Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  Laffite immediately rushed this letter to Claiborne by another special courier, and the governor, in turn, not only sent it along to Jackson with the others but had them all published in the newspaper, further adding to the city’s growing alarm. Along with the other unfolding evidence of a British invasion, Laffite’s communications undoubtedly confirmed Jackson’s decision to attack Pensacola, but when he saw Laffite’s offer to bring his Baratarians to the defense of New Orleans in exchange for a pardon, Jackson unwisely reverted to doctrinaire pedantry. He denounced the Baratarians as “hellish banditi” and finally got around to issuing a proclamation of his own—directed to the Louisianans—in which he informed the startled Creoles that the “base, perfidious Britons” were “the sworn enemies of all Frenchmen,” and that all Creoles should “nobly die in the last ditch” before accepting Nicholls’s suggestion to join with the British in the overthrow of American rule in Louisiana. What Jackson failed to understand at this point was that he would soon need all the help he could get, including that of the hellish banditi.

  Laffite, for his part, was now waiting for the other shoe to drop; he knew not whose, nor where nor when. His fortnight time limit to join the British invasion had expired, and several of His Majesty’s warships now lay off Barataria Bay, possibly to enforce the “stick” part of the naval commander’s earlier warning to him—and now the Americans, too, were organizing a force to send against him. What was a pirate to do? Laffite was not a man to wonder for long; he ordered most of the Baratarians to sail away from Grand Terre with whatever of value they could carry, including munitions. He put his older brother Dominique You in charge of the island with about five hundred men, instructing him to fight the British from the fort if they attacked and, if that proved unsuccessful, to burn all the warehouses and ships at anchor. Pierre, who had become ill, was then sent off to a plantation to the west. With all that done, Laffite did the sensible thing and fled with Pierre to a friend’s plantation on the so-called German Coast, northwest of the city, to await developments, which were not long in coming.

  A contemporary American visiting New Orleans from New York, Philadelphia, or Boston might easily have concluded that he had been deposited in a foreign land—which, for all practical purposes, he had. A brief examination of the New Orleans of the time is useful now, since to understand the forces at work under the impending emergency one would almost have to go back several hundred years to the bewildering days of the Borgias.

  The city had been founded in 1718 as a trading post on a crescent switchback curve of the half-mile-wide Mississippi River by the Frenchman Sieur de Bienville, who had recently established a similar post at the head of Mobile Bay, about 140 miles to the east. In many ways the site was ideal, for it provided an expansive riverfront to accept the downriver canoes, rafts, and boats that brought goods from the rivers that drained the Mississippi Basin all the way to the Great Lakes, with tributaries such as the Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, Wabash, Arkansas, and dozens of smaller streams leading into the interior. It had access to world markets both from the river, about a hundred twisting southward miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and from Lake Pontchartrain, just a few miles away.

  In other important ways, however, the site was far from ideal, primarily since it lay about eight feet below the level of the river, which during storms—let alone hurricanes—could (and did) cause serious problems, until the levees were built. The site was also swampy and would have to be drained to make it habitable. Nevertheless, Bienville named the place La Nouvelle Orleans, after the priggish Duke of Orleans, and sailed away—no doubt after wishing his small colony of French settlers good luck—never to return.

  For the next half century New Orleans languished as a trading backwater with the dreaded yellow fever and other tropical diseases periodically reducing its population dramatically. Frenchmen being Frenchmen, however, they tried to make it nicer by laying out a formal, symmetrical city of European design, with elegant government buildings, a cathedral, and a large convent for the Ursuline nuns. Then, in 1763, after losing the Seven Years’ War, the French were forced to cede the territory of Louisiana to Spain, which began adding its considerable national flavors, until 1800, when the Spanish, then under Napoleon’s domination, transferred it back to France. By 1803 Napoleon realized that pressing military affairs on the European continent foreclosed his ability to support, defend, and administer the great territory, and, needing cash, he got the bright idea to sell it to the foolish Americans, who overnight doubled the size of their country for a paltry $15 million.

