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The winter of 1805-6 witnessed an unusual sight in Washington DC--the arrival of a Tunisian ambassador, Sidi Suliman Mellimelli. See https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tunisian-envoy for some of the details.

The visit is also discussed in Irving Brant's James Madison (volume 4, dealing with Madison as Secretary of State), p. 306:

"Mellimelli landed next day with his party of eleven, including four Turkish attachés (he himself was a Turk), Negro servants and an Italian band. The ambassador called at once on Madison, followed by the carrier of his four-foot pipe. Mellimelli was a man of fifty, with an eight-inch black beard streaked with gray, who usually wore rich scarlet and gold silks topped by a twenty-yard turban of white muslin. The arrangements for him, he reported, were satisfactory, except for one omission. He needed some concubines. Madison supplied the deficiency with 'Georgia, a Greek,' and charged the cost to the State Department. 'Appropriations to foreign intercourse,' wrote Madison a few months later, 'are terms of great latitude and may be drawn on by very urgent and unforeseen occurrences.'"

(As Brant notes, to make the social scene in Washington a bit more colorful, not only was Mellimelli present, but so were numerous Indians, some sent east by Lewis and Clark. This created some social problems--the Sacs would not eat with the Osages because their tribes were at war--but after all the British and French ambassadors, Merry and Turreau, obeyed a similar taboo. At one point, at a reception in Dolley Madison's drawing room, Mellimelli asked the red men if they were followers of Mohammed, Moses [1], or Jesus Christ. "We worship the Great Spirit without an agent" was their reply. Mellimelli called them "vile heretics" and asked Jefferson how he could prove that these men were descended from Adam. "The president replied it was difficult.")

Did the public ever learn that Madison was charging this particular cost to the State Department? I have not seen anything stating that it did, though https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tunisian-envoy
notes that Jefferson "assured one senator that obtaining peace with the Barbary powers was important enough to 'pass unnoticed the irregular conduct of their ministers'." Obviously the public didn't assume that Turks were either celibate or monogamous, but this is not a matter of simply tolerating "irregular conduct" for the sake of diplomacy but of actually providing the woman at taxpayers' expense. Were American voters of the time worldly enough to accept this? (It is true that fundamentalism was less strong in the US than it would be; the Second Great Awakening was just starting to get underway. Still, even some non-fundamentalists might think Madison went a bit too far...)

Remember that Madison's election in 1808 was not nearly as easy as it may look from the final electoral vote. Yes, he did overwhelmingly get the support of the Republican caucus in Congress--but that was because his opponents boycotted the caucus. And even then he faced opposition from a somewhat resurgent Federalist party (which capitalized on the unpopularity of the Embargo in New England), from Vice President George Clinton, and from his fellow Virginian Monroe. (See https://web.archive.org/web/2016030...tDetail.html?UserBlogID=24&UserBlogPostID=268 for some details.) Could some equivalent of a modern tabloid headline reading MADISON PIMPED FOR BARBARY PIRATES AT TAXPAYERS' EXPENSE [2] have been fatal to Madison's election hopes in 1808?

[1] According to
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tunisian-envoy
However, according to Brant, he gave the three alternatives as Jesus,Mohammed, or Abraham.

[2] Mellimelli brought a fine Arabian stud horse as a gift, and it might have been sold for enough to pay all the expenses of the Tunisian mission--including Georgia--but there's no need to burden a story with such details. Brant says (p. 308) that there is nothing to indicate whether the horse covered the cost of the mission.
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