General Charles Lallemand also found substantial support when he reached Boston in 1816, having already failed in one attempt to free the emperor. Around him revolved the hopes of a resettlement group calling itself by several names, including the "Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive." Lallemand's aims and their desire to start a new French community in the New World largely coincided, and each could use the other. Lallemand went to New Orleans late in 1816 or early 1817, and quickly established relations with the exile community there, most notably Humbert. Lallemand published a disingenuous manifesto proclaiming peaceful agricultural intentions, and his followers gained land grants in the Alabama territory and set out to settle there in the summer of 1817.9 Lallemand showed no interest in his part of the grant. He was no farmer. He was a general, and he dreamed a general's dreams. Influenced perhaps by Humbert, he turned his eyes to Texas.
By September Washington knew the outlines of Lallemand's idea of enlisting French exiles as the nucleus of an army to take first Texas, and then Mexico—not to liberate the native peoples, but to substitute French rule for Spanish. Lallemand tried to reassure Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that he had no plans for conquest, yet by January he was buying arms and munitions in New York while he had men enlisting adventurers in Louisiana.10 He tried to enlist Aury in his cause, but the invitation came ten days after Aury had been expelled from Amelia and washed his hands of the Gulf for good. Lallemand even tried to win over Onís by offering to place himself and his followers in the king's service. Apodaca had no thought of countenancing an armed band of adventurers settling on Spanish soil. He sent orders to authorities throughout New Spain to arrest Lallemand on sight. Well before then, however, Lallemand boarded the first contingent of 150 followers aboard the Huntress at Philadelphia, along with six cannon, 600 muskets, 400 sabers, and 12,000 pounds of powder, funded in part by money from Joseph Bonaparte. On December 17, 1817, he set sail for the Gulf and Galveston.11
By January 1818 Jean Laffite had been at Galveston three months and had the establishment well in hand. Upon his arrival the previous September he put slaves brought in on the first prizes to work building houses for his men. According to Juan Castro, one of the blacks thus employed, there was no question among the slaves that they worked for "the Commandante of that Island, who was Mr. Lafitte."12 By January 5, 1818, when Jean's old associate Dominique brought a prize into port, there was the semblance of a community. Youx was back at sea after a series of fiascos.13 Finally in September 1817 he had managed to get a schooner, the Louise, out of Bayou St. John and into the Gulf, soon to be refitted into the privateer Josephine.14 Flying the checkerboard flag of Mexico, Dominique took the Spanish schooner Marin off the Tortugas on November 30 and now brought her into Galveston. Only two vessels rode at anchor in the harbor, both prizes and one of them the Panchita, taken by Lameson, who had gone to New Orleans to get materials to convert her into a corsair. Not another privateer was in sight at the moment.15
Manuel Gonzales served aboard the Marin, and when he came ashore on January 6 he was one of the first visitors to see the new establishment. It did not impress him overmuch. He found the island to be little more than a "wild sand bar" with four or five "temporary miserable hovels" for the fifty men, mostly blacks and mulattoes, living there. Laffite built for himself "a tolerably good looking frame house" on a slight elevation. It rose two stories, with a piazza and center hall from front to back, and a parlor to one side. It had no carpets and the simplest furniture, and at first remained unpainted on the exterior, but it was a mansion compared to the huts and shanties. 