Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (24 page)

Another woman called “Nila,” possibly a variation on the Arabic name Naila, and a man named Sambo, a common but not exclusively
Muslim name, also resided on Washington’s plantation.
²⁶³
Sambo, which means “second son” in the Hausa and Fulbe West African languages, was also the name of a runaway slave of definitively Islamic ancestry whose return was sought in 1775 in a Savannah, Georgia, newspaper.
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As for George Washington’s Sambo, a skilled carpenter, he fled to Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, but later was returned forcibly to Mount Vernon. The terms of Washington’s will freed Sambo in 1801. As a free man, the former slave volunteered in 1835 to work on his former master’s tomb at Mount Vernon.
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Like Jefferson, Washington supported universal religious freedom for all Americans, but never considered the possible presence of Muslim slaves on his own property.
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Unlike Jefferson, Washington’s will freed all his slaves, while Jefferson, the owner of two hundred souls, manumitted only three during his lifetime and five at his death.
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And neither Founder ever spoke even theoretically to the potential contradiction concerning Muslim slaves.
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But Washington’s case allows us to consider the probability that Jefferson, too, owned slaves of Muslim origin, no matter what their names. But until 1786 his knowledge of Muslims and their faith would remain entirely book-bound.

Given Jefferson’s now certain intimacy with his slave Sally Hemings, and their resulting seven children (only five of whom survived infancy), it even remains possible (though as yet not provable) that the Founder’s children may have had a Muslim great-grandmother of West African origin.
²⁶⁹
Recent scholarship by Annette Gordon-Reed, depicting the Hemingses as “an American family” also opens space for speculating about them as a potential American Muslim family.
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If this could be documented, then the tragedy of Jefferson’s most cherished achievement, which in principle included Muslims, would be its failure in practice to embrace his own children—and their mother.
²⁷¹

The founding father of Muslim rights in America, Jefferson had legislated theoretical equality for a population he presumed to be foreign, never recognizing those already present in his country. Although prepared to take an unusual leap on behalf of future free, white Muslims, he could not, as a man of his times, see beyond the race and enslaved status of Americans already present in Virginia, to imagine a day when they might be counted as citizens.

The complications of race and slavery would render Jefferson’s theory of rights, in both the Declaration of Independence and A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, less than universal in application. He could
acknowledge this contradiction in the former founding document, but never in the latter Virginia statute, in part because he never realized that there were slaves who were being denied, among other rights, the freedom of religion. The first American Muslims remained invisible to the new country’s most impassioned defender of Muslim rights.

Before he crossed the Atlantic to take up diplomatic duties in Europe, Jefferson had never met a Muslim. This would change when he and his friend John Adams met in London to negotiate a peace treaty with the Muslim ambassador from Tripoli in 1786. The two Founders would try to solve the problem of North African piracy through negotiation, despite diametrically opposed views of effective foreign policy.

The Problem of North African Piracy and Their Negotiations with a Muslim Ambassador in London, 1784–88

“T
HERE IS A
Tripolitan Ambassador with whom I have had three conferences,” wrote John Adams from London on February 21, 1786, inviting Thomas Jefferson, then serving as a diplomat in Paris, to help negotiate a treaty with the Muslim envoy from Tripoli, the North African coastal city in what is today Libya. Jefferson would comply the next month.
¹

In March 1786, three months after the landmark legislation on
religious freedom in Virginia was passed in his absence, Jefferson would for the first time encounter a real Muslim, one of only two he ever knowingly met. The month before had been Adams’s first time meeting a Muslim too.

In London, Jefferson and John Adams listened as the ambassador from Tripoli referred to the Qur’an to justify naval attacks against American shipping in the Mediterranean, which the two Americans duly noted in their joint communiqué. It is possible that the Muslim ambassador’s invocation of specific passages in the sacred text caused Jefferson to consult his own copy, perhaps even presenting the occasion when the Founder saw fit to mark the book with his initials. To judge by Jefferson’s single reference to the Qur’an in the context of Adams’s three earlier meetings with the Muslim ambassador, as well as the fourth, at which Jefferson was present, it is clear that religion, however convenient a rationale for “Islamic piracy,” was not the paramount issue in American negotiations with Tripoli. Still, in this earliest face-to-face cultural encounter, it would be Adams, not Jefferson, who emphasized religion in his perceptions of the enemy.

