Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (29 page)

Adams’s fifth and final meeting with Abd al-Rahman took place in London in January 1787, after which the Tripolitan ambassador planned to return home. Adams reported that he had no direction from his government with which to continue or conclude negotiations.
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There would be no treaty for all these protracted negotiations between Tripoli and the United States.

Three months later, Jefferson admitted to Adams that their ideas about how to deal with piracy continued to differ. Allowing that their “instructions” from Congress had “required us to proceed by way of negotiation to obtain peace,” and that “Whatever might be our private opinions, they were to be suppressed,” he acknowledged biting his tongue though he had followed his orders “honestly” and “zealously.” “Though, it was therefore never material for us to consult together on the best plan of conduct toward these states,” Jefferson continued to think “it would be best to effect a peace thro’ the medium of war.” He outlined his reasons systematically. These included ethical propositions, but no religious ones, and he assumed Adams’s assent to the first four, though this compatriot thought “respect” from European powers would be won more easily by forging treaties, not waging war:

Jefferson then outlined the “next steps,” those “in which we shall differ”:

After offering other financial calculations, Jefferson admitted that war carried risks, but he weighed these against “the greater uncertainty of the duration of a peace bought with money, from such a people, from a Dey 80. years old, and by a nation who, on the hypothesis of buying peace, is to have no power on the sea to enforce the observance of it.”
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It was not an unwarranted concern about the eighty-year-old ruler of
Algiers, the end of whose life would likely not just end his rule but also abrogate his treaty arrangements.

Jefferson was optimistic that the United States would not bear “the whole weight of this war,” for Naples would join them and possibly Portugal. He had an even more unusual hope: “that a Convention might be formed between Portugal, Naples and the U.S. by which the burthen of the war might be quotaed on them according to their prospective wealth, and the term of it should be when Algiers should subscribe to peace with all three on equal terms.” He further envisioned that “sooner or later” the other powers of Europe (except France, England, Holland, and Spain) would “enter into the confederacy,” increasing its efficacy and further distributing the costs.
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Knowing they were of very different minds on the matter, Jefferson was careful not to offend Adams, allowing that he shared his ideas to show that “a semblance of reason” had taken him thus far, “and not with the expectation of their changing your opinion.” He even graciously admitted that because “The same facts impress us differently,” this led him to humbly “suspect an error in my process of reasoning tho’ I am not able to detect it.”
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But however polite, he was less than forthright about how far he had taken his plans for a naval force to oppose piracy.

Unbeknownst to Adams, sometime earlier in July 1786, Jefferson had started working behind the scenes in France to enlist international support for a multinational naval force to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean. The idea, forward-looking for the eighteenth century, had actually been first proposed by
Benjamin Franklin, who informally observed that it was in the interest of the European powers to join forces against piracy.
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There is evidence that Jefferson privately presented his plan for a naval confederation on July 4, 1786, to Del Pio, the Neapolitan minister to France. The only surviving copies of his Proposed Convention against the Barbary States are in French and Italian.
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Jefferson also discussed this plan with Lafayette, who on October 22, 1786, without mentioning Jefferson’s role, proposed it to President George Washington,
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as well as to John Jay, whom he urged to bring the idea before Congress. As Julian Boyd has concluded, Jefferson may have chosen to keep his authorship from Adams, knowing it “could only have accentuated the difference of opinion” between them and the legislature, thinking it would have “weakened the presentation of the plan to Congress.”
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Jefferson’s convention invited any willing nation to work “in concert” against the pirate states of North Africa, “beginning with the
Algerines.” His object was nothing less than “to compel the pyratical states to perpetual peace, without price, and to guarantee that peace to each other.”
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This would be accomplished by the deterring effect of patrolling the Mediterranean, not by bombarding North African land targets. Once Algiers agreed to a perpetual peace, the attentions of the naval confederation would be directed to the less threatening pirate states. Though he never claimed public credit for the idea, Jefferson copied this proposal in his autobiography, but alas Secretary Jay and Congress were not convinced, “and so it fell through.”
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On July 25, 1785, the schooner
Maria
of Boston was captured by Algerian pirates near Cape St. Vincent, off southern Portugal. Five days later, pirates of the same power took the
Dauphin
(or
Dolphin
) of Philadelphia off Lisbon.
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The result was not simply the loss of both ships and cargoes, but the imprisonment of twenty-one American citizens.
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That Adams and Jefferson were aware of this situation while negotiating the next year in London can have only exacerbated their frustration at not being empowered by Congress to offer ransom. Nevertheless, when the American agent John Lamb arrived in Algiers in March 1786, they instructed him to offer no more than two hundred dollars per man, a sum they thought they could answer for.
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But the dey of Algiers was asking $59,486 for all twenty-one men, with $18,000 for the captains and much less for each of the ordinary sailors.
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The fate of the prisoners was still unresolved when Jefferson returned to Paris after the failed negotiations in London. It was then he turned to the Order of the Holy Trinity and Redemption of Captives, known as the
Mathurins, for help.
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The Catholic order had members throughout North Africa and a headquarters in Paris. Jefferson hoped that they might act as covert go-betweens to redeem the American prisoners in Algiers. This they agreed to do early in 1787, but Jefferson still awaited funds. While he did, he set about publicly affecting to have lost interest in the American prisoners, hoping thereby to reduce the price of their ransom.
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But the posturing impressed no one but the prisoners themselves, who despaired. They wrote him with “the most afflicting reproaches.”
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It was not until Jefferson was about to return to
the United States in August 1789 that the funds were finally secured from Holland. By then, however, the French Revolution had put an end to the Mathurin order, and with it American hopes for their intercession.
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The group of twenty-one sailors seized by Algiers in 1785 would be held for eleven years. Two of them were released by private donations; almost half of them would die of disease waiting for their freedom.
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As we have seen, Jefferson and Adams differed as to the best remedy for the piracy crisis. They also differed as to the role religion played in it. For while Jefferson took the pragmatic view that it was a matter of simple pecuniary opportunism, Adams was prepared to see an element of religious conflict, whatever he may have thought of Abd al-Rahman’s Qur’anic justifications. It is interesting, then, to consider the efforts each man made to understand the religion of the nation’s adversaries.

