The Pirates Laffite Read online

  Since the Laffites were already on the scene and knew the routes to and from Grand Terre, visiting French corsairs naturally turned to them to dispose of prize goods and share in the proceeds. Thus, the supply probably initially came to the Laffites without their seeking it, but word of mouth among the corsairs only guaranteed that their business would grow. Latour commented on a sale by public auction at Grand Terre at which he saw people from all over lower Louisiana. Nor did the buyers make any attempt to hide the business they were at. In the streets of New Orleans Latour saw traders giving and receiving orders for goods purchased at Barataria, with no more care for secrecy than if they were ordering from Philadelphia or New York. "The most respectable inhabitants of the state, especially those living in the country, were in the habit of purchasing smuggled goods coming from Barataria," observed Latour. The goods were subject to official confiscation if discovered, but this hardly retarded the trade, for what got by the customs officers was highly profitable for the traders, as they bought the goods cheaply due to the quantity brought in by the privateers and the fact that no duty was attached. The privateers were usually anxious to sell so they could get on another cruise, which made them dispose of their goods even more cheaply, and all to the benefit of the Laffites and the others who plied their trade.57

  Early in May Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin advised Thomas Williams, the customs collector in New Orleans, that the Non-Intercourse Act had expired and a new law enacted that excluded from American ports any British and French privateers, whether publicly or privately owned. Any French corsairs already in New Orleans in violation of the Non-Intercourse Act prior to its expiration were still to be prosecuted, which only guaranteed that the freebooters would continue to haunt Barataria instead.58 Officials increased their watchfulness, and at the Balize, though he knew of no specific cargoes of contraband goods being smuggled, customs officer Chauncey Pettibone told Williams that he had no doubt but that "vast quantities of them are carried to New Orleans every week."59 Meanwhile, when French privateers and their Spanish prizes were impounded in New Orleans, the federal officials were altogether lax in prosecuting the cases, allowing many if not most of the privateers to sell their cargoes and leave. The Spanish consul in the city, Diego Morphy, began to lodge protests with Williams as early as May, and thereafter his complaints became commonplace as he vainly demanded that the captured goods be returned to the Spaniards who claimed rightful ownership.60 The blind eye in New Orleans was already lazily at work, one more silent ally of the Laffites and their associates.

  At the time there were perhaps several leading men called "bos" at Barataria, and while neither of the brothers could be said to dominate the others, their combination of marketing skill in New Orleans was already attracting more and more of the privateers to deal first with them.61

  Before the summer was out Pierre had disposed of nineteen slaves and realized a total of $7,903. One slave had come from San Domingue, and another had been brought from Cuba, but fully a dozen came directly from Africa, though by what means Pierre did not say. Everyone knew.62 In seven months he took in on behalf of himself, Jean, and André Robin, one of the biggest slave merchants in the territory, 63 just over $12,000 from slaves alone. He could even afford to buy slaves on the legal market now, and in April he and another man paid his partner Robin $4,025 for eight young blacks, and the next month spent $400 for a seventeen-year-old mulatto girl.64

  The revenue from their smuggling allowed the Laffites to live rather well by the end of the year. Having owned a warehouse on Royal Street, however briefly, Pierre knew the area well and he and Jean leased or rented another on the same street. While Pierre probably remained with Marie practically full-time, Jean sometimes stayed at a boardinghouse in the city. Fellow boarders found him excellent company at the dinner table, and at least rudimentarily conversant in English and Spanish, though he was most comfortable in Bordelaise, a regional patois French. It seemed apparent from his conversation and good grammar that he had received some education in his youth.65

