He also gained standing as one who was game for adventure. By the summer of 1819 echoes of Rezin's earlier Texas flirtation with Kemper beckoned, and now James Bowie met another of the adventurers with their eyes perennially fixed on Texas. “Never was a more propitious moment for effecting their purpose,” said the Natchez press of the filibusters. “Should New-Mexico and Texas unite in the great cause, the consumation of the independence of all America will be soon and certain.”59 Texas, as usual, was in a lawless, leaderless state of ferment. Hoping to capitalize on that, and on resentment that in the recent Adams-Onís Treaty the United States had yielded the claim that Texas was rightfully included in the Louisiana Purchase, Dr. James Long, Ben Milam, and seventy-five others gathered in Natchez in June 1819 intent on invasion and liberation.
Word of the planned expedition was in all the Natchez newspapers and certainly reached as far as Avoyelles. Moreover, Long's route of march to Natchitoches took him through Rapides Parish, perhaps as close to Bowie as Alexandria, and men joined him all along the way. It would have been very difficult indeed for James Bowie to resist the temptation to emulate his brother, especially since his friend from their old regiment, Warren D. C. Hall, was involved. By the time Long reached Nacogdoches, west of the Sabine, his numbers had swelled to three hundred, Bowie no doubt among them. There in late June they declared a new government, began enacting laws, and Long proclaimed that he would sell land in Texas at a dollar an acre as a lure to more adventurers to join him, something that would especially have appealed to Bowie.60
Meanwhile James himself soon became a favorite among the filibusters, especially with Hall and Long's lieutenant, Col. James Gaines. He may even have engaged in one or two of the little skirmishes in July and August as Long spread his reach into Texas, for Gaines recalled Bowie being “a very devil” in a fight, though this would have been Bowie's first taste of mortal combat. Yet it was obvious to most that Long was outmanned and outclassed by the Spanish authorities, and on October 28, 1819, they drove him out of Nacogdoches, and within a month the expedition was a shambles. James Bowie was not there to see it happen. By October 2 he was already back in Avoyelles. He may simply have lost interest in the ill organized and haphazardly led expedition. Equally if not more likely, in Texas he encountered something that appealed to him much more than the promise of cheap land tied to a tottering revolution.61
The other Bowie brothers had grown apace, with varying fortunes. Rezin's firstborn appeared in June 1815 shortly after his return from the war but died a few months later. But then in October 1817, as James was setting up his plantation, Margaret gave birth to a son whom they named, predictably, James.62 Rezin—who endured seeing his name appear as everything from “Reason” to “Recision”—established himself in his own right in St. Landry Parish as a businessman, and then in Avoyelles, where James had settled. He was appointed an officer of the Avoyelles Mounted Riflemen militia and rose rapidly to a position of respect in the community. While James acquired a smattering of Spanish, Rezin learned to read and speak both Spanish and French. A friend, William H. Sparks, found him “a man of most exalted genius, wonderful originality and high attainments.” Moreover, Rezin was “eminently social and genial in his nature, fond of adventure, as careless of the present as indifferent to the future.” Sparks concluded that he was “little in nothing, but noble even in his vices.”63 In short, he seemed the near-mirror image of brother James, though more thoughtful and less impulsive. Already, however, Rezin suffered the signs of poor eyesight that plagued many of the Bowie men, but that happily seems to have missed James.64
Brother Stephen now was past his twenty-first birthday, and out on his own like the rest. Just recently he had married Mary Ann Compton, whose family moved to Rapides from Maryland. She was already expecting their first child, and the new family needed a home.65 The eldest, John, also prospered, though he, too, suffered from severe near-sightedness that kept him from participating in some of the wilder escapades James and Rezin indulged in.66 But when it came to business ventures that required daring brains as much as physical prowess, John stood very much side by side with his brothers, and now, in late 1819, a new opportunity in a very old business beckoned.
