Patriotic Fire (10 page)

At this point, Jean Laffite, if had he wanted, easily might have sailed over to the British and requested (at least a part of) his bribe, and then sailed away again to places unknown, a rich man. Or he simply could have ordered the Baratarians to load up their ships from the warehouses and done the same thing. That he didn’t seems testimony that Laffite must have felt either a certain loyalty to America or perhaps an animus against the British-Spanish cabal, but the fact remains that he did not take the easy way out; he chose sides.

If Laffite thought that the New Orleans authorities were now going to forgive him for smuggling, however, he was mistaken. Not only did they do no such thing, they decided not to believe him. When Blanque delivered Laffite’s communiqué to Claiborne, the governor convened the legislature’s Committee of Public Safety, which recently had been organized as the present crisis unfolded. This committee consisted, in addition to the governor, of a number of prominent citizens, including the American army and navy commanders, Ross and Patterson, Major General Jacques Villeré, head of the Louisiana militia, and the U.S. Customs collector, among others. Claiborne laid out the letters for the committee to read, then asked: “The council must decide two questions: first, are these letters genuine; second, is it proper for the Governor of Louisiana to enter into any correspondence with Jean Laffite or any of his associates.”

Most committee members insisted that the letters must be fakes, forgeries, and that Laffite was a low-down pirate simply trying to get his brother out of jail with a cheap gambit. The one voice that spoke out on Laffite’s behalf belonged to General Villeré, who declared that the Baratarians were privateers operating under the Cartagena flag, that they had adopted the United States as their country, and that they must be trusted. If anyone knew the fragility of Louisiana’s defense forces, it was Villeré, but he was overruled; just in case, though, it was decided to send a verbal reply with Laffite’s messenger telling him not to do anything until the matter could be given further consideration. In any event, Commodore Patterson and Colonel Ross—who were not bound by any decisions of the state government but took their orders direct from Washington—announced they were going ahead with their expedition to oust Laffite and company from Grand Terre.

Meanwhile, Laffite, who had been anxiously on the lookout for the return of his messenger, was both surprised and delighted to see in the messenger’s pirogue none other than his brother Pierre, who had magically “escaped” from jail. The magic probably had something to do with bribery, but in any case Pierre was free. Yet, as good news is so often followed by bad, Laffite’s spies in New Orleans also returned with the unpleasant wind that Patterson’s flotilla and army were assembling at New Orleans to put him out of business. This prompted Laffite to write another letter, this time to Claiborne himself, regarding “the safety of the country,” in which Laffite candidly admitted his sin of smuggling but offered his own services and those of the Baratarians “in defense of the country,” asking in return a pardon for himself, Pierre, and any other of his men who were indicted or about to be. “I am a stray sheep,” he wrote, “wishing to come back into the fold.”

Matters then began unfolding very quickly, as they are apt to when war is just over the horizon. At about this time an anonymous letter from a privateer spy in Havana—where Nicholls’s flotilla had put in before sailing on to Pensacola—was delivered to Laffite. The spy was apparently a good one, too, because the letter revealed the British plot to enlist thousands of hostile Indians in Florida, as well as the slaves; provided the names and types of British ships, plus a description of troops and artillery; and gave a summary of the entire plan of operations: first attack westward from Pensacola and secure the American fort at the mouth of Mobile Bay, then the conquest of Mobile itself, followed by a march on New Orleans in concert with the two British fleets now headed in that direction. The spy closed with a warning: “You have not a moment to lose; because if they get a footing, it will be very difficult to get clear of them.” He went on to describe Colonel Nicholls as “an impatient blustering Irishman, apparently brave and cruel.” (The letter proved to be chillingly accurate.)

