So it's written by James Leander Cathcart, who was the U.S. Consul in Tripoli, to the Secretary of State in May 1800, and he's writing to explain that the Bashaw, or the leader of Tripoli, has become very unhappy with treaty arrangements. Americans were trying to trade in the Mediterranean, particularly with European countries, so they were trading with Europe, Bordeaux and Lisbon and ports like that, but the Barbary pirates would—basically they had a protection racket. So if you didn't pay them some sort of tribute or some sort of money, they would capture your ship, so it would make it very difficult for you to trade. And Americans really needed that type of trade to go on.

So Tripoli—Cathcart, rather, is in Tripoli trying to arrange those—smooth things over with the Tripolitan Bashaw. And the Bashaw has become aware that Algiers is getting paid more than he's getting paid, and this is making him unhappy. What he probably also knew is that Americans were three years behind in their payments to Algiers, so even though the treaty looks better on paper for Algiers, Americans weren't able to make those payments because they were just so short of cash. So the Bashaw had apparently informed Cathcart that unless he received presents in addition to whatever tribute payments had been arranged, he was going to declare war.

And Cathcart is communicating that information to the Secretary of State and indicating that they can—They have a few options. The President is supposed to respond. The Bashaw expects him to respond—not Congress, not Secretary of State, but the President, so as long as the President responds in a reasonable amount of time, they can take a little bit of time for that response to come. Cathcart also indicates that if they're going to make payments, if they're going to make a present to the Bashaw, that that will probably buy another year, and after that time the Bashaw will will probably once again become unhappy and demand some sort of payment or presents.

Cathcart is also of the opinion, in this letter, that if the Americans were able to send ships over, it would protect their commerce. So he, I think, in another letter, suggests a couple of ships would do. If they were able to send four ships, it would be enough to take care of the problem, and the force would overwhelm the need to send presents.

Cathcart also says or gives some of the details of other arrangements. For instance, the Danes and the Swedes are also making these protection payments, and what I found particularly interesting is he indicates how much those payments are—so he says they're paying 1500 dollars every three years which seems like quite a bit of money. It was quite a bit of money then.

And you can see the trouble that Americans are having. They don't have a lot of money in the federal government, even though they're at least operating under the Constitution instead of the Articles of Confederation. They can't pay Algiers, let alone Tripoli. They need desperately to trade in the Mediterranean, but they're not able to either protect their trade or make the payments that they need to make.

It is difficult for students, I think, to understand the language, and I find if you can have students read it out loud, that they can often make sense of it. And it is meant to be a public document, so it's being sent to the Secretary of State, but Cathcart is well aware that this is going to be a document that's going to circulate. It might be published in part in the newspaper, it might be something that's going to end up in collections for the government, it might be in Congress. So he's definitely writing in a way that he thinks will look good for other people to read, which can be difficult for us to interpret.

He's also using terms that may be unfamiliar, like the Imperials, the Danes. Ragusians, which was a very small trading state on the Dalmatian coast. And those powers that he's listing there are not very strong powers. So the British, the French, had very strong navies, but these people do not, and they're involved in the carrying trade, because they, like the Americans, are neutral states, and there's so much war on the continent at that time period that the neutral states are making a lot of money in the carrying trade—as long as they can pay off the Barbary pirates.

Well, there's actually humongous subtext, and if you're going to do further research, there are two ways I think that you could have students approach this. One is the issue of trade and how trade was carried out at that time period—and increase in violence, as well, between the 1780s and the early 1800s. There's an incredible increase in violence in trade in general. The French Navy, for instance, grows something like 40 or 60 percent, and that's fairly standard. A lot of European and Russian navies—the Algerian navy, for that matter, grows at this time period. There are European powers, including the Neapolitans, who are seizing American ships. One historian estimated that between about 1800 and about 1810, other powers seized about 1,600 American ships all told. And North Africans take 13 of those ships. So the North Africans are the least of our problems in many ways.

