Principles Before Appeasement: America Clashing with the Barbary States

From Wikimedia Commons: Bombardment of Tripoli, August 3, 1804 (Michele Felice Cornè, 1806). In the decades following the American Revolution, the U.S. found itself navigating a perilous global seascape. Deprived of British naval protection, its merchant ships became vulnerable to predation from the notorious “Barbary corsairs” — state-sponsored pirates operating from the North African coast. These sailors, under the command of Muslim tyrants in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco, preyed on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, capturing ships and enslaving their crews. For the U.S., a nation newly born and diplomatically inexperienced, the threat posed by the Barbary...