Laffite immediately rushed this letter to Claiborne by another special courier, and the governor, in turn, not only sent it along to Jackson with the others but had them all published in the newspaper, further adding to the city’s growing alarm. Along with the other unfolding evidence of a British invasion, Laffite’s communications undoubtedly confirmed Jackson’s decision to attack Pensacola, but when he saw Laffite’s offer to bring his Baratarians to the defense of New Orleans in exchange for a pardon, Jackson unwisely reverted to doctrinaire pedantry. He denounced the Baratarians as “hellish banditi” and finally got around to issuing a proclamation of his own—directed to the Louisianans—in which he informed the startled Creoles that the “base, perfidious Britons” were “the sworn enemies of all Frenchmen,” and that all Creoles should “nobly die in the last ditch” before accepting Nicholls’s suggestion to join with the British in the overthrow of American rule in Louisiana. What Jackson failed to understand at this point was that he would soon need all the help he could get, including that of the hellish banditi.

Laffite, for his part, was now waiting for the other shoe to drop; he knew not whose, nor where nor when. His fortnight time limit to join the British invasion had expired, and several of His Majesty’s warships now lay off Barataria Bay, possibly to enforce the “stick” part of the naval commander’s earlier warning to him—and now the Americans, too, were organizing a force to send against him. What was a pirate to do? Laffite was not a man to wonder for long; he ordered most of the Baratarians to sail away from Grand Terre with whatever of value they could carry, including munitions. He put his older brother Dominique You in charge of the island with about five hundred men, instructing him to fight the British from the fort if they attacked and, if that proved unsuccessful, to burn all the warehouses and ships at anchor. Pierre, who had become ill, was then sent off to a plantation to the west. With all that done, Laffite did the sensible thing and fled with Pierre to a friend’s plantation on the so-called German Coast, northwest of the city, to await developments, which were not long in coming.

A
contemporary American visiting New Orleans from New York, Philadelphia, or Boston might easily have concluded that he had been deposited in a foreign land—which, for all practical purposes, he had. A brief examination of the New Orleans of the time is useful now, since to understand the forces at work under the impending emergency one would almost have to go back several hundred years to the bewildering days of the Borgias.

The city had been founded in 1718 as a trading post on a crescent switchback curve of the half-mile-wide Mississippi River by the Frenchman Sieur de Bienville, who had recently established a similar post at the head of Mobile Bay, about 140 miles to the east. In many ways the site was ideal, for it provided an expansive riverfront to accept the downriver canoes, rafts, and boats that brought goods from the rivers that drained the Mississippi Basin all the way to the Great Lakes, with tributaries such as the Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, Wabash, Arkansas, and dozens of smaller streams leading into the interior. It had access to world markets both from the river, about a hundred twisting southward miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and from Lake Pontchartrain, just a few miles away.

In other important ways, however, the site was far from ideal, primarily since it lay about eight feet below the level of the river, which during storms—let alone hurricanes—could (and did) cause serious problems, until the levees were built. The site was also swampy and would have to be drained to make it habitable. Nevertheless, Bienville named the place La Nouvelle Orleans, after the priggish Duke of Orleans, and sailed away—no doubt after wishing his small colony of French settlers good luck—never to return.

For the next half century New Orleans languished as a trading backwater with the dreaded yellow fever and other tropical diseases periodically reducing its population dramatically. Frenchmen being Frenchmen, however, they tried to make it nicer by laying out a formal, symmetrical city of European design, with elegant government buildings, a cathedral, and a large convent for the Ursuline nuns. Then, in 1763, after losing the Seven Years’ War, the French were forced to cede the territory of Louisiana to Spain, which began adding its considerable national flavors, until 1800, when the Spanish, then under Napoleon’s domination, transferred it back to France. By 1803 Napoleon realized that pressing military affairs on the European continent foreclosed his ability to support, defend, and administer the great territory, and, needing cash, he got the bright idea to sell it to the foolish Americans, who overnight doubled the size of their country for a paltry $15 million.

By this time there was a small but growing Anglo-American presence in New Orleans, but as the War of 1812 broke out, most of its twenty-five thousand citizens were of French, Spanish, or African extraction. Of these last—which comprised the majority of people in the district—about half were so-called free men of color, including the several thousand who had recently arrived from Haiti, or they were slaves.

The blacks, despite their population superiority, could not play much of a role in the political intrigues, since free men of color were not allowed to vote, sit on juries, run for public office, or intermingle publicly with whites. Mostly they became tradesmen—bricklayers, carpenters, lamplighters, tailors, and oftentimes overseers on the burgeoning sugar plantations. Slaves, on the other hand, were treated basically like barnyard animals.

