The Pirates Laffite Read online

  Pierre Laffite left on one of those refugee ships no later than early March 1803, and if he went that late then he did not go alone.18 By the time he put San Domingue permanently behind him, Pierre Laffite had an infant son.19

  TWO

  New Men in a New World 1803–1806

  These are our realms, no limits to their sway—

  Our flag the sceptre all who meet obey.

  Ours the wild life in tumult still to range

  From toil to rest, and joy in every change.

  IN 1803 NEW ORLEANS was overwhelmingly a French community, though so many languages and colors were to be seen on its streets that it was truly a city of the world. It had changed hands often since its founding by the French in 1718. France had ceded the vast inland empire known as Louisiana to Spain in 1762, but in 1801 in the Treaty of Madrid, Napoleon reclaimed Louisiana as part of the spoils of his reduction of Spain to a vassal state. Now, even as Laffite walked the streets of New Orleans, Napoleon was negotiating the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the infant United States.

  New Orleans itself made up several dozen square blocks of Creole and colonial houses on the northwest side of a crescent bend in the Mississippi River, all still encased in the remnants of an earthen rampart remaining from its earlier defenses. The Place d'Arms sat just back from the river, an open square on which stood the Cathedral Church of St. Louis, with the territorial prison and guardhouse to one side and an ecclesiastical charity house on the other. Street names redolent of French and Spanish history—Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Dauphine, Burgundy, and Rampart—paralleled the levee road at the river's edge. Intersecting them were others of equal association—Bienville, St. Louis, Conti, Toulouse, St. Pierre, Orleans, St. Anne, Dumaine, St. Philip, and more. Many of the blocks at the outer periphery close to the rampart were yet vacant, while to the east, beyond the rampart, already Faubourg Marigny was growing, mainly the home of the large free black and mulatto community.

  Pierre Laffite may not have found reestablishing himself in New Orleans to be as easy as he could have hoped. In 1803 an arriving refugee faced paying $10 to $20 a month for lodging in a quiet suburb of town.1 Pierre first took rented quarters on Royal Street, probably near the intersection with Dumaine, while looking for a suitable venue to go into business. A newcomer had to pay $25 to $80 a month to rent a well-located commercial building.2 Instead of renting, however, on March 21, and at a cost of 8,000 silver Spanish pesos, Pierre bought from the widow Marguerite Landreaux a city lot one block east of the Place d'Arms, at the intersection of Royal and Dumaine. It came with a substantial house and outbuildings, including probably a small warehouse, if the selling price be any measure. The site had a mercantile history, having belonged until 1800 to the late Julian Vienne, an importer with San Domingue connections who had operated two merchant vessels prior to his death, and who may well have done business with Laffite in years past.3 Laffite bought it in partnership with Joseph Maria Bourguignon, a member of a New Orleans family dating back at least to 1728. Bourguignon lived on Dumaine, and he and Pierre may have become acquainted when Laffite took lodgings around the corner. Evidently they did not have much by way of cash in hand, however, for they promised to pay the widow half of the purchase price at the end of June, and the balance at the end of 1804.4

  Within a few weeks Laffite had to borrow 320 pesos from an innkeeper, the Spaniard Pedro Alarcon, who was known to conduct an unlawful gambling table that might have increased Pierre's indebtedness. 5 Thereafter Pierre's financial affairs reveal a chronic shortage of ready cash, and with it a tendency to live beyond either his means or his ability to manage his money.6 Indeed, only eleven weeks after signing the papers for the Royal Street property, Laffite and Bourguignon returned it to Landreaux in return for cancellation of their debt on June 6, probably after finding that they could not make the first installment due at the end of that month.7 Pierre Laffite had been a property owner for less than three months, and would never own a house or land again.

