The Barbary Wars by Frank Lambert

Author:Frank Lambert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374707279

No aspect of the U.S. conflict with the Barbary pirates caused more outrage among the American public than the capture and enslavement of American citizens and news of the horrors of their ordeal. Reading letters from the captives in newspapers caused an outpouring of sympathy for the men and renewed efforts to relievetheir suffering. In 1794 one group of Philadelphians solicited donations to fund the release of the captives. There was also an outcry of national humiliation that Americans were “enslaved at Algiers” and that others were at risk of being captured. 26

The captives made the Barbary conflict a wrenching human story and reminded Congress and the American people of the limits of their independence. By the mid-1790s Algiers had captured more than a hundred Americans and sold them into slavery. At a time when most Americans were enjoying the “blessings of liberty” in a land where the “pursuit of happiness” was regarded as a natural right, the Algerine slaves labored under the hot Mediterranean sun, some building the fortifications that continued to impede their countrymen.

The captives complicated Congress’s negotiations with the pirates because Barbary leaders wanted to use them to extort money from the United States. Thomas Jefferson hoped to remove the captives as bargaining chips by leading the dey of Algiers to believe that Congress would not redeem them. Upon learning of the strategy, the prisoners were understandably distressed, but foreign affairs secretary John Jay thought it best to continue it. Recognizing the captives’ suffering, he thought that Congress and private citizens could send “little supplies” in “so indirect a Manner as not to be traced either by them or by the Algerines, and would tend greatly to the Comfort of these unhappy People.” 27Written in 1788, Jay’s directive indicates that, while America was concerned for the captives’ well-being, the nation’s priority was to deceive the captors into thinking that Congress was prepared to sacrifice some of its citizens for the honor of the nation.

By 1794 public pressure caused Congress to abandon this ploy and make freeing the slaves a priority. Frustrated over delays in securing their release, an increasing number of Americans demanded that Congress free the hostages immediately.

In condemning the Barbary pirates for religious and political tyranny, Americans invoked the ideals of freedom and independence. In their telling, free America was a world apart from oppressiveBarbary. But in denouncing slavery, Americans confronted atrocities committed by southern as well as Barbarian slaveholders, and any attack on slavery in North Africa invited a counterattack on the same institution that flourished in the United States.

Even as Americans grappled with these differences, no topic received more attention than the American slaves in Algiers, some of whom had languished for more than a decade. Indeed, the slave narrative, a literary form first made popular by seventeenth-century Puritans captured by Native Americans, became a powerful vehicle for condemning Barbary atrocities. The question of slavery posed a problem, because by 1800 Americans held more than threequarters of a million Africans and persons of

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