SLAVERY, THE ISSUE THAT INCREASINGLY DIVIDED THE American people in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, bore no obvious connection to the Middle East. This was an American scourge and Americans, not Egyptians or Moroccans, had to confront and expunge it. And yet, from the earliest days of the Republic, the Middle East occupied a prominent and often pivotal place in the clash between slavery’s opponents and protagonists. An illustration of that centrality appeared in a March 1790 edition of the Federal Gazette, in an article entitled “On the Slave-Trade.” The piece was reputed to be the work of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, an Algerian prince who possessed a great number of slaves and wished to defend his right to retain them. That the prince’s slaves were white Americans, rather than African blacks, was presented as merely incidental.
“If we cease our Cruises against the Christians…[and] forbear to make Slaves of their People, who…are to cultivate our Lands?” Sidi Mehemet asked. It was a rhetorical question, for the answer was obvious: in the absence of American captives, the Algerians themselves would have to toil. But the prince also expressed concern for the well-being of the slaves, worrying whether years of captivity had rendered them incapable of surviving independently. Once freed, he reasoned, the slaves were certain to become social burdens, subjected to inhumane working conditions, and the pitiless vagaries of nature. Rather than “sending them out of Light into Darkness,” Sidi Mehemet wondered whether the American slaves would not be better off basking under the “Sun of Islamism” and enjoying Algeria’s care. “Let us then hear no more of this detestable Proposition [of emancipation],” he concluded, “the Adoption of which would…create universal Discontent, and…general Confusion.”
The article aroused considerable controversy throughout the young United States, not least because its author was, in reality, fictitious. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim was the product of the aged but still agile mind of Benjamin Franklin. By citing the same arguments used to justify the enslavement of black people in the United States—their alleged inability to adapt to freedom or to survive without the munificence of whites—to defend the enslavement of Caucasians by Algiers, Franklin sought to expose the hypocrisy of American slave owners. His parody was timed to coincide with a vicious congressional debate over the legality of the slave trade, a contest that pitted state prerogatives against the inalienable rights of men—the Constitution against the Declaration of Independence. The gap between the anti-and pro-slavery representatives proved unbridgeable, however, and Congress resigned itself to the status quo. Franklin’s last invention—he died three weeks later—failed to achieve its purpose. Throughout the next seventy years, slavery would increasingly polarize and ultimately fracture the American people.1
Peculiar But Kindred Institutions
Franklin was not the first American to draw a parallel between slavery in the United States and its practice in the Middle East. Years earlier, in 1776, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins decried the faithlessness of the slave-owning congregants in his own Newport, Rhode Island, church. “If many thousands of our children were slaves in Algiers or any part of the Turkish dominions…would any cost or labour be spared…in order to obtain their freedom?” he upbraided them. A future founder of the American Board of Foreign Missions, Hopkins wondered aloud why the same Americans who fretted over Christian prisoners in North Africa displayed total indifference to the plight of America’s slaves. “The reason is obvious,” he said. “’Tis because they are Negroes.”
Comparisons between the two brands of slavery, American and Middle Eastern, grew more commonplace after the United States gained its independence and Barbary began seizing Americans. Like the Reverend Hopkins before him, John Jay reproved his countrymen for showing sympathy for the sailors captured by Algiers but apathy toward their bond servants at home. “The American slaves at Algiers were WHITE people,” he explained, “whereas the African slaves at New York were BLACK people.” A correspondent for the New Jersey Gazette, calling himself Humanus, observed in September 1786, “Masters [of black slaves] doubtless shudder at the idea of slavery among the Algerines, and execrate them as barbarous tyrants, but are they less barbarous than the followers of Mahomet?” The following year, Martha Jefferson informed her slave-owning father, America’s minister to Paris, of a Virginia sloop that had narrowly escaped seizure by Algerian corsairs, only to return to a country that permitted slavery. “Good God have we not enough?” she pined. “It grieves my heart…that these our fellow creatures should be treated so terribly…by many of our countrymen.” Early opponents of slavery such as the Abolition Society of Pennsylvania urged the Constitutional Convention to regard the plight of Americans in Algiers as divine retribution for “the injustice and cruelty of which we are guilty toward the wretched Africans.” Which was worse, an anonymous essayist asked his readers in 1789, the enslavement of Africans by Americans or the Americans’ enslavement by Africans? The answer, he posited, was simple: “Six of one and half a dozen of the other.”
