Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Bill Bennett’s latest book, America: The Last Best Hope. Additional excerpts forthcoming on Townhall.com. The book can be purchased here.
Thomas Jefferson faced a lingering foreign crisis early in his administration. For more than twenty years, he had been urging military action against Arab corsairs on the Barbary coast. These were fast, cheap warships that preyed upon merchant shipping along the northern shore of Africa. Various Arab rulers there would regularly declare war against European countries and then begin seizing their ships and men. The captured crews would be held for ransom or sold in the market as slaves. “Christians are cheap today!” was the auctioneer’s cry.
This practice had been going on for centuries.As many as a million and a quarter Europeans had been enslaved by Muslims operating out of North Africa. When he served as America’s minister to France in the mid-1780s, Jefferson had once confronted an Arab diplomat, demanding to know by what right his country attacked Americans in the Mediterranean:
The Ambassador answered us that it 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.
Confronted by such obstinacy, Jefferson appealed to John Adams, who was then America’s minister to England. But Adams was unwilling to fight. Jefferson resolved from those early days to fight the Muslim hostage-takers. “We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honourable occasions or with a weaker foe?” he wrote to James Madison in 1784. The kidnapping and ransoming of American merchantmen continued for nearly twenty years.