James Madison, who had been oddly quiet for the last few days, now rose in an effort to reframe their duty as one of world-changing significance. “Nothing has excited more admiration in the world,” he began, “than the manner in which free governments have been established in America.” But there was more work to be done. State governments were one thing, but if America could craft a well-functioning federal system then they would turn even more heads.
Turning to the debate at hand—the issue of amending the Constitution before or after ratification—Madison appealed to both common sense and fear. He explained that if the anti-Federalists were to win, the other nine states that had already ratified would have to reopen their conventions to address the new amendments. Anything could happen at those new conventions—from new amendments proposed to votes being changed. The entire process, Madison told them, could be derailed by Virginia’s stubbornness.
Then, perhaps playing a game of “Good Constable, Bad Constable” himself, Madison offered an olive branch to Patrick Henry. “His proposed amendments could be subsequently recommended,” he told the crowd, “not because they are necessary, but because they can produce no possible danger, and may gratify some Gentlemen’s wishes. But I can never consent to his previous amendments because they are pregnant with awful dangers.”
Henry fumed. These amendments aren’t necessary? he thought, his face crimson with rage. Freedom of religion is not necessary? Trial by jury is not necessary? The right to bear arms is not necessary? If a Declaration of Rights is necessary in enlightened Virginia, how much more vital is it in the mighty consolidated government these Federalists have cooked up for us?
“Madison,” he bellowed, his voice drawing out the name into three very distinct syllables, “tells you of the important blessings which he imagines will result to us and to mankind from this system. I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant. I see it. I feel it.” Henry’s voice rose higher and higher. “I see beings of a higher order anxious concerning our decision. We have it in our power to secure the happiness of one half of the human race. Its adoption may involve the misery of the other hemisphere.”
And, suddenly, those “higher beings” seemed to personally invade the debate. A distant thunder drew near, and then cracked close by. The skies grew black, then bright white as lightning streaked through overhead. The storm seemed to want to sever the building’s roof from its walls. Heavy oak doors slammed shut from the force of the mighty winds. Lead windows rattled and seemed ready to crack and explode into a thousand violent shards.
Patrick Henry stood silent and passive, a calm eye at the center of a great tempest. The chair furiously banged his gavel for adjournment. There was no way anyone could proceed in the midst of this chaos.
Those in the balcony simply stared and marveled at Patrick Henry, the man who could seemingly call down the heavens as his witness.
Theatre Square (“The New Academy”)
Broad Street, between Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets
Richmond, Virginia
June 25, 1788
Patrick Henry sensed trouble was brewing.
The roll call commenced on the series of prior amendments Henry had proposed to ensure American rights. This vote was everything. If the delegates decided to shoot down the idea of ratifying with amendments, then Henry knew he would lose the larger battle as well.
He watched intently as the votes began to come in. Delegates from Virginia’s first four counties all voted “no”—against the prior amendments, and against Henry. Back and forth it went.
James Madison rose from his chair to gain a better vantage point of what votes remained. A glare from Chairman Pendleton quickly forced him down. With 160 votes counted, the vote stood even. George Mason slumped. He knew that many committed Federalists were still left to vote. If the anti-Federalists were to win, it would have to be on a final flat-footed tie. One by one, the remaining delegates voted, solidly and firmly: “No.”
There would be no prior amendments.
Henry and Mason knew that the final vote on ratification of the Constitution itself was now a foregone conclusion. The tight margin, 89–79, belied the anticlimactic nature of the roll call. With Virginia on board, the Constitution and a new nation built around a far stronger federal government would now move forward.
No cheers greeted the final tally. The vote had been too close for that. There had been too many good patriots on either side. And there still remained much work to do. There might be no “previous” amendments, but, in the end, Patrick Henry and George Mason would win their fight for “subsequent” amendments and the badly needed Bill of Rights.
EPILOGUE
James Madison and Edmund Randolph rose from their seats and walked out toward the street. Nobody spoke, but James Madison heard a voice in his head. It was Patrick Henry’s, and the words that came to him were the same ones Henry had spoken over the previous two weeks.
“Virtue will slumber,” Henry had warned. The Constitution could not hold it up. “The wicked will be continually watching,” he cried to the heavens. “Consequently you will be undone.”
The words repeated themselves, over and over again, faster and faster, in James Madison’s mind. Virtue will slumber. The wicked will be continually watching. Consequently you will be undone.
He tried to vanquish the thoughts from his head but instead the warnings grew louder and faster. What if, Madison thought, factions did arise, taxation did become oppressive, or the government did become consolidated? What if the states became impotent in the face of an ever-growing central government? What if foreign treaties endangered our freedoms and crushed our sovereignty? What if this new government eventually moved so far away from the principles they’d all agreed on that it could not even pay the interest on its legal debts? What if privacy was no longer respected? What if the press was not independent and instead an instrument of the state?
Virtue will slumber. The wicked will be continually watching. Consequently you will be undone.
