Patriotic Fire (29 page)

Finally there were Laffite’s Baratarian artillerists, who fought so hard and well at the guns on the rampart. Their absence alone might not have turned the tide of battle, but, when everything is taken into consideration, Laffite’s contributions to the victory were substantial, if not crucial. When the government would not give him back what he considered his property, obtained legally under international law (though admittedly illegally smuggled), Laffite smoldered until the end of his days, though he always blamed “corrupt, dishonest officials,” not the American nation herself.

A
fter Galveston, Pierre Laffite is said to have joined Jean in the area around St. Louis. He died in 1844, in the small town of Crevecoeur, Missouri, where he was buried in the local cemetery. Brother Dominique You bought a saloon on St. Anne Street in New Orleans, joined the Masons, and settled down to a calmer life. He died in 1830 and, after a large public funeral in which his casket was carried by the Masons, was buried in the fashionable St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 with full military honors, including an artillery salute.

Of the other characters in the drama:

Major Gabriel Villeré, who had neglected to block Bayou St. John, which was right behind his house, and thus let the British land unmolested, was court-martialed for dereliction of duty. Perhaps because his service during the rest of the campaign was stellar, or perhaps because of the outcome of the battle, he was acquitted “by a jury of his peers.” He lived into old age; by the time of Judge Walker’s recollections, he’d invariably get misty-eyed when he described how he had had to kill his favorite dog to keep from being recaptured by the British. His father, Major General Jacques Villeré, later became a governor of Louisiana.

The architect Arsene Lacarrière Latour, who was Jackson’s chief military engineer, returned to New Orleans, where he became, of all things, a paid agent (spy) in the employ of Spain. He also began work on the first historical account of the battle, which was published in 1816. Latour’s book is of inestimable value, since it is the first contemporary account and includes almost all of the pertinent documents surrounding the campaign, as well as his complete map atlas. Afterward Latour went to Cuba and resumed his architectural work, then in 1834 returned to France, where he lived with an old aunt until his death in 1837, during a flu epidemic.

Edward Livingston, Jackson’s military secretary and composer of his dispatches to Washington, was already a well-known attorney at the time of the battle. Afterward he became a famous one, having written over a number of years what has come to be known as the Livingston code of criminal law. He served three terms in Congress before being elected senator from Louisiana in 1829. When Jackson assumed the presidency, he named Livingston his secretary of state and, later, ambassador to France. In 1836 he died at the family mansion on the Hudson River in New York. Not long afterward, on Grand Terre, a substantial fort named Fort Livingston was erected by the United States. Right up until the end, Livingston continued to enjoy a correspondence with his old antagonist Sir Harry Smith.

Louisiana governor William Claiborne was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1816, but he died before he could take office. He remained angry that Jackson had not embraced him and had relegated him to lesser military roles, doing him out of a chance to share in the glory.

The French general Jean Robert Humbert, who fought so bravely as a volunteer with Jackson’s army, had trouble making ends meet after the war. He tried teaching and at one point went to Mexico to get in on the revolution, but he arrived too late. He continued his daily excursions to the New Orleans coffeehouses, in full French uniform as usual, for dominoes and brandy, and “died of dissipation” in 1823. The city of New Orleans gave him a military hero’s funeral.

The free men of color who had performed so bravely at the battle were given short shrift. One of their number, Captain Joseph Savary, was recognized for valor and voted a military pension of $30 a month by the Louisiana state legislature. Later he apparently led a group of fifty or sixty followers to Galveston to join Laffite. Another, Jordan B. Noble, who had been a teenage drummer boy, later became a drummer during the Mexican War. As a drummer for the Plauché Guards of the Confederate army, he was captured during the Civil War battle for New Orleans and switched sides to the Union army. For years “Old Jordan,” as he was affectionately known, “became a fixture in the many city parades that marched down the years.”