  Meanwhile the number of corsairs hoping to profit from the Louisiana trade steadily grew. One of them was Louis Aury, who arrived in May off Barataria having left Guadaloupe aboard his vessel the William just two weeks ahead of Guadaloupe's capture. He unloaded 208 slaves at Grand Terre and engaged three Baratarians to take 105 of them up Bayou Barataria to a place known as McLarange's Vacherie on Bayou Lafourche, from which point Joseph Mendoza took them farther up the Lafourche to be sold for $17,000 to Eugene Fortier, a man with whom Pierre Laffite had transacted slave deals a few years before. They were discovered, however, and soon depositions and statements were taken in the federal district court.66 Meanwhile, thinking himself safe after unloading his cargo, Aury sailed into the Mississippi claiming distress from weather damage. The United States marshal promptly impounded the William, and when the case went to the federal district court, the judge ordered Aury's arrest on $50,000 bond, and had his vessel seized and sold, the proceeds going to the government. Aury was eventually acquitted on charges of piracy. Accompanying Aury to Louisiana was the experienced privateersman Jean Jannet—alias Janny, Jeanette, and Jannetty. 67 Given their later close association with both Aury and Jannet, the Laffites very likely had some involvement with arranging the transportation of the Williams, slaves. Indeed, this may have been their first meeting with Aury and Jannet.

  Soon after Aury's misfortune, Pierre became a direct participant in the smuggling, perhaps for the first time and very nearly the last. Early that year Vincent Dordoigaite, a Spanish merchant in Pensacola, fitted out a felucca, a small sailing vessel also powered by oars and well adapted for the coastal waters, to make a slaving run to Africa. He called the ship El Bolador and she made a successful voyage early that summer. On the return trip his ship had just cleared the Straits of Florida on July 5, with a straight sail to Pensacola, when an armed felucca appeared, identified herself as the privateer Carolina, raised the flag of France, and ordered El Bolador to stop. She was commanded by Jan Leloupe and Ange Michel Brouard, and the latter, at least, was no Frenchman, but a sometime resident of New Orleans. In fact, he was part owner and sometime captain of the Due de Montebello. Dordoigaite had no doubt that the corsair was unlawfully fitted out and crewed in Louisiana, but had no choice but to yield. The "pirates," as Dordoigaite called them, imprisoned the felucca's crew on the corsair, then put a crew aboard El Bolador and sailed her to an inlet called Round Bay some miles east of the Balize. Brouard pillaged the brig of everything including seventy slaves, then burned her. That done, he sailed west to the mouth of Bayou Lafourche and then started the slaves on the underground trade route up the Lafourche to the New Orleans market, only releasing the crew of El Bolador after the slaves were gone.

  Dordoigaite was not a man to take his loss genially. On his way to New Orleans he got word of the direction his slaves had been taken, and immediately reported it to the marshal, who found and recovered some of them before long. Dordoigaite continued using the law to reclaim more slaves as he learned of their locations. 68 He informed the secretary of the New Orleans Territory, Thomas Robertson, then acting governor during Claiborne's absence, and Robertson issued a proclamation condemning the "set of brigands" who brought this cargo into the territory via Barataria and Lafourche, and asserting that "an extensive and well-laid plan exists, to evade or to defeat the operation of the laws of the United States." He believed there were more than one hundred slaves now held illegally by citizens, and he called on the public to help find them and crush the lawbreakers. Not surprisingly, the people ignored him almost completely.69

  But not completely. By late August, hearing that what one editor called "those piratical smugglers" had secreted some twenty of the slaves up the Lafourche and sold them to various planters, Sheriff Robert Walker of Lafourche Parish seized the slaves and marched them to another plantation where he found some of their companions, then brought them all to New Orleans.70 Dordoigaite filed charges against Brouard, whom Hall's
court ordered to post $40,000 bond while the matter of ownership of the slaves was settled, and got a warrant for the arrest of all of the blacks wherever found.71 Then, in a surprising twist, the sheriff of Ascension Parish summoned Pierre Laffite to assist him in the parish seat, Donaldsonville. It was a young little community, founded by William Donaldson, a New Orleans merchant and builder. In February 1806 he bought the site of a defunct village called l'Ascension, and commissioned none other than the San Domingue refugee and sometime privateer Lafon to survey its lots and produce a town plan. Lafon himself owned property where the river and the bayou met, and it can hardly be coincidental that privateers now smuggled their goods on a stream that passed directly by the bayou bank property of their occasional comrade.72 Certainly the Laffites used the Lafourche route, and even if they had not known Lafon on San Domingue, they became well-established associates now.

