What was America's first terrorist threat?

From the moment it was established, the United States had headaches with terrorism of the pirate variety. For decades, the federal budget even include bribe money to pay them off. Learn all about this early threat on this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant. I'm talking weird
like a radio announcer, which means it's time for stuff
you know podcast. It's right. Welcome, sir. How are you well?

(00:25):
I'm good. Welcome to you as well. Great, I'm I'm good.
You I'm fantastic. Are you sure you're feeling high? Uh?
Is that a trick question? Yeah? I'm feeling high, good man,
feeling high, feeling gay and feeling ready to go? Good. Well,
let's do this all right, okay, um, Chuck, Josh, Yeah,

(00:47):
Wait a minute, wait, let me relish this. There's no plugs,
there's no lead ins, nothing here. Pretty good, okay, Chuck. Yes,
have you ever heard the terrorism? Terror? Terror? War? Is
no terror? Or? I know? I have a thick tongue

(01:08):
terror or terror? Yes? I have you have? Yes? Did
you know it's from the French? Um? I did not know. That.
Pretty surprising, isn't it? It is to me it's from
the French. Terrorism. That's how I assume it's pronounced. You
have to say it like you're condescending. Sorry, uh yeah, nice, um.

(01:29):
But it was coined during the reign of terror in
the sev during the French Revolution, So uh, did it
have the same meaning like unconventional means of warfare that
involved citizens. It was basically it did have roughly the
same the same meaning in that it involves citizens. This

(01:50):
is the one thing that terrorism is always pointed to.
It's um. It's it's when citizens, innocence are casualties, are
directly involved in big problems. Yeah, and not just you know,
of course there's casualties all the time, including nowadays with
US drone strikes and our own wars, but literally abandoning

(02:13):
the rules of war, which we've done a podcast on
in favor of you know, homemade guerilla tactics to all
outside those rules and to terrorize people and to terrorize people,
but you're you're directly targeting normal, everyday citizens, which there
in lies the terror right. So terrorism, it's been around

(02:34):
the last couple of hundred years, although in the US
here it's it's just only in the I guess the
fifties it started to become kind of a household word.
Definitely by the eighties. Once um, hijackers started taking over
airplanes all over the place. We knew what terrorists were. Yeah, boy,

(02:55):
remember that hijacking was such a big deal because I
used to be terrified of that, and of course that
was a central component of nine eleven. But um like
hijacking as far as just taking over the plane, that
was like a big deal back in the day. Remember
that very iconic image of the terrorists holding a gun
to that pilot's head on a tarmac and I think

(03:15):
cypress and leaning out the window. Yeah, I remember that.
It was before they had the good sense to keep
those doors secure or use metal detector before you got
on the plate, so you couldn't get a forty five
onto a plane. You're just on the plane smoking your
cigarette with your gun, right exactly. Pilots doors open, if
you want to tour the cockpit, just come on up, right.

(03:35):
Do you mind taking your burlap hood off right so
we can see who you are? Man? Things were so lax,
so weird, so um. So we we came to understand
terrorism from maybe the sixties of the eighties on. But
the United States has been dealing with terrorism literally since
the moment it was born. Especially if you call piracy terrorism,

(04:00):
and for our purposes today we will yes to fall
in line with the title of this article. We're going
to yes. Uh, from the moment we gained our independence
from England before them, yeah, before then, because Europe was
dealing with it as well. He's um on the North
African Coast, the Barbary Coast, so named for the Barbarossa brothers. Yeah,

(04:23):
care and Dean. No, that's sorry, that's one guy. Car
Dean was one Barbarossa. Yeah, I'm not quite sure who
he was, but there were brothers, a rouge and his ear. Yeah,
and Barbara Rossa, Barbara Beard Rosa, Red red Beard, red Beard,
just like the Ferrari Testa Rosa, the Red Testes exactly.

