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by Aya Katz

The Meaning of Treason: United States v. Aaron Burr

February 1, 2014 in American History, general history, History, Legal History

Under the English common law, treason was an inexact and nebulous charge, one that could be leveled at almost anyone by association. Speaking against the government might be treason. Having friends who were traitors might be treason. A person might never have raised a hand in anger against his King or the state and yet still be hanged as a traitor. But under the United States constitution, treason is a well-defined and very limited offense.

Article Three of the United States Constitution

Article Three of the United States Constitution

Article 3, Section 3 of the United States Constitution defines and limits treason as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Notice that the word “only” is part of the definition of treason. That means that the drafters of this section of the constitution wanted a very strict construction of their words to apply. They realized that case law often adds to or changes a statutory definition, but they did not want this to happen in the case of treason. Treason was to be what they said and no less than that should ever be allowed to pass for treason in an American court, nor could the definition of treason be changed by statute or case law. Only an amendment to the constitution could ever overturn the expressed desires of those who drafted this clause.

Why did the drafters of the Constitution feel so strongly about this? Because each and every one of them, by British law,  had been a traitor against Britain, long before ever they levied war against their mother country, and each of them remembered how it felt. They wanted people to be free to rise up against an oppressive government,  to speak against it, censure unjust rulers and seek redress for wrongs, before it became necessary to rise up in arms.

The people who wrote this section of the constitution were still alive at a time when one of their own decided to use a different definition of treason. That man was Thomas Jefferson, and he was at the time the President of the United States. He wanted Aaron Burr found guilty of treason, declared him in public to be a traitor in advance of trial by his peers, ignored the right to habeas corpus and used the military to arrest persons who were material witnesses in the trial and to hold them without access to an attorney until they had confessed.

Thomas_Jefferson_by_Rembrandt_Peale_1805_cropped

Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale 1805
From the Wikimedia Commons

Here is a brief factual description leading up to the case. In 1800 Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr had been tied for the presidency. They had both run on the same ticket. Eventually Jefferson had become the president, and Aaron Burr was his vice president. However, when Jefferson ran for a second term, he did not choose Aaron Burr as his running mate. Burr then devised a scheme whereby he intended to attack Mexico and acquire land in Texas. His ally in this plan was American General James Wilkinson, but Wilkinson, unbeknownst to Burr,  was being paid by Spain to protect its territorial interests. In pursuance of the best interests of Spain, James Wilkinson informed Thomas Jefferson that Aaron Burr was planning to use his army against the Western territories held by the United States. Thomas Jefferson declared Aaron Burr a traitor, and he used the United States army, under the command of General Wilkinson, to arrest various people whom he believed to be aiding and abetting Aaron Burr to commit treason. Among these people were Erich Bollman and Samuel Swartwout. Although they were arrested in Louisiana Territory, they were transported to Washington City, where the president took it upon himself to personally interrogate them.

John_Marshall_by_Henry_Inman,_1832

Chief Justice John Marshall painted by Henry Inman in 1832

A writ of habeas corpus was eventually ruled upon by John Marshall in the case of Ex Parte Bollman and Ex Parte Swartwout. Although Bollman and Swartwout were set free  for want of evidence against them and also because the Federal Court in the District of Columbia was not the Court before which they should have been brought, some of the obiter dicta in his published opinion later came to haunt John Marshall when he was presiding over the treason trial of Aaron Burr.

Namely, it was this part of the opinion that could be argued to expand the constitutional definition of treason beyond what the founders intended and to bring the American law on treason into a closer agreement with English common law:

 When war is levied, all those who perform any part, however minute or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are traitors.

Aaron Burr had at no time levied war against the United States. Neither had any of the persons who supported his scheme to conquer Mexico and acquire land in Texas. However, at one point, on Blennerhassett’s Island, when a United States officer had come to arrest some of the men who were planning to help Burr with his conquest of Mexico, the men refused to be arrested and pointed their muskets at the poor man, who then backed down. This was the “act of levying war” on the United States that the prosecution and the Jefferson administration were basing their case on. However, when this happened, Aaron Burr had been nowhere near Blennerhassett’s Island and was not a direct participant in this “act of war”, which in fact might more accurately be described as resisting arrest.

The great legal question that had to be resolved by John Marshall in the trial of Aaron Burr was this: which definition of treason holds, the one spelled out clearly in the constitution or the one he himself had set forth in Ex Parte Bollman and Ex Parte Swartwout.

A very nice dramatization of the decision before John Marshall can be found in the video below:


 

John Marshall’s  decision at the time was unpopular. He decided to abide by the constitution, even if it seemed that he was reversing his earlier ruling. Aaron Burr had not levied war against the United States government and no evidence that he had had been presented in court. Marshall instructed the jury on the definition of treason as set forth in the constitution, and the jury found Aaron Burr not guilty.