  Somehow the sheriff in Donaldsonville suspected that one A. Bayonne and Louis Bourdier, in addition to having purchased some of the slaves through knowing them to be illegally imported, had forcibly taken four of the recently recovered slaves out of the local jail where they were being held temporarily, and then hidden them on Bourdier's plantation in the parish. In a delicious irony, the sheriff made Pierre a deputy marshal, and sent him to recover the blacks if he could. Laffite knew Bourdier, who was at this time an officer of the court and a frequent witness to legal acts in the parish. Bourdier also bought and sold a lot of property on the Lafourche, and was clearly a man of some prominence. Laffite took with him Captain Peter Paillet of El Bolador, who might be able to identify the missing slaves, and in mid-September they reached the Bourdier plantation to find the owner absent or in hiding. They found one young boy hidden in an outhouse, and Paillet claimed to recognize him. Then they found three more slaves concealed in a garret, and these, too, Paillet recognized. They seized all four and handed them over to the sheriff.73 After Laffite and Paillet gave sworn depositions, the sheriff ordered Bourdier's arrest and Laffite, still a deputy marshal, served the writ on Bourdier in Donaldsonville and brought him in to be held on bail.74

  Yet it may not have been as simple as that. Following the official abolition of the foreign slave trade, statute law provided a means of dealing with the slaves who were now undeniably in the country. If identified, they were to be seized, then sold at public auction—which made them lawful domestic slaves thereafter—with half of the proceeds going to the government and the balance going to the person who identified or recovered them. Slave sellers like the Laffites may have realized that they could use the law to "launder" Africans by importing them and then arranging for them to be turned over to the authorities. Thereafter they could buy the slaves at a sheriff's auction, usually for much less than their market value, and not only have lawful slaves to dispose of, but also recover half of what they paid at auction as their reward.

  Moreover, if slave recovery led to a prosecution and fines for those involved, the informant was entitled to half of those fines. Paillet immediately filed claims for the slaves recovered by him and Laffite, as well as many others once they were found. The fine for trading in illegal Africans was $800 per slave, and Paillet eventually got his half.75 In other similar claims filed on behalf of Dordoigaite, Paillet sought to collect $57,600.60 as the purchase price of all seventy-two of the slaves taken from his vessel.76 Ultimately all of them were found and restored to Dordoigaite.77 What Pierre Laffite got for his trouble is unknown, but the fact that he was a temporarily deputized officer of the court did not exclude him from a share of fines and rewards. Pierre appeared in court twice in September to file testimony and affidavits in the case, but by September 28 he was finished with the matter, at least officially.78

  Yet the question remains of why the court brought him into it in the first place, especially since his brother was surely known in Ascension as well as New Orleans for his smuggling connections, and Pierre likely was, too. Pierre may have inserted himself into the matter, informing on Bourdier and others purely for profit. Almost certainly the Laffites were not parties to the smuggling of the El Bolador slaves, and if Jean had been the middleman in the operation, Pierre would hardly have helped in its disruption. If it became known that the Laffites sold slaves and then aided in their recovery, costing buyers the purchase price plus legal fines, buyers would not continue to deal with them for long. It is far more likely that Leloupe and Brouard were outsiders trying to bypass the growing Laffite operation at Grand Terre, and that in aiding in the recovery of the slaves and the prosecution of buyers, Pierre was attempting to eliminate competition, and at the same time sending a none-too-subtle message both to privateers and to buyers that all parties would be wise to deal through the Laffites. The Laffites were stretching their tendons to take control of the Baratarian operation, as well as the Lafourche and other avenues of trade.

