Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  In any event, no sooner had Cochrane’s ships departed the Chesapeake than he received orders from the Admiralty to proceed with the 4,000-man army southward to the Caribbean, and once there to rendevous at Jamaica with an even larger fleet embarking from Portsmouth and from Bordeaux, containing an army of the Duke of Wellington’s veterans of the Peninsular campaign. At the time they wrote the orders, Imperial Army headquarters in London had assumed that General Ross would command this combined force; while dismayed to learn of his death, in his stead they hurried off Lieutenant General Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, to catch up with the armada, already at sea, and lead it against New Orleans.

  Wellington himself had just been tapped to take overall charge of the American war, but he remained pessimistic. “I don’t promise myself much success there,” he told the prime minister. Still in Europe trying to tidy up affairs after his defeat of the French, Wellington also tried to persuade the British to tone down the proposed peace terms with the United States, and, as we shall see, disapproved of the operation to take New Orleans.

  Unquestionably, both nations were growing weary of war. The British had at first embraced the American conflict with fire-breathing newspaper editorials and much shouting and foot-stamping in Parliament, but they soon became appalled at the prospect of renewed taxes to finance it, especially because of the costliness of the recent wars against Napoleon. In America, where the war had never been popular in the first place, by now things were far, far worse.

  For one thing, the economy was almost in paralysis; the U.S. Treasury was bankrupt and the government had defaulted on the national debt. Pay for the army was months in arrears and desertions were rising.* 30 The financial situation had gotten so bad that there wasn’t even enough money to pay for firewood to heat the newly built cadets’ quarters at West Point, and the students had taken to stealing rails from nearby farmers’ fences, causing an uproar in the area. America’s once-prosperous trade in agricultural products became almost nonexistent because of the British blockade. There was some blockade-running, of course, but the skyrocketing cost of maritime insurance made this problematic. All the bountiful American cash crops—cotton, tobacco, sugar, grains for flour—had become worthless to plant. Corn farmers had begun feeding their crops to cows and pigs.

  When Congress convened in September, it was understandably shocked at the ruins of what had been the shining capital city. Some members even demanded moving the capital elsewhere—back to Philadelphia or up to New York. And everybody, Federalist and Democratic Republican alike, was furious at Madison, who now was lampooned on both sides of the Atlantic. Administration officials began to resign, including Secretary of War Armstrong, who was blamed for the Washington disaster. In his place was put Secretary of State James Monroe, who concluded that it would take at least 100,000 regular soldiers to win the war at some point in an uncertain future—and this with not a cent in the Treasury to pay them.

  Especially troublesome was the situation in New England, which had opposed the war from the outset and now, predictably, was perhaps the hardest hit. Its vital shipping industry was at a standstill, with both ships and cargoes rotting at the wharves. Unemployment had soared to the point that many citizens were forced to resort to public relief or even beggary. So fervent was the disaffection that many New Englanders defied the embargo against trading with the enemy and began an open commerce in livestock and other goods across the Canadian border. The circumstances became so inflammatory that in the early autumn of 1814 the New England state legislatures (minus, of course, what is now Maine, which had been occupied by the British) voted to convene at Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss a formal secession from the Union.* 31

  Not even during the darkest days of the Revolution was there more doomsaying, hand-wringing, and despair across the land. Citizens began to wonder if their country really was second-rate; certainly there was little to be proud of at present. Then came word that a large British fleet and its accompanying army were on their way to the practically defenseless Gulf Coast—to do who knew what? The disheartenment wasn’t limited to just New England; there was talk of upheaval, disaffection, even disunion across the country—in the taverns, newspapers, legislatures, churches, parlors, and streets and even in the Congress.

  On August 22, Jackson established his headquarters at Mobile. Though word of the British attacks on Washington and Baltimore would not reach him for some time, Old Hickory in any case felt he had sufficient cause to march into Spanish Florida, which he considered to be in cahoots with England.

