A Sea Change

BRIAN: We’re back, with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’re talking today about some of the lesser-known ways that Islam has figured in the story of America, going back many generations. We’re going to turn now to America’s first major encounter with the Islamic world on the international stage.

PETER: On October 11, 1784, the American ship Betsy and her nine-man crew were captured by Moroccan sailors. The schooner was the first of many US vessels that would be taken by the four Barbary states. With Morocco, these included three provinces of the Ottoman Empire– Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli.

ED: The brand-new United States had inherited an old problem. Barbary leaders demanded that foreign ships pay tribute to guarantee safe passage to the Mediterranean. And if countries failed to pony up, well, then things got messy. Barbary corsairs held foreign crews hostage for exorbitant ransoms, and sometimes sold them into slavery. All of which posed a problem for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom were diplomats in Europe at the time.

FRANK COGLIANO: Adams’s solution is it’s better to pay the money and be done with it. Like the British do, like the French do, like the Spanish do, et cetera.

ED: This is historian Frank Cogliano.

FRANK COGLIANO: Jefferson says, no, no, this is a point of principle. And the point of principle’s very important. Because if we give ground on this, we’ll end up paying forever. It will cost us more in the long run to pay tribute than it would to wage war. But in the 1790s, during the Federalist era, the United States does negotiate a series of treaties with the Barbary powers, and they basically grit their teeth and pay tribute, and enjoy a fairly lucrative trade in the Mediterranean.

PETER: One of those treaties was the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which fell apart as soon as Jefferson became president four years later. He refused to pay any more tributes, and in response, Tripoli declared war. It was actually another negotiating tactic, but Jefferson took the declaration at face value. Just a few months into his presidency, the US was at war with the Barbary states. It was America’s first conflict in the Islamic world.

FRANK COGLIANO: Since 2001, there’s been a spate of scholarship and publications and online commentary presenting the Barbary War and the First Barbary Wars as the first Wars on Terror, as though we get the antecedents to our contemporary conflict there. I just don’t think that’s the case. I think although religion is an element of these conflicts, as far as the Barbary states are concerned, this is a financial transaction. They’re seeking to raise money and revenue, and this is how they do it. They’re essentially taxing people, ships that pass by their coast.

And for the United States, it’s not a conflict of religion. As the 1796 treaty with Tripoli stipulates– and that was negotiated on behalf of John Adams– the United States was not founded as a Christian country, and it has no conflict with Islam. And I think that characterizes most of what’s going on in this period. This is about trade. This is about power.

PETER: And I can quote from that treaty, ratified by the Senate. “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

And it suggests, though, that Tripoli might have thought that there was a religious element, and that’s why that explicit declaration that religion is not important was made.

FRANK COGLIANO: Yes, that’s true. I mean, when Jefferson and Adams held negotiations with the Tripolitan ambassador in London in 1786, this issue came up. You know, they asked. They said, basically, what’s your problem with us? Why are you doing this?

PETER: Yeah, exactly.

FRANK COGLIANO: And the Tripolitan ambassador used religion in part to justify that, and said, well, our Prophet commands this. And so to some extent, the 1796 treaty is a deliberate repudiation of that. And I think that this is important, both as a statement of fact, but also it’s an aspirational statement. It’s seeking to separate the United States from the traditional diplomacy and statecraft of Europe and the Old World– which, of course, was characterized by conflicts between Islam and Christianity. And the United States is attempting to distance itself from that.

As far as the ambassador himself was concerned, I think it’s an interesting moment. Because he is using Islam to justify going to war with the United States and opening up these negotiations. But to some extent, he’s doing it in answer to the question he’s asked, and he’s perfectly willing to set aside his religious belief, especially if he’s given a sizable enough gift from Adams and Jefferson to negotiate peace. So it seems to me it’s more of a justification than anything, but the conflict between the two isn’t really over religion.

PETER: Well, let’s look a little bit further– the show is about Americans and Islam– and focus on the founders, people like Jefferson, and what their religious views were. And why they would have been less likely, perhaps, than modern policymakers to emphasize religion in their view of foreign policy.

FRANK COGLIANO: It’s a moment when revealed Christianity is not that important to the founding generation. I just don’t believe it is. And as a consequence, I think if we’re talking about Jefferson and the way the other founders saw Islam, I think they’re curious about Islam. I think they have some understanding of Islam. And as we know, Jefferson owned a copy of the Quran.

PETER: Right, exactly.

FRANK COGLIANO: But they’re not going to war, I don’t think, in 1801 with Islam. Because they don’t actually know enough about Islam to go to war with Islam. They saw is as an alien faith. I don’t think they saw it as a threatening faith. And I think that’s the important distinction– in part because for men like Adams and Jefferson, religion was something one could believe, there were benefits to be derived in terms of the kind of values one could learn from religious teaching, but it wasn’t necessarily something that one should engage in wars over. Jefferson believed the Old World had been drenched in blood because of religious intolerance.

PETER: Right. What’s the big deal for you about the Barbara Wars? It’s clear you don’t think that the religious dimension’s important. What is important?

FRANK COGLIANO: Well, I think what’s really important there is what it tells us about Jefferson. We don’t have Jefferson the quasi-pacifist who hates war, here. We have a Jefferson who’s very comfortable using force, and using deadly force, to advance American interests. We don’t have Jefferson who’s worried about strict construction of the Constitution, as we all learned in school. He’s willing to go to war without consulting Congress in the first instance.

So there are interesting precedents there, in terms of the kinds of issues we debate today, about presidential power or war powers and so on. So it reveals much to us about Jefferson. I don’t think it reveals as much as some would suggest about a clash of civilizations.

PETER: Right. How would you summarize your critique of the deployment of that trope or that idea, a clash of civilizations, in modern discussions of American engagement in the Middle East and North Africa?

FRANK COGLIANO: Well, I just don’t think it’s very helpful. Because the trope is often deployed to justify contemporary conflicts. And the implication is that, you know, we’ve always been doing this. We’ve been in this clash of civilizations for more than two centuries, and it will continue, presumably, for the next two centuries.

Yes, we’re involved in prolonged conflict. Yes, we have been involved in conflicts in the Islamic world previously in our history. But the context really does matter. I just don’t think we can find the roots of our contemporary conflicts in what happened to North Africa. I think it’s far more useful, as far as what it tells us about how the United States makes foreign policy, and makes decisions, and presidents make decisions about the use of force, than it is about a war with Islam.

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PETER: Frank Cogliano is a historian at the University of Edinburgh. He’s the author of Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy.