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55  6 “I find hand to hand is not child’s play” T he new hero would have little time to rest on earned laurels. Preble had only a few men, and he needed to use them effectively. The day after Decatur returned to Syracuse, Preble ordered him to sail for Messina to oversee the Enterprise’s refitting. “It is expected that not a moment of time will be lost,” Preble warned, as “in the latter part of March I shall sail with the Squadron on an important expedition, where I shall want your services.” Preble also warned Decatur to stay within a budget: “You are not to expend any money in Ornamenting the Schooner Enterprize—I expect One thousand dollars will pay the expences necessary.”1 Perhaps Preble recalled that Charles Stewart had tried to get the government to pay for furnishings for the lieutenants and midshipmen and wanted to make sure that Decatur did not develop extravagant tastes at government expense.2 Strong west winds forced Decatur off course from Messina, and he put in at Malta. Although he was still wanted by the British as an accomplice to murder, he was not arrested when he anchored, but was instead invited to dine with the governor. The governor was still without a secretary, though the replacement for the one Decatur had helped to kill was on his way. On a return visit to Malta, Decatur would get to know the new secretary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who reached Malta sometime in July 1804. Decatur made a vivid impression on Coleridge, not as a military hero but as a political thinker. In addition to Mediterranean politics, the conversation between Decatur and Coleridge focused on the unfolding drama in Louisiana. Would the United States wrest it from Spain? Would the United States buy it from France? Although Americans today might regard the Louisiana Purchase as having sealed the nation’s greatness, the sudden expansion of the republic troubled Decatur. “I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States,” Coleridge later recalled, “and wished that province had been possessed by England . He thought that, if the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last chance of the United States becoming a great compact nation would be lost.”3 It is not clear how much Decatur’s words have been filtered through Coleridge’s own ideological prism. Coleridge recalled Decatur ’s sentiment because it very nearly coincided with his own belief that a nation would become great if it were challenged by its neighbors, looking to 56 chapter six history for examples such as Greece being challenged by Persia or Rome by Tuscany and Carthage. What is clear is that with the purchase of Louisiana, the destiny of the United States took a different path, and that the nation would ultimately look inward, to develop its own continent, rather than outward , to engage with the rest of the world. Coleridge closed his 1818 essay “On the Law of Nations” with an extended paraphrase of Decatur’s dinner table conversation: “An American commander, who has deserved and received the highest honours which his grateful country, through her assembled Representatives, could bestow upon him, once said to me with a sigh: in an evil hour for my country did the French and Spaniards abandon Louisiana to the United States. We were not sufficiently a country before: and should we ever be mad enough to drive the English from Canada and her other North American Provinces, we shall soon cease to be a country at all. Without local attachment, without national honour, we shall resemble a swarm of insects that settle on the fruits of the earth to corrupt and consume them, rather than men who love and cleave to the land of their forefathers. After a shapeless anarchy, and a series of civil wars, we shall at last be formed into many countries; unless the vices engendered in the process should demand further punishment, and we should previously fall beneath the despotism of some military adventurer, like a lion, consumed by an inward disease, prostrate and helpless, beneath the beak and talons of a vulture, or yet meaner bird of prey.”4 All this was conjecture about the future; the war and its complicationswere in the here and now. The wind had carried Decatur away from Messina, and now instead of sailing on to repair the Enterprise, he...

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