The Constitution of the United States is still the law of the land. Anyone charged with treason over actions not defined as treason in that document is not a traitor. This is as true today as it was in 1807.

 

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by Aya Katz

Resisting the Japanese: The Rival Chinese Resistance Movements in WWII

January 27, 2014 in general history, History, History of China, History of Japan, Pacific History

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1941) merged into the Second World War following the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, historians refer to the continued war in China against Japan as part of  the Pacific Front of WWII. But these types of labels serve to obfuscate the shifting loyalties and general lack of ideological coherence of the global war in question, and of each front of that war, as participants switched sides and coalitions shifted. In its resistance against the Japanese, China received aid from Germany, the Soviet-Union and the United States — although not all at the same time.

During a time of war and grave national calamity, we may expect rival factions for internal control of a country to band together to fight the common enemy. Idealized depictions of allegiance also foster a view of allies who choose one side of an international dispute and stick to that side until the war is over. Generalized historical accounts of the era do tend to describe events in broad brushstrokes, speaking of thMapShandong1945e Allies versus the Axis, or of the Americans as a homogeneous monolith, rather than the FDR administration as opposed to its detractors, but in reality the subtle distinctions and gradations within a nominally united group are very telling. Infighting continues while a war is in progress, and the true winners are those who end up on top, (e.g. Soviet Union) regardless of which side ( Axis or Allies) emerges as victorious.

In China, during the Japanese occupation, there was a very active local resistance movement in Shandong Province. In fact, there were two such movements: the Nationalists and the Communists. When they were not engaging the Japanese, they were intent on destroying each other.

The lack of cohesion among the Chinese resisting the Japanese can be in some measure attributed to the lack of cohesion on the the part of the ever changing membership roster of the Allies and the Axis in Europe and the Pacific as the war progressed.

“Britain, the United States and Japan were drawn towards a Pacific war after Japan signed a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in late September 1940, and sponsored a collaborationist government in Nanjing, formed in March 1940 and led by Wang Jingwei. The United States and Britain responded by granting China loans and imposing economic sanctions against Japan.” (Lai 2008.134)

The Soviet Union was a wild card with no particular allegiance to any cause but its own.  Though  the Soviets allied themselves with Germany during the beginning of the war in Europe and the 1939 invasion of Poland, by 1941, due to Germany’s aggression toward  Soviet-held territories, the Soviet Union joined the Allies.

According to Sherman X.  Lai, the Soviet Union supported the Chinese Communists and supplied them with weapons, but there was also some negotiation by Stalin with the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. Anything was possible, and the parties to these negotiations were motivated primarily by practical considerations, rather than any allegiance to ideology or to a nominal side in the international struggle for power. (Lai 2013)

MaoLaiEarly in the Sino-Japanese war, Joseph Stalin was worried that Mao Zedong’s focus was too much on territorial expansion against the Nationalists, rather than fighting the Japanese. For this reason, despite the Soviet Union’s theoretical support for the the ideology of the Chinese Communists, Stalin also helped to arm the Chinese Nationalists. (Lai 2013.5)

The eventual outcome of the war between the Nationalists and the Communists was to be decided not only by military means through skirmishes and pitched battles, but even more so by behind the scenes dealing in currency and munitions.

According to Laurance Tipton (1949), a British escaped internee who served with the Nationalist resistance,  General Wang Yumin  (王豫民) who was at that time in charge of the Nationalist resistance in Shandong Province, issued his own currency and prohibited the use of any other currency in the area that he controlled.

Tipton (1949.120 ) writes:

“Under Japanese occupation, the Chinese National currency in North China was declared illegal tender and was replaced by the Japanese issued Federal Reserve Bank notes. But although Chinese National currency was forced out of circulation in the larger cities and railway towns, it was still current in the interior. As Chief of the Financial Department, Yu-Min’s first step was to print and circulate resistance money, which he exchanged for Chinese National Currency, silver dollars and gold bars at specified rates of exchange. At the same time he issued a proclamation prohibiting the use of any currency but the newly issued ‘resistance money.’ As the funds in the exchequer grew, so an increasing number of purchasing agents were dispatched to obtain ammunition, but, still dissatisfied with the results, Yu-Min continued to press for the opening of their own munitions and arms factories and finally won his point.”

ChineseMunitions.

According to Sherman Lai (2008) the Communist resistance eventually proved more successful not by implementing the principles of communism — redistribution and collectivism — but by reviving the feudal system of landlords and tenants that had operated in China for thousands of years prior to modernization.

Rather than attempting to reform society or to level any social stratification of which communism did not approve, the commissars recruited high level people in the existing order of things along the country-side in order to help them gain control.

