James Leander Cathcart was one of six American sailors captured by an Algerian corsair off the coast of Portugal in 1785. He was held in servitude for 11 years, but through luck and cunning managed to rise from dangerous and demeaning labor-it was his job to feed the lions in the palace gardens-to the highest position available to a Christian slave: that of clerk to the Algerian regency or Dey (Cathcart 144). During his captivity Cathcart accumulated enough money to purchase the ship that would carry him back to the United States. The Dey allowed him to go-even lent him some of the money-but he had no intention of releasing the other American seamen held captive in Algiers; their number was about 100 at that time (Baepler 103-04, 144; Allison 20). Cathcart sailed home to plead for his fellow captives, which meant pressing the American government to capitulate to the Dey's ransom demands. Whatever the episode reveals about the Dey's cunning, it is emblematic of the complexity of the American encounter with Islam at the end of the eighteenth century. Cathcart was forced into what might be called a pact with the devil: motivated out of sympathy for his fellow captives he in effect does the Dey's bidding. In his memoir, unpublished during his lifetime, Cathcart downplays the conflict by describing his decision in terms of sentimental rather than national or religious loyalty. He wants to help his fellow captives; he also believes that cooperation is possible across lines of national and religious difference (Cathcart 141,145; Field 39). The bonds of sentiment, like those of commerce, were supposed to traverse differences in creed. Indeed, the same feelings that led Cathcart to cooperate with the Dey moved him to propose a transatlantic naval alliance that would force the Barbary States to renounce piracy and accept the rules of commerce. He called this alliance the "union of sentiment" (Cathcart 141, 145, 129). i The union of sentiment, as Cathcart conceived it, crossed national and religious boundaries. Like many of his contemporaries, Cathcart believed that fellow feeling could
