The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 38, December, 1860 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860, by Various
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THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. VI.--DECEMBER, 1860.--NO. XXXVIII.
Speak of the relations between the United States and the Barbary Regencies at the beginning of the century, and most of our countrymen will understand the War with Tripoli. Ask them about that Yankee crusade against the Infidel, and you will find their knowledge of it limited to Preble's attack. On this bright spot in the story the American mind is fixed, regardless of the dish we were made to eat for five-and-twenty years. There is also current a vague notion, which sometimes takes the shape of an assertion, that we were the first nation who refused to pay tribute to the Moorish pirates, and thus, established a now principle in the maritime law of the Mediterranean. This, also, is a patriotic delusion. The money question between the President and the Pacha was simply one of amount. Our chief was willing to pay anything in reason; but Tripolitan prices were too high, and could not be submitted to.
The burning of the Philadelphia and the bombardment of Tripoli are much too fine a subject for rhetorical pyrotechnics to have escaped lecturers and orators of the Fourth-of-July school. We have all heard, time and again, how Preble, Decatur, Trippe, and Somers cannonaded, sabred, and blew up these pirates. We have seen, in perorations glowing with pink fire, the Genius of America, in full naval uniform, sword in hand, standing upon a quarter-deck, his foot upon the neck of a turbaned Turk, while over all waves the flag of Freedom.
The Moorish sketch is probably different. In it, Brother Jonathan must appear with his liberty-cap in one hand and a bag of dollars in the other, bowing humbly before a well-whiskered Mussulman, whose shawl is stuck full of poniards and pistols. The smooth-faced unbeliever begs that his little ships may be permitted to sail up and down this coast unmolested, and promises to give these and other dollars, if his Highness, the Pacha, will only command his men to keep the peace on the high-seas. This picture is not so generally exhibited here; but it is quite as correct as the other, and as true to the period.