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Not quite all of the former captives disappeared into anonymity; a few returned to Barbary to serve as the United States’ first African experts during a second round of captivity crises. Captain Richard O’Brien had been America’s de facto consul in Algiers throughout much of his eleven years of captivity and had gone to great pains during that period to demonstrate his knowledge of Algerian affairs. John Barry, captain of the USS United States, one of the newly constructed ships intended to patrol the Mediterranean, offered O’Brien the position of lieutenant, no doubt due as much to his understanding of Barbary culture and geography as his seamanship. O’Brien refused the offer in favor of an even better position: consul general to Algiers. When informing the dey of O’Brien’s appointment, President Adams noted that the captain’s “intimate acquaintance with the manner of transacting public affairs at Algiers may render him particularly useful to his country as well as acceptable to your excellency.”1 In 1799 O’Brien would be joined by his fellow ex-captive and the dey’s former chief Christian secretary, James L. Cathcart, who was appointed U.S. consul to Tripoli. William Eaton, a prickly but courageous Dartmouth graduate and career soldier with no previous Mediterranean experience who was appointed U.S. consul to Tunis in 1798, soon joined them. Using his characteristic naval metaphors, O’Brien wrote that he, Cathcart, and Eaton “might be compared unto three lighthouses erected on three dangerous shoals, said lighthouses erected to prevent valuable commerce running thereon.” Unfortunately, while the “lighthouses” did generally manage to keep American commerce safe at first, they appeared to be poorly synchronized from the beginning and soon could not work together at all. Although a number of factors c h a p t e r s e v e n Masculinity and Servility in Tripoli 138 Captivity and the American Empire were at play, ultimately the problem was that Eaton could not respect the others due to the very thing that had brought them to the State Department in the first place: their experience in Algiers. American negotiators, Eaton complained to the Secretary of State, had thus far been “Frenchmen, apostate Americans, and slaves.” Clearly, the last of these categories referred to Cathcart and O’Brien. Rather than valuing his colleagues’ expertise, he suspected that O’Brien and, to a lesser extent, Cathcart retained a servile mentality toward the North African rulers as a result of their years in captivity. Eaton added that he did not “mean a criminal reflection” by complaining of “slaves.” Many otherwise brave warriors, he explained, would tremble “in passing the graveyard for fear of ghosts,” and, likewise, many slaves might not “shrink at the thunder of a broadside of a man of war,” but they would still “tremble at the nod of a turban.”2 Eaton’s equation of the former captives’ slavery with cowardice suggests a deeper concern with their masculinity. In every corner of the new republic and at nearly all social levels, Americans equated manhood with independence and the mastery of passions (including fear) and femininity with submission and unrestrained passion (including cowardice).3 In the South, honor culture dictated that planters gauge the reaction of their peers to their own behavior and take umbrage at the least slight to their honor. A planter who submitted to invective without taking action would be considered unmanned, and the greatest insult was to be labeled a coward. Furthermore, honor applied only among equals, so that inferiors were by definition excluded from this masculine culture to the extent that their insults were deemed so insignificant that they could be ignored with no damage to the superior’s honor. Slaves, therefore, existed in a realm as far as possible from that of honor culture.4 Not only would an insult from one of them be insignificant, but the very dependence of their position as chattel symbolically unmanned them. This emasculation comported well with planter notions of paternalism, which held all slaves to be essentially children and male slaves to be “boys” no matter what their age. Thus, a former North African captive would be suspect within the masculine world of honor, independence, and brave manliness. Independence, mastery, and masculinity were also closely linked in urban mercantile and artisanal culture. Merchants facing bankruptcy, having lost control of their affairs, portrayed themselves as essentially unmanned. For artisans, too, the goal was mastery. Apprentices and journeymen served masters while...

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