Not Exclusively a Christian Nation: American Cultural Formation and its War with Algiers in 1815” Paper Abstract for “1812 in the Americas,” Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, June 7-9, 2012 Bethel Saler, Associate Professor of History Haverford College, Haverford, PA, USA

This paper is part of a larger project that explores Americans’ struggles to come to terms with their own peculiar national identity as a “New World” settler republic by considering their diplomatic relations, hostage crises and naval engagements with the North African (“Barbary”) states over the period, 1776- 1820. More specifically, the paper looks at the intersections between the War of 1812 and the Americans’ naval conflict with the regency of Algiers in 1815. While historians disagree over whether the War of 1812 represented the United States’ second war of independence from Britain, the American war with Algiers in 1815 did end the United States’ tributary and subjected nation status with the North African states. Over the duration of the War of 1812 and stretching back to at least 1785, the Islamic regencies along the North African coast insisted on treaties of tribute from the young United States or their corsairs would seize American merchant ships and “enslave” their crews. Thus, the notable boost to American national confidence and the emergence of a distinctive nationalism that appeared in the years following the War of 1812 might be better framed within a comparative perspective in which both the (European) West and the (Islamic North African) East threatened the United States and ultimately were rebuffed.

My paper will consider Americans’ responses to their crises with North African city- states during the War of 1812 by analyzing U.S. newspaper accounts and published narratives with a special focus on the writings of Philadelphia-born, Sephardic Jewish writer and U.S. Consul to Tunis, Mordecai Manuel Noah. President James Madison appointed Noah in 1813 to the consular post in Tunis in large part because of his presumed advantage in dealing through informal channels with the Dey of Algiers for the release of the eleven American seamen of the merchant vessel Edwin that the Algerians captured in 1812. Madison reasoned that Noah, as a Jew, would have better access to Algerian Jewish banking families as intermediaries, and his appointment would impress on the Islamic Algerian ruler the American Republic’s distinctive religious tolerance. Noah was unsuccessful in retrieving all the hostages and subsequently dismissed (the State Department’s stated reason was Noah’s Judaism made him inappropriate as a consul in Tunis). His subsequently published travel journal and defense of his consular actions provide curious parallels between his own struggles to reconcile his religious marginalization with his fierce republican nationalism and the United States’ marginalization in international politics with its self image as the most advanced incarnation of Western enlightenment ideals. Importantly both Noah’s writings and American nationalist discourse more generally emphasized “New World” characteristics of representative government, dedication to free trade and environmental distinctiveness against the degraded “Old Worlds” of North Africa and Europe. In other words, the concurrent confrontations with Algiers and Britain between 1812 and 1815 influenced both Noah’s conceptions of his own Jewish exoticism and the “New World” nationalism arising in the United States.