In an era fed on Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and the poetry of Lord Byron, romantic notions of corsairs were a fixed part of popular culture, and the Laffites were well cast to fill the role. Novelists and writers of serial romances for the press seized upon Jean Laffite as a vehicle for their formulaic potboilers. Almost every known aspect of the brothers' career became exaggerated. They and almost they alone would be given credit for saving New Orleans in 1815. The $1,000 reward that Jean jokingly offered for Claiborne grew until by 1839 it was 10,000 British pounds, the episode dated to before the American Revolution. Stories had Jean leaving Galveston to set up his operation in Barataria rather than the other way round.25
Probably the first novel appeared in 1826, only three years after Jean's death, when an author listed only as "Intruder Tar" published The Memoirs ofLafitte, or The Baratarian Pirate; A Narrative Founded on Fact, a fictional romance that went through at least six editions under different titles in book and serial form by 1836.26 Then in 1829 an American newspaper made the erroneous connection between Jean Laffite and Byron's poem "The Corsair" that would ever after confuse readers. Charlotte Barnes hauled Jean out on stage in her play "La Fitte, the Pirate of the Gulf," which premiered at the Louisville Theatre in Kentucky on November 30, 1836, its author promising that her play was "founded upon the history of an extraordinary man." 27 The previous year Joseph Holt Ingraham published a small edition of his two-volume novel The Pirate; or, Lafitte of the Gulph of Mexico, which in numerous subsequent editions became the grandfather of all future Laffite romances, increasingly removed from fact. By 1840 Jean Laffite was depicted as a fatal lothario with women, and a cold-blooded murderer of men who yet observed some forms of honor.28 Everything from hatred of Spain, to unrequited love, to simple bloodlust had driven him to be a corsair. "I like blood," one author had him declare before taking a prize and slaying its crew.29
Hand in hand with the romances went the stories of lost and buried treasure. The prosaic reality is that pirates and privateers lived hand to mouth, were improvident when they had money, and kept plying their trade because they saved none. Pierre Laffite had been bankrupt at least once and in almost constant legal difficulty over debt and disputed claims. The brothers together lost much in the 1818 hurricane, and they never did recover the $18,000 or more they spent on behalf of Spain. When they abandoned Galveston they had nothing more than their three ships, and soon lost one of those. When Pierre tried to raise new crewmen in Charleston, he offered to pay less than half the rate he had paid in New Orleans only two years before. When Englishman William Bollaert visited Galveston in 1840 and met with a few remnants of the Laffite days, one of them told him that "the Lafittes [meaning his men] squandered their money."30
That did not stop the march of fantasy. Starting in the 1840s, Laffite treasure was known to be buried all along the Gulf coast from Barataria to Galveston, and every few years a new story appeared of a mysterious stranger who had more money than he should, or of clandestine diggings and lights in the darkness on the beaches. 31 Sometimes the searcher was one of the brothers' former companions. On one occasion it was Pierre Laffite himself, raised from the dead.32 Or one of the former associates, with his dying words, would reveal the whereabouts of chests of gold. Once the information came from a former slave of the Laffites,' complete with lurid tales of how "Marse Lafitte, when he bury dat money, kilt a nigger and put him in de hole too."33 In 1853 Jean Laffite manifested himself at a séance at Galveston, and promised to lead astonished participants to the hiding place of some of his treasure, though they never seemed to have found it.34
In 1875 there came a report that someone had found $75,000 off Bayou La Battre.35 Others said that Jean—it was nearly always Jean—built a brick vault on the Calcasieu and hid a fortune there.36 In 1878 a seventy-eight-year-old man in Galveston called "Crazy Ben" Dolivar, supposedly known to produce antique gold coins from time to time to buy his drink, suddenly disappeared with a nephew of Jean Laffite after revealing to him the location of Laffite's treasure.37 Six years later one editor was so perplexed by the plethora of treasure stories that he wondered that "one would suppose that this idea of Laffite's having buried treasure promiscuously about in every odd looking spot, would exist only with ignorant and superstitious persons," whereas "men of known good sense have been drawn in this foolish search." More than that, said the editor, "the whole truth is, that Laffite never had any treasure at all." Those looking for it, like those seeking the secret of perpetual motion, "will founder on the banks of insanity."38
