The Pirates Laffite Read online

  If Laffite made any of these buying trips himself, he could not have helped but learn something of the geography of the immediate interior, from the tiny Spanish settlement of Galvezton to the east, to the system of bayous on the west side of the Mississippi below Point Coupée.35 Most important of all was Bayou Lafourche, a distributary that took high water from the Mississippi from a point thirty miles downriver from Baton Rouge all the way to the Gulf, bypassing New Orleans. It was too narrow for sailing vessels to navigate, and often too shallow in summer drought, but with only a few feet of water in it the light draft pirogues could easily row up and down its entire length. That made it ideal not only for trading with Indians and the more reclusive trappers and hunters in the backcountry, but also for smuggling goods past New Orleans to Baton Rouge, or else for evading United States customs inspectors at the Mississippi's mouth by bringing commodities up the Lafourche to the big river, then downstream to New Orleans by the back door. Pierre Laffite may not have used Bayou Lafourche for that purpose, for smuggling did not offer very rich rewards in 1804 and 1805, but before long it would, and the knowledge gained here now would be very useful one day.

  West Florida's administrative center at Pensacola also offered a profitable market for goods the merchants at Baton Rouge acquired in the region, especially now when the Pensacola merchants John Forbes and Company, successors to Panton and Leslie Company, began expanding eastward.36 Pierre Laffite might have found that prospect attractive, and certainly developed some contacts for future exploitation in Pensacola, but taking goods to the Pensacola market himself would have been a long and costly journey.

  Indeed, sometime in 1805, and perhaps within less than a year of moving to Baton Rouge, Pierre decided that his fortune was not to be made in this backwater. The continuing political turbulence may have helped persuade him to leave, for in August 1805 the Kempers tried and failed once more to take Baton Rouge. Spanish officials sent reinforcements at the same time that relations between the United States and Spain began to deteriorate. A clear threat of war loomed. Jefferson had wanted to acquire Florida from Spain when he bought Louisiana from France, believing those parishes essential to protecting New Orleans from above.37 Robert Livingston had advised on May 20, 1803, that if necessary the United States should take West Florida by force before Britain did. Following the Louisiana Purchase, Livingston continued to argue that West Florida had been included in what France originally understood it received from Spain, but Spain refused to sell.38 In the growing discord, Folche felt such concern that he tried to get West Florida and the province of Texas immediately west of Louisiana heavily reinforced by Spain. 39

  The tense atmosphere threatened to make Baton Rouge an unhealthy place for a merchant should war erupt, and Laffite turned once more to New Orleans. He was back in the city as early as March 1805, though not yet on a permanent basis.40 Indeed, since he owned no property in the city, he well could have divided his time between rented lodging in New Orleans and Baton Rouge as he continued bringing upstream trade to the city marketplace. By July his associates knew that he did not intend to stay indefinitely, and perhaps had even contemplated leaving not only New Orleans, but the territory itself.41

  At that very moment an unfounded rumor that the diplomatic crisis might result in ceding Louisiana back to the Spaniards circulated, which in itself could have suggested to Laffite that he look elsewhere.42 But his first allegiance now and in the future was to his trade and livelihood, and he was already thinking of strengthening his ties in Pensacola. A much more powerful inducement for him to think about leaving New Orleans was debt, for yet again he could not pay what he owed. How much was due and to how many creditors is uncertain, but in July merchant Stephen Carraby filed a civil suit against him in the parish court for a mere $122 after Pierre repeatedly ignored demands for payment. Carraby demanded Laffite s arrest if he did not pay.43 Carraby may have been one of those who extended credit to Laffite for trade goods to be sent upriver, but since Carraby also traded in slaves, the debt may have been owed from a slave purchase.44 It may even have been money borrowed for an earlier slave purchase that went awry, when Pierre Laffite had what was probably his first direct experience with both smuggling and illegal slaves.

