After 11 September 2001, many books have explored the clash between the United States and the Barbary States in the years bridging the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, seeking the traces of early national engagement in the Muslim world. The interest in this clash of cultures has given rise by now to a considerable bibliography, recognizing that as early as the Jefferson presidency there was a real conflict. Usually these books lack originality, basing their arguments especially on Naval Documents Related to the United States War with the Barbary Powers, published in 1939 with the strong support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which long-term interest in the American navy was buttressed by the contingent interest in showing that the United States had from his earliest decades engaged in foreign wars, succeeding where European powers had shown themselves inadequate.

In Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, Lawrence A. Peskin, associate professor of history at Morgan State University at Baltimore, finally moves beyond these publications, bringing both new sources and new ideas into play. Enlarging the sphere of attention to include the American public, Peskin rethinks actors and events, showing how the ambivalent conception of slavery was at the core of the policies of the new nation. Abandoning his usual field of economic history for the history of ideas, the author shows in the three chapters of the book – “Captivity and the Public Sphere,” “The Impact of Captivity at Home,” and “Captivity and the American Empire” – how Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison faced the Barbary Wars, trying to avoid the cycle of great wars and destructions that had characterized the European balance of power, but at the same time reacting with force to the enslavement of American sailors, as American public opinion required, defining a new vision of a republican empire based on white freedom, the slavery of African Americans and the barbarity of Native Americans.

As Peskin points out, the ethnic and religious dynamic of Barbary and Indian captivity appeared the opposite of African captivity in the United States. Alongside the portrait of “the captors as devilish heathen” (71), we have the portrait of “the supposedly civilized Americans” (76) defending in arms the principles of a system that will collapse only after the Civil War. Even if many of the poems and plays of the period simply stressed the contrast between liberty and slavery, showing sympathy toward the fate of the African slaves in the United States and effecting the American abolitionist movement, it was clear that the Republican elites, and the common people as well, differentiated the threats to liberty from arbitrary tyrants – the Barbary bashaws – from the legal mastery of southern slaveholders and their practice of buying and selling African American slaves.

The final reflections on the War of 1812 show another original aspect of this book. For Peskin, “the war itself prompted a final Barbary captivity crisis and a second Barbary war” (187), offering a first chance to assert United States strength abroad and to demonstrate the ability of the Americans to tame “barbarians” in both the Old World (the Barbary pirates) and the New (the savage Indians supposedly incited by the British).

In this larger view, the war President James Madison asked Congress to declare against Great Britain was not a single war but “The Wars of 1812,” including along with the British not only the Barbary pirates but the new surge of Indian hostility in the American West, culminating in 1811 with the Battle of Tippecanoe as well. In fact many Americans – like former Whiskey Rebel William Findley of Pennsylvania, at that time in the House of Representatives – believed British agents responsible for “intriguing with the savage tribes.”

Finally, declaring that after these wars “Americans could proclaim themselves fully independent of Britain and Barbary” (187), the book reveals that, though these clashes soon disappeared from classic historiography, which chose to focus on the creation of the myth of a peaceful republic, the debate over the Barbary Wars was pivotal in American contemporary politics and public opinion.