Ever since America had achieved independence, her relations with the Barbary predators had been an open scandal. Yet people at home argued that all Europe’s relations with them had been an even greater scandal from way back; so why should we rush in with arms where older and greater nations preferred not to tread? Ever since the Arab conquests of the eighth century, the Mediterranean had been a feuding ground between Arab corsairs and Christian traders (often with their own corsairs attached). It had been thought that with the rise of British and French power in the inland sea, the Moslem marauders under their Turkish suzerains would finally be brought to book. Yet nothing of the sort had happened. The European powers, locked in struggle with each other, had found it cheaper to buy off the pirates than to fight them. By 1800, this unheroic great-power arrangement had taken on the additional advantage ot turning Barbarian eyes upon other, weaker Western nations less able to pay such blackmail—particularly upon the United States, whose Mediterranean commerce was booming.

Indecisive, isolated, and anxious not to risk its small Meet, the United States had first signed up with the robber barons of Morocco lor protection, purchasing peace and exemption from capture lor a trifling $25,000. Relieved Americans thought these terms a bargain. But then came the Dey of Algiers, who, having taken several of oui ships and crews, demanded and got an outright ransom of $640,000, plus an annual tribute to the value of $20,000 in the form of naval stores, including ammunition that could be used against us. This in turn aroused the lust of the next neighbor along the line, the Bey of Tunis, who demanded gilts exceeding $100,000 if his buccaneers were to be called off. Finally came the Pasha ol Tripoli, who proclaimed that amid this general shakedown he was not to be left out, either.

It was into this den of thieves that Pickering sent Eaton, a Horid, corpulent, rugged man, with instructions to try to get the Tunisian chieftain to modify his terms; this might in turn mollify Tripoli. President John Adams, usually a proud personage, penned an obeisant introduction for his new emissary to the pirates’ lair that, began: “To the most Illustrious and most Magnificent Prince, the Bey, who commands the Odgiac of Tunis, the abode of happiness, and the most honored Ibrahim Dey and Soliman, Aga of the Jani saries, and Chief of the Divan of all the Elders of the Odgiac.” Since the illustrious prince also had a particular fondness for jewels, Eaton was to reassure him that plenty would soon be on their way, if only he would reduce

For the Bey:

1 Fusee [musket] six feet long, mounted with gold, set with diamonds

4 [of the same] set with gold mounting, ordinary length

1 pair of Pistols, mounted with gold, set with diamonds

4 pair ol Pistols, mounted with gold

1 poniard, enamelled, set with diamonds

1 diamond Ring

1 gold repeating watch, with diamonds, chain the same

1 gold snuffbox, set with diamonds

6 pieces of brocade of gold

30 pieces superfine cloth of different colours

6 pieces Satin, different colours

But even before Consul Eaton arrived at Tunis to confer about these and other fine points of tribute, he was to stop oil en route at Algiers to pay respects to that principality’s ruler and check up on how our agreement on foreign aid was going there. How an American tribute-bearer was received in Algiers in the year 1798 is best described in Eaton’s own words. After being led through a maze of dimly lit palace corridors, he was instructed to remove his shoes before being admitted to the sublime presence. Then, “we were shown to a huge, shaggy beast, sitting on his rump, upon a low bench, covered with a cushion of embroidered velvet, with his hind legs gathered up like a taylor, or a bear. On our approach to him, he reached out his fore paw as if to receive something to eat. Our uuide exclaimed, ‘Kiss the Dey’s hand!’ ”

Eaton’s description went on sardonically: “The animal seemed at that moment to be in a harmless [mood]: he grinned several times; but made very litlle noise.” Then lhe newly arrived consul erupted: “Can any man believe that this elevated brute has seven kings of Europe, two republics, and a continent, tributary to him, when his whole naval force is not equal to two line of battle ships? It is so.”

Proceeding along the coast from the Dey to the Bey, Eaton again removed his shoes, kissed lhe Tunisian’s hand, and was sharply taken to task for delays in the arrival of some of America’s “gifts.” The consul gave reassurances and meanwhile tried to renegotiate a particularly frivolous treaty demand of the Key’s, namely that one barrel ol good LJ ni ted States gunpowder be delivered lor every single gun salute tendered by a Tunisian vessel or shore battery to any visiting American. (Tunisian sloops were virtually smothering arriving American vessels with saluting gun smoke in order to build up their own ammunition stocks thereby; the nine salutes due a United States consul or commodore, for instance, meant nine barrels for the Bey.)

Flushed and shoeless on the Bey’s carpet, Eaton soon found himself in bitter wrangles on this point. “[I said that] the

“ ‘However trifling,’ said he, ‘it may appear to you, to me it is important. Fifteen barrels of gunpowder will furnish a cruiser which may capture a prize and net me $100,000.’ ”

Eaton retorted that both justice and our national honor forbade such degrading terms as these.

