Patriotic Fire (31 page)

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⁴⁴
Even the Baratarians must have thought this strange, since there no longer
were
any of His Majesty’s colonies in America.

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⁴⁵
Despite their pretensions, the majority of the French and Spanish who had settled Louisiana were not descended from aristocrats but were the offspring of traders, soldiers and sailors, or even in many earlier cases deported criminals. Nevertheless, as they gained wealth and position, the Creoles assumed the trappings of the European upper crust and soon began to believe that they were aristocracy themselves.

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⁴⁶
Vincent Nolte, a German-born New Orleans cotton and sugar merchant, wrote in his 1854 book
Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres
of his revulsion, while traveling through Kentucky, at discovering that so many of the backwoodsmen had let the fingernails on their thumbs and forefingers grow long, sharpening them with files. This, Nolte recorded, was for the purpose of “eye gouging,” a customary tactic of the time during fights. Nolte professed himself astounded at the number of one-eyed Kentuckians he encountered on his trip.

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⁴⁷
According to a handbill for this affair, if the tiger beat the bear, it would then be sent against the last surviving bull, and if the bull happened to win, “several pieces of fire-works will be attached to his back, which will produce a very entertaining amusement.”

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⁴⁸
This seizure became the subject of an almost decadelong three-way federal lawsuit. Not only had Patterson and Ross claimed the seized goods as a legitimate prize to be awarded to them and their men, but the United States attorney in New Orleans also claimed them on behalf of the U.S. government to sell as contraband for evaded customs duties. The Laffites themselves filed suit as well, asserting that the goods had been illegally seized since all their ships were accredited under the privateering laws of Cartagena.

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⁴⁹
It was later widely repeated in print that the wife of Lieutenant General Edward Pakenham had come along, intending to become the duchess of Louisiana, or some such, when her husband secured the victory. But it was not so; Pakenham was a bachelor.

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⁵⁰
This consisted, among other things, of being painted with kitchen grease and slops and getting dumped into a tub of bilgewater.

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⁵¹
Many military men of the day, especially admirals, were able to retire as wealthy men with great estates, owing to their shares in captured enemy property. The booty believed to be in New Orleans, however, dwarfed anything previously considered as a prize.

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The now deceased General Ross had been told by the War Office before he’d left England to cooperate with the navy but not to get involved in any action he considered militarily inadvisable from the army point of view. The inexperienced Keane had received no such instructions.

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⁵³
Dysentery is usually contracted by ingesting bacteria-contaminated water or food. There was no cure then but to let it run its course, for better or worse.

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The story is told that before he entered the city proper Jackson was invited to refresh himself and have breakfast at a plantation just outside town. A genteel neighboring Creole lady had been superintending the meal for what she was told was “a great general.” Afterward she confronted the plantation owner and told him: “I worked myself almost to death to make your house
comme il faut
and prepared a splendid
dejeuner
and now I find that all my labor is thrown away upon an ugly old Kaintuck flat-boatman, instead of your grand General, with plumes, epaulettes, long sword and moustache!”

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These splendidly uniformed companies contributed inadvertently, and in some inconclusive way, to the ultimate British tactics that cost them the battle. Seeing all the various uniforms, the British wrongly concluded that each represented a full regiment of militia, rather than only a company.

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The fear by influential citizens and politicians of arming and training these men was based on two factors: that it would “place them on a too equal footing” with the whites and, second, that it would create in the city a large group of armed and trained blacks who might possibly turn on their white brethren. The solution to the latter issue was, after the emergency ended, to pay off the free men of color and then run them out of town—preferably out of state.

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⁵⁷
Not only that, but the usually do-nothing legislature issued a proclamation of its own, urging all plantation owners to send as many slaves as they could spare to work on fortifications.

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⁵⁸
Building the gunboats as the mainstay of America’s national naval defense had been the brainchild of the Jefferson presidency as a way to save money. Naval historian Teddy Roosevelt damned the reliance on them by the Jefferson and Madison administrations as, variously, “ludicrous, painful folly and stupidity,” “bungled,” and “humiliating,” and Jefferson himself as “the most incapable Executive that ever filled the presidential chair.”

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⁵⁹
Laffite’s journal details a rather fanciful account of meeting Jackson on the street instead of at his headquarters, and some historians have accepted this version. It seems to me more likely that he would have gone instead to Jackson’s headquarters.

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⁶⁰
It is tempting to suggest that Adams’s harsh criticism stemmed from a lasting resentment of Jackson for having prevailed over his grandfather John Quincy Adams in the 1828 presidential election.

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⁶¹
These men were hustled off down the bayou in boats and held aboard the ship of the line
Royal Oak.
They were treated roughly until the
Royal Oak
’s captain discovered that one of their number had served as a groomsman in his wedding in New York before the war. “In consequence of this recognition, the captain of the
Royal Oak
caused a very elegant dinner to be prepared for the prisoners which was attended by all the ship’s officers of the
Royal Oak
and several other ships.”

