Wikipedia Deep Dive

First Barbary War

14 min read

In 1801, the infant United States of America—a nation that had won its independence barely two decades earlier and still owed enormous debts from that struggle—found itself at war on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The enemy wasn't a European superpower. It was a small Ottoman province called Tripoli, whose ruler had grown tired of waiting for tribute payments and declared war in the traditional Barbary manner: by chopping down the American flagstaff outside the United States Consulate.

This was America's first foreign war. And it began over a protection racket.

The Business Model of Piracy

For centuries, the Barbary Coast had operated one of history's most successful extortion schemes. The quasi-independent North African provinces of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—along with the fully independent Sultanate of Morocco—maintained fleets of corsairs whose business was simple: capture merchant ships, enslave their crews, and ransom them back to their home nations for enormous sums.

This wasn't mere criminality. It was state policy. The wealth extracted from European and American shipping enriched these nations and funded their naval power. The system was so entrenched that a Catholic religious order called the Trinitarians, also known as the Mathurins, had operated out of France for centuries with the specific mission of collecting money to ransom kidnapped sailors.

European nations had long since decided that paying tribute was cheaper than fighting. The math was straightforward: maintain expensive warships and lose sailors in combat, or simply pay the protection money and let your merchants sail in peace. Most chose the ledger over the sword.

American ships had been protected during the Revolutionary War under the Treaty of Alliance with France. But once independence was won and the treaty expired, American merchants sailing the Mediterranean became fresh prey. The corsairs knew an opportunity when they saw one.

The First Capture

On October 11, 1784, Moroccan pirates seized an American brigantine called the Betsey. It was the first American merchant ship captured after the Treaty of Paris formally ended the Revolutionary War. Spain negotiated the crew's freedom, but the message was clear: pay up, or this will keep happening.

Thomas Jefferson, then serving as the United States Minister to France, tried diplomacy. He sent envoys to Morocco and Algeria with instructions to purchase peace treaties and free any captured sailors. The budget for this diplomatic mission was forty thousand dollars—roughly equivalent to just under a million dollars today.

The Barbary states wanted six hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Each.

Morocco proved surprisingly cooperative, signing a treaty in June 1786 that ended Moroccan piracy against American ships. Article six of that treaty even promised that if Americans captured by other Barbary states were brought to a Moroccan port, they would be freed and placed under Morocco's protection.

Algeria was another story entirely.

The Economics of Ransom

Algeria had already captured two American ships in July 1785: the schooner Maria and the Dauphin. Their crews would remain enslaved for over a decade, joined by sailors from other captured vessels. Diplomatic negotiations went nowhere. The Americans couldn't afford what the Algerians demanded, and the Algerians saw no reason to accept less.

In March 1786, Jefferson and John Adams traveled to London to meet with Tripoli's ambassador, a man named Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. The Americans asked what they had done to deserve these attacks. The ambassador's answer was memorable:

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.

The ambassador added colorful details about boarding tactics—how the first man onto an enemy ship received a bonus slave, and how Barbary sailors attacked with a dagger in each hand and a third clenched between their teeth, a sight that usually convinced their victims to surrender immediately.

Jefferson was convinced. Paying tribute, he believed, would only invite more demands. Adams agreed in principle but was more practical: the United States had just emerged from an exhausting war, was deep in debt, and couldn't afford to build a navy capable of fighting the Barbary states. Sometimes you pay the bully because you can't beat him yet.

Life in Captivity

What happened to the captured American sailors? Their treatment was unlike the brutal chattel slavery that Americans practiced in their own southern states. Barbary captivity operated on different rules.

Prisoners could accumulate wealth and property. They could rise in status. One captured American named James Leander Cathcart climbed all the way to the highest position a Christian slave could achieve in Algeria, becoming an advisor to the dey—the governor. This was extraordinary, but it was possible.

For most captives, however, the reality was hard labor, abuse, exposure to disease, and vermin-infested conditions. As freed sailors returned home and published accounts of their ordeals, American public opinion began demanding that Congress do something more forceful than write checks.

The Treaty That Didn't Hold

In July 1794, Congress appropriated eight hundred thousand dollars—about seventeen million in today's money—to ransom prisoners and negotiate peace with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. The following year, American negotiator Joseph Donaldson signed a treaty with Algeria that cost over six hundred thousand dollars in immediate silver payments, plus various gifts for the dey's court, plus an indefinite yearly tribute of twenty-one thousand six hundred dollars in shipbuilding supplies and ammunition.

