Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (7 page)

You must remember, that was a bad time; and bad times then were a good deal worse than bad times today. The country had been driven into a war it did not want and for which it was ill-prepared. The regular armies had been smashed, partly by the enemy, partly through the machinations of a group of traitors who had their headquarters at Hartford, Connecticut, and who had not only sold their honor for power, but were ready to sell their country, too. Defeat in war, partition of the nation, loss of independence and freedom, all that was acceptable to them if only it would destroy democracy and put them into the seat of power.

But they are not our story; they failed, as other groups of their nature failed, before and since then. Our story concerns a pirate and a general. The pirate we have met; the general's name was Jackson, and he came from Tennessee, which has raised up a good many sound men in the course of years.

When everything was lost and the traitors would have withdrawn all armies from the field and made peace, Jackson recruited his own army. He raised it from Kentucky and Tennessee men, men who knew a horse and a rifle when they saw one and were also not ignorant of a thing called freedom. Properly, they were not a regular army, not even what they called, in those days, the militia, but a people's army of armed citizens. The enemy was to call them “dirty-shirts” for the long, gray homespun hunting frocks they wore instead of uniforms. They were intent upon the preservation of the union because it involved so deeply their own preservation; let the union be dismembered, and they would be a fringe of homeless nobodies on a lost frontier.

There were between two and three thousand of them, and they marched south with Andrew Jackson to lead them. They picked up some regular troops on the way, and they drove the Seminole Indians back into the swamps. They taught Spain a lesson in Florida, and then they marched west to where Wellington's veterans were preparing to land at New Orleans and deal a death blow to the Union.

When Governor Claiborne of New Orleans received Jean Laffite's letter, he was inclined to act upon it. It contained the first definite and precise information concerning the British attack on New Orleans, and it offered, in defense of the city, a group of tried if undisciplined fighting men. But when he read it to his council, they pointed out to him that since such a degree of honor was obviously impossible in a pirate, therefore it was a forgery.

So he sent it on to General Jackson, who was approaching New Orleans with his army of frontiersmen. Then he sent what troops he had to destroy the pirate's stronghold at Barataria.

Jean Laffite had his sources of information too, and when he heard of the governor's decision, he sent for Dominique You.

“By God,” he told Dominique, “it is hard like the devil to be an honest man.”

“And what for?” Dominique demanded. “Let them send their soldier down here. We smash them—pouf!”

“We don't smash them.”

“I think you crazy, so help me God. You don't want to be governor of Louisiana?”

And everyone agrees that Laffite's answer, then and afterward, was, “What kind of damn fool land make me a governor? You want to live there?”

“Sure.”

Laffite said, “You're just a fool, Dominique. How much it cost for a deal to get Pierre out of jail?”

“Maybe five thousand dollar,” Dominique said hopelessly.

“Go get him out.”

And that was that, and when Governor Claiborne's little army showed up, the pirates were gone, cleared out completely; his victorious return to New Orleans was marred only by the fact that Pierre Laffite had disappeared from the city jail.

So much for the record, but when you try to get at the root of what motivated that strangest of all pirates, Jean Laffite, even the people of the Delta can't help you. They will remember knowingly that Governor Claiborne re-covered from the hideout of Barataria over half a million dollars' worth of loot that Laffite's corsairs had garnered from the shipping of many lands and which he had not found time to remove. But why Laffite avoided and fled from a miserable little force he could have ripped to pieces—that they can't say.

The next episode in the strange tale of Laffite concerns a woman, perhaps the same one he had had with him at the hideout when the British officers visited him—although that is hard to say, such a throng of women come in and out of his life. And an emerald necklace, too, as if this story of a pirate were an invented romance, instead of the gospel truth, word for word, detail for detail, as anyone on the Delta will tell you, if you only take the trouble to ask.

It seems that in his hasty departure from Barataria, Jean had time to take only a few choice items, one of them a necklace of emeralds; and a week later he slipped into New Orleans with a dual purpose in mind, to see his lawyer, Edward Livingston, a friend of Jackson and former mayor of New York City, and to give the necklace to a certain lady. Much legend attaches itself to this necklace, and it has been said that to obtain it Jean and Pierre fought a great battle against a Spanish frigate, sinking it finally; but there is no proof for or against that. Anyway, one night, close to midnight, Jean turned up in the lady's bedroom, the necklace dangling enticingly from one lace-covered hand.

