US diplomacy treated a single African Muslim’s freedom as leverage with North African states

Evidence

In 1826, he wrote to his father, asking him to pay whatever ransom was required to free him. With the help of local whites, the letter was sent to one of Mississippi’s US senators, then to the US consul in Morocco, and finally to Secretary of State Henry Clay. Secretary Clay apparently intervened in the case because he thought that freeing him might help smooth relations with the North African Barbary states with which the United States military had fought two wars—one from 1801 to 1805 and the other from 1815 to 1816. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 365

Categorization

• SEED: The conflation of West African and North African Muslims in 1820s US diplomacy is a vivid case of Orientalist category collapse worth an essay.