Diplomacy by Other Means

 

Conventional histories of the United States paint a lurid portrait of the republic’s early relationship with the Muslim world, especially with the so-called Barbary Coast states of northern Africa. The particulars of the Americans’ first violent encounter with a North African principality complicates the usual account of scimitar-wielding “Barbary corsairs” demanding tribute or enslaving white sailors. In October 1784 the American brig Betsey, en route from Boston to Tenerife, was captured by Moroccan raiders and by them taken to Sale. Perhaps the ten crewmen expected enslavement, but instead local officials held them as hostages, by order of the Moroccan sultan. Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah (r. 1757-90), the prince in question, had ordered the ship taken and its crew held not because he thirsted for blood and plunder, but as a diplomatic gambit. The United States, whose independence the sultan had recognized in 1777, had promised to send treaty commissioners to Morocco after the Revolutionary War. The increasingly moribund postwar Congress, however, dithered too long for Sidi Muhammad’s liking, and failed to send him either gifts or contrite sentiments by way of apology.

Modern brig (Maria Asumpta), by Murgatroyd49

Muhammad very much wanted trade with the United States and other Atlantic polities. His principality was poor in resources and its people were mostly self-governing nomads, from whom the sultan could expect little in taxes. Sidi Muhammad also wanted other nations to take him seriously as a sovereign. The capture of the Betsey was essentially a bit of princely throat-clearing. One could draw a comparison between this act of violent communication and the sharp but limited attacks - coups, as the historian Matthew Jennings calls them - that Native American nations sometimes made against the settlements of Europeans who had not treated them with proper respect. The goal, in each case, was not to start a war but to remind the other polity of the comparative benefits of peace, and to remind them too not to take the attacker for granted.

 

Sidi Muhammad’s act of diplomatic piracy paid off. The United States resumed communication with Morocco, and the sultan released his hostages into Spanish custody. In 1786 American commissions signed the Treaty of Marrakesh, a favorable commercial agreement with Morocco, henceforth a destination (if a marginal one) for American merchant ships. The treaty also clarified that the Moroccan state’s first attack on those ships was its last one: it guaranteed the Americans against detention and having to pay tribute to the sultan and his successors.

 

Sources: Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh (Doubleday, 2009); Gary Wilson, "American Hostages in Moslem Nations, 1784-1796," Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 123-141.