Founding Pirates

Not long after independence, the US faced “its first acute foreign threat,” writes Michael Oren in Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present . Not from Britain or France, but from North Africa. John Paul Jones complained that “The Algerians are cruising in different squads of six and eight sail, and extend themselves out as far as the western islands.” Three American ships had been captured, and hijacking and hostages were just beginning.

But what to do? Under the Articles of Confederation, there seemed little chance that the states would coordinate efforts to fight back. “American cannot retaliate,” said Lord Sheffield in England. It is too difficult to get the states “to act as a nation.” Oren argues that this was one of the motivations for the replacement of the Articles with the Constitution, which provided a mechanism for the formation of a navy:

“Though downplayed during the Constitutional Convention, the connection between the Middle East and the American federation figured prominently in the impassioned state-level debates on ratifying the proposed Constitution. The Reverence Thomas Thatcher reminder the Massachusetts convention that the enslavement of ‘our sailors . . . in Algiers is enough to convince the most skeptical among us, of the want of general government.’ Nathaniel Sargeant said it was ‘preposterous’ to think that the United States could continue under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation and still defend itself from ‘piracies and felonies on ye high seas.’” In Norther Carolina, Hugh Williamson “a distinguished physician and astronomer, wondered ‘What is there to prevent the Algerine Pirate from landing on your coast, and carrying your citizens into slavery?’ The Kentucky attorney George Nicholas asked, ‘May not the Algerines seize our vessels? Cannot they . . . pillage our ships and destroy our commerce, without subjecting themselves to any inconvenient.’”

Federalist 24 mounted a similar argument: “If we mean to be a commercial people . . . we must endeavor as soon as possible to have a navy.” Without a Navy (#11) “of respectable weight . . . the genius of American Merchants and Navigators would be stifled and lost.” Only union under the Constitution (#41) can protect America’s “maritime strength” against “the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians.” Peter Markoe published a satirical poem under the name Mehmet, an Algeian who planned to exploit American factionalism to seize women and maidens, along with Rhode Island. One historian wrote, “In an indirect sense, the brutal Dey of Algiers was a Founding Father of the Constitution.”

All of which indicates: American long-standing entanglement with the Middle East, as well as American’s long-standing linkage of military and commercial interests