IF THE PIRATE JEAN LAFITTE HAD JOINED THE BRITISH AT NEW ORLEANS
After the battle of New Orleans, on the 8th of January, 1814, General
Andrew Jackson, the victorious commander, called before him a certain
officer, of dashing and Frenchy appearance, and publicly thanked him for
the important part which he had borne in the battle. To judge from the
signal honor done to this man, the credit for the victory was in no
inconsiderable part due to him. And, indeed, this was the case.
The man to whom the victor's thanks had been thus conspicuously awarded
was Jean Lafitte, the Baratarian pirate. That the success of Jackson in
defeating and virtually destroying the army of Pakenham, consisting of
the very flower of the Duke of Wellington's soldiery, hinged, in an
important sense, upon this extraordinary corsair and buccaneer, has
never been adequately acknowledged in American history.
Jean Lafitte, the foremost of the three pirate brothers of Barataria,
was a man of extraordinary influence and popularity among the French and
other Latin inhabitants of Louisiana and New Orleans. He was a native of
France, and a brave and chivalrous corsair, as corsairs go. A price had
already been put upon his head by the American governor, Claiborne. But
so secure was Lafitte in the affections of the Creole people, whom he
served in many ways, that he frequently attended parties and receptions
in New Orleans. Arriving, on such occasions, in the full splendor of his
outlaw state, and bringing joy to the heart of every lady in the room
by his attractive manners as well as by his fame, the pirate chief would
practically defy the authorities to lay a hand upon him. If agents of
the law were sent to arrest him, he knew of it, through a hundred spies,
long before they reached the place, and withdrew at once to some near-by
hiding place which was well known to him. In New Orleans he had a
hundred safe places of refuge.
Under his command was a force of pirates who were many or few, according
to the exigencies of the moment; for they could masquerade as peaceful
fishermen if necessary, or they could, upon occasion, muster a force of
several hundred at a word's notice--always perfectly armed, perfectly
drilled, thoroughly redoubtable.
Lafitte preyed impartially upon all the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico,
and, when pursued, ran into one of the numerous mouths of the
Mississippi or some inlet of the Gulf--into Barataria Lake, into Bayou
Lafourche, or into Bayou Teche. There it was vain to follow him, for the
intricacies of these passages were known only to his men or to the
dwellers along their shores, who were in sympathy with him.
When the British descended upon New Orleans in the autumn of 1813, they
offered Jean Lafitte a captain's commission in the British naval
service, thirty thousand dollars in money, a full pardon for past
offenses and rewards in money and lands for his followers if he would
join them in making war on the Americans. He could easily have done so.
The French people of Louisiana had no keen loyalty for the Stars and
Stripes at that time. As Lafitte went they might have gone. The British
knew this, and made their bait a rich one.
But Lafitte, although Claiborne's price was on his head, and his brother
Pierre in prison in New Orleans, refused the offer. Instead, he sent
the letters from Captain Lockyer, of the British navy, making this
proposition, to the Louisiana legislature. Later, after Pierre had
escaped, he actually joined General Jackson's nondescript army with a
force of riflemen. He seems to have acted from a very honest love for
the young American republic.
Jackson, at first, under a misapprehension of the circumstances, had
refused to accept the aid of these "hellish banditti," as he had called
Lafitte's men in a proclamation on his arrival. But when he found that
the British were upon him, and that a considerable proportion of his
poorly equipped militia were without flints for their muskets, he not
only accepted the flints that Lafitte sent him, but gave the pirate an
important command on his right wing. There Jean and his men performed
signal service.
If Lafitte had joined the British with his men and ships, there is
little likelihood that the Americans would have had in this fight the
powerful aid of the vessels of war _Carolina_ and _Louisiana_, on the
river. Nor is it likely that they would have had the passive support of
the French population. Nor that they would have found any substitute for
the flints with which Lafitte supplied them. And it is very likely that
the British assault upon Jackson's intrenchments would have been
attended with a different result.
Jackson, indeed, might have been crushed very much as Windsor had been
crushed at Washington, not long before.
Such a result at New Orleans would not have affected the outcome of the
war, for a peace favorable to the American arms had already been
declared at Ghent. But how profoundly a defeat would have influenced the
personal and political fortunes of Andrew Jackson and all the events in
American history which hung upon his subsequent career!
General Jackson won the presidency in 1828 because he was the military
hero of the day. His popularity was due to the brilliant victory that he
won at New Orleans. After his defeat in 1824, a spectacular visit which
he made to the field of the 1814 battle renewed the souvenirs of the
great fight and intensified his popularity; and in 1828 he was
triumphantly elected. If he had been defeated in battle by Pakenham, and
New Orleans had been taken, his fame would have been extinguished then
and there.
And without Jackson--should we ever have had machine politics? It was he
who introduced these into our government. He was the inventor and
discoverer of the spoils system. "To the victors belong the spoils" was
the maxim of his lieutenant, Marcy, and his own principle of action. We
have never been able quite to shake off the system which he fastened
upon the country. Patronage has been the curse of our politics from that
day to this.
Then there was his determined and disastrous assault on the United
States Bank. Upon this institution, which was founded by Alexander
Hamilton, and whose position somewhat resembled the present position of
the Bank of England, the financial system of the country depended.
Jackson attacked it as a "wicked monopoly," as a concrete expression of
the "money power." He succeeded in wrecking the bank, in bringing on the
panic of 1837, which wrought untold ruin and disaster to the people, and
in inaugurating in its place the system of wildcat State banks and
currency chaos which lasted up to the Civil War.
But Jackson attacked more than the United States Bank and the principle
that public office is a public trust. He attacked nullification.
Nullification meant that the States could refuse to recognize or obey
the laws of the United States. He struck that dictum hard, when it made
its appearance in South Carolina, and paralyzed it to such an extent
that the portion of the nation which did not believe in secession was
able to get its preponderant growth, and organize its strength, and
prevent disunion, when the test finally came.
Jackson saved the Union by stunning the nullification snake until the
republic was big enough and strong enough to trample it under foot. And
that, no doubt, was the greatest event that hung on the contingency of
Lafitte's choice of sides at New Orleans.