Part 6

Then Governor Claiborne played his last card, and secured indictments of the Lafittes on the charge of piracy. Pierre Lafitte was arrested in his blacksmith-shop and confined without bail in the calaboose. Jean Lafitte promptly trumped the governor's card by retaining the services of Edward Livingston and John R. Grymes, the two most distinguished members of the Louisiana bar, at the enormous fee of twenty thousand dollars apiece. Grymes was then the district attorney, but he resigned his office for the fee. When his successor accused him in open court of having bartered his honor for pirate gold Grymes challenged him to a duel, and crippled him for life with a pistol bullet through the hip. When the two eminent lawyers had cleared their poor, innocent, persecuted clients of the unfounded and outrageous charges brought against them, and had taught them certain legal tricks whereby they could continue doing business at the old stand and still keep on the right side of the bars, Pierre Lafitte sent them an invitation to visit Barataria and collect their fees in person. Livingston, a cautious gentleman who had no desire to risk himself among the pirates whose virtues he had just extolled so highly to a jury, declined the invitation with thanks, offering his colleague a commission of ten per cent to collect his fee for him. Grymes, who was a hard-drinking, high-living Virginian, and afraid of nothing on two feet or four, accepted the invitation with alacrity, and until the end of his life was wont to convulse his friends with lurid descriptions of the magnificent entertainment which Lafitte provided for him. After a carouse which lasted for a week, and which, from Grymes's accounts, was a combination of the feasts of Lucullus with the orgies of Nero, Lafitte sent his legal adviser back to New Orleans in a sailing vessel, together with several huge chests containing his fee in Spanish gold pieces. It is an interesting commentary on the customs which prevailed in those days that by the time Grymes reached New Orleans, after having visited the various plantations along the lower Mississippi and tried his luck at their card-tables, not a dollar of his fee remained.

Now, it should be understood that the feebleness which characterized all the attempts of the Federal Government to break the power of the buccaneers was not due to any reluctance to prosecute them, but to the fact that it already had its attention taken up with far more pressing matters, for we were then in the midst of our second war with Great Britain. The long series of injuries which England had inflicted on the United States, such as the plundering and confiscation of our ships, the impressment into the British Navy of our seamen, and the interruption of our commerce with other nations, had culminated on June 18, 1812, by Congress declaring war. So unexpected was this action that it found the country totally unprepared. Our military establishment was barely large enough to provide garrisons for the most exposed points on our far-flung borders; the numerous ports on our seaboard were left unprotected and unfortified; and our navy consisted of but a handful of war-ships. The history of the first two years of the struggle, which was marked by brilliant American victories at sea, but by a disastrous attempt to invade Canada, has no place in this narrative. Early in the summer of 1814, however, the British Government, exasperated by its failure to inflict any vital damage in the northern States, determined to bring the war to a quick conclusion by the invasion and conquest of Louisiana. The preparations made for this expedition were in themselves startling. Indeed, few Americans have even a faint conception of the strength of the blow which England prepared to deal us, for with Napoleon's abdication and exile to Elba, and the ending of the war with France, she was enabled to bring her whole military and naval power against us. The British armada consisted of fifty war-ships, mounting more than a thousand guns. It was commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, under whom was Sir Thomas Hardy, the friend of Nelson, Rear-Admiral Malcolm, and Rear-Admiral Codrington, and was manned by the same sailors who had fought so valorously at the Nile and at Trafalgar. This great fleet acted as convoy for an almost equal number of transports, having on board eight thousand soldiers, which were the very flower of the British Army, nearly all of them being veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns. Such importance did the British Government attach to the success of this expedition that it seriously considered giving the command of it to no less a personage than the Duke of Wellington. So certain were the British that the venture would be successful that they brought with them a complete set of civil officials to conduct the government of this new country which was about to be annexed to his Majesty's dominions, judges, customs-inspectors, revenue-collectors, court-criers, printers, and clerks, together with printing-presses and office paraphernalia, being embarked on board the transports. A large number of ladies, wives and relatives of the officers, also accompanied the expedition, to take part in the festivities which were planned to celebrate the capture of New Orleans. And, as though to cap this exhibition of audacity, a number of ships were chartered by British speculators to bring home the booty, the value of which was estimated beforehand at fourteen millions of dollars. Whether the British Government expected to be able to permanently hold Louisiana is extremely doubtful, for it must have been fully aware that the Western States were capable of pouring down a hundred thousand men, if necessary, to repel an invasion. It is probable, therefore, that they counted only on a temporary occupation, which they expected to prolong sufficiently, however, to give them time to pillage and lay waste the country, a course which they felt confident would quickly bring the government at Washington to terms.

