As the three ships rolled along side by side in the ocean swells, the privateers watched the development of the mutiny. The Spanish officers slowly gained ground against the unarmed Frenchmen—one of whom was shot dead when he called out to the privateers’ ships, “Vive la France!” Once the Spanish regained control, according to Laffite, “they ordered the mutineers to be bound and forced to go up on deck, where the officers ordered the chef, the black cook, to hit each on the head with an axe and, afterwards, throw them into the sea.
“Uncle Reyne,” recorded Laffite, “was very upset by the massacre of the Frenchmen,” and shouted out for the Atrevida to surrender. When this produced no response, a shot was fired at her bow, knocking off the bowsprit. Still no surrender, but the Spanish captain was operating under a considerable handicap since he had just executed most of his own gun crews. More cannon shot from the privateersmen finally had the desired effect, and the Atrevida was captured. Its captain, however, became surly and refused to show the privateersmen where the gold and other valuables were.
To get this information, the privateers tied him up on deck in the equatorial noonday sun, and when he was still not forthcoming, a magnifying glass was used “to focus more of the sun’s heat on him.” Not only that, but pistols were repeatedly discharged “close to his ears to create a vibration of his nerves.” This did the trick, and the privateers sailed home to Haiti with their prize in tow and their hold full of Spanish gold.* 36 Thus Jean Laffite, like Andrew Jackson, experienced at an early age some terrible sights that left with him a lasting impression that the world was a violent and unforgiving place. In lieu of Jackson’s hatred of the British, Laffite developed an abiding hatred of Spain.
At the age of eighteen Jean fell in love with and married Christine Levine, whose parents were Danish Jews, on the island of Saint Croix. Over the next four years she presented Jean with two sons and a daughter, Denise Jennette, but Christine died during the final childbirth. Jean’s sister took in Denise, and the two boys were sent to live with Pierre’s wife, Françoise Sel, while Jean and Pierre plied their privateering trade. Then further calamity struck.
Led by Toussaint-Louverture, a charismatic former slave, a massive slave rebellion erupted on Haiti that ultimately, in 1802, terminated French rule on the island. The later fighting centered around an attempted annihilation by the slave army of the prosperous colony of free light-skinned blacks—quadroons, octaroons—who themselves kept slaves, and who formed a sort of black upper class on the island. But it quickly spread into a movement to free all 600,000 Haitian slaves and establish an independent black republic. Aided and abetted by the Spanish, Haiti soon became engulfed in a monstrous civil war in which thousands were slaughtered, plantations were burned, and their French owners and families were put to the sword, gallows, or burning stake.* 37 Napoleon responded by sending a 34,000-man army from France to put the rebellion down, but it was decimated amid a scourge of yellow fever in which more than two-thirds of the soldiers died, including the commander.
The situation on Haiti had become so intolerable by 1804 that the French colonists—as well as most of the free men of color, the mulattoes—were forced to flee, and many of them wound up in New Orleans, with its large French population. This included the Laffites, who evacuated their families and friends to the new American republic.
Many of the wealthier French-Haitian planters found a natural transition for themselves in the rich Mississippi bottomlands south of New Orleans, which they soon discovered were ideal for growing sugarcane. Ever since a plague of caterpillars wiped out their indigo crops half a century earlier, Louisianans had been planting sugarcane, but it had been only recently that they learned how to refine it into granulated sugar. Up until then, the best they could produce was a kind of sweet gummy syrup, which they soon realized could be used to make rum, a development that caused the governor to complain that “the immoderate use of [rum] has stupefied the whole population.”