The similarities between American and Middle Eastern slavery served as a popular theme for early American writers. Royall Tyler, the New England jurist whose 1797 novel The Algerine Captive had criticized American passiveness toward Barbary, also assailed America’s hypocrisy regarding slavery. Before his seizure by pirates, Tyler’s picaresque hero Updike Underhill serves as a surgeon aboard a slave transport—the cynically named Sympathy—where Africans were treated “like so many head of cattle or swine” and beaten, starved, and raped. “I thought of my native land and blushed.” Later, after his own enslavement by pirates, Underhill vows that, if released, he will “fly to…the southern states…[and] on [his] knees conjure them to…cease to deprive their fellow creatures of [the] freedom which their…constitutions…have declared to be the unalienable birthright of man.” The year 1797 also saw the publication of The American in Algiers, an anonymous poem by a “Patriot of Seventy-Six,” who claimed to be writing from an Algerian jail. After describing the horrors of being dragged through the streets, insulted, and beaten and thrown at the feet of the dey, the poet likens his own ordeal to that of American blacks:
Does not that Sacred Instrument contain
The Laws of Nature, and the Rights of Man?
If so—from whence did you obtain
To bind our Africans in slav’ry’s chain?
What then, are all men created free,
And Afric’s sons continue slaves to be.2
Even more damning comparisons were made by those Americans who had personally experienced slavery in the Middle East. James Stevens, a seaman liberated from Algiers in 1796, denounced “the execrable practice [of slavery] in the United States” and asked “with what countenance then can we reproach a set of Barbarians, who have only retorted our own acts upon…our citizens?” Relentless in his condemnations of North Africa for its enslavement of Americans, William Eaton was no less restrained in denouncing the institution in his own country. “Barbary is hell,” he proclaimed from Tunis in 1799, but “so, alas, is all America south of Pennsylvania; for oppression, and slavery, and misery are there!”
The most influential of these testimonies was that of James Riley, a thirty-eight-year-old sea captain from Connecticut, staunch Presbyterian and militia volunteer during the War of 1812. As skipper of the Commerce in 1815, Riley was shipwrecked off the coast of the Spanish Sahara, captured by Arabs, and driven across the desert. He ultimately reached the port city of Mogadore, where the British consul ransomed him, but not before the American had been severely flogged, parched, and reduced to a mere ninety pounds. Returning to Washington, D.C., Riley met President Monroe, who encouraged him to publish his story. Riley’s Sufferings in Africa became a national sensation, selling nearly a million copies over the next forty years. Particularly appealing to readers was the final chapter in which the author, recalling with horror the black slaves he had seen on sale in New Orleans, urged Americans to cut down “the cursed tree of slavery” and to “shiver in pieces the rod of oppression.” Among the book’s most enthusiastic admirers was a young bibliophile who preferred reading to working on his father’s Indiana farm. Later, as president, Abraham Lincoln would list Sufferings in Africa, along with the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, as one of the books that had most shaped his life and thinking.
Lincoln was not alone in drawing abolitionist conclusions from the works of Americans who had witnessed Middle Eastern slavery firsthand. Some of the institution’s most outspoken opponents, among them Horace Mann, Charles Wells Brown, and Theodore Parker, cited the barbarity of Middle Eastern slavery in their demands for freeing American blacks. Some even insisted that North Africa’s slaves were treated more mercifully than those in the United States. In his 1847 polemic, White Slavery in the Barbary States, the Harvard Law professor (later Massachusetts senator) Charles Sumner compared “the Barbary States of America” unfavorably with those of North Africa and charged the South with demonstrating greater “insensibility to the claims of justice and humanity.”3
The persistence and cruelty of Middle Eastern slavery proved particularly abhorrent to American missionaries serving in the region, most of whom were unswerving abolitionists. A boat crammed with black slaves sailing toward Cairo in 1823 seemed to Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk “a sight which could not fail to excite the most painful emotions in our breasts.” Twenty years later, from the crest of Mount Zion, Harriet Livermore prophesied “great national calamities” awaiting the United States as punishment for its permissiveness toward slavery.
