Good background from Christopher Hitchens in the beginning of his New York Times review of three new non-ficition works on America’s Pirate Wars:
Viewed from our hyperpower perspective, the decades between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were so precarious they seem to belong almost to the history of another country. And in many ways they do. The ”United States” at that time was to the east coast of North America what Chile now is to the west coast of the southern cone: a long and ribbonlike territory with indistinct or disputed frontiers, caught between mountains and the ocean. Three large European empires — British, French and Spanish — exerted immense influence on the rest of the continent, and on the Atlantic and Caribbean approaches to it. The new Republic had a tenuous and fluctuating relationship with France, a hostile one with Britain and a competitive one with Spain. It had no army or navy to speak of, and a Constitution that was skeptical about, if not antagonistic to, the maintenance of permanent armed forces. The two human symbols of this vulnerability were the American sailor seized from his ship and ”impressed” into the British or French Navy, and the sailor or passenger taken at sea by marauding Muslim pirates and delivered into slavery.
Each of three new books treats a different aspect of that vertiginous period. The word ”corsair,” which can mean either pirate ship or pirate, became inextricably and incorrectly linked with the Romantic as a result of Byron’s 1814 poem of that name. But corsairs ruthlessly kidnapped and plundered, whether in Africa (the Barbary Coast) or the Gulf of Mexico. We may still harbor a slight sympathy for the smuggler and the bootlegger, but there was little romance in living at a time when such people had state power.