This formidable armada set sail from England early in the summer of 1814 and, reaching the Gulf of Mexico, established its base of operations, regardless of all the laws of neutrality, at the Spanish port of Pensacola. One morning in the following September a British brig hove to off Grande Terre, and called attention to her presence by firing a cannon. Lafitte, darting through the pass in his four-oared barge to reconnoitre, met the ship's gig with three scarlet-coated officers in the stern, who introduced themselves as bearers of important despatches for Mr. Lafitte. The pirate chief, introducing himself in turn, invited his unexpected guests ashore, and led the way to his quarters with that extraordinary charm of manner for which he was noted even among the punctilious Creoles of New Orleans. After a dinner of Southern delicacies, which elicited exclamations even from the blasé British officers, Lafitte opened the despatches. They were addressed to Jean Lafitte, Esquire, commandant at Barataria, from the commander-in-chief of the British forces at Pensacola, and bluntly offered him thirty thousand dollars, payable in Pensacola or New Orleans, a commission as captain in the British Navy, and the enlistment of his men in the naval or military forces of Great Britain if he would assist the British in their impending invasion of Louisiana. Though it was a generous offer, no one knew better than the British commander that Lafitte's co-operation was well worth the price, for, familiar with the network of streams and navigable swamps lying between Barataria Bay and New Orleans, he was capable of guiding a British expedition through these secret waterways to the very gates of the city before the Americans would have a hint of its approach. It is not too much to assert that at this juncture the future of New Orleans, and indeed of the whole Mississippi Valley, hung upon the decision of Jean Lafitte, a pirate and a fugitive from justice with a price upon his head.

Whether Lafitte seriously considered accepting the offer there is, of course, no way of knowing. That it must have sorely tempted him it seems but reasonable to suppose, for he was not an American, either by birth or naturalization, and the prospect of exchanging his hazardous outlaw's life, with a vision of the gallows ever looming before him for a captain's commission in the royal navy, with all that that implied, could hardly have failed to appeal to him strongly. That he promptly decided to reject the offer speaks volumes for the man's strength of character and for his faith in American institutions. Appreciating that at such a crisis every hour gained was of value to the Americans, he asked time to consider the proposal, requesting the British officers to await him while he consulted an old friend and associate whose vessel, he said, was then lying in the bay. Scarcely was he out of sight, however, before a band of buccaneers, acting, of course, under his orders, seized the officers and hustled them into the interior of the island, where they were politely but forcibly detained. Here they were found some days later by Lafitte, who pretended to be highly indignant at such unwarrantable treatment of his guests. Releasing them with profuse apologies, he saw them safely aboard their brig, and assured them that he would shortly communicate his decision to the British commander. But that officer's letter was already in the hands of a friend of Lafitte's in New Orleans, who was a member of the legislature, and accompanying it was a communication from the pirate chief himself, couched in those altruistic and patriotic phrases for which the rascal was famous. In it he asserted that, though he admitted being guilty of having evaded the payment of certain customs duties, he had never lost his loyalty and affection for the United States, and that, notwithstanding the fact that there was a price on his head, he would never miss an opportunity of serving his adopted country. A few days later Lafitte forwarded through the same channels much valuable information which his agents had gathered as to the strength, resources, and plans of the British expedition, enclosing with it a letter addressed to Governor Claiborne in which he offered the services of himself and his men in defence of the State and city on condition that they were granted a pardon for past offences.

Receiving no reply to this communication, Lafitte sailed up the river to New Orleans in his lugger and made his way to the residence of the governor. Governor Claiborne was seated at his desk, immersed in the business of his office, when the door was softly opened, and Lafitte, stepping inside, closed it behind him. Clad in the full-skirted, bottle-green coat, the skin-tight breeches of white leather, and the polished Hessian boots which he affected, he presented a most graceful and gallant figure. As he entered he drew two pistols from his pockets, cocked them, and covered the startled governor, after which ominous preliminaries he bowed with the grace for which he was noted.

"Sir," he remarked pleasantly, "you may possibly have heard of me. My name is Jean Lafitte."

"What the devil do you mean, sir," exploded the governor, "by showing yourself here? Don't you know that I shall call the sentry and have you arrested?"

"Pardon me, your Excellency," interrupted Lafitte, moving his weapons significantly, "but you will do nothing of the sort. If you move your hand any nearer that bell I shall be compelled to shoot you through the shoulder, a necessity, believe me, which I should deeply regret. I have called on you because I have something important to say to you, and I intend that you shall hear it. To begin with, you have seen fit to put a price upon my head?"

"Upon the head of a pirate, yes," thundered the governor, now almost apoplectic with rage.

