Patriotic Fire (8 page)

That was enough for Jackson. After sending off a letter to the Spanish
comandante
at Pensacola, demanding to know the meaning of British troops in his district, and another to Governor Blount to hurry Tennessee troops down to Mobile—as well as one more canceling Rachel’s visit—Jackson set about reinforcing the shabbily built Fort Bowyer, the first British objective at the mouth of Mobile Bay and the key to the city. Having done so, he then began to calculate operations against Pensacola to rid that whole territory of both the British
and
the Spanish. Although he’d requested permission to do this back in June, Jackson had received no answer from the War Department, but now he was determined to charge ahead, permission granted or not. If war with Spain was the result, so be it—events were rapidly coming to a head, and Andrew Jackson was prepared to deal with them on his own.

On the night of September 12, Jackson sailed from Mobile to inspect the rehabilitation of Fort Bowyer, about thirty miles south on the gulf. Three hours later his schooner encountered a small sailboat, whose passenger had an urgent message for the general: Fort Bowyer had just come under siege by the British, with four warships bombarding from the sea and a party of 600 Indians and 130 British marines attacking by land. Quickly understanding the peril he was in, Jackson ordered his boat to come about for Mobile, where he dragooned a company of infantry and sent them rushing to the besieged outpost down the bay.

The next morning the relief force sailed back into Mobile Harbor with distressing news: Fort Bowyer had apparently exploded and been lost. The citizens of Mobile spent an anxious day and night, fearing the momentary arrival of the British to capture their city and turn them out of their homes. The following morning brighter word arrived: Fort Bowyer was secure. The giant flash that the relief party assumed was the fort’s powder magazine blowing up was actually the British twenty-gun man-of-war
Hermes
being blown to bits in the pass. The other three enemy ships departed, as did the shore raiding party, leaving 162 Indians and Englishmen dead on the beaches and aboard the ships. Fort Bowyer’s commander, a Major Lawrence, had gathered his defenders before the battle and—in a play on the famous last words of his namesake on the ill-fated
Chesapeake—
made them repeat their new motto: “Don’t give up the fort!”*
 
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With Fort Bowyer secure, Jackson set about organizing his attack on Pensacola, a task he looked forward to with relish, since the Spanish
comandante
had replied to his earlier letter by calling him “impertinent.”

Slowly but surely, the troops Jackson had called for from Tennessee began to arrive, among them the reliable General Coffee’s 1,800 cavalrymen. On November 2 Jackson marched on Pensacola with an army of 3,000, including 700 regulars. Four days later it stood before the city while a messenger under a white flag walked toward Pensacola to deliver an ultimatum to surrender. He was fired upon, not apparently by the Spaniards but by the truculent, newly arrived British. That night Jackson maneuvered his soldiers so as to encircle the city, and at dawn on November 7, 1814, they stormed the town. There was brief fighting, but soon Jackson was informed that the Spanish
comandante,
“old, infirm and trembling, was stumbling around with a white flag in distracted quest” of him. The surrender was quickly arranged, but not before the British blew up their commandeered garrison at Fort Barrancas, reboarded their ships, and sailed off for parts unknown. What happened to the majority of hostile Indians has never been fully explained, although a number of them were rounded up after they were observed staggering drunkenly around the city, proudly wearing their British red coats without pants.

Leaving a large number of his men to garrison Pensacola, Jackson then countermarched back to Mobile. After leaving even more men to protect that city, he took Coffee and his cavalry and pushed on to New Orleans, where he expected the main battle to break out.

Five

C
entral to the British design for the capture of Louisiana was an extraordinary scheme devised by Colonel Nicholls to enlist the services of the “pirates of Barataria,” who were for the most part not pirates at all but “privateers,” operating under “letters of marque” from foreign countries. Under the agreed concessions of maritime law, these official letters, or commissions, allowed the privateers to prey on the merchant shipping of any nation at war with the issuing country without—in the event they were captured—being subject to hanging as pirates, the accepted punishment of the day. Privateering had a long if not always honorable history—Sir Francis Drake, famed navigator of the Elizabethan era, was also a privateer. In certain instances, New England businessmen owned privateering ships, and Jefferson himself approved of their use in place of naval warships. But any time a diverse band of armed men is organized without the strict discipline of military rules and regulations, excesses can occur, and in privateering, especially, they occurred frequently.