  This put an unfortunate kink in his plan to reunite with Rachel, whom he hadn’t seen for most of the year. It had been his intention that Rachel, bringing Andrew Jr., join him in Mobile, where the family could enjoy the hospitality of that quaint French-Spanish city by the bay. After arranging for a new carriage and “a good pair of horses” for the trip, Jackson proceeded to instruct his wife in the proper comportment for her newfound status: “You must recollect that you are now a Major Generals lady in the service of the U.S. and as such you must appear elegant and plain, not extravagant, but in such state as Strangers expect to see you.”

  Shortly after his arrival in Mobile, however, Jackson’s spies told him that a British squadron had arrived at the port city of Pensacola on the Gulf of Mexico, about forty miles east. With not so much as a by-your-leave, the British commander, Colonel Edward Nicholls, escorted by a force of redcoats, had marched up to the quarters of the Spanish governor and informed him that the British would be using the city as a base of operations against the Americans. With an unctuous acquiescence from the Spanish comandante, the British raised their flag to equal height with that of the Spanish colors, and Colonel Nicholls got down to business. He installed his troops in several large Spanish fortifications and began recruiting an army of disaffected Indians—many of them leftovers from the Red Stick War—promising to reverse the Treaty of Fort Jackson and restore their lands, as well as, more materially, promising them firewater.* 32 They were to be armed with a shipload of twenty thousand weapons sent by Admiral Cochrane, then to speed southward for his rendezvous and the anticipated attack on New Orleans.

  On August 29, Nicholls issued a windy “proclamation” and ordered it distributed to the “Natives of Louisiana” (by which he meant Frenchmen and Spaniards and their offspring, who comprised the majority of that state’s white population). This document called for them to “assist in liberating from a faithless, imbecile government [meaning the Madison administration] your paternal soil.” In case they chose to disagree, Nicholls went on to threaten them: “I am at the head of a large body of Indians, well armed, disciplined and commanded by British officers [and] a good train of artillery [as well as] numerous British and Spanish squadrons of ships and vessels of war,” and then concluded, “The American usurpation in this country must be abolished.”

  That was enough for Jackson. After sending off a letter to the Spanish comandante at Pensacola, demanding to know the meaning of British troops in his district, and another to Governor Blount to hurry Tennessee troops down to Mobile—as well as one more canceling Rachel’s visit—Jackson set about reinforcing the shabbily built Fort Bowyer, the first British objective at the mouth of Mobile Bay and the key to the city. Having done so, he then began to calculate operations against Pensacola to rid that whole territory of both the British and the Spanish. Although he’d requested permission to do this back in June, Jackson had received no answer from the War Department, but now he was determined to charge ahead, permission granted or not. If war with Spain was the result, so be it—events were rapidly coming to a head, and Andrew Jackson was prepared to deal with them on his own.

  On the night of September 12, Jackson sailed from Mobile to inspect the rehabilitation of Fort Bowyer, about thirty miles south on the gulf. Three hours later his schooner encountered a small sailboat, whose passenger had an urgent message for the general: Fort Bowyer had just come under siege by the British, with four war
ships bombarding from the sea and a party of 600 Indians and 130 British marines attacking by land. Quickly understanding the peril he was in, Jackson ordered his boat to come about for Mobile, where he dragooned a company of infantry and sent them rushing to the besieged outpost down the bay.

  The next morning the relief force sailed back into Mobile Harbor with distressing news: Fort Bowyer had apparently exploded and been lost. The citizens of Mobile spent an anxious day and night, fearing the momentary arrival of the British to capture their city and turn them out of their homes. The following morning brighter word arrived: Fort Bowyer was secure. The giant flash that the relief party assumed was the fort’s powder magazine blowing up was actually the British twenty-gun man-of-war Hermes being blown to bits in the pass. The other three enemy ships departed, as did the shore raiding party, leaving 162 Indians and Englishmen dead on the beaches and aboard the ships. Fort Bowyer’s commander, a Major Lawrence, had gathered his defenders before the battle and—in a play on the famous last words of his namesake on the ill-fated Chesapeake—made them repeat their new motto: “Don’t give up the fort!”* 33

  With Fort Bowyer secure, Jackson set about organizing his attack on Pensacola, a task he looked forward to with relish, since the Spanish comandante had replied to his earlier letter by calling him “impertinent.”