And then Madison heard the words of anti-Federalist James Monroe: “There are no limits pointed out. They are not restrained or controlled from making any law, however oppressive.” These words melded with Henry’s, creating a great, pounding prophetic cacophony of trepidation, as disturbing as any storm of thunder and lightning.
Madison shook his head and took a deep breath. No, he thought, these things could never happen. The Constitution—and, certainly this Bill of Rights they’ve insisted on—would hold such tyranny at bay. Not even in three hundred years could these iron bulwarks we have erected fail to protect our hard-fought liberty.
But Patrick Henry, unable to rise from his chair inside the hall, silent and speechless for once in his life, feared otherwise.
4
The Barbary War: A Steep Price for Peace
Chambers of Abd al-Rahman
London, England
March 28, 1785
The ambassador shifted in his seat. It had been twenty minutes and mysterious odors were beginning to waft into the waiting room from the kitchen. He impatiently glanced at the Arabic script and mosaic tiles covering the walls and heard his stomach growl. He missed his Virginia plantation and the meals his slaves cooked for him.
The ambassador was a man of contradictions. He was a revolutionary, but he’d never fired a gun in anger. He was a profligate spender and chronic debtor, but he hated government expenditures and fought ferociously against a national debt. And he was a well-known slaveholder, who was also his country’s most eloquent advocate for liberty and equality.
The only contradiction that currently mattered, however, was Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward the ongoing hostage crisis in the Mediterranean. Hundreds of American sailors, the victims of pirates backed by petty dictators on the Barbary Coast, were languishing in North African prisons. These pirates had also confiscated thousands of dollars’ worth of ships and goods. Jefferson hated the Europeans’ policy of ransoming their hos
tages and buying peace by bribing the marauders, but he was equally distrusting of the strong central government that would be required to build a navy strong enough to protect American commerce with force.
At last, a figure approached, silhouetted against the arched hallway. Jefferson stood and turned his tall, thin figure toward Abd al-Rahman, the personal representative of the Pasha of Tripoli, Ali the First. Though nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Tripoli was a quasi-independent state that, like Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, had been harassing American ships.
Rahman wore a flowing white robe and dark turban. His scarred and pocked face reflected the brutal land he’d left behind. After some brief pleasantries, Rahman turned to the matter at hand, alternating his language between Italian, Spanish, and French, depending on which word he remembered first as he struggled to translate from his native Arabic. “The United States is our enemy,” he said, with a candor Jefferson had not been expecting. “Peace is possible, but peace has a price. One hundred eighty-three thousand guineas, to be exact. Otherwise, we will extract our fee by continuing to pillage your ships.”
Jefferson converted guineas to dollars in his head. The total owed to Tripoli and the surrounding Barbary States would approach $1 million. That was one-tenth the entire annual budget of the United States.
“Monsieur Rahman, our countries are being drawn toward a universal and horrible war,” Jefferson replied in flawless French, speaking slowly to make sure the Pasha’s envoy understood him. “We have no interest in sending soldiers across the Atlantic to fight your men.”
Rahman took a deep breath. He understood Jefferson’s words just fine but doubted that the young republic this man represented was really prepared to stand behind them. Far larger nations with far stronger militaries had chosen to pay for peace. He had no doubt that this one would as well.
“It is written in the Koran,” Rahman said, “that all nations without acknowledged Islamic authority are sinners. As Muslims, it is our right and duty to make war upon whomever we can find and to make slaves of all we can take as prisoners.”
Jefferson knew before he’d even arrived that he, as the United States Ambassador to France, was unlikely to succeed where the Ambassador to Britain, his friend John Adams, had already tried and failed. And now, as he listened to Rahman lecture him about the Koran and infidels and slaves, Jefferson knew he’d been right.
Dartmouth College
Five years later: August 1, 1790
There was no doubt that William Eaton liked the girl. He probably even loved her. But the line between love and infatuation was a bit too fine for the twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate. He had courted her, kissed her, and proposed to her. He would gladly promise to love her and honor her. But he wouldn’t obey her. Frankly, he wasn’t ready to obey anyone. So when this girl, his college sweetheart, said she’d only marry him if he promised to stay in New England and forgo his plans of returning to the army, he had no choice but to give up on her.
“My dear,” he said, kissing her cheek, “no man will hereafter love you as I do—but I prefer the field of Mars to the bower of Venus.”
A few years later, William Eaton joined the U.S. Army.
Washington, D.C.
Eleven years later: March 4, 1801
The inaugural address was eloquent. How could it not be? Even the new president’s fiercest enemies—he had many of them—had to admit that Thomas Jefferson had a way with words.
“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he told the audience gathered in the Senate chamber that day. The high-minded sentiment was quintessential Jefferson.
As Jefferson took office, a familiar problem nagged at him. His meeting with the Pasha’s representative sixteen years earlier had only led to another in a long line of expensive bribes. By 1801, the young republic was spending approximately 20 percent of its annual budget paying off the Barbary dictators. It sent ships brimming with gold, precious stones, lumber, spices, cannons, and powder in return for safe passage, but the bribes only invited even more aggression. Ships were still being captured, loot confiscated, and sailors held hostage for ransom.
