Treaty of Tripoli

The Treaty of Tripoli (Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary) was the first treaty concluded between the United States of America and Tripolitania, signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796 and at Algiers (for a third-party witness) on January 3, 1797. It was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, receiving ratification unanimously from the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797 and signed by Adams, taking effect as the law of the land on June 10, 1797.

The treaty was a routine diplomatic agreement but has attracted later attention because the English version included a clause about religion in the United States.

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen ,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The treaty is cited as historical evidence by popular commentators and news magazines in the modern day controversy over whether there was religious intent by the founders of the United States government. Article 11 of the treaty has been interpreted as an official denial of an exclusively Christian basis for the U.S. government. Professor of History John Fea, however, has recently noted in his book addressing the Christian element to the American founding that, "If the Treaty of Tripoli is correct...then someone forgot to tell the American people." Many other historians, secular and religious, have further insisted on the relative unimportance of the document or argued against the position that it rules out the influences of religion on the Founders, the constitution, or American culture, at the time of the founding. The clause is hotly debated in popular culture, but professional historians do not cite it as evidence of a secular nation. For example, although he never mentions the treaty in his book, professor of history Jon Butler claims that "The United States wasn't founded as a Christian country." He qualified that remark, however, in also noting that "no other Western society ever wrote so bold, so novel, and so successful a prescription for religion's role in a nation's destiny."

Historian Anson Phelps Stokes' three volume account of Church and State in the United States argued that the Treaty of Tripoli is the "only statement of any importance which we have found in the official documents of the United States which seems to deny specifically that the government was founded on the Christian religion." He also noted that "those who wished to deny that the United States as a government has any special regard for the Christian religion... almost invariably failed to call attention to the fact that the treaty was superseded, less than a decade later, by another 'Treaty of Peace and Amity,' signed in Tripoli June 4, 1805, in which the clause in question...is omitted."