American consuls in the region warned that the United States’ prestige was plummeting

From Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval side of the War of 1812. Page 4.

The first week of February 1804 found Commodore Edward Preble, forty-two years old, captain of the frigate Constitution and commander of America’s six-ship Mediterranean squadron, going prematurely bald and gray. His dark blue eyes were as fierce as ever, but he was increasingly given to bouts of racking physical debilitation from a griping stomach complaint that laid him low for days at a time. On the outside he usually managed to keep up a front of self-control and even optimism; inside he was blackened by darts of despair at the task before him, at his mission in life, at the distressing run of bad luck that kept coming his way.

Just a year before taking command of the Constitution the previous May, he had tried to resign his commission from the navy altogether, pleading his shattered state of health, which had kept him bedridden more often than not for weeks on end. Writing the secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, with his decision, Preble had enclosed a statement from his physician confirming that he was “reduced to a distressing state of debility and emaciation,” adding, “he is extremely susceptible of injury from the cares and fatigues of business.” His ship’s surgeon agreed that the burdens of the job had proved too much for a man of Preble’s hard-driving and easily provoked temperament.

But Secretary Smith had spurned the resignation, ordering Preble on furlough to get some rest, and slowly his health had improved enough for him to return to the endless vexations of commanding one of the three plum ships of the tiny American fleet. For more than two years the American squadron in the Mediterranean had been waging an anemic battle against the Barbary corsairs that were raiding American ships traversing the region. For centuries the semi-independent Muslim states of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli had flourished on piracy and tribute extorted from European shippers that sailed the Mediterranean. On May 14, 1801, the pasha of Tripoli had made known his dissatisfaction with the amount of tribute he had been receiving from the United States in return for allowing American ships to pass unmolested: in a symbolic declaration of war, the pasha had sent his men to chop down the flagstaff in front of the American consul’s residence.

Little had happened since. The American naval force found it could not effectively blockade Tripoli’s harbor and had been reduced to defensive measures, convoying American ships rather than directly confronting the Tripolitan corsairs. American consuls in the region warned that the United States’ prestige was plummeting—as was her navy’s, both at home and abroad. Jefferson’s cabinet, true to the antinavalist credo of the Republican party, was strongly inclined to simply pay off the pasha and be done with it; Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin wrote the president that he considered the decision “a mere matter of calculation whether the purchase of peace is not cheaper than the expense of a war.