And I think Cathcart, that's the second way you could approach this, Cathcart himself is a really interesting case. He's very concerned about the issue in Tripoli, and he's concerned in a really personal way, because in 1785, as a young man in his early 20s, he was captured by Algerian pirates and he was enslaved in Algiers for 11 years. In 1796, he is finally redeemed, by the United States, with a bunch of other Americans, and returns home and is appointed then to be the Consul in Tripoli.

So he has a really unique insider viewpoint. He knows North African politics. Most Americans don't. You can tell that he's trying to pitch this idea to the Secretary of State, that you might have to make presents or force. And that's really clear, and it's been clear to Europeans since like the 12th century—you're either gong to make these payments or you're going to get a big enough navy to do something about it.

America is kind of in a bind. It doesn't have a lot of money to do either, and Cathcart is trying to convince them, I think, to use force. I think there are two things—one is that he says If we make this payment, it's only going to delay things for about a year. And the other place is where he talks about pretenses. That they're going to attack us no matter what, they're going to come up with excuses no matter what to attack us. So we might as well put a stop to it forever, and the only way to do that is force, and that's what I'm seeing between those lines, where he's talking about pretenses and delaying and it's only going to be a year and then we're going to have to do something else.

Well, I think, in fact, these Tripolitan pirates are privateers. Everybody else's privateers look like pirates to you. And privateers, what that means is that it's a government-arranged, government-sponsored program of piracy. And the Tripolitans were very clear about it. If you make arrangements with them, if you sign a treaty with them, they're not going to capture your ships. If you don't, they will capture your ships.

They know to capture your ships because you're carrying what's called a Mediterranean pass, so if you're trading legitimately, and you're trading legitimate American goods on an American ship, you're going to have one of these Mediterranean passes and Tripolitans are going to board your ship and they're going to check out your pass and see if things are in order, and if things are in order, they won't capture your ship. If things are not in order, if you don't have your pass, if you are not actually a legitimate American ship, you're just claiming to be an American ship, they're going to capture you and they're going to take your goods and they're going to sell your ship and possibly enslave the people that you have on the ship. Every ship that's not convoyed—so sometimes Americans were able to get French or British or Portuguese ships to convoy their ships, so if you don't have the force to keep them from stopping their ship, yes, they're going to stop your ships.

And in part they have that power because in 1785 the Spanish made a treaty with them—the Spanish then stopped keeping them out of going through the Straits of Gibraltar, so they could actually get out into the Atlantic after 1785. You didn't have to come into the Mediterranean, in other words. You could be trading on the coast of Portugal, and they could still stop your ships.

So this is very much an organized state endeavor. The pirates are organized by the state, they're supported by their state, it's part of the taxation system of the money that the state is bringing in, in Tripoli. And the government in Tripoli is telling the privateers which countries are appropriate for them to attack. They really are using terms that indicate they're seeing themselves as more of a navy, so that Morad Raiz that's mentioned, Raiz is their term for captain, so that just means he's a captain in the navy, and this is his job basically. He's told by the state, the Americans aren't paying us enough, we want them to pay us more, you should stop their ships. And if it looks like they have a lot of booty on board, then we need to capture them and make things difficult for the Americans so they will negotiate with us.

They'd sell the ships, they'd sell the goods, sometimes—the Tripolitans are less likely to do this but Algiers, in particular, would enslave the men. By the early 1800s, Tripolitans are less likely to do that. And to be fair, Europeans are doing this as well. I think it's 1790, there's something like 800 Muslims held in Malta, so privateering was going on on both sides, and both sides are calling the other people's navy pirates, and they're all privateers, they're licensed by the state.

Normally I'm a big fan of handing out primary sources and just seeing what they do with it, but, I think in this case, I would want to make sure that we had looked at a map together and seen where these places are, and seen what's on the Mediterranean, and seen maybe the ports, the European ports, so they they could a get sense of how close you have to get to North African ports and how far their ships would range. I think I might also want to talk with them about what people were trading over there, because that's one of the questions you're left with, why are Americans trading with Tripoli? They really aren't trading with Tripoli, but they're taking a whole bunch of flour and wheat over to the European continent, is really what they're trading.

