Letters (115 page)

This last, at least, he finds easy to answer to his satisfaction: his Fort Bowyer postscript to (posthumous) Letter #1 had implored Andrée to come with the twins to New Orleans, where he now professes to hope to find them, under Lafitte’s protection, upon his return. And the other questions?

He reviews his official motives. In William Patterson’s house in Baltimore, where he recuperated, it was believed that the destruction of Washington on the one hand and on the other the British defeats at Plattsburgh, Lake Champlain, and Baltimore would bring the treaty commissioners at Ghent to an understanding, perhaps before 1815 commenced. But the question remained open whether such a treaty would bind the signatories to their
status quo ante bellum
or
uti possidetis
—before the fighting started or after it should end. Thus Admiral Cochrane’s race to restore his fortunes by taking New Orleans, and General Jackson’s to reach that city and muster an army in time to defend it.

Now, from Andrew Cook IV’s earlier point of view there would have been everything to be said for a British victory: Thomas Jefferson himself fears that once possessed of Louisiana the British can hold it indefinitely, navigating with impunity from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and effectively bordering the United States at the Mississippi; and radical New England Federalists are maintaining publicly that British possession of Louisiana will signal dissolution of the Union and legitimize a New England Confederation. But our ancestor has become, however qualifiedly, a
patriot:
if he does not want the Indians driven into the Pacific, neither does he want the Union dissolved. (A
French
Louisiana would be another story: a third influence, to check both British and American expansion into the West…)

He fears, moreover, that the confrontation will be horrific. Cochrane will reinforce his expedition massively at Jamaica (There are rumors that Wellington himself is being sent to lead the army. In fact, Wellington has advised the British cabinet to relinquish their demand for an Indian free state and settle a treaty: in his view, the loss of Tecumseh and of naval control of the Lakes has lost the war). Andrew is no lover of General Jackson, the butcher of the Creeks, but he knows him to be a formidable officer; if the defense of New Orleans will be made difficult by the shortage of regular troops and armaments and by the ethnic diversity of its defenders—Spanish, Mexicans, Anglo-Saxons, West Indians, free blacks and “coloreds,” Creole French both Bourbon and Bonapartist, even Italians and Choctaws!—its invasion will be also, through a labyrinth of bayous where only the alligators and the Baratarians are at home.

It is our progenitor’s official hope, then—
was,
he reminds Andrée—that he can help turn the battle into a siege at worst, till the treaty is announced, by persuading each side that the other is decisively superior. With the aid of the Baratarians, perhaps Jackson can contain the invaders in a holding position; knowing Cochrane’s irresolution and his greed for prizes, Andrew even imagines that the admiral might be bought off with a negotiated indemnity, and the ransom ships then seized at sea by Lafitte’s privateers. It is exactly such audacious traffic that the U.S. Navy has tried to break up by destroying Barataria in September and arresting Pierre Lafitte and Dominique You (Jean’s older brothers, the latter under his
nom de guerre):
a move deplored by New Orleans merchants whose stock in trade comes from the privateers.

Thus Andrew’s official reasons. But we have seen how the Cooks and Burlingames fly from husband- and parenthood; how this Andrew in particular is in flight from the general Pattern of our past and the specific course of his life’s “first cycle” (in my view, he runs into and perpetuates what he flees, like King Oedipus). There is moreover his guilt concerning Andrée, and concerning dead Tecumseh. And that blow on the head…

