TOBIAS LEAR remained in the Mediterranean as consul general, and he continued to dote on his young wife, Fanny. During a rare separation in 1807, he wrote to her from aboard the USS Constitution, which had transported them on their honeymoon, “I am at last in our dear little cabin, which wants only yourself to make it an earthly paradise to me.”
Lear also continued to coddle the Barbary powers, paying tribute and giving elaborate jeweled presents such as “a gold watch with diamonds, a diamond solitaire, etc.” A congressional study later found that Lear had overseen spending more than $500,000 in four years, from 1805 to 1809. He never received an official reprimand for his handling of the treaty with Tripoli.
Finally, in 1812, not coincidentally after the death of Eaton, who had threatened him, Tobias decided to return to the United States. And the Dey of Algiers opted to extort one last $27,000 present out of him. Desperate to depart, Lear convinced the moneylenders Busnah & Bacri to advance him the sum; they charged 25 percent interest. In a couple of days, Lear had lost $33,750, close to the price of William Eaton’s entire mission.
Lear, after run-ins with the British navy, finally reached home in 1813; he soon after asked a friend to deposit $4,900 for him; he also purchased a carriage and a pair of horses for $1,100. Lear apparently had done quite well—financially—as a diplomat to Barbary. He resumed his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote back warmly and invited Colonel Lear, Fanny, and son Lincoln to come visit him at Monticello.
Though Lear hoped for a Cabinet-level appointment, President Madison offered him only the post of chief accountant in the War Department, which he reluctantly accepted. With Lear back in Washington City, fanatical Federalists such as Timothy Pickering renewed their harsh criticism of the consul general and his Tripoli treaty. They also revived the charge that Lear—seeking favors—had destroyed some of Washington’s letters.
On October 11, 1816, with no hysterics and no warning, Tobias Lear committed suicide. His son discovered him bloodied, still holding the pistol. He left no note. The former secretary to George Washington was buried in Congressional Cemetery; he was joined forty years later by his beloved wife, Fanny, who never remarried.
***
Hamet Karamanli, impoverished exile, stayed on in Syracuse; his princely entourage dwindled down to a mere dozen; he survived on a $200-a-month dole from the U.S. Navy agent. Almost fourteen months after Congress approved it, Hamet did receive $2,400 in “temporary relief,” with most of the money going to pay his debts.
The new U.S. consul to Tripoli, Dr. George Davis, as soon as he learned of Lear’s secret article in May of 1807, informed Bashaw Yussef that the clandestine agreement had not been ratified by the U.S. Senate and therefore was not part of the agreed treaty. Yussef was furious and demanded a “consideration” to change it. Davis—in the hard diplomatic school of Eaton and Preble—held his ground and confronted Yussef during a session of the divan. “Our treaty is known to all the world and our public faith pledged in [Hamet’s family’s] behalf,” said Davis. “Your brother cooperated with us and to deceive him in such a tender point would disgrace us as a nation.”
Yussef caved and agreed to free the family. On October 13, 1807, at 10 P.M., Hamet’s wife, three sons, and a daughter, with an entourage of nineteen servants and slaves, departed for Syracuse on an Italian vessel, chartered by the U.S. government. Reunion was sweet, but Hamet had no means to support his royal clan. “I do not see how he can provide bread,” Davis soon wrote. Fleeing creditors, Hamet moved from Syracuse to Malta. He borrowed often and even pawned his wife’s jewelry.
When the governor of Derne—Mustifa—died in late 1808, Davis lobbied Yussef to appoint his brother to rule there. The Bashaw surprisingly agreed, and in spring of 1809 Hamet and both his wives and all the children prepared to leave Malta. However, his landlord refused to let him go, and the United States, at the last minute, paid $2,360 in back rent to extricate him. Hamet and family moved into the palace at Derne, where by all accounts, he ruled wisely and fairly and was well liked by his people. Davis informed him that all U.S. responsibilities toward him had now officially ceased.
Two years later, Yussef tried to kill him. In 1811, Hamet fled to Alexandria, along that same desert route that he and Eaton had taken a half decade earlier. He died that year in unpleasant exile at the age of forty-seven. His son Mohammed tried to take over Tripoli in the 1830s but failed.