The treaty freed 115 American sailors. It was, in effect, an admission that the United States would pay protection money like everyone else.

Jefferson never stopped arguing that this was a mistake. President George Washington came around to his view. And with the recommissioning of the United States Navy in 1794 and a wave of new warships being built, it was becoming increasingly possible to imagine an America that didn't have to pay.

The debate over whether to build a navy capable of projecting power across the Atlantic became entangled with the deepest questions of American identity. Jefferson's own Democratic-Republicans believed America's future lay in westward expansion across the continent, not in Atlantic trade that would drag the young nation into Old World conflicts. Why build expensive warships to protect commerce when that commerce itself was the problem?

Nevertheless, in 1798, Congress established the United States Department of the Navy specifically to address the Barbary threat. The pieces were moving into place.

Jefferson Gets His Chance

The presidential election of 1800 was bitter and divisive. Jefferson defeated the incumbent John Adams, and in March 1801, just before his inauguration, Congress passed legislation providing for six frigates that the president could deploy as he saw fit. If the Barbary powers declared war, these ships were authorized to "protect our commerce and chastise their insolence—by sinking, burning or destroying their ships and vessels wherever you shall find them."

Yusuf Karamanli, the Pasha of Tripoli, didn't wait long to test the new president. He demanded two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars—a traditional "consular gift" expected whenever a government changed hands. For context, total federal revenues that year were just over ten million dollars.

Jefferson refused.

On May 10, 1801, Karamanli declared war by cutting down the flagstaff at the American consulate. It was the traditional Barbary method—no formal documents, just a dramatic gesture. Algeria and Tunis, notably, did not join him.

The Constitutional Question

Before Jefferson even learned that Tripoli had declared war, he had already dispatched a small squadron under Commodore Richard Dale—three frigates and a schooner—carrying gifts and letters intended to maintain peace. But if war had been declared, Dale was instructed to protect American ships and citizens.

Jefferson was careful about constitutional limits. He told Congress that he was "unauthorized by the constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense." He presented Congress with all the information and let them decide how to respond.

Congress never formally declared war. But they authorized the president to instruct naval commanders to seize Tripolitan vessels and goods, and to "cause to be done all such other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war will justify." It was, in effect, permission to fight a war without calling it one—a precedent that would echo through American history.

The American squadron sailed to the Mediterranean and joined a Swedish flotilla already blockading Tripoli. The Swedes had been at war with the Tripolitans since 1800, providing an unexpected ally.

An Unlikely Alliance

Commodore Edward Preble, who took over from Dale, sailed to Sicily to meet with King Ferdinand IV of Naples. The kingdom was already at war with Napoleon and had its hands full, but Ferdinand saw an opportunity to weaken an enemy without committing his own stretched forces. He supplied the Americans with manpower, craftsmen, supplies, gunboats, and mortar boats. He opened the ports of Messina, Syracuse, and Palermo as bases for operations against Tripoli.

The Americans would need all the help they could get. Tripoli was a fortress city defended by a hundred and fifty heavy artillery pieces and twenty-five thousand soldiers. Its fleet included ten brigs carrying ten guns each, two schooners with eight guns apiece, two large galleys, and nineteen gunboats.

The first real action came on August 1, 1801, when the American schooner Enterprise, commanded by Lieutenant Andrew Sterret, defeated the fourteen-gun Tripolitan corsair Tripoli in battle. It was a promising start.

The Philadelphia Disaster

In October 1803, everything went wrong.

The USS Philadelphia, a frigate, was patrolling Tripoli harbor when she ran aground on a reef. The crew couldn't free her. Under fire from shore batteries and Tripolitan ships, they had no choice but to surrender. Captain William Bainbridge, all his officers, and every crew member were taken ashore as hostages.

The Tripolitans floated the Philadelphia off the reef and converted her into a floating battery for harbor defense. An American warship was now a Tripolitan weapon.

On the night of February 16, 1804, Captain Stephen Decatur led a small detachment of Marines in one of the most audacious raids in American naval history. They sailed a captured Tripolitan ketch, renamed the Intrepid, into the harbor. By pretending to be a local vessel, they got close enough to board the Philadelphia. Decatur's men stormed the ship, overpowered the Tripolitan guards, and set her ablaze. Covered by fire from American warships, they escaped.

The British Admiral Horatio Nelson, no stranger to bold naval actions, reportedly called it "the most daring act of the age."

