Jefferson’s passionate belief in freedom at times made his liberalism somewhat anarchic. “Was ever such a prize won with so little blood?” he asked during the early years of the French Revolution. He earned a reputation as a demagogic radical, but as the third president of the United States from 1801 Jefferson showed restraint and sensitivity in preventing the ideological schism that threatened to fracture the infant nation. He was an extraordinarily intense man, but was almost incapable of animosity. “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he declared at his inauguration.
The Republican Jefferson believed government’s paramount duty was to protect the individual’s right to “life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He deplored the Federalists’ readiness to curtail civil rights in the supposed interests of the nation. But he concealed his extraordinary passions. His even-tempered approach quelled fears. Americans embraced republican principles, realizing that Jefferson’s protection of liberty would protect them too.
In one of the first acts of his presidency in 1801, Thomas Jefferson refused to pay the pirate state of Tripoli the extortionate tribute it demanded in return for safe passage of American ships on the high seas. In so doing, he sent America for the first time into combat against an Islamic power in the Middle East.
Nominally vassals of the Ottoman empire, but in reality independent states run by corsair dynasties, the regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were known, along with the sultanate of Morocco, as the Barbary States. Unashamedly piratical, they existed very profitably on the revenue garnered from slave trading, looting, tribute and ransom.
The ships of the newly independent United States, now lacking British naval protection, were prime targets. Only substantial tributes could secure them some relief. By 1801 America was paying out 20 percent of her annual federal revenue to the pirate states. When Jefferson assumed the presidency, he was determined to prove that war was preferable to tribute and ransom.
The Karamanli dynasty of Tripoli ruled what is now Libya. Pasha Yusuf Karamanli defied American power: “I do not fear war, it is my trade.” Prospects initially looked bleak. In October 1803 the USS
The erstwhile US consul to Tunis, William Eaton, managed almost single-handedly to reverse the fortunes of war. A maverick, educated at the elite Dartmouth College, fluent in Greek and Latin, a veteran of the Indian wars who could throw a knife with deadly precision from eighty feet, Eaton fulminated at the prospect of “bartering our national glory for the forbearance of a Barbary pirate.” He proposed conquering Tunis with a force of 1000 marines. Then he suggested ways of enforcing regime change in Libya. The US secretary of state rejected both proposals.
Eaton acted unilaterally instead. He recruited a Karamanli prince, Hamet, in Egypt, and with nine marines and a mercenary force of 400 he led his motley troop of Arabs and Christians on a 500-mile desert march to launch a surprise attack on Tripoli’s second-largest city, Derna (modern Darnah). In the fierce pitched battle that ensued, Eaton and Hamet emerged triumphant. But Eaton’s plans to make good his coup and march on Tripoli were thwarted. The pasha hastily offered the USA a treaty, which US naval officials immediately negotiated. Hamet was sent back to Egypt. Deeply disappointed, Eaton returned to America—a renegade hero whose role in American history has never been fully acknowledged.
Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States. This bold move, seizing on Napoleon’s unexpected offer to sell French territory, was a decision taken (as Jefferson freely admitted) without constitutional authority. It was an act that secured America’s stability and created what Jefferson called an “empire for liberty.” It also earned him a landslide election to a second term as president.
The man who declared that “all men are created equal” has been censured for his racial attitudes. Jefferson was a staunch opponent of slavery, yet he owned large numbers of slaves on his Virginian plantation. His only book,
