The Pirates Laffite

by William C. Davis

  "The quantity of goods which passed my House during the High Water is incredible," Foley complained on September 27. "Day and night continually passed Pirogues on Topp covered with Cockel Shells, and I am convinced, as you justly observe that wealthy Planters and others from their situation in life ought not be concerned in business injurious to the community and contrary to the Laws." Local report said that Jean Laffite or some of his men had recently landed three prizes at Cat Island, and were now passing up and down the Lafourche continually as they convoyed the prize goods to hiding or on to buyers. The brothers' Donaldsonville agents were also actively traveling the bayou, though "Mr Dumon who is a great friend of Lafites" was stopped by a small company of soldiers camped lower down on the Lafourche and denied further passage. He simply took another route. Meanwhile another agent, probably Mayronne—"He is notorious as well as Dumon"—successfully passed the guard and brought back a pirogue loaded with goods.

  Perhaps this increasingly blatant flouting of the law is what finally escalated the contest between the Laffites and the authorities. Of course, by the fall they were quite definitely wanted men. Both had failed to appear in court in July. Judge Hall set another court date for October, saying this would be their last chance. But neither made an appearance then, either.31 Any bond they had posted in April was now forfeit, and they would be prosecuted as smugglers if caught.

  The Laffites did not try to hide their guilt. They were committed to their trade, and had accepted that it made them outlaws. On September 28 inspector Walker Gilbert saw three men across the Lafourche from Donaldsonville boldly taking something out of hiding in daylight. For the past several days boats loaded with contraband had been passing, including one very heavy and low in the water that Foley had seen that morning. He assumed its cargo had been deposited somewhere along the bayou, and now Gilbert had seen it. Gilbert went across the Lafourche and demanded the men halt. The men loading a pirogue tossed their goods into the bayou and then jumped into the stream and swam to safety. Gilbert found a quantity of coarse linen, now well soaked and partially ruined but still, he thought, worth bringing to New Orleans for sale once dry.32

  Both Laffites had been in the neighborhood for some days. Pierre was staying at Lake Verret, where he received stores and provisions, especially ship's biscuit, sent up the Mississippi to Dumon, whose wagons then carted it to the Lafourche, and thence through the Attakapas Canal. Pierre was building up supplies to get to Cat Island for another cruise. Jean, whom locals referred to as "the Captain," kept a more public profile in and around Donaldsonville. There he received privateering recruits, men described by residents as having "the appearance of Brigands," whom he funneled to Pierre for assignment to the Laffite vessels. He also spent much time on open and intimate terms both with Dumon and, more disturbingly, county Judge B. Hubbard. Foley learned that it was Hubbard's cart and slaves that had transported the most recent load of provisions to Lake Verret.

  Early in October Foley heard stories of a very large store of accumulated merchandise hidden in the woods and long grass at a plantation on the Attakapas Canal. That Gilbert now posed a threat to those goods after his seizure on September 28 irritated Jean. Moreover, rumors—false as yet—claimed that a reward had been offered for the apprehension of one of the Laffites, though which was unknown. This spurred a new resolve with Jean, and he and his friends did not attempt to conceal it. "The Contrabandists & their friends insinuate that as the Merchandise which Mr Gilbert seized is going to New Orleans that it will be taken by them," Foley learned. Jean probably made the open threat in the hope of dissuading the overzealous Gilbert from further interference. If it was more than a stratagem, however, the Laffites were changing the equation. In November 1812 they had run from Holmes and then surrendered without resistance. They would not do so again. Now they themselves would take action, and if Gilbert resisted, the confrontation could lead to violence. The ancient imperatives of their trade were finally catching up with them.

