Signing and Ratification
President George Washington appointed his old colleague David Humphreys as Commissioner Plenipotentiary on March 30, 1795, in order to negotiate a treaty with the Barbary powers. On February 10, 1796, Humphreys appointed Joel Barlow and Joseph Donaldson as "Junior Agents" to forge a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship". Under Humphreys' authority, the treaty was signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796, and certified at Algiers on January 3, 1797. Humphreys reviewed the treaty and approved it in Lisbon on February 10, 1797.
The official treaty was in Arabic text, and a translated version by Consul-General Barlow was ratified by the United States on June 10, 1797. Article 11 of the treaty was said to have not been part of the original Arabic version of the treaty; in its place is a letter from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli. However, it is the English text which was ratified by Congress. Miller says, "the Barlow translation is that which was submitted to the Senate (American State Papers, Foreign Relations, II, 18-19) and which is printed in the Statutes at Large and in treaty collections generally; it is that English text which in the United States has always been deemed the text of the treaty."
The Treaty also had spent seven months traveling from Tripoli to Algiers to Portugal and, finally, to the United States, and had been signed by officials at each stop along the way. Neither Congress nor President Adams would have been able to cancel the terms of the Treaty by the time they first saw it, and there is no record of discussion or debate of the Treaty of Tripoli at the time that it was ratified. However, there is a statement made by President Adams on the document that reads:
Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed, and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof.
Official records show that after President John Adams sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in May 1797, the entire treaty was read aloud on the Senate floor, and copies were printed for every Senator. A committee considered the treaty and recommended ratification. Twenty-three of the thirty-two sitting Senators were present for the June 7 vote which unanimously approved the ratification recommendation.
However, before anyone in the United States saw the Treaty, its required payments, in the form of goods and money, had been made in part. As Barlow declared: "The present writing done by our hand and delivered to the American Captain OBrien makes known that he has delivered to us forty thousand Spanish dollars,-thirteen watches of gold, silver & pinsbach,-five rings, of which three of diamonds, one of saphire and one with a watch in it, One hundred & forty piques of cloth, and four caftans of brocade,-and these on account of the peace concluded with the Americans." However, this was an incomplete amount of goods stipulated under the treaty (according to the Pasha of Tripoli) and an additional $18,000 had to be paid by the American Consul James Leander Cathcart at his arrival on April 10, 1799.
It was not until these final goods were delivered that the Pasha of Tripoli recognized the Treaty as official. In Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America by David Hunter Miller, which is regarded as an authoritative collection of international agreements of the United States between 1776 and 1937, Hunter Miller describes, "While the original ratification remained in the hands of Cathcart... it is possible that a copy thereof was delivered upon the settlement of April 10, 1799, and further possible that there was something almost in the nature of an exchange of ratifications of the treaty on or about April 10, 1799, the day of the agreed settlement." It is then that the Pasha declares in a Letter to John Adams on April 15, 1799, "Whereby we have consummated the Peace which shall, on our side, be inviolate, provided You are Willing to treat us as You do other Regencies, without any difference being made between Us. Which is the whole of what We have, at present, to say to You, wishing you at the same time the most unlimited prosperity."
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