  By this time there was a small but growing Anglo-American presence in New Orleans, but as the War of 1812 broke out, most of its twenty-five thousand citizens were of French, Spanish, or African extraction. Of these last—which comprised the majority of people in the district—about half were so-called free men of color, including the several thousand who had recently arrived from Haiti, or they were slaves.

  The blacks, despite their population superiority, could not play much of a role in the political intrigues, since free men of color were not allowed to vote, sit on juries, run for public office, or intermingle publicly with whites. Mostly they became tradesmen—bricklayers, carpenters, lamplighters, tailors, and oftentimes overseers on the burgeoning sugar plantations. Slaves, on the other hand, were treated basically like barnyard animals.

  That left the three white groups—the French, the Spanish and their descendants (Creoles), and the Americans—each of which detested the others. The first impression most of the by then self-assumed aristocratic French and Spaniards* 45 had of Americans was of those ragged, ill-mannered, drunken, and profane flatboaters from “Kaintucky” who arrived dressed in animal skins with their cargoes of furs, lumber, and occasionally something more useful, such as corn whisky. Because the current flowed so strongly southward, there was no way the rafts could make it back upriver, so the Kentuckians (and Tennesseans, Illinoisans, and Ohioans—all lumped together as “Kaintucks”) often stayed and brawled and drank and whored and made themselves otherwise obnoxious to the recently refined tastes of the Mediterranean Creoles.* 46

  It has been said of New Orleans that it is so romantic you leave it either crying or drunk, and that was probably just as true in 1814 as it is today. A Sunday stroll around town would have found the levee path along the river thronged with colorful people in their Sunday best: Creoles, Kaintucks, mulattoes, quadroons, and with some Irish, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese thrown into the mix, speaking a variety of tongues, gathering around impromptu musical bands, fighting, flirting, laughing, and cursing, all against the backdrop of the tall masts of sailing ships that crowded the city wharves. The naturalist John J. Audubon described the levee on Sunday as “crowded by people of all sorts as well as colors, the market very abundant, the church bells ringing, the billiard balls knocking, the guns [of hunters] heard all around.” At night, several theaters presented (in different languages) the latest plays from Europe. Probably the most eclectic theater in town was the Grand Opera, where performances were sung in numerous languages, including Russian. For those interested in sport there was a racetrack and any number of cockfighting pits.

  There were even more exotic entertainments. For $1 (half price for children) one could see large animal fights, pitting a Bengal tiger against a bear, twelve dogs against a large bull, or six bulldogs against a Canadian bear—each event serenaded by a military band.* 47 One could, if one wished, attend a voodoo rite conducted by Haitian immigrants, at which some participants were turned into zombies while others drank the warm blood of a live rooster (as a cure for zombiism). And, of course, there were the Quadroon Balls, where for an entrance fee of $10 wealthy men could drink, gamble, and make personal arrangements with young “high-yellow” women.

  A walk along the unpaved and often muddy streets of New Orleans was rarely without anxiety, especially in certain parts of town. Thanks to the volatile mix of sailors, gamblers, riverboat men, soldiers of fortune, and other dubious charac
ters, the city boasted the nation’s highest crime rate, particularly for murder. Even so-called gentlemen went armed with concealed pocket pistols, sword canes, and elaborately carved knives and daggers.

  Then there was the dueling, for which New Orleans was infamous. In earlier days the duels had been mostly swordfights in which honour was satisfied with the first drawing of blood, but later, when men began using firearms, duels turned into far more deadly affairs. According to the New Orleans writer John Bailey, on a single Sunday morning twenty men paired off to fight back-to-back duels beneath a tree called the Dueling Oak on one of the sugar plantations, and three of them were carried away dead.

