The event would have far-reaching significance for the Laffites and the rest of the privateering community. With West Florida as far as the Pearl now in American hands and the Spaniards on their way out, use of those parishes as a back door for smuggling slaves or other goods into Louisiana became more difficult. And this sudden change came virtually at the same moment as an event even farther away that would have an even greater impact. In May 1810 Cartagena, a formidable fortress city on the coast of Colombia, rose in open resistance. Within weeks the independence movement spread all the way to the Venezuelan capital at Bogotá, where a junta deposed the governor in July and declared Cartagena an open port.5 Just as quickly the movement began to sputter, though not in Cartagena, where a mercenary, the former French officer Pierre Labatut, took over as all-but-dictator. Meanwhile Francisco de Miranda liberated Caracas and declared a Venezuelan republic in December 1810, and a young revolutionary named Simon Bolivar began making plans for a broader new republic he wanted to call Gran Colombia.
More than a decade of infectious rebellion in Spain's New World possessions thus saw its dawn. Not surprisingly, as an old corsair himself, Labatut anticipated the value privateers could provide to Cartagena now. Nearly alone at the moment, it did not need a navy, but it did need supply and finances. As luck would have it, dozens of privateers had just lost the last of their French bases with the fall of Guadaloupe. By now their commissions were expiring, even if they could find a lawful port. Thus as soon as the word spread through the Caribbean that Cartagena was in rebellion, corsairs flocked to the port, among them Dominique Youx. When the privateers sailed away, they took with them letters of marque signed by Presidente-Gobernador Manuel Rodriguez Torices and Secretary of War Joseph Axnazola y Vonay, as well as a code of conduct that they probably ignored entirely now that they were back in business.6
However, prizes could hardly be taken back to Cartagena for sale or for safekeeping. The money to be realized from selling prize goods lay in other places not strapped for cash by the cost of sustaining a rebellion. The corsairs might be sailing under legitimate commissions at the moment, but there were no other safe ports in the Caribbean or on the Gulf. There was Louisiana, however. The United States still maintained its neutrality toward France and Spain, meaning that vessels of an unrecognized insurgent Spanish city could not be received in New Orleans. But there was always the growing mercantile and smuggling establishment loosely managed by the Laffites.7 As early as August 1810 Spanish authorities began to complain of the "unlucky incident" of their vessels being captured and "taken by the French pirates to the Great Land of Barataria."8
By the fall more Spanish vessels than ever were being taken by privateers, and their goods unloaded at Grand Isle for introduction into Louisiana. All their owners could do, through their agents or the Spanish consul Morphy in New Orleans, was protest and seek action in the federal court. An officer of Spain's ministry in Philadelphia complained to Secretary of State Robert Smith in Washington, specifying, "I also understand that the most frequented rendezvous of these Pirates is at Barataria, and have even been assurred, that they have fortified themselves at that place, threatening vengeance with daring arrogance to whomever attempts disturbing them." He demanded that the president make efforts to dislodge and prosecute "this nest of pirates." 9
For the next several years Madison would pursue an equivocal course. U.S. policy was to maintain neutrality and respect the rights of other nations—meaning Spain. Washington often offered assurances of sympathy along with promises to put an end to depredations on Spanish shipping by vessels fitted out or operating from American waters. Unofficially, anything that irritated or weakened Spain in North America worked to Madison's purpose, for his administration, like Jefferson's before it, wanted Spain out of the Floridas. Madison had encouraged the revolt in West Florida that now saw it a part of Louisiana, and his administration would be none too diligent in discouraging similar grassroots movements in East Florida, though support for independence there was weak as yet. When privately raised and funded schemes emerged to lead filibustering assaults on East Florida, Washington officially condemned them, but quietly willed them to succeed. For the next decade Spain would find Madison and his secretaries of state Smith and James Monroe to be duplicitous friends at best.