So I might want to set up some of the context. Why are we going there? What's going on once we're getting there? Who are these Tripolitans? Where are they Iocated, so they could get a sense of what was going on. I would ask them to come up with a list of questions from the source, so that we could talk about what was confusing to them or talk about some of the things that they were interested in. And what I would hope would come out of that is that they would ask even more detailed questions about the relationship and how was the government involved, but also the relationship between the United States and Tripoli. Why Tripoli is taking the ships, I think that would be a really interesting question for them to ask.

The other thing I was struck with is that at the very end and at the very beginning of this letter, he talks about how long it takes letters to get back and forth. So I think that raises a lot of issues about doing government business, if it takes two and three months to get letters back. And of course Cathcart is probably sending multiple copies of the same letter by various ships, hoping that one of them will make it, because those ships are very likely to be captured by Algerians, by the French, by the English, and never make it home

And in fact, he's kicked out of Tripoli and Tripoli declares war on the United States, and the Americans don't know for another month or so after that war has been declared because he can't get the information back soon enough. So meanwhile, America does send a couple of ships over, and the ships are charged with either making arrangements or attacking. So they're sent with some money, and said if you can smooth things over, if you can make things work out alright, that's okay, but if you have to use force, use force. They get to Gibraltar and they find that war has been declared. And what happens after that is Americans have—I think it's five ships that are sent as part of that flotilla, and they blockade the Tripolitan port. Unfortunately, they blockade it ineffectively because they're only five ships. And what they find is that the Barbary States in general work together. So they're blockading Tripoli, but Algerian ships take Tripoli goods, Tripoli passengers, and they're able to get into the harbor of Tripoli because we're not officially at war with Algiers. Tunis does the same thing, so they load up goods on their ships and they're able to get into the harbor and America can't really do anything about that.

Incidentally, at the same time, one of the states that's often part of that Barbary States configuration, Morocco, looks like they're going to declare war, so some of those ships are sent down to Morocco to protect American shipping, basically, past Morocco, which is on the Atlantic and much more able to take American ships.

And basically, between 1800 and 1803, we try to blockade Tripoli, to no effect, because the Barbary States are all working together, because we don't have enough ships to blockade that port, and so there's sort of a standstill. There's a series of actions but nothing incredibly exciting until 1803, when the Philadelphia is chasing a Tripolitan ship into the harbor of Tripoli, and apparently, the captain and his navigator—David Porter is the navigator, Captain William Bambridge is the captain—apparently, they don't have a very good map of the Tripolitan harbor, and they run the ship aground on a reef that the Tripolitan ship would have had knowledge of.

It's the largest ship in the Navy at that time, and William Bambridge tries to save the ship by throwing everything he can find off the ship. So they're unloading cannon, they're throwing it into the water, he's trying to get the ship to lift, so it will free from the reef. But he's not able to free the ship. So the Tripolitans capture the ship, they capture the crew of about 307 men, they take them into the city of Tripoli and put them in a prison.

And then they use the American men to refit their own warship, because the next day, the Tripolitans are able to free that ship from the reef and bring the ship into their harbor. So that's a very difficult situation for the Americans. They have—the Tripolitans have managed to capture the largest ship in the Navy, they've got 307 hostages to work with. In 1805 we sign a treaty with Tripoli, and it's really through that treaty diplomatically that things are solved.

William Eaton, who is a consul, or an American diplomat, in Tunis, is extremely aggravated that we're paying money to pirates, so he pitches a plan to the President that we should take land forces into Tripoli—so we have the Navy working, we'll have Marines in Tripoli, and we'll be able to take the country. And William Eaton convinces the Bashaw's—the leader of Tripoli's—brother, Hamet, to work with us. Eaton and about 200 marines and several thousand Tripolitans, Berbers, all kinds of people who flock to the that banner of Hamet do in fact have this long dramatic march through Tripoli and are able to stake out the city of Derna. And they're holding that city, and William Eaton believes that they're holding it successfully, but there are thousands and thousands of Tripolitans surrounding them, and the Bashaw is just sending some of his professional soldiers down there, so it looks very bad for him.

