is admirably presented in S. E. Morison, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis (2 vols., 1913). The larger biographies of Jefferson are: H. S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (3 vols., 1858), commonly referred to as the standard biography, though exceedingly partisan; G. Tucker, Life of Thomas Jefferson (2 vols., 1837); and James Parton, Life of Thomas Jefferson (1874).

CHAPTER VIII

THE PURCHASE OF THE PROVINCE OF

LOUISIANA

NOT a war cloud was in the sky when Jefferson took the oath of office. The European calm, to be sure, proved to be only a lull in the tempest of war which was to rage fifteen years longer; but no mar could have cast the horoscope of Europe in that age of storm and stress. The times seemed auspicious for the Republican program of retrenchment and economy. Jefferson was so sanguine of continued peace that he would have been glad to lay up all seven of the frigates which then constituted the navy in the eastern branck of the Potomac, where "they would be under the immediate eye of the department, and would require but one set of plunderers to take care of them." Peace was his passion, he frankly avowed. He would have been glad to banish all the paraphernalia of war. Yet within three months the United States was at war with an insignificant Medi. terranean power and menaced by France from an unexpected quarter.

Early in the spring of 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli, one of the Barbary powers which for years had preyed upon the commerce of the Mediterranean, declared war upon the United States by cutting down the flagstaff at the residence of the American consul. European states had purchased immunity for their com

merce by paying tribute to these rapacious pirates; and the United States had followed the custom. The Pasha of Tripoli, however, was dissatisfied with the American tribute, a paltry eighty-three thousand dollars, and demanded more. The other Barbary powers threatened to make common cause with him. Anticipating trouble, Jefferson had sent a small squadron to the Mediterranean even before the dramatic act of the Pasha at the American consulate; and hostilities began on August 1 with the capture of a corsair by the schooner Enterprise. Therewith Jefferson's dreams of a navy for coast defense only vanished in thin air.

Contrary to all expectations, the Tripolitan War dragged on for four years, causing the peace-loving Administration no end of embarrassment. So far from reducing expenditures, Gallatin was obliged to devise new ways and means for an ever-increasing naval force. An additional duty of two and one half per cent was laid on all imports which paid an ad valorem duty, and the proceeds were kept as a separate treasury account. The Administration was sensitive to the charge that it was guilty of the very crime which it had accused the Federalists of committing "taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure for war." With superior wisdom and a higher sense of popular responsibility, the Republicans, so the argument ran, were establishing a "Mediterranean Fund," so that the people might know in detail just what was collected and spent for war purposes.

–

Tales of individual daring go far to relieve the

tedious record of ineffective blockades and bombardments during the war. Two exploits left an imper ishable memory in the minds of contemporaries Lieutenant Stephen Decatur's destruction of the captured frigate Philadelphia, under the guns of the forts in the harbor of Tripoli; and the tragic death of Lieutenant Richard Somers and the crew of the Intrepid, as they were about to blow up the Tripolitan gunboats in the harbor. These deeds of heroic adventure created the very last thing that Jefferson desired, something closely akin to an esprit de corps in the new navy.

It was not so much the onslaughts of Commodore Preble's gunboats, however, as an unexpected attack on his eastern frontier which brought the Pasha to terms. His exiled brother, Hamet Caramelli, had fallen in with an American adventurer by the name of Eaton, who persuaded him to join an expedition against their common enemy. With a motley army they marched across the desert from Egypt and fell upon the outlying domains of the Pasha. That astute monarch then yielded to persuasion. On June 3, 1805, with many protestations that he was being subjected to humiliating terms, he agreed to live on terms of peace with the United States and renounce all claim to tribute; but his injured feelings were salved by a ransom of sixty thousand dollars for the crew of the Philadelphia. The Pasha's brother was rewarded with a pension of two hundred dollars a year.

At the same moment that hostilities broke out in the Mediterranean, Jefferson heard disquieting news from France. "There is considerable reason to appre

hend," he wrote to Monroe, on May 26, 1801, "that Spain cedes Louisiana and the Floridas to France. It is a policy very unwise in both, and very ominous to us." What Jefferson apprehended was, indeed, an accomplished fact. On October 1, 1800, the day after Joseph Napoleon, in the name of his brother, set his hand to the Treaty of Morfontaine, which restored amicable relations between France and the United States, General Berthier under instructions from Napoleon signed at Ildefonso a treaty which restored Louisiana to France. In effect, as Mr. Henry Adams says, the second treaty undid the work of the first.

The retrocession of Louisiana, long desired and sought by the Directory, was regarded by Talleyrand as a diplomatic triumph of first magnitude. The price, easily paid by one who held Italy under his iron heel, was a kingdom in Tuscany for the young Duke of Parma, nephew and son-in-law of Charles IV of Spain. The gateway to this vast province was New Orleans, and the avenue of approach lay by way of Santo Domingo, once an important French colony, but now under the rule of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Before Talleyrand's dream of a revived colonial empire in the heart of the North American continent could be realized, this "gilded African" must be removed and Santo Domingo restored to its former position as the center of the French West Indies. The conquest of a negro republic surely could not be a difficult undertaking for one who had humbled Austria on the battlefields of northern Italy. In November, 1801, Napoleon dispatched Leclerc with