How the Barbary Wars changed nineteenth-century American politics

Between 1785 and 1815, North African corsairs in the Mediterranean captured and enslaved around seven hundred American sailors and held them hostage. Forced to respond, the fledgling United States launched a series of naval campaigns to free them and prevent future attacks—known today as the Barbary Wars. In this groundbreaking study, Matthew Goetz examines the effects this signal conflict had on American racial politics back home, including the debate over slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and Indian removal.

Goetz shows how, for many Americans, the Barbary Wars reinforced the racial prejudices that underpinned the white supremacist policies of the early republic. At the same time, antislavery activists seized on the hypocrisy of their fellow countrymen who decried the enslavement of white Americans by North Africans while simultaneously enslaving Black Americans. Political allies of Indigenous nations similarly pointed out that those who labeled the North Africans “barbarians” also advocated forcibly removing Native peoples from their lands. As Charles Sumner, the crusading senator from Massachusetts, contended, his slaveholding and ruthlessly expansionist country might be justly labeled “the Barbary States of America.”