She was a practical lady. “Is it true,” she asked the pirate, “that Claiborne took a million dollars' worth of loot out of Barataria?”

“Unless prices go up—no. Maybe half of that,” Jean smiled.

“And you are angry?”

“I am always angry when I lose so much money,” Laffite nodded, and he put the necklace on her. But a little while after, he took it off her, and along with it her long yellow hair; for in a burst of sympathy, she showed him a package of treasonable correspondence she had been conducting with the enemy.

Perhaps there is nothing new about the French custom of so treating a collaborationist female. But her father had influence with the governor, and it was published around that clipping her hair was Laffite's vilest crime. However, that is hardly true.

Afterwards, Laffite told Dominique You, “Love of God, there is no one faithful.”

“No one.”

“No one without a price for treason.”

“No one but maybe that damn Yankee General Jackson.”

“I don't like Yankees—”

The Yankee General Jackson, sick with fever, suffering from ulcers and dysentery, lay in bed and cursed the citizens of New Orleans. He had good reason to swear. Having made his way to New Orleans with his army of three thousand backwoodsmen, having opposed, in doing so, much of the vacillating and frightened Washington government, he discovered that the city was ready as a ripe fruit to fall.

Somewhere to the south of the city was a powerful British army. From one direction or another, the army would make its way north to New Orleans, and it was very necessary that the enemy should be stopped short of the city. But when it came to a knowledge of the wild, swampy land at the Mississippi's mouth, Jackson met up with a blank wall. Not only did no two maps agree, but no two citizens of New Orleans agreed on the number or direction of the twisting waterways that led to the gulf.

Jackson called in his friend, Livingston, and pleaded with him that he had to know. He said, they say, “There is someone, Edward, there must be someone who is sane in this damned comic-opera city!”

“Undoubtedly—”

“Someone who knows the swamp.”

“I know someone who knows the swamp,” Livingston said. “His name is Laffite.”

A stream of ripe language put an end to that. “I'll hang him to the highest oak in the city,” Jackson said.

Livingston subsequently repeated that to Laffite, word for word, and Laffite's only comment was, “What does the general want done?”

“The waterways blocked.”

“They will be blocked,” Laffite said.

And so they were. Dominique You led a hundred of Laffite's men up to Jackson's headquarters, where they volunteered for service in the swamp. Did they know the swamp? They said, yes, they had some little knowledge of the swamp. Of course, every Creole present recognized them for what they were, but if the Americans were so stupid, that was the Americans' affair. The pirates blocked the swamp. The pirates volunteered for service in the few small gunboats Jackson had. And a week later, Jackson issued a handbill for the arrest of Jean and Pierre Laffite.

Of course, every Creole in New Orleans knew Jean Laffite, and of course no one claimed the reward money that Jackson offered, any more than they had claimed the reward money Governor Claiborne had offered. By this time, the little French town which had so recently come under the jurisdiction of the United States was boiling. Five hundred red-sashed, cutlassed Baratarians owed allegiance to Jean Laffite, and everyone knew they fought like devils, and here was the Yankee madman, Jackson, posting handbills for their arrest instead of making a deal with them.

Well, Jackson had his conception of law and order, as was only fitting in a man who later became President of the United States, but he also had something more than that. He had a sense of values, of forces. That is why, when a man showed up at his headquarters, was ushered into his office, and announced, “I am Jean Laffite,” he did not immediately have him taken out and shot. No; instead, he eyed the man keenly, nodded at him, and said to him:

“Sit down and talk. You have fifteen minutes. Then I will order your trial by military court for the following crimes—piracy, larceny, abduction, murder, and conniving with the enemy. On any single count, you can be sentenced to death.”

They will tell you, down there, that on some of those counts Jean was guilty, but on others as innocent as a newborn babe. It is true, he was a pirate; not since the time of Henry Morgan had there been a pirate on so grand a scale; he elevated the profession, they will tell you. But murder—hardly. They will also impress on you that this Jackson was a hard man; look at the words that followed. The histories ignore the words, as they always do. All the histories say is that Jean Laffite spoke to Jackson for fifteen minutes and convinced him that the Baratarians could be of service—and Jackson accepted; just like that!