In the Gulf of Mexico, a large gathering of these strange and ruthless men had set up operations on Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, which lies about forty miles south of New Orleans as the crow flies, but with the only route to the city lying along the twisted tangle of rivers, bayous, creeks, and canals, it was about a hundred miles and normally took three days or so to get there. The leader of this band was a tall, handsome, magnetic Frenchman named Jean Laffite, who, using his blacksmith shop in New Orleans as a front, came to run a phenomenal business smuggling contraband (illegal goods on which no federal duties had been paid) to the grateful citizens of New Orleans, rich and poor alike, who had been deprived for years by the American embargo and the British blockade. At any given time there were as many as a thousand (some say five times that number) of these “Baratarians” on the island of Grand Terre, constantly coming and going in their armed sloops and schooners-of-war to attack mostly Spanish and sometimes British shipping in the gulf and the Caribbean.

It was to the Baratarians that Colonel Nicholls dispatched his emissaries from HMS
Sophie
to see if they, with their valuable skills, armaments, and priceless knowledge of the area, could be enlisted into the British effort against New Orleans.

On the morning of September 3, 1814, the
Sophie
dropped anchor in the straits between Grand Terre and its next-door neighbor Grand Isle and fired a signal cannon to announce her arrival. Through spyglasses the British observed hundreds of sleepy-eyed, ill-dressed men begin gathering on the sandy beach of Grand Terre, wondering no doubt at this strange new visitor. Presently a small boat was launched from the beach, rowed by four men with a fifth man in the bow. From the
Sophie
a longboat was likewise launched, carrying its captain, Nicholas Lockyer, and a Captain McWilliams of the Royal Marines. The boats met in the channel, and Lockyer, in his best schoolboy French, asked to be taken to Monsieur Laffite; the response from the man in the bow of longboat was that Laffite could be found ashore. Once on the beach, the two British officers were led through the suspicious crowd by the tall man in the bow, along a shaded path, and up the steps of a substantial home with a large wraparound gallery. At that point he genially informed them, “Messieurs, I am Laffite.”

J
ean Laffite remains among the most enigmatic and persistently romanticized figures in the American historical experience, ranking up there with such legends as Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Hickok. (Most of these, in the 1950s and ’60s, had their exploits turned into popular television serials. Laffite, however, had two major feature movies made of his life—one starring Fredric March and the other Yul Brynner—both produced by the flamboyant Cecil B. DeMille.) For a man who lived on the edges of society, Laffite would perform for the failing young republic a valuable and patriotic service when he might just as easily have sailed out of danger as a very wealthy man.

Jean Laffite was born at Port-au-Prince in the French colony of San Domingo (now called Haiti), probably about 1782.*
 
³⁴
His father had been a skilled leatherworker in Spain, France, and Morocco before he settled on Haiti and opened a prosperous leather shop. His mother died “before I could remember her,” and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, whose husband, a Jew, had been a pharmacist in Spain before he was murdered during the Inquisition. Laffite’s grandmother “never lost an opportunity to tell me about all the tribulations her relatives were subjected to,” and—like Jackson’s youthful hatred of the British—this became the cornerstone of young Jean’s lifelong antipathy toward the Spanish. There were eight children in the Laffite family, of whom Jean was the youngest. Of these, his brothers Pierre, two and a half years older, and Alexandre, a seaman eleven years older, would figure prominently in his life.

After a rigorous education beginning at age six, Jean and Pierre were sent away, by the time they reached their early teens, to advanced schooling on the neighboring islands of Saint Croix and Martinique. Next they went to a military academy on the island of Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), where they received training in swordsmanship, navigation, and artillery; later they honed their skills in the martial arts of dueling and fencing back in Port-au-Prince.

