Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/455

436 his own Federalist friends in 1807, because of defending Jefferson who had done nothing for him, but who at a critical moment represented in his eyes the Union.

Meanwhile peace with Tripoli was obtained without tribute, but at the cost of sixty thousand dollars, and at the expense of Eaton and his desperate band of followers at Derne. Hamet Caramelli received at last a small sum of money from Congress, and through American influence was some years afterward made governor of Derne. Thus after four years of unceasing effort the episode of the Tripolitan war came to a triumphant end. Its chief result was to improve the navy and give it a firmer hold on popular sympathy. If the once famous battles of Truxton and the older seamen were ignored by the Republicans, Preble and Rodgers, Decatur and Hull, became brilliant names; the midnight death of Somers was told in every farmhouse; the hand-to-hand struggles of Decatur against thrice his numbers inflamed the imagination of school-boys who had never heard that Jefferson and his party once declaimed against a navy. Even the blindest could see that one more step would bring the people to the point so much dreaded by Jefferson, of wishing to match their forty-fours against some enemy better worthy of their powers than the pirates of Tripoli.

There was strong reason to think that this wish might soon be gratified; for on the same day when Lear, in the "Essex," appeared off Tripoli and began