The Barbary appetite for riches was apparently insatiable.
Jefferson distrusted the Barbary dictators and disliked appeasing them. He believed that war was, in the long run, more economical and more honorable than bribery. He knew there was no end to the demand for money, nor any security in their promises. Blackmail, he believed, would have to be replaced by gunpowder and cannonball.
But Jefferson’s actions were not always as resolute as his words. As George Washington’s secretary of state, he had personally overseen a policy of ransom and tribute to the Barbary states. As the champion of rural farmers, he had long opposed the creation of a navy and, in fact, was planning to decommission warships built to patrol the Barbary Coast. The budget, after all, had to be balanced.
Tunis
May 15, 1801
The short, muscular consul to Tunis was, after all these years, still looking for another fight. As a boy, the excitable lad had run away from home to fight the British. As a young man, he had chosen the U.S. Army over his would-be fiancée. And now, after service in the Indian war, a court-martial for disobedience, and a dishonorable discharge from the army, William Eaton had a new war in mind. This would be a war to accomplish a task America had never before tried: regime change.
Eaton’s mood today was even more bellicose than usual. The blue-eyed, bulldog-faced consul had just heard news of an attack on the American consulate in Tripoli. Without a Tripolitan Congress to pass an official declaration of war, the Pasha’s soldiers had followed their traditional process of chopping down the flagpole at the U.S. consulate.
For the first time in its history, America found itself at war in a foreign land.
William Eaton could not have been happier.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Two years later: June 13, 1803
William Ray was having a bad run of luck. Over the past few years, he had lost a string of jobs as a newspaper editor, schoolteacher, and general-store owner. Then, to top it all off, he’d found his girlfriend in the arms of a stranger—a Frenchman who, unbeknownst to Ray, was her husband.
After heavy drinking at a succession of pubs, the morose, frail thirty-four-year-old stumbled down to the banks of the Delaware River. His life a mess, he was ready to drown himself in the river’s muddy waters but something made him pause. It was a noise, distant but steady: the beating of a drum.
His curiosity piqued, Ray looked down the river in the direction of the sound. Through the fog he saw the hulking outline of the largest warship he had ever seen. Perhaps because he could think of nothing better to do, or perhaps because he wasn’t yet ready to meet his maker, Ray staggered along the riverbank toward the ship.
When he neared his destination—a thirty-eight-gun frigate with U.S.S. PHILADELPHIA stenciled in large letters on its side—he discovered a man in a blue and red uniform standing on the dock looking for recruits. “See the world!” shouted the Marine over the banging of the recruiting drum. “Serve your country and see the world!”
At the time, there were fewer than five hundred United States Marines, and it was not difficult to see why. Their pay was the lowest in the American military; their duties—mainly policing sailors and preventing mutiny—were the least glamorous; and their nickname was curious: leathernecks. The term had come from their dress uniforms, which included tall, stiff leather collars that made it difficult for a Marine to turn his head, or, more important, to lose it to the blade of a Barbary pirate’s saber.
At that moment, however, none of those things really mattered to William Ray. Guaranteed meals, shelter, and a distraction from his duplicitous girlfriend were all the compensation he needed.
What do I have to lose? he thought as he shook hands with the Marine and boarded the ship for a personal tour.
Washington, D.C.
July 1, 1803
Thomas Jeffe
rson rubbed his temples. The candles didn’t shed enough light to prevent his aging eyes from straining, and it was starting to give him a headache. Everyone else in the executive mansion had already gone to bed.
Jefferson had spent the day wrangling with the domestic problems of state, but by evening he had turned his attention to international troubles. Chief in his mind was the situation on the Barbary Coast. It had been more than two years since the Pasha attacked the U.S. consulate in Tripoli and declared war on them, and, so far, the American war effort was going nowhere.
The first squadron Jefferson sent to blockade the enemy port had returned before its timid leader even put up much of a fight. The second squadron’s leader, a dilettante named Commodore Richard Morris, had spent more time at parties than at sea. All the while, gold and hostages kept disappearing into the black hole that was Tripoli.
Now what? Jefferson heard the advice of his bitterly divided cabinet members in his head. Robert Smith, his hawkish Secretary of the Navy: “Nothing but a formidable force will effect an honorable peace with Tripoli.” Albert Gallatin, his dovish Secretary of the Treasury, had the opposite view: “I sincerely wish you could empower our negotiators to give, if necessary for peace, an annuity to Tripoli.”
Jefferson rubbed his temples again. Damned pirates, he thought. We have enough problems to worry about here. From debates over the size of the national debt and tensions with some American Indian tribes, to congressional ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson already had his hands full domestically.
After a few more torturous minutes Jefferson made a decision: He’d send one more squadron. He had heard good things about a frigate christened the USS Philadelphia. The name was a good sign: Philadelphia was where the colonies had voted to take a stand against tyranny; perhaps the Philadelphia would finally take a stand against piracy. In either case, Jefferson was determined to not go down in history as the first American president to lose a war.