  Foley sent word to Gilbert to be careful if he tried to take the captured goods to New Orleans, then continued his surveillance.33 Gilbert, far from being frightened by Laffites threats, continued uncovering and seizing goods—including nine bales of fabric on the evening of October 7—at the same time notifying New Orleans that more loads were getting past him regularly from his want of men to take them.34 Perhaps what finally drove Jean to action was the loss of another small boat loaded with goods as it moved down the Mississippi from Donaldsonville, taken from some of his men in a nighttime attack. The rest of the smugglers' boats escaped, and the men aboard ran them ashore and landed their goods, which they hid in the woods under brush and wood. That done, Jean Laffite and the men with him crossed to the other side of the river to hide, but returned the next day after a rain made them fear their merchandise had gotten wet. Indeed it had, and Laffite set the men to laying it out on the shore to dry for two or three days, all the while fearful of discovery. On the evening of October 12, the smugglers were walking a few miles downshore to contact the man to whom Laffite was selling the shipment, probably Mayronne, when a horseman rode up from the Lafourche and called for Jean, then gave him a letter most likely sent by Dumon or Hubbard. It informed Laffite that Gilbert was expected to be moving his captured goods down the river to New Orleans that very evening. Now was Jean's opportunity to make good on his threat to retake his merchandise. He reassured his men that few men would be on the boat, and that only Gilbert was to be feared. They lay in wait, but Gilbert did not pass that night. The next morning they walked farther downriver to the house of a Mr. Gaudins on the west bank, perhaps only six miles upstream of New Orleans, where they found Mayronne waiting for them.

  Jean and his men stayed at Gaudins's all day and all that night, and on the morning of October 14 saw Gilbert approach. He was in a keelboat, a wide-bottomed cargo craft with a box-like cabin amidships, usually propelled by men walking along the side pushing poles against the river bottom, or else by cordelling, men walking along the levee pulling the boat along with ropes. Laffite could see two black men cordelling the boat, and another three men on top of the cabin, none of them Gilbert. Laffite stepped to the levee and stopped the cordeliers, and the keelboat floated by with Gilbert in the cabin. Jean sent Andrew Whiteman, a man named Scott, and a mulatto after him in a pirogue. As the men left, Jean gave Whiteman peremptory orders to "fire in case of being fired at," and instructions to demand the boat's surrender with the threat that Jean would fire upon it from the shore. Then Laffite and two mulatto associates ran along the levee to catch up with the keelboat, which was drifting close enough to shore that they could probably leap aboard if they caught it.

  Whiteman and the pirogue were no sooner on the water than they saw a chicken fall overboard from the keelboat and heard one of the men on its cabin, who clearly did not yet apprehend the situation, yell to them to catch the bird for him. Whiteman had a bigger catch in mind, however. He rowed up to the boat and started to board it, Scott calling in French for Gilbert's men to give up. William Randall, one of the men on the cabin, quickly ducked inside to load his musket, but Gilbert had his gun ready A pistol in each hand, Scott stuck his head in the cabin and Gilbert fired, but his musket was loaded with buckshot, and so he only succeeded in wounding Scott in the head, and not seriously. Scott fired back and hit Randall in the thigh, and then Whiteman fired his musket into the cabin and demanded that Gilbert give up "Mr Lafite's" goods. At the same moment, Laffite and the mulattoes leapt aboard from the shore, and at that, Gilbert surrendered the boat.

  Randall was wounded, and at first it looked serious. As was characteristic of the solicitude the Laffites showed toward the Spaniards on the prizes they took, Jean left to find a physician while the rest of his men hauled the keelboat back to Gaudins's, then took Randall to a neighboring house. The next day the firing of a signal gun told Laffite that buyers from New Orleans were on the other side of the river, and he had his men row the merchandise across for sale. Jean, meanwhile, stayed a
t Gaudins's house, and when some men he had been expecting arrived, he led them up the west bank to return to the Lafourche.35

  News of the attack aroused immediate indignation. "This is an outrage I can scarcely believe," Foley declared, "although there is nothing these Pirates are not capable of." 36 It certainly left Gilbert and Randall frustrated. It took Gilbert more than six months to collect the $2 a day due him for his time in bringing the contraband as far as he got it and another $20 reimbursement for the hire of the black deckhands. He paid Randall's doctor out of his own pocket, care that ran to $100 in addition to the $68 he had to pay to board the wounded man for some time at the house where he recuperated. But Randall, who had volunteered to help Gilbert, was not a revenue service employee, and therefore was not eligible for compensation for his time lost due to his injury. No one attached any blame to their loss of the cargo, but still each was a loser in the event.37