16 Only two women were on the island. One called herself "Madamoiselle Victoire" and ran a cabaret of sorts. The other was a slave belonging to Colonel Savary, though Gonzales noted that she "was then attending upon Lafitte." As for the men, most were sailors and appeared to be in Laffite's employ. During the eight subsequent months that he lived among them, Gonzales saw no sign of anything like a civil government. They flew no nation's flag, held no military parades, and observed no civil order. Living with Laffite was one Rivard, who acted as secretary and oversaw the large store of muskets, pistols, and sabers in Laffite's house. The people generally acknowledged Rivard as "commandant," though there was no question that "Lafitte was the chief."17 Those who were more familiar with the social landscape of Louisiana noted that the man in command was "Lafite the younger."18
The chief would still have been dealing with Dominique's new prize on the afternoon of January 14 when the Huntress hove into view and ran aground on the bar. It had been a miserable passage. The passengers were "pressed like anchovies," said one, forced to sleep four to a bed, and when one turned, all did. A storm had hit them, breaking a mast and spoiling much of their food, then alternate cold and hot weather added to their misery. Tempers were frayed and there had been considerable dissent aboard by the time they reached New Orleans.19 Now General Antoine Rigaud, senior officer among the passengers, went ashore to find Laffite. The next day Laffite came to them, boarded the Huntress, and helped get her afloat. That afternoon, having asked Jean for his protection, the passengers brought their stores ashore.20 To some the place looked desolate, not a tree in the vicinity for shade. They chose a site some distance from Laffite's settlement and made a temporary camp to await Lallemand, who had stayed in New Orleans buying provisions and materials for planting. They erected tents and made rude huts of reeds and driftwood found on the beach, then dug a trench around the camp to protect them against Indians and Laffite's men, "of whose disposition towards us we were yet ignorant," noted Just Girard. 21
They could do little but try to resupply their larder by fishing and hunting deer on the island, the beginning of a monotonous six weeks until Lallemand finally arrived.22 Laffite gave them enough provisions for 120 men and officers to help them through their first shortage, and would continue to help.23 It was, Pierre would say, "convenient" to win the colonists' trust.24 Not surprisingly, the boredom, added to the hunger and thirst and exposure, the vermin on their bodies, the mosquitoes, the frequent storms and rain, the clothes rotting as they wore them, left the French settlers miserable and short-tempered. Fear of their neighbors only added to the discomfort. "It was difficult for some of us to live mixed in with a horde of real brigands," said one Frenchman. Mounting dissent soon made "disunity the rule." The enlisted men refused to obey their officers, and arguments led to fights, then duels, with at least one man killed in an altercation. One of their number confessed that "we were more than once on the point of cutting each other's throat."25
All of which played quite nicely into the Laffites' plans. In New Orleans Pierre met with Lallemand and his brother Henri when they arrived on February 2, and soon he told Fatio of their plans to create a French enclave in Mexico that would lead to a new empire one day. In several meetings at the house on Bourbon and St. Philip, Lallemand credulously told Pierre that the contingent on the Huntress was only the first wave, and that he expected six thousand before long.26 Anyone connected with fall—bustering had heard claims of such large numbers before, and knew that the men never materialized. Still, Pierre's information seemed all the more vital when he passed the exaggerated figures on to Fatio, and the consul continued to believe that "No. 13 is very exact in his information." 27 Then Lallemand hired Pierre's new brig the Intrepide to take his brother, his officers, and more men and provisions to Galveston. It was exactly the trap Pierre had proposed to effect.
