American Exception?: William Eaton and Early National Antisemitism

William Eaton, U.S. consul to Tunis from 1799 to 1803 and one of the great heroes of America’s First Barbary War in Tripoli, has received a fair amount of attention from historians over the years, but none has grappled with, and few have even acknowledged the deep and disturbing anti-Jewish tone of his letters. The closest this topic has come to receiving analysis is in a dismissive remark by authors Louis B. Wright and Julia H. MacLeod seventy years ago that reading Eaton’s letters and those of his correspondents “out of context, one might assume that the consuls were three anti-Semitic Americans heaping insults upon the Jewish race.” However, they add, “Actually these diatribes were directed at a particular group of Jewish bankers and not the race as a whole.”² This view arguably ignores the virulence of the anti-Jewish sentiment of Eaton’s consular correspondence, much of which is readily available in printed form. It is entirely off the mark when one considers the content and frequency of Eaton’s anti-Jewish sentiments in his less easily accessible personal papers, which are stored at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.³ These papers reveal a man who, during the period from 1799 to 1802, could hardly refrain from derogatory mention of the “particular group of Jewish bankers” as well as Jews in general, and who did not hesitate to make comments that today would be judged extremely offensive for the way they tapped into nasty stereotypes of Jews. Of course, as Wright and MacLeod rightly imply, one cannot judge early-nineteenth-century discourse by modern standards. Instead of condemning Eaton or dismissing his utterances as lacking wider import, it seems more useful to examine them closely and consider what they may be able to tell us about early American attitudes toward Jews and Jewry.

From 1799 to 1803, Eaton’s letter books reveal a man obsessed with Jews, whom he believed were united in a conspiracy against him and the nation he represented. Dozens of his letters specifically discuss “Jews” or “Hebrews” or “covenant people” in derogatory terms, and many others apply those attitudes to individuals Eaton knew to be Jewish, most frequently, members of the Bacri banking family of Algiers and their associates.⁴ Eaton often insults these Jews with standard antisemitic tropes, including references to “Shylocks” and “Christ killers,” and also by implying that Jews employ their manipulative abilities across borders throughout the Mediterranean world. He insults gentiles by calling them “Jews” or claiming that they are somehow in league with the Jews or their “Sanhedrin” (the ancient Jewish court system). While it is certainly the case that much of his vitriol was reserved for the Jewish bankers, particularly the powerful House of Bacri and Busnach, he also made it clear that the Bacris were just one part of a larger Jewish conspiracy acting against him and his country and that they represented the larger “race” or “nation” of Jews. As such, Eaton’s papers offer a valuable, albeit disturbing, view into what one important figure and his correspondents found acceptable in describing Jews. Historians should be disturbed not only because of the language, but also because, at first blush, Eaton’s positions seem so contrary to the usual understanding of early American tolerance for Jews. In recent years, American historians have chipped away at the old consensus of a uniquely tolerant early republic through their examinations of political antisemitism and recurring literary tropes, but the language in Eaton’s letters goes far beyond most of their examples.⁵

Furthermore, Eaton’s papers and his correspondence with others are, so far as I know, the largest collection of letters written by an American gentile discussing Jews during this period. Most of our knowledge of anti-Jewish attitudes during the early republic comes from the public sphere: newspaper accounts, literary sources, and political/legal matter. When historians have used more private sources, such as letters and journals, they have mostly been the expressions of Jews. Occasionally, they have...