Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  Galveston had certain advantages over Barataria in that it was much more remote and was also the subject of a diplomatic dispute between Spain, which claimed it was part of Mexico, and the United States, which asserted that it was part of the Louisiana Purchase. Neither nation, therefore, wanted to exercise a presence there for fear of upsetting the negotiations. Its disadvantages, however, were manifest. First, there was no ready outlet for disposing of captured goods as there had been in New Orleans. Also, the island was writhing with poisonous rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins (it was at first called Snake Island). Not only that, but there was a fierce band of Indians, known as the Karankawa tribe, who over the centuries had come under the impression that the island belonged to them.

  Nevertheless, after battling both snakes and Indians, Laffite and the Baratarians established themselves on what they had named Campeche, which soon would contain a boardinghouse, arsenal, shipyard, and a number of rude houses. A formal government was set up, complete with tax collectors, magistrate, notary, and secretary and with Laffite as its “governor.” Laffite seems actually to have moved there, but his brothers Pierre and Dominique apparently kept residence in New Orleans and visited only when they went out on raids.

  One possible reason Jean did not stay in New Orleans was that a nasty rumor had begun to circulate that among his “goods” being auctioned off by Patterson and Ross were certain pieces of jewelry that had been identified by New Orleans women as having belonged to a well-known widow who had gone on a trip to Europe and vanished without a trace. The implication, of course, was that she fell victim to pirates, and that here was the evidence, in Laffite’s own cache of booty. All his life, Laffite maintained that he was a privateer and never a pirate and that he did not countenance piracy among his Baratarians. Yet here was this allegedly damning evidence, or rumor of evidence, and Laffite became thoroughly disgusted. He had done his best to save New Orleans, sent his men, his artillery, his munitions, risked his life—and now this ingratitude and innuendo.

  The Galveston enterprise quickly became profitable, and by 1818 Laffite had made arrangements to sell his captured goods to various merchants in the interior, as far away as St. Louis, Missouri, where, on April 15 of that year, he received a receipt from one Jh. Robidoux for “Twenty slaves, mature, have good teeth. Males speak French; Twenty mirrors; Five Hundred big hatchets; Two Hundred butcher knives; Twenty-five cauldrons. Twenty-five silk ropes; One thousand steel and flints. Three hundred pieces of wool bands; Three thousand flints; Three hundred pounds glue; Three hundred muskets. Three hundred pounds powder; Five hundred blankets; Twenty pieces packing-canvas; Four casks wine; Two hundred pounds tobacco. Three hundred shirts; Five hundred pounds raw sugar.” All of it worth, on the black market, $3,535.

  Jean Laffite seemed to be one of those people for whom “trouble always rides behind and gallops with him.” It wasn’t long before the authorities in Washington got wind of the goings-on at Galveston; James Monroe, who had since become president, sent a message to the effect that Laffite and his crews must depart that place under threat of being evicted by U.S. troops.

  Laffite then began to engage in a long-winded correspondence with the federal government over a period of months, which purported to establish his legitimacy in occupying Galveston but upon second reading appears merely to be a stall for time. Then, in late September 1818, a hurricane roared through Galveston Island, drowning a number of men, wrecking most of the ships, ruining the food stores and supplies, and wiping out most of the houses and buildings.

  With all this difficulty, a more prudent man might have packed up and gone, but Laffite set about rebuilding and resumed writing letters to the authorities, which by now included the Spanish government, who had of necessity become involved in the thing, and who began characterizing Galveston as a madriguera de malvado (place of wickedness). Laffite managed through this gauzy and voluminous correspondence to keep the authorities at bay for another two years, but finally in 1821 he abandoned the commune. It was apparently not an impromptu decision; in the intervening time Laffite—no doubt recalling what had happened when Patterson raided Grand Terre—had been stashing his goods in numerous places, from Donaldsonville, Louisiana, to St. Louis.

  When he finally left Galveston, Laffite for all intents disappeared. American naval officers who had come to see him off arrived with every expectation that they would confront a fierce, piratical-looking man, dressed in colored sashes, swashbuckle, the works. Instead they found Laffite wearing a handsome blue topcoat and forage cap, and aboard his sleek and elegant ink-black schooner. He invited them on the ship for a sumptuous supper and apparently charmed them. One of these officers later concluded a magazine piece about the encounter: “We made our adieus . . . with feelings far more interested for the gallant rover than either would have chosen to confess. We shook hands for the last time in this world.”

  What became of Laffite afterward has been the subject of much contradictory speculation. It was reported that he was killed in a sea battle, drowned in a hurricane, hanged by the Spanish, died of disease in Mexico, and murdered by his own crew. If you believe his own journal (a discussion of that document appears in the Notes on Sources section at the end of this book), Laffite retired from the privateering business after Galveston and, according to family papers, went upriver to St. Louis, where he had considerable business connections. There, in 1832, he was remarried, to a young woman named Emma Mortimere, found God, and settled down to the life of a landlubber, fathering a son. During this period a spate of books and magazine stories appeared, most of them absurdly fictitious, which often characterized him as the bloodthirstiest kind of pirate and attributed to him deeds of the vilest nature. Chagrined, at some point Laffite, now turning portly, grew a beard and changed his name to John Lafflin.