***
Bashaw Yussef Karamanli of Tripoli (1766-1838), despite being master of the smallest corsair fleet in Barbary, continued to extort a luxurious lifestyle out of the nations of Europe and the United States. The U.S. government, for one, sent a nice gift of $5,000, which included a diamond snuffbox. Yussef continued to enjoy the music of his Italian band and continued to prefer the company of his Negro wife to his Turkish one. Despite many coup attempts by his own sons, the Bashaw continued to rule and to thrive for another twenty-seven years, through 1832. During his waning days of power, however, with the French and British demanding payments, the sixty-eight-year-old ruler holed himself up in the castle, drinking brandy with his three favorite African concubines. His desire to cover them in jewels had bankrupted the kingdom, claimed a French consul. Yussef’s son then forced him from the throne, and the old man wound up living in a deserted part of the palace, half-naked in rags.
When Yussef died, unmourned, three years later, the Turkish government paid to have him buried near his ancestors in the Karamanli mosque in the heart of the city, not too far from where he had once let dogs feast on the remains of American sailors.
***
The Scottish pirate, Murad Rais—the former Peter Lyle, who had forsaken family and foreskin—led the corsair fleet out hunting in the wake of the American peace treaty. As usual, he stalked the weaker nations and, within weeks, had captured a Neapolitan ship with twenty slaves aboard, and then a merchant ship flying a Danish flag. Murad, married to Yussef’s sister, rarely failed to reward his patron.
About a decade later, however, Murad’s lush lifestyle suddenly came to an end, thanks to the anger of the United States. The American consul, Richard B. Jones, liked to shoot quail, sometimes venturing onto the edge of Murad’s country estate. Murad ordered his slaves to attack him. One smashed him twice over the head with the thick shaft of a hoe. “My hat prevented the blow from being fatal,” later wrote Jones.
The American demanded justice. So, Bashaw Yussef agreed to banish Murad until the United States would allow him to return. This Barbary pirate, whom Eaton had once called a “damned villain,” boarded a British ship to Lampedusa with his eldest sons, the nephews of the Bashaw.
After three years, the United States allowed Murad to return to Tripoli, and he reclaimed his post as admiral. In 1832 he made the mistake of supporting Hamet’s son Mohammed during a failed coup. Murad died that year when hit by a cannonball fired from the walls of Tripoli castle.
***
Dr. Jonathan Cowdery (1767-1852), the assistant surgeon of the USS Philadelphia who had served the Bashaw’s family, returned to the United States in 1805, suffering from an eye disease prevalent on the Barbary Coast. In 1833, despite being blind in his left eye, he became chief surgeon of the U.S. Navy, a post that he held until his death.
***
Commodore Samuel Barron recovered from his liver ailment long enough to oversee building Jefferson’s gunboats at Hampton, Virginia, and to father a son. He was never censured for shilly-shallying in the Mediterranean; this favorite of Jefferson died on October 29, 1810, long before the era of death benefits for widows. “In recognition of the service of his father,” his son, Samuel Barron III, at the age of two years and five weeks, was appointed a midshipman, the youngest officer in the history of the U.S. Navy; he was immediately entitled to receive a portion of his salary. Late in life, Samuel III became a commodore during the Civil War . . . for the navy of the Confederate states.
***
After being feted for a while, William Bainbridge (1774-1833), the exonerated captain of the USS Philadelphia, took a furlough from the navy to earn money as a merchant captain. While climbing aboard a commercial vessel, he tripped and fell into the water. Unable to swim, he sank three times below the surface before a Negro servant dove in and rescued him.
During the War of 1812, Bainbridge finally had his moment of glory. He commanded the frigate USS Constitution against the British HMS Java, which had forty-nine cannon and 400 men. Early on, Bainbridge received a musket ball in the hip, then was sprayed with splinters when a British cannonball blew away the ship’s wheel. He persevered on the quarterdeck and steered the Constitution—by ordering sailors to pull rudder cables belowdecks—to head directly at the Java’s bow until their riggings became entwined. The Americans’ superior gunnery then devastated the British ship.
Bainbridge thrived in the peacetime navy, establishing the first naval school in Boston harbor and overseeing various shipbuilding ports.
