Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (37 page)

I
N
1790, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson reported to President Washington and Congress that since the peace with the British in 1783, America’s lucrative prewar trade in the Mediterranean had not “been
resumed,” owing to North African piracy.
¹
It was something of an exaggeration. Despite the threat and lack of naval protection, American merchants did indeed continue to risk their ships, their freedom, and even their lives plying the waters of the Mediterranean. By 1785, Algiers had seized two American merchant vessels and twenty-one sailors.
²
By 1793, eleven more American merchant vessels and over a hundred sailors would be seized by the same power. Release for these captives in Algiers would not come until treaty and ransom negotiations succeeded in 1796–97.
³

A solution to this crisis would elude Jefferson during his tenure as secretary of state, as vice president, and into his presidential term, until 1806.

In 1801, Jefferson would become the first executive of the United States to go to war with an Islamic nation. He would also be the first American holder of high office whose political opponents defamed him with accusations of being a Muslim. This experience notwithstanding, he would be the first president to entertain a Muslim ambassador in the nation’s new capital, and in correspondence with Muslim rulers of
North Africa he would repeatedly invoke a shared belief in one God. In the conduct of foreign relations, Jefferson had relied on his study of Islam, and when after leaving office he returned to his library at Monticello, he would choose a telling final place in his collection for the Qur’an that had informed his understanding of the Muslim faith. Let us now consider the arc of that understanding and its part in his political career.

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1791) by Charles Willson Peale. (
illustration credit 6.1
)

In 1790, Jefferson reported to Congress that before the end of the Revolutionary War “about one-sixth of the wheat and flour exported from the United States and about one-fourth” of all “dried and pickled fish, and some rice, found their best markets in the Mediterranean ports.”
⁴
These substantial exports, he estimated, required “eighty to one hundred ships annually, of twenty thousand tons, navigated by about twelve hundred seamen.”
⁵
Jefferson emphasized the extent of the trade by way of rationalizing its continuation in treacherous circumstances, when it “was obvious to our merchants, that their adventures into that sea would be exposed to the depredations of the piratical States on the coast of Barbary.” Temptation existed on both sides, and for the pirate states it was created by the Strait of Gibraltar, which Jefferson described as “only five leagues wide,” and where enemy “cruisers, taking a safe and commanding position near the strait’s mouth, may very effectually inspect whatever enters it. So safe a station, with certainty of receiving for their prisoners a good and stated price, may tempt their cupidity to seek our vessels particularly.”
⁶
Greed, Jefferson took pains to imply, was a universal human motive, not particular to followers of any religion.

Having failed to ransom American captives during his time as ambassador to France, Jefferson was now to insist upon an earlier, more aggressive policy option: America should answer force with force.
⁷
As a feature of this policy, he proposed that captured North African pirates be held for ransom. He even had in mind a price schedule by nationality: North African rulers would, he rightly inferred, value prisoners of Turkish origin more than “
Moors,” or indigenous Muslims, because “their government is entirely in the hands of
Turks, who are treated in every instance as a superior order of beings.” Nevertheless, he knew the scheme was likely to be fruitless since the exchange of prisoners was not
customary for the governments of Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis.
⁸
Indeed the only Tripolitan pirates ever captured, in August 1804, would end up as spectacles on the New York stage in March of the next year; none were ever ransomed to free American captives.
⁹

Something, however, had to be done for the sake of the American economy—and lives. As Jefferson told Congress, “The liberation of our citizens has an intimate connexion with the liberation of our commerce in the Mediterranean, now under the consideration of Congress. The distresses of both proceed from the same cause, and the measures which shall be adopted for the relief of one, may, very probably, involve the relief of the other.”
¹⁰

He recounted his and John Adams’s efforts in 1786 to sue for peace with Tripoli, and how they had foundered on the fiscal “demands” of the ambassador Abd al-Rahman, which were “beyond the limits of Congress and of reason.” Even if “purchasing” peace were financially feasible—he outlined how much it might cost—there remained the danger that an expensive peace might be abrogated by the untimely death of a North African ruler.
¹¹

Finally, he made his most direct case to “repel force for force,” the option he had privately endorsed since 1784. To do this, a navy would be required, and it was only “prudent” that it be “a force equal to the whole of that” which “opposed” the Americans. Jefferson presented the options with a veneer of impartiality, concluding that “it rests with Congress to decide between war, tribute, and ransom.”
¹²
But his own mind had long been made up, and as president he would choose war in 1801, without requesting the support of Congress.