  In November 1804 the Spanish merchant schooner Nuestra Senora del Carmen, out of the port of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, anchored at the Balize. She had regularly brought slave cargoes to New Orleans for the past twenty years or more, but now supposedly carried only a cargo of logwood and a rowdy crew of Spaniards and other "rabble" that the customs inspector thought were "mostly a lot of ill looking Wretches, and a medley of all the Indies and Campeache included." They promised to be a challenge to keeping the peace if they reached New Orleans, he warned. More to the point, he found them in concert with the denizens of a house near English Turn, a tight bend in the river a few miles downstream from New Orleans, where a Spaniard kept a tavern on the east bank, and from which smugglers used a bayou for landing and transporting to the city illicit goods secreted past the inspector at the Balize. 45

  The inspector managed to keep the schooner at anchor for several weeks, but Captain Jean Baptiste Deyrem landed several slaves without his knowing it and got them to 'New Orleans for sale.46 More than that, after the inspector duly recorded a free black woman named Marie Zabeth and her infant child as passengers, a privateer named Juan Buatista Elie came aboard the detained ship and simply took them, either by force or with the collusion of Deyrem.47 As soon as Elie's vessel reached New Orleans, he sold mother and child into slavery. The buyer was Pierre Laffite. Zabeth, however, almost immediately turned to the parish superior court, where in December 1805 she won her suit and their freedom.48 Laffite almost certainly did not get his money back from Elie, money that he may well have borrowed from Carraby.

  Just why Laffite bought Zabeth is unclear. He was not dealing commercially in slaves, at least not in 1805. Though he had no established home of his own in New Orleans, however, Laffite may have needed a woman with housekeeping experience, which Zabeth had from her time in Port-au-Prince. Whoever mothered his son born in San Domingue, by 1805 she seems to have been out of the picture and Pierre needed someone to take care of his boy, who presumably stayed with him whether here or in Baton Rouge. Moreover, by this time he was involved with a woman who could use a housekeeper, as there would be others on the way to care for as well.

  A three-tiered racial structure—white, free black and mulatto, and slave—prevailed in New Orleans, as did a gender imbalance imported with the influx of white men from San Domingue. Whites and free blacks could not marry by law, and free blacks and slaves could not marry. However, if a working or merchant class white male wanted to have feminine company on a stable basis, a mulatto mistress offered an acceptable alternative to participating in the heavy competition for the few eligible white women in the city. As a result, color lines blurred in New Orleans more than anywhere else in the young United States.

  A visitor to the city the same year that Laffite first arrived complained that there were taverns seemingly on every corner, open all hours, with white and black, free and slave, mingling indiscriminately. Best known of them was "the famous house of Coquet," as the proprietor called it, "where all the scum is to be seen publicly." Three years earlier Bernardo Coquet opened his dance hall on St. Philip between Bourbon and Royal Streets, only a few blocks from Pierre Laffite's first residence in town. He originally intended it for white and free black revelers, but quickly slaves in the city gathered there as well. Coquet held dances every Sunday night, and twice a week during the annual Shrove Tuesday carnival in February.

  In 1805 Coquet rented the St. Philip Street ballroom to Auguste Tessier, and in November Tessier renamed the hall the Salle Chinoise and began holding two balls a week for white men and free colored women. His operation would last until the summer of 1807 when Coquet returned to continue the business under a succession of names, but maintained Tessier's practice of allowing no colored men t
o attend the dances. The intention that they be a setting for liaisons was clear.

  The "quadroon balls" promoted a custom called plaçage, very likely imported to New Orleans by the refugees from San Domingue, in which free mixed-blood women paraded themselves before eligible white men hoping to make a match of convenience and, if possible, romance.49 Meaning essentially "placement," plumage was economically far more advantageous for a free black woman than a marriage with a free black male, and because many quadroons had so little African blood that they were nearly white, they would not marry full blacks or mulattoes, whom they considered socially inferior. Mothers sometimes contractually placed their daughters at ages as young as thirteen or fourteen with white men, including married men looking for mistresses. A virtual business arrangement was reached whereby the woman became the man's mistress and bore and raised his children, but he did not get to cohabit with her until he had bought her a house, preferably near Rampart Street, and all the trappings of domesticity, sometimes including slaves. (In New Orleans many free blacks owned slaves, and 70 percent of those black slaveowners were women, who also owned much more real estate than black men thanks to the gifts of their plaçage mates.50) He also agreed to provide for her for life and for their children, and to give her a settlement if they separated. Any children were regarded as "natural," and were set apart from bastards. The men often gave the young women some education, and taught their brothers a trade.