When it came to the privateers, however, Washington faced an internal dilemma. Their depredations hurt Spain and worked toward a laudable end. But the volume of the prize goods that came in by way of the Laffites and their like cost the government vast sums in unpaid customs duty. Aside from public condemnation, Madison was not certain what to do. Outright pirates were one thing, but these Americans and outcasts from a host of other nations now flying the flag of Cartagena—and soon other insurgent Spanish colonies—presented a more complex problem. Their defiance of Commodore Porter revealed their boldness. Their victory over him demonstrated their strength and the support for them in Louisiana.
New Orleans was an enormously important city to the United States, far out of proportion to its size, though already it was the largest city in the South. It commanded the Mississippi, and the river was the key to opening and exploiting the central part of the continent. Madison knew all too well how divided was the population, and how great the suspicion and resentment on the part of the French and Creole majority toward their new American townsmen and rulers. He need have no fear of an uprising among them, but with relations with Britain deteriorating rapidly, and with a strong and assertive British naval presence in the Caribbean, he could imagine a scenario in which a disaffected French population would choose Britain as the lesser of evils in a contest with the United States. He could not afford to lose even the lukewarm support of that population, especially when his own navy was so weak that Porter and his successors would complain for years of not having the proper vessels to do their job. Put the privateers out of business, and many of the merchants of Louisiana would suffer as well, and all of the citizens would pay more for their goods, not to mention the effect of removing the only source of new slaves capable of meeting expanding demand.
And so Washington would continue making a show of trying to quell violations, and naval authorities would continue to bring in a questionable privateer from time to time, while the district attorney steadily filed libels in the federal court against ships and cargoes believed to be improperly commissioned or unlawfully fitted out in American jurisdiction. But nearly as often, Judge Hall's court found in favor of the privateers. As a result, men who had been aboard ships taken and plundered at sea often encountered their robbers walking the streets of New Orleans, yet could do nothing about it. 10 At worst, the smugglers and privateers were an embarrassment to the American community. The French regarded them as colorful heroes who brought them bargains while thumbing a nose at Spain, Washington, and the resented local Americans at the same time.
Amid such an indulgent population, Jean was able to pursue as active a social life as he chose. Pierre, too, enjoyed that freedom, and not being married he may have allowed his social sport to extend beyond Marie Villard before his stroke restricted his activity.11 The Laffites may have shared with other smugglers in the supply and operation of retail sales establishments on Conti and Toulouse streets in the city itself.12 It was not a good time for Pierre's unauthorized sale of the slave that he leased when he went to Pensacola to come back to haunt him. In 1808 the slave was jailed in New Orleans as a runaway using an assumed name. His original owner, William St. Marc, paid for his release, only to have the man to whom Laffite sold the slave file a suit two years later, charging St. Marc for $125 in lease revenue for the time St. Marc had the slave after his release from jail. When he lost the suit and had to pay, St. Marc in turn filed a suit against Pierre Laffite to recover his loss.13 By the end of the year Pierre was borrowing money from the Bank of Louisiana.14 Then, just after the first of the year, something happened that threatened to bring the Laffites more directly under the gaze of the authorities for the first time, and at the
same moment risked costing them the goodwill even of their French-Creole sympathizers.
Slave rebellions did not occur that often in Louisiana. The first came in 1730, an unsuccessful uprising led by a slave named Samba. In 1795 Point Coupée Parish experienced a brief slave revolt linked to the unrest in San Domingue. Three whites and twenty-five blacks were arrested, and twenty-three of them were put in a boat and floated downstream toward New Orleans, stopping in each parish church along the way for one of them to be hanged as an example. 15 Thereafter the fear that the San Domingue influence could lead to a serious revolt in Louisiana remained constant.
