The Second Barbary War (a.k.a. the Algerian War) begins: Commander-in-Chief Madison orders Commodores Stephen Decatur, Jr., and William Bainbridge of the Navy of the united States to sail to the Barbary States, and reassert the right of free navigation on international waters.  During the Napoleonic World War of 1812, the Dey of Algiers had resumed the practice of exacting tributes from American commercial vessels on the Mediterranean.

       [added 8/22/2026] Thanks to Jim Lorenz for this entry; who found an appropriate quote, while reading Christopher Hitchens’, “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” Twelve (May 2007); On page181, quoting at length to preserve the integrity of the text:

As far as I am aware, there is no country in the world today where slavery is still practiced where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran.  This returns us to the retort delivered, in the very early days of the republic, to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  These two slaveholders had called on the ambassador of Tripoli in London to ask him by what right he and his fellow Barbary potentates presumed to capture and sell American crews and passengers from ships using the Strait of Gibraltar.  (It is now estimated that between 1530 and 1780 more than one and a quarter million Europeans were carried off in this way.) As Jefferson reported to Congress:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of the Prophet, that is was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.

       Ambassador Abdrahamen went on to mention the requisite price of ransom, the price of protection from kidnapping, and last but not least his own personal commission in these proceedings. (Religion once again betrays its man-made conveniences.) As it happens he was quite right in what he said about the Koran. The eighth sura, revealed at Medina, deals at some length with the justified spoils of war and dwells continually on the further postmortem “torments of fire” that await those who are defeated by the believers. It was this very sura that was to be used only two centuries later by Saddam Hussein to justify his mass murder and dispossession of the people of Kurdistan.

       Republican (constitutionalist) President Madison signs the Army Authorization Act of 1815, approving a standing (peacetime) army of 10,000.

        NOTE: Madison had originally requested an amount twice that size.

       [restored 12/4/2021]