  Socially, New Orleans in 1805 disappointed some visitors, one complaining that there was scarcely a pane of window glass in the city, and the streets were little more than rivulets of mud and water with decaying rats and house pets in the puddles. "The eternal jabbering of French in the street was a sealed book to us," recalled Thomas Nicholls in 1840.51 Many of those French "jabberers" were the San Domingue refugees who gathered at the "Café des Refugiés" or "Café des Émigrés" run by Jean Thiot on Chartres Street, next door to the Hotel de la Marine, the haunt of gamblers and more disreputable elements. 52 Pierre Laffite probably visited there with his friends from earlier days when in New Orleans, though most likely he did not meet Marie Louise Villard there, but at one of Coquets or Tessier's balls.53 She was about twenty-one years old, a free mulatto or quadroon born in New Orleans about 1784 to a white father and a free black or mulatto mother Marie Villard, who was of a family of free mixed blood Villards who had been in Louisiana since the 1760s.54 Pierre may not have entered into a formal pla$age arrangement with Marie Villard, for among other things he seems hardly able to afford the upkeep of a woman in New Orleans, but very soon she and Laffite began a relationship that would last for the next sixteen years.

  With fear of slave revolt making refugees from San Domingue unwelcome in Louisiana, Laffite may well have faced a coolness that made New Orleans less than hospitable, a situation only compounded by his problems with Stephen Carraby. When Carraby determined that Pierre had no real property in New Orleans that he could seize to satisfy his debt, he demanded that Laffite be arrested and held to bail until he paid. Judge Thomas Kennedy summoned Pierre to appear at the courthouse in the first week of August or else face judgment by default, but when the sheriff, George Ross, tried to locate Pierre to serve the summons, he reported that Laffite was nowhere to be found and had no known address.55

  Pierre Laffite may have taken his son and Marie Villard with him, for now she was pregnant and dependent upon him, and he had not installed her in a house of her own in New Orleans.56 Or more likely she remained in the city living with relatives and keeping Pierre's boy with her. Pierre probably went back to Baton Rouge, where he had trading connections, and apparently he profited well enough on the trip that he returned to New Orleans by November, openly and presumably without fear of arrest.

  That was because he also came back with a new calling—slave dealer. Where he acquired the slaves, or the money to buy them, is unclear, but that same November he sold two young males for more than enough to satisfy the debt to Carraby and several hundred dollars to spare.57 In the next five months he sold nine more slaves for a combined $4,880.58 It was a small fortune to a man who the year before almost went to jail for a debt of $122. It was also a revelation, as if Laffite needed one, that a man could spend months making pennies trading upriver for hides and tallow, or acquire substantial affluence almost overnight by bringing black gold from Africa to a hungry New Orleans marketplace. Of course one had to buy one's stock cheaply in order to realize a good profit, and to do that could mean stepping outside the law. But then, seemingly everyone else was doing it, or looking the other way in order to realize their own bargains.

  He might even have a partner in his brother Jean.

  THREE

  Brothers United 1806–1809

  Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,

  And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide,

  The exulting sense—the pulse's maddening play,

  That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?

  FROM THE MOMENT of his birth in Pauillac to more than twenty years thereafter, Jean Laffite's life is a complete mystery, though it is virtually certain that at some point he chose the sea for his livelihood. Unlike his brother Pierre, who would always be a land-bound merchant dependent upon trade from the oceans, Jean walked the decks of the ships, and by early manhood acquired enough experience before the mast to command merchant vessels at least. He felt at home on the small sailing feluccas with their mainmast and triangular sails, the single-masted schooners, and even the larger merchant brigantines that carried most of the oceanic and Gulf trade. Where and how he acquired his seamanship is part of his mystery, though likely he started on the Gironde estuary on vessels owned by or trading with his father. After that he may have shipped on merchantmen, or even entered the French navy, but here, too, the page is blank. He may just possibly have been in San Domingue in the merchant trade with Pierre by 1802.1 What is certain, though, is that by 1806 more than one "Captain Lafitte," under varying spellings, commanded merchant and privateering vessels in American waters, and one of them was probably Pierre's brother. 2