  The exact nature of Laffite's mercantile enterprise is unclear but, despite later myth and recollection to the contrary, it almost certainly was not ironworking.8 Dumaine in that period was known as the "Street of the Stores," and would have been the place to be if Laffite, like fully one-fourth of the other refugees from San Domingue, was a merchant.9 He may have expected to import goods from abroad or perhaps from Havana, but with so many newly arrived merchants in New Orleans added to the established houses, competition would have been keen, especially for a man of limited resources. In 1803 merchants led all other professions in the city, selling chiefly cargoes imported by ship. Most were middlemen who did not own the ships themselves, but already it was evident that the real fortunes would be made by men who controlled both the importation and sale of their wares.10 Doing that would require more capital than Pierre Laffite could command at the moment, however, and more likely, he hoped to trade in goods from the Louisiana Territory interior, a market still being developed. Indeed, the crowding in New Orleans just then may have forced him to that alternative.11

  Unfortunately for Pierre Laffite, he arrived near the end of the massive immigration from San Domingue. Refugees from the Haitian revolts arrived in New Orleans at a steady rate, starting at a trickle of about one hundred per year from 1791 to 1797 and reaching more than 1,000 by 1803. The French-speaking community in the city welcomed the white arrivals, and at first they did not mind lots of San Domingue slaves coming with them. By 1803, though, just under 4,000 whites were barely outnumbered by 4,100 blacks, a third of them free. 12 Already undercurrents of fear were palpable in the white community, especially with the example of San Domingue if not on their doorstep then certainly in their front yard. Then there was the question of changing nationalities. Americans spreading into the Ohio and upper Mississippi River valleys needed the Mississippi for access to markets. The Spaniards had closed the port of New Orleans to them, effectively stifling trade, at the same time leaving America's back door vulnerable to European aggression. When Spain turned the Louisiana Territory over to an aggressive Napoleonic France in 1801 President Thomas Jefferson's anxiety for the infant United States' western border only heightened, as he expected Napoleon to keep the river closed. Moreover, with France at war with Britain, a British victory could put America's onetime colonial master in control of the Mississippi, with every manner of foreseeable unfortunate consequence. Rumors of an expedition being readied to invade Louisiana and take it from France only spurred Jefferson to action.13

  Jefferson sent Robert Livingston and James Monroe to France to negotiate an open port at New Orleans and free trade for the United States. But changing circumstances in Europe made Napoleon amenable to much more than that, and in April 1803 Jefferson's emissaries were asked point-blank what they would pay for the Louisiana Territory. By the end of that month Jefferson had all of it from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific northwest, including the so-called island of New Orleans—that small portion of land east of the Mississippi running from the Gulf through Lake Borgne, west through Lake Pontchartrain on the city's northern outskirts, and thence through Lake Maurepas and along the Amite River and Bayou Manchac to its mouth on the Mississippi seventy miles upstream from New Orleans. Above that lay the parishes of Spanish West Florida.

  Pierre Laffite was probably in New Orleans on December 20, 1803, when the formal ceremony turning over the government of Louisiana took place on the Place d'Arms. General James Wilkinson and new territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne accepted the keys of the city from the French commissioner and then raised the flag of the United States, "amidst the acclamations of the inhabitants" according to an American present.14 Many of the French and Spanish citizens saw the reaction rather differently, however, and one spoke of "the lugubriousness of the silence and immobility" among the Frenchmen and Spaniards and the locally born European Creoles.15 It would not be the last mark of a subdivision in the white community, nor of conflicting loyalties among the Europeans that would one day
make the livelihood of Pierre Laffite and ultimately direct his destiny. Significantly, Jefferson sent several gunboats to New Orleans to protect order among what their naval commander David Porter regarded as "a very turbulent population."16

  Claiborne had already promised to the European community in New Orleans all the protections of United States citizens, and the carryover of all previous laws and civil officers except those who collected the customs, who would now be federal appointees.17