Plus one thing more, Henry, which he does not list among his motives but mentions promptly (as though in passing) in this letter. Andrew reaches New Orleans in late November 1814; he puts himself in touch with his friend Jean Blanque of the state legislature, who introduces him to Jean Lafitte. Cook has sensibly assumed the name of his Gascon forebear André Castine: Lafitte and Blanque are fellow Gasconards, from Bayonne, home of the eponymous ham and the bayonet. They hit it off at once; Cook’s impression is confirmed that the French Creoles want neither a British victory, which would end their influence and their privateering, nor an overstrong Federal presence: Mayor Girod himself had disapproved of the navy’s raid on Barataria. Like Andrew, but for a different reason, they prefer uneasy balances of power: it is Cartagena’s rebellion against Spain, for example, that licenses their privateering. Lafitte and Blanque are convinced that the 5,000 Baratarians, their copious munitions and supplies, local knowledge and experience of combat, could turn the coming battle in either direction. They would prefer to fight on the American side, in exchange for a general pardon and tacit permission to reestablish their “business”; but despite their refusal of British overtures to cooperate against “the destroyers of Barataria,” Andrew Jackson has ill-advisedly proclaimed against them, calling them “hellish banditti.” Jean Lafitte himself has scarcely been able to arrange Pierre’s escape from the New Orleans Cabildo, where Dominique You still languishes in heavy irons. Indignantly they show Andrew the offending proclamations, as translated and reprinted in a month-old issue of the local French-language Bonapartist newspaper,
L’Abeille.
He reads; he politely tisks his tongue at Jackson’s sanctimonious imprudence. Then his eye is caught by a familiar phrase in a neighboring column: “…next, drawing from her purse the deadly letter-opener…” (“…
ensuite, tirant de son sac à main l’ouvre-lettre mortel…”).
It is from an installment of a serial fiction,
Les lettres algériennes, par C.C.

Andrew demonstrates for his companions his remarkable ability to imitate the speech and manners of rural Anglo-Americans and proposes to intercede for the Baratarians with General Jackson, under the name of Andrew Cook of Maryland. He then inquires about this “C.C.” A pregnant Spaniard, Lafitte tells him with a smile: current mistress of Renato Beluche, an old comrade and fellow buccaneer with a peculiar fancy for expectant mothers. He Jean has been instilled by his Jewish grandmother with an animosity toward all things Spanish (the Inquisition killed her husband and drove the family to Haiti, where Jean and his brothers were sired by their Gascon father); but “Uncle Renato,” a New Orleans Creole of Tourainian descent, does not share this prejudice. As for his special taste in women, Beluche declares it to be a matter of sweetened complexions, the convenience of nonmenstruation, and the freedom from responsibility for by-blows; but Jean attributes it to Renato’s mother’s having been left pregnant at her husband’s death, and to young Renato’s solicitude for her.

Satisfying himself that Consuelo is, at least until her term, in good hands (Beluche has set her up in a flat on Conti Street, near Jean’s own mistress, and prevailed upon friends at
L’Abeille
to translate and publish her fiction. When delivery time comes he will see to her
accouchement,
give the newborn a generous birthday gift, and look for another expectant beauty in need of protection), Andrew presses his inquiry no further, but decides to use some other English name in his dealings with Jackson.

It is this ready and thorough improvisation of identities which Lafitte finds most appealing in our ancestor. Himself at this time a suave 32-year-old who for a decade already has been chief among the Baratarian captains, he relishes pseudonyms and disguises, but has no gift for facial change and the imitation of speech. When Andrew now alters before their eyes the set of his jowls, the flare of his nostrils, the cast of his eyebrows and the pattern of his facial wrinkles, along with his stance, apparent height, and timbre of voice (he becomes “Jonathan Barlow, elder nephew of the late American minister to France: born in New England, educated in Paris and London, now come down from Kentucky as confidential observer for his old friend Henry Clay”), Lafitte offers him at once the post of minister of magic in whatever new Barataria might rise from the ashes of the old when the British are turned back.

But first they must be turned, and to their turning our forebear credits himself with three significant contributions. Early in December Andrew Jackson arrives, gaunt with dysentery and the rigors of his march from Florida, and assumes command of the city’s defenses. He inspires morale; he moves with industry and intelligence to fortify or block the likeliest approaches; but he has not enough men. In particular he lacks trained sailors and cannoneers, and heavy weapons for their use. Reinforcement is on the way, from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, but it is all cavalry and infantry. Delegations of Creole citizens petition him in vain to enlist the Baratarians. To the bilingual “Ambassador from Kentucky” (whom he trusts for “speaking like a proper American and not a damn’d Frenchie”) Jackson confides that he has begun to regret his proclamation, but fears he will be thought irresolute if he rescinds it. “Johnny Barlow” opines that his friend Henry Clay, in such a situation, would subtly shift his stand and refuse the
next
such petition on jurisdictional instead of moral grounds: Baratarian leaders are in jail awaiting federal prosecution, and he Jackson has no authority to release them. “Barlow” will then see to it that the petitioners and the federal district judge get the hint; when prosecution is suspended and the Baratarians are released, Jackson may accept their service and materiel without having solicited them. The matter of pardon can be postponed until after the emergency. Jackson will thus have at his disposal the best sailors and cannoneers in the world, at no cost to the U.S. Treasury, together with an exquisite network of strategic information. Any contradictions of his proclamation will pass unnoticed; the Baratarians’ role can be ignored or understated in official dispatches to Washington; their prosecution can even be resumed at some future date, with or without giving them covert advance warning and time to escape.