This chapter traces the evolution of Jefferson’s thinking about the piracy problem from 1784 to 1788. His strategy was, from the first, governed not by religious but political and economic considerations. These drove his early, somewhat duplicitous attempt to solve the problem by military means without informing Adams, who believed that payment for peace was the nation’s better course. As early as 1784, Jefferson preferred a military response to what he considered piratical extortion, but not until 1801, when he was president, would he act on this impulse. Until then, his diplomatic efforts were doomed to failure, since the United States had neither a navy to protect its ships nor even a central government authorized to collect taxes that might be used to pay tribute for peace or the ransom of American captives held in North Africa.
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Piracy, as this chapter documents, was not an exclusively Muslim practice in the Mediterranean, but the taking of captives did provoke difficult questions in America about individual liberty and freedom in the face of what was essentially a faith-based form of slavery.
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Ironically, throughout the effort to end this bondage of their fellow citizens, most Americans, including Jefferson, would never connect it to the contemporaneous American practice of race-based slavery inflicted on captured West Africans.

The problem of piracy was at the heart of Jefferson’s diplomatic career in Europe, and his effort to fight this mischief perpetrated by the four Islamic powers of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (collectively known in Europe and America as the Barbary States) has been well documented elsewhere.
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But his refusal to construe this threat to American lives and commerce as primarily a conflict between a Christian United States and an Islamic North Africa has not been sufficiently explored.
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Recent histories of the U.S. encounter with North Africa confirm this point more generally. As the historian
Frank Lambert asserts, “Evidence abounds that neither the pirates nor the Americans considered religion central to their conflict.”
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Instead, the motivations on both sides were more mercenary: American merchants were willing to risk their liberty for commercial gain in the Mediterranean, while the pirates of North Africa believed it their right to attack and hold for ransom all those who ventured into waters they controlled.
⁷

The liberty and equality that were in Jefferson’s view the natural rights of white American males were threatened by the North African powers, which also rejected his internationalist notions of universal free trade in other nations’ waters.
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From the North Africans’ perspective, these lofty and naive American suppositions only disrupted a business plied profitably in the Mediterranean by both Christians and Muslims since the sixteenth century. Americans, like Europeans before them, had a choice about how to secure access to coveted markets in the eastern Atlantic along the coasts of Spain and Portugal and on the northern Mediterranean littoral. They knew this could be done by purchasing expensive peace settlements with the pirates. But absent this
cost of safe passage, they would run the acknowledged risk of the seizure of ships, goods, and civilians, the latter being taken with the express purpose of securing lucrative ransoms for their freedom. This was the customary arrangement, and it took no account of the self-evident rights Americans believed they had secured by breaking from Great Britain.
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Six months after the fruitless negotiations with the ambassador from Tripoli, John Adams, unlike Jefferson, saw the conflict as a religious one. As he wrote Jefferson in July 1786, “The policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet.”
¹⁰
Jefferson, who had deliberately disestablished Christianity in Virginia, could see the problem at this first stage in the 1780s and early 1790s
only in political terms. Even in his private letters, he never emphasized the religious differences of the opposing sides. As a consequence, their respective responses to the crisis differed, amounting to the first major break in what would later evolve into a tempestuous relationship between the two men.

American captives seized by North African pirates defined themselves as slaves, just as their captors defined them, but the terms of their captivity differed from those of American slavery, although the differences were not always obvious. For one thing, Muslims theoretically distinguished between captivity (
asr
) and slavery (
ubudiyya
),
¹¹
a Qur’anic distinction, admittedly often lost on captive Americans.
¹²
Also blurring the difference was that Muslims practiced their own race-based enslavement of black West and sub-Saharan Africans; these slaves lost freedom for life, a practice supported by Islam as it was by Judaism and Christianity.

Nevertheless, the captive/slave distinction was ultimately crucial, and Christians captured by Muslim pirates were not considered as slaves, perpetually unfree, but as captives. As people “taken in military or naval encounters between armies or privateers,” they might be exchanged for ransom.
¹³
If their countrymen could raise the money for their release, their freedom could be restored. There is no question that most American captives suffered years of privation, harsh forced labor, intermittent cruelty by their overseers, outbreaks of plague, and death. The captivity they endured was comparable to slavery, although Christian captives were free to practice their faith.
¹⁴
And they had the hope, at least in principle, of being released, but for many it took years to be ransomed through negotiation and treaty agreements. Some gained their freedom another way: through
conversion to Islam.

A few American captives, such as
James Cathcart, even prospered as prisoners in North Africa. Beginning in 1785, Cathcart spent eleven years as a captive in Algiers, where he rose from coffee maker to chief Christian clerk of the Muslim ruler. He helped negotiate the treaty that led to his release, arriving back in the United States in a ship he purchased with the money he earned while a prisoner.
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(Cathcart was allowed to run a tavern in prison and retain half the income.)
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He later returned to North Africa as the U.S. consul to Tripoli.
¹⁷
Richard
O’Brien, a ship’s captain also held in Algiers, would later return to that city as the U.S. consul.
¹⁸