In the 1820s, in the settlement of Little Pigeon Creek in Indiana, a lanky, dark-haired boy picked up an unusual book. For a child who had lost his mother at only nine, books were more than mere escapes. In the isolated frontier, they were the next best things to guide one through life. This particular volume was a stirring account of an American merchant captain who had been taken into slavery in Africa. Even for a voracious reader like the boy, the book was captivating. It was one of the texts that informed him of the evils of slavery, whose abolition would become the boy’s mission in adulthood.
The book’s author had commanded the ship Commerce, when it struck a reef in fog on the coast of North Africa. The shipwrecked crew stumbled ashore at the edge of the Western Sahara. At first, they thought that the worst was behind them. But they were wrong. Soon a band of Saharan tribesmen captured, bound and stripped them. Then they led them on foot and by camel across the desert. The captives had little food or water, and even less hope of ever seeing home again. Along the way, they were separated and sold into slavery.
The captain, James Riley, eventually survived to tell his tale. He convinced a Saharan trader to purchase him and his companions and bring them north. There Europeans paid a substantial ransom for their release. And so Riley and his crew found freedom. His story was among the first real-life accounts of how an American had fallen victim to slavery and lived at another’s mercy. The book, called Sufferings in Africa, became one of the most-read American captivity narratives of the nineteenth century. But Riley was hardly alone. Scores of other Americans had experienced a similar fate. Their ordeals shaped America’s relationship with distant north Africa. And in Riley’s case left an impression on a young reader who would one day confront slavery at home.
***
Before there was Captain Riley, there was James Cathcart. In July 1785, the Boston-based schooner Maria was en route to Cadiz. It was carrying a cargo of furs, lumber, and dried cod. Along the way, Algerian state-backed pirates — the corsairs — forced the ship onto the Portuguese coast.
A second American ship, the Dauphin, was taken days after. Between the two crews, twenty-one Americans were captured, among them the eighteen-year-old James Cathcart. The corsairs preyed on merchant ships in the southern Mediterranean. The practice had become a major source of revenue for the economies of Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli, the four nations the Europeans called the Barbary States.
In Algiers, Cathcart and his shipmates were taken into slavery. From then on they lived the way most enslaved Christians did in Muslim lands. They were subjected to hard labor, little food, and the bastinado — a beating on the soles of the feet. It was administered for offenses as small as working too slowly, and it cost Cathcart several toenails.
By August, the captains of the two ships had written a petition to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were posted in Europe, pleading for help. Jefferson decided to act on his own. He authorized an envoy to negotiate a peace treaty with the ruler of Algiers, the Dey. He also sent a letter to Congress, explaining the urgency of the matter.
But the Congress had little means by which to tackle the crisis. America barely had a treasury then, and no navy to speak of. So the new nation managed this crisis in the way it managed most crises: with prayers, bribes that were euphemistically called “tributes,” and the hope that things would not get worse.
But they did.
Jefferson’s envoy failed to negotiate a deal. And so the Americans remained slaves in Algiers for another decade. However, Cathcart was not the kind to sit around waiting to be saved. He was shrewd, literate, and resourceful, and inside the closed economy of any prison those qualities are always currency. He picked up Arabic and Turkish and worked his way up from a menial laborer to clerk of the prison. He used his earnings to buy shares in several local taverns. With that revenue, he bought better food, clothes, and medical care for himself and his shipmates. He also bribed the guards and other prison officials to get them to lighten their workload. When one of the Americans died, he bribed the guards again to let them give the dead a Christian burial. In time, Cathcart had achieved what no Christian prisoner before him had. He became the chief Christian secretary whom the Dey trusted with correspondence.
Soon after Cathcart’s rise to high office, matters took an even worse turn for Americans. For years, Portugal had kept a naval blockade on the Strait of Gibraltar to protect its Atlantic shipping routes. However, after decades of hostility, Portugal and Algiers signed a temporary truce, lifting the blockade. Once again, the corsairs poured into the Atlantic and seized more American vessels, capturing some hundred more sailors.
Congress, which had endlessly debated whether to build a navy at all, finally acted. It authorized six warships. But the decision came with an odd caveat: if peace with Algiers came before the ships were finished, construction would stop. America had just ended its greatest war and was earnestly hoping that it had been its last. But building a navy meant that another war was in the offing — something the nation could not endure again, especially so soon.
America’s hopes proved not to have been in vain, thanks mostly to the one well-positioned accidental diplomat it had in James Cathcart. He had the Dey’s ear, and understood the inner workings of Algerian politics. So when the final attempt at a negotiation came in 1795, the odds of its success were greater than ever before.
Congress appointed Joseph Donaldson to the task. With Cathcart inside the court, Donaldson dispatched a negotiator named Joel Barlow to Tripoli. One of the nation’s most unconventional diplomats — a poet, a Yale graduate, a Revolutionary War chaplain, and one of the young republic’s most celebrated writers — Barlow knew how to deliver what the occasion demanded.
He worked off his frustrations with the unpredictable Dey by traveling through Algiers, writing letters to his wife, and, reportedly, going boar-hunting. He had resolved not to budge until he had brought every last captive home. His determination was on full display when he, undaunted by the plague, visited the sick Americans in prison. There was, however, one enormous obstacle in his way: money. The United States had agreed to a ransom it could not readily pay in Algiers.
A man of the world, Barlow knew the who’s who in many major cities. In Algiers, he turned to Joseph Bacri, a member of the Jewish Algerian merchant family who dominated the Mediterranean trade and had influence over the Dey. Bacri gave Barlow the funds he needed to finish the job. With the Bacris’ help, Barlow secured the freedom of the captives and purchased the vessel that would deliver them home.
Of the original twenty-one Americans, twelve had survived and made it home. With money he made in captivity, James Cathcart bought a ship and sailed to Philadelphia. On the seas, Cathcart, the former slave, commanded his own vessel and, with it, he became a free man once more.
After Algiers, the United States had to quickly deal with Tripoli, which had similarly stymied American maritime trade. Signed in 1796, the Treaty of Tripoli guaranteed safe passage, fair treatment of prisoners, and protections for American merchants. The treaty was hardly a mere political agreement. It was a clear statement of the principles that the newly founded country was projecting to the world. Its Article XI read:
“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 Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, 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.”
With this agreement America declared that it was not a Christian power carrying centuries of religious hostility toward the Muslim world. Rather, it was a republic with no inherent religious quarrel with Islam. The Constitution had already rejected religious tests for federal office. And the First Amendment had barred Congress from establishing a national religion. Now Article XI was introducing that experiment to the Muslim world.
However eloquent the passage, it went strangely missing from the Arabic version of the treaty. Its absence is a mystery that still haunts historians and experts alike.
It took hundreds of American lives and countless tragedies for the treaty to finally come into being. But those losses arguably helped pave part of the way for the greatest transformation America had known since 1776.
James Riley’s Sufferings in Africa, along with those of other enslaved Americans in the Barbary region laid bare the evils of slavery for Americans at home, among them a young boy on an Indiana settlement. He grew up to become America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, who resolved to remove its stain from the face of his nation.
ــــــــــــــــــــ
Luca Guerzoni contributed to the production of this story.