Old Hickory grimaces. “Politics!”

“John Barlow” shrugs. What is a general of the army but a sort of chief executive? he asks. And what is the President of the United States but a sort of general, strategically marshaling and deploying the forces at his disposal to carry out as it were the orders of the Constitution? Jackson’s frown turns pensive.

Two days later Dominique You and the others are free, Jean Lafitte is reviewing his own maps with the general, Renato Beluche is organizing artillery companies, and the vessels that in September had fired Barataria are now manned by the Baratarians! “John Barlow” discreetly retires.

The British land their advance parties and assemble below the city. A sustained drive against them is out of the question: even with Jackson’s reinforcements, it is some 3,000 American militia against three times that many seasoned British regulars. Nevertheless, the first action between them—a bold and successful night raid by Jackson to induce the British to delay their own attack until their whole army is assembled (thus giving him more time to complete his defenses)—convinces “André Castine” that with the help of the Baratarians New Orleans can be defended. Word has come through Jean Lafitte’s spies that the British service commanders are at odds with each other. Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, does not like the terrain: his army has the Mississippi on one flank, a swamp full of alligators and Indians on the other, the Americans before (who barbarously harass them all night long), and behind them a fleet that can evacuate only one third of the troops at a time. Admiral Cochrane is complaining that he has another General Ross on his hands; that if the army “shrinks from New Orleans as it shrank from Baltimore,” he will land his sailors and marines, storm the city himself, and let Pakenham’s soldiers bring up the baggage.

All familiar as a re-play’d play,
writes Andrew Cook:
the Chesapeake moved to the Mississippi!
On the day after Jackson’s night raid—i.e., December 24, as Henry Clay and his colleagues in Ghent sign a treaty agreeing to the
status quo ante bellum
(which the British privately mean to interpret as invalidating Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase)—he puts by his French alias and under his proper name gets himself “rescued” by the British.

More specifically, he devises with Lafitte and Beluche the following strategy: their agents among the Spanish bayou fishermen, who are cooperating with the British, will identify him as a friend of Lafitte’s with whom Jean has broken over the question of the Baratarians’ allegiance to the U.S. However much Cochrane distrusts him after the Chesapeake episode, the admiral will most certainly question him about the strength and disposition of Jackson’s forces. Cook will improvise as best he can to stall and divert a major British offensive at least until Jackson’s defense line is complete.

The crucial thing is that his “rescue” seem authentic. Unfortunate coincidence comes to his aid: Lafitte arranges for a party of Baratarian scouts to bring Andrew in from the marsh as a captured
British
scout; he is then quickly transferred under Baratarian guard, with other captured British scouts, through a stretch of bayou known to be patrolled by Cochrane’s marines. At the first evidence of British troops nearby, the Baratarians pretend to take fright and flee to save themselves, abandoning their prisoners. As the British congratulate themselves on their unexpected good fortune, Andrew experiences the first of those post-McHenry blackouts aforementioned: he wakes to find himself under a stand of loblolly pines on Bloodsworth Island, 36 years old, the war not yet begun…

Or so for a dizzy moment he imagines, till he learns from a redcoated officer that it is Bayou Bienvenue whose muddy bank he sits on, not the Chesapeake: those are cypresses, not pines, and it is Christmas Day, 1814. The sailors who row him down to Cochrane’s headquarters are jeering openly at the soldiers encamped along the way; morale does not seem high. At the Villeré plantation, British GHQ, word has it that Cochrane and Pakenham are still arguing strategy. An army aide comes out to interrogate the rescued scouts: Andrew declares to him that the key to Jackson’s defense is two armed schooners anchored in English Turn, a bend of the Mississippi below the city. So long as they lie there, he swears, no approach by road to the American main line is feasible; but to destroy them will involve the construction of artillery batteries on the levee above.