Still men looked for the treasure, and inevitably criminals capitalized on the lure, as in 1909 when Joseph Choate swindled $10,000 from gullible investors by claiming to know the cave near Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Laffite's treasure lay hidden. He never found the money, of course, but did discover a six-year prison sentence for fraud.39 Then in 1936 a woman revealed that Laffite sank his treasure ship in the Trinity River, and only she and her father knew where. They had known for fifty years, but never got around to recovering the gold they knew to be aboard, which was why they could not reveal its location. 40 But, no, in 1981 Laffite's treasure had moved to Cameron, Louisiana. Not so, said others twenty years later, who knew it to be back at Lake Charles.41 Laffite's gold even had magical powers, as Captain J. E. Fehann could attest. He had sailed on a vessel with the unfortunate name the Miasma, whose captain was a descendant of a man who had served the Laffites, and always wore around his neck a gold doubloon given him by Jean. It gave him good luck at sea. If ever a storm arose, he said, he had merely to touch the coin to the mainmast and say, "Jean LaFitte banish this wind," and the storm went away. Fehann saw it work in a Caribbean squall when a quarter of an hour after the words were spoken, the storm abated.42
Through all the myth and legend, Americans were trying to settle for themselves the place of the Laffites in their history and their folk pantheon. One thing is certain. The brothers were emblems of their time and place. Throughout the settlement of North America, there always appeared at the latest fringe of civilization a species of entrepreneur daring, resourceful, uninhibited by the restrictions of the scanty law available, and imaginative in devising means to get around even those. Once Americans established independence and pursued their inexorable spread westward, the numbers of such men exploded with the dramatically expanding opportunity. Wherever there was a borderland beyond the efficient imposition of the law, they appeared. Wherever there was a population with a need not adequately supplied by conventional means of commerce, they flourished. And once the vacuum of laws and regulation was filled, they disappeared and moved on, unable and unwilling to adapt to existence in the new environment. This was the story of Samuel Mason and the famed "land pirates" of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in the early 1800s, the story of James Bowie and his phenomenal land frauds in Louisiana and Arkansas in the 1820s, and the story of the Laffites and the Gulf corsairs. They could not have appeared at any other time or place in America's story, and when the conjunctions of history that created them disappeared, so did they.
Judged by the measure of their achievements, the Laffites were men of temporal success but lifetime failure. First from smuggling, then from privateering and piracy, they often took in large sums of money, and nothing suggests that either entertained any higher ambition. Yet like virtually all of the men in their trades, they kept little for very long, neither did they use their gains to acquire or establish anything lasting. They were chancers who lived for the moment. As for their influence on the course of filibustering efforts to wrest New World colonies from the grip of Spain, none of the enterprises that they supported succeeded, and none of those that failed once the Laffites began to work for Spain owed their demise to the brothers' schemes. Like the filibusters and their opponents, none of them individually, nor the lot of them as a whole, exerted any decisive influence on the revolutionary movements in Latin America or the fate of Texas. While the committed native revolutionaries like Bolivar and San Martin
succeeded, Gutiérrez, Humbert, Toledo, Picornell, Aury, Lallemand, Long, and all the other opportunistic "patriots" failed. The damage the corsairs did to Spanish shipping was never enough to keep Spanish merchantmen off the Gulf and Caribbean, or to make the difference in Spain finally losing its New World colonies.
