This is a guest post by Dr. Jamie L. Jones.*
Given the length of this post, be sure to click at the line marked "continue reading Pirates at the Legation..."
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One hundred and fifty years ago this week, the sultan of Morocco weighed in on the United States Civil War: Morocco would side with the Union, against the rebelling Confederate states. The announcement was subtle but decisive, delivered in the form of an edict about ships entering Moroccan ports. Because Morocco did not recognize the legitimacy of the Confederate government, it would not allow Confederate ships to enter Moroccan ports.
In a letter dated September 23, 1863, the sultan and his ministers issued this order to the bashaws in all the ports of Morocco:
...if any vessel of the so-called Confederate states enters your ports, it shall not be received, but you must order it away at once, as they are not allowed entrance, because we do not know them, and they have no consul by which they may be known to us, or who may act for them; therefore we have prohibited their entrance on pain of seizure; and you will act on this subject in cooperation with the United States vice-consul, in accordance with the treaties and in conformity with our master’s royal order. And peace.
A ship is a material emblem of its state, and when Morocco closed its maritime ports to the Confederates, it closed the country to the Confederacy at large.
The formal letter offers a glimpse of diplomacy as a polite process carried out in pen and paper. But the letter was the last stage in a process that began a year and a half earlier when the U.S. Consulate at Tangier (now the Tangier American Legation) played host to two pirates and a noisy riot. The Civil War’s arrival in Tangier was strange and surprising: an important, if little-known, episode in the history of relations between the U.S. and Morocco.
During the winter of 1862, the U.S. Consul James De Long got word that two Confederate naval officers were visiting town on a short layover. The men had been sailing with the Confederate raider Sumter, which had been sinking Union ships in the Mediterranean. When De Long heard that the two men had landed at the port, he acted quickly. With the assistance of Moroccan police, he arrested the two men, Henry Myers and Thomas T. Tunstall, and held them in irons at a makeshift prison at the Consulate. His charge? The two men were treasonous traitors, “pirates” who were bent on destroying the material interests of the United States, of which they were legal citizens.
Not everyone agreed that the two Confederates were pirates. In fact, De Long’s peers among the European diplomats in Tangier were outraged. Europe and England were working hard to maintain neutrality in the U.S. Civil War, in part because they depended so strongly on cotton trade with the southern states. The consuls and ambassadors in Tangier believed De Long had no authority to enlist Moroccan police, nor to imprison the men. (It’s hard to imagine the present-day Legation as the site of a prison, however makeshift.)
Some of the Europeans in Tangier raised a riot and stormed the U.S. Consulate in an attempt to free the prisoners at the Consulate. In response, Consul De Long wrote scolding letters to foreign ministers and ambassadors of nations all over Europe and to foreign ministers in Morocco. De Long implored these diplomats and statesmen to punish offending rioters in Tangier and side with the Union against the Confederacy. The matter of how to respond to De Long was debated in the British Parliament and, likely, in offices throughout Europe. In short, De Long and his pirates incited a diplomatic crisis. While Europe and the U.K didn’t budge in their doctrine of neutrality, Morocco agreed to take sides, and the United States strengthened ties with one of its oldest allies.
I wrote about this incident this week in The New York Times’ Civil War blog, Disunion. And it is a special pleasure to tell this story on the TALIM Director’s Blog, where I first became curious about the role of Morocco in the Civil War. In March 2011, Jerry Loftus wrote an enticing post about a “Topic in Search of a Historian: The U.S. Civil War in Tangier." I was finishing my Ph.D. dissertation at the time, and dreaming of future projects. I filed away the idea for my next trip to Morocco. Now, the project is coming full circle, back to the blog. And I am delighted to report that there’s enough rich material at TALIM to support the work of many generations of American scholars.
The opportunity to research the U.S. Civil War in Tangier came this past summer. I spent June exploring in TALIM archives and immersing myself in 19th-century Tangier. I thumbed through the crumbling, yellowed pages of Al-Mogreb Al-Aksa and the Tangier Gazette. I dipped into Luella Hall’s massive diplomatic history on The United States and Morocco. I read Charles Sumner’s fiery abolitionist treaty on the horrors of slavery at home and abroad: White Slavery in the Barbary States. And I read Coos-Coo-Soo, a fascinating narrative written by a young woman who spent several years living at the American Legation in the nineteenth century.
The story of De Long and his pirates came alive when I found De Long’s correspondence in FRUS - Foreign Relations of the United States. De Long describes the riots at the Consulate in lurid detail. And the correspondence follows the conversation between Moroccans foreign ministers, De Long, and Jesse McMath, De Long’s successor as U.S. Consul in Tangier.
I was struck, when reading, at the way 19th-century Americans often experienced Morocco not as an exotic foreign land, but as a place where they were often reminded of home. Morocco, with its racial and ethnic diversity—and its racial and ethnic conflicts—was familiar, in a strange way. And Tangier struck Americans as a place of utterly unique cross-cultural contact, positioned as it was at strange borders, between Africa and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
This past summer, I spent at least as much time walking up and down the hills of Tangier as I did in the archives, looking for traces of the 19th-century world and taking in the daily spectacle of Tangerine geography. I spent hours at the Phoencian tombs and at Café Hafa, watching ferries and fishing boats and the misty coast of Spain, coming in and out of focus. Before I came to Tangier, I was surprised that the Moroccan city had any place whatsoever in the distant U.S. Civil War. But in the TALIM archives and on the shores of the Straits, I realized that Tangier has always been a place where the nations of the world play out their battles over national borders and national belongings.
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*Jamie L. Jones holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, and she is currently a Lecturer in English and writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her research explores the literature, art, and cultural history of the maritime world in the 19th and early 20th century. She is currently writing a book about the cultural afterlife of the United States whaling industry.
Photos of De Long and McMath courtesy Dr. Philip Abensur, whose ancestor Moses Pariente served as "dragoman" or interpreter at the American Legation for the Civil War Consuls.