"In spite of that fact," continued Lafitte, "I have rejected a most flattering offer from the British government, and have come here, at some small peril to myself, to renew in person the offer of my services in repelling the coming invasion. I have at my command a body of brave, well-armed, and highly disciplined men who have been trained to fight. Does the State care to accept their services or does it not?"

The governor, folding his arms, looked long at Lafitte before he answered. Then he held out his hand. "It is a generous offer that you make, sir. I accept it with pleasure."

"At daybreak to-morrow, then," said Lafitte, replacing his pistols, "my men will be awaiting your Excellency's orders across the river." Then, with another sweeping bow, he left the room as silently as he had entered it.

Governor Claiborne immediately communicated Lafitte's offer to General Andrew Jackson, then at Mobile, who had been designated by the War Department to conduct the defence of Louisiana. Jackson, who had already issued a proclamation denouncing the British for their overtures to "robbers, pirates, and hellish bandits," as he termed the Baratarians, promptly replied that the only thing he would have to do with Lafitte was to hang him. Nevertheless, when the general arrived in New Orleans a few days later, Lafitte called at his headquarters and requested an interview. By this time Jackson was conscious of the feebleness of the resources at his disposal for the defence of the city and of the strength of the armament directed against it, which accounts, perhaps, for his consenting to receive the "hellish bandit." Lafitte, looking the grim old soldier squarely in the eye, repeated his offer, and so impressed was Jackson with the pirate's cool and fearless bearing that he accepted his services.

On the 10th of December, 1814, ten days after Jackson's arrival in New Orleans, the British armada reached the mouth of the Mississippi. Small wonder that the news almost created a panic in the city, for the very names of the ships and regiments composing the expedition had become famous through their exploits in the Napoleonic wars. It was a nondescript and motley force which Jackson had hastily gathered to repel this imposing army of invasion. Every man capable of bearing arms in New Orleans and its vicinity--planters, merchants, bankers, lawyers--had volunteered for service. To the local company of colored freedmen was added another one composed of colored refugees from Santo Domingo, men who had sided with the whites in the revolution there and had had to leave the island in consequence. Even the prisoners in the calaboose had been released and provided with arms. From the parishes round about came Creole volunteers by the hundred, clad in all manner of clothing and bearing all kinds of weapons. From Mississippi came a troop of cavalry under Hinds, which was followed a few hours later by Coffee's famous brigade of "Dirty Shirts," composed of frontiersmen from the forests of Kentucky and Tennessee, who after a journey of eight hundred miles through the wilderness answered Jackson's message to hurry by covering the one hundred and fifty miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in two days. Added to these were a thousand raw militiamen, who had been brought down on barges and flat-boats from the towns along the upper river, four companies of regulars, Beale's brigade of riflemen, a hundred Choctaw Indians in war-paint and feathers, and last, but in many respects the most efficient of all, the corps of buccaneers from Barataria, under the command of the Lafittes. The men, dragging with them cannon taken from their vessels, were divided into two companies, one under Captain Beluche (who rose in after years to be admiral-in-chief of Venezuela) and the other under a veteran privateersman named Dominique You. These men were fighters by profession, hardy, seasoned, and cool-headed, and as they swung through the streets of New Orleans to take up the position which Jackson had assigned them, even that taciturn old soldier gave a grunt of approbation.

Jackson had chosen as his line of defence an artificial waterway known as the Rodriguez Canal, which lay some five miles to the east of the city, and along its embankments, which in themselves formed pretty good fortifications, he distributed his men. On the night of December 23 a force of two thousand British succeeded, by means of boats, in making their way, through the chain of bayous which surrounds the city, to within a mile or two of Jackson's lines, where they camped for the night. Being informed of their approach (for the British, remember, had the whole countryside against them), Jackson, knowing the demoralizing effect of a night attack, directed Coffee and his Tennesseans to throw themselves upon the British right, while at the same moment Beale's Kentuckians attacked on the left. Trained in all the wiles of Indian warfare, the frontiersmen succeeded in reaching the outskirts of the British camp before they were challenged by the sentries. Their reply was a volley at close quarters and a charge with the tomahawk--for they had no bayonets--which drove the British force back in something closely akin to a rout.

Meanwhile Jackson had set his other troops at work strengthening their line of fortifications, so that when the sun rose on the morning of the day before Christmas it found them strongly intrenched behind earthworks, helped out with timber, sand-bags, fence-rails, and cotton-bales--whence arose the myth that the Americans fought behind bales of cotton. The British troops were far from being in Christmas spirits, for the truth had already begun to dawn upon them that men can fight as well in buckskin shirts as in scarlet tunics, and that these raw-boned wilderness hunters, with their powder-horns and abnormally long rifles, were likely to prove more formidable enemies than the imposing grenadiers of Napoleon's Old Guard, whom they had been fighting in Spain and France. On that same day before Christmas, strangely enough, a treaty of peace was being signed by the envoys of the two nations in a little Belgian town, four thousand miles away.