(04:44):
And uh like former quarterback then he Testa Verde. But
my friend he's called Bevinny green Balls, so I thought
was pretty funny. And he played that he was like
fifty so he probably did have said he played for
the books, right. Oh, he played for a bunch of teams.
He was known to play for the Buccaneers, he was
and then later with the Jets, and he was all

(05:05):
over the place. Yeah, I was just associated with the Buccaneers. Yeah,
well he I think he played a portion of his
career there, but when he played for twenty five years
or whatever, you're gonna get around. You know, there was
never a better Heyday for team logos than there were
than the seventies and eighties. Like the old Raiders logo,
which I guess is still around that the Raiders stay

(05:25):
pretty concer but the Buccaneers used to have a great
one orange. The New England Patriots had like that min
man who was ready to hike the ball. They were,
They were just great. The Pittsburgh Pirates had probably one
of the better ones of all time. Uh well, yeah
they were baseball of course, sure, I know, yeah, I
said sports logos. Okay, I think I said sports. Yeah,
you're talking about the old stove top hats that the

(05:46):
Pirates were at the flat Caps they had. Oh yeah, yeah,
those are awesome with the yellow bands. Yeah they were terrible.
So speaking of Pirates, we were talking about the brothers
red Beard, Barbarossa and um. These guys were actually Turks,
but the Spaniards were the ones who named them. Barbarossa
and the Spaniards were well versed in the school of

(06:07):
the Blade, taught by a rouge and his year Barbarossa. Yeah,
and these pirates specifically were helping out Muslim Moore's driven
away from Spain by Christians, and this just reinforced to
me like Christians and Muslims, man, they've been fighting for
a long time, like anything you see on the news
these days, just like, yeah, this has got quite a

(06:29):
bit of history here. Yeah, is a really big year
for Spain. Sent Columbus over here to the New World
and drove the um Spanish Muslims a k a. The
Moops from Spain or they the moops, No, the Moors.
Remember that Seinfeld where he's playing can we pursue with
Bubble Boy and he's like the Moors. He goes, no,

(06:49):
it's the moops. Yeah, I forgot about that. I feel
silly because I thought that might have been. Yeah, yeah,
the Spaniards like Moore's moops. Who cares? Okay. So after
this happens, the Mediterranean Sea right there between North Africa
and Southern Europe, all of a sudden, because it was
such a heavily traveled trade route, became a haven for

(07:12):
piracy because there was lots of stuff to booty, Yeah,
lots of stuff to lots of booty to pillage. Yeah,
because at this time it was that was the route
between Europe and the East Indies, and that's where Europe
was making all of its money from the spice trade
and all that um. And so to get there you
had to go through the Mediterranean. When the Christians drove
the Moors to North Africa, and of course the North

(07:34):
Africans are like, hey, we're living here, the Berber folks,
and that where Barbary comes from. No Barbary comes from Barbarossa.
Oh I thought it said it was so named for
the Berber people. Know, the Barbarossa brothers. Those guys were
so bad they named the entire North African coast after them,
the four states of uh, Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli,

(07:56):
which is what we know know is liberal Libya, liberty.
That's the Barbary Coast named after the Barbarosis. So you've
got all this piracy going on. It's stepping up in
earnest after and everybody's just getting taken every which way
but Sunday, that's right, Uh, every which way. So Muslims

(08:20):
and Christians were both you know, getting it on the
piracy game. We don't want to like sling stones to
good point only at the Muslims. But um, because of
where it was, it was just a haven for it.
And I think you point out this is your article right, Um,
in the seventeenth century at one point and estimated twenty
people were captured by the Barbaries and held in Algiers alone.