  Gilbert was angry. He felt he was risking his health and even his life in combating the smugglers. Worse, in the days after his return to Donaldsonville, several more pirogues came up the bayou and he simply could not find anyone to assist him in taking them.38 Two weeks after the affair, the Laffite brothers had made a list of people such as Randall whom they knew to have assisted Gilbert in his seizures. They left the list in the hands of friends in Donaldsonville, who showed it about town and in the immediate area, passing along the Laffites' promise to kill anyone on the list who helped the revenue collector again. Even Gilbert felt the shadow of the threat, for he begged his superior in New Orleans, Pierre Dubourg, to keep what he said about the Laffites in confidence.39

  Jean was not the only brother now using force. At almost the same time that Jean confronted Gilbert, Pierre had as many as ninety men with him on Bayou St. Denis in six pirogues heavily loaded with contraband. Suddenly they saw a longboat full of unidentified men approach. Pierre fired a pistol shot in the air and yelled out "pavilion Francais," indicating that they were under French colors and implying a French privateer commission. Then the smugglers unleashed a ragged volley of musket and pistol fire at the boat. A voice came from the boat begging them to stop and saying the strangers meant no harm. The voice identified himself as Captain Amelerq of the United States service, saying he was visiting points along the coast where contraband was believed to be coming ashore. Nevertheless, Laffite and his men continued firing, and Amelerq ordered his men to return a volley. Three of Amelerq's men went down with wounds, and Pierre called out again to ask who his adversaries were. Now Amelerq identified his men as United States soldiers. At once Pierre replied that if he had known he would not have opened fire, and volunteered to take the three wounded men into the city for care. 40 But he added that he preferred to lose his life rather than lose his merchandise.

  The Laffite operation grew increasingly sophisticated. The brothers even devised a means of introducing contraband goods directly into New Orleans aboard their own ships in broad daylight. It was deceptively simple. They would send La Diligent into port with a safe cargo or perhaps none at all, allowing a thorough search of the vessel without fear. Then the captain made out a manifest to cover the outgoing cargo he was taking on in port. However, whatever he loaded in his hold—and most likely it was innocent provisions for a voyage—on his manifest he listed goods the Laffites had in hand at Cat Island, counting on port authorities not to compare the inventory with the cargo when he left port. After all, the revenue agents were interested in what came into New Orleans, not what went out of it. Then the vessel sailed to the mouth of the Lafourche and took on the contraband, which now matched a cargo manifest signed and approved by the port inspector. The ship took the goods back to New Orleans, where all the paperwork was in order and there was nothing to show that the goods were prize merchandise taken by the privateers. The ploy also worked in reverse. A vessel coming into the Mississippi with a legitimate cargo would stop at the Balize for inspection, but once cleared to go on to New Orleans, the boat went some distance upriver where smugglers loaded contraband they had brought through the bayous, counting on inspectors in port not to check too carefully a manifest that had already passed once. 41

  Authorities caught on before long, however. Just ten days after Jean attacked Gilbert on the Mississippi, Shaw's Gun Vessel No. 5 stopped La Diligent and performed an exhaustive search of the vessel, comparing the findings to the manifest and then seizing her cargo.42

  Meanwhile the Laffites and their associates expanded their network of Gulf shore landing places and inland storage and auction sites. They sent goods from the Lafourche landing places into the Bayou Teche country to the hungry planters there.43 They sometimes held sales on the shores of Bayous Villars, Barataria, Rigolets, Perot, and Lake Salvador. The Temple, on the western shore of Lake Salvadore, was their principal trading post, but they also sold and auctioned merchandise at the "Little Temple" where Bayous Rigolets and Perot met.44 The Laffites also used Bayou Sauvage, which flowed into the rear of the Bretonne, or Indian Market, on Bayou Road just outside New Orleans, passed on through the Gentilly to Bayou Bienvenue, and continued to the Gulf. It was usable only by small boats. Daniel Clark lived and had his depot on the bank of the bayou near the junction of Esplanade and Bayou Road streets, making his place a convenient conduit into the city.45 Thus the smugglers could get their goods to customers from virtually every point of the compass: northward from Barataria to the Temple or on to the city directly; from the east via the lakes and then in the St. John Bayou road or by Clark's place; from the northwest by bringing it down the Mississippi from Donaldsonville; and from the west and southwest by several routes connected to the Lafourche. Whenever one route began attracting too much attention, they could let it lie fallow and concentrate on one or more of the others for a while.

