For centuries, pirates sponsored by the Muslim Ottoman Empire’s four provinces on the North African (Barbary) coast of the Mediterranean had
preyed on European shipping. These Barbary Pirates from Tripoli,
Algiers, Tunis, and the Sultanate of Morocco had begun capturing
American ships and ransoming their crews in 1784. Because the new
American nation had no Navy, the Spanish advised the American Minister
to France, Thomas Jefferson, to pay the Barbary Pirates tribute as
economic protection. In fact, the Tripoli Pirates threatened war against
the United States unless they paid tribute. In March 1786, Jefferson
and John Adams met with Tripoli’s envoy to London. They asked him by
what right Tripoli and the other Barbary Pirate provinces had to make
war on nations that had done them no injury. His answer, according to
Jefferson, was a classic brief on the Islamic doctrines of Paradise as a
reward for Jihad:
“The right was founded on the Laws of the Prophet,
that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have
answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty
to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves
of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman [Muslim]
who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Jefferson and Adams recommended against paying a
tribute, rightly reasoning that it would only encourage more piracy.
Congress, however, did not feel they had the means to resist. When
Jefferson became President in 1801, he rejected paying tribute to
pirates. He won the war with a strengthened U.S. Navy and Marine Corp in
1804, remembered ever after with the Marine Corp Hymn celebrating
victory on “the Shores of Tripoli.”
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