Where the sheriff expected to find Pierre is unclear, though most likely it was at the house on Dumaine Street that Marie Louise Villard purchased on April 9 from Pierre Delaronde, and almost unquestionably with money provided by Pierre. If Laffite did not legally own property in New Orleans, then it could not be seized.14 That Pierre would risk being in the city at all while the authorities groped toward a way to arrest both Laffites, and charge at least Jean with a capital crime, seemed incredible. Pierre's visits to Marie in spite of such danger suggest more than a casual relationship between the two. At the same time, Lanusse's belief that Pierre was about to leave the state raises the possibility that once again both Laffites thought of departing Louisiana.
While Pierre's legal and possible financial embarrassments occupied his lawyer, Pierre's and Jean's attention were directed to their business, current and future. Willful failure to pay debts was not good practice for a merchant, even a crooked one, for today's creditors could be tomorrow's customers. Pierre's bankruptcy may have been a legal dodge to avoid paying his debts, but more likely he did not have as much money available to him as rumor said. After all, his was a costly and uncertain business. For all their failures, the customs men did make seizures from time to time, and what they confiscated in New Orleans was almost certainly the Laffites' share of cargoes sold and distributed at Cat Island and elsewhere. Just as Lanusse was in court going after Pierre, Major Peire seized a substantial cache of contraband at Barataria.15
But most of the merchandise continued going through, and the local inspectors could only report it to New Orleans and perhaps send lists of the names of men trading with the smugglers to be charged as abettors.16 Helpful citizens were so cowed after Gilbert's experience and Stout's death, that when they did furnish information it often as not came anonymously.17 Claiborne told Dubourg that if the Laffite operation were to be disrupted, it would have to be United States forces that did it.
Flournoy came up with a means of breaking the logjam. Since Dubourg was a federal official, he said, if the collector asked the governor for help, then officially it would be a request from the United States government, and the governor could station a company of state militia at Donaldsonville without risk to his own prestige.18 That worked for the governor, who promised on March 1 to order one hundred militia to report to Dubourg.19 The next day Claiborne addressed the legislature once more, asking for a volunteer force of one hundred and four men and officers to serve for up to six months. He got around fiscal objections by averring that since the force would be used to enforce United States laws, Washington would reimburse any expenses.
Once again the assembly was not moved. Even if the assembly failed to act, though, encouraged by this glimmer of cooperation from Claiborne, the collector approached Commodore Patterson to ask if he could spare an armed vessel for an expedition against the smugglers, and though Patterson had to respond that he could not at the moment, he promised that he would help as soon as he could free one of his ships from more pressing duty off the coast.20 At the same time, Flournoy detailed a sergeant's guard of United States soldiers—not much, but an encouraging start—for Dubourg's anticipated strike.21 The collector was marshaling forces to hit the smugglers, and in their small ways the governor, the army, and the navy were contributing and cooperating for the first time. It would not be the end of the Laffites, but it would be the beginning of the demise of their enterprise.
Meanwhile their privateering continued to bring in the goods for their sales. On April 9 the Spanish schooner the Amiable Maria sailed from Havana with a cargo of wax, paper, and dry goods, bound for Vera Cruz. Thirty miles from her destination Pierre Cadet and the Dorada, now mounting five cannon, came upon her on April 15 and raised the French flag. After capturing the merchantman, however, Cadet ran up the flag of Cartagena, and took the prize to Grand Terre, arriving May 15 to be detained a month while Jean Laffite oversaw sale of the cargo to buyers from New Orleans.22 Cadet proved himself to be "without comparison in kindness and attentions," according to a Spanish civil officer aboard. The privateers did not touch the passengers' personal luggage and possessions when they brought the Amiable Maria into Barataria, and shortly thereafter Cadet provided the Spaniards with passage back to Havana.23
This civility was standard procedure for Laffite captains, and in time the Laffites' consideration toward Spanish seamen would work to their advantage. Indeed, there may have been some calculation in their attentions to Spaniards, for in the roiling world of Spanish America, allegiances shifted constantly. For the rest of their lives the brothers would find their fortunes linked both passively and actively to Spain's affairs in the New World. Of course they made their living preying on Spanish shipping, but far more was to be made by capitalizing on the political quicksands around them. Cartagena, Chile, Buenos Aires, and Venezuela had all declared independence by now, and Bolivar led revolutionary forces in New Granada in campaigns from Caracas to Cartagena. Their fortunes ebbed and flowed, Spain sometimes retaking lost ground, but the revolutionaries had the taste of independence in their mouths and were not to be dissuaded. At this moment Bolivar was in retreat, the revolutionaries under Bernardo O'Higgins had been defeated in Chile, and José Maria Morelos y Pavon, who had been leading a revolt in Mexico since 1810, was besieged just short of his goal of Mexico City.