In the meantime, Alexandre returned occasionally from his adventures as a privateer attacking Spanish ships in the Caribbean and regaled his younger brothers with engaging stories of his exploits, among which was a stint as an artilleryman in the service of Napoleon. A short man with a bull-like build, hooked nose, large alert eyes, and a fiery temper, Alexandre had by now assumed the alias “Dominique You,” an unusual name, perhaps, but a common practice among privateers who realized that at any given point—in the days before photos and fingerprints—some authority might be looking for them under another.*
 
³⁵

So captivated were the two young Laffites by their older brother’s tales that nothing would do but for them to follow him to sea, despite their grandmother’s fervent protests. A cousin, Renato Beluche, also of French ancestry but a native of New Orleans, apparently helped them get aboard one of the many privateers bearing French letters of marque, where they “learned the trade,” so to speak, of this variation on piracy.

F
or a quick look at how such men operated their everyday business back then, let us turn to an account attributed to Laffite of an unusual encounter between two privateering ships and a Spanish corvette, the
Atrevida,
in the spring of 1801. Spying the Spaniard off the coast of Vera Cruz, Beluche (who, because he was a bit older, was known as Uncle Reyne by the Laffite boys) ordered his vessel to pour on sail and overtake the corvette. When they closed, Beluche’s men were bewildered at what they saw. At first it appeared that there were many armed men on deck waiting for them. But soon it became apparent that, in fact, a mutiny was in progress. The
Atrevida
was manned for the most part by a crew of Frenchmen who, having been deported from Mexico by Spanish authorities, had been forced to work their way across the Atlantic as servile crewmen to the Spanish captain.

As the three ships rolled along side by side in the ocean swells, the privateers watched the development of the mutiny. The Spanish officers slowly gained ground against the unarmed Frenchmen—one of whom was shot dead when he called out to the privateers’ ships, “
Vive la France
!
” Once the Spanish regained control, according to Laffite, “they ordered the mutineers to be bound and forced to go up on deck, where the officers ordered the chef, the black cook, to hit each on the head with an axe and, afterwards, throw them into the sea.

“Uncle Reyne,” recorded Laffite, “was very upset by the massacre of the Frenchmen,” and shouted out for the
Atrevida
to surrender. When this produced no response, a shot was fired at her bow, knocking off the bowsprit. Still no surrender, but the Spanish captain was operating under a considerable handicap since he had just executed most of his own gun crews. More cannon shot from the privateersmen finally had the desired effect, and the
Atrevida
was captured. Its captain, however, became surly and refused to show the privateersmen where the gold and other valuables were.

To get this information, the privateers tied him up on deck in the equatorial noonday sun, and when he was still not forthcoming, a magnifying glass was used “to focus more of the sun’s heat on him.” Not only that, but pistols were repeatedly discharged “close to his ears to create a vibration of his nerves.” This did the trick, and the privateers sailed home to Haiti with their prize in tow and their hold full of Spanish gold.*
 
³⁶
Thus Jean Laffite, like Andrew Jackson, experienced at an early age some terrible sights that left with him a lasting impression that the world was a violent and unforgiving place. In lieu of Jackson’s hatred of the British, Laffite developed an abiding hatred of Spain.

A
t the age of eighteen Jean fell in love with and married Christine Levine, whose parents were Danish Jews, on the island of Saint Croix. Over the next four years she presented Jean with two sons and a daughter, Denise Jennette, but Christine died during the final childbirth. Jean’s sister took in Denise, and the two boys were sent to live with Pierre’s wife, Françoise Sel, while Jean and Pierre plied their privateering trade. Then further calamity struck.

Led by Toussaint-Louverture, a charismatic former slave, a massive slave rebellion erupted on Haiti that ultimately, in 1802, terminated French rule on the island. The later fighting centered around an attempted annihilation by the slave army of the prosperous colony of free light-skinned blacks—quadroons, octaroons—who themselves kept slaves, and who formed a sort of black upper class on the island. But it quickly spread into a movement to free all 600,000 Haitian slaves and establish an independent black republic. Aided and abetted by the Spanish, Haiti soon became engulfed in a monstrous civil war in which thousands were slaughtered, plantations were burned, and their French owners and families were put to the sword, gallows, or burning stake.*
 
³⁷
Napoleon responded by sending a 34,000-man army from France to put the rebellion down, but it was decimated amid a scourge of yellow fever in which more than two-thirds of the soldiers died, including the commander.