For almost two hundred years slavery had been an increasingly important factor in the economy and society of the United States. By the turn of the nineteenth century it was confined to the agrarian South and what was called the Old Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Of course it was an important source of labor for the great planters as well as the small farmers like the Bowies, and in its modest way it had been a part of Bowie family life for three generations or more. Undeniably, and especially in a region like Louisiana, where there was no established aristocracy of old families, the ownership of slaves brought to the newer men a species of social equality that they craved.67 The Bowies, too, sought that, though in James's case at least, it was not so much for social station for its own sake as for the opportunity to enhance his fortunes afforded by access to the upper strata of society.
Slaves also meant money. Congress abolished the African slave trade just a decade earlier in 1808, partly in the mistaken expectation that domestic supply of bondsmen would be equal to future demand. But it reckoned without the growth and expansion into the Old Southwest, where plantation farming required vast cheap labor. The demand for slaves in Louisiana west of the Mississippi far outstripped the supply, sending prices ever higher and sending planters seeking other sources. Smuggling of slaves commenced as soon as Congress abolished the foreign trade, most of them coming into the country through the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast. The federal government made only halting efforts to contain smuggling or to capture the smugglers themselves, and since Congress had failed to provide a policy on how to handle any contraband slaves seized, the several states devised their own means. One thing they would not do was send them back to Africa, or to the South American countries from whose slave ships many of them had been captured in the first place. The states needed slaves despite the law. The best solution seemed to be to sell them at auction, with the proceeds going into the federal treasury. The slaves thus sold henceforward acquired legal status, and the government at least derived some good from those breaking its laws. Some states, Louisiana among them, provided an added incentive by promising half the auction proceeds to the person or persons turning in smuggled slaves or on whose information they were taken.68
By 1819 one source dominated the illicit slave business in Louisiana, ironically a man much credited with having helped to save New Orleans during the battle of January 8, 1815. Mystery and myth surrounded Jean Laffite even in his own time, but no doubt existed that his principal trade for years had been all manner of smuggling, much of it the cargoes he took as a privateer from Spanish hulls captured in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Following the victory at New Orleans, he continued for a time to operate out of his remote fastness in the Barataria region forty miles south of the city. By 1817, however, his presence had become an increasing irritant to local and national authorities, and he scouted for a new base of operations. As so often in the affairs of the region in this era, his gaze turned inevitably toward Texas.
The Magee-Gutiérrez expedition was only one in a succession of poorly planned and ill-led filibustering attempts to wrest Texas from Spain, sometimes loosely coordinated with efforts for independence elsewhere in Mexico. Col. Henry Perry served with Kemper in Texas in 1813 but returned to the United States when the expedition ended in repulse after Kemper and others abandoned the enterprise in disgust. But two years later he was back on another campaign, raising three hundred volunteers at Belle Isle in the swampy coastal plain southwest of New Orleans, and in November taking them west to Galveston Bay. Settling first on the mainland beside the Trinity River, Perry moved across the bay in the winter of 1816 to what some in the area called Snake Island, thanks to its serpent population. By then another adventurer and revolutionary, Louis Michel Aury, made his own armed camp in a
few shacks on the island, using it as a base for his ships to prey on Spanish vessels. When Perry arrived, accompanied now by the Bowies' old companions in arms John Davis Bradburn and Warren D. C. Hall, he refused to subordinate himself to Aury, and the two maintained separate and none-too-friendly camps until November, when yet another revolutionary, Francisco Xavier Mina, arrived with more men and sufficient authority to exert command over Perry and to achieve an uneasy cooperation with Aury. Finally in April 1817 Aury convoyed Mina and Perry in his ships in an attack on the Mexican coast. The expedition broke down in predictable squabbling, and Aury left the others and sailed back to Snake Island. When he got there, however, he found new occupants and new rulers. The Laffites had come.69
Jean and his brother Pierre Laffite knew Snake Island well. In addition to their smuggling activities, they operated as legitimate importers of wine and spirits from Bordeaux to New Orleans, as well as consumer goods like vinegar and hard merchandise. Shortly after Mina's arrival, the Laffites began loading wine by the cask and the bottle aboard their ship Devorador and shipping it to the uneasy community of filibusters at what they then called “Galveztown.” The Devorador made one voyage in January 1817 and two in March, and when its captain returned from these trips he no doubt brought word of Mina's advancing preparations to depart for Mexico. Indeed, so good was his information that when Jean Laffite registered the Devorador's next outgoing cargo of wine on April 4, he almost certainly knew that three days later the Mina expedition would depart, leaving the island almost abandoned.70 That was his opportunity. Perhaps on that very same April 4, with the casks of vinegar and the cases of bottles of red and white wine, Jean Laffite boarded forty or fifty of his own men, knowing that they would be the ones drinking that wine as the new rulers of Galveztown.
