Letters

Our mission, which we had expected to complete in a matter of weeks once we arrived, kept us in Algiers from March of ’96 till July of the following year, thanks to the difficulty of raising gold bullion in a Europe still spent from the wars of the French Revolution & about to embark upon the more exhausting campaigns of Napoleon. Thanks also to the slowness & unpredictability of the mails, which I am convinced have alter’d & re-alter’d the course of history more than Bonaparte & all the Burlingames combined. Our single strategy became cajolement of Hassan Bashaw (an ape of a fellow, given to despotic whims & tantrums, but no fool) into extending his deadline for payment instead of cancelling his treaty & declaring war on the U. States. Our tactics we improvised, and Barlow now reveal’d himself an apt student of his former tutor. When we were “greeted” by an outraged Dey (he refused to receive us; would not even open Barlow’s letter of credentials) whose initial deadline had already expired & who was threatening war in eight days, Barlow bought a 90-day extension by the inspired but dangerous expedient of offering the Bashaw’s daughter a 20-gun frigate, to be built in Philadelphia & deliver’d to Algiers! It was a wild excess of our authority: $45,000 for the frigate; another $18,000 retainer to the Jewish banker Joseph Bacri, the Dey’s closest advisor, whom Barlow befriended (on the strength of their shared initials — Bacri was a Kabbalist) & thus bribed to make the offer. There was also the certainty that the frigate would be used to highjack further merchant shipping, perhaps “our” own. But the stratagem workt: the Dey (who now declared his earlier anger to have been feign’d — and demanded 36 instead of 20 guns) was delighted; so was President Washington. We got our 90 days, Bacri got his $18,000 (plus Barlow’s banking busness, which he managed scrupulously), & Hassan Bashaw, two years later, got the frigate Crescent: a 36-gunner costing $90,000.

We were also permitted to deliver our consular gifts: jewel’d pistols & snuffboxes, linens, brocades, Parisian rings, bracelets, & necklaces for the ladies of the harem.

“Your father would be proud of us,” Barlow exulted. “The Bashaw has been Burlingamed!”

I could scarcely agree; another such 90 days’ grace, I ventured to say, would bankrupt the Union. Tut, said Barlow, ’twas cheaper than one week of war. Bacri’s fee in particular he judged well invested, not only because the Jew alone could have made our offer (& added gratis the nicety of making it to the Dey’s daughter: a diplomatic stroke Barlow admitted he himself never would have thot of), but because in Barlow’s opinion the best thing we’d bought so far with “our” $138,000 was not the 90-day extension, but Bacri’s friendship. My father, he told me, used to swear by the cynical dictum of Smollett’s Roderick Random: that while small favors may be acknowledged & slight injuries atoned, there is no wretch so ungrateful as he whom you have mostly generously obliged, and no enemy so implacable as those who have done you the greatest wrong. He meant to cement his new friendship with Bacri at once by rendering him a small but signal service — in gratitude for Bacri’s advice that we not tell the Dey we were in Algiers for no other purpose than to complete the treaty & ransom the prisoners, but instead rent a villa & make a show of settling in for a permanent consular stay.