Meanwhile, Tobias Lear has been sent over to make final negotiations, and he agrees to pay 60,000 dollars to free those American soldiers who have been captured, including William Bambridge, and signs a favored nation treaty with the Bashaw that includes, basically, presents, which are tribute payments, but they call them presents. So, from an American point of view, it looks like he's arranged a treaty that does not include tribute, but from the Bashaw's point of view, he expects those presents, and to him it's tribute.

This is an editorial cartoon by Paul Conrad that ran in the Los Angeles Times and was picked up by a lot of other newspapers. And the image itself was in reaction to a particular moment in history when Lieutenant William Calley—who was on trial for war crimes committed in March of 1968—was convicted and sentenced. There was a great deal of public reaction of varying kinds at the time and this cartoon was as much a reaction to the verdict as it was to the reaction to the verdict.

People sent hundreds of thousands of letters and telegrams to the White House, 99 percent of them demanding his release. What Paul Conrad is drawing here is that reaction: the cheering, the yelling, the flag waving. At the top of the ditch represents that swell of sentiment, that Calley was this hero and he was being scapegoated unfairly. You see mostly male figures and they seem to be wearing suits. And there are two signs evident. One says "We're With You, Lt. Calley." The other says, "Well done, Lt. Calley."

The caption is "The My Lai Ditch Claims Another Victim." It references the event of My Lai itself. And the ditch in My Lai was one of the most searing moments of the massacre. Conrad is clearly saying that the United States lost something very dear in that moment.

What appealed to me and caught my eye initially was that he was not just targeting some narrow facet of this story, but was literally attacking the American sense of conscience, and the American sense of what is right and what is wrong. Everything that American soldiers are supposed to be fighting and protecting is gone.

A turning point in the Vietnam War took place in January or February of 1968 with the Tet Offensive. Anti-war sentiment in the United States was swelling in late 1967 and to try and keep a lid on opposition sentiment, President Johnson and his administration embarked on a kind of pep talk campaign for the American people. The message to the American people was that we've almost got the communists licked and this war is almost over.

The enemy in fact was laying in wait and so January 31st, 1968, the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies launched a massive, country-wide assault on both American and South Vietnamese military and government installations. And the hope of the enemy with this offensive was that the people would join them and rise up, a mass uprising to evict what they saw as this American invader in their country.

So, the American people, having just been told that the war is almost over, are now treated on the nightly news to images of fighting in the American embassy compound in Saigon, to images of great carnage at the Marine Base at Queshan, at the imperial city of Hue. People are thinking, this war is not over. We've been lied to. We've been had. And public opinion started to tank.

In Vietnam, this really unnerved American soldiers. And the knowledge that the enemy had been able to orchestrate this offensive without any awareness on the part of the United States was deeply disturbing to soldiers who were trusting that the guys in charge know what they're doing.

They were enduring very harsh conditions in terms of rain and mud and sleeping outside and not eating hot meals. And they were experiencing casualties, but not casualties due to enemy engagement. They were getting picked off by snipers or by booby traps or by injuries. And there's a great sense of frustration that they can't find the enemy. They don't have anybody to blame.

The 1st Platoon, and perhaps the company as a whole, were not particularly well led. There's evidence from February 1968 of a breakdown in discipline. But what we see of Charlie Company in the month of February, in the early weeks of March 1968, is a group of soldiers starting to unravel. So when they were charged with this operation to go into My Lai, which the military referred to as "Pinkville," tensions were very, very high.

Vietnamese villages are complexes of little hamlets and this village was, to the Vietnamese, known as Song My. My Lai was just one of several hamlets in Song My village.

In fact, everyone agrees that the first shots fired at My Lai were against an old man who was farming when the helicopters came in. He waved at them and they shot him. The fog of war is often invoked for what came after that. Maybe some soldiers heard shots and interpreted that as enemy fire. But they basically moved the 150 meters from the landing zone into the village and continued firing at any Vietnamese person they saw.

At one point, a large group of civilians was gathered into the irrigation ditch, about 170 people. Calley told them, told some of his soldiers to "take care of them." So these guys are standing there watching these villagers, and Calley came back after a while and said, "I thought I told you to take care of them," and they said, "We're watching them, we're guarding them." And he said, "No, I meant kill them."