The situation on Haiti had become so intolerable by 1804 that the French colonists—as well as most of the free men of color, the mulattoes—were forced to flee, and many of them wound up in New Orleans, with its large French population. This included the Laffites, who evacuated their families and friends to the new American republic.

Many of the wealthier French-Haitian planters found a natural transition for themselves in the rich Mississippi bottomlands south of New Orleans, which they soon discovered were ideal for growing sugarcane. Ever since a plague of caterpillars wiped out their indigo crops half a century earlier, Louisianans had been planting sugarcane, but it had been only recently that they learned how to refine it into granulated sugar. Up until then, the best they could produce was a kind of sweet gummy syrup, which they soon realized could be used to make rum, a development that caused the governor to complain that “the immoderate use of [rum] has stupefied the whole population.”

Soon the production of sugar became Louisiana’s principal cash crop; a successful planter could easily make $20,000 to $30,000 a year ($300,000 to $400,000 in today’s dollars). Sugar growing was a labor-intensive operation, however, and as more plantations were added more slaves were needed to plant and cut the cane, grind it for boiling, then pack the crystallized sugar into barrels for shipping abroad.*
 
³⁸

By this time the riverbanks for miles had become a continuous row of sugar plantations, most of them about eight hundred to a thousand acres, upon which the planters often built sumptuous plantation homes, in addition to keeping their luxurious town houses in the city. All in all, during the first years of the nineteenth century, New Orleans prospered dramatically—not just from sugar but from the upriver trade of furs, grains, flour, cotton, salt, sawn timber, whisky, and other goods, which came down on flatboats from as far away as Ohio and Pennsylvania to be loaded onto ships destined for the far corners of the world.

Good things don’t usually last forever, and in the case of New Orleans they certainly didn’t—beginning on the first day of January 1808. First there was the aforementioned Embargo Act, passed by Congress to retaliate for the assaults on American shipping by England and France during the Napoleonic Wars. Next was the African Importation Act, which banned the introduction of any more slaves into the United States. With these two measures in place, maritime commerce in New Orleans slowed almost to a standstill, broken only by the time-honored practice of smuggling.

It was amid this setting that the brothers Laffite began their rise to prominence.

W
hen Jean and Pierre arrived in Louisiana from Haiti they did not come as wealthy French planters but as privateersmen—a barely respectable and unquestionably dangerous business—and just in time to learn that the U.S. government had ordered all American ships to remain in port indefinitely under the Embargo Act. Accordingly, the Laffites set themselves up in New Orleans with a blacksmith’s shop in which, using slave labor, they began fabricating, among other things, the fancy kinds of cast-iron grilles that dress so many New Orleans balconies and windows.*
 
³⁹

A mere smithing enterprise, reputable as it was, never quite suited the ambitious Jean Laffite, who by now had grown into a somewhat formidable presence. In his mid-twenties, Laffite was described as a handsome, dark-haired man*
 
⁴⁰
about six feet tall with “dark piercing eyes,” and a furious vertical crease in his brow—he was “well made,” in the parlance of the day—with a physical comportment something like that of a large, powerful cat. He was also recorded as being smart, shrewd, and convivial—if not jovial—and a gambling and drinking man as well. One of the first American chroniclers of the era was Judge Alexander Walker, a New Orleanian whose book
Jackson and New Orleans
was published in 1856, and who thus knew firsthand many of the personages of the Jackson-Laffite era. According to Judge Walker, Laffite “was a man of good address and appearance, of considerable shrewdness, of generous and liberal heart, and adventurous spirit.” Laffite spoke English, Spanish, and Italian with a heavy French accent, and was reputed to be something of a ladies’ man, though little is known of his romantic life except that he regularly attended the fabulous Quadroon Balls, in which young men of means in New Orleans mingled (and more) with the beautiful light-skinned “free women of color” from the Caribbean islands.