  During his later years, according to the purported memoirs, Laffite traveled widely, engaged in various “business transactions,” and sometime in the early 1850s settled in Alton, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, where he began writing a journal of his life. He lived there until his death in 1854 at the age of about seventy.

  He never got over the shabby treatment he felt he had received from the federal government and from the city he had risked his life and treasure to defend. At one point he mused bitterly over what might have happened if he had instead taken the British offer of money and other emoluments and betrayed America. Answering his own hypothetical, he concluded that the Americans would have lost the battle, as well as Louisiana, and that there would have been no president of the United States named Andrew Jackson.

  He makes some interesting points. First, Laffite and the Baratarians possessed the vital knowledge of the tides, shoals, and quirks of Barataria Bay and of all the tributaries, paths, and routes leading up to New Orleans. It is just possible that he could have guided the British up to the city without being noticed. His warning to New Orleans, even though it was not believed for a few days, certainly put the city on alert, when time was measured practically in precious minutes.

  His offer of powder and flints may well have been critical to the outcome of the battle. New Orleans had inadequate munitions and, as we have seen, being so far in the West, acquiring them was a difficult proposition (the missing arms boats did not turn up until two weeks after the battle ended). It took a great deal of gunpowder in those days to fire a single cannon shot—sometimes up to twenty pounds—and since we know that on one morning during Pakenham’s reconnaissance attack, the Louisiana alone fired some eight hundred rounds, that could have used up as much as ten thousand pounds of powder.

  If the Americans had run out of gunpowder on the morning of January 8, who can determine the outcome? Likely it would not have been a good one. The same is true of the flints (made from a very hard type of stone). Muskets and rifles then were flintlocks, meaning that the shot was ignited by a spring-loaded hammer into which a flint had been inserted, striking a flashpan of gunpowder that, in turn, was set off by the resulting
spark. But flints wore out fairly often. Some of the troops at first had to use pebbles for flints, the kind one finds on the ground, but naturally these did not work well most of the time.

  It was Laffite’s suggestion that the rampart on Jackson’s left be strengthened and run nearly half a mile into the swamp. This was truly an astute observation, and while somebody else might have thought of it later, Laffite is the one who gets the credit in the history books. It is well that the matter was taken care of, too, because turning Jackson’s left was precisely what the British had in mind.

  Finally there were Laffite’s Baratarian artillerists, who fought so hard and well at the guns on the rampart. Their absence alone might not have turned the tide of battle, but, when everything is taken into consideration, Laffite’s contributions to the victory were substantial, if not crucial. When the government would not give him back what he considered his property, obtained legally under international law (though admittedly illegally smuggled), Laffite smoldered until the end of his days, though he always blamed “corrupt, dishonest officials,” not the American nation herself.

  After Galveston, Pierre Laffite is said to have joined Jean in the area around St. Louis. He died in 1844, in the small town of Crevecoeur, Missouri, where he was buried in the local cemetery. Brother Dominique You bought a saloon on St. Anne Street in New Orleans, joined the Masons, and settled down to a calmer life. He died in 1830 and, after a large public funeral in which his casket was carried by the Masons, was buried in the fashionable St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 with full military honors, including an artillery salute.

  Of the other characters in the drama:

  Major Gabriel Villeré, who had neglected to block Bayou St. John, which was right behind his house, and thus let the British land unmolested, was court-martialed for dereliction of duty. Perhaps because his service during the rest of the campaign was stellar, or perhaps because of the outcome of the battle, he was acquitted “by a jury of his peers.” He lived into old age; by the time of Judge Walker’s recollections, he’d invariably get misty-eyed when he described how he had had to kill his favorite dog to keep from being recaptured by the British. His father, Major General Jacques Villeré, later became a governor of Louisiana.

  The architect Arsene Lacarrière Latour, who was Jackson’s chief military engineer, returned to New Orleans, where he became, of all things, a paid agent (spy) in the employ of Spain. He also began work on the first historical account of the battle, which was published in 1816. Latour’s book is of inestimable value, since it is the first contemporary account and includes almost all of the pertinent documents surrounding the campaign, as well as his complete map atlas. Afterward Latour went to Cuba and resumed his architectural work, then in 1834 returned to France, where he lived with an old aunt until his death in 1837, during a flu epidemic.

  Edward Livingston, Jackson’s military secretary and composer of his dispatches to Washington, was already a well-known attorney at the time of the battle. Afterward he became a famous one, having written over a number of years what has come to be known as the Livingston code of criminal law. He served three terms in Congress before being elected senator from Louisiana in 1829. When Jackson assumed the presidency, he named Livingston his secretary of state and, later, ambassador to France. In 1836 he died at the family mansion on the Hudson River in New York. Not long afterward, on Grand Terre, a substantial fort named Fort Livingston was erected by the United States. Right up until the end, Livingston continued to enjoy a correspondence with his old antagonist Sir Harry Smith.