Soon the production of sugar became Louisiana’s principal cash crop; a successful planter could easily make $20,000 to $30,000 a year ($300,000 to $400,000 in today’s dollars). Sugar growing was a labor-intensive operation, however, and as more plantations were added more slaves were needed to plant and cut the cane, grind it for boiling, then pack the crystallized sugar into barrels for shipping abroad.* 38
By this time the riverbanks for miles had become a continuous row of sugar plantations, most of them about eight hundred to a thousand acres, upon which the planters often built sumptuous plantation homes, in addition to keeping their luxurious town houses in the city. All in all, during the first years of the nineteenth century, New Orleans prospered dramatically—not just from sugar but from the upriver trade of furs, grains, flour, cotton, salt, sawn timber, whisky, and other goods, which came down on flatboats from as far away as Ohio and Pennsylvania to be loaded onto ships destined for the far corners of the world.
Good things don’t usually last forever, and in the case of New Orleans they certainly didn’t—beginning on the first day of January 1808. First there was the aforementioned Embargo Act, passed by Congress to retaliate for the assaults on American shipping by England and France during the Napoleonic Wars. Next was the African Importation Act, which banned the introduction of any more slaves into the United States. With these two measures in place, maritime commerce in New Orleans slowed almost to a standstill, broken only by the time-honored practice of smuggling.
It was amid this setting that the brothers Laffite began their rise to prominence.
When Jean and Pierre arrived in Louisiana from Haiti they did not come as wealthy French planters but as privateersmen—a barely respectable and unquestionably dangerous business—and just in time to learn that the U.S. government had ordered all American ships to remain in port indefinitely under the Embargo Act. Accordingly, the Laffites set themselves up in New Orleans with a blacksmith’s shop in which, using slave labor, they began fabricating, among other things, the fancy kinds of cast-iron grilles that dress so many New Orleans balconies and windows.* 39
A mere smithing enterprise, reputable as it was, never quite suited the ambitious Jean Laffite, who by now had grown into a somewhat formidable presence. In his mid-twenties, Laffite was described as a handsome, dark-haired man* 40 about six feet tall with “dark piercing eyes,” and a furious vertical crease in his brow—he was “well made,” in the parlance of the day—with a physical comportment something like that of a large, powerful cat. He was also recorded as being smart, shrewd, and convivial—if not jovial—and a gambling and drinking man as well. One of the first American chroniclers of the era was Judge Alexander Walker, a New Orleanian whose book Jackson and New Orleans was published in 1856, and who thus knew firsthand many of the personages of the Jackson-Laffite era. According to Judge Walker, Laffite “was a man of good address and appearance, of considerable shrewdness, of generous and liberal heart, and adventurous spirit.” Laffite spoke English, Spanish, and Italian with a heavy French accent, and was reputed to be something of a ladies’ man, though little is known of his romantic life except that he regularly attended the fabulous Quadroon Balls, in which young men of means in New Orleans mingled (and more) with the beautiful light-skinned “free women of color” from the Caribbean islands.
It was said that Jean dressed as a gentleman and had a gentleman’s manners to match, but that neither he nor Pierre (and certainly not their older brother Dominique You, who still dressed like a pirate) were actually treated as such in the rarefied society of nineteenth-century New Orleans. Though they were accepted as daytime equals and nighttime drinking and gambling partners because of their bearing, wealth, demeanor, and prowess with the dueling sword and pistol, the male upper crust of the city excluded them from their extravagant social events, let alone their parlors to meet their wives and daughters.
Just how the Laffites became involved so quickly and prominently in the massive smuggling enterprise then engulfing New Orleans is a matter of historical
controversy. The most plausible explanation comes from New Orleans historian and LSU professor Jane Lucas De Grummond,* 41 who tells us that in the summer of 1805 Jean sailed into the city after a privateering cruise with 12,600 English pounds that he needed to dispose of (without anyone asking a lot of questions). Brother Dominique You (who had been in the city awhile) found the answer in the person of Joseph Sauvinet, a Frenchman who had become one of the principal businessmen of New Orleans. As head of the largest accounting and banking house in the city, Sauvinet had divined the enormous profits to be made from smuggling and just as quickly recognized the value of a man such as Jean Laffite—not to mention the value of his 12,600 British pounds (about $860,000 today).