(08:42):
Twenty thousand kidnappings. That's like a couple of good sized
cities back then. Yeah, that's significant. So they were doing
a pretty good job. I guess it's the piracy. Yeah,
that's like the average attendance on a Tuesday night of
a Pittsburgh Pirates game in the late seventies. Tuesday night,
late seventies. Yeah, they were pretty good. Yeah, but Roberto

(09:06):
Clemente era, he can fill those seats. He was earlier
than that. But yeah, the Willie Stargel era, that's what
I said. Let's call it that. Um so European. They
they did so much pirating. They thought, you know what,
we can make more money if we start to extort people.
Not only can we pillage their booty, we can extort
money from them a k a. Getting tributes paid, Yeah,

(09:27):
which is really just extortion. It's a protection racket. Yeah,
it was. We will protect you from ourselves. These guys
are like Sicilians. All of a sudden, it's like, hey,
we wouldn't want anything to happen to your ship. Give
us some money, we'll make sure it doesn't. But they
weren't even as sly as the average Sicilian. They said,
if you don't give us money, we're going to attack
your ships, take your goods, and kidnap your crews. And

(09:51):
they had certain things so in addition to to tribute
and then capturing goods, kidnapping a person could be kind
of lucrative no matter what the person's station was socially. Well, yeah,
because well, first of all, pay us if and we
won't kidnap you, and then we will kidnap you and
then get try and get you to pay us the ransom,
or if you won't do that, then we'll just sell

(10:13):
you as a slave. And we're gonna make money one
way or the other, one way or another. If you
are a member of a Barbary state and you're a pirate,
you know how to make some coin. Yeah, And it
was such a racket that nations included line items and
their budgets to pay these tributes. It was like an actual.
I guess you'd call it legit. I mean, it wasn't

(10:35):
legitimate because it was uh, you know, plundering, but they
legitimately included it as like, hey, we gotta pay these
guys off exactly this much money per year, so we
just gotta think about that. Yeah. Um, and the I
think the United States in its four fiscal budget had
eight grand set aside to pay as tribute to Barbary governments. Yeah,
that is crazy. And um, that was actually small at first.

(10:59):
Two Well yeah it um, I think you pointing out
it goes up to a million dollars by and they
paid a million dollars annually for fifteen years. It's a
lot of coin. Back then. That was ten percent of
the federal annual income at the time. Well million bucks.
The reason it went up so much was the Barbary

(11:21):
states actually had tribute on a sliding scale. They they
the European nations right at the time. If you think
of them as corporations, because essentially it's what they were,
Like the British East India Company was pretty much one
and the same as the British government. Um, they would
use the Barbary pirates to um, they would use their

(11:43):
diplomats to get the Barbary pirates to attack some nations
leave theirs alone. They would pay some tribute, but they
were It was definitely part of the political maneuvering was
to just kind of keep this Mediterranean shipping channel open
for the superpowers and squeeze out the little guys. Well
of Barbaries were like, yeah, we like making money from you,
but we also want to make it from the little

(12:04):
guys too, So we're gonna establish the sliding scale and
based on the size of your economy, that's how much
tribute we're going to extract from you. And when the
US was born, they're like, oh, you're tiny, just give
us like eighty grant how about that? And then within
like ten years they were like, oh, yeah, you guys
have a whole continent of raw material. You show no
scruples that stealing it um from the natives who are

(12:27):
living there, right, So how about a million a year
from So they did that for fifteen years. Um. One
of the main reasons they did this for so long
was because they were trying to form a navy. They
didn't even have a navy at this point the US. Yeah,
and then in fact this is why the navy was born.
It would have been born at some point anyway, because
you need a navy. But this is what really spurred

(12:49):
the creation of the navy in the US. And Thomas
Jefferson comes along and was, like I told John Adams,
was like, dude, we can't be paying these this old
world stuff and worrying about paying off these tributes to
these guys. Like we got to expand west brother, Like
this is where it's at. We're sitting here playing these
old games, paying these guys money and trading and over

(13:10):
the Atlantic. Screw that, Let's just stay over here, expand westward,
and that's where the future of this country is. Right.
He also made a pretty good point that it would
be more cost effective to take that million bucks and
put it into a navy and pound the Barbary States
into submission, then to just keep paying him a million
dollars a year, you know, ad infinite. Um. I wonder