Some of the most poignant comparisons, however, were made by African Americans, who likened their plight in the United States not to that of Americans in Algiers but to that of the ancient Hebrews in Egypt. The Holy Land, accordingly, served as their symbol of freedom—an association illustrated by their churches, which were often named for Zion and other biblical sites, and celebrated in their music. “A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan…’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven,” the era’s preeminent African American leader, Frederick Douglass, recalled. “We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”4
Curiously, those least disposed to link the two brands of slavery were the Americans who journeyed to the region. Beginning with John Ledyard in 1788, American travelers in the Middle East made a point of visiting local slave markets. They wrote with horror of the sights they witnessed, but never connected them to similar scenes in the United States. In Cairo, Dr. Valentine Mott was shocked to see a sale of white women, “the beau ideal of a race that is deemed the most perfect of human beings,” and pronounced it a “heartrending spectacle,” but never once mentioned the auction of black women in his native United States. Nathaniel Parker Willis pitied the eastern European slaves “chained together by the legs…dispirited and chilled” whom he passed in Istanbul, but made no mention of the human chains passing through America’s Southern cities. Encountering a slave caravan in Jidda, in present-day Saudi Arabia, John Lloyd Stephens was “struck with the closeness of man’s approach to the inferior grade of animal existence,” yet failed to denounce the dehumanization of millions of his own countrymen.
Of the many American tourists who documented their journeys through Muslim lands, only two appear to have drawn explicit connections between Middle Eastern slavery and “the peculiar institution” back home. Both were originally from the South, yet their observations served to illustrate the divisions soon to rend the entire country. James Cooley contrasted the condition of slaves in the Middle East with that of blacks in his native state of Mississippi who, he claimed, were “well fed, happy, and civilized.” A diametrical view was submitted by David Dorr, the self-described “Colored Man,” who identified unreservedly with the bondsmen, black and white, he saw in the Middle East. Invoking the many years he spent as a slave and the millions in the United States who had yet to be liberated, Dorr dared to ask what so many of his countrymen had merely wondered, “Oh, when will we be the ‘freest government in the world?’”5
North, South, and Middle East
Dorr’s question was answered only after many blood-soaked battles, beginning on April 12, 1861, with the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter. From that day until the South’s surrender four years later, the American people were consumed by their internal cataclysm and had scant enthusiasm for Middle Eastern affairs. Apart from the Zouave uniforms—fezzes, pantaloons, sashes—adopted from French-Algerian troops and worn by several Northern units, Americans had almost no reminders of their antebellum involvement with the area. The paramount concern of both Union and Confederate leaders was to secure the support of the region’s rulers for their cause or, failing that, to ensure their neutrality in America’s conflict.
Secretary of State William Henry Seward worried that the governments of the Middle East, “accustomed as they are to wait upon power with respect, and visit weakness with disdain,” would take advantage of the violently divided United States. Indeed, America’s ambassador to the Porte in 1861, the Alabaman James Williams, tried to persuade the Porte to shun the Union and recognize the Confederacy. President Lincoln consequently replaced Williams with Edward Joy Morris, a Pennsylvanian, and assured the sultan of his desire to “continue to cultivate the friendly relations which have always so happily existed between the government of the United States and that of the Ottoman empire.” But the Ottomans, who had long battled secessionist movements in Greece and the Balkans, needed little persuasion. In replying to Lincoln, Sultan ‘Abdul ‘Aziz reiterated his “friendly sympathies” for the North and his hope that its differences with the South “may be soon settled in such a manner as will preserve the Union intact.” The sultan also took the extraordinary steps of renewing the 1830 treaty with the United States and forbidding Confederate privateers from operating in Ottoman waters.6
Generally stable, typified by mutual esteem, America’s relations with the Middle East throughout the War between the States contrasted radically with the savagery that Americans displayed toward one another. And yet the perils of being perceived as weak in the region were illustrated by two relatively obscure, but nevertheless illuminating, episodes.
The first incident occurred in February 1862, with the journey of Henry Myers and Thomas T. Tunstall to Morocco. Myers, from Georgia, was paymaster of the Confederate cruiser Sumter, which managed to seize eighteen federal ships before putting into port in Gibraltar. Seeking supplies, Myers, together with Tunstall, an Alabaman who had served as a U.S. diplomat in Spain, boarded a French packet for Cadiz, but stopped en route for a sightseeing tour of Tangier. The allure of the Middle East proved costly for the pair, however, when their presence in the city became known to U.S. Consul James De Long.
A former judge from Ohio, De Long, fifty, was a fierce patriot with a penchant for impetuous action. Arriving at the dilapidated consulate building in November 1861, he immediately asked the State Department to send him a large American flag “with 34 stars,” as well as gilt-framed portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and all the cabinet secretaries. Thus arrayed, De Long next demanded that the Moroccan government withhold recognition from the “so called Southern Confederacy” and forbid secessionist privateers from anchoring in Moroccan ports. Five days after receiving assurances to this effect, on February 20, De Long learned that “rebels” had landed in Tangier.
