The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter

Abstract

On 25 July 1785, a Boston schooner named the Maria, bound for the Mediterranean on a trading voyage, was commandeered by a fourteen-gun Algerian xebec plying the waters off the coast of Portugal. The “Mahometans” who boarded the six-man vessel demanded to see its flag and papers. “[O]f the first they had no knowledge,” writes James Cathcart in his account of eleven years in Barbary captivity, “and the papers they could not read and Mediterranean pass we had none.”1 With this terse assessment of national nonrecognition and the international legal jeopardy it occasioned, the American nation’s political relationship with the Islamic world opened its first violent chapter. The ongoing history of this relationship is proving to be a complex narrative. Of late, scholars and historians have compared the United States’ engagement in the Barbary Wars (1801–05; 1815) with the nation’s current “war on terrorism,” which once again pits the United States against stateless Muslim actors and the Islamic states that give them harbor.2 Indeed, the two eras have striking parallels. The just-marked two-hundredth anniversary of the United States’ first foreign military engagement, the Tripolitan War (1801–1805), presents an appropriate time to survey the arc of American political, military, and rhetorical relations with the Islamic world. Americans first came to know this world through American narratives of Barbary captivity and the wider public discussions to which this white slavery gave impetus. According to Paul Baepler, although “the Barbary captivity narrative in English existed for more than three centuries, it caught the attention of American readers primarily during the first half of the nineteenth century. Between John Foss’ 1798 narrative and The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter