Jean Laffite and the Baratarians are most elusive and difficult to pin down—Laffite especially—up to and including the spelling of his name. Stories have him born in various places in France or in Haiti. Compounding the problem is the fact that people in Laffite’s profession often played fast and loose with such particulars as their ages and even their identities. (Writers have often confused Pierre and Jean, because contemporary accounts frequently used only “Laffite,” or “Lafitte,” or “La Fite,” or “LeFete,” or “Lafite,” or “Lafit,” and so forth, leaving history to sort out just who was who.) Stories have him terrorizing the high seas off the coast of Spain and Africa. Other accounts have him cravenly offering his services to the United States in order to get his big brother out of jail; yet others have him offering the same services for purely patriotic reasons. Laffite is a slippery character.
Not long after the Battle of New Orleans Lord Byron memorialized Laffite in a poem, then various novelists either romanticized or villified him as they saw fit. One of the first attempts at biography was Lafitte the Pirate by Lyle Saxon, from 1930, which has its interesting aspects. In 1952 New Orleans historian Stanley Clisby Arthur wrote Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover, in which we have, for the first time, at least the proper spelling of Laffite’s name, which was taken from a safe-conduct pass into and out of Grand Terre that Laffite had given to a wealthy New Orleans merchant. Arthur’s was also the first book to utilize the controversial Memoirs of Jean Laffite.
Next came the first biography by a trained historian, Dr. Jane Lucas De Grummond of Louisiana State University. The Baratarians and the Battle of New Orleans was published in 1961 by Louisiana State University Press. It, too, cited the disputed Memoirs of Jean Laffite, which subject we shall now open for discussion.
This document, and other papers purporting to pertain to Laffite, first surfaced in the possession of a man named John Andrechyne Laffite, who said his name was once John A. Lafflin, which allegedly was Jean Laffite’s assumed name after he moved to Missouri following the war. The man said that he was the great-grandson of Jean Laffite; that his grandfather had willed him a trunk of family papers after he died; that the trunk contained, among other things, an autobiographical journal composed by Laffite in the 1840s and ’50s, when he was an old man. (Most sources record Laffite’s death as having occurred sometime in the late 1820s.)
In the 1950s John A. Laffite began trying to sell the documents and went to New Orleans to do so. He was immediately taken in by a married couple interested in the history of the period who introduced him to the leading historians of New Orleans and the War of 1812. The problem was that this Laffite seemed to be something of a crank, and people quickly tired of him. In 1955, likely at somebody else’s suggestion, he sent samples of the memoirs to a well-known laboratory in Nebraska, which authenticated them as being “more than seventy-five years old,” and the next year the Library of Congress informed him that the paper used appeared to have originated in the early nineteenth century.
Written in French over several hundred pages, the memoirs were poorly translated into English, possibly by the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans, and published in 1958 by Vantage Press as The Journal of Jean Laffite. Lafflin, or Laffite, as he now called himself, was a retired railroad engineer traveling on free passes and so turned up in many places, “making public appearances as the great-grandson of Jean Laffite; peculiar in personality; well liked by some, scoffed at by others.”
Over the next two decades the original papers remained awash in controversy. They were bought by antiquarian manuscript dealers, sold, resold, and finally wound up being bought, personally, by the then governor of Texas, Price Daniel (who was interested because of the Galveston Island connection), and interred in 1977 at the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center, where they remain today.
The controversy over their provenance, however, proved a snake pit of antiquarian backbiting. For every expert who pronounced on their authenticity, another expert would dispute it. Finally the former Texas governor had had enough. The Laffite journal and papers were by then appraised at $75,000. In 1979 the ex-governor foolishly agreed to let one of the principal skeptics, an IRS employee and amateur pirate buff, have a professor at the University of New Orleans, who was reputed to be an expert in handwriting, examine the documents and render a final appraisal of their legitimacy.
This so-called expert soon concluded after a lengthy handwriting analysis, according to a New Orleans newspaper account of her findings, that the Laffite journal was “one of the biggest freehand forgeries in American history.” All this went out on the wire services, was picked up by the TV networks, and was reported throughout the land: Jean Laffite’s journal was nothing more than a crude hoax. And there the matter seemed to rest.
It turns out, though, that this handwriting expert was apparently someone who had only taken a class in graphology twenty years earlier as part of her course work in something called “art therapy,” and had since developed her skills to teach a class at the University of New Orleans in the Continuing Education Department, in which she employed her “handwriting analysis” as a sort of palm-reading or tea-leaf-reading device to determine the compatibility of lovers. In other words, she was not exactly the FBI crime lab.
Yet the damage had been done; millions of Americans had now seen or heard of the alleged fraud, and Laffite’s Memoirs fell into disrepute. The graphology teacher had even written her sponsor that she hoped the whole thing could be parlayed into a profitable exposé—a movie, television, or book deal—but this never happened.
The situation languished that way for nearly twenty years, until a Louisiana college history professor mentioned to a colleague who taught languages that there was this manuscript in French in Texas and would he be interested in translating it and seeing if it were genuine? He did, and thus a new edition of The Memoirs of Jean Laffite was published in 1999, including forty-two pages of scholarly discussion of its provenance. It is a fair argument on all sides, and just as inconclusive.