  Slowly but surely, the troops Jackson had called for from Tennessee began to arrive, among them the reliable General Coffee’s 1,800 cavalrymen. On November 2 Jackson marched on Pensacola with an army of 3,000, including 700 regulars. Four days later it stood before the city while a messenger under a white flag walked toward Pensacola to deliver an ultimatum to surrender. He was fired upon, not apparently by the Spaniards but by the truculent, newly arrived British. That night Jackson maneuvered his soldiers so as to encircle the city, and at dawn on November 7, 1814, they stormed the town. There was brief fighting, but soon Jackson was informed that the Spanish comandante, “old, infirm and trembling, was stumbling around with a white flag in distracted quest” of him. The surrender was quickly arranged, but not before the British blew up their commandeered garrison at Fort Barrancas, reboarded their ships, and sailed off for parts unknown. What happened to the majority of hostile Indians has never been fully explained, although a number of them were rounded up after they were observed staggering drunkenly around the city, proudly wearing their British red coats without pants.

  Leaving a large number of his men to garrison Pensacola, Jackson then countermarched back to Mobile. After leaving even more men to protect that city, he took Coffee and his cavalry and pushed on to New Orleans, where he expected the main battle to break out.

  Five

  Central to the British design for the capture of Louisiana was an extraordinary scheme devised by Colonel Nicholls to enlist the services of the “pirates of Barataria,” who were for the most part not pirates at all but “privateers,” operating under “letters of marque” from foreign countries. Under the agreed concessions of maritime law, these official letters, or commissions, allowed the privateers to prey on the merchant shipping of any nation at war with the issuing country without—in the event they were captured—being subject to hanging as pirates, the accepted punishment of the day. Privateering had a long if not always honorable history—Sir Francis Drake, famed navigator of the Elizabethan era, was also a privateer. In certain instances, New England businessmen owned privateering ships, and Jefferson himself approved of their use in place of naval warships. But any time a diverse band of armed men is organized without the strict discipline of military rules and regulations, excesses can occur, and in privateering, especially, they occurred frequently.

  In the Gulf of Mexico, a large gathering of these strange and ruthless men had set up operations on Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, which lies about forty miles south of New Orleans as the crow flies, but with the only route to the city lying along the twisted tangle of rivers, bayous, creeks, and canals, it was about a hundred miles and normally took three days or so to get there. The leader of this band was a tall, handsome, magnetic Frenchman named Jean Laffite, who, using his blacksmith shop in New Orleans as a front, came to run a phenomenal business smuggling contraband (illegal goods on which no federal duties had been paid) to the grateful citizens of New Orleans, rich and poor alike, who had been deprived for years by the American embargo and the British blockade. At any given time there were as many as a thousand (some say five times that number) of these “Baratarians” on the island of Grand Terre, constantly coming and going in their armed sloops and schooners-of-war to attack mostly Spanish and sometimes British shipping in the gulf and the Caribbean.

  It was to the Baratarians that Colonel Nicholls dispatched his emissaries from HMS Sophie to see if they, with their valuable skills, armaments, and priceless knowledge of the area, could be enlisted into the British effort against New Orleans.

