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. Why did Clay think that the freeing of a Muslim from West Africa might have some effect on North African Muslim leaders? This was no simple error of geography. It was also an expression of Clay's racialist thinking. Like other slave holders, Clay likely thought of Muslim slaves literally as a "breed apart." The elites among them were seen not only as better educated but also as more "civilized" than non-Muslim slaves and thus, it was assumed, these Muslims had to be not only from different religious and ethnic communities but also from different racial stock. Ibrahima could not possibly be of pure "Negro" origins; for Clay and others like him, Ibrahima must have had Arab or Moorish blood in his veins.

XREF: Connects to broader historical scholarship on racial categorization and how Europeans and Americans rationalized educated, elite non-Westerners by postulating racial mixture—echoes of Hamitic hypothesis and racial hierarchy thinking.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 365