  Once they got their goods to the vicinity of New Orleans, sale posed little problem, for seemingly everyone was interested in bargains. When he came to New Orleans after the Gilbert affair, Andrew Whiteman recognized a frequent customer at the Grand Isle sales, only now he was in uniform with the epaulettes of an officer in charge of the city guardhouse.46 Nevertheless, smuggled goods were just as vulnerable to seizure in the city as on the bayous. On October 9 officials raided Patton and Murphy's auction house and removed a considerable quantity of contraband.47

  For the time being, the Lafourche remained the favored artery, though when low water made it too shallow, the Laffites used another route through the Atchafalaya to Bayou Boeuf to Grand Lake and on to Plaquemine.

  Late in October, with the repercussions of the attack on Gilbert only starting to be felt, Dumon was helping to plunder a prize schooner off the mouth of the Teche and moving the booty to the Lafourche for hiding.48 Suddenly the men Gilbert called "the Cat Island boys" disappeared from Donaldsonville, though Jean Laffite stayed in the village for a few days before going down the Mississippi to an area called the German Coast to protect goods purchased at one of his auctions from a repeat of Gilbert's recent interference.49 Dumon seemed almost constantly away from home doing the brothers' business.50

  Then, just before the end of the month, large pirogues began passing down the bayou loaded with barrels for packing goods and more than twenty-five men, all locals well known in the community, and some of them rather prominent, such as the son-in-law of the Ascension Parish judge. The Laffites had hired them to unload a new prize off the Atchafalaya's mouth, this time a haul of woolens. They were well armed and made no secret of their determination to resist if challenged on their return passage with their contraband, and Foley complained to collector Dubourg that "the Inhabitants generally are friendly towards them & assist and give them every information in their power." 51 The brothers' share of the latest prize went to New Orleans for sale, while the crew's portion of the goods went on sale at a two-day auction on the banks of the Lafourche at Valentine Solent's plantation. Hundreds of people attended. Merchant I. Hart of New Orleans spent nearly $7,000, and others from the city almost as much, and within days the wares wer
e in the stores of the city.52 The impunity with which the transactions were carried on almost challenged a response. "It will be impossible without a force (Military) to put a stop to the contraband in this Neighbourhood," Foley told Dubourg. He knew of a cache of merchandise hidden on Bayou Boeuf not far from Donaldsonville, under the guard of "from 16 to 20 of these ruffians." Nor was that all authorities would have to contend with, for "the inhabitants are likewise interested so it is impossible to go near them."53

  Collector Dubourg could add to the problem, for on at least one occasion in October when he asked a local military commander to furnish him with a squad of soldiers for an expedition inland to seize goods, the officer provided the men but Dubourg failed to show up. The officer chided Dubourg that while he was happy to cooperate when he could, he did not have enough men available to be able to divert any of them from their duties for nothing.54 Meanwhile Dubourg had sent repeated complaints about the smuggling problem to his superiors, begging to have more revenue cutters to patrol the coast and more men assigned as inspectors inland. Secretary of the Treasury William Jones was not unsympathetic, but he was relatively powerless during the war emergency. He acknowledged being fully aware of "the frequent violation of the revenue laws of the United States, by a daring & unprincipled band of pirates & smugglers." Jones had ordered Dubourg's predecessor Thomas Williams to ask Claiborne for help, but to little avail. "I will not dissemble however that whilst the inhabitants of Louisiana continue to countenance this illegal commerce and the courts of justice forbear to enforce the laws against the offenders, little or no benefit can be expected to result from the best concerted measures," he now told Dubourg. "The appointment even of Inspectors unless they are proof to the temptation of bribes, so far from operating as a check upon smuggling, will only contribute to diminish the chances of detection."