The Shores of Tripoli

Naval bombardments continued through the summer of 1804, but the results were inconclusive. An attempt to send the Intrepid into Tripoli harbor as a fire ship—packed with explosives and intended to wreak havoc—ended in disaster. The ship was destroyed, possibly by enemy fire, before reaching her target. Captain Richard Somers and his entire crew were killed.

The turning point came from an unexpected direction: a land invasion.

William Eaton was a former Army captain who had served as American consul in Tunis. He styled himself "general" and hatched an audacious plan. He would lead a force across the Libyan desert from Egypt to attack the Tripolitan city of Derna from the landward side, where its defenses were weakest.

His army was improvised: eight United States Marines under Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon, and about five hundred mercenaries—Greeks from Crete, Arabs, and Berbers. They marched over five hundred miles across the desert from Alexandria.

In April 1805, they attacked Derna and captured it. It was the first time in history that the American flag was raised in victory on foreign soil.

This moment is immortalized in the Marines' Hymn: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." The line commemorates this desert march and the battle that followed.

The End of the War

Yusuf Karamanli found himself in an impossible position. American ships blockaded his coast. An American-led force held Derna and threatened to advance on Tripoli itself. Even worse, the Americans had found his exiled older brother Hamet and were openly discussing restoring him to power.

On June 10, 1805, Karamanli signed a treaty ending the war. The Americans would pay sixty thousand dollars for the release of the Philadelphia's crew—a ransom, but a far cry from the tribute demands that had started the conflict. Article Two of the treaty specified that the Pasha would hand over all American prisoners while the Americans would return all Tripolitan subjects in their custody.

The First Barbary War was over.

The Unfinished Business

The peace didn't last. Algiers and Tunis continued demanding tribute. During the War of 1812, when the United States was distracted fighting Britain, the Barbary states resumed attacking American shipping. A Second Barbary War would be necessary in 1815 to finally end the practice.

But the First Barbary War established something important: the United States would project military power across oceans to protect its interests and its citizens. It would not simply pay off threats. The small republic that had barely survived its revolution was announcing, in the language of cannon fire and Marine bayonets, that it intended to be taken seriously.

The war also tested constitutional boundaries that remain contested today. Jefferson fought a conflict for four years with congressional authorization but without a formal declaration of war. The precedent of military action under broad congressional authorization rather than explicit war declarations would shape American foreign policy for centuries.

For the young United States Navy, the war was a proving ground. Officers like Stephen Decatur, who would become some of the most celebrated commanders in American naval history, earned their reputations in the Mediterranean. The institutional culture of the Navy—aggressive, willing to take risks, capable of projecting power far from home—was forged in these years.

And for the Marines who marched across the desert to Derna, the war gave them a line in their hymn and a legacy of expeditionary warfare that continues to define the Corps. Those eight men who followed Lieutenant O'Bannon into battle were the ancestors of every Marine who has deployed to distant shores since.

The Broader Context

The Barbary Wars fit into a larger pattern of Mediterranean history that stretches back millennia. The sea that Romans called "Mare Nostrum"—Our Sea—has always been contested space. Phoenician traders, Greek colonists, Roman galleys, Byzantine fleets, Arab conquests, Ottoman expansion, European imperialism: the Mediterranean has been the crossroads of civilizations and the battlefield where they clashed.

The Barbary corsairs were not unique in using naval power for economic extraction. European nations had done the same for centuries—and would continue doing so through the age of colonialism. The difference was that the Barbary states targeted Christians specifically, framing their piracy in religious terms that made it particularly offensive to European and American sensibilities.

The ambassador's explanation to Jefferson and Adams—that their religion justified plundering and enslaving non-believers—was sincere. But it was also convenient. The corsairs attacked any ships they could profit from, regardless of the crews' beliefs. Religion provided the justification; money was the motivation.

By the same token, American rhetoric about the war emphasized liberty and the unacceptability of enslaving white Christians—even as the United States itself held millions of Black people in far more brutal bondage. This contradiction was not lost on everyone at the time, though most Americans found ways not to see it.

History is rarely simple. The First Barbary War can be read as a young nation's bold assertion of its rights and dignity. It can also be read as the first chapter in a long story of American military intervention overseas. Both readings are true. The Marines' Hymn celebrates courage and sacrifice. It doesn't mention what came after.

What we can say with certainty is that the war mattered. It shaped American institutions, American self-image, and American willingness to use force abroad. The United States that emerged from the conflict was more confident and more capable than the one that had entered it. Whether that confidence was a blessing or a curse depends on which chapter of subsequent history you choose to emphasize.

The shores of Tripoli were just the beginning.