  Within months of the American takeover, the character of the city began to change as its new masters imposed order on its chaotic streets and in its civil affairs. More new shops opened almost overnight as American merchants rushed to the city to capitalize on the new world marketplace. The influx increased the population to twelve thousand. What the influx meant for Pierre Laffite and other San Domingue refugee merchants was even more competition in a crowded market. They had almost monopolized trading to this point, even spreading out over the rural sections of lower Louisiana and along the inland bayous. 18 Many turned peddler, getting a year's credit from wholesale suppliers in New Orleans and then taking their goods to the interior and accepting payment in furs and agricultural goods that they returned to sell in the city's marketplace to pay their debt and outfit for the next trading trip.19

  Pierre Laffite decided to become one of them, or at least to seek prosperity outside the immediate orbit of New Orleans. Sometime prior to the fall of 1804, he settled at the post of Baton Rouge in Spanish West Florida, some seventy-five miles upriver from New Orleans, and there went into business as a merchant once more.20 Baton Rouge sat on the east bank of the river, home to a small garrison and a regional commandant under orders from the administrative center at Pensacola, 250 miles to the east. Aside from the Spaniards in the garrison, the locals were mostly German, Irish, and French-speaking Acadian immigrants from Canada. Baton Rouge was truly a frontier, for beyond it living conditions became increasingly primitive with the exception of the community thirty miles upstream at Point Coupée.

  Point Coupée had been in 1766 a string of settlements running about twenty miles along the west bank of the Mississippi, augmented by others on a nearby "false river"—a former bend of the Mississippi cut off and isolated as a lake when the river changed its course. A fort, a four-bastioned quadrangle, with stockade and commandant's house, barracks, storehouses, and a prison stood there. Spain kept barely more than a dozen soldiers stationed there in 1766, along with a capuchin father to operate the church near the fort. About two thousand white inhabitants and seven thousand slaves grew tobacco, indigo, and corn and raised poultry that they sold in New Orleans to victuallers from the merchant ships. They also cut timber and sent lumber and staves downriver in rafts. After 1762 and the Spanish takeover, most of the planters who were cultivating on the east side moved to the west bank. 21

  Now Point Coupée was an enclave of wealth without the ostentation of New Orleans. Its planters, proud and jealous of each other, eschewed dancing, gambling, and fine clothes. The English-speaking planters lived on the east bank of the Mississippi and traded more with Natchez upstream than with New Orleans. In earlier years they produced furs, indigo, bear oil, and game, as well as salt beef and pork. Now, however, they planted cotton, which accounted for their advancing affluence. Their money attracted merchants, and by 1804 new stores appeared constantly, offering credit to the planters and saving them a trip to Natchez or New Orleans for goods. Itinerant merchants called caboteurs peddled from their boats, moving on the river and bayous plantation by plantation in their flat-bottomed pirogues. Most were French sailors stuck in Louisiana by the current war. They sold poor quality merchandise at low prices due to the intense competition among them, and became so numerous that travelers met them at all times on the river. The caboteurs bartered goods for chickens, eggs, hides, grease and tallow, honey, corn and rice, beans, and anything else they could sell in New Orleans, in the process becoming the chief source of fresh produce in the city. They also traded illicitly with the slaves, selling tafia—a cheap rum substitute—and oddments in return for chickens and other stolen items. The whites frequently complained of the thefts encouraged by the caboteurs, but to no avail. Meanwhile itinerant peddlers competed by working their trade on foot or in carriages.22

  Point Coupée was more than a planter community. River travelers stopped there en route to Natchez. Those moving into the western Louisiana interior via the Red River used the riverbank there as a staging place, providing a trade in fur, horses, tallow, and Indian produce. By the time Pierre Laffite came to the area, the population of Point Coupée—also called False River—had declined, but still maintained a typically imbalanced population in which two-thirds were slaves. 23