“It is true,” Laffite began, “I am pirate. Circumstances make me pirate. Circumstances make you general.”

“I don't grant the comparison,” Jackson said.

“Naturally. Everyone say, what for that damn fool Laffite insist on helping American? Cost me maybe half million dollar already. Cost me very nice business down in Barataria.”

“To save your neck,” Jackson said.

“So? But British also want to save my neck. They make not one deal, but five. Jean—you can have this, or this, or this, or that. Sacred name of God, do I say I am not thief? Pirate? Large businessman in smuggled goods? All very true. But I tell you, Laffite is finished. Whoever win, the profession is no good now. So I talk a little bit about liberty and the rights of man.”

“Talk quickly,” Jackson said.

“When I am small child, I see the Bastille stormed. The citizens take up arms and go to die, and even as very small child, I wonder why. I hear about your Valley Forge, and I wonder why. I watch Napoleon—by God, that's one bad man, even if I got maybe his best gunners in my band—”

“His best gunners?” Jackson inquired.

“What then? Dominique, Captain of Artillery, Peter Vourage, Master of Guns, Jacques Mans, Maurice Fremont—but that is nothing. I talk about rights of man. I know whole story of your revolution, how bad they need guns, powder; what a shame, that is done, and I got five hundred guns, put away, dry—”

“With powder and shot?”

“With powder and shot,” Laffite nodded. “I say to myself, do you look into soul and conscience of every man who fight with you? Only good men fight for liberty? How is that, my general? You catalogue each one? Is it bad a tyrant should die with bullet from thief's gun, no? Or maybe it make man a little better he fight for freedom? Burr is traitor—he never steal five cents; Arnold never steal a penny. You ask to what is Laffite loyal and why? Maybe to a dream, my general.”

“These gunners of yours,” Jackson answered, “have they artillery?”

Laffite shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. “It can be found. For all the men who can serve them, I assure you, there will be cannon enough.”

“I offer no pardons,” Jackson said.

“True—”

“When the danger is passed, I will be forced to order your arrest.”

“Naturally.”

“But now we can shake hands,” Jackson said.

You can see that this took considerably less than fifteen minutes.

It is not our affair here to retell the story of the awful battle of New Orleans. That was the last time an enemy in any force set foot upon American soil, and God grant there will never be such a time again. There have been greater battles than that, but it is doubtful that there was ever one more terrible in the toll American arms took.

For when the battle finished, after two horrible hours, the enemy had lost two thousand six hundred men in dead, wounded, and prisoners; our loss was seven dead and six wounded. And with that battle, our long revolution was finished and a country made here in America.

But something should be noted. When Wellington's veterans attacked our barricades, they expected rifle fire—yet the terrible toll was taken before they ever reached rifle range, by red-sashed, barefooted pirates under the command of Jean Laffite and Dominique You. They turned the tide of battle and made a victory out of defeat. They appeared for two hours on the stage of this country's history, served the guns, their golden ear-rings flashing, plunged home the ramrods, jammed in the grapeshot, and built in front of the American lines a wall of accurate, devastating artillery fire.

So the pirate chief came on the stage and left it. He is harder to trace after his moment of glory; in the roaring commerce of a new America, his enterprises collapsed, and even the people of New Orleans were inclined to smile a little at anything so romantic as red sashes and gold earrings. Two years later, the court records of Louisiana show a conviction and sentence to three years' imprisonment for one, J. Laffite. The crime was waylaying a Mississippi flatboat loaded with casks of rum. So the mighty are fallen. It seems that when he came out of jail, he attempted to reestablish himself at Barataria, but the new Yankee administration was in no mood for anything so impractical as pirates, and in one month a police detachment ran him out and burned his hastily-contrived warehouses. Dominique You fatalistically accepted honest employment on a sailing vessel; and when Jean Laffite attempted to establish a small if somewhat illegal enterprise in New Orleans itself, a court order gave him just three days to leave the city and never again return.