(13:33):
what the because this is while they were doing this,
concurrently they were building a navy to try and stop this.
Like if that was ten, I wonder how much it
costs to build the navy, Like a substantial portion of
the federal government's funds was tied up and stopping this
at the time, including building the navy, paying these ransoms
or tributes or extortion fees depend which way one. And

(13:55):
it was a big problem, like we said, right out
of the gate um. But it wasn't handled for a
while because Jefferson ideas, I guess, his westward expansion concept
and then building a navy rather than paying tribute um.
He was in the minority. He was the diplomat that
succeeded Benjamin Franklin, who was the America's first diplomat or France.

(14:16):
And Benjamin Franklin had he took the tech that most
people at the time took, which was this was just
part of doing business with the East Indies, and you know,
we'll we'll do what we can. Before we used to
be under the protection of Great Britain. While we split
from Great Britain, we're not under the protection anymore. We're
still kind of a fledge nation, so we need a

(14:38):
protection of superpower. So Franklin knew how to charm the French,
and he set up the Treaty of Amity and Commerce
of seventeen seventeen seventy eight just directly addresses this pretty much. Yeah.
It actually had mentioned the Barbary nations by name in
this treaty and basically said France, you got help us

(15:01):
out here in the Mediterranean and France said okay. They
did say okay, which is good. So Jefferson, Um, he
doesn't have any real pull at this point yet. It
was not until he became president that actually really enact
his plan, which was to get out of this whole mess. Yeah,
and once he did, he basically said, you guys are toasted. Yeah.

(15:23):
I mean, as soon as he was sworn into office,
the Turkish ruler Pasha demanded an extra two hundred and
fifty dollars from this new administration. They were like, well,
you're the new guy. Well we just need a bonus
payment because you're now in office, right, And I, Um,
I looked this up. I was like, god, I thought
that was so much money. Back then it was about

(15:44):
three million dollars. It was less than three million, which
is not that much. Yeah, and you never hear about this,
Like I didn't learn this in high school. No, I know,
you know, I remember getting out of high school and realizing, like,
there's so much more to history. Yeah, I didn't realize
what else Jefferson was doing in Paris. You know, he
was doing a lot of crazy stuff. Yeah, and some

(16:05):
not so crazy romantic things. But you didn't learn about
that in high school either, about him. I bet I
wonder if they teach that stuff now. I'd be curious
to sit in on a high school history class. I
imagine it's very much the same. Yeah, there's a certain uh,
there's a certain school of thought that you're indoctrinated into,
and there's stuff you need to know and things you

(16:26):
shouldn't know, and you don't need to know about that.
We don't need to talk about that kind of thing.
And then college was where I first started getting my
real education, had some really good history teachers. Yeah. Um,
all right, So where are we? We are in office
as Jefferson, Yes, and he already hates the Barbary States
because he's been trying to get everybody to turn against

(16:49):
him for fifteen years. He's finally got the power to
do something about it. That's right. Uh, they had taken
control of a couple of crew members captured American chips
and they and you know what, we'll release these guys
if you increase your tribute. And Jefferson said enough of
this crap. We've got ships now, six of them. I
think at first, Yeah, that's cute. You gotta start small,

(17:12):
and we're coming over to pay you a little visit
in our ships. And the First Barbary War from e
ten o one to eighteen o five, Uh, it was,
it was, but pretty happen in war. I mean it
was mostly at sea and it lasted four years, right, yeah,
But um, at one point they captured Uh well they
captured because the US the USS Philadelphia I think, ran

(17:36):
aground and got stuck. So this is one sixth of
the entire US fleet at the time, I think, so, yeah,
so I got stuck and like working order still, So
they captured the ship, take control of the crew, and
they used the ship as a gun battery against us
because it's just parked right there, I guess cannons aimed
out towards the sea. So they just used it that