  On the morning of September 3, 1814, the Sophie dropped anchor in the straits between Grand Terre and its next-door neighbor Grand Isle and fired a signal cannon to announce her arrival. Through spyglasses the British observed hundreds of sleepy-eyed, ill-dressed men begin gathering on the sandy beach of Grand Terre, wondering no doubt at this strange new visitor. Presently a small boat was launched from the beach, rowed by four men with a fifth man in the bow. From the Sophie a longboat was likewise launched, carrying its captain, Nicholas Lockyer, and a Captain McWilliams of the Royal Marines. The boats met in the channel, and Lockyer, in his best schoolboy French, asked to be taken to Monsieur Laffite; the response from the man in the bow of longboat was that Laffite could be found ashore. Once on the beach, the two British officers were led through the suspicious crowd by the tall man in the bow, along a shaded path, and up the steps of a substantial home with a large wraparound gallery. At that point he genially informed them, “Messieurs, I am Laffite.”

  Jean Laffite remains among the most enigmatic and persistently romanticized figures in the American historical experience, ranking up there with such legends as Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Hickok. (Most of these, in the 1950s and ’60s, had their exploits turned into popular television serials. Laffite, however, had two major feature movies made of his life—one starring Fredric March and the other Yul Brynner—both produced by the flamboyant Cecil B. DeMille.) For a man who lived on the edges of society, Laffite would perform for the failing young republic a valuable and patriotic service when he might just as easily have sailed out of danger as a very wealthy man.

  Jean Laffite was born at Port-au-Prince in the French colony of San Domingo (now called Haiti), probably about 1782.* 34 His father had been a skilled leatherworker in Spain, France, and Morocco before he settled on Haiti and opened a prosperous leather shop. His mother died “before I could remember her,” and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, whose husband, a Jew, had been a pharmacist in Spain before he was murdered during the Inquisition. Laffite’s grandmother “never lost an opportunity to tell me about all the tribulations her relatives were subjected to,” and—like Jackson’s youthful hatred of the British—this became the cornerstone of young Jean’s lifelong antipathy toward the Spanish. There were eight children in the Laffite family, of whom Jean was the youngest. Of these, his brothers Pierre, two and a half years older, and Alexandre, a seaman eleven years older, would figure prominently in his life.

  After a rigorous education beginning at age six, Jean and Pierre were sent away, by the time they reached their early teens, to advanced schooling on the neighboring islands of Saint Croix and Martinique. Next they went to a military academy on the island of Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), where they received training in swordsmanship, navigation, and artillery; later they honed their skills in the martial arts of dueling and fencing back in Port-au-Prince.

  In the meantime, Alexandre returned occasionally from his adventures as a privateer attacking Spanish ships in the Caribbean and regaled his younger brothers with engaging stories of his exploits, among which was a s
tint as an artilleryman in the service of Napoleon. A short man with a bull-like build, hooked nose, large alert eyes, and a fiery temper, Alexandre had by now assumed the alias “Dominique You,” an unusual name, perhaps, but a common practice among privateers who realized that at any given point—in the days before photos and fingerprints—some authority might be looking for them under another.* 35

  So captivated were the two young Laffites by their older brother’s tales that nothing would do but for them to follow him to sea, despite their grandmother’s fervent protests. A cousin, Renato Beluche, also of French ancestry but a native of New Orleans, apparently helped them get aboard one of the many privateers bearing French letters of marque, where they “learned the trade,” so to speak, of this variation on piracy.

  For a quick look at how such men operated their everyday business back then, let us turn to an account attributed to Laffite of an unusual encounter between two privateering ships and a Spanish corvette, the Atrevida, in the spring of 1801. Spying the Spaniard off the coast of Vera Cruz, Beluche (who, because he was a bit older, was known as Uncle Reyne by the Laffite boys) ordered his vessel to pour on sail and overtake the corvette. When they closed, Beluche’s men were bewildered at what they saw. At first it appeared that there were many armed men on deck waiting for them. But soon it became apparent that, in fact, a mutiny was in progress. The Atrevida was manned for the most part by a crew of Frenchmen who, having been deported from Mexico by Spanish authorities, had been forced to work their way across the Atlantic as servile crewmen to the Spanish captain.