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⁶²
Here is another of the nagging historical discrepancies that seem to defy resolution. Several historians, including Remini, Jackson’s authoritative biographer, say it was Jean Laffite who warned Jackson about extending the line, but Laffite’s latest biographer, William C. Davis, reports that it was Pierre.

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⁶³
General Brown believes that the sugar was emptied out and the barrels were then filled with earth but does not cite a source for this statement. Many others think that the barrels remained filled with sugar, which seems most likely.

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⁶⁴
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” composed only a few months earlier, was not yet known west of the Mississippi.

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Parton was somewhat off in his estimate of fifty artillery pieces. The British had twenty-four guns total, while Jackson’s line contained sixteen, for a total of forty guns—still an impressive and volatile number that rattled windows in New Orleans, six or so miles away.

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Kemper was a cousin to Confederate major general James L. Kemper, a hero of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and later a governor of that state.

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⁶⁷
Dudley Avery was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present generation of the McIlhenny family, owners and operators of the McIlhenny Company, which, since 1868, has manufactured Tabasco sauce at Avery Island, Louisiana. (Letter courtesy of Avery Island, Inc. archives)

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⁶⁸
This officer was probably Lieutenant Colonel John Fox Burgoyne, illegitimate son of General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, who had disgraced himself during the American Revolution by surrendering Saratoga, New York, in 1777.

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One of these guns, a heavy bronze howitzer, had markings that identified it as having been captured from the British at the surrender of Yorktown thirty-four years earlier. How it got to New Orleans is anybody’s guess.

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The thousand or so British muskets collected were just about the number Jackson needed to arm the Kentuckians and those of the militia who were poorly armed. He also figured the arms loss subtracted at least that number of British soldiers who could be brought against him.

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⁷¹
Finally Gleig decided to go into the frigid water after his dead ducks. He took off his clothes, he said, but for some mysterious reason not his thick woolen socks, and he lost one of them in the mud. In his narrative Gleig carries on about the lost sock as if it were somehow more significant than the lost victory before New Orleans. I raise this point only to demonstrate that there is no telling what young lieutenants in the field might do or think after a battle.

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⁷²
A day earlier he had written an account to Secretary of War Monroe in which he summed up the entire action and singled out numerous individuals for special praise. It was in this document that my great-great-great-grandfather Major Montgomery was “mentioned in dispatches.”

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⁷³
Including, one presumes, the governor’s wife, Madam Claiborne, who had declared him “the most remarkable man she had ever met,” after having been introduced to him a few weeks earlier as the mysterious “Monsieur Clement” by the hostess of the Elmwood plantation above New Orleans.

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⁷⁴
Along the Carolina coast this construction is known as “tabby.”

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⁷⁵
This account of the execution of the militiamen is taken entirely from James Parton’s
Life of Andrew Jackson,
which seems to offer the most accurate and extensive report.

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⁷⁶
Namely, one that he expressed in a letter to President Madison when trying to get his privateering property back: that he had known of Patterson’s intended raid on Barataria and could have loaded his valuables on his ships and sailed away, but because of the impending crisis he chose to stay and help fight the British, even though it meant the loss of all his ships and property. This is vintage Laffite.

Notes on Sources & Acknowledgments

T
he most striking feature of researching this book was the dismaying number of contradictions and conflicts in the various historical accounts. Practically everything seems to be in dispute: troop strength, number of cannons, length of battles, population of New Orleans, spelling of names, distance on the battlefield, width of the Mississippi, number of British dead, and who said or did what, when, where, and to whom and for what motives. Just about the only facts not in dispute are the outcome of the battle and the dates on which it occurred.

Having said that, I believe it is equally true that one can put together a fairly accurate account of the event. Official papers, especially the correspondence of Jackson with Secretary of War Monroe and with his officers, are the bedrock of the factual material. These I found in the book
Memoirs of Andrew Jackson,
a collection of the official dispatches, organized by S. Putnam Waldo, a Connecticut lawyer, in 1819, which is nothing more than a compilation of the Jackson correspondence found in his papers in the Library of Congress but just as valuable.

Likewise, a year after the battle Arsene Lacarrière Latour, Jackson’s engineer, published most of these same documents, as well as additional immediate orders, in his running account of events,
Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana,
which includes a priceless atlas of maps of his own drawing that allow the reader to see in detailed close-up the battle areas in the various actions.

Jackson himself is the subject of many biographies, almost all of them useful. The earlier ones at times, for reasons of poor communication, lack of documentary materials, or sheer embellishment, occasionally skew the material. But this is usually counterbalanced by the fact that the biographer himself lived either during the age of Jackson or directly after it, and spoke personally with men who were present at the fight. Alexander Walker, for instance, had become a city judge in New Orleans when he wrote
Jackson and New Orleans
in 1856, forty-one years after the battle. He had the opportunity to interview veterans of the war, who would have been in their sixties or seventies, but he often records as fact their embroidery or faulty memories. The same is true of John Reid and John Eaton’s
The Life of Andrew Jackson,
published in 1817. James Parton’s
Life of Andrew Jackson
(1861) is a trained historian’s account but frequently cites Walker’s sometimes fanciful reportage as fact.