“American Citizens, may talk and plot treason and rebellion at home,” the consul vowed, “but they shall not do so where I am, if I have the power to prevent it.” Appealing to the “Moorish authorities,” De Long had Myers and Tunstall arrested and clapped in irons in the consulate’s uppermost floor. They repeatedly tried to escape, offering their watches to the Moroccan guards and attempting to saw off their chains with a knife hidden in Myers’s pants leg, but in vain. De Long, meanwhile, requested assistance from the U.S. Navy in removing his prisoners from Tangier. “I want the presence of a Federal man of war in this bay,” he wrote, sensing that his action might prove controversial.
De Long was aware of an event that occurred four months earlier, when the Union warship San Jacinto impounded the Trent, a British merchant vessel, and captured two Confederate diplomats on board. Their arrest triggered an international crisis as London charged the United States with violating British neutrality. Fearing that Her Majesty’s government might retaliate by recognizing the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration backed down. The prisoners were released and the captain of the San Jacinto was cashiered. De Long feared a similar fate, for he, too, had incarcerated Confederate officials on ostensibly neutral ground.
Indeed, France promptly denounced what it considered a flouting of its neutrality, arguing that Myers and Tunstall had sailed to Tangier under the protection of the French flag. The Sumter’s captain, Raphael Semmes, meanwhile accused “the unscrupulous Consul” of taking advantage of Morocco’s “political ignorance,” prompting the emperor, Muhammad IV, to close Tangier’s harbor. In protest, De Long reminded the ruler of Morocco’s Barbary past and asked him whether “70 years of uninterrupted friendship” between Americans and Moroccans would be ruined “for the sake of [Confederate] Pirates.”
De Long’s situation continued to deteriorate, however, and on February 27 became desperate as a crowd of three hundred foreigners, mostly Frenchmen, surrounded the consulate and demanded the prisoners’ release. But the feisty Ohioan refused to give in. “I have heard of barbarian mobs in barbarian countries, but it is the first time that I have ever heard of nearly the entire Christian population in a semibarbarian country rising a mob to interfere with the acts of a Christian consul.” Violence might have ensued but for the timely appearance of the USS Ino. With bayonets fixed, thirty U.S. Marines charged ashore—the first to land in North Africa since the Barbary Wars—and managed to press through the mob. De Long then issued an ultimatum: either Muhammad IV would reopen the port and permit the captives to be evacuated or the United States would close its consulate. Given the choice between placating the French and alienating the Americans, the emperor sided with Washington. Less than an hour later, guarded by a detachment of Moroccan troops and watched by “at least three thousand spectators,” De Long and the Marines led Myers and Tunstall up the Ino’s gangplank.
A jubilant De Long informed his fellow consuls, “If temporary civil war is waging in my beloved country, we still have a Union and a Constitution, which we will in God’s name preserve…through succeeding generations, and a flag…[that] shall not be insulted by a rabble European mob on the coast of Africa.” His elation, however, was premature. Fearing a rupture of Union relations with France, Lincoln again relented and released both Tunstall and Myers from prison in Boston. And like the captain of the San Jacinto before him, De Long was replaced. The embittered former consul questioned whether Lincoln’s leniency would backfire and cause Middle Eastern leaders to doubt America’s strength.
De Long’s dismissal did not, in fact, augur a decline in America’s status in Morocco or elsewhere in the region. On the contrary, the Union’s spirited opposition to Confederate privateers only enhanced Washington’s standing throughout the Middle East. Proof of that elevation came in 1865, when the United States was invited to join nine European countries in establishing a lighthouse on Tangier. The convention, though minor by great-power standards, was a landmark for America—its first-ever multinational treaty.7
The Civil War did nevertheless place strains on America’s relations with one Middle Eastern state, Egypt. The focus of the controversy lay far away from the region and even from the battlefields of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Rather, Egypt and the United States came to loggerheads—however improbably—in Mexico.
