Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

At last, a figure approached, silhouetted against the arched hallway. Jefferson stood and turned his tall, thin figure toward Abd al-Rahman, the personal representative of the Pasha of Tripoli, Ali the First. Though nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Tripoli was a quasi-independent state that, like Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, had been harassing American ships.

Rahman wore a flowing white robe and dark turban. His scarred and pocked face reflected the brutal land he’d left behind. After some brief pleasantries, Rahman turned to the matter at hand, alternating his language between Italian, Spanish, and French, depending on which word he remembered first as he struggled to translate from his native Arabic. “The United States is our enemy,” he said, with a candor Jefferson had not been expecting. “Peace is possible, but peace has a price. One hundred eighty-three thousand guineas, to be exact. Otherwise, we will extract our fee by continuing to pillage your ships.”

Jefferson converted guineas to dollars in his head. The total owed to Tripoli and the surrounding Barbary States would approach $1 million. That was one-tenth the entire annual budget of the United States.

“Monsieur Rahman, our countries are being drawn toward a universal and horrible war,” Jefferson replied in flawless French, speaking slowly to make sure the Pasha’s envoy understood him. “We have no interest in sending soldiers across the Atlantic to fight your men.”

Rahman took a deep breath. He understood Jefferson’s words just fine but doubted that the young republic this man represented was really prepared to stand behind them. Far larger nations with far stronger militaries had chosen to pay for peace. He had no doubt that this one would as well.

“It is written in the Koran,” Rahman said, “that all nations without acknowledged Islamic authority are sinners. As Muslims, it is our right and duty to make war upon whomever we can find and to make slaves of all we can take as prisoners.”

Jefferson knew before he’d even arrived that he, as the United States Ambassador to France, was unlikely to succeed where the Ambassador to Britain, his friend John Adams, had already tried and failed. And now, as he listened to Rahman lecture him about the Koran and infidels and slaves, Jefferson knew he’d been right.

Dartmouth College

Five years later: August 1, 1790

There was no doubt that William Eaton liked the girl. He probably even loved her. But the line between love and infatuation was a bit too fine for the twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate. He had courted her, kissed her, and proposed to her. He would gladly promise to love her and honor her. But he wouldn’t obey her. Frankly, he wasn’t ready to obey anyone. So when this girl, his college sweetheart, said she’d only marry him if he promised to stay in New England and forgo his plans of returning to the army, he had no choice but to give up on her.

“My dear,” he said, kissing her cheek, “no man will hereafter love you as I do—but I prefer the field of Mars to the bower of Venus.”

A few years later, William Eaton joined the U.S. Army.

Washington, D.C.

Eleven years later: March 4, 1801

The inaugural address was eloquent. How could it not be? Even the new president’s fiercest enemies—he had many of them—had to admit that Thomas Jefferson had a way with words.

“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he told the audience gathered in the Senate chamber that day. The high-minded sentiment was quintessential Jefferson.

As Jefferson took office, a familiar problem nagged at him. His meeting with the Pasha’s representative sixteen years earlier had only led to another in a long line of expensive bribes. By 1801, the young republic was spending approximately 20 percent of its annual budget paying off the Barbary dictators. It sent ships brimming with gold, precious stones, lumber, spices, cannons, and powder in return for safe passage, but the bribes only invited even more aggression. Ships were still being captured, loot confiscated, and sailors held hostage for ransom.

The Barbary appetite for riches was apparently insatiable.

Jefferson distrusted the Barbary dictators and disliked appeasing them. He believed that war was, in the long run, more economical and more honorable than bribery. He knew there was no end to the demand for money, nor any security in their promises. Blackmail, he believed, would have to be replaced by gunpowder and cannonball.

But Jefferson’s actions were not always as resolute as his words. As George Washington’s secretary of state, he had personally overseen a policy of ransom and tribute to the Barbary states. As the champion of rural farmers, he had long opposed the creation of a navy and, in fact, was planning to decommission warships built to patrol the Barbary Coast. The budget, after all, had to be balanced.

Tunis

May 15, 1801

The short, muscular consul to Tunis was, after all these years, still looking for another fight. As a boy, the excitable lad had run away from home to fight the British. As a young man, he had chosen the U.S. Army over his would-be fiancée. And now, after service in the Indian war, a court-martial for disobedience, and a dishonorable discharge from the army, William Eaton had a new war in mind. This would be a war to accomplish a task America had never before tried: regime change.

Eaton’s mood today was even more bellicose than usual. The blue-eyed, bulldog-faced consul had just heard news of an attack on the American consulate in Tripoli. Without a Tripolitan Congress to pass an official declaration of war, the Pasha’s soldiers had followed their traditional process of chopping down the flagpole at the U.S. consulate.

For the first time in its history, America found itself at war in a foreign land.

William Eaton could not have been happier.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Two years later: June 13, 1803

William Ray was having a bad run of luck. Over the past few years, he had lost a string of jobs as a newspaper editor, schoolteacher, and general-store owner. Then, to top it all off, he’d found his girlfriend in the arms of a stranger—a Frenchman who, unbeknownst to Ray, was her husband.

After heavy drinking at a succession of pubs, the morose, frail thirty-four-year-old stumbled down to the banks of the Delaware River. His life a mess, he was ready to drown himself in the river’s muddy waters but something made him pause. It was a noise, distant but steady: the beating of a drum.

His curiosity piqued, Ray looked down the river in the direction of the sound. Through the fog he saw the hulking outline of the largest warship he had ever seen. Perhaps because he could think of nothing better to do, or perhaps because he wasn’t yet ready to meet his maker, Ray staggered along the riverbank toward the ship.

When he neared his destination—a thirty-eight-gun frigate with U.S.S. PHILADELPHIA stenciled in large letters on its side—he discovered a man in a blue and red uniform standing on the dock looking for recruits. “See the world!” shouted the Marine over the banging of the recruiting drum. “Serve your country and see the world!”

At the time, there were fewer than five hundred United States Marines, and it was not difficult to see why. Their pay was the lowest in the American military; their duties—mainly policing sailors and preventing mutiny—were the least glamorous; and their nickname was curious: leathernecks . The term had come from their dress uniforms, which included tall, stiff leather collars that made it difficult for a Marine to turn his head, or, more important, to lose it to the blade of a Barbary pirate’s saber.

At that moment, however, none of those things really mattered to William Ray. Guaranteed meals, shelter, and a distraction from his duplicitous girlfriend were all the compensation he needed.