“ ‘You consult your honor,’ said he, ‘I my interest.’ ”

Eventually Consul Eaton reached a compromise with the Key, only to find the next-door chieftain at Tripoli breathing dollar-hungry fury and dispatching an ultimatum for his share. Seized by moral revulsion, the Yankee on the spot rebelled against all our past policy in Xorth Africa and lashed out in private and public philippics against the disgrace of our submission. “Barbary is Hell,” he told his private journal (adding as a staunch New Englander that “So, alas, is all America south of Pennsylvania, for oppression, and slavery, and misery are there.”) The Barbary chieftains, he wrote, “are under no restraints of honor nor honesty. There is not a scoundrel among them, from the prince to the muleteer, who will not beg and steal.” Soon angry letter after letter went forth from him to Secretary Pickcring. “When has a tyrant ever been known to lift his foot from the neck of a voluntary slave? Where is the evidence of Barbary’s being satisfied with the generosity of its friends ? Does Spain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, exhibit it? Will the United States ever exhibit it? Xever, so long as they have powder to give, and want the energy to burn it!” And then this rousing summons, of a sort not to be expected in the reports of mere consuls: “We must either bribe their avarice or chastise their audacity. Giving only increases their avidity for more … it is devoutly to be hoped that the United States may have the honor (very easily obtained) of setting the first example, among the tributaries, of chastising the insolence of their lords.”

In his wrath, Eaton sometimes became overheated and sounded like a thumping xénophobe. Algiers was “a vulture”; Tunis and Tripoli were “dog kennels”; Britain, France, and Arab and Jewish trading interests were arrayed in an “infamous league” against us; and as for the Turkish su/erains of Barbary, they were “a contemptible military, and at sea, lubbers .”

Yet, back in the capital, President Adams went on swallowing his pride and copying the European example of paying rather than fighting. A cautious Congress, with a small war against French privateers already on its hands, had no starch for further trouble.

To be sure, Adams’ rival, Thomas Jefferson, had cried out some time back in a moment of ardor: “Tribute or war is the usual alternative of these Barbary pirates. Why not build a navy and decide on war? We cannot begin with a better cause or against a better foe.” But by 1800, sensing the home temper, Jefferson had reversed himself and run for office on a platform proclaiming that “Peace is our passion.” Between a penny-wise Adams and a pacifist Jefferson, there was little lor a smoldering Eaton in faraway Barbary to choose from. On Adams’ very last day in office, a Federalist Congress had passed a bill laying tip a major part of our small Navy, along with half of its captains—and Adams had signed it. The incoming anti-Federalist was in no mood to reverse it.

“There is but one language which can be held to these people, and this is terror .” So Eaton had written home about the Barbary pirates. But the elections of 1800 told both him and the Arab chieftains that America was probably not going to apply “terror” or anything like it. What other possibilities were there, then?

To be sure, a few surviving frigates might show the flag. Yet the last visit to Algiers by an American warship—the frigate Goerge Washington , twenty-four guns, Captain William Bainbridge—had been singularly inglorious. Arriving to deliver twenty-six barrels of tributary dollars to the Dey, Bainbridge had been ordered under the shadow of coastal guns to hoist the ensign of Algiers and convey an Algerian ambassador to the Sublime Porte of Constantinople. When Bainbridge protested, the Dey remarked with primitive logic, “You pay me tribute, by which you become my slaves. I have, therefore, a right to order you as 1 think proper.” Rather than risk war, Bainbridge had obeyed, thereby providing the world with the unique spectacle of an American man-of-war serving as a Moslem ferryboat to the Bosporus.

“Dishonor … disgrace,” Eaton scribbled into his notebooks and dispatches. More was to come. Pasha Yusuf of Tripoli, infuriated at the delay in getting his share, cut down the flag of the American Consulate and thereby challenged us to fight. President Jefferson bestirred himself and sent out a squadron, only to have it placed under the pennant of the ponderous Commodore Richard Dale, who ineffectually blockaded Tripoli for one summer and then blandly sailed home. Next came Commodore Richard Morris, with six good ships—but he, too, sailed about fatuously and was recalled and cashiered.

“[The] Government may as well send out quaker meeting-houses to float about this sea as frigates with Murrays [one of Morris’ captains] in command,” Eaton snorted to the new Secretary of State, James Madison. “Our operations … produce nothing … but additional enemies

It took Eaton a trip home to explain his own plan of operations to a Congress now growing restive amid the Navy’s failure against Tripoli. He described his and Cathcart’s proposal for dividing the enemy on land by elevating ex-Pasha Hamet. “Remember,” he had already conspiratorily written the pretender,

that your brother thirsts for your blood. I have learned from a certain source that his project in getting you to Derna was to murder you. He is now determined more than ever, because he has intercepted some of your letters to your friends in Tripoli. You cannot be safe, therefore, in any part of your Regency, unless you enter it in your true character of Sovereing [ sic ].