There was one instance where a helicopter landed and interceded. There was a helicopter piloted by a man named Hugh Thompson and he had a good view of what was going on underneath him. And he saw American soldiers shooting at women and children and he landed near the ditch and put his ship in between American guns and Vietnamese civilians. He managed to pick up around 20 people and loaded them on his helicopter and carried them to safety.

A turning point in the Vietnam War took place in January or February of 1968 with the Tet Offensive. Anti-war sentiment in the United States was swelling in late 1967 and to try and keep a lid on opposition sentiment, President Johnson and his administration embarked on a kind of pep talk campaign for the American people. The message to the American people was that we've almost got the communists licked and this war is almost over.

The enemy in fact was laying in wait and so January 31st, 1968, the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies launched a massive, country-wide assault on both American and South Vietnamese military and government installations. And the hope of the enemy with this offensive was that the people would join them and rise up, a mass uprising to evict what they saw as this American invader in their country.

So, the American people, having just been told that the war is almost over, are now treated on the nightly news to images of fighting in the American embassy compound in Saigon, to images of great carnage at the Marine Base at Queshan, at the imperial city of Hue. People are thinking, this war is not over. We've been lied to. We've been had. And public opinion started to tank.

In Vietnam, this really unnerved American soldiers. And the knowledge that the enemy had been able to orchestrate this offensive without any awareness on the part of the United States was deeply disturbing to soldiers who were trusting that the guys in charge know what they're doing.

They were enduring very harsh conditions in terms of rain and mud and sleeping outside and not eating hot meals. And they were experiencing casualties, but not casualties due to enemy engagement. They were getting picked off by snipers or by booby traps or by injuries. And there's a great sense of frustration that they can't find the enemy. They don't have anybody to blame.

The 1st Platoon, and perhaps the company as a whole, were not particularly well led. There's evidence from February 1968 of a breakdown in discipline. But what we see of Charlie Company in the month of February, in the early weeks of March 1968, is a group of soldiers starting to unravel. So when they were charged with this operation to go into My Lai, which the military referred to as "Pinkville," tensions were very, very high.

Vietnamese villages are complexes of little hamlets and this village was, to the Vietnamese, known as Song My. My Lai was just one of several hamlets in Song My village.

In fact, everyone agrees that the first shots fired at My Lai were against an old man who was farming when the helicopters came in. He waved at them and they shot him. The fog of war is often invoked for what came after that. Maybe some soldiers heard shots and interpreted that as enemy fire. But they basically moved the 150 meters from the landing zone into the village and continued firing at any Vietnamese person they saw.

At one point, a large group of civilians was gathered into the irrigation ditch, about 170 people. Calley told them, told some of his soldiers to "take care of them." So these guys are standing there watching these villagers, and Calley came back after a while and said, "I thought I told you to take care of them," and they said, "We're watching them, we're guarding them." And he said, "No, I meant kill them."

There was one instance where a helicopter landed and interceded. There was a helicopter piloted by a man named Hugh Thompson and he had a good view of what was going on underneath him. And he saw American soldiers shooting at women and children and he landed near the ditch and put his ship in between American guns and Vietnamese civilians. He managed to pick up around 20 people and loaded them on his helicopter and carried them to safety.

Any soldier who was there that day would have had the ability to write a complaint or to let someone in authority know what had happened. Hugh Thompson was the only one who did. He spoke with his chaplain with the understanding that the chaplain would follow this up the chain of command. The chaplain in this case dropped the ball and didn't pursue it.

Thompson also spoke with Colonel Henderson, Lieutenant Colonel Barker's superior officer, and nothing official was done about the accusations. In fact, there was a great deal of effort to cover up what had happened. The official report sent up the chain of command said that 128 enemy combatants had been killed in combat at My Lai and that three weapons had been captured.

The person who actually made the effort to tell the story wasn't even there. There was a soldier named Ron Ridenhour who was serving in Vietnam. He was not in Taskforce Barker. He had nothing to do with the incident at My Lai in March 1968.