On Christmas Day, however, the wonted confidence of the British soldiery was somewhat restored by the arrival of Sir Edward Pakenham, the new commander-in-chief, for even in that hard-fighting day there were few European soldiers who bore more brilliant reputations. A brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, he had fought side by side with him through the Peninsular War; he had headed the storming party at Badajoz; and at Salamanca had led the charge which won the day for England and a knighthood for himself. An earldom and the governorship of Louisiana, it was said, had been promised him as his reward for the American expedition.

Pakenham's practised eye quickly appreciated the strength of the American position, which, after a council of war, it was decided to carry by storm. During the night of the 26th the storming columns, eight thousand strong, took up their positions within half a mile of the American lines. As the sun rose next morning over fields sparkling with frost, the bugles sounded the advance, and the British army, ablaze with color, and in as perfect alignment as though on parade, moved forward to the attack. As they came within range of the American guns, a group of plantation buildings which masked Jackson's front were blown up, and the British were startled to find themselves confronted by a row of ship's cannon, manned as guns are seldom manned on land. Around each gun was clustered a crew of lean, fierce-faced, red-shirted ruffians, caked with sweat and mud: they were Lafitte's buccaneers, who had responded to Jackson's orders by running in all the way from their station on the Bayou St. John that morning. Not until he could make out the brass buttons on the tunics of the advancing British did Lafitte give the command to fire. Then the great guns of the pirate-patriots flashed and thundered. Before that deadly fire the scarlet columns crumbled as plaster crumbles beneath a hammer, the men dropping, first by twos and threes, then by dozens and scores. In five minutes the attacking columns, composed of regiments which were the boast of the British army, had been compelled to sullenly retreat.

The British commander, appreciating that the repulse of his forces was largely due to the fire of the Baratarian artillery, gave orders that guns be brought from the fleet and mounted in a position where they could silence the fire of the buccaneers. Three days were consumed in the herculean task of moving the heavy pieces of ordnance into position, but when the sun rose on New Year's morning it showed a skilfully constructed line of intrenchments, running parallel to the American front and armed with thirty heavy guns. While the British were thus occupied, the Americans had not been idle, for Jackson had likewise busied himself in constructing additional batteries, while Commodore Patterson, the American naval commander, had gone through the sailors' boarding-houses of New Orleans with a fine-tooth comb, impressing every nautical-looking character on which he could lay his hands, regardless of nationality, color, or excuses, to serve the guns. With their storming columns sheltered behind the breastworks, awaiting the moment when they would burst through the breach which they confidently expected would shortly be made in the American defences, the British batteries opened fire with a crash which seemed to split the heavens. Throughout the artillery duel which ensued splendid service was rendered by the men under Lafitte, who trained their guns as carefully and served them as coolly as though they were back again on the decks of their privateers. The storming parties, which were waiting for a breach to be made, waited in vain, for within an hour and thirty minutes after the action opened the British batteries were silenced, their guns dismounted, and their parapets levelled with the plain. The veterans of Wellington and Nelson had been out-fought from first to last by a band of buccaneers, reinforced by a few-score American bluejackets and a handful of nondescript seamen.

Pakenham had one more plan for the capture of the city. This was a general assault by his entire army on the American lines. His plan of attack was simple, and would very probably have proved successful against troops less accustomed to frontier warfare than the Americans. Colonel Thornton, with fourteen hundred men, was directed to cross the river during the night of January 7, and, creeping up to the American lines under cover of the darkness, to carry them by assault. His attack was to be the signal for a column under General Gibbs to storm Jackson's right, and for another, under General Keane, to throw itself against the American left, General Lambert, who had just arrived with two fresh regiments, being held in reserve. So carefully had the British commanders perfected their plans that the battle was already won--in theory.

No one knew better than Jackson that this was to be the deciding round of the contest, and he accordingly made his preparations to win it with a solar-plexus blow. He also had received a reinforcement, for the long-expected militia from Kentucky, two thousand two hundred strong, had just arrived, after a forced march of fifteen hundred miles, though in a half-naked and starving condition. Our history contains nothing finer, to my way of thinking, than the story of how these mountaineers of the Blue Ridge, foot-sore, ragged, and hungry, came pouring down from the north to repel the threatened invasion. The Americans, who numbered, all told, barely four thousand men, were scattered along a front of nearly three miles, one end of the line extending so far into a swamp that the soldiers stood in water to their waists during the day, and at night slept on floating logs made fast to trees.