John Foss, barbary captivity, and strains of American thought in the eighteenth century -

Abstract

This work is an attempt to draw out the ideological underpinnings of A Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss, the 1798 captivity narrative of the Massachusetts sailor John Foss. This study undertakes to demonstrate how the Journal draws on motivating secular and religious thought to make sense of the “embarrassments” John Foss and his fellow American captives endured at the hands of their Muslim masters in Algiers. By identifying the American nation with the sufferers of biblical history, Foss mediated the weakness endemic to the United States in his time and appealed to an afflictive model of progress. This teleological model sustained the period’s rising “secular optimism,” and the Journal’s narrative binds the captive’s fate with that of the nation while demonstrating an important discursive use of Islam in the early United States. The experiences in Algiers in the 1780s and 1790s made manifest many of the inadequacies of the American government, military, and social institutions in what Robert Allison has characterized as “a time of fear.” The roughly three-decade course of American Barbary captivity that culminated in Tripoli in the early nineteenth century, however, would transport the nation to an ideologically significant “time of triumph.” This progression describes an arc resembling that followed by the English in the previous century. As Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar have written of seventeenth-century Britain, “the nightmare of captivity gave way to the dream of empire.” John Foss’s Journal appeared at a critical juncture of a similar transition in the American relationship to the world of Islam. The severity of Foss’s abjection forced him to confront the modest exigencies of American identity in the early years of American independence. More important, however is that Foss also embraced the optimistic thrust of many American ideologies emerging at the time he wrote the Journal. Reconciling th