The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service 1776â1924. Revised Second Edition. Charles Stuart Kennedy
treaty commitments, and ordered his corsairs to attack American shipping. The timing could not have been worse for the Algerian side, since war had now begun between the United States and Britain, with the British navy picking up almost all American merchantmen in the Mediterranean. An Algerian ship captured one American vessel, the brig Edwin out of Salem, and twelve captives ended up in the dey’s hands. The American consuls in Tunis and Cadiz, with the surprising assistance of the British consul in Algiers, were able to get some of the captives ransomed in 1814, but the rest remained captives until after the war.
Although the British navy had bottled up the much smaller American one in its harbors by the end of the 1812–15 war, the American navy had acquitted itself well in a series of frigate encounters in the earlier part of the war. Most of the United States Navy was intact when hostilities ceased in 1815.
With the conflict with England out of the way, President Madison turned American attention to the dey of Algiers and his fellow Barbary rulers. At Madison’s request Congress declared war on Algiers on 2 March 1815, Commodore Stephen Decatur set sail from New York with a squadron of three frigates, two sloops of war, three brigs, two schooners, and one new consul general to the Barbary States, William Shaler. The consul general designate, a former sea captain in the China trade, had served some years before as the American consul in Havana. He had also been sent on diplomatic missions in Europe during the War of 1812.29 Stephen Decatur was returning with zeal to the scene where he had earned international fame in burning the captive frigate Philadelphia under the guns of the pasha of Tripoli. He would not shrink from the task of bringing the corsair leaders to heel. Madison was sending a tough team to deal with the dey.
Decatur’s squadron, arriving off Gibraltar, captured the flagship and one other ship of the Algerian fleet and took more than 400 Algerians captive.30 When the American fleet anchored off the harbor of Algiers, the new dey found the defenses of his port in disrepair and what was left of his navy in poor shape; he was ready to listen to whatever Decatur and Shaler had to propose. The Americans demanded that all tributes cease, that all American prisoners be released without ransom, and that the dey pay an indemnity of $10,000 for seizing the Edwin in 1812. The dey would get back the prisoners and ships taken by the United States. The very idea that a Barbary ruler should actually pay indemnification was unprecedented, but forced to yield to superior power, the dey signed the treaty, and Shaler landed to take up his duties as consul general. He was to remain at the difficult post in Algiers for twelve years.
Decatur then took his fleet to Tunis and after consulting with the consul there, Mordecai Noah,31 demanded of the dey $46,000 in indemnity because, during the War of 1812, the dey had permitted the British navy to retake prizes brought into the supposedly neutral port of Tunis by American privateers. The dey of Tunis was as reluctant as the dey of Algiers to pay money to a Christian power, but he paid, and Decatur sailed to Tripoli with his fleet. During the British-American War the pasha had allowed American prizes to be retaken, and Decatur, with obvious relish, forced Yusuf to pay $25,000 and release some Christian captives.32
When the War of 1812 began, the British assured the dey of Algiers that they would sweep the American navy from the seas and that the Algerians had nothing to worry about in helping England. Three years later Decatur appeared with his flagship, the Guerriere, a former British frigate captured in a famous duel with the Constitution during 1812. The dey reportedly said to the British consul in Algiers: “You told us that the Americans would be swept from the seas in six months by your navy, and now they make war upon us with some of your own vessels which they have taken.”33
In 1816 the Algerian dey tried to change the unfavorable treaty concluded with Decatur and revert to the 1795 agreement that provided for tribute. He expelled the American consul general. Time, however, had run out for the Barbary corsairs, not only because the United States Navy was on the prowl, but because the end of the wars between England and France after the battle of Waterloo lessened the European tolerance for the rapacious acts of the corsairs. A large British-Dutch fleet in July 1816 bombarded Algiers, destroying most of its ships and the port area. The dey was forced to release all his Christian captives and abolish Christian slavery. Later in the same year Consul General Shaler returned to Algiers supported by a naval show of force and was able to make the dey accept Decatur’s treaty. As far as the United States was concerned, the power of the Barbary rulers had been broken, and Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers became backwater port cities where American consuls’ main worry was the plague and not the men of the pasha, or dey coming to the consulate to chop down the flagpole.
After 300 years of dominating the North African coast, the Barbary rulers were brought into line by a country across the Atlantic that did not even have a navy until the turn of the century, and had seemed willing to pay tribute rather than fight. In a short fifteen years, from 1800 to 1815, a former American consul had led an expedition across an impassable desert and taken one of their towns, and an American fleet had dictated a harsh peace including indemnities. These North African potentates found that the United States was different from European nations in that it did not encourage corsairs to attack commercial rivals. Tribute was bribery and was perhaps more repugnant to the Americans than to the sophisticated Europeans. Moral indignation was a powerful motivating force for the American naval commodores and consuls, a force Barbary rulers never quite understood.
During the time that relations with the Barbary States were of major concern to the United States, consuls were appointed for their demonstrated merit and accomplishments, not for domestic political reasons. This was a state of affairs that would not continue as partisan politics became predominant. The appointments of Cathcart and O’Brien brought into the consular service the two Americans most knowledgeable about the Barbary Coast. Joel Barlow was already a major intellectual figure at the time of his appointment, and while there could have been reasonable concern that he might be too sophisticated for Barbary tastes, he proved to be a tough negotiator. Tobias Lear had already served as a consul in a difficult post and was familiar with the political scene before he came to Algiers. William Eaton won his spurs in the army and was known as a bold and resourceful leader. William Shaler served as a consul in Havana and had diplomatic experience in Europe before going to North Africa. While these men did not always get on well together, they were as professional a team as any nation could have sent to such a trouble spot.
5. Free Trade and Seamen’s Rights (1800–1815)
In the first decade of the nineteenth century the United States had a sizeable consular service covering sixty-two cities, mainly in Europe and the West Indies. There were ten American consular posts in Great Britain and its dominions, including Malta and Gibraltar; in French territories there were thirteen, including Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and French Guiana in South America. In the period 1800–15 American consuls on French territory were not called consuls but commercial agents, apparently because when Napoleon seized power and called himself first consul, the United States wanted to avoid the confusion of having a consul general in Paris when the French head of state was first consul. But in practice everyone involved, including French officials, called the commercial agents consuls.
Portugal had four American consular posts, one on the mainland, one in the Azores, another on the island of Madeira, and another in San Salvador, Brazil. Spain had nine posts, but none on the mainland of South America. Other posts were in Denmark and its possessions in the West Indies. Prussia, Sweden, and Russia had one post each. Ten American consuls were scattered throughout the German and Italian states.
There were the four Barbary consulates established with such difficulty. In China a post was created in Canton, and the first post in the Middle East was in Smyrna, in the Ottoman Empire. It is noteworthy that there was no American consul in Halifax to the north, or in Mexico, or other parts of the Spanish domain in South America. Despite this consular expansion American diplomatic missions were still limited to the major courts of Europe.
American consular officers’ main responsibilities remained looking out for their seamen and shipping, precisely the two areas directly challenged during the long series of wars between England and France. With these two powers dominating the rights of neutral shipping, the U.S. consuls could do little in the greater problem of securing immunity for ships and seamen under the American flag. That was up to their diplomatic colleagues, who were equally impotent. Consuls could