A Seal in Algiers, a Signature in Philadelphia: The Treaty of 1795

On Saturday, September 5, 1795, which fell on the 21st of Safar in the year 1210 of the Hijra, Dey Hassan Pasha of Algiers took up his seal and pressed it onto a treaty with the United States of America. The document was written in Turkish, the language of government in the Regency. On the American side it was signed by Joseph Donaldson Jr., who had come to Algiers to make peace, and the English version he signed closes with a promise that its articles would be kept "Sacred and inviolable."

The State Department's Office of the Historian, which keeps the official record of America's diplomatic relations, sums up the meaning of that day in a single sentence: "Algiers recognized the United States by the signing of a peace treaty on September 5, 1795." George Washington was in his second term. The Constitution was six years old. And in a palace above the Mediterranean, an Algerian ruler had put the name of the new nation into a formal treaty, alongside the great powers of Europe.

Two calendars, one peace

The treaty carried both dates side by side, the Gregorian and the Hijri, and that small detail captures what made it remarkable. Two very different worlds were learning to deal with each other on paper, and they did it with care.

The negotiations had help from a friend in the city. Pierre Eric Skjöldebrand, brother of the Swedish consul at Algiers, "worked as an intermediary for the United States in negotiating a peace treaty with Algiers," the Office of the Historian records. Sweden even supplied the model. Donaldson reported that the text brought back to him, in Turkish and then in English, "Proves to be that of the Sweedes," a reference to Sweden's own treaty with Algiers. The American text followed it closely.

Between the two sides moved a remarkable American. James Leander Cathcart had come to Algiers as a young sailor and risen, in the words of the historian Liva Baker writing in American Heritage magazine, to be "chief Christian secretary to the dey." Baker goes further: "Cathcart actually was chief mediator, carrying Donaldson's and the dey's demands to each other." An American who knew the palace from the inside, he helped both governments understand each other.

The finished treaty ran to twenty-two articles. It declared peace and friendship between "the President and Citizens of the United States of North America" and the Dey of Algiers. It protected ships and trade, and it gave the American consul a dignified place in the city, with the right to "Exercise his Religion in his own House." One article set out a ceremony of mutual respect: when an American warship anchored at Algiers, it was to be "Saluted with twenty one Guns," which it would return in the same number, and the Dey would send fresh provisions on board, "as is Customary, Gratis."

The treaty also carried financial terms, as Mediterranean treaties of the age often did, and the United States honored them.

"With peculiar satisfaction"

News of the treaty crossed the Atlantic slowly. On December 8, 1795, President Washington stood before Congress for his seventh annual message and shared it. "With peculiar satisfaction I add that information has been received from an agent deputed on our part to Algiers," he said, reporting terms that promised "a speedy peace."

The Senate gave its consent on March 2, 1796, and on March 7 Washington ratified the treaty and proclaimed it in a single document, which the treaty scholar Hunter Miller described as "at once a ratification and a proclamation." The full text is preserved today by Yale Law School's Avalon Project, with Miller's notes and a modern translation of the Dey's own documents.

Two days after the Senate's vote, on March 4, 1796, the poet and diplomat Joel Barlow presented his credentials to Dey Hassan as the first American consul to take up his post in Algiers, a date the Office of the Historian treats as the beginning of American consular representation in the city. Barlow had set out from Paris "on Christmas Day of 1795," the historian Bernard A. Weisberger wrote in American Heritage, carrying "jeweled pistols, snuffboxes, brocaded robes, and other gifts" for the Dey's court.

A Dey writes to a President

What followed reads less like a legal file than a correspondence between two heads of state who meant to make the peace work. When the American side was slow to deliver what it had promised, the Dey did not hide his impatience. Baker tells how Barlow calmed him with a bold offer, and how in May 1796 "the dey sent Cathcart to Philadelphia with a message for President Washington." The letter Cathcart carried was blunt: "eight Months has elaps'd without one article of their agreement being complied with."

The Americans answered with deeds. A frigate, the Crescent, was built in America and sailed to Algiers as part of the settlement. The instructions given to the American consul who sailed with her survive in Miller's notes: "The Crescent Frigate in which you are to embark, you will deliver to the Dey and Regency."

For the Dey, a promise kept mattered. For the Americans, the treaty with Algiers had shown that patient diplomacy could open the Mediterranean to their ships.

"The mutual friend of the parties"

The friendship soon showed its value beyond Algiers. James Leander Cathcart wrote that in November 1795, after talks with the Dey and with "Hadgi Ally [Ambassador of Tunis at Algiers]," he had "procured a truce for the United States with Tunis for eight months, guaranteed by the Dey of Algiers."

With Tripoli, Algiers' role was written into the treaty itself. The American treaty with Tripoli of November 4, 1796, describes the peace in its first article, in Barlow's English translation, as "guaranteed by the most potent Dey & regency of Algiers." Its twelfth article went further still. If the two parties ever fell into a dispute their consuls could not settle, "an amicable referrence shall be made to the mutual friend of the parties, the Dey of Algiers."

The treaty was then carried to Algiers, and on January 3, 1797, Hassan Pasha signed and sealed it there. An Arabic certificate under his seal states that "this peace treaty has been authorized at his hands." After his death in 1798, his successor, Mustapha Pasha, added his own confirmation to the American copy: "we accord with their having concluded a full [complete] peace."

Think about what that meant. Barely two decades after American independence, the ruler of Algiers stood as the guarantor of America's peace with its neighbors, the friend both sides could trust. It is a role Algeria would play for the United States again, nearly two centuries later.

A memory both nations keep

The papers of 1795 to 1798 still speak across the centuries: a Turkish text on a Swedish model, a Hijri date beside a Gregorian one, a Dey and a President writing to each other directly, and Hassan Pasha's seal on another nation's treaty as "the mutual friend of the parties."

Algerians and Americans have not forgotten it. When President Chadli Bendjedid stood in the White House State Dining Room on April 17, 1985, on the first state visit by an Algerian president to the United States, he reached back to exactly this moment. He spoke of "the deep historical roots of the relationship between our two countries, illustrated by the treaty of peace and friendship signed on the 5th of September 1795."

For Algerians, the treaty recalls a sovereign government in Algiers that treated with the American republic in its own name, on its own terms, at a time when that republic was still finding its place in the world. For Americans, it is a reminder that some of their country's earliest diplomacy was written in Turkish and Arabic, and rested on the seal of a Dey. Two young stories met in 1795, and each nation can look back on that meeting with pride.

Dr Mohammed Doumir