The message to men of enterprise was not that Spain had the rebels on the run almost everywhere in mid-1814. Rather it was that with the mother country so distracted and so distant, there was opportunity in the vastness of New Spain. Eastern Florida seemed ripe, as did the province of Texas immediately west of the Sabine River. Moreover, Texas afforded a back door to northern Mexico that hopeful revolutionaries might use. The fabulous wealth that Spain had siphoned from Mexico and South America for centuries may have made the dons rich, but it also fed the dreams of adventurers, and the weakening of Spain during the Napoleonic wars in Europe, along with its defensive position on so many fronts in the New World, naturally gave daring men ideas of opportunity.
One such man was Louis Aury, now operating as a corsair out of Cartagena. He owned and commanded three privateers by February, and nearly three hundred men answered to his orders. He regularly sent prizes into Louisiana, and his agent in New Orleans, the merchant François Dupuis, held several thousand dollars of Aury's money in safekeeping at any given time. The junta at Cartagena had been good to Aury, and he to them with the money he brought them from his prizes. They gave him distinction and "have filled my strong box," he boasted. Speaking for Cartagena, Spanish America, and New Orleans he said, "Homage is paid here as in all times and countries to the strongest." 24
The privateers produced by European wars and New World upheavals were among the first to attach themselves both to the independence movements like Cartagena's and to the shadier enterprises that soon took their name from the Dutch vrijbuiter, which sounded like and essentially meant "freebooter." It would have been strange if New Orleans had not become a seedbed for these "filibusters," for its access to the sea, the convenience and privacy of the coastal ports at Barataría, Cat Island, and elsewhere, and Louisiana's proximity to Texas, virtually dictated that the Creole city on the Mississippi be the center of plots against Texas, Mexico, and much of the rest of New Spain.
As early as 1791 Philip Nolan and the ever-scheming General James Wilkinson cast eyes toward exploiting Texas, and possibly something more, but Nolan lost his life in a skirmish with Spaniard soldados in 1801, and by that time Wilkinson was on Spain's payroll as a spy while also acting as commanding general of the United States Army. Another army officer, Augustus Magee, resigned his commission in 1812 and with José Bernardo Maximiliano Gutiérrez de Lara led an abortive invasion of Texas that resulted in Magee's death in February 1813, followed by Gutiérrez's brief success and then rapid descent into brutality. José Alvarez de Toledo, a Havana-born former officer in Spain's navy, maneuvered Gutiérrez out of his command, but led the army to disaster at the Battle of the Medina on August
18, 1813, after which Toledo escaped to New Orleans, arriving in early November 1813.
The hallmark of filibustering, however, was that defeat and disaster only seemed to whet the appetite of adventurers. After all, Gutiérrez had taken most of Texas before his downfall. A more able leader should do even better. The next would-be liberator on the scene appeared to be such a leader. Jean Joseph Amable Humbert had commanded a company in Napoleon's Imperial Guard in 1796, and thereafter rose rapidly in the emperor's esteem. A veteran of campaigns in Ireland and San Domingue, he asked Bonaparte in June 1812 to send him to the United States on a mission probably having to do with distracting Spain from Europe by starting insurrections in Mexico. Carrying a bogus passport identifying him as Jean Berthum—a transparent anagram of Humbert—he arrived in Philadelphia in November, where he established an uneasy partnership with the refugee plotter Toledo before Toledo departed to join Gutiérrez and Magee's ill-fated expedition.
In Philadelphia, Humbert also became acquainted with Juan Mariano Buatista de Picornell y Gomila. The fifty-three-year-old Picornell had been a revolutionary in Madrid, and had tried to incite revolt in Venezuela as early as 1798. In about 1806 he came to Philadelphia and started hatching plots to take Texas that saw him spending some time in New Orleans, but to no avail. He returned to Philadelphia by 1812, when he allied himself with Toledo, but after the Medina he returned to New Orleans, and then rejoined the remnants of the invading force at Natchitoches.