In a noteworthy act of ingratitude, however, after the British had been defeated, apparently few, if any, of these blacks were given their promised bounty or land and, in the words of one historian of the free men, “were forced to be content with honeyed words and stately phrases, which became empty phrases after the battle.”

Most of the owners of the great plantation houses within the battle area returned to find their homes in ruins. Those that were not destroyed or damaged by fire had been looted and ransacked. The owners began immediately to restore or rebuild, and many of these places lasted into the first half of the twentieth century, until sugarcane growing moved westward and high prices were being paid to buy up the area for industrial development. The proprietor of the Macarty plantation left many of the British cannonballs embedded in its walls and had them coated in gold as a conversation piece.

The big mansions are gone now, along with their formal gardens and luscious orange groves, replaced by large shipyards, which cut huge slips into the plantation grounds, as well as by cement factories, sugar and oil refineries, and other commercial enterprises.

Like Laffite and the Baratarians, the Creoles of Louisiana afterward felt that they had been overlooked in the military dispatches Jackson sent out in the weeks following the victory. There is some truth to this. Jackson, now a major general of federal troops, tended to heap most of his praise on the two regiments of U.S. Army regulars, as well as on his home-state Tennesseans, and so a false and painful impression was created in the minds of Americans that Louisiana and the United States had been saved mainly by the brave volunteers from Tennessee.

This was true, as far as it went, since the Tennesseans constituted some 5,000 of Jackson’s 8,000-man army. But for years afterward the Louisianans, who had fought as bravely as anybody else—more so, perhaps, since they were defending their land, their homes, their wives and daughters—used every opportunity to convince the world otherwise.

Of the men who served with Jackson during the Creek War but were not at New Orleans, Davy Crockett went on to become a U.S. congressman and later, of course, was at the Alamo, where he passed into legend. Sam Houston also went west, where he performed deeds that resulted in his becoming the Father of Texas, and ultimately presided over the independence of what would soon become the Lone Star State.

Not much poetry, good or bad, came out of the battle, but several popular songs did. “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a ribald ballad consisting of nine stanzas, was composed by a Samuel Woodworth and sung to the air of “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey,” which sounded a bit like “Yankee Doodle.”

You’ve heard, I s’pose how New Orleans

Is fam’d for wealth and beauty,

There’s girls of every hue it seems,

From snowy white to sooty.

So Pakenham he made his brags,

If he in fight was lucky,

He’d have their girls and cotton bags

In spite of old Kentucky.

CHORUS:

Oh Ken-tuck-y, the hunters of Ken-tuck-y!

Oh Ken-tuck-y, the hunters of Ken-tuck-y!

But Jackson he was wide awake

And was not scar’d at trifles,

For well he knew what aim we take

With our Kentucky rifles.

So he led us down to Cypress swamp

The ground was low and mucky,

There stood John Bull in martial pomp

And here was old Kentucky.

CHORUS.

The composer, a Bostonian, seems to have acquired an elevated concept of the Kentuckians’ role in the battle.

In the America of that day, many of the prominent names that came out of the battle were stamped indelibly on the public mind. Perhaps it was because the nation was expanding so quickly, and there were so many new places to be named: among others, we have cities and counties named after Jackson and Houston, and for Montgomery, who was killed at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend; counties named for Carroll, Coffee, Adair, and, in Mississippi, for the gallant cavalryman Hinds. A national park has been named for Laffite, and a street and a hotel in New Orleans were named after Governor Claiborne. Also in the city today, the Laffites’ blacksmith shop is extant, and the tomb of Dominique You, the Old Absinthe House, where Jean and his crew hung out, as well as the calaboose are tourist attractions all.

T
here is another city park dedicated just to the battle itself, which is now run by the National Park Service. In the late spring and summer following the battle, many citizens of New Orleans began to visit the site. It was too soon, and what they saw was not pleasant. “At one place the ditch still retained a bloody stain and the smell was extremely offensive,” wrote one early visitor.