  By 1814 relations between the French and Spanish Creoles and the Americans had so soured that each group sullenly occupied a different part of town. The Creoles despised the Americans as greedy, dull, and uncouth, and the Americans returned the compliment by branding the Creoles frivolous, foppish, and arrogant. The Creoles were Catholics and the Americans Protestants; the Creoles delicately dipped snuff and sneezed into their lace handkerchiefs, while the Americans chewed and spat tobacco juice on the ground; the American men shook hands, the Creole men kissed one another on the cheeks; and the Creoles conversed in French and Spanish, for which the Americans considered them “foreigners.” Because the Creoles enjoyed a voting majority, they controlled the state legislature and city government, and some had even refused to recognize that they were now part of the United States. When William Claiborne, a Virginian by birth, was appointed Louisiana governor by Thomas Jefferson, it led to even more resentment, especially since Claiborne did not speak, and refused to learn, any language but English, which, upon reflection, might not have mattered much since he and the legislature were barely on speaking terms anyway.

  As the intelligence of a British invasion of Louisiana unfolded, the problems exacerbated, because Claiborne began to fear that—as the British had implied—Creoles (especially the Spaniards) might not only refuse to help defend the city but actually join the enemy. When Claiborne communicated that unpleasant prospect to Andrew Jackson, it could not have been reassuring news for the general.

  The American attack on Barataria arrived at just after daybreak on September 16, 1814, the morning after Jean and Pierre Laffite had fled. The invasion force, organized by Commodore Patterson, consisted of the schooner-of-war Carolina, six gunboats, and a number of barges carrying Colonel Ross’s men of the 7th Infantry Regiment. Having dropped down the Mississippi, the flotilla entered the gulf through the Southwest Pass and made for Grand Terre.

  Ashore, and on the privateers’ ships anchored in the harbor, anxious men waited with their cannon at the ready, matches lighted, wondering if the approaching fleet was British or American. Laffite’s instructions had been to fight if it was the British but, if American, not to resist. He had felt certain that his offer to help defend the country against the British would be accepted, the requested pardon bestowed, and the Baratarians’ stores of prize property respected, but it certainly didn’t look that way now. As the ships neared, word rang out that they were American, and so the Baratarians began to scramble for any means of escape—pirogues, rowboats, gigs, anything that would float—and headed west and north toward the trackless marshes.

  “I perceived the pirates were abandoning their vessels and were flying in all directions,” said Patterson. “I sent in pursuit of them.”

  Most got away, but about eighty were captured and thrown into the calaboose, including Dominique You and many of the other ship captains. It took Patterson and his men four days to collect all the goods and merchandise in the Baratarian warehouses, which they loaded into the twenty-six captured privateer schooners. Afterward they burned the Baratarians’ buildings—forty in all—and sent everything up to New Orleans to be catalogued and filed for themselves as claims in the prize court. It was quite a haul for Patterson and Ross—estimated at more than $600,000, a considerable fortune today—and that was the end of Barataria, though not of the Baratarians.* 48

  Seven

  The rendezvous of the British invasion armada was a sight to behold when it converged at Negril Bay, Jamaica, in November 1814. The pride of the navy, more than sixty vessels—from the huge eighty-gun ships of the line such as Tonnant, Admiral Cochrane’s flagship, to fighting brigs and frigates and armed troop transports, as well as dozens of cargo ships to carry off the millions in goods and merchandise they expected to capture at New Orleans—rested at anchor, each with a large Union Jack snapping in the breeze above the sparkling azure waters and tall promontories of this safe harbor. Aboard a number of the ships was a small army of British civil administrators—judges, Indian agents, colonial secretaries, and their minions—schooled to deliver His Britannic Majesty’s intended decrees and edicts to a defeated and cowed Louisiana population. There was even an acting governor, who had brought with him his five “fashionable, marriageable” daughters. This bureaucratic host came complete with a printing press to compose the edicts and decrees, along with an editor and printer.

  Also aboard many ships were the wives of British officers, invited to see the show.* 49 At night, on deck, regimental balls and dances were often held to the tunes of musical bands, and colorful lanterns swung from the shrouds and other rigging. It was said that the password and challenge during this period was “beauty and booty,” which some authors perhaps rightly have interpreted as “rape and plunder,” an allusion to the dark affair at Hampton, Virginia, earlier in the year.