(17:57):
way for a while. And um, it was Stephen Decatur,
Lieutenant Stephen Decatur of the Navy led some marines and
recaptured the ship and burned it so they couldn't use it.
And that guy is he's I think there are forty
six communities in the United States named Decatur, including one
where you live right here in Atlanta, and Jerry So

(18:20):
named yeah, and Jerry So named for Stephen Decatur. And
there's a pick there's a statue. Is that Decatur Jefferson?
I think there's a Decatur statue right there at the
is the one that we shot at though, Was that Jefferson? Oh?
Was that Jefferson the guy writing? You know, man, I
don't even know that's sad, like molested the statue. We

(18:42):
don't even know what statue was, but I know there
is a Decatur monument in the center of Decatur. Stephen Decator,
he was, but yeah, this is where he really kind
of proved his stripes as an admiral. And apparently he
came very close to being killed. But one of his
crew members when they were going to attack the Philadelphia,
one of his crew members threw himself in between Decatur

(19:04):
and a barbary I guess pirate, and um, he survived,
but like he threw himself in in between the sword
and Decatur and Decatur went on to um even greater stuff. Um.
But yeah, so they destroy the Philadelphia. They get out
very daring and you said marines were there, Yeah, I

(19:24):
mean led by a naval officer, but it was definitely
the Marines the dirty work. And that's why if you
listen to the Marine Corps him in the first line,
it's from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
This is what they're talking about. Pretty cool. Um. So
the First Barbary War last from eighteen o one to
eighteen o five, it was mostly with Tripoli. They're the

(19:47):
ones who were giving us the most trouble. Tunis and
l Jeers Um basically said, you know what, We're just
gonna stand over here for a little bit. We're fine.
We all of our alliances with you were not to
break up. We're pirates. We're all pirates, everybody, What did
you expect? And then several years later, Thomas Jefferson retires
the Monticello and James Monroe comes into the presidency and

(20:10):
we have trouble again, but this time it's with Tunis
and l Jeers and James Monroe takes a totally different
tack than Thomas Jefferson. I think because we had a
much bigger navy by then. For the Second Barbary War,
was it just a little more aggressive we just went
into the coast of Tunis and Algiers impounded their cities
with our cannons and they said, okay, okay, sorry that.

(20:32):
Right after that the US said no more, We're never
paying you another dime. Yeah. And in the First War
they you pointed out that they used the tactic used
by the Green Berets, which was to find local insurgent
groups to help them do the fighting. And I think
in this case there were some Greeks and Arab and
Berber mercenaries that we like enlisted to help fight against

(20:56):
them on land, what little fighting it was on land,
and it worked, and it was the first time a U.
S Flag was ever raised on foreign soil, thankfully. Man.
I am just overwhelmed with jingoism right now? Are you
a jingoist? I for the moment, Eve, until we Keith
growing around? Man, that guy, what happened to him? He's around?

(21:20):
I'm sure, okay, I mean, I don't keep up, but
nothing's happened to him as far as I know. He's
still gingering it up. Uh So is that it? I've
got nothing else, I've got something else. So we were
talking about how you said Christians and Muslims alike, we're
not shy about resorting to piracy, enslavement, all that stuff.
And um, the Mediterranean had seen piracy for millennia, but

(21:44):
it all really started in the Crusades, and that's when
one side was just you know, capturing the other people.
Never that at some point the Crusades. Yeah, I mean
we could only have to be an overview obviously, because
we could do like tin shows on the Crusades. Sure. Um,
but through at this time there's this order called the Mathurians,

(22:04):
and they are a French Catholic sect and their whole
gig was raising money to use to ransom sailors who
couldn't pay their own ransom to keep them from being
sold into enslavement, which is a pretty noble pursuit. And
these guys were like they were you know, they took
vows of poverty, so they like weren't holding any of