  The most tantalizing possibility among them is the commander of the French privateer La Soeur Cherie. She appeared off Louisiana in April 1804 accompanied by two prize vessels. Her captain knew the locale well enough, or had aboard a sufficiently knowledgeable pilot, to avoid the customs inspector at the Balize by entering the Mississippi from a less used side channel. Territorial officials stopped her at the tiny post at Fort Plaquemine a dozen miles upstream. The unarmed prizes were allowed to pass on, while the captain sent word to the authorities in New Orleans that his ship was in distress. He asked permission to take on fresh water and provisions and to come upriver to the city for refitting and repairs.3 Permission granted, he tied up at the city wharf after dawn on April 25.

  In New Orleans in 1804 the customshouse was run by about six people. Unlike their Spanish predecessors, American officials did not yet search ships carefully. A ship arrived and the captain made his declaration of the contents of his cargo and then unloaded it without problems. The passengers likewise made their personal declarations, and then went on their way. If an irregularity were discovered later, the ship could be seized, but by that time it was often gone.4 Now, once in port, the captain of La Soeur Cherie told the governor that his ship was a French privateer outfitted and commissioned at Aux Cayes on San Domingue in late September, and departed to cruise on October 7, 1803. Claiborne seems to have believed him, though the beleaguered French on the island at that time were probably no longer issuing letters of marque—privateering commissions. In fact, the French commander at Aux Cayes, General Jean Baptiste Brunet, had surrendered his command to the British just five days after the supposed departure of La Soeur Cherie. A week later France and Spain signed an alliance, meaning that French private armed vessels—privateers—could no longer prey on Spanish shipping, and certainly not out of San Domingue, which by January had been declared independent and renamed Haiti. Hereafter privateer act
ivity for the French would only be against British shipping, and out of the Caribbean island ports of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

  The captain's story included taking the two prizes that had accompanied him to the Mississippi, but then, he said, he nearly lost his vessel in a storm that cost several crewmen their lives, and lost more men in desertions when the ship made landfall. This, too, Claiborne apparently believed, though guardedly, for pleading damage at sea and a need to refit was on its way to becoming a popular ploy for privateers wanting to come into port to unload smuggled goods or to take on men and arms to continue privateering. Consequently Claiborne ordered an inspection of the ship, including her armament, and forbade her from taking aboard either arms or men. He also brought in an inspector, who reported back that since landing, La Soeur Cherie had indeed lost more than a dozen men as deserters, but that most of them were slaves from San Domingue. The story smelled of chicanery. The importation of foreign slaves into the United States and its territories had been outlawed everywhere by 1803. The so-called desertions sounded very much like a subterfuge for illegally bringing San Domingue slaves into the territory for sale.

  This finally aroused enough suspicion in Claiborne that he held the vessel in port until August. By then he had conclusive proof that the captain was enlisting men, though not Americans, to fill out his crew, and that one of the two prizes in convoy had tied up before reaching the city and sold her cargo, thus evading customs at the Balize and New Orleans alike. Worse, though presented as being a Spanish prize, this vessel was in fact an American ship taken while she traded with British Jamaica.5 Before Claiborne could take action, however, La Soeur Cherie and her elusive captain had set sail and were gone.

  During the time he spent in New Orleans, the commander of the mystery ship was known to the governor only as "Captain La fette."6 Nothing more is known of him.7 He might not have been Jean Laffite, but it is certainly interesting that the same summer, only a few weeks before Claiborne allowed La Soeur Cherie to leave in early August, Stephen Carraby believed that Pierre Laffite was about to leave the territory, and on July 30, as the privateer made ready to leave port, Pierre could not be found in the city. Of course, two months later Pierre was in Baton Rouge, but there exists at least the possibility that the "Captain La fette" of La Soeur Cherie was Jean, and Pierre left with him to escape his creditors, then made his way back to Spanish West Florida by another route. And there exists as well the possibility that this brother freebooter was the source of Pierre Laffite's sudden supply of marketable slaves in late 1805 and early 1806.