How Pirates Made The U.S. Navy Into The Strongest Sea Force On Earth - When the Revolutionary War came to a close, the United States spent nearly a decade without a regular navy. With the war against Great Britain won, the reasoning went, why would it need one? The simple answer is: pirates. After breaking with England, American merchant ships were no longer protected by the Royal Navy. The fledgling U.S. government couldn’t raise a Navy but believed it could stave off attacks from Barbary pirates — north African privateers from Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli with loose ties to the Ottoman Empire — through treaties.

While the Moroccan pirates cooperated, Ottoman Algerian leader Dey Mohammed ben-Osman declared war on the United States, capturing a merchant ship in 1784, and offered to assume peaceful relations only if the U.S. government could pay him a tribute. Though the U.S. was able to negotiate a treaty with Morocco in 1786, Congress didn’t have the money to pay off Mohammad, according to records held by the U.S. State Department.

Luckily for then-President George Washington, Portugal was warring with Algiers and protected U.S. merchant ships — until 1793, when the two states reached a truce, opening American vessels up to attack once more.

Desperate to utilize the Mediterranean trade route and protect American ships, the 1794 Congress, at Washington’s urging, authorized the “gradual creation” of the U.S. Navy with a fleet of just six ships.

Shortly after, America’s Navy got its first taste of military action against its Revolutionary ally, France, in 1798, when its monarchy fell and the U.S. government stopped paying off its debts from the war. This angered France, along with the fact that the United States and Great Britain settled colonial disputes in the Jay Treaty — a move that France viewed as violating the U.S.’s public commitment to neutrality in the English-French squabble.

After this “Quasi War,” then-President John Adams would become known as the “Father of the American Navy” as a result of his strong advocacy for a formidable sea service, which included the acquisition of “twelve vessels, of up to twenty-two guns each,” according to an annotated bibliography by the Navy’s history division.

A small but aggressive force, the nascent U.S. Navy was particularly effective at pressing France to bend to America’s wishes. “In the war, the navy proved itself an effective instrument of national policy,” the bibliography reads.

However, the U.S. government was struggling to keep the Barbary states at bay, with financial tributes reaching roughly $1.25 million by 1797.

Congress still fell $140,000 short to Algiers and nearly $150,000 short to Tripoli, according to author Gregory Fremont Barnes’ 2014 book “The Wars of the Barbary Pirates.” By 1801, the stiffed pirates of Tripoli had launched a full-on campaign against the U.S. that would later be deemed the First Barbary War.