***
With the end of the War of 1812, Stephen Decatur Jr., who had burned the Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor, was given the plum assignment of commanding a squadron heading to the Mediterranean to confront the Barbary nations. His mission was to deliver long overdue payback for decades of insolence.
Decatur captured the Algerian flagship Mashuda with 406 sailors aboard, and enjoyed the exquisite treat of dictating terms to Algiers—no tribute ever again, no American slaves ever again—and he demanded an immediate $10,000 payment for past wrongs.
Next stop was Tunis, where Decatur and his fleet again demanded an immediate payment, in this case of $46,000, to compensate for an American ship being looted the previous year. Decatur refused to be tricked ashore or delayed. The Bey paid.
Then Decatur continued east to Tripoli. He entered the port where 300 American sailors had toiled as slaves; he demanded that Bashaw Yussef immediately hand over $30,000 for violating the treaty between the United States and Tripoli. Yussef threatened to declare war and disparagingly offered a pittance on the dollar. Decatur was unmoved. Yussef, very quickly, paid $25,000 and freed ten Christian slaves.
Decatur returned home to the United States to extraordinary applause for being the first American officer successfully to defy the Barbary powers.
On March 22, 1820, the national hero fought a duel with Captain James Barron, younger brother of Commodore Samuel Barron. Captain James Barron, who had been disgraced during the Chesapeake incident with England, believed that Decatur had repeatedly slandered him and blocked his re-entry into the navy. Decatur chose Captain Bainbridge to negotiate the rules of the duel, and Bainbridge graciously allowed the severely nearsighted Barron to fire from the shortened distance of eight paces instead of the usual ten. Decatur died. For the rest of her life, Decatur’s widow, Susan, called Bainbridge “one of my husband’s murderers.”
***
The days of the Barbary corsair were numbered. Decatur’s regatta of defiance helped shame the European powers to end their centuries-old practice of placating the Barbary nations. Admiral Lord Exmouth led a combined English-Dutch fleet into Algiers in 1816, a year after Decatur. Heavy bombardment swayed the Dey to agree to renounce enslaving any Christians and to agree to a lasting peace without tribute. Within a few years, however, the Dey was back in the white slave trade and at war with France. In 1829, two armed French brigs ran aground in the harbor, and the enraged Dey offered a $100 reward for each severed French head brought to him. He paid for 109. France soon after attacked with massive force and in three weeks conquered Algiers, ending that nation’s maritime crimes forever. France did not grant independence to Algeria until 1962.
Tunis struggled on as a second-rate pirate power, but the demise of Algiers spelled its own doom as a predator. France eventually controlled Tunis as well, from 1881 through 1956.
As for Tripoli, once Bashaw Yussef fell from power, his squabbling sons sent the nation into near constant civil war. The Ottoman Empire in 1835 sent a fleet and ended the Karamanli dynasty and officially stopped the piracies. Italy conquered the region in 1911 and held on until its own defeat in World War II. Libya was an Islamic monarchy in 1968 when Colonel Moammar Qaddafi staged a coup and took power. At first he preached anti-Westernism and a support for terrorism worldwide. However, many factors, including economic sanctions and an American missile landing near his desert tent, have led him in recent years to abandon that message.
***
Eaton’s mission was the United States’ first overseas covert operation, but certainly not the last. The CIA agenda for the latter half of the twentieth century was filled with agents seeking covert regime change—especially in Central and South America—to create governments sympathetic to U.S. interests. But dirty tricks often have strange results. In the 1980s, the United States’ secret aid to the mujahideen “Freedom Fighters” in Afghanistan put American-made weapons in the hands of a fellow by the name of Osama bin Laden.
At this very moment, plans are afoot at CIA headquarters to prop up or topple regimes around the world. Many of these plans will remain secret for years, if not decades. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had grave misgivings about taking this path, of trying to reshape the world through stealth, of unleashing kingmakers like William Eaton.
***
Congress never rewarded the marine privates who marched with Eaton on his forlorn mission across the desert. In fact, for almost a century after Tripoli the entire United States Marine Corps remained a lowly, underpaid, underrespected outfit, mostly assigned to guarding ships and navy yards, and to parading around on ceremonial occasions. The Marine Band played at presidential events.
