It’s midafternoon on April 27th, and eight marines have just completed a 500 mile trek through the Middle Eastern desert from Egypt to Derne, Libya. They are being shot at from the windows and rooftops of homes. You might think this scene was from earlier this week, or today even, but it in fact took place 214 years ago in 1805. Thomas Jefferson was President at the time. The eight Marines and their foreign mercenaries would capture the city, and this would be the first time the America flag would be raised on foreign soil.

Thomas Jefferson was very familiar with the Middle East. And the documents he penned 243 years later are still shaping our foreign policy. The Unites States has often been labeled by the belief that countries around the world should have their governments elected by the people. Ultimately this belief was sprung forth from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy that self-government would come to the entire world. Nowhere else has this mission been on better display than in the Middle East, and that also started with Jefferson.

Jefferson had a relationship with the Arab world from a young age. Early on he purchased a copy of the Qur’an. Not an easy book to come by, translated into English, in the 1700’s. This Qur’an is in fact still in existence, in the Smithsonian. It was most recently brought out earlier this month to use for the swearing in of one of our first two Muslim congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib. He even purchased Arab grammar books and other documents in an effort to teach himself Arabic. There is no doubt Jefferson knew much more about the Arab world and Islam than many of our current legislators.

To set the stage, during the Revolutionary War French ships would protect American merchant ships who were trading in Europe and the Mediterranean. But shortly after the war this treaty of protection went away. This open the doors for pirates from the Barbary States, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the Sultanate of Morocco (present day Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco) to seize US merchant ships and holding their crews for ransom.

The first American ship, the Betsey, was seized in 1784. Thomas Jefferson, then US Minister to France, sent envoys to Morocco and Algeria to purchase treaties and the sailors freedoms from Algeria. Morocco would go on to sign that treaty in 1786, and thus a Middle Eastern country became the first country to sign a treaty with the United States. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also traveled to London that year to meet with Tripoli’s ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. When the US paid Algeria the ransom, they also agreed to pay them $1 million a year for 15 years for the safe travels of American ships.

This piracy, capture, and ransom issue would continue all the way until the time Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801. Hijacking and enslavement of US sailors had been happening so frequently in the Mediterranean that some sailors had been prisoners for over a decade. This all came to a crescendo in 1795 when the US secured the release of 115 sailors for $1 million. This at the time was a staggering 1/6 of the entire US budget that year. 3 years later, the government under John Adams with Jefferson as Vice President created the United States Department of the Navy in order to help prevent further attacks and ransoms in the Middle East.

On the day that Jefferson became President, Pasha Yusuf Karamanli, the leader of Tripoli, demanded a huge sum of money from the United States. Jefferson immediately refused. Which led to two months after Jefferson taking office Tripoli declaring war on the United States. This action would begin the Barbary Coast Wars.

Jefferson sent armed American vessels to the area to seize all ships and goods of Tripoli. Many of the US vessels engaged in battles with Tripolitan vessels. In 1803 Tripoli seized one of the armed US frigates, the USS Philadelphia. They took the entire crew as hostages. In 1805 General William Eaton led his small force of 8 Marines, and 500 Arabs and Greeks all the way from Alexandria, Egypt to Derna, Tripoli (Libya). They captured the city, which was the first US victory on foreign soil, and gave the US enough leverage to secure the release of the hostages. This battle and victory would go on to be memorialized forever in the Marine’s Hymn line “to the shores of Tripoli”, describing the Marines first ever victory. A peace treaty was signed by Tripoli two months later. The Navy and Marines would be permanent fixtures in the US Military and government from this point forward.

Here we end the trend of the President’s Vice President succeeding them as President. Especially with Jefferson’s first Vice President Aaron Burr shooting and killing Alexander Hamilton while he was still Vice President. He would spend Jefferson’s second term in exile after fleeing to Europe. Our next President was the father of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the only President besides George Washington to actually sign the Constitution. So stay tuned next week to learn more about the President who drafted our Constitution.