  Within weeks of the El Bolador business, Pierre Laffite may have been unable to stretch anything else. Though only forty, sometime that fall or winter, perhaps as early as October, he suffered a thrombosis or stroke.79 It attacked his left side, resulting in partial paralysis and fits of trembling that recurred again and again in the years to come, and perhaps the rest of his life. That December, for the first time, he failed to appear before a notary or to sign an instrument for a slave sale, leaving it to Robin to sign for both of them.80 He may not have been feeling well enough to travel or leave New Orleans again until March 18n.81 More to the point, though he was mobile most of the time, his permanent impairment meant that he could no longer be as active. From now on he would limit himself almost exclusively to being the brothers' New Orleans presence, leaving more and more of the active operation and management of their affairs elsewhere to his brother. Within a few months it would be general knowledge among Louisianans that the younger brother Jean Laffite was now in charge.

  FIVE

  Dawn of the Corsairs 1810–1811

  Not now my theme—why turn my thoughts to thee?

  Oh! who can look along thy native sea.

  Nor dwell upon thy name, whate'er the tale

  So much its magic must o'er all prevail?

  BY THE TIME Pierre Laffite finished his one and only stint enforcing the law, Louisiana was to experience more upheaval. Since the spring of that year some of the Anglos living north of Baton Rouge had let their discontent at being subject to Spain erupt once more. Rebellion again threatened, the Kempers always at the forefront. They secured permission to hold a convention in Baton Rouge that September, and almost at once the majority faction proposed declaring independence. The independence bloc stopped short of an outright declaration, but began steps to enact a civil code that virtually stripped Spanish officials of authority, even though most of the inhabitants of West Florida were not in sympathy with the effort. When the convention adjourned, it seemed clear that any second meeting would try to evict the Spaniards from West Florida and claim independence.

  The complaints against Spain were the same as everywhere else in her colonial empire. Pay for her soldiers habitually arrived a year late, corruption riddled the administration of every government department, and justice was venal and capricious. "The Reins of Government are held with a loose & careless hand & the public distress & discontent are every where conspicuous," complained a Pensacola merchant. 1 After soldados led by Folche marched toward Baton Rouge to enforce order, outbursts of resistance appeared in several places. On September 23, the day Pierre Laffite made his final appearance in court at Donaldsonville, a force of rebels attacked and easily took the fort at Baton Rouge. Then the insurgents set out to take Mobile, which Folche attempted to fortify while Pensacola girded itself Meanwhile veterans of the capture of Baton Rouge met at St. Francisville some miles up the Mississippi and formally declared the independent Republic of West Florida under a blue flag with a single white star. At once some sent an appeal to President James Madison in Washington to annex West Florida to the United States, either for future statehood, or else to become a part of Lo
uisiana.

  Madison was all too ready to seize the opportunity. The United States had maintained since 1803 that the so-called Florida Parishes north of New Orleans between the Mississippi on the west and the Pearl River on the east were included in the Louisiana Purchase. Responding to the increasing appeals and violations, as well as complaints from authorities in Louisiana, on October 27, 1810, Madison issued a proclamation condemning the smuggling and slave trade on the Gulf coast in general, and instructing Claiborne as governor of the Louisiana Territory to take steps to assume control of West Florida preparatory to its being absorbed into Louisiana.2

  The result was electric. "The Star of the West for such is the flag of the people of Baton Rouge, has shed its baleful influence as far as Tombigbie & Tensaw," grumbled an Englishman who preferred to remain under Spanish dominion. Americans clearly bent on aiding the rebellion began flocking to Pensacola on the pretext of business, and soon Mobile expected an army of five hundred rebels to attack.3 Rumor rapidly increased their number to over one thousand, backed by artillery taken at Baton Rouge, but some thought another objective beckoned. "Pensacola will afford more plunder & be more convenient," wrote a man in Gainesville far to the east. "I wish them success in the great object (if it be object) of rendering Florida [a] republic as an American,—but I would endeavor to convince them—if they w[oul]d listen one moment to the voice of reason amidst the tempest of ambition,—that outrage and plunder will not lead to republicanism, or to peace, or to honour." When no attack materialized and the coup was accomplished with relatively little bloodshed, most Floridians felt relief. 4 On December 7, 1810, Claiborne and Governor David Holmes of the Mississippi Territory assumed control of St. Francisville, and the blue lone star flag went down. Soon they established control in Baton Rouge as well, and the Republic of West Florida ended its all-too-brief existence.