In defense against banditry, local society was protected by powerful families who built fortifications and maintained private security forces. Those powerful families, also de facto bandits, stood in the way of the 115th Division’s … deployment southwards. In the campaign to gain a footing in this strategic region, Luo Ronghuan, its commissar, showed diplomatic skills. He approached a few prominent semi-bandit families who had displayed patriotism, seeking to persuade them to join the CCP-led anti-Japanese United Front. (Lai 2008.126)

Equally interesting is the fact that trade, not warfare, played an important role in strengthening the Chinese Communist Party in Shandong. It is easy to forget that the entire purpose of war for a free nation is to keep trade routes open. But a corollary may be this: that even during outright war,  trade in staple goods and exchange of currency must continue to exist. Whoever corners the market on trade eventually wins the  war. For the Communist Party (CCP) of Shandong, defeating the Japanese was partially made possible by trading with the Japanese.

Sherman Lai sums up the situation:

” ..the CCP in Shandong not only controlled economic affairs within its territory, but also obtained access to territories under enemy occupation through manipulation of currency exchange rates and by controlling the trade in staple grains, cotton, salt and peanut oil. As a result, trade with occupied China and with the Japanese invaders became the principal source of revenue of the CCP in Shandong as early as the second half of 1943.” (Lai 2008.i)

The greatest success of the Communist Shangdong Bureau during the Japanese invasion was their “red banking system.” Recognizing that simply printing money would result in devaluation, the Communists sought to corner the real market in agricultural staples for the purpose of trading for other goods. They realized that private enterprise in agriculture was the real tax base under communist control, so they encouraged local farmers.”The regulation of trade was intended to barter surplus products made in the CCP zones for needed supplies from the occupied zones” (Lai 2008.301)  They founded their own bank and saw to it that the currency it printed would be more attractive and more stable than those issued by the Japanese collaborators or the Nationalist opposition.

 The core of this system was the North Sea Bank (Beihai Yinhang) …. one of the three forerunners of the People’s Bank of China, China’s current central bank. Its banknotes, the beipiao (北票), spread from Shandong throughout eastern China and remained in circulation until December 1949. (Lai 2008.217)

Toward the end of the war, at a time when the Nationalist forces were crumbling under economic pressure and the Japanese themselves were weakening due to lack of supplies, the Chinese Communist party was taking in income through trade. They were a successful business concern, operating in a highly chaotic market.

It was not until the summer of 1944, after the invasion of Normandy and after the Japanese suffered a grave reversal in the Battle of the Philippine Sea that Mao started to prepare to implement the collectivization of agriculture that was to be the hallmark of his peacetime reign.

The nominal communists defeated their  nationalist rivals and their imperialist invaders by being more successful capitalists. Once they had done this, they could afford to show their true colors. This is just one of the many ironies of a war with ever-shifting allegiances, multiple causes and fronts, which today, for some reason,  is viewed by many in the Western world as the only truly “moral” war.

REFERENCES

Lai, Sherman Xiaogang . 2008. Springboard to Victory.  http://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/6186/1/Lai_Sherman_X_200809_PhD.pdf

Lai, Sherman Xiaogang. 2013,. A war within a war: the road to the new fourth army incident in January 1941.   http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22127453-12341249;jsessionid=m1l3vwtlvkh1.x-brill-live-02. Journal of Chinese Military History,

Lunghu, 2012.  Blog Post:  Part Deux: East of the Mountains.   https://lunghu.wordpress.com/2012/11/

Tipton, Laurance.  1949. Chinese Escapade. Macmillan and Company, Ltd.

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by J-Hanna

Books About James Cook’s Voyages

December 13, 2013 in general history, History, Pacific History

Captain James Cook only held the position of post-captain for the last four years of his life, but he will be remembered for his voyages of discovery in the South Pacific and beyond.  Today he has been critiqued by indigenous people for the legacy that his travels brought to places such as Hawaii and Australia, which led to colonization and displacement of native populations on, but the same token, Cook was not the vengeful explorer than many other Europeans had track records for being.  Cook often had admiration and respect for indigenous peoples, and he even expressed remorse and hurt when he his sailors had brought venereal diseases to isolated regions, such as the Hawaiian Islands.  Cook tried to prevent infected men on his ship from engaging in conjugal relations for this reason, but this was often beyond his control. Cook was also recognized for ameliorating incidents of scurvy on his expeditions by provisioning his men with fresh produce, but he also could go into a fit of rage when a sailor refused to eat part of his provisions. Thus, Cook was a man who cared deeply about the sanitation and health of his crew, but he was not above flogging for cases of insubordination when it came to small things, like not eating an allotment of meat. Cook was literally about running a tight ship, and his protege William Bligh would later try to emulate his commanding style with far less positive results.

Sir Joseph Banks was an aristocrat with an interest in science, and he went on Cook’s first voyage, where he learned about breadfruit. Later the push to gather breadfruit plants and transport this fruit-bearing plant