Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom
Under Laffite, Barataria took on a remarkable new look. In addition to the large home he built for himself, other houses of the thatched-palm-roof “cottage” variety began to spring up on Grand Terre as the money poured in. At any given time dozens of ships lay at anchor inshore, and not infrequently Baratarians could be seen strolling defiantly upon the streets of New Orleans in various stages of sobriety. Laffite had ordered the construction of a fort at the west end of Grand Terre and armed it with cannon from plundered ships. After the fall of the French in the Caribbean, Laffite arranged for the privateers to operate quasi-legally under the flag and letters of marque of Cartagena, a large city-state in what is now Colombia that had recently declared independence from Spain and was at war with that country. In addition, Laffite began to squirrel away large stores of arms, gunpowder, flints, and cannonballs at various secret locations in the wilds of Barataria—for use against exactly what is not clear—but these munitions would prove a godsend when the Battle of New Orleans broke out.
Six
Not everyone was pleased with the cozy arrangements between Laffite’s Baratarians and the citizens of New Orleans, especially William C. C. Claiborne, the new governor of Louisiana, which had recently been admitted as the eighteenth state of the Union. Claiborne’s complaints against the “pirates of Barataria” soon became abundant. First, they were violating U.S. tariff regulations right under his nose—no inconsequential matter either, since, without a federal income tax, the government in Washington depended for most of the nation’s revenues on duties collected on imported goods. The fact that the U.S. Treasury was about to go broke did not help things at all.
Then there was the African slave issue. Not only had the importation of slaves become illegal by federal law, but there were apparently further consequences of the Baratarian smuggling of this human cargo that distressed Governor Claiborne. Several years earlier a slave rebellion had erupted on the plantations north of New Orleans; after murdering a number of whites, the slaves marched on the city itself but were finally broken up by militia units. To Southern whites the notion of a slave uprising was their most dreaded fear, and the fact that it was blacks from Haiti who had instigated the earlier rebellion caused the governor and others to conclude that slaves from the Caribbean islands were rebellious by nature and thus not to be trusted—these were precisely the kinds of bondsmen the Laffites were importing to Louisiana.
Not only that, but Jean, Pierre, and a couple of dozen Baratarians had recently been apprehended at night by a company of U.S. Army regulars while attempting to smuggle about $4,000 worth of cinnamon into New Orleans. After posting bail, the Laffites skipped town for Grand Terre, from where they taunted the authorities. Claiborne issued a proclamation damning the activities of the Baratarians and specifically naming Jean Laffite as the principal troublemaker. The governor personally offered, “in the name of the state,” a $500 reward for the capture and delivery of Jean Laffite.
No one could accuse Laffite of not having a sense of humor—let alone audacity—because he immediately responded by having handbills plastered all over New Orleans promising a $5,000 reward for the capture and delivery to him of Governor Claiborne!
Numerous writs of arrest were also brought against the Laffites by federal authorities, but U.S. marshals, fearful for their lives, refused to go into Baratarian territory to serve them, and the court records are filled with marshals’ notations about the Laffites: “Not found in New Orleans.” Even the U.S. government surveyor declined to practice his business in the Baratarians’ lair, writing his boss in Washington, “They are an outlaw set [and] I am fearful they will give me some trouble.” In fact, the surveyor went on, the Baratarians had actually arrested several customs agents and sentenced one of them “to ten years at hard labor with a 56-pound weight hung to his leg.” As if that wasn’t enough, a number of American merchants in New Orleans began to complain to Claiborne that since most of the smugglers’ goods were being acquired by their French Creole rivals, their own businesses were suffering.
Try as he would to rid himself of this lawlessness, the governor was continually whipsawed. After an encounter between customs agents and the Baratarians left one agent dead and two others “greviously wounded,” Claiborne went to the Louisiana legislature to seek action. The legislators—preponderantly of French extraction—considered the governor’s request for money and men to destroy the Baratarian stronghold and “took it under advisement,” where, as the New Orleans historian Stanley A. Clisby aptly put it, “it remains to this day.”
Time, however, was running out for the Baratarians. In his frustration Governor Claiborne finally appealed directly to President Madison, who ordered the secretary of war and the secretary of the navy to do something. They in turn told Commodore Daniel T. Patterson of the navy and Colonel George T. Ross, commanding the 44th U.S. Infantry, to come up with a plan to rid the country of these “banditi” who were attacking ships on the high seas belonging to “nations not at war with the United States.”
Accordingly, the Carolina, a schooner-of-war armed with fourteen guns, was moved to New Orleans for the express purpose of breaking up the operations at Grand Terre. The fact that she was still there when the British attack broke out, and the crucial role she played in repelling it, remains one of the delicious ironies in a war filled with irony.
In the meantime, further trouble came the Laffites’ way. In the late summer of 1814, just as Jackson was concluding the Treaty of Fort Jackson with the Indians, a federal grand jury in New Orleans indicted Pierre Laffite for aiding and abetting piracy, a hanging offense. Pierre had recently suffered a stroke (which left him somewhat cross-eyed), and he had taken to spending time in the city with his wife and family, which was where the authorities caught up with him. He was thrown into the calaboose—the filthy, lice-ridden, old Spanish jail—without bail and chained to the wall, in case he entertained the notion of escape.