Of course the Laffites represented a special case among their brethren. If their first loyalty was to themselves, still as smugglers and privateers they proved more principled than the rest, solicitous of life, loyal to friends, and operating according to ethical values that often seemed out of place amid a thicket of thieves. Thus it is ironic that one of the earliest stories told of them, one that appeared in print while they were yet living, portrayed them as murderously bloodthirsty. A story appeared in New Orleans the same month as Jean's abandonment of Galveston that told of a passenger ship bound from New Orleans to France in 1812. A wealthy French lady was among those aboard, and word of the riches with which she traveled reached the corsairs. The ship vanished and nothing was ever heard of it or its passengers, but months later the daughter of the affluent woman was stunned while walking on a New Orleans street to see her mother's jewelry around the neck of Marie Villard. Pierre Laffite indignantly denied any involvement in the disappearance of the ship, and claimed he won the baubles at cards with his associates at Barataria. That the story first appeared immediately after the near panic in New Orleans and the temporary reprieve of Desfarges and Johnson's associates is hardly coincidental. It is certainly a myth, though one that would crop up in Laffite novels, plays, and romances for more than a century. 43
Beyond their lack of bloodlust, they showed the skills to create and build, even if only for purposes of exploitation. First the Barataria community, and then the commune at Galveston, revealed that they had the organizational sense and the personal presence to establish and govern their rough associates, and to conceive and manage an enterprise directed toward the greater and more efficient profit of all. Most of the pirate communities of the world operated in some degree as egalitarian enterprises in which leaders ruled—to the degree that they governed at all—by common consent rather than election, and only after they had demonstrated an ability to take command and direct for the mutual benefit.
The community had to take care of its own. Every man on a ship that took a prize was entitled to a share regardless of his role in the taking, and when a man suffered a serious or disabling injury, he was entitled to something extra from the commonweal to compensate him for his loss. It was not a "social safety net," but the men who sailed the Laffite vessels out of Galveston did have by right a degree of welfare protection not yet known to ordinary workers. And they recognized the irony that a community of thieves could only flourish by adhering to its own body of laws, laws that the Laffites enforced even to the death. Certainly this is how the Laffites rose to authority among the corsairs for whom they provided a service, and their service was as vertical as that of the largest corporation, from supplying letters of marque to sail under and the ships to take prizes, to providing a port to receive prize goods, and then the means to get the goods to market.
That the scheme did not always work perfectly, or that it did not work for long, takes nothing away from the novelty and magnitude of the Laffites' conception. Their place lies in a portrait of motives and attempts, not lasting achievements. In the end, the importance of the Laffites and the corsairs lies in the impact they had on Americans' perceptions of their country in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in their attitude toward just who had the right to capitalize on the bounty of the hemisphere, and on the development of nascent Manifest Destiny west of the Mississippi. In an era when dreams were limited only by the size of men's imaginations, the Laffites dreamed large.
In the larger realm of loyalties removed from potential profit, however, the brothers remain an enigma. As spies they were never motivated by more than the hope of gain, of which Jean's final service privateering against Spanish ships after Spain had dispensed with the brothers' services is proof enough. Neither can self-interest be removed from their aid to Claiborne and Jackson at New Orleans. Theirs was a patriotism limited by convenience, and when maintaining a connection to the United States had no further benefit to them, no bonds of sympathy or loyalty held them. Real patriots would have changed profession to remain Americans. The Laffites preferred to remain corsairs and become citizens of the sea.
In the city they had once helped to save, two sisters and several children either waited in hope for the return of the brothers Laffite or else swallowed grief at their abandonment and got on about the business of living. Accurate word of the time and manner of Jean's death may never have come to Catherine, and there is no telling how long it took for news of Pierre's passing to find its way to Marie Villard. George Schumph may never have set foot in Louisiana again after he left Yucatán. Most probably the news came by word of mouth, perhaps via Jean before his own last fight, or from rumors picked up by merchant visitors to Campeche and Cartagena. All that can be said with certainty is that Marie Villard knew or assumed her lover was dead by March 19, 1825, when the marriage record of their daughter Catherine Coralie Laffite listed the father of the bride as "Pierre, dec[eased]."44
Marie Louise Villard lived on in the Faubourg Marigny. She was still there in the 1830s, living on Bagatelle Street between Esplanade and the Canal Marigny, with her daughter Rose and two of her surviving younger sons, probably Jean and Joseph.45 By that time her other children by Pierre had gone on to varying fortunes. In 1833 Rose Laffite married the son of the owner of the St. Philip Street Ballroom, the free mulatto André Tessier, and began several generations of a large family.46 Pierre's son Martin Firmin Laffite married the mulattress Silvania Catherina Brunetti on April 14, 1828, but he died within a few years, before they could begin a family, and she remarried.47 Her father Francisco Brunetti was a merchant in New Orleans and an occasional associate of the Laffites.48 He had been one of Sedeñas couriers to Havana, and was robbed at sea by Aury in 1817. He regularly traveled to Campeche as late as 1820, perhaps still doing a little business with the Laffites.