  In the convoy, sailing down from the affairs at Washington and Baltimore, was Lieutenant George R. Gleig, a nineteen-year-old Oxford dropout who had been commissioned in the 85th Light Infantry Regiment. Three times wounded with Wellington’s army in Spain and France, Gleig kept a detailed journal of his experiences. Despite the death of their leader, General Ross, Gleig recorded that the British soldiers and sailors were filled with optimism during their passage south. As they neared the equator, the men were treated to hazing associated with the traditional initiation into the Order of Neptune.* 50 And on Gleig’s ship they also managed to catch a large shark—considered a delicacy, if only because it was fresh food.

  When the ships from France and England arrived in Jamaica on November 24 and anchored beside those that had come down from the Chesapeake, it was one of the largest such gatherings yet assembled at sea, including the Spanish Armada. It was said that the entire of Negril Bay seemed taken up; that one could almost step from ship to ship without getting a foot wet. The scene on the beaches had taken on a sort of carnival atmosphere: dozens of small boats coming and going; large ships constantly signaling one another with semaphore flags or “shouting trumpets” (megaphones). Many officers had pitched tents, or marquees, or even built grass-roofed huts on the beach, and the free Jamaicans were selling tropical foodstuffs as well as other things: papayas, star apples, oranges, pineapples, bananas, fresh fish, sea turtles, rum, sugarcane, nuts, coffee, pimientos, wood carvings, dyed kerchiefs, and, inevitably, the services of women.

  Aside from the 10,000 sailors and 1,500 marines of the fleet, also aboard the ships were 8,000 British soldiers of the invasion army, with another 2,700 sailing close behind. They were some of the most famous regiments in the army: the 4th (King’s Own), 24th (Royal Fusiliers), 95th Rifles (who wore bright green jackets instead of the traditional red coats), 85th Light Infantry, 44th (East Essex), and the 93rd Highlanders, numbering 1,100 men, each of them by regulation over six feet tall, dressed in tartan trousers and wearing Scots’ tams on their heads. To cap it off were two cavalry squadrons of the 14th (Duchess of York’s) Light Dragoons. Also in the mix were two astonished regiments of Jamaican “colored troops,” the 1st and 5th West India.

  Still a few days behind at sea were three more regiments: the 70th, the 40th, and the 43rd. For the moment, all these soldiers were under the command of Major General John Keane, the thirty-one-year-old son of a baronet and member of the House of Lords, who—obviously with some help from his powerful father—had ent
ered the army as a captain, at the age of thirteen! Keane knew his command was temporary, since General Ross’s true replacement, General Edward Pakenham, was presently coming across the ocean, but until he arrived Keane was in charge, along with Admiral Cochrane, whom one early historian characterized as “a ruthless and indefatigable Vandal.” This was an ill-fated situation for the British army because, being somewhat cowed by the elder admiral’s prestige and strong demeanor, Keane acquiesced to Cochrane’s intention to land the invasion force in an amphibious operation just below New Orleans, which, in turn, influenced the calamity that followed.

  Cochrane had formed his determination after learning of Jackson’s victory at Mobile and the capture of Pensacola, which foreclosed that route of approach (as Jackson had earlier observed, that would have been the obvious course “for any true military man”). Although Cochrane had intelligence from a spy in New Orleans that he could easily ascend the Mississippi River in his ships, “with only two small forts to oppose you,” he was skeptical. He quickly realized that none of his larger vessels could get over the bar at the river’s mouth, a hundred river miles below New Orleans; that navigation on the Mississippi was slippery going upstream; and, in addition, who could tell what forces the Americans might muster against him once they learned that he was trying to get up the river? He also understood, once he got to Jamaica, that the efforts to turn the Baratarians to the British side had failed, putting Barataria Bay out of the picture so far as an easy invasion route to New Orleans went. He doubtless also had been informed through spies of Jackson’s public calls for troops from Tennessee and Kentucky, which made it improbable that the invasion force would be facing only a few “undisciplined militia,” as the spy had suggested.