Fatio had at his disposal the Spanish armed brig the Almirante at Pensacola, and now he and Pierre plotted that she would meet his ship at sea and take her as a prize. The Intrepide would fly the American flag, a conventional privateer ruse, but once she was stopped and boarded, the Spanish officers detaining her would know to go to the cabin door where they would see a box with the initials "J. L." on its lid. Inside would be papers to warrant their seizing her. That done, the Spanish warship would escort its prize to Galveston flying flags that Jean would recognize. He would take a boat with a pilot out to mee
t them. The Spaniards were to seize Jean and interrogate him privately, thus preserving the Laffites' cover, and once alone Jean would respond to a coded inquiry with a countersign sent him by Fatio, at which confirmation the officers were to follow Jean's direction in bringing the Intrepide into port and preparing to capture the Huntress. Pierre would be aboard to assist Jean in carrying out the coup.28
Before leaving, Pierre thought it wise to reinforce the brothers' cover in New Orleans. Collector Chew provided a convenient pretext when one of his letters to Washington complaining of Galveston and the Laffites by name appeared in the press. On February 6 Pierre published an open letter in the Louisiana Courier in response to what he termed the collector's "foolish & tiresome heap of idle words." He played the revolutionary card ably, if rather too heavily, linking the brothers with movements for the independence of Mexico and then accusing Chew of opposing freedom and liberty. "You poor little collector of the port of New Orleans," he said derisively. Americans throughout the Union prayed for the liberation of Mexico and South America. "I have embraced with all my heart, the independence of Mexico," he said, and "with all my pecuniary means, and even at the peril of my life." If the United States had been in the hands of men of Chew's sort during the late war, he accused, they would now be a British colony once more. As for the collector's accusation that the Laffites were or had been pirates, Pierre retorted that "I defy you, and defy any man to whatever nation, to prove that I did ever capture any other vessels but those navigating under the flag of Ferdinand VII." When Chew referred to the Laffites and their followers returning to their old ways in spite of the government's generous pardon, Pierre feigned indignation. "What pardon was I in want of?" he demanded. He had been a patriot, and the offices in Washington had the documents Jean had taken there to demonstrate his response to the British offer in spite of the "wealth" the enemy had offered. He wondered if Chew would have shown such high-toned patriotism in the same situation. Then, with no relation to what Chew had written but in a statement aimed directly at the insurgents, he added that "I never became an informer against any man." 29 In fact, the "associates" were all but defunct now, disillusioned by too many failed enterprises after the destruction of Mina's expedition. To add to his ruse, Pierre often feigned great agitation when talking to people on the street about Spanish injustices. He told those would listen that "his hatred of Spain grew out of persecutions which that nation had afflicted on himself and family," recalled young Samuel May Williams. "He frequently became greatly excited while speaking of the wrongs rec'd from Spain."30
Pierre may have thickened his cover by publishing this letter, but he antagonized Chew. When Pierre applied for clearance from the port on February 16, Chew searched the Intrepide and, finding munitions belonging to the Frenchmen aboard, refused to let her leave until they had been unloaded. That delayed her three days, meaning she would miss her rendezvous with the Almirante. Worse, President Monroe's December message to Congress was in the press by now, and its statement of his intent to clear privateers from Amelia and Galveston discouraged a number of Lallemand's officers who had intended to sail with Laffite. Pierre calmed them by saying that he would be on the voyage himself, but in fact when the Intrepide sailed,31 he sent a teenage boy with letters to Jean.
Pierre's letters were meant to preserve the Laffites' pose as revolutionary supporters and to incriminate Lallemand and his people in Spanish eyes when the ship was captured and the letters read. Pierre went out of his way to state that Lallemand intended to take all of Texas, and then "extend his frontiers farther ... with no less intention than the conquest of Mexico." No doubt with a smile, Pierre wrote that Lallemand would give the Spaniards much more trouble than Mina had. Pierre went overboard in referencing the incriminating papers placed in the box in the ship's cabin, no doubt in case Fatio's instructions to the Spanish warship were not clear.32 Not content with one letter, Pierre wrote a second the same day to let Jean—and the Spanish captors—know that Humbert would be aboard the ship, as if Jean would not recognize him.33 By sending Humbert along either to assist Lallemand or to take some office under Jean at Galveston, Pierre was putting one more revolutionary into the Spaniards' grip.
Pierre told Fatio he was entrusting his letters to his son Eugene to carry, and asked Fatio to write to Cienfuegos in Havana and implore him to be no harsher with the lad than was necessary to keep his cover when he and the rest of those captured on Intrepide were eventually brought to Cuba for justice.34 In fact, it is possible that the boy was not even Pierre's son, and he only made this claim to convince Lallemand's officers of his confidence in the voyage. 35 That done, the Intrepide departed February 19, but not before Fatio and Pierre learned that the Huntress had already landed at Galveston. Not willing to fight the Frenchmen already on shore and well armed, Fatio directed that they content themselves with capturing the Intrepide and with her Humbert and most of the important officers.36 They could probably starve out the rest on the island, and that would be enough to kill the French threat aborning.