By April 15 Laffite was firmly in control on Snake Island, and before long his Baratarians built a larger settlement atop Aury's old shantytown. In time Laffite commanded three hundred or more men in the village he named Campeachy. He built himself a substantial house, the Maison rouge, and for his men he erected a tavern, a billiard room, and several “groggeries” to keep them happy when they were not at sea preying on Spanish vessels.71 By the time Aury returned with his ships in July, he found the Campeachy establishment too strong to challenge and had no choice but to move elsewhere.
But Aury left Laffite a small legacy, one that may have been part of Galveztown's original lure. While operating from the island as a privateer against Spanish shipping, Aury found a number of slaves among his prizes. He did not need them, the revolutionaries in Mexico were definitely opposed to slavery; the only other way to dispose of them was to import them into Louisiana in spite of the abolition of the slave trade. Aury opted for the last and shipped the blacks overland to the Sabine and on to Alexandria, to an eager market.72 Where slaves had been a nuisance to Aury, however, they meant profit to Laffite. Snake Island sat outside the border of the United States, and Mexico was in turmoil, meaning that neither jurisdiction could threaten him, yet Campeachy lay close enough to Louisiana that the distance to his buyers was not prohibitive. Moreover, rather than risk his own skin by importing the slaves into Louisiana—for which penalties up to death awaited—he could simply establish a slave mart there and let the Louisiana buyers come to him.
It worked perfectly. The very month that he occupied the island, Laffite brought in two prizes with 287 slaves, and by August the collector of customs in New Orleans complained of “the most shameful violations of the slave act” by the Laffites and, worse, that “a great proportion of the population are disposed to countenance them.” Laffite built a large barracks for the slaves on the west bank of the Sabine, by the fall filled with more than 650 of them, and left all risk for smuggling the blacks into Louisiana to the planters “whose eagerness to procure them will induce them to run every hazard.” Men went to Campeachy or the Sabine barracks with large sums of cash to buy slaves for themselves and others in what the collector called “an extended and organized system of enterprise, of ingenuity, of indefatigability, and of audacity,” and despite the occasional successes of revenue cutters in capturing small boatloads of contraband slaves, the impact was minuscule.73
If enterprise, ingenuity, indefatigability, and audacity were what it required, then the business ideally suited the temperament of the Bowie brothers. They must have known at least in a general way about the slave smuggling by Laffite from Barataria in earlier years, and the arrival of the slaves sent by Aury to Alexandria was certainly common knowledge in the interior of Louisiana. Moreover, Rezin at least already had some limited experience in the business. While Laffite established himself at Galveztown, Rezin had helped a New Orleans trader who brought in sixty illegal slaves from Cuba with an elaborate ruse to recover the blacks when seized by authorities.74 To young men of ambition who did not scruple at violating federal law, the profits could be considerable. In the more remote parishes a young adult male slave brought $650 or more, while in the New Orleans markets legal domestic slaves commanded as much as $1,500.75
The opportunity would not wait long before the government did something about Laffite, but while it lasted the potential was dazzling. Moreover, by the fall of 1819 the Bowies needed money, especially James. A hurricane that swept through the region that summer caused widespread damage, and on top of that a financial depression seized all of western Louisiana in 1819 and lasted for two years.76 James felt the financial embarrassment keenly. In February he had bought a mulatto slave woman from Judge Jesse Andrus of the parish court at Opelousas for $1,200, giving his note due June 1. The date came and went with no payment, and when Andrus started demanding his money, Bowie refused to pay. Moreover, he used a technicality when Andrus got a summons for him to appear at Opelousas. He lived in Avoyelles Parish, Bowie argued, and was not subject to a St. Landry summons. Andrus continued trying to get Bowie to court throughout the summer of 1819, to no avail, and when James went off with Long it may in part have been in the hope of evading him, as well as in the expectation of finding something that would change his fortunes.77