(22:24):
the money themselves. They were getting fatl this they really
used it, and over three centuries, um, they ransom ninety
thousand sailors that were captured. Yeah, and um, one of
those guys turned out to be Miguel de Cervantes who
wrote Don Quixote. Really he was captured in the Mediterranean,
And I suppose wrote that after he was freed. I

(22:46):
don't know, I would say so, well, that's just a guess.
An that cool though. Thought about one more thing too,
apparently the slaves. I mean, it was not great to
be captured as a slave, but it wasn't like European
and uh American slaves like you could actually gain wealth
and possession and status as a slave in Africa. Yeah. Yeah,

(23:09):
African slavery is much different than Portuguese style slavery that
we're used to here in this and and most of
the time it was not like a great thing, but
you could. I think one guy even rose to a
position of advisor to a king of Algae. Wow. Wow. Yeah.
And by used to I meant uh aware of and

(23:29):
disgusted by, right, not used to? Yeah, accustomed to? Is
that is that it? Yes? Okay, well that was America's
first terrorist threat, pirates. That's the answer. If you want
to learn more and uh read the article that I wrote,
you can type in first terrorist threat. There's a lot
of terrorism stuff. We should do one on how terrorism

(23:51):
works in general. We no, um, you can find all
that stuff by typing terror into the search bar. How
stuff works dot Com. I'll bet he'll bring up some
surprising stuff. Uh. And since I said search bar this year, mail,
not quite yet, my friend. Okay, quick little TV show plug. Yes,

(24:13):
by now everybody knows we have a television show coming
out on Science Channel UM at ten pm Eastern Standard
Time on Saturday, January nineteen. Yes, and we're very excited
about it. Yes, we were following the series three premiere
of IDID Abroad that Carl Pill contender Ricky Gervais will
get pretty pumped up about. And then comes our show.

(24:35):
And if you don't have TV or cable, you can
still get this on iTunes. You can purchase each show
each week I believe the following day for about ninety
nine and the first show is free. Yeah. So Saturday,
January nine at ten pm is the world premiere of
Stuff you Should Know television show, and then at ten
thirty PM is episode two, back to back episodes on

(24:56):
January nineteen. There'll be a big deal. So what listener,
male time? Now? All right, Josh, I'm gonna call this
a sexual healing is your coin? Did you make that up? Yeah?
That's awesome, guys. When I first saw the podcast on
a sexuality. I figured it had to be about a
sexual reproduction, like single celled organisms or c sponges. It

(25:19):
was a little trepidacious when I saw I was actually
about a sexuality as a sexual orientation. Often I am
not particularly happy with any brief overview of any subject
they care about or have much knowledge about. I was
pleased I had no such negative reaction to your podcast, though,
in fact it was extremely uplifting. You described much of
the difficulty I had growing up. The talk of being

(25:39):
confused by your friends suddenly being into girls was particularly evocative.
In high school and college, I also had a lot
of really awkward or negative interaction with people, especially girls
who just didn't get what I was. I even had
a female friend stop being my friend when I turned
down her sexual advances. I can only guess as to why,

(26:00):
but I always felt like she just didn't believe me,
and that really sucked um. I Also, it also made
me realize that, at thirty one years old, I'm not
as okay with my sexuality as I'd like to think
I am. No matter how much I've told myself and others,
I'm a sexual and I'm cool it. I've always had
that itch in the back of my head that has
told me that I'm crazy or delusional or there's something
wrong with me. Knowing that this is a real thing,

(26:22):
with such a relief, I'm now looking into a d
E N and finding all sorts of exciting stuff. So
thank you very much recovering the subject. Nice. Yeah, congrats,
And that is an anonymous listener who got something out
of the show, which is nice. Got a sexual healing
out of the show, I hope. So that's really cool.
That is what we do, man, that's why we do this,

(26:45):
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(27:06):
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