The United States Marine Corps did not begin to evolve into one of the world’s most elite fighting forces until its accomplishments in World War I—the Fourth Marine “Devil Dogs” of Belleau Wood, for one—followed by amphibious assaults and its heralded valor in World War II at Iwo Jima and elsewhere. The Corps successfully moved from its early “The Desperate, the Drunk” to its current “The Few, the Proud.”
Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon (1776-1850), the fiddle-playing fearless marine who charged alongside Eaton, was the only U.S. Marine to receive a reward. The State of Virginia commissioned a fancy scimitar to be presented to him. Before he received it, though, disgusted over his lack of promotion, O’Bannon resigned from the marines on March 6, 1807, and spent two years in the U.S. Army. O’Bannon then moved back to Kentucky and started distilling whiskey with his brother-in-law under the brand “Old Pepper”; he was elected to the state legislature and amassed a small fortune in real estate. Years after his death, the Daughters of the American Revolution had his remains moved from obscure Russellville to Kentucky’s premier cemetery in Frankfort. The tombstone reads: “As Captain [sic] of United States Marines he was the First to Plant the American Flag on Foreign Soil.”
In 1826, Marine Commandant Archibald Henderson adopted a curved Mameluke sword for the U.S. Marines dress uniform. Marine tradition holds that Hamet Karamanli, in gratitude, had presented a similar scimitar to Lieutenant O’Bannon after the capture of Derne. Unfortunately, no evidence exists that Hamet, penniless as always, ever presented O’Bannon with a sword. (The legend first surfaced when an O’Bannon relative wrote it up as fact in the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1917.)
All that notwithstanding, the marines did carve out more than a little glory on that march with Eaton, and almost every day, someone somewhere loudly sings their praise: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea. First to fight for right and freedom, And to keep our honor clean, We are proud to claim the title of United States Marine.”
***
Slave girl Anna Porcile returned to Sardinia and slipped out of the history books. Her father, the chevalier, never repaid anyone for her ransom. Among the slaves captured alongside her during that Tunisian raid in 1798 was another appealing girl, Francesca Rosso, who was nine at the time. In 1810, Francesca married the Bey of Tunis, and their son Sidi Hamed, nicknamed “Il Sardo” (the Sardinian), later ruled Tunis for eighteen years.
To the present day, on the tiny island of San Pietro on November 15, the people celebrate their ancestors’ liberation from Moslem slavery with a Catholic festival called The Madonna of the Slave. They exult in knowing they no longer have to fear that they might go to sleep free and wake up headed in chains to the coast of Barbary.
***
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) never apologized in any way to William Eaton; he never chastised Tobias Lear; he never publicly admitted regret over the Tripoli treaty. “Biologically, as well as psychologically, he was thin-skinned,” wrote biographer Joseph Ellis in his award-winning American Sphinx. Jefferson spent his retirement working to found the University of Virginia, greeting an endless stream of visitors to Monticello, and answering more than a thousand letters a year.
And every so often in one of those letters, he would weigh in on a political topic. Though he rarely acknowledged his own contradictions, changes in his beliefs certainly did occur. Jefferson had always distrusted the idea of creating a strong permanent navy of massive warships. And yet, on June 19, 1813, he wrote to Tobias Lear: “I suppose we can do little with the Dey [of Algiers] till we have peace with England, but then I would, at any expense, hunt him from the ocean, a navy equal to that object we should ever keep.”
That is a strong statement from the Gunboat President.
Jefferson and Eaton always shared an abhorrence for the bullying of the Barbary pirates. In his later years, Jefferson inched closer to Eaton’s view that the United States must spend money to create a military force large enough to compel respect. And, ultimately, a few years after Jefferson’s death, it was military coercion and not diplomatic finesse that ended the three-century-long reign of terror of the Barbary pirates.
***
Eliza Danielson Eaton (1766-1833), William’s patient, beautiful wife, was eventually forced to sell all her remaining Brimfield properties to pay off her husband’s debts. After incurring lawyer bills fruitlessly searching for lost family lands in Ohio and Maine, she moved to upstate New York, where she lived frugally with support from her children. She watched her four sons join the military and saw three of them die young and be buried in their uniforms, including William Jr., at age twenty-three. Over the years, she rarely, if ever, complained about that lost soul she had married, whose combustible patriotism had led the U.S. Marines to the pirate coast of Tripoli.