The fifty-eight-year-old Humbert was a man of commanding presence and personality. Slender and above-average height, he presented a long swarthy face and heavy beard that seemed dominated by a red drinker's nose like a plump strawberry. In mid-August 1813 he boarded ship for New Orleans, taking with him a number of French and Spanish officers whom he had enlisted in his enterprise. Their task was to maneuver Gutiérrez out of command of those remaining loyal to him, establish a base in Texas, and then encourage revolt in Mexico. Unfortunately, one of Humbert's hallmarks was his indiscretion, and while in Philadelphia he tried to persuade the Spanish minister Luis Onís to his cause. Onís had been in Philadelphia since about 1809, running a shadow legation because Washington refused to recognize his appointment as minister until King Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne taken from him by Napoleon. Onís constantly lobbied the State Department and other officials in Washington on behalf of Spanish interests, at the same time running an intelligence system in the United States, the Caribbean, and New Spain. A masterful politician and diplomat, Onís played along with the guileless Humbert, and as a result had word of his plans on the way to the viceroy in Havana even as Humbert sailed. 25
As soon as Humbert reached New Orleans he began fomenting filibusters, and approaching the Baratarians to link them with his schemes. His contacts with the Laffites at this stage, if any, would have been few and probably indirect, for the brothers were seldom in the city, and then only clandestinely. But certainly they knew of his presence and probably his mission, and he could not have been in the city long without learning that they exercised more authority than anyone else over the loose brotherhood of corsairs and smugglers operating on the coast. Their bases at Grand Isle and Cat Island would be ideal staging points for any maritime arm of his Texas plan. First he had to deal with Gutiérrez, however, but that did not take long. After the debacle of his 1812–1813 expedition, Gutiérrez commanded little respect. Indeed, when Humbert reached New Orleans, Gutiérrez had gone underground and was nowhere to be found. Toledo was out with the remainder of the beaten volunteers from the Medina, and Picornell's ambitions were political rather than military. That left the field in New Orleans to Humbert.
He actively began enlisting men for his new "army," and found hundreds of Frenchmen and Creoles interested in following his guidon. Unfortunately, he both exaggerated his support and outright misled the men in telling them that he acted with Toledo's blessing, for Toledo soon disavowed Humbert entirely. Each presumed to be entitled to command the next "invasion" of Texas. Humbert apparently did achieve one thing, however. As early as mid-September the rumor spread outward from New Orleans that some Barataria-based privateers had agreed to make their ships available to convoy men and supplies to the Texas coast to support Humbert, no doubt in hopes of making new bases for their own operations. Gutiérrez had reportedly come to a similar understanding with them earlier that year, though nothing came of it. 26
Nothing specifically links the Laffites with these first interactions between the privateers and the filibusters, but it is inconceivable that such an alliance would have been made without at least their knowledge and more likely their involvement. It made good business sense for them to shift their base outside United States territory now that being seen in New Orleans was no longer safe for them. Humbert's "army" would offer them a measure of protection against Spanish interference by land. Sailing from a base outside the United States on the Sabine River—or even closer on the Calcasieu, whose upper tributaries reached almost to the Red River—they should not be subject to harassment from Patterson and the navy, yet would be close enough to Louisiana to smuggle their goods in by the usual means.