And Secretary Madison, on learning of his consuls’ devious plan, had guardedly declared that

Although it does not accord with the general sentiments or view of the United States to intermeddle with the domestic controversies of other Countries, it cannot be unfair in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to take advantage of the hostile co-operation of others.

Yet almost a year passed before any practical support was given to the Eaton-Cathcart plan. When it came, it stemmed from President Jefferson himself, who was sufficiently intrigued by its possibilities to have Eaton appointed a special “naval agent to the several Barbary regencies.” He was ordered to report to Commodore Samuel Barron, our newest squadron commander on the spot, and given a vague mandate to try to bring the stratagem off.

The daring idea was not popular with brass-bound Commodore Barron, however. Neither was its expounder— Mister Eaton, as Barron pointedly addressed him. During Eaton’s year in Washington, the Navy had indeed taken firmer hold of matters off Tripoli under the redoubtable Commander Edward Preble—only to lose young Stephen Decatur’s fine frigate Philadelphia right in the pirates’ roadstead. Then Preble had found himself superseded by Barron, another ponderous figurehead of the Dale-Morris stripe, who was now faced to his discomfiture with having to back “Mister” Eaton to the tune of some $20,000—plus a detail of marines—for his mad venture. The cash Barron grudgingly advanced; but of his nearly two hundred marines, he would lend only eight.

After hearing Eaton rehearse all his plans on his quarter-deck, Barron finally, in November, 1804, off the North African coast, wrote out these secret orders to Captain Isaac Hull of brig Argus —one of the most remarkable documents in the history of our Navy: The written orders I here hand you, to proceed to the port of Alexandria or Smyrna, for convoying to Malta any vessel you may find there, are intended to disguise the real object of your expedition, which is to proceed with Mr. Eaton to Alexandria, in search of Hamet Bashaw, the rival brother and legitimate sovereign of the reigning Bashaw of Tripoli; and to convey

Two weeks later Eaton reached Alexandria, only to find that his exiled friend Hamet had disappeared, evidently in fear of his ruling brother’s assassins. Finally the pretender was located in an outlying village—a sallow, frightened reed of a man—and confronted with an imposing convention drawn up by Eaton for him to sign. It began: GOD IS INFINITE

Article I: There shall be a firm and perpetual peace, and free intercourse, between the Government of the United States of America and His Highness, Hamet Karamanli, Bashaw, the legitimate sovereign of the kingdom of Tripoli …

It went on to specify that

William Eaton, a citizen of the United States now in Egypt, shall be recognized as general and commander in chief of the land forces which are, or may be, called into service against the common enemy.

Drawing on Barren’s $20,000, Mr. Eaton—now the “general” of desert irregulars—had already let the word be passed into Tripoli that the time for revolt was now ripe. In Cairo he hired as his organizer an international soldier of fortune and notorious wastrel named John Eugene Leitensdorfer, a great operator when he could lay hands on a little money, who in turn rounded up more drifters.

Ninety men composed Hamet’s own “suite”; the mercenary Greeks numbered forty; two Arab sheiks provided cavalry on 107 camels. On March 8, 1805, with Eaton, Lieutenant O’Bannon, Navy midshipman Pascal Paoli Peck ( his name was real, not made up), and Leitensdorfer as “chief of engineers” (there were no engineers) in the van, and Hamet surrounded by his footmen and bearers, the motley array got under way from the outskirts of Alexandria. First destination: a rendezvous with American warships at Bomba, 400 desert miles away.

Almost at once there was trouble between Christians and Moslems, between marines and foreigners, between Hamet’s functionaries, who were getting a good part of the $20,000 for disbursement, and the supporting Bedouin cavalry, who complained they were not getting anything at all. On March 10, when only approaching the Libyan waste, Eaton faced his first threat of mutiny. “The forenoon was consumed, and no appearances of a disposition to proceed ahead. I ordered the Christians under arms and feinted a countermarch; threatening to abandon the expedition and their Bashaw, unless the march in advance proceeded immediately. This project took effect; the mutiny was suppressed.”

