BARBARY PIRATES, WARS ON

The regiments which fought across North Africa in World War II were not the first Americans to fight in Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, for in 1801 we sent our then infant navy there to make war on the pirates of the Barbary Coast who had been destroying shipping for many years, American included, and France and Britain together had not been able to stop them. If we succeeded where the latter had failed it was largely owing to the ingenuity of one man, William Eaton, Consul at Tunis, who from out of Egypt and with a small group of natives infiltrated from behind the coast. It was Eaton who sent home the famous message, “Send some cash and a few marines.” The Marine Corps was born in that war.

The majority of heroes and leaders in the war, which was neither short nor easy, were Masons, Stephen Decatur, William Bainbridge (probably), Commodore Edward Preble, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, Commodore Thomas MacDonough, etc. Decatur's utterance, quoted countless times, did not say that his country was never wrong or that he would support it in wrongdoing ; he said, ''My country-may it ever be right, but, right or wrong, my country ,“ the utterance plainly saying that his country might be in the wrong. Like his father before him, who had belonged to Veritas Lodge No. 16, Maryland, Decatur became a Mason early, in St. John's Lodge, Newport, R. I., in 1799. William Eaton was raised in North Star Lodge, Manchester, Vermont, in 1792.