Over the years the river began to erode the right side of the rampart nearest the levee, and before long it was gone. The architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe, who had designed the U.S. Capitol, and whose son had fought in the battle, visited the site several years later and predicted that the whole line would be washed away by rains in the coming years, destroying “every vestige of a work which saved the city and the whole country . . . from conquest.”

For years visitors were beseeched by local slaves to buy souvenir bullets, grapeshot, and cannonballs that they had picked up from the fields. And as these things were becoming more scarce, the relentless press of agriculture was removing many traces of the event. The American forward redoubt near where Colonel Rennie had died; the British forward batteries and their redoubts; indeed, Jackson’s own line itself were all either obliterated or threatened to be, reverting back into sugarcane fields.

In 1839 a group of foresighted young New Orleans men proposed building a memorial on the battlefield, but they were unable to raise enough subscription money. The next year, however, was the twenty-fifth anniversary, and Jackson himself agreed to attend. This was only a few years before his death, and he was in ill health. If he had any impressions of the old rampart—known by then on battle maps as “Jackson’s Line”—he kept them to himself.

In 1851 the mayor of New Orleans organized a committee to build a memorial, and the next year the state legislature appropriated $5,000 for a monument and also funds to purchase the surrounding land on Chalmette’s plantation. It was decided that the monument would be an Egyptian obelisk 150 feet high, along the same lines as the Washington Monument, which was then under construction (but which would be more than 500 feet high).

The work was interrupted by the Civil War and thereafter, for thirty years, by a lack of funds, and the monument remained half finished and in dilapidated condition, an embarrassment to both the city and the state. City officials tried to cede it to the federal government, but Washington did not want it, and nobody seemed to know what to do next. Then some women got into the act.

A group of Louisiana ladies known as the United States Daughters of 1812 petitioned the governor of the state to do something—and he did. In 1894 he gave the monument to them, along with $2,000, and told them to get it finished if they could. Using funds from private donations and “with the meager revenue derived from the sale of pecans, wood and the rental of pastures [the society] built a keepers lodge, repaired old fences, cleared and drained the grounds, replaced twenty-one iron steps inside and placed a temporary top until such time as it could be completed.”

Then they appealed to Congress for money, and waited, patiently, which was a good thing since it was a long wait—fourteen years, to be exact—but finally Congress appropriated the money and the Chalmette Monument was finished, seventy years after it was begun; it remains there today. People unacquainted with the area often mistake it for a lighthouse.

O
ne thing is certain: if Tecumseh had never come to Alabama, and if William Weatherford had not been inspired by him to go on the warpath, and if Andrew Jackson had not led his militia to victory in the Creek Indian War, then Jackson would never have been commissioned a major general in the United States Army and ordered to take charge of the defense of New Orleans.

Instead, some hidebound bumbler such as General Wilkinson likely would have been put in command merely because he held the rank, and the outcome probably would have been quite different.

In the overarching vault of military history, it almost seems as if nobody
other
than Jackson could have pulled it off. In a matter of a few weeks he cobbled together the most unlikely of armies—90 percent of them untrained—and by sheer dint of will he inspired these disparate men to cling to their rude dirt rampart like bats to a cliff and hold it in the face of a professional British army that had never tasted defeat.

Jean Laffite, like Andrew Jackson, had grown up on the edges of civilization, where life had taught him some harsh lessons. Also like Jackson, he was a natural leader of men and could be a killer when necessary. Confidence in imaginary possibilities was an enduring part of Laffite’s thinking, but the British bribe of cash and commissions had adjusted his sense of reality, presenting him with a decision of brutal simplicity: either to warn the Americans, who wanted to arrest him, or to join with the British and take their bribe. He made his choice to become an American patriot.

Laffite was a complicated and mysterious man, as the writer J. Frank Dobie once suggested years ago when he wrote, “He must have been a puzzle even to himself.” But at the Battle of New Orleans Jean Laffite was there when it counted. Jackson appreciated it, and that was enough.