The Wars of the Barbary Pirates

Introduction

Most Americans are unaware that, as a young republic, their nation fought a war with the Barbary pirates, the North African corsairs who plied the waters of the Mediterranean at the turn of the 19th century in search of ships to loot and men to enslave. This is perhaps not surprising, for the wars were conducted on a small scale, over a short period of time, and at a considerable distance from American shores. They were, moreover, the product of one of the most inglorious – even degrading – episodes in the nation’s history and, as such, have been conveniently ignored. It is an unpalatable fact long since forgotten, that for many years the new republic paid tribute to the despotic regimes of North Africa in order to protect American citizens from capture at sea. Lacking both the means and the will to protect itself from extortion on a grand scale, the United States – beginning with the administration led by no less than President George Washington himself – furnished ransom payments on a lavish scale. Worse, perhaps, even than a proud nation, whose independence had been so recently purchased in blood, sinking to such depths, was the fact that many of its citizens were forced to wait more than a decade for their release – all the while living on starvation rations in prison hell-holes and forced to break rocks in the quarries of North Africa.

The wars against the Barbary pirates signaled America’s determination to throw off its tributary status, liberate its captive citizens, and reassert its right to navigate and trade freely upon the seas. Yet the wars’ significance extended beyond this: they played an important part in the early development of America’s self-image, its navy, and its foreign policy. When a small party of United States Marines were dispatched “to the shores of Tripoli” as their hymn proudly commemorates, it was the first American military force ever to land on a hostile foreign shore, and the planting of the Stars and Stripes on the ramparts of Derna has been immortalized as one of many great feats performed by the Marine Corps since its birth less than a decade earlier. For the Navy, the Barbary Wars became a training ground, with many commanders going on to perform more distinguished service in the War of 1812 against Britain.

The depredations of the Barbary pirates obliged the United States to choose between a policy of appeasement or war. It could continue as a tributary nation or be prepared to defend the right to conduct its burgeoning maritime trade without hindrance. The choice for the young republic was nothing if not stark: to pay tribute and ransom to the Barbary States, so protecting its merchant sailors from captivity and slavery; or confront them – with an uncertain prospect of success – with the very limited naval resources available.

The Barbary States occupied the northern coast of Africa, bounded by the Atlantic to the west, stretching 2,000 miles (3,219km) to Egypt in the east, with the Mediterranean to the north and the Sahara to the south. They consisted, from west to east, of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, with Algiers being the most active and powerful of these. Morocco’s capital, Tangier, was unique among the Barbary States in bearing a different name from the state itself. All the states were governed ruthlessly by a succession of despotic regimes, with Morocco an independent kingdom and Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli ostensibly still subordinate to Ottoman authority – though by the 18th century they were effectively independent.

The period of tension that existed between the United States and the Barbary States began only a year after American independence in 1783, and did not draw to a close until 1815, by which time the United States had established the presidency, adopted a constitution, doubled in size, and fought wars with the two most powerful nations in Europe: France (1798–1800) and Britain (1812–15). Open conflict with the Barbary States occurred on two occasions: the Tripolitan War of 1801–05 and the Algerine War of 1815. In the first instance, the conflict not only triggered a congressional debate concerning the restrictions granted by the Constitution over the powers of the president for waging war; it constituted the first war in which the United States attempted to blockade a foreign port, shell a foreign capital, and land troops on foreign soil. In many ways the Tripolitan War reads like a Hollywood film: on land, a tiny contingent of marines makes a harrowing 500-mile (805km) march across the Libyan desert; at sea, while captive American sailors languish in filthy prisons and endure years of slavery, the infant US Navy engages in bloody encounters over the decks of opposing ships, performing, in one notable instance, perhaps the greatest exploit of the age of fighting sail.

The wars against the Barbary States would provide the US Navy with vital experience that would stand it in good stead during the Anglo-American War of 1812. Indeed, many officers would cut their teeth under Commodore Edward Preble, who led the most successful squadron, later known as the “nursery of the Navy,” to the heart of the pirates’ lair. Men such as Isaac Hull, Charles Stewart, William Bainbridge, James Lawrence, Thomas Macdonough, David Porter, and Stephen Decatur – all having served in the undeclared naval conflict with France known as the Quasi-War (1798–1800), and all protégés of Preble – would later distinguish themselves in command of their own vessels against the Royal Navy both at sea and on the Great Lakes.