  Seemingly unable to avoid turmoil wherever he moved, Pierre Laffite arrived in the Baton Rouge-Point Coupée vicinity in the middle of a brief revolution. In August 1804 Nathan and Samuel Kemper, brothers from a perpetually turbulent family, led about thirty men in a march on Baton Rouge to throw out the Spanish and declare West Florida independent. They maintained that the so-called West Florida Parishes were really part of the Louisiana Territory and should have been ceded to the United States. The people refused to rise up with them, however, and so the Kempers simply plundered the countryside then retreated northward into the United States' newly created Mississippi Territory, pursued by Spanish militia. Spain's officials protested to Claiborne, who acted as governor of Mississippi as well as interim governor of Louisiana, but he declined to extradite the Kempers and their followers. To protect Spain's interests and discourage any further outbreaks, Vicente Folche, governor of West Florida, collected a professional garrison and brought it to Baton Rouge.24

  Folche arrived not long after Laffite went into business, and in the days ahead the two became at least passingly acquainted as the governor oversaw even the most minor legal transactions. Indeed, soon after his arrival Laffite became well known to local officials including Don Carlos de Grand-Pré, colonel of the Spanish Royal Army commanding the post of Baton Rouge, and on the other side of the river Julian Poydras, the new American civil judge representing the United States in Point Coupée. By October 1804 Pierre had other connections in Point Coupée as well, sufficient that a local widow engaged him as her attorney to sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of for her profit two of her slaves who had been imprisoned in Pensacola. The prison term of one of them was about to expire, and now she authorized Laffite to act on her behalf in New Orleans, or in any Spanish court in Havana, or even distant Vera Cruz, Mexico, or wherever else the slaves might be found after their release, to reclaim and dispose of them. In the process, she transferred all her rights in the slaves to Pierre, evidence of his ability not only to instill trust in her, but also to convince her that he had connections far beyond the sphere of rural Louisiana. 25 Her confidence in Pierre was well placed, for within two weeks he sold one of the slaves several months in advance of his anticipated release, and the buyer was none other than Folche.26 The transaction reveals the effort that Laffite put into establishing good connections with both Spanish and American authorities, something that was always good for a businessman, and a pattern he continued in the years ahead. More than that, though, this was his first experience in the New World at profiting by the sale of a slave.27

  Pierre's transaction for the widow touched upon another tension in the region, for her slaves had been imprisoned for taking part in a rebellion against white control. Real and imagined insurrection plots, some inspired by the San Domingue example, unsettled Point Coupée and West Florida from the 1790s onward.28 By 1804, isolated from one another, whites lived in constant fear of slave uprisings and mounted nightly patrols of their plantation environs.29 On November 9 inhabitants of Point Coupée drafted a petition asking Claiborne to send militia to protect them from yet another feared slave uprising. Laffite did not sign, but as a resident of Baton Rouge he would certainly have shared their apprehension.30

  By July 1804 Claiborne felt sufficient co
ncern for the public safety that he had ships stopped at the Balize, a customs point covering the intersection of the three delta channels that connected the Mississippi with the Gulf to keep San Domingue slaves from coming into Louisiana.31 This fear of introducing insurrection from San Domingue made the importation of slaves to Louisiana difficult at a time when the demand to put more and more land under cultivation was driving up the price of slaves. A slaveowner could make up to $30 a month by renting a slave. Slaves fresh from Africa sold for $500 or more, while a skilled Louisiana slave could bring up to $1,400. 32

  Pierre Laffite was in Baton Rouge when the apprehension at Point Coupée reached its height. Indeed, as a resident merchant he could be expected to be in Baton Rouge most of the time, though like other traders he may not have depended entirely upon the caboteurs to bring him goods.33 Most likely he made buying trips into the interior to barter for goods to sell downriver. The trading boats used by merchants like Laffite were open, with only a tendelet—usually just a pole frame with canvas over it for shelter—raised above the deck at the stern for the owner, the captain, and his friends. Some pirogues carried up to one hundred barrels under their canvas covering, with rowers crowded on either side of the cargo. They could row six leagues a day, as much as eighteen miles, and farther with a current behind them. Traders hired the boatmen by the trip or by the month at about a dollar a day.34