The Pirate Coast(11)

However, the two men shared a few traits: an enormous love of country and a sense of disgust at the actions of the Barbary powers of North Africa. “I am an enemy to all these douceurs, tributes and humiliations,” Jefferson had once written to Madison. “I know nothing will stop the eternal increase from these pirates but the presence of an armed force.” But Jefferson’s “economy” at times prevented him from ample military spending. An internal tug-of-war, not his first, slowed Jefferson, the would-be warrior.

On Wednesday, February 8, 1804, the Virginian reviewed Eaton’s expense accounts and drafted a long unflattering letter to him. Jefferson devoted two handwritten pages to analyzing Eaton’s two biggest expense items. The president’s training decades earlier in the law served him well. Jefferson eviscerated the idea that Eaton as a consul—for no matter how patriotic a cause—could commission and hire his own armed merchant ship, Gloria, to act as part of the U.S. Navy. “Only the Legislature [Congress] can add to or diminish our naval force,” wrote Jefferson, who added that the Executive Branch would “carry its indulgence to the utmost” and allow Eaton’s expenses for the Gloria when delivering important government messages.

Jefferson was even more dismissive of the $10,000 that Eaton was tricked into giving to the prime minister of Tunis. Eaton had promised the man a bribe if he would help overthrow the ruler of Tripoli, a bribe that would be paid only if the United States’s ally, Hamet, mounted the throne. Since Hamet never gained power, Eaton argued, the minister had no right to claim an extra $10,000 during a business transaction. Jefferson regarded the matter as a private business dispute and offered—very cold comfort indeed—that Eaton’s successor as consul to Tunis would “lend [his] aid in recovering the money . . . but this is the utmost to which [the United States] are bound.”

Jefferson finished the letter, tamped it dry, then abruptly changed his mind and decided not to send it. He apparently didn’t relish a head-to-head confrontation with Eaton, since he had other means available. Three days later, Secretary of State Madison delivered an almost identical message to the Treasury auditor, who in turn relayed it to Eaton, who became furious.

To make matters worse, the auditor also tallied a tentative total for Eaton’s accounts, based on Jefferson’s decision. He informed Eaton that he would owe the staggering sum of $40,803. That was twenty years’ salary for a navy captain. If the judgment stood, not only Eaton but his wife, his three stepchildren, his three daughters, would all be ruined.

The bad financial news mirrored even worse personal news. From every scrap of correspondence, it’s clear that Eaton regarded his expense-account ruling as a kind of tribunal for his handling of Barbary Coast affairs. His honor and reputation were on the line. If his expenses were justified, so was his conduct in pulling out all stops to try to launch civil war and overthrow the enemy government in nearby Tripoli and defy these Barbary pirates.

Eaton wasted no time in taking his case directly to Congress. The stroll to the rickety underheated Capitol building took but a minute. Access was almost that easy. At the Eighth Congress, First Session, on February 16, 1804, Eaton addressed a long passionate plea to the Honorable Speaker. He shaped it as a vindication of his diplomatic career; and he could not resist mapping out the course he desperately hoped his country would follow against the Barbary pirates of North Africa.

In the speech, he repeated one name over and over again, like a mantra: “Hamet, Hamet, Hamet.” William Eaton contended that he had incurred the bulk of his expenses while pursuing a secret plot—approved by Secretary of State Madison—to overthrow the anti-American ruler of Tripoli, Bashaw Yussef, and replace him with his older brother, the rightful heir, Hamet. (The man’s correct Arabic name was Ahmet, but Eaton and all Americans called him Hamet.)

Eaton told Congress that he had first met Hamet, then in exile in Tunis, shortly after Tripoli declared war on the United States in May 1801. On the advice of the U.S. consul to Tripoli, James Leander Cathcart, Eaton had explored the idea of plotting with Hamet to restore him to his rightful throne to achieve a long-term payment-free friendship between the two nations. The American motivation was clear: Hamet would swear never to enslave Americans or to demand tribute money; the United States would then have a Moslem ally on the dangerous Barbary Coast. (Hamet had ruled Tripoli briefly in 1795 but had been locked out of his own palace; Yussef, almost a decade later, still held Hamet’s wife and children as hostages in Tripoli.)

Plans for an American-backed civil war remained on a slow simmer. Then early in 1802 while Eaton recuperated from an illness in Leghorn, Italy, he learned that Yussef was plotting Hamet’s death. Yussef intended to lure his brother with the promise of letting him rule two rich provinces, Derne and Bengazi, and then he would kill him. Eaton desperately wanted to rush from Leghorn back to Tunis to warn Hamet, but no ships were heading in that direction. Here is where Eaton’s expenses started to mount. Eaton commissioned his own merchant ship, the Gloria, to take him on the voyage from Leghorn to Tunis, which with contrary winds, took two expensive weeks. He reached Tunis on March 12, 1802, just in time to warn Hamet of the danger of leaving with the forty armed Turkish bodyguards sent by his brother. With Hamet now under his wing, Eaton commissioned his own Gloria to go to Gibraltar to seek the U.S. Navy squadron to inform them of the critical need to aid Hamet immediately.