The origins of the wars with the North African corsairs are simple enough to trace. The Barbary States had for centuries partly sustained themselves through piracy. They maintained a more or less constant state of conflict against the smaller, more vulnerable states of (mostly southern) Europe, enslaving their captives and either releasing them upon payment of ransom, or keeping in perpetuity those (usually impoverished fisherman and merchant sailors) whose governments lacked the resources to secure their release. The annual payment of tribute, which varied from nation to nation, protected a country’s citizens from capture; failure to satisfy what in today’s terms constituted “protection money” left sailors of nearly all nationalities vulnerable to capture at sea, followed by years of hardship and suffering – and not uncommonly death – in captivity.

The pirates of the North African coast shared little in common with their namesakes best known to the Western world – the buccaneers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries who cruised the waters of the Caribbean and the Atlantic seaboard in search of Spanish gold and silver. European pirates such as Bartholomew Roberts and Edward Teach did not, for the most part, conduct their infamous operations at the behest of a government; rather, they preyed on vessels more or less indiscriminately, their object seldom extending beyond seizing cargo and riches irrespective of the nationality of the ships concerned. The Barbary pirates, on the other hand, were subjects of countries engaged in war with other nations – albeit conflict existing merely as a pretext for dispatching corsairs to prey on shipping for the sole purpose of financial gain. In some respects this was not war at all, for the Barbary States had no interest in achieving political advantage over their enemies, nor was the practice of piracy ideological in nature or the product of religious hatred. Raiding commercial vessels was a business – and, indeed, a state-sponsored enterprise – whose limits depended on the vulnerability of the target and the risk of retribution from the nation whose vessels were seized.

Pragmatically, the Barbary States knew better than to intimidate or antagonize powerful nations – that is, those with substantial navies – by harassing their merchant ships. While merchant vessels hailing from weaker nations faced grave risks if they ventured within reach of North African waters, by the time the United States finally confronted Tripoli, vessels flying the Union Jack or the Tricolor stood immune from seizure. If this was not war on a grand scale, nor was it, from the perspective of the Barbary States, piracy either, for while Western nations viewed the corsairs as mere cut-throats and thieves who took to the seas, the “pirates” styled themselves as privateers sent out legitimately to prey on shipping at the behest of their rulers. The Barbary Wars, in short, blurred numerous boundaries.

Such issues of course meant little to those who fell victim to the corsairs, for prisoners were considered more valuable to the Barbary States than any other commodity. Captives could be exchanged for ransom – and families were known to impoverish themselves for the redemption of a loved one – or, failing this, could be put to hard labor at minimal cost. Over the centuries the institution of white slavery had in fact grown essential to the North African economy, and seizing the nationals of Western countries on the high seas proved simpler and more lucrative than obtaining black Africans from beyond the Sahara. The former could be ransomed; the latter could not. Nor, in enslaving Europeans and Americans, was there any risk of capturing co-religionists, whom Muslims refused to hold in bondage.

Captured crews were immediately stripped of their possessions and taken ashore. Some were reserved for service in the ruler’s household, but most were brought in manacles to the town square or slave market and sold at public auction or by private sale. Interested buyers inspected a prisoner’s teeth and hands, made him run to gauge the level of his fitness, and sometimes struck him to see what reaction he produced. A few prisoners might be fortunate enough to find themselves ransomed and released within a matter of years, but the majority spent decades – sometimes their entire lives – in miserable captivity. Slaves were often chained together and forced to work in quarries or on the rowing benches of galleys, with death not uncommon from overwork, disease, and maltreatment. Women, though far fewer in number, fared particularly badly, for the most attractive were sent off to Constantinople to serve as concubines for the sultan, while the remainder might find themselves in similar circumstances in the households of local rulers or, worse still, the town's brothels. Still others were doomed to an appalling existence as scullery maids, cleaners, or street vendors.

Many slaves worked on farms, while those condemned to working in government quarries suffered perhaps the most. From dawn to dusk they quarried stone and dragged it into the city on crudely made carts. At night they returned to the bagnios, or prisons, there to eat unwholesome and meager rations and to sleep – only to rise before dawn to repeat the whole loathsome process. For years the United States government refused either to ransom or to compel the release of its citizens from this wretched state. Later, it adopted what many contemporaries condemned as the craven policy of paying the Barbary States for protection against piracy. Conflict eventually arose, however, when the United States – bristling with righteous indignation at the continuous demands for more tribute, newly armed with a fledgling navy, and determined no longer to play the role of a tributary nation – dispatched a naval force to the Mediterranean.