  Louisiana governor William Claiborne was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1816, but he died before he could take office. He remained angry that Jackson had not embraced him and had relegated him to lesser military roles, doing him out of a chance to share in the glory.

  The French general Jean Robert Humbert, who fought so bravely as a volunteer with Jackson’s army, had trouble making ends meet after the war. He tried teaching and at one point went to Mexico to get in on the revolution, but he arrived too late. He continued his daily excursions to the New Orleans coffeehouses, in full French uniform as usual, for dominoes and brandy, and “died of dissipation” in 1823. The city of New Orleans gave him a military hero’s funeral.

  The free men of color who had performed so bravely at the battle were given short shrift. One of their number, Captain Joseph Savary, was recognized for valor and voted a military pension of $30 a month by the Louisiana state legislature. Later he apparently led a group of fifty or sixty followers to Galveston to join Laffite. Another, Jordan B. Noble, who had been a teenage drummer boy, later became a drummer during the Mexican War. As a drummer for the Plauché Guards of the Confederate army, he was captured during the Civil War battle for New Orleans and switched sides to the Union army. For years “Old Jordan,” as he was affectionately known, “became a fixture in the many city parades that marched down the years.”

  In a noteworthy act of ingratitude, however, after the British had been defeated, apparently few, if any, of these blacks were given their promised bounty or land and, in the words of one historian of the free men, “were forced to be content with honeyed words and stately phrases, which became empty phrases after the battle.”

  Most of the owners of the great plantation houses within the battle area returned to find their homes in ruins. Those that were not destroyed or damaged by fire had been looted and ransacked. The owners began immediately to restore or rebuild, and many of these places lasted into the first half of the twentieth century, until sugarcane growing moved westward and high prices were being paid to buy up the area for industrial development. The proprietor of the Macarty plantation left many of the British cannonballs embedded in its walls and had them coated in gold as a conversation piece.

  The big mansions are gone now, along with their formal gardens and luscious orange groves, replaced by large shipyards, which cut huge slips into the plantation grounds, as well as by cement factories, sugar and oil refineries, and other commercial enterprises.

  Like Laffite and the Baratarians, the Creoles of Louisiana afterward felt that they had been overlooked in the military dispatches Jackson sent out in the weeks following the victory. There is some truth to this. Jackson, now a major general of federal troops, tended to heap most of his praise on the two regiments of U.S. Army regulars, as well as on his home-state Tennesseans, and so a false and painful impression was created in the minds of Americans that Louisiana and the United States had been saved mainly by the brave volunteers from Tennessee.

  This was true, as far as it went, since the Tennesseans constituted some 5,000 of Jackson’s 8,000-man army. But for years afterward the Louisianans, who had fought as bravely as anybody else—more so, perhaps, since they were defending their land, their homes, their wives and daughters—used every opportunity to convince the world otherwise.

  Of the men who served with Jackson during the Creek War but were not at New Orleans, Davy Crockett went on to become a U.S. congressman and later, of course, was at the Alamo, where he passed into legend. Sam Houston also went west, where he performed deeds that resulted in his becoming the Father of Texas, and ultimately presided over the independence of what would soon become the Lone Star State.

  Not much poetry, good or bad, came out of the battle, but several popular songs did. “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a ribald ballad consisting of nine stanzas, was composed by a Samuel Woodworth and sung to the air of “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey,” which sounded a bit like “Yankee Doodle.”

  You’ve heard, I s’pose how New Orleans

  Is fam’d for wealth and beauty,

  There’s girls of every hue it seems,

  From snowy white to sooty.

  So Pakenham he made his brags,

  If he in fight was lucky,

  He’d have their girls and cotton bags

  In spite of old Kentucky.

  CHORUS:

  Oh Ken-tuck-y, the hunters of Ken-tuck-y!

  Oh Ken-tuck-y, the hunters of
Ken-tuck-y!

  But Jackson he was wide awake

  And was not scar’d at trifles,

  For well he knew what aim we take

  With our Kentucky rifles.

  So he led us down to Cypress swamp

  The ground was low and mucky,

  There stood John Bull in martial pomp

  And here was old Kentucky.

  CHORUS.

  The composer, a Bostonian, seems to have acquired an elevated concept of the Kentuckians’ role in the battle.

  In the America of that day, many of the prominent names that came out of the battle were stamped indelibly on the public mind. Perhaps it was because the nation was expanding so quickly, and there were so many new places to be named: among others, we have cities and counties named after Jackson and Houston, and for Montgomery, who was killed at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend; counties named for Carroll, Coffee, Adair, and, in Mississippi, for the gallant cavalryman Hinds. A national park has been named for Laffite, and a street and a hotel in New Orleans were named after Governor Claiborne. Also in the city today, the Laffites’ blacksmith shop is extant, and the tomb of Dominique You, the Old Absinthe House, where Jean and his crew hung out, as well as the calaboose are tourist attractions all.

  There is another city park dedicated just to the battle itself, which is now run by the National Park Service. In the late spring and summer following the battle, many citizens of New Orleans began to visit the site. It was too soon, and what they saw was not pleasant. “At one place the ditch still retained a bloody stain and the smell was extremely offensive,” wrote one early visitor.