Jefferson bought his Qur’an eleven years before piracy became a practical diplomatic issue and his initialing of his copy bears scrutiny, offering tantalizing clues not only to his interest in consulting the holy book but also to the provenance of the copy that survives. In fact, his interview in London with the ambassador from Tripoli may explain why he placed his initials in his copy of Sale’s translation precisely where he did, near verses that refer to warfare. There are different possible circumstances for his doing so.

First, presuming that Jefferson’s Qur’an had survived the 1770 fire and remained behind in his Virginia library, he may have initialed the book sometime after his 1789 return to the United States, before becoming secretary of state in 1790. He may have then placed his initials beneath verses of the Qur’an’s fourth chapter that detail the importance of fighting “in the path of God,” and the wisdom that those who strive in this way are “preferred” by God for their industry (Qur’an 4:94–96). Equally, he may have been moved to mark these particular verses somewhat later, perhaps in 1801, when as president he faced the choice of whether or not to go to war against Tripoli.
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But if Jefferson had lost his two-volume Qur’an in the 1770 fire, he may have taken the opportunity while in London to purchase a replacement copy. There is no recorded evidence of this. What remains certain
is that in volume 1,
this page
, Jefferson inscribed his characteristic “T” and “I” at the bottom of the page (following the eighteenth-century practice of using the Latin “I” instead for the “J” in Jefferson).
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this page
of Jefferson’s Qur’an with his initials inscribed at the bottom. (
illustration credit 4.1
)

It is also possible, though less likely, that he randomly decided where to indicate his possession of the book when he first purchased it in 1765. He left no other notes in his copy.

John Adams, by contrast, for all his concern with religion, displayed only a belated if not decidedly lukewarm curiosity about the Qur’an. He would not buy a copy of the sacred text until 1806, five years after the end of his presidency, and twenty years after his negotiations with the ambassador from Tripoli. The text he ultimately purchased, now preserved in the Boston Public Library’s collection of his books, was not Sale’s English translation but the first American edition of the Islamic holy book, printed in 1806 in Springfield, Massachusetts, based on an
earlier, flawed translation from Arabic via French undertaken in the mid-seventeenth century.
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Well before the acquisition, in 1797 President Adams would sign the first U.S. peace treaty with Tripoli.

Jefferson may have been inspired to check Abd al-Rahman’s Qur’anic references, to better understand his military opponents’ ideology, but he never perceived the conflict with North African powers in primarily religious terms. Indeed, the one reference to “holy war” in his voluminous writings pertains to the only struggle Jefferson considered truly sacred: “for if ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.”
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By the time he wrote these words in 1813, he had prosecuted a war against Tripoli during his first presidential term (1801–5) and signed a peace treaty with that power in 1806, at the beginning of his second. Perhaps it was because of what he gathered from the Qur’an that he initially understood the North African piracy crisis in terms economic, military, and diplomatic. Yet during his presidency, religion, both his own and that of the rulers of North African pirate powers, would appear as a factor in his diplomatic actions.

Not long after Jefferson and Adams’s failure to negotiate an effective treaty with Tripoli in 1786, and as American captives continued to languish in North Africa, national debate assumed a new focus: the Constitution proposed in 1787.
Thomas Bailey, a diplomatic historian, has asserted that the dey of Algiers might deserve “indirect” credit as one of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States because the plight of the imprisoned Americans did so much to prove the need for a new federal Constitution, with a system of taxation that could raise the funds to pay for their ransom.
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A North Carolina Federalist,
Hugh Williamson, made a similar point in 1788, asserting that without a navy the United States could not stave off the pirates from Algiers that one day might attack the coast of his state.
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