In 1801 Thomas Jefferson deployed American's infant navy to the Mediterranean in the nation's first projection of military power abroad in reaction to decades of piracy emanating from the regencies of North Africa. 1 The flotilla's efforts eventually included a naval blockade against the port city of Tripoli as well as an overland Marine campaign in support of a coup attempt against a Barbary sovereign. While the military campaign is often relegated to little more than a colourful historical footnote of American foreign relations, the intellectual milieu surrounding domestic perceptions of the Barbary threat offers revealing insights into the complex interplay of war, diplomacy and literary culture.During the period of American involvement in the Barbary, literary representations were a primary means by which citizens were introduced to this largely unknown adversary, communicated through an ample supply of travel logs, captivity narratives, theatrical presentations, historical studies, poetry and works of popular fiction. These depictions of Barbary culture drew on several persistent sources of knowledge; inherited presumptions of European philosophy, powerful subtexts of republican political ideology and a vast reservoir of domestic experience with Native American tribes serving as a basis for cultural comparison. These disparate notions melded together to form a uniquely Americanised strain of inherited old world orientalism, preoccupied with domestic ideological concerns over matters of political virtue, religion and state, gender equality, free commerce, private property, and persistent a paranoia over the risks of backsliding into the grips of monarchical despotism.In prelude to conflict, popular literature served two important functions for the reading public, first as telescope, second as mirror. The literary telescope offered distant glimpses revealing the face of the adversary and providing an intellectual context for the crafting of diplomacy and war. At the same time the 1.In this context the term Barbary States generally refers to the Ottoman military provinces of Algiers, Tripoli, Tunisia and the independent regency of Morocco.