Jefferson had disagreed with John Adams since 1786 about the best response to piracy, but five years later, their differences in this and other political matters would become more pronounced. When the rift became public, Islam became not only a subject for dispute but a means of personal and political insult.

Jefferson was first accused of being a Muslim as a result of words he wrote in 1791 in praise of his friend Thomas
Paine’s tract
The Rights of Man
. The context was innocent, a note to the father of Paine’s American editor, wherein Jefferson referred to himself in the third person:
“He is extremely pleased to find it will be re-printed here, and that something is to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us. He has no doubt our citizens will rally a second time round the standard of Common sense.”
¹³

Having assumed his words were private, Jefferson was soon chagrined to see them transposed into the first person and set in print as an introduction to the American edition. The expression “political heresies” particularly inflamed John Adams and his supporters, who took it as a damning reference to Adams’s recently published ideas in support of aristocracy, an element of his opposition to the
French Revolution.

As it happens, Adams had read Jefferson’s words correctly, though Jefferson never intended for Adams to read them at all, which he privately admitted in a letter to George Washington. In the same letter, he nevertheless, made his reproach more explicit, insisting anew that the theories of government in Adams’s
Discourses on Davila
represented “political heresies,” referring as well to Adams’s “apostacy to hereditary monarchy and nobility.”
¹⁴
A day later, Jefferson wrote James Madison making the same confession. Having so assiduously avoided a public disagreement with Adams over his plan for a multinational force to fight piracy while both served as diplomats in Europe, he was appalled that his differences with his friend should now be in the open—appalled and worried, though not chastened, to judge by his letter to Madison:

For his part, Madison staunchly supported Jefferson in a letter to him, concurring that Adams’s political views warranted disparagement as attacks on “the Republican Constitutions of this Country,” and “antirepublican discourses.”
¹⁶

Adams
and Jefferson’s divergent responses to Paine’s latest work issued from another point of simmering disagreement between them: the French upheaval itself. Paine had written
The Rights of Man
in 1791 as a rebuttal to Edmund Burke’s censorious
Reflections on the Revolution in France.
In
Discourses on Davila
the year before, Adams had couched his own disapproval of the Revolution in terms of British political traditions
.
But Jefferson, by contrast, heartily welcomed the events across the Channel, the overthrow of an absolutist monarchy and the advent of republicanism, in which he saw more affinities with the American Revolution, where Adams saw destructive chaos.

By July, Jefferson realized that, awkward as it might be, he could not publicly deny his endorsement of Paine’s work: “I had written it: I could not disavow my approbation of the pamphlet, because I was fully in sentiment with it: and it would have been trifling to have disavowed merely the publication of the note, approving at the same time of the pamphlet.” He “determined therefore to be utterly silent, except so far as verbal explanations could be made.”
¹⁷
As early as June, however, he’d had reason to suspect that Adams had taken up the pen against
him
under the pseudonym “Publicola.”
¹⁸
Proxy newspaper duels ensued between supporters of Jefferson and Adams, with some believing that Jefferson had joined the fray personally under various classical pseudonyms.
¹⁹
In fact, he hadn’t, and nor was Adams actually the one who had taken up “the cudgels” to attack him and Paine as Publicola. That author was in fact Adams’s twenty-four-year-old son John Quincy, who had commenced a series of letters in defense of his father on June 8 in the Boston paper the
Columbian Centinel
.

In his first letter, John Quincy took immediate issue with Jefferson’s phrase “political heresies,” casting the words as an un-American absurdity. He laced his counterattack with religious references linking Jefferson’s political views to the twin Protestant nightmares of Catholicism and Islam, imputing to Jefferson quasi-papal “infallibility” and referring to Paine’s book as canon law. As Publicola, he wrote: