The Barbary Wars were a series of wars between the United States of America and the Barbary States of North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At issue was the Barbary pirates' demand for tribute from American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea. If ships failed to pay, pirates would attack the ships and take their goods, and often hold crewmembers for ransom. United States naval power attacked the fortified pirate cities and extracted concessions of fair passage from their rulers. The administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison undertook the actions against the Barbary States. Jefferson led the first, from 1801 to 1805, against pirates' cities in what are today Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. Madison directed forces for the second war in 1815.
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The Barbary pirates had long attacked British and other European shipping along the North Coast of Africa. They had been attacking British merchant and passengers ships since the 1600s. The many captives required regular fundraising by families and local church groups, who generally raised the ransoms for individuals. The British became familiar with captivity narratives written by Barbary pirates' prisoners and some who were sold into Arab slavery before the North American colonies were well established.[1] This was decades before English colonists became subject to captivity by Native Americans and began to write their own narratives.
During the American Revolution, the pirates attacked American ships. On December 20, 1777, Morocco's Sultan Mohammed III declared that the American merchant ships would be under the protection of the sultanate and could thus enjoy safe passage into the Mediterranean and along the coast. The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship stands as the U.S.'s oldest non-broken friendship treaty[2][3] with a foreign power. In 1787 Morocco had been one of the first nations to recognize the United States.[4]
When the United States military efforts of the early 19th century were successful against the pirates, partisans of the Democratic-Republicans contrasted their presidents' refusals to buy off the pirates by paying tribute with the failure of the preceding Federalist administration to suppress the piracy. The Federalist Party had adopted the slogan, "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute," but had failed to end the attacks on merchant ships. The phrase was attributed to Charles C. Pinckney in the course of the XYZ Affair; however, historians have determined that the sentence originated with Sen. Robert Goodloe Harper.