Opportunities of Empire: Three Barbary captives and American nation-building, 1770-1840

Abstract

“Opportunities of Empire” is a collective biography of three uncommon commoners in the early American republic: Richard O’Brien (1758–1824), James Cathcart (1767–1843) and James Riley (1777-1840). As a biographical microhistory, this study explores how these three ordinary citizens engaged in self-making on the maritime and western frontiers, and in doing so, influenced and reflected American nation-building and the development of concepts of liberty, masculinity and nationhood in the early republic and throughout the Jacksonian era. To date, no study has taken a biographical approach to any of the hundreds of American sailors who were held as “white slaves” in the North African “Barbary States.” Biographies of American sailors are typically of distinguished and long-serving naval officers, not of merchant sailors who averaged just 5-10 years at sea. The whole lives of the three subjects of this dissertation therefore provide an ideal opportunity for a fine-grained bottom-up study of how sailors’ meandering life courses influenced and reflected America’s physical, ideological, commercial and diplomatic development. These three men’s lives reflect the wide range of occupational and personal experiences of ordinary and extraordinary Americans of their generation, dramatically intersecting with domestic, transnational and ideological developments in early American nation-building. They tended to New England farms and, during the Revolutionary War, served as sailors in the Continental, Massachusetts and Virginia State Navies. Later they were merchant sailors; captives in the Barbary States; advisors to a foreign Muslim ruler; and soon after securing their freedom they returned to North Africa as American consuls. They went on to become, variously: state politicians; frontiersmen; surveyors in the West; land speculators; authors; and federal bureaucrats. This range of experiences intimately connect fields of United States historiography that scholars typically examine in isolation from one another, including: the self-interest of sailors in the Revolution; America’s place in the world following the Revolution; the development of an American national identity; American Orientalism; “white slavery” in the Barbary States; early American war-making in the First Barbary War; the politically-inspired nature of American masculinity; the merchant-consul system that dominated American diplomatic representation abroad until 1856; Jacksonian era democracy and the spoils system; and territorial expansion with its accompanying “taming of the wilderness.” O’Brien’s, Cathcart’s and Riley’s experiences in these myriad fields, on both the maritime and western frontiers, reflect the haphazard path of self-made men during the early republic. Lacking the innate genius of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, typical self-made men depended upon luck and adaptability to secure financial independence and public recognition. The literary and professional contributions of these three sailors also became part of a revolutionary democratization of knowledge, the “Village Enlightenment,” whereby publications of non-elite citizens upended both the production and consumption of knowledge in the fields of law, science, medicine, exploration and religion. While the self-made man celebrated the upward mobility of the ordinary individual, the Village Enlightenment saw ordinary individuals circumvent the professional elites and publish personal insights, thus enabling mass self-making of new generations in the young republic.