All it took was Warren Hall. He had returned to Snake Island with Aury and decided to stay on, establishing himself at the west end of the island, where he soon became friendly with Laffite. Sometime in 1818 or 1819 Hall had made a brief visit to Rapides Parish, and while there saw his old friends James and Rezin Bowie and gave them all the details of Campeachy and of the opportunity awaiting. Hall more than sufficiently piqued their interest so that James—and possibly Rezin—later accompanied him on a visit to Galveztown, probably on the same trip that Hall and Gaines made as envoys for Long that summer of 1819. Hall introduced him to Laffite, and James and the smuggler struck up an instant friendship. He spent some time at Campeachy and learned the manner of Laffite's operation. Laffite sold slaves like any other merchandise, by weight, at one dollar a pound, the average healthy male costing $140. He had also a supply of weak and ill blacks that he could not sell and that he did not care for overmuch, but still he kept them rather than turn them out or simply kill them.
Campeachy was a bustling place in its way, something of a crossroads for that milling jumble of shadowy figures whose past, present, and future aspirations for Texas and for profit kept them ever at the edge of the frontier awaiting the next scheme, the next opportunity. Besides Hall and Bradburn, there was the Irish sailor John McHenry, and J. Randal Jones of Nacogdoches, and a number of the earliest settlers of the Brazoria region of Texas, a few miles inland and to the west. Freebooters, filibusters, adventurers, and all the flotsam of the frontier passed this way, and while Laffite cordially entertained Bowie at Maison Rouge for several days, men like these filled his head with the stories of the huge forests, the vast fertile plains, the lost Spanish silver mines, and more of the riches of Texas there for the taking. Mexico would be independent from Spain soon, and Texas was far enough from Mexico City that men of enterprise could profit there with a minimum of governmental interference. It was something to ponder.
More immediately, though, the Bowies got a concession from Laffite. They, too, tendered a dollar a pound, but they also offered to buy the infirm blacks as well, though for a reduced price.78 The deal struck, the Bowies returned to Louisiana, for there was still much to be done on the scheme and their own twist to put to it. They would buy directly from Laffite themselves, of that they were certain, and their brother John would join them in the venture. They had then to get the blacks to a market, and that presented a challenge. The revenue cutters made bringing the slaves by boat along the coast dangerous, especially since additional vessels had been assigned to the patrol just the past August.79
Fortunately the Bowies had some familiarity with the interior of western Louisiana. In May 1817 John and their father bought property and a sawmill on Bayou Nezpique, some thirty miles west of Opelousas, and they would have known that its sources lay only a few miles from the Calcasieu River.80 That stream flowed southwest to Calcasieu Lake on the Gulf Coast just thirty miles from the Sabine. Thus the slaves could be marched from the Sabine to Calcasieu Lake, and from there taken upriver by boat. A two-day overland march from the stream could take them either to Opelousas or Alexandria, with the latter the preferred destination. But if they wanted, they could also take them to the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, a coastal passage from Galveztown of 250 miles—in a good westerly breeze a matter of only two days.81 Once on the bayou, they could sail or row upstream to its meeting with the Mississippi at the French and Acadian settlement of La Fourche des Chitimachas in Ascension Parish. It was sixty miles above New Orleans and thirty miles below Baton Rouge, deep into Louisiana and close to buyers but a safe distance from state or federal agents, and Laffite had a man there named Martin who handled his smuggled imports and might help with slaves.82
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