Of the more modern works on Jackson, Marquis James’s
The Life of Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain
(1933), Burke Davis’s
Old Hickory
(1977), and Robert Remini’s
The Life of Andrew Jackson
(1988) are each entertaining and contain much useful factual information. In addition, Remini has written a lively and powerful account of the episode in
The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory
(1999).

Major Howell Tatum’s Journal,
the recollections of another of Jackson’s engineers, published by Smith College in 1922, has a straightforward, if bland, account of the battle but contains corroborative material. Vincent Nolte, the German cotton merchant, published
Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres
in 1854 and was an eyewitness, if a rather low-ranking one, to the fight. Benson Lossing’s
Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812
(published in 1867) is especially useful for its lovely pencil drawings of military sites, including the Rodriguez Canal, the Macarty house, De la Ronde’s plantation, and so on.

The
Louisiana Historical Quarterly
is a fountain of useful information. Published by one of the nation’s oldest historical societies, it contains countless memoirs, recollections, arguments, and accounts of the battle and events leading up to it. Miraculously, its issues, dating back to the nineteenth century, can be read and downloaded online simply by joining the Louisiana Historical Society for a very reasonable membership fee.

If the
Quarterly
is a fountain, the Williams Research Center in New Orleans is a perfect geyser. This wonderful facility, housed in an old former courthouse in the heart of the French Quarter, contains practically every original document, diary, and journal relating to the Battle of New Orleans and has an extremely polite, generous, knowledgeable, and helpful staff.

The British seem to have brought more diarists to the battlefield than did the Americans. There is, of course, the prolific Lieutenant George Gleig, who in 1827 published his first account,
The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans Under General Ross, Pakenham and Lambert;
his embarrassingly embellished revision of it was issued six years later in an American edition:
A Subaltern in America; Comprising His Narrative of the Campaigns of the British Army, at Baltimore, Washington, During the Late War.

An excellent account by a high-ranking officer is that of Colonel Alexander Dickson, who was the chief of the British artillery during the invasion. His recollections are contained in the Dickson Papers at the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich. Also used extensively were the memoirs of Captain John Henry Cooke,
A Narrative of Events in the South of France and of the Attack on New Orleans in 1814 and 1815,
Benson Earl Hill’s
Recollections of an Artillery Officer,
and the
Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith.

Several modern British historians have written books or papers with a decidely slanted point of view and occasionally take quarrelsome exception to the American accounts of such things as “booty and beauty” (untrue!), the intention of Pakenham’s reconnaissance attack on December 28 (never intended as an actual attack), the relative strengths of the two armies (the British were outnumbered), and so on. Among these are Robin Reilly’s
The British at the Gates
and the work of Carson I. A. Ritchie, who claims, among other things, that diarists Gleig, Hill, and Cooke gave unreliable accounts of the battle. Reilly’s and Ritchie’s are nevertheless well-written and instructive arguments and should be paid close attention.

Very useful for the Creek War segment were
The Amphibious Campaign for West Florida and Alabama,
by General Wilbert S. Brown;
Tecumseh,
by R. David Edmunds; and
Andrew Jackson and the Creek War
by James W. Holland. For the War of 1812 in general, see Donald R. Hickey’s
War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict;
Roger H. Brown’s
The Republic in Peril;
Frank Owsley’s
Struggle for the Gulf: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans;
and Walter Lord’s
Dawn’s Early Light.
For the Battle of New Orleans itself, the
Historic Research Study, Chalmette Unit, Jean Laffite National Park and Preserve,
by James A. Greene, is invaluable for meticulous and unvarnished research. Samuel Carter III’s
Blaze of Glory
is a lively and entertaining account. And Tim Pickles has published a neat illustrated book on the subject for the English Osprey Series with many interesting facts and interpretations. Also, in 1965, the sesquicentennial of the battle, the Battle of New Orleans, 150th Anniversary Committee of Louisiana, caused to be published a series of nine little gems of pamphlets on specific aspects of the battle, addressing such topics as
The Weapons of the Battle of New Orleans, Negro Soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans, Plantation Houses at the Battle of New Orleans,
and the like.

The naval aspects of the campaign are well covered by Theodore Roosevelt in
The Naval War of 1812,
which is entertaining, instructive, insightful, and about as good as it gets on the subject.

The Life of Edward Livingston
by Charles Havens Hunt, published in 1864, remains the best work on that interesting and vital individual.

Figures regarding the relative values of the American dollar and British pound during the period under examination, vis-à-vis what they would be worth today, were obtained from the Internet consortium of economists published jointly by Wake Forest University and the University of Miami. It can be accessed by typing into your search engine “How much is that?” The scholars who developed this resource are to be highly commended for providing a valuable, informative, and worthwhile service.

J
ean 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.