Humbert worked on his plans and his recruiting until November, when he went to Natchitoches, the overland gateway to east Texas. On November 25 the motley remnant of earlier expeditions and new recruits created a Provisional Government of the Interior Provinces of Mexico and chose Picornell as president. Five days later Picornell gave Humbert a general's commission, and Humbert accepted.27 With Toledo absent and maneuvered out of influence, Humbert took command of the so-called Republican Army of the North, and appointed none other than Arsené Latour an officer on his staff. 28 But it was evident that they would continue to be paper tigers without more men and money, and Picornell and Humbert soon after returned to New Orleans, hoping to win the cooperation of prominent filibuster leaders like the Kempers, Henry Perry, who commanded much of the remnant after the Medina, and Dr. John Robinson, another would-be giant who had compromised Magee's operations prior to the Medina. Rumors spread that some three thousand men and one thousand Indians were ready and waiting to follow Humbert's lead.29
The reality was vastly different, the plan doomed to failure, for by February 1814 an important participant in the filibusters' meetings had been "turned" and was feeding information to the Spaniards through the most unlikely of intermediaries, the Capuchin Fray Antonio de Sedella, the parish priest of New Orleans who lived behind the Cathedral of St. Louis on the Place d'Arms. Known to his parishioners as Père Antoine, Sedella was a fierce-looking and combustible cleric with an unyielding loyalty to his flock and an equally tenacious devotion to Spain, regardless of Louisiana's American ownership. In the past he had fed information on revolutionaries to Spanish authorities, and now with the filibuster leaders in New Orleans, he was determined to crack one of them open. Incredibly, he decided to start at the top, and on February 4 wrote to Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, the captain general in Cuba, that he intended to make a traitor of none other than Picornell.30 More amazing still, within a week Sedella succeeded.
Apparently Picornell had been an uncertain revolutionary for some time, and after almost two decades of one insurrectionary plot after another he was tired, and no doubt disillusioned by the chancers and opportunists who filled his ranks. He had approached Onís about a pardon and resumption of allegiance to Spain a couple of years earlier, but the Texas dream had lured him back to the revolutionary fold. Now Picornell fell out with the bumptious and impractical Humbert, the vain Toledo, Perry, the treacherous Robinson, the brutal Gutiérrez, and the sort who followed them. Despite his title as president, he had lost control of the enterprise. Within a month Claiborne would issue a proclamation that made Picornell an outlaw in the United States as well as a traitor to Spain, and thus a man without a country. He was easy prey for Sedella, who approached with promises of a pardon. By February 11 Picornell had been turned, and the next day he officially resigned his presidency and submitted an application for pardon.
31 Hereafter he would work with Sedella in trying to compromise the efforts of the filibusters, and though henceforth he would be outside the inner circle of plotters, still Picornell knew much and could find out more.
Thus it is almost certain that Picornell was the source of the first piece of useful information about Humbert's plans that Sedella was able to feed Apodaca. Only days after Picornell's resignation, Sedella learned "through a person present in the meetings held to this respect," that the privateers and pirates of Barataría, soon to be joined by others out of Cartagena, intended to surprise and ransack Tampico, midway down the Mexican Gulf coast, and then sail up the coastline to Matagorda Bay, midway between the mouths of the Sabine and the Rio Grande rivers on the Texas coast. There, in a fine bay sheltered by barrier islands, they would remain in strength to establish a new base. Tabasco, on the southernmost Mexican Gulf coast shore, was another possible target.32
Picornell's information did not mention the Laffites, but soon Sedella and Spanish consul Diego Morphy learned more that made the brothers' involvement unquestionable. On April 12, 1814, with Picornell and Toledo effectively out of the affair, Gutiérrez formed a new junta in New Orleans and held a meeting. This council included prominent merchants such as Abner Duncan and John K. West, the ambitious attorney Edward Livingston, and adventurers of the stamp of Ellis P. Bean and Henry Perry One of the members of the council was Pierre Laffite. They discussed a combined land and naval expedition against Matagorda and Tampico, with Gutiérrez and Humbert to be in command of seven hundred men, assisted, as the Spaniards put it, "by the pirates of Barataria." 33 This assistance was what put Pierre in a seat on the council.
Morphy passed along the information to minister Onís, who immediately protested to Secretary of State Monroe. President Madison had issued a proclamation on June 29 proclaiming neutrality toward Spanish affairs, but people in New Orleans flagrantly violated that doctrine, he complained. Robinson and Toledo and Humbert were at large making their nefarious plans, as was "the traitor Picornel and even the monster Bernardo Gutierres the perpetrator of the atrocious assassinations committed in the Province of Texas." Louisiana citizens—the men on the council—were aiding "these convicted Traitors, these high way Robbers." He told Monroe of the anticipated expedition against Mexico, "assisted by the Pirates of Barataria who furnished five armed vessels and a portion of their People to carry the expedition into effect." Indeed, he went on, the plans were hardly a secret in New Orleans. Referring to the "ascendancy acquired by the Pirates of Barataria," he went on to ask the administration "to destroy that nest of Robbers."34
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