This development weighed heavily on Jean, for he had every reason to be concerned for his brother’s health in those conditions. No amount of legal maneuvering by lawyer Edward Livingston could spring Pierre from “the depths of a dungeon,” as Laffite described it, and for all Jean knew Pierre’s next steps might be to the gallows. These matters were on Jean’s mind when he received the delegation from His Britannic Majesty’s military services at Grand Terre on that sultry day in early September 1814.
After recovering from the surprise that their tall, swarthy guide was none other than the infamous Laffite himself, the British captains got down to business. Initially, this consisted of handing over to Laffite a packet of documents produced by their superiors that included an advance copy of Colonel Nicholls’s “proclamation,” which was about to be distributed to the citizens of Louisiana. Next were two documents of the carrot-and-stick variety, signed by Captain W. H. Percy, British senior naval commander in the Gulf of Mexico. On the one hand, Percy threatened to send a fleet to destroy the Baratarians and their stronghold because of their privateering activities against Spanish and British shipping. On the other, if the Baratarians would join with the British, they would receive “lands within His Majesty’s colonies in America” and the opportunity to become British subjects with a full pardon for any previous crimes.* 44
Finally there was a personal note from Colonel Nicholls to Laffite as “Commandant at Barataria,” in which the Irishman explained himself by announcing, “I have arrived in the Floridas for the purpose of annoying the only enemy Great Britain has in the world. . . .” What the British wanted, the letter went on to say, was use of all the boats and ships of the Baratarians and the enlistment of the Baratarian gunners and fighters in the invasion of Louisiana. Nicholls also promised Laffite, personally, that he would be made a captain in His Majesty’s Royal Navy.
This was quite a bit to digest, but at the same time it seems to have made Jean hungry, too, for as Judge Walker tells us, after glancing over the papers Jean ordered an elaborate feast to be laid out for His Majesty
The drift of the conversation, according to Walker, then came around to the declaration that Laffite and his minions were crucial to guiding the British invasion force up through the swamps, and that once New Orleans was secured the army would move upriver and “act in concert” with the British forces in Canada, thereby, as Laffite put it, “to shove the Americans into the Atlantic Ocean.” The British officers indicated that His Majesty’s forces also intended to set free all the slaves they could find and enlist their help in subduing the presumptuous Americans.
The two Englishmen next offered Laffite their pièce de résistance: a bribe of 30,000 British pounds (more than $2 million today) if he could convince his followers to join with the British against the United States. If this seems like a lot of money—and it was—the British would nevertheless have consided it well spent, since it was understood that the Baratarians’ knowledge of those tangled, trackless marshes and bayous leading up to New Orleans would be nearly priceless. To attack the city by appearing on its outskirts right out of the swamps would for all purposes amount to a British coup de main in which the money was a pittance compared to the enormous amount of booty they expected to confiscate from New Orleans warehouses after so many years of embargo and blockade.
As Laffite was pondering this generous offer, however, trouble began to brew. Upon seeing the red-coated British marine and blue-jacketed British naval captain, the run-of-the-mill Baratarians suspected that something nasty was afoot. Not a few of them were Americans and, despite their troubles with the law (which they mostly considered a nuisance), they wished no part of a British scheme to conquer America. Accordingly, a disturbance broke out, with the Baratarians demanding to know the meaning of the Britons’ presence; some grumbled that His Majesty’s emissaries should be hanged as spies.
After considerable remonstration, Laffite managed to get his people calmed down long enough to spirit the Englishmen back to their gig and send them on their way, but, playing for time against the threatened British assault on his stronghold, he told the two envoys he needed “a fortnight” (fourteen days) to compose his men and put his personal affairs in order. After that, according to papers later filed with the U.S. Federal Court in New Orleans, Laffite promised the Englishmen that he and his men would be “entirely at your disposal.”
What was going on in Jean Laffite’s mind as he watched the Britishers sail happily away is uncertain. He must have considered the bribe, for it would have been far out of character for a man of his makeup to turn down that kind of money without a thought. Then there was the fact of his brother Pierre languishing in the wretched jail, contemplating the hangman’s noose—the British having also promised that, upon their victory, Pierre would be set free.
On the other hand, Laffite, though a Frenchman by birth, apparently considered himself something of a patriot where America was concerned. After all, the country had been good to him—at least until recently—as he had amassed a considerable fortune (though in blatant contravention of its laws) by being a smuggler on her shores. Also, under the British offer, he would have had to give up all his ships to take advantage of the promised “lands within His Majesty’s colonies in America,” and farming was not exactly Laffite’s goal in life. The slave-freeing business must have bothered him too; after all, being a slaver himself, Laffite would not likely cotton to any notion of arming slaves.
What exactly he might have thought about all or any of this appears to have had little more moment than a passing shadow, because Laffite promptly sat down with pen and paper and proceeded to double-cross his newfound British friends.