But now it happened. On January 8, 1811, at the plantation of Manuel Andry in St. Charles Parish, thirty-six miles south of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a San Domingue refugee, organized the other slaves on the plantation. Joined by a handful of "maroons," or runaway slaves living in the swamps close by, Deslondes's band wounded Andry and killed his son, then armed themselves and set off down the river road toward New Orleans, gathering recruits and burning plantations as they went. Eventually their force grew to somewhere over one hundred, though panicked reports soon inflated the number to five hundred or more. White families fled before their advance, and the families' carriages arriving in New Orleans spread the alarm. "The whole city was convulsed," a naval officer reported a few days later. Commodore John Shaw, Porter's successor, sent forty men and officers on shore to cooperate with General Wade Hampton and twenty-eight of his army regulars, augmented by volunteers and city militia under Captain George Ross, in an expedition to stop the insurgents.16 While awaiting military support, white planters organized and on the evening of January 9 attacked the blacks on the François Bernoudi plantation and drove them into the woods. The next morning Hampton's detachment arrived, attacked, and stopped the rebels at Jacques Fortier's plantation in St. Charles Parish.
The first report said that sixty-six had been killed or executed on the spot, another sixteen taken prisoner, and seventeen escaped. The number killed was higher, as bodies continued to be found after this report, and soon more fugitives were found in the woods. On January 13 trials began at the Destrehan plantation and thirty blacks were brought before a tribunal of plantation owners. Two days later the tribunal condemned twenty-one of them to death and released the rest. The condemned were taken to their home plantations, and then shot and beheaded, the heads placed on poles to be a continuing admonition to other blacks thinking of freedom. 17 Meanwhile, others who escaped the soldiers fled to New Orleans, but several were caught and tried, and at least thirteen more were executed.18
Had they not moved quickly, Shaw concluded, "the whole coast would have exhibited one general scene of devastation." He trained the guns of his brig USS Syren on the city and the powder magazine in the Place d'Arms, and ordered guards to patrol the city for four nights. Even after the uprising was quelled on January 10, New Orleanians remained in a panic. "I have never before been witness to such general confusion and dismay, as prevailed throughout the city," said Shaw. Few men had their own guns, and he doled out weapons and ammunition from his own stores. Once the trials commenced, he observed that "condemnations, and executions by hanging and beheading are going on daily."19
Several theories about what caused the revolt emerged in Louisiana and the United States. Some blamed disgruntled Spanish planters in Louisiana. The most persistent suspicion, however, laid it at the feet of the San Domingue slaves, since the assumed leader Deslondes and several of the other offenders came from San Domingue. Of course, the community had been conditioned to fear a revolt by these people for fully a decade. Governor Claiborne certainly shared this view, though none of the evidence brought forward at the trials suggested that the rebellion was instigated specifically by recent arrivals from San Domingue.
As a result of the 1811 revolt, the Louisiana legislature passed stringent slave control laws. In New Orleans the city council enacted ordinances restricting the movement of slaves in the city, and banning from the city slaves not owned or temporarily hired by New Orleans residents. Slaves could not gather in the streets except for funerals and dances with mayoral sanction, and neither were they to be in the public squares, the markets, or coffeehouses. That the revolt hit just as Congress was debating statehood for Louisiana came as a severe embarrassment, while word of the revolt spread renewed fear of slave insurrection throughout the Union. Small though it was, in numbers involved it was the largest revolt ever to occur in the United States.