That left the three white groups—the French, the Spanish and their descendants (Creoles), and the Americans—each of which detested the others. The first impression most of the by then self-assumed aristocratic French and Spaniards*
 
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had of Americans was of those ragged, ill-mannered, drunken, and profane flatboaters from “Kaintucky” who arrived dressed in animal skins with their cargoes of furs, lumber, and occasionally something more useful, such as corn whisky. Because the current flowed so strongly southward, there was no way the rafts could make it back upriver, so the Kentuckians (and Tennesseans, Illinoisans, and Ohioans—all lumped together as “Kaintucks”) often stayed and brawled and drank and whored and made themselves otherwise obnoxious to the recently refined tastes of the Mediterranean Creoles.*
 
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It has been said of New Orleans that it is so romantic you leave it either crying or drunk, and that was probably just as true in 1814 as it is today. A Sunday stroll around town would have found the levee path along the river thronged with colorful people in their Sunday best: Creoles, Kaintucks, mulattoes, quadroons, and with some Irish, Germans, Italians, and Portuguese thrown into the mix, speaking a variety of tongues, gathering around impromptu musical bands, fighting, flirting, laughing, and cursing, all against the backdrop of the tall masts of sailing ships that crowded the city wharves. The naturalist John J. Audubon described the levee on Sunday as “crowded by people of all sorts as well as colors, the market very abundant, the church bells ringing, the billiard balls knocking, the guns [of hunters] heard all around.” At night, several theaters presented (in different languages) the latest plays from Europe. Probably the most eclectic theater in town was the Grand Opera, where performances were sung in numerous languages, including Russian. For those interested in sport there was a racetrack and any number of cockfighting pits.

There were even more exotic entertainments. For $1 (half price for children) one could see large animal fights, pitting a Bengal tiger against a bear, twelve dogs against a large bull, or six bulldogs against a Canadian bear—each event serenaded by a military band.*
 
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One could, if one wished, attend a voodoo rite conducted by Haitian immigrants, at which some participants were turned into zombies while others drank the warm blood of a live rooster (as a cure for zombiism). And, of course, there were the Quadroon Balls, where for an entrance fee of $10 wealthy men could drink, gamble, and make personal arrangements with young “high-yellow” women.

A walk along the unpaved and often muddy streets of New Orleans was rarely without anxiety, especially in certain parts of town. Thanks to the volatile mix of sailors, gamblers, riverboat men, soldiers of fortune, and other dubious characters, the city boasted the nation’s highest crime rate, particularly for murder. Even so-called gentlemen went armed with concealed pocket pistols, sword canes, and elaborately carved knives and daggers.

Then there was the dueling, for which New Orleans was infamous. In earlier days the duels had been mostly swordfights in which
honour
was satisfied with the first drawing of blood, but later, when men began using firearms, duels turned into far more deadly affairs. According to the New Orleans writer John Bailey, on a single Sunday morning twenty men paired off to fight back-to-back duels beneath a tree called the Dueling Oak on one of the sugar plantations, and three of them were carried away dead.

By 1814 relations between the French and Spanish Creoles and the Americans had so soured that each group sullenly occupied a different part of town. The Creoles despised the Americans as greedy, dull, and uncouth, and the Americans returned the compliment by branding the Creoles frivolous, foppish, and arrogant. The Creoles were Catholics and the Americans Protestants; the Creoles delicately dipped snuff and sneezed into their lace handkerchiefs, while the Americans chewed and spat tobacco juice on the ground; the American men shook hands, the Creole men kissed one another on the cheeks; and the Creoles conversed in French and Spanish, for which the Americans considered them “foreigners.” Because the Creoles enjoyed a voting majority, they controlled the state legislature and city government, and some had even refused to recognize that they were now part of the United States. When William Claiborne, a Virginian by birth, was appointed Louisiana governor by Thomas Jefferson, it led to even more resentment, especially since Claiborne did not speak, and refused to learn, any language but English, which, upon reflection, might not have mattered much since he and the legislature were barely on speaking terms anyway.