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The Barbary Wars

In 1786, while Jefferson was serving as the United States Ambassador to France, the issue of piracy in the Mediterranean became the most serious economic threat to the newly established United States. Independence from Great Britain had had economic consequences abroad. This was before international law had established protections for territorial waters, so if a ship sailed into range from a country with which the local government had no treaty, it was generally assumed to be hostile and therefore subject to attack. While America was still a group of colonies of the British Crown, its ships were protected because the Crown had such a treaty and paid an annual tribute to the government inTripoli to protect its interests. But with the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. lost the protection of both the royal coffers and the royal navy, making travel and trade a precarious endeavor around the coast of the Maghreb. Pirates from the modern-day states of Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia attacked American merchant ships trading in the region with abandon.

Jefferson, together with his contemporary, John Adams, who was then serving as the Ambassador to England, met with the Ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, in an attempt to understand why American ships were being attacked and Americans being taken hostage. In a report to the then Secretary of State John Jay, Jefferson cites the Ambassador as saying:

It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.^xv

Scholars recognize the ambassador’s paraphrasing of the “Sword Verse” (Surah 9:5), as the Qur’anic passage sometimes used to justify jihad is popularly known. The document is an excellent summation of the pirate’s motivations. It may also be read as an eerie foreshadowing of the rationale claimed by some terrorists today. But Jefferson’s understanding of the Qur’an resulted in a very different outcome from today’s Global War on Terror. The 1796 Treaty of Tripoli was Congress’s response to the pirating of American ships in the Mediterranean. Drafted by Jefferson’s friend and colleague, Joel Barlow, the treaty stated emphatically that “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 Musselmen.”^xvi

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