Letters

Here began my firsthand schooling in international politics & intrigue. Whilst we moved down the Rhone & then thro Catalonia towards Alicante & Algiers, chatting of Don Quixote & buying new presents for the Dey, Hassan Bashaw (to add to the $27,000 consular gift we carried with us!), Barlow explain’d the manifold delicacy of our mission as it had been set forth to him by his new friend James Monroe, Washington’s minister to France. The Barbary pirates, over the 10 years past, had seized a number of U. States merchant vessels, confiscated the hulls & cargoes, & made slaves of the crews. The American public — and U. States shipping interests, principally in New England — were indignant. France & England were either indifferent or privately content: they had no love themselves for the troublesome corsairs & could at any time have employ’d their navies to rid the Mediterranean of them. But they prefer’d to bribe the Dey to spare their own vessels, & thus, in effect, to harass their American competition, along with the Danes, Swedes, Dutch, Portuguese, Venetians, & cet. On the other hand, they fear’d, as did Washington, that enough such incidents would oblige or justify the construction of a large American navy, just as retaliatory attacks by the Indians had “justified” the extension of “our” army ever farther west of the Appalachians. To be sure, many U. States interests desired just that, & so were in a sense obliged to the Barbary pirates for rousing public opinion to their cause, and did not want them prematurely put down or bought off! Even Washington, suspicious as he was of New England Federalist shippers, and opposed in principle to standing professional armies & navies (as chancres on the economy & chiefest dangers to the peace they were supposed to ensure), had to acknowledge that nothing so strengthen’d the fragile Union as an apparent menace from beyond its borders. He also fear’d (said Barlow) that the anti-slavery or merely anti-Southern interests above Mason’s & Dixon’s Line would make factional propaganda out of the Dey’s enslavement of more than 100 white Yankee sailors. Barlow himself was of a mind to add a passage on the subject to the 8th Book of his revised Columbiad.

For the present, then, Washington had no alternative but to buy the prisoners’ freedom & negotiate with the Dey a humiliating bribe for sparing our ships in the future. The only apparent issue was the size of the ransom & bribe: even pro-Navy interests in the U. States were divided betwixt those who believed that a ruinously large payment would make the construction of warships seem an economizing measure, and those who fear’d that too large a figure would leave nothing in the Treasury to build a navy with. Behind that lay the covert question, whether the treaty negotiation should be expeditious or deliberately prolong’d. A quick settlement might be a high settlement — the Dey was asking $800,000—and (or but) would reduce the opportunity to exploit the occasion for building a navy & for propagandizing against African slavery &/or for national unity. It would also, of course, gratify the captured sailors & their families. Prolong’d negotiation might result in a better bargain, but (or and) it would also afford time to build and man warships, & cet. It could also — for better or worse, depending on one’s larger strategy — incite the capricious Dey to seize more of “our” ships, raise his ransom price, perhaps even break off negotiations altogether. In short, as many interests in both America & Europe would be pleased to see Barlow’s mission fail as would be gratified by its success.

“Bonaparte tells us that generalship is the art of improvisation,” he concluded (our calèche was rolling through the almond & olive groves of La Huerta); “Henry Burlingame teaches us that improvisation, in its turn, is the art of imagining & cleaving to that point of view from which whatever comes to pass may be seen to be to one’s interests & exploited to advantage. I pray you, Andrew, ponder that: we can lose only insofar as we may fail to improvise ‘victory’ out of ‘defeat,’ & make it work.”