, it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to turn to their advantage, the enmity and pretension of others against a common foe.” (August 22, 1802)
Dispatching Eaton marked the first time that the U.S. government ever sent an “agent” or a “covert force” to try to help overthrow a foreign government. It would not be the last: President Madison would finance a team on a secret mission to Spanish Florida; other presidents would tinker covertly to acquire Texas and California. But it was only after World War II, with the birth of the CIA, that the United States began to launch numerous covert operations in countries all around the world: the Philippines, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Afghanistan, to name a few. These murky events—often denied for decades—generally become best known when they fail, such as John F. Kennedy’s aborted effort in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs to dislodge Castro. Rarely do covert ops go as smoothly as when the CIA and British intelligence teamed up to reinstall the Shah in Iran in 1953 so as to keep the oil fields open to foreign companies and prevent—or rather postpone—an Islamic fundamentalist regime.
The people of the United States almost seem in denial about the existence of these operations. Secrecy and duplicity are regarded—perhaps wishfully—as un-American.
Eaton’s mission marked the first tentative steps by a deeply idealistic government trying to wrestle with ugly problems overseas. When is secrecy justified? What about assassination? What about government deniability? Later generations of politicians and spymasters would grow far more cynical about pursuing American interests abroad.
Jefferson and Madison decided that they should show compassion for the foreign leader who would become embroiled in American plans. They knew that covert operations often fail.
Madison added to Eaton: “Should this aid be found inapplicable or thy own personal object unattainable, it will be due to the honor of the United States and to the expectations he [Hamet] will have naturally formed to treat his disappointment with much tenderness and to restore him as nearly as may be to the situation from which he was drawn.” Madison concluded that in the event of a treaty with the current Bashaw Yussef of Tripoli “perhaps it may be possible to make some stipulation formal or informal in favor of the brother.”
Eaton received one key added incentive by taking this assignment. Secretary of State Madison and the auditor at Treasury apparently agreed to hold off from finalizing Eaton’s disastrous accounts from Tunis; for Eaton, victory by Hamet and a regime change in Tripoli might open their eyes to his arguments.
Eaton, revived, a man with a mission, hurried to Baltimore to learn details about his new job from Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith, a forty-six-year-old civic-minded lawyer. Eaton would soon become personal friends with Smith, and later describe him “as much of a gentleman and soldier as his relation with the administration will suffer.”
Eaton was told he would receive the vague title of “Navy Agent of the United States for the Several Barbary Regencies.” Since the new squadron would need at least a month for outfitting and supplies, Eaton had time to squeeze in a quick celebratory visit home before returning to North Africa.
At least twice during their marriage, Eaton had come home in disgrace, the first time after his court-martial, and more recently after being exiled from Tunis and accused of squandering government money. Now this headstrong man was a secret agent, animated by his patriotic mission to rescue 307 American men and boys held hostage in Barbary.