Ridenhour was really troubled by it and so he started to seek out other men from the company to find out what happened. As a result of his own informal investigation, he starts to hear that the first guy's story is being corroborated down to the finest details.

And so in March of 1969, he writes a letter to his congressman who had just come out against the war. And he also sends copies of the letter to military and government officials, other congressmen, senators, the president, senior officials in the Pentagon. And so in April of 1969, the Army launches a preliminary inquiry.

Details about what Calley did started to come out in November of '69. The rumors were starting to emerge that a massacre had taken place, that perhaps hundreds of Vietnamese civilians had been killed by American soldiers. And I think people didn't want to believe that it was true.

Anything that makes it into Life Magazine is kind of a big deal. And so you're flipping through your Life Magazine, having heard these rumors or read a newspaper article or two about this Calley guy, and suddenly you turn the page and there, in Technicolor, is a pile of bodies. A pile of Vietnamese women and children. There's one photograph in particular that's become iconic of the My Lai massacre and it is of this pile of people in a road. On the top of the pile is a baby, a little, naked baby, with its bottom facing up. It's really hard to understand why the baby needed to be shot.

So the photographs pretty much silenced the naysayers who said this was a rumor. This was definitive proof, vindication for Vietnamese people who knew that this had happened. And it became the biggest story of the day, which is quite an amazing thing given that the war itself was incredibly controversial. Given that atrocities committed by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army had recently been unearthed in the city of Hue in Vietnam. It reignited anti-war sentiment. So what ensued then was the release of a lot of detail as the trials were underway and publicized with updates day in and day out. The people who cheered William Calley had seen those photographs and they had seen the interviews with the perpetrators and they had seen interviews with the victims in My Lai. And they had read the testimony in court. They knew what they were cheering.

Eventually, the charges that came down were charges of murder against William Calley. I think he was charged with over a hundred murders because of the incident at the ditch where he ordered his men to kill. And then there actually came a moment where his soldiers refused to continue because there were only children left and Calley took one of their rifles and "finished the job."

Calley's trial drew a tremendous focus and part of it was because of the defense that he used. He did not deny that he had done these things. In fact, he testified rather proudly about his conduct at My Lai. The Army law is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, says that soldiers have to follow orders and if in a combat or a wartime situation, they don't follow orders, that is a treasonable offense. So the defense went something like this: Calley was given these orders and under penalty of being shot or being prosecuted, he had to follow through. But the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that soldiers are not under any obligation to follow unlawful orders. So the question then becomes whether or not Calley and his men understood that the orders to kill unarmed civilians, women and children, were unlawful.

When I've used images like this or images of propaganda, I have them just work through the story. I think students sometimes are reluctant to just tell a narrative, where they think that somehow they're supposed to be offering some incredibly complicated insight. And, so, if you just have students answer the question, what is going on here, what do you see, they can collectively start to put it together. I see people about to fall off a cliff, or people celebrating.

He gives us this maw in the ground, this sense of divide, that there's one figure on one side and that there's another group of people on another side. They will, I think, arrive, at some sense of division, and that's a great starting point for understanding what happened to the American public during the Vietnam War.

There are clues that Conrad gives us. "The My Lai ditch claims another victim," so obviously this space that he's drawing represents the My Lai ditch. It's not any ordinary ditch. It's this iconic image of the 20th century, and Lt. Calley, his name as well is spelled out. He is not an anonymous person.

I would look at an image like this as a starting place and as a launching point to get students interested in a really complicated story. You can engage so many facets of the Vietnam War, you can talk about the actual incident at My Lai, you can talk about the trial, public reaction to the trial.

The image of the ditch and the incident at My Lai lends itself to a discussion of American strategy there, but I think what it ultimately arrives at is questions of the ethics, of who's responsible and which version of the story American wants to claim. And if students are conflicted I think that's okay. Anyone who has too definitive a perspective on My Lai isn't really paying attention.

I think Conrad would agree with me because he's targeting not the people who are confused, he's not criticizing the people who are sorting through, he's criticizing the people who are cheering and celebrating and are taking this singular one-sided view of the event.