The burning of the Philadelphia and the bombardment of Tripoli are much
too fine a subject for rhetorical pyrotechnics to have escaped lecturers
and orators of the Fourth-of-July school. We have all heard, time and
again, how Preble, Decatur, Trippe, and Somers cannonaded, sabred, and
blew up these pirates. We have seen, in perorations glowing with pink
fire, the Genius of America, in full naval uniform, sword in hand,
standing upon a quarter-deck, his foot upon the neck of a turbaned Turk,
while over all waves the flag of Freedom.

The Moorish sketch is probably different. In it, Brother Jonathan must
appear with his liberty-cap in one hand and a bag of dollars in the
other, bowing humbly before a well-whiskered Mussulman, whose shawl is
stuck full of poniards and pistols. The smooth-faced unbeliever begs
that his little ships may be permitted to sail up and down this coast
unmolested, and promises to give these and other dollars, if his
Highness, the Pacha, will only command his men to keep the peace on the
high-seas. This picture is not so generally exhibited here; but it is
quite as correct as the other, and as true to the period.

The year after Preble's recall, another New-England man, William Eaton,
led an army of nine Americans from Egypt to Derne, the easternmost
province of Tripoli,--a march of five hundred miles over the Desert. He
took the capital town by storm, and would have conquered the whole
Regency, if he had been supplied with men and money from our fleet.
"Certainly," says Pascal Paoli Peek, a non-commissioned officer of
marines, one of the nine, "certainly it was one of the most
extraordinary expeditions ever set on foot." Whoever reads the story
will be of the same opinion as this marine with the wonderful name.
Never was the war carried into Africa with a force so small and with