Thus impressed by its “general,” the caravan moved onward, covering twenty miles the next day, and twenty-one the day after that. But on March 13, after a practice shoot, “Our foot Arabs, who were in the rear with the baggage, hearing the firing, and apprehending that we were attacked by wild Arabs of the desert, attempted to disarm and put to death the Christians

In the meantime Hamet himself, the man for whom, supposedly, the expedition had been mounted, had lost heart and tried to desert. His followers were discovered about to seize and make off with Eaton’s ammunition train. Eaton lined up his marines and Greeks and threatened to open fire. Once more, order was restored; and now they reached the Libyan port of Bomba, where they were to rendezvous with American ships for supplies to carry them on. But there were no ships, and the Arabs, again losing courage, determined to rise en masse and quit. Eaton lit all-night campfires around his headquarters tents. Next morning good fortune greeted them: there, close inshore, lay U.S.S. Argus . “Captain Hull had seen our smokes, and stood in.”

This fortunate encounter was the turning point. The feeble Hamet, seeing American victuals riding ashore to the ragged legion from Hull’s trim brig, took heart again. Eaton was able to prevail upon his ward to resume the march over even more rugged and lonely leagues westward. Ten days later their lead scouts sighted the key port of Derna. Its white walls gleaming against the blue sea beyond, Derna presented an inviting but also a forbidding appearance, for gunnery loopholes had been cut in its terrace walls, and earthworks had been thrown up around it. Eaton deployed his force so as to make a bold impression, and, learning from line-crossers that many of the local Tripolitans would like to give in, sent the local governor a flag of truce and a call for surrender. “My head or yours!” was the pithy response—and the governor had a garrison of eight hundred to back him.

So there was nothing but to charge the earthworks frontally. Eaton, a good strategist of combined operations, waited until three ships of Barron’s squadron sailed in to take positions off the anchorage. Then, leading one flank himself, the civilian general ordered an assault. “Mr. O’Bannon,” he later reported to Commodore Barron, “… urged forward with his marines, Greeks, and such of the [Arab] cannoneers as were not necessary for the management of the field piece; passed through a

In the melee, Eaton himself was wounded in the arm while rushing against “a host of savages more than ten to our one.” But strategic Derna was won, and the ruling Pasha Yusuf’s grip on much of his country was broken. Quickly, in order to forestall any further advance by brother Hamet and to maintain himself on the throne, Yusuf sued for peace. He calculated on dividing his foes by accommodating the Americans but not Hamet, just as Eaton had sought to divide Tripoli by encouraging Hamet. And Yusuf succeeded, particularly after a sharp cavalry raid by his remaining supporters showed up the weakness of Eaton’s and Hamet’s “liberators” at Derna. The treaty he offered, which the United States in due course accepted, afforded the most favorable terms yet won by a Western power in dealing with Arab pirates (release of captives without ransom, promises of friendship without payment), but it left the reformed pirate Yusuf still in command of his domain.

So, exit the hapless Hamet. Exit also Eaton, though he was America’s hero of the hour. For the negotiations for this treaty were conducted entirely above his head and its terms reached over his protest. A new American plenipotentiary appeared on the scene, Consul General Tobias Lear, who had played no part in the undertakings to Hamet, and who solemnized the new agreement. Eaton cried out that he himself as well as Hamet and our national pledges to the latter had been betrayed. To this it was answered that the pledges had been Eaton’s own, that the United States government had never officially placed itself behind Hamet, and that besides, the pretender had proved himself an incompetent. “When we put [Hamet] into possession of Derna,” President Jefferson himself said in a message to Congress, “we found he was totally unable to command any resources, or to bear any part in co-operation with us.”

Satisfied with its ascendance over the incumbent pasha, the United States moreover agreed to evacuate Eaton’s and Hamet’s troublesome irregulars from Derna, even though this exposed their partisans to the ruler’s reprisals. Eaton himself was the last man to leave. Bitterly he wrote: Then the shore, our camp, and the battery were crowded with the distracted soldiery and populace, some calling on the Pasha [Hamet], some on me, some uttering shrieks, some execrations. Finding we were out of reach, they fell upon our tents and horses, which were left standing, carried them off and prepared themselves for flight.

Victory, to be sure; yet it was an ignoble ending for its architect. A realist in power politics, Eaton had been overtaken

Three decades later, however, his oldest surviving North African partner and confederate, now calling himself “Colonel” Eugene Leitensdorfer and since transplanted to a farm in Missouri, was still to be found regaling passers-by with yarns of the great old days when he had fought with “General” Eaton in high Barbary.

In his Teutonic accent overlaid with a Mediterranean vocabulary, Leitensdorfer added wondrous tales of great desert goings-on with multitudes of Arab maidens in tents of Oriental luxury. “He has had, and I believe still has, several wives in several countries which he had inhabited, and owns to 27 children,” one wideeyed rural neighbor recorded. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri presented a bill for the relief of the old wastrel. When the sum was voted, one senator who had heard Benton’s lengthy oratory in behalf of his constituent was quoted as remarking, “By the way, did we ever do anything about old Eaton?”

The answer was No.

THE BIG PAY-OFF