The British—at least Colonel Nicholls and his people—seemed to live in a fool’s paradise so far as the makeup of the American people was concerned. First, they had convinced themselves that a vast body of Indians from Florida would join them in the descent upon New Orleans, but they were, of course, disabused of that particular scheme by Andrew Jackson’s attack on Pensacola, which sent the Indians scattering into parts unknown. Likewise, they believed that the French and Spanish Louisiana Creoles hated America enough to rise up and join with them to separate from the United States.
More far-fetched was the British conviction—embodied in Nicholls’s proclamation of August 29—that even the Anglo-Americans living west of the Appalachians were so disaffected with the government in Washington that they would gladly acquiesce to a British invasion of their soil. (In a stunning display of geographical misunderstanding, Nicholls had appealed in his proclamation to the “Inhabitants of Kentucky, you have too long borne with grievous impositions . . . ,” failing entirely to include the then populous state of Tennessee, as well as the territories of Alabama and Mississippi.) As the historian Wilburt S. Brown aptly pointed out, these British soldier-diplomats “seemed to have become victims of their own propaganda.”
No matter what anybody would say about it later, Laffite’s letter to the U.S. authorities (even if somewhat tainted by a logically self-serving pardon request) was a bold, loyal, audacious, and public-spirited declaration of patriotism. Addressing himself to his powerful friend Jean Blanque, Laffite revealed the entire British scheme, as well as their smarmy offers and bribes to him, in such a way as to express a clear and present warning of the danger. He also informed Blanque that he was stringing the British along and asked for instructions from the authorities at New Orleans. A huge British fleet containing an entire army was at the moment gathering for an attack on the city, Laffite said, and he asked Blanque to do whatever he would with the information but obviously assumed Blanque would take it to the governor. When he was finished, Laffite put his letter into a packet and sent it by a special courier who reached Jean Blanque in New Orleans in less than a day, a remarkable feat in itself, since the trip from Grand Terre normally took three.
Jean Blanque did exactly what Laffite had expected him to do: he rushed those critial communications to Governor Claiborne. As a wealthy and respected lawyer, banker, and member of the Louisiana legislature (as well as an investor in Laffite’s privateering enterprise), Blanque carried considerable weight, especially since Laffite had included all the documents the British had given him, imperial seals and all.
At this point, Jean Laffite, if had he wanted, easily might have sailed over to the British and requested (at least a part of) his bribe, and then sailed away again to places unknown, a rich man. Or he simply could have ordered the Baratarians to load up their ships from the warehouses and done the same thing. That he didn’t seems testimony that Laffite must have felt either a certain loyalty to America or perhaps an animus against the British-Spanish cabal, but the fact remains that he did not take the easy way out; he chose sides.
If Laffite thought that the New Orleans authorities were now going to forgive him for smuggling, however, he was mistaken. Not only did they do no such thing, they decided not to believe him. When Blanque delivered Laffite’s communiqué to Claiborne, the governor convened the legislature’s Committee of Public Safety, which recently had been organized as the present crisis unfolded. This committee consisted, in addition to the governor, of a number of prominent citizens, including the American army and navy commanders, Ross and Patterson, Major General Jacques Villeré, head of the Louisiana militia, and the U.S. Customs collector, among others. Claiborne laid out the letters for the committee to read, then asked: “The council must decide two questions: first, are these letters genuine; second, is it proper for the Governor of Louisiana to enter into any correspondence with Jean Laffite or any of his associates.”
Most committee members insisted that the letters must be fakes, forgeries, and that Laffite was a low-down pirate simply trying to get his brother out of jail with a cheap gambi
Meanwhile, Laffite, who had been anxiously on the lookout for the return of his messenger, was both surprised and delighted to see in the messenger’s pirogue none other than his brother Pierre, who had magically “escaped” from jail. The magic probably had something to do with bribery, but in any case Pierre was free. Yet, as good news is so often followed by bad, Laffite’s spies in New Orleans also returned with the unpleasant wind that Patterson’s flotilla and army were assembling at New Orleans to put him out of business. This prompted Laffite to write another letter, this time to Claiborne himself, regarding “the safety of the country,” in which Laffite candidly admitted his sin of smuggling but offered his own services and those of the Baratarians “in defense of the country,” asking in return a pardon for himself, Pierre, and any other of his men who were indicted or about to be. “I am a stray sheep,” he wrote, “wishing to come back into the fold.”
Matters then began unfolding very quickly, as they are apt to when war is just over the horizon. At about this time an anonymous letter from a privateer spy in Havana—where Nicholls’s flotilla had put in before sailing on to Pensacola—was delivered to Laffite. The spy was apparently a good one, too, because the letter revealed the British plot to enlist thousands of hostile Indians in Florida, as well as the slaves; provided the names and types of British ships, plus a description of troops and artillery; and gave a summary of the entire plan of operations: first attack westward from Pensacola and secure the American fort at the mouth of Mobile Bay, then the conquest of Mobile itself, followed by a march on New Orleans in concert with the two British fleets now headed in that direction. The spy closed with a warning: “You have not a moment to lose; because if they get a footing, it will be very difficult to get clear of them.” He went on to describe Colonel Nicholls as “an impatient blustering Irishman, apparently brave and cruel.” (The letter proved to be chillingly accurate.)