Catherine Coralie Laffite married the mulatto Pierre Roup of San Domingue, a man of prominence in the free black community, a Masonic leader who founded Perseverance Lodge #4, and in time became a prosperous builder who erected several fine houses on Rampart and Esplanade streets. 49 She may even have maintained a connection to that possible earlier liaison of Pierre's with Adelaide Maseleri. The surname existed in a bewildering variety of at least forty-five spellings, one of them being Demasilieres, and in 1825 a Catherina Laffit, probably this same Catherine Coralie Laffite, was godmother at the baptism of Marie Demasilieres.50 Of Adelaide Maseleri's daughter Marie Josephe Laffite, however, not another trace remains.51 Of Pierre's sons Joseph, Jean, Pierre, and/or the possibly mythical Eugene, no definitive trace was left after 1830. The elder may have gone with Pierre to Mugeres. The younger could have succumbed to the annual fevers. They may simply have merged into the growing population of Laffites of all spellings and other blood, and disappeared through the documentary cracks.
As for their mother, sometime before her death on October 27, 1833, at forty-eight, Marie married or took another common-law husband named Ramos, probably the father of Feliciano Ramos.52 Her family buried her in the St. Louis Cemetery Number 2.53 Her sister Catarina or Catherine Villard lived on another quarter century and somehow kept much of the family together. By August 1850 she resided in the Faubourg Marigny, and P. Ramos, probably Marie's last mate, lived with her. In the same household lived Adele Laffite, born in 1819 and probably a daughter of Jean's or Pierre's, and several of Catherine's children, including two by Feliciano Ramos. Next door lived Marie's daughter Coralie Laffite Roup and one of her sons, as well as a young man named Alexandre Laffite whose relation to the family is unclear.54 Catherine lived on, never marrying, until she died, aged about sixty-five, on July 2, 1858.55 Years before she had buried Jean Laffite's only known son, Jean Pierre Laffi
te, who died during an epidemic in October 1832.56
The children of Pierre Laffite lived quietly. Indeed, within two generations his descendants had different surnames, thanks largely to the fact that only his daughters Rose and Coralie, and his possible daughter Adele, seem to have had children. Even in the close-knit free black community where they lived, their connection with the famous pirates passed into hearsay. By 1863 a rumor said a Laffite daughter was still living in New Orleans. Catherine Roup had died on July 22, 1855, aged about fifty.57 Adele Laffite Grant Ramos was still alive, however, as were most of her nine children, and Rose Laffite Tessier lived until November 10, 1870.58
Rose and her husband André Tessier lived on Esplanade, and raised at least five children.59 Pierre Laffite had left little behind for them to remember him by. His name disappeared when his daughters married, and none of his grandchildren bore it. All that remained in the family by way of mementos were a buckle and a small cross said to have been Pierre's, though they were probably Tessier's.60
One thing that Pierre Laffite undeniably left to his progeny, however, was his white skin. Though sometimes referred to as "colored," Marie Villard was almost certainly a mulatto, meaning that in the mathematics of blood, her children with Pierre were three-fourths white and one-quarter black. In the equations of race in Louisiana at that time, however, they were colored before the law if they had a single drop of Negro blood in their veins. They could not vote or hold office, enlist in military service, marry whites, or enjoy a number of other privileges, and the records to establish their legal race were several, including the birth, marriage, and death certificates required in the city, as well as the baptismal, marriage, and funeral records in the Sacramental Archives of the Cathedral Church of St. Louis. Thus the baptisms of the children of Pierre and Jean Laffite were recorded in the sacramental books for free blacks and slaves.
The Pirates Laffite Page 49