In May 1801, men in Tripoli chopped down the flagpole at the U.S. consulate, a formal declaration of war against a young and nearly broke United States. This episode explores how the First Barbary War pushed Thomas Jefferson into America’s first overseas conflict and helped give birth to the modern U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

We trace the crisis from the loss of French protection after the Revolution, through Jefferson and John Adams’s 1786 meeting with Tripoli’s ambassador and their disagreement over paying tribute, to the 1795 ransom paid to Algiers. Then we follow the war itself: Jefferson’s use of his commander-in-chief role, the grounding of the USS Philadelphia, Stephen Decatur’s raid, William Eaton’s desert march, and the controversial peace deal.

• How the Barbary states ran a system of captures, ransoms and tribute payments
• The unusual case of captive James Leander Cathcart rising to advise the ruler of Algiers
• Decatur’s night raid to burn the captured Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor
• Eaton, Presley O’Bannon, eight Marines and a mercenary army taking the city of Derna
• Why Tobias Lear’s $60,000 ransom deal left Eaton furious and the war’s outcome debated