Laffite’s writings have been used by any number of historians of the New Orleans battle, including the redoutable Andrew Jackson scholar Dr. Robert Remini, although his Memoirs is rarely cited in their notes. Because I chose not to annotate this story, I can hide behind that tree. In the various histories I have written I have both annotated and not annotated, or have used footnotes only to illuminate the story but not included the remorseless endnotes to prove somebody else’s scholarship; if text is in quotations, that means somebody else wrote or said it. As pointed out previously, many of the issues in this book are so contradictory that it would serve nobody’s interests, except those of confusion, to try and document them here in such a way.
The most recent Laffite biographer, William C. Davis, discounts the Memoirs, noting correctly that they are “disputed,” and has done hard scholarly work to prove that Jean and Pierre were born in Bordeaux—which may be so, but even his fine book offers no absolute proof of this. Likewise, Davis concludes that Jean died after being wounded in a battle with Spanish ships in 1823 and was buried at sea near Honduras, and that Pierre had died of yellow fever in Mexico the previous year. But he also points out that there are varying accounts of the lives of the Laffites following the war, though he does not consider the one given in the Memoirs. Record keeping was poor and hard facts are dimmed through time; there are no absolutely reliable birth or death certificates or tombstones.
The reason I have used John A. Lafflin’s, or Laffite’s, so-called inherited journals (and I used them quite sparingly—mostly in trying to reconstruct Jean’s early life and then his later years after leaving Galveston, but not in connection with the Battle of New Orleans) is one of simple deductive logic: as of right now they cannot be proved or disproved. The price estimated by the Sam Houston Research Center to have them authenticated by modern methods (FBI or other super-scientific time-dating and handwriting laboratories) is probably upward of $25,000, and the center simply doesn’t have
the money at this time when so many other pressing human issues are awaiting attention in the Texas state budget.
Here is my opinion. If Laffite’s Memoirs is a fake or forgery, then who on earth would have done it, and why, way back then, and then hidden it in a trunk not to be opened for nearly a hundred years? If, as the Library of Congress apparently stated, the paper and ink date back to the nineteenth century, then why would anybody have taken such time to scrawl by hand several hundred pages of this—and in French? There are certainly entries that make one’s flesh crawl, because they do not square with the known facts of Laffite’s participation in the battle; actually, they appear to be the work of a boasting, angry personality, which goes against the popular notion of him as a smooth and suave gentleman privateer. But might they not be the outpouring of an embittered old man, looking back at his past through rose-colored glasses and seeing it in terms of a government that he indisputably helped in its time of need, and which he then believed had betrayed him by confiscating his years of privateering fortune? Also, from comparing the few proven writings of Laffite, the Memoirs seem to have his “voice” and, in addition, contain some of his familiar themes.* 76
History leads to many dead ends, and though I believe my interpretation is likely true, I’m willing to eat crow if I’m proven wrong. (Reminder: “If you have to eat crow, eat it while it’s hot.”) If one has to lean on odds, I would guess the odds at just better than even that Laffite’s Memoirs is authentic; but until someone other than a handwriting fortune-teller from New Orleans proves conclusively that the thing is a fake, I’ll stick by my guns.
There is also the matter of Edward A. Parsons, a New Orleans lawyer, Tulane professor, and antiquarian collector who kept a private reference library in a room of his home, which he entitled Bibliothèque Parsoniana, devoted mostly to original documents from the War of 1812 and, most especially, those pertaining to Jean Laffite. In the 1950s Parsons donated this valuable collection to the University of Texas, and it had long been my notion that it must contain priceless historical information on the life and times of the alleged pirate. Although there is certainly solid, valuable information in the collection, it is mostly primary documentation of previously known facts and interpretations, and gives little fresh insight into the man himself.
I would especially like to thank Wren Murphy for her dogged location of research materials and for organizing them all in large categorized ring binders, which only she knew would make the work so much easier. As usual my wife, Anne-Clinton Groom, was, and remains, tireless in her efforts and support. A profound and grateful thanks for that. My literary agent, Theron Raines, gave invaluable support both to the project and to the manuscript, and Ash Green, my editor at Knopf, astonishes in his eagle eye for error and misuse of language.
A Note About the Author
Winston Groom is the author of fourteen books, including the acclaimed Vietnam War novel Better Times Than These and the prizewinning As Summers Die, and coauthored Conversations with the Enemy, which was nominated for a 1984 Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of the New York Times No. 1 best seller Forrest Gump. Mr. Groom’s Shrouds of Glory, an account of Confederate general John Bell Hood’s decisive actions in the last great campaign of the U.S. Civil War, was published in 1995. He lives with his wife and daughter in Point Clear, Alabama.
Also by Winston Groom
Better Times Than These
As Summers Die
Only
Conversations with the Enemy
(with Duncan Spencer)
Forrest Gump
Shrouds of Glory
Gone the Sun
Gumpisms
Gump & Co.
Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl
The Crimson Tide
A Storm in Flanders
1942
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2006 by Winston Groom
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Groom, Winston, [date]
Patriotic fire : Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans / Winston Groom.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. New Orleans, Battle of, New Orleans, La., 1815. 2. Jackson, Andrew, 1767–1845. 3. Generals—United States—Biography. 4. Laffite, Jean. 5. Pirates—Louisiana—Biography. 6. New Orleans (La.)—History—19th century. I. Title.
e356.N5G79 2006
973.5'239—dc22 2005051001
eISBN: 978-0-307-26531-9
v3.0
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