Ever since the issuance of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States had sought to prohibit further European interference in the Western Hemisphere. Forty years later, however, with its armies locked in internecine warfare, the nation was incapable of enforcing the policy. Taking advantage of that paralysis, Emperor Napoleon III of France conspired to create a New World empire, beginning in Mexico. In January 1863, he dispatched thirty thousand troops to Vera Cruz with orders to occupy Mexico City. With them marched a battalion of five hundred Egyptians whose services had been volunteered by the Egyptian ruler Sa’id Pasha, a fervent ally of France. The soldiers were mostly black Sudanese who, the French believed, were acclimated to Mexico’s heat and resistant to yellow fever.
The Lincoln administration was outraged by Napoleon’s aggression and keenly disappointed with Egypt. Relations between Washington and Cairo, if never especially close, had consistently been friendly. At the outset of the Civil War, the Egyptian government had acceded to the State Department’s request to banish an American vice consul, Robert Wilkinson, who remained loyal to the South. The department, in turn, had lauded Egypt’s “generous contribution” in aiding “the widows and orphans of the defenders of the Union,” and the bravery of several young Egyptians who had volunteered to fight for the North. That goodwill was now jeopardized, however, by the presence of Egyptian forces so close to America’s border, and in violation of its long-standing doctrine.8
The French went on to conquer much of Mexico and to install an Austrian archduke, Maximilian, as its monarch. The Egyptian contingent throughout served admirably, patrolling ports, and guarding railroad cars. About one hundred of them died, including their commander, Colonel Jabbar Allah Muhammad, ironically from yellow fever.
The United States remained powerless to intervene, at least until Appomattox in 1865 and the victory of Union arms. Only then could the State Department send its consul in Alexandria, Charles Hale, with an unequivocal message for Sa’id. “What the Pacha has done in Mexico at the request of another power, the United States might do in Egypt at the request of some friendly power,” Hale warned him, and reminded him that the United States now had 100,000 black troops who, like Sudanese in Mexico, were well suited for Middle Eastern service. These soldiers could easily be landed in Egypt, Hale said, “if the vicious principle of interference which supports the empire in Mexico, to which the Pacha lends his soldiers, should at any time be retaliated by us.”
Duly intimidated by this threat, Sa’id backed down and refrained from sending further reinforcements to Mexico. The French were eventually defeated by republican rebels who executed the hapless Maximilian. The surviving Egyptians—the only Arabic-speaking Muslim soldiers ever to be deployed in the Americas—sailed home.9
THE CIVIL WAR had ended and the United States could once again interact with the Middle East as an undivided nation. The war had reminded Americans of the dangers of being perceived as weak by the region’s rulers and of the need to project at least a semblance of power. Now, with its economy rapidly industrializing and a million men under arms, the United States could cast an unambiguous image of economic and military strength. The transformation was not lost on Middle Eastern governments, many of which were buying up Civil War surplus and looking to the United States as a potential counterpoise to European imperialism.
With their great-power status nearly established, Americans could resume their antebellum pilgrimages to the Holy Land and their pursuit of Middle Eastern myths. And Lincoln yearned to join them. Riding with the First Lady in a carriage on the evening of April 14, 1865, the president purportedly spoke of his dream of someday touring Jerusalem. Later, after they reached their destination, Ford’s Theater and took their seats in the box, Lincoln again leaned toward his wife and whispered, “How I should like to visit Jerusalem!”
Shot during the course of the performance, Lincoln did not live to experience the Middle East, but one of the Southern sympathizers implicated in his assassination sought asylum there. A quondam Confederate courier and spy, Harrison Surrat Jr., was associated with Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, and other members of his conspiracy. While federal troops quickly captured or killed the ringleaders, the twenty-one-year-old Surrat escaped—first to Canada, then to Britain and Italy, and finally to Egypt. Forewarned of Surrat’s arrival in Alexandria, Charles Hale, the consul, watched disembarking passengers until he found one who “looked American” and had him arrested. On December 21, 1865, Surrat was led in chains aboard the USS Swatara and shipped back to Washington. Though the trial ended in deadlock—Surrat died, a free man, in 1916—the United States praised the “considerate and friendly disposition” of Egypt’s government and presented it with a portrait of the late president.10
Though perhaps strange to twenty-first-century readers, the fact that this concluding chapter of the Civil War saga was set in the Middle East proved fitting. The cataclysm that first fractured and then welded the United States would also serve as the catalyst for economic upheaval in many parts of the region, for revolutionary advances in health and education, and unprecedented exposure to the West. Yet in few areas of the Middle East would the war’s influence prove more irreversible and profound than in Egypt, a country largely unknown to antebellum Americans but which, in the age of Reconstruction, became a centerpiece of America’s attention.