Some influential leaders and some of the population wondered whether it was possible to absorb a large slave population and enclaves of foreign-born people such as the refugees without borrowing trouble. Everyone knew that in 1809 and 1810 the Laffites brought smuggled San Domingue slaves into the territory. No evidence emerged that slaves smuggled in through Barataria by the Laffites participated in the uprising.20 But fear was far more persuasive than fact, and suddenly the perception of the Laffites in New Orleans shifted. Hereafter the authorities began to take greater notice of their activities, and to take efforts to hinder them.21
Certainly the Laffites did not let up in their growing trade, though Jean probably had to absorb more of the New Orleans share of their business until Pierre recovered. Moreover, Pierre's domestic responsibilities continued to expand. Sometime early in the year Pierre and Marie added to their brood with the birth of Jean Baptiste Laffite.22 But if Pierre's health was yet too frail, all too many of the locals were happy to aid in the enterprise.23 Walker Gilbert at Donaldsonville, empowered to seize smuggled goods if he could find them, declared in January 1811 that "it is astonishing the interest the inhabitants take in aiding those persons to carry on that shameful trade. I am certain that there is goods now secreted on the bayou to the amt. of $15,000 or 20,000$." That month he learned of three prizes being unloaded at the mouth of the Lafourche, probably of slave cargoes. Gilbert suspected that a justice of the peace in Lafourche Parish was involved in the trade, and learned that a few months before the owners of a boat carrying $20,000 worth of contraband goods had paid a $2,000 bribe to be allowed to go on their way when stopped in a canal above New Orleans. 24 In May a single French privateer brought in four prizes and ninety-one slaves that he offered to sell cheaply at $5,000 for the lot.25
The efforts of the authorities seemed as futile as ever. On March 14 one of Shaw's armed boats, Gun Vessel No. 15, took the privateer La Sirena—sailing under a French captain, yet carrying both Spanish and French papers—and a cargo of slaves. Shaw consulted with Governor Claiborne and District Attorney Grymes and they decided to try to make an example of her "for the purpose of breaking down the Piratical outrages committed by plunderers of this description, on our commerce." They took the offenders before Judge Hall on charges of piracy, but already Shaw expressed pessimism as to whether a fair trial could be obtained. He suggested that in the future captured pirates be taken to some other port in the United States where they could be tried. Meanwhile, remembering the experience of Porter before him, he predicted that "I shall acquire myself a host of enemies in this city; the population of which is made up of an influx of beings, from all countries, and of all descriptions, three fourths of whom, possessing the very worst principles. In a word, New Orleans, may with propriety, be stated the Botany Bay of America."26 He proved to be a prophet, for when the accused came to trial before Judge Hall, despite good evidence of piracy against them, a jury composed almost entirely of Frenchmen gave them an acquittal.27
The Laffites had the Bayou Lafourche route firmly established now, and had thoroughly familiarized themselves with other available avenues to introduce goods. Timbalier and Terrebonne bays a few miles west of the mouth of the Lafourche were even larger than Barataria, and Timbalier offered good anchorages and a short overland portage to the Lafourche. Terrebonne Bay had a direct connection thanks to Bayou Terrebonne, which flowed out of the Lafourche some fifty miles above the bay. And the Laffites found other spots like Cat Island that were good for running prize ships agrou
nd for unloading.
Still Grand Isle dominated the Baratarians' enterprise. The fact that the pass at the east end of the island was the only one wide and deep enough to allow oceangoing vessels to pass meant that by commanding it the smugglers could enjoy safe haven inside the bay. Those vessels too deep of draft to make the pass anchored on the seaward side of the island.28 The smugglers and the visiting privateers lived in rude quarters among the oaks, but also had camps at Cheniere Caminada on the mainland just opposite the western tip of the island, as well as at a few other points inside the bay.29 Their scattered encampments bespoke the fact that no one really commanded them, however much the Laffites increasingly dominated their business.
The full scale of the brothers' business is elusive, but they certainly did well in slave sales early in the year. In five weeks in March and April 1811 Pierre sold twenty-five blacks, mostly Africans, for $15,275.30 Most likely they represented all or part of a single cargo brought in that spring. But thereafter the Laffites' slave sales declined dramatically. In the next six months Pierre sold a single slave, and then five in three days at the end of October. Another three brought the Laffites some money in November, then four more sold in December, but for more than eight months of the year the Laffites sold just thirteen slaves for a total of $4,955. Moreover, for those six sold after April they realized prices per head that were down by a third over what slaves brought them earlier in the year.31
Finally the authorities had begun to erode the slave supply. Certainly the privateers continued taking vessels frequently, and just as often the court let them off when they were caught, but more and more they were losing their cargoes to the government if they had not unloaded at Barataria before capture. In August Shaw's gunboats took two privateers off Mobile. In at least one case the naval vessels managed to take forty crewmen with a four-pounder cannon and a chest of muskets while they waited to be picked up by a privateer at Chandeleur Island outside Lake Borgne in the Gulf. 32 Then in September 1811, Lieutenant Thomas ap Catesby Jones took a privateer ship between Lake Barataria and Lake Perdido, and found it manned with French men who had earlier violated the neutrality act by signing on with a French privateer.33
The Pirates Laffite Page 8