Under What Pressures Was the Treaty Of Tripoli Signed?

Question

Who was the treaty with?
Why did we need a treaty?
Could the nature of the threat have lead to wording of the treaty?

Answer 1

What wording are you referring to? The part about this not being a Christian nation?

The treaty provided that we would pay yearly bribes for safe passage in the Mediterranean. This was common practice at the time.

I find nothing to pressure us to include that wording, but certainly if you take the view that the pirates held the upper hand, you could form your own theory. However, since it was our founding fathers that drafted this treaty, I believe they were being true to the principles they had just stated in the Constitution which was ratified only ten years earlier.

They had just taken on and beaten the British. I'm sure (and as the Barbary Wars played out) they weren't afraid of the Barbary states. The payments were just easier at the time.

Answer 2

The Treaty of Tripoli (the Treaty of Peace and Friendship) was a 1796 peace treaty between the United States and Tripoli. It was signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796 and at Algiers (for a third-party guarantee) on January 3, 1797 by Joel Barlow, the American consul-general to the Barbary states of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. The official treaty was in Arabic text, and a translated version provided by Barlow was ratified by the United States on June 10, 1797. Although the United States government has used Barlow's translated version, there has been considerable controversy as to the discrepancy between the official Arabic document and the translated version.

Basically we negotiated with pirates on this one and we were basically at war with them.