After missing her rendezvous with the Almirante, however, the Intrepide sailed into Galveston after an uneventful voyage. Pierre's letters to Jean now created a problem. They put Pierre on record as urging his brother to show Lallemand's people every cooperation. Assuming the French officers aboard ship may have seen the letters, and outnumbered by the French exiles, Jean faced the necessity of making good on his brother's false instructions.
General Lallemand arrived at Galveston in early March, to find those on the island fed up and demoralized. The settlers celebrated with a party, and he began to enforce order, telling his men they would leave shortly to establish a permanent settlement.37 Jean told Lallemand of a bluff about thirty miles up the Trinity River from its mouth on the northeastern extension of Galveston Bay, a place where the relatively higher ground would afford some protection while keeping them within reach of the Coushatta Indians, with whom they could trade for provisions.38 After only three days, on March 12, Lallemand embarked his people and their provisions in nine pirogues that he bought from Laffite. It was the first of a series of ill-advised decisions by the general. The group left in the dark to cross the pass and row to the mainland, but soon lost their bearing. After a mile of rowing a high wind hit them and waves swamped their boats, capsizing one and drowning all but one of its occupants. The settlers would spend another forty-eight exhausting hours rowing nearly sixty miles up the bay before they came to the Trinity. Meanwhile Lallemand went by land. All told it took six days before his followers reassembled on a low bluff overlooking the Trinity just upstream from a wide lake that it formed before flowing into the bay. 39
As soon as they landed Lallemand's men began fortifying the bluff, including preparations to mount cannon that Lallemand had on the way. A man from Natchitoches who passed by noticed that Lallemand had them under good discipline again, and one of the French settlers made it clear that they were not privateers and had no connection with Laffite other than having accepted his hospitality. They also professed to have high regard for the United States, a useful sentiment since Washington claimed this area as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and repeated their public avowal that they came strictly to become farmers.40 Yet other observers, including a French spy, remained convinced that the colony was connected to a Bonapartist plot.41 Few if any of Lallemand's settlers understood his true objective, which was probably setting up a local government and then associating it with the Mexican revolutionaries.42
Unfortunately the slipshod planning that crippled so many filibustering attempts saw the settlers arrive at their new home, which they named "Champ d'Asile," with only eight days' rations. It would take more than two weeks to go back to Galveston and bring up more. They rationed themselves to a single biscuit and four ounces of rice a day per man, and when that foodstuff ran out they were reduced to two handfuls of boiled corn. Boats had gone back to Galveston for more provisions from Laffite as well as newly arrived settlers, but on the return trip, the new arriva
ls consumed so much of the provender they brought that the colony was reduced to just ten days' victuals.43 Lallemand left on a mission of his own to bring more supplies, but in his absence the rest lapsed into growing despondency. For fully a month they struggled to stay alive before Laffite-sent boats arrived laden with fresh supplies as well as mail and newspapers. 44
From Galveston Laffite kept a careful eye on the Champ d'Asile people. Meanwhile Jean continued the assembly of his own establishment.45 When Nacogdoches merchant J. Randal Jones came to buy slaves on behalf of friends in Louisiana, he found that the men had not yet improved their plank and sailcloth shanties. However, Laffite offered hospitality characteristic of that given to visitors to Barataria. "I was never, however, treated with more courtesy and kindness than I was by the dreaded and much abused pirate, Lafitte," Jones recalled. "He was a fine, well-proportioned man, about six feet high, with the bearing and manner of a refined and cultivated gentleman, affable and pleasant."46 Jones found Laffite in the prime of manhood, now in his late thirties, "his hair dark, a little gray."47 Laffite rarely left the island except to board the occasional incoming ship to inspect cargo and make arrangements for off-loading and reshipment of slaves and goods to Louisiana.48 Instead, he devoted much of his time to continuing the expansion of the village. He was erecting an earthwork fort to command the pass and the bay, and emplacing a few cannon. He was working on an arsenal and dockyard and a wooden boardinghouse near the fort. A few good wooden houses would be going up soon.49
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