Sauvinet set up Jean and his brothers in the smuggling business, with instructions on how to avoid U.S. Customs by off-loading their goods and booty downriver below a bend called English Turn, from where it could be transported to Sauvinet’s warehouses for resale in New Orleans. According to De Grummond, this “was the beginning of a contraband commercial venture that was to involve nearly everyone in New Orleans.”
Using some of their share of the captured English pounds, the Laffites then began acquiring a small fleet of privateers with which, over the next half dozen years, they terrorized Spanish shipping in the Gulf of Mexico. Under the rules of the French letters of marque, prizes seized were to be taken to French ports, where a court would award the privateers a percentage of money based on the value of the prize itself (minus copious administrative fees and costs). But as the first decade of the nineteenth century wound down, fewer and fewer of these ports were available owing to a long string of French defeats in those island waters, and finally, after Guadeloupe and Martinique fell to the British, there were none left at all.
Naturally this became a pressing problem for the privateers, since the bulk of their haul often consisted of the captured ship itself, and because America was not then at war with Spain (or, for that matter, with France or England), it was illegal to dispose of the craft within the United States. A base of operations, as it were, was required to take these valuable prizes and somehow turn them into cash. The privateers found their base on the remotest part of the Louisiana coast, at a place called Barataria Bay.
There are parts of Barataria today as dark and unsullied as they were two hundred years ago; it is a place somehow set adrift in time. The bay is hemmed in on the Gulf of Mexico by Grand Isle and Grand Terre (the latter is about six miles long and three miles wide), as well as by several smaller barrier islands, but its name is not just a play on that term; rather, it seems to have been aptly named by some prescient early Frenchman after the mythical island of Barataria in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which translates, roughly, into “a place of deception.”
The bay,* 42 dotted with many small marshy islands, is about twenty miles wide at its widest point near the coast and tapers out northward to a length of about thirty miles. Among its virtues was that it provided a safe haven from the harsh winter northers as well as all but the fiercest summer hurricanes that blow out of the gulf.
For the privateers of those times seeking a secure harbor, it must have been a paradise, a place of breathtaking natural beauty and serenity. Wondrous varieties of oysters, shrimp, crab, and fish teemed in the blue-green waters right up to shore. Ducks, geese, woodcock, snipe, and other waterfowl were in abundant profusion. Deer roamed the surrounding forests, as well as squirrel, rabbits, and turtle (and frogs, for those so inclined) in the marshes. The island upon which the early Baratarians had settled—Grand Terre (named after a similar isle near Guadaloupe)—was elevated enough to provide protection from all but the worst hurricanes and was covered with canopies of Spanish moss–draped live oaks, palms, pines, and, close on the beaches, a low, scrubby, and gnarled pearlike tree that, judging from its defiantly bent appearance in later photographs, must have custom-designed itself against the strong winds that blew in across the gulf.
There are two other reasons Barataria was an ideal place for a smuggling operation. To the north, behind the barrier islands, the bay was isolated by cypress swamps—their tall branches filled with the nests of eagles and waterbirds—and surrounded by a thousand square miles of nearly impassable quagmires and marshes in which resided dangerous alligators and bears, rattlesnakes and water moccasins, as well as the ever-present anopheles mosquito that carried the deadly “yellow jack.” All this made Barataria secure enough from prying official eyes, or so the privateers thought. Second, through a serpentine waterway of rivers, lakes, canals, and bayous, Grand Terre was connected directly to New Orleans, so that smuggled goods could be brought unimpeded into the city in blunt-bowed pirogues, the customary means of inland travel then in south Louisiana.
About halfway between Grand Terre and New Orleans is a raised piece of land in the swamps, which, judging from the huge mounds of clam- and oyster shells, was in centuries past used by Indians for ceremonial purposes, including, many believed, ritual sacrifice—owing to the large numbers of human bones also found there. Known as the Temple, it now became utilized by the privateers as a sort of midway sales and auction spot at which as many as five hundred wealthy New Orleanians at a time would arrive by boat on designated days to buy captured slaves and other smuggled goods and merchandise.
The slave trade was central to the Baratarians’ economy. Spanish ships carrying Africans were usually easy marks for the heavily armed privateers, and it was not extraordinary for them to have on hand several hundred or more of these miserable people, whom they kept on Grand Terre in slave pens called “barracoons” to await purchase by the ever-expanding number of sugar plantation owners.* 43
Other merchandise was kept in warehouses, and soon there would be more than forty of these on Grand Terre containing the wealth of Spain, Mexico, South America, and the West Indies: fine silks, Moroccan rugs and leather, elaborately carved furniture—beds, chairs, tables—ornate silver flatware, china, crystal, tapestries, lace, clothing, lamps, and kegs of whisky, rum, and wine. Almost everything imaginable that could be seized on the ocean was sold to the acquisitive citizens of New Orleans, for whom these things were unattainable as a result of the Embargo Act and, close on its heels, the British blockade—and at a healthy discount to boot.
As we have seen, Jean Laffite was not an inconsequential man, but, like so much else about him, exactly how he became the leader of the Baratarians remains murky. History records that there were then two types of Baratarians. First was a band of Grand Isle and Grand Terre islanders who for many years had engaged themselves in fairly minor smuggling undertakings in between their usual fishing and hunting activities. Then, after the British conquest of the French-held Caribbean islands, there sailed into Barataria Bay a new sort—the homeless privateers. Soon the two groups began squabbling, and often fights broke out, some of them deadly.
At the same time the more successful privateers realized they needed an agent, as it were, to represent them in New Orleans, promoting sales of their booty, negotiating prices, arranging auctions, and keeping the law out of their way. Jean Laffite, a privateer himself, came highly recommended, since he also mingled and mixed with the richest and most powerful men in the city. This worked out well for several years; then the two Baratarian factions started feuding again, and it became apparent that what they really needed was a genuine leader. Laffite had experience with both factions—and they with him—so much so that they managed to drop their differences long enough to ask him if he would come down to Grand Terre and become the headman, or bos.
Laffite agreed, and among the first of the differences he settled was a dispute between himself and a villainous Italian captain named Vincent Gambie over the latter’s attack on an American sailing vessel. A confrontation ensued during which one of Captain Gambie’s men, armed with a pistol, moved threateningly toward Laffite, who—without so much as a “Stop or I’ll shoot!”—shot him through the heart. Recalling the incident many years later, brother Dominique You stated, “That put the fear
of God in them.”
The ascendency of the Laffites marked the beginning of a heyday for the Baratarians, which would last several more years. Under Jean’s stewardship the privateers captured more than one hundred prizes with all their cargoes, the most valuable of which were slaves taken in the waters around Havana, which had become the center of the trade in the Western Hemisphere. Being in charge of such rough customers was not always easy. In addition to Gambie, there was another fiery Italian captain named Louis Chighizola, known as “Nez Coupe” because he had lost half of his nose in a swordfight.
With the exception of Laffite, who still attired himself as a gentleman, the rest of the Baratarians—and by this time there were probably more than a thousand of them—dressed just like the swashbuckling pirates from the old stories: bright red and black striped blouses, pantaloons, tall boots, and colorful bandanas tied around their heads. Many wore gold earrings, and all carried cutlasses, knives, and pistols.
As business grew, the activities of the Baratarians became more and more outrageous. Flyers were posted in broad daylight on buildings throughout New Orleans announcing the booty auctions, cataloguing the items to be sold. These were attended by the most prominent men in the city, who bought up everything from slaves to pig iron to dresses and jewelry for their wives. Everybody knew smuggling was illegal, but for the Creoles, poor and upper crust alike, it had been a way of life under both the Spanish and the French regimes for as long as anyone could remember. Occasionally, some of the Baratarians ran afoul of the law, yet Laffite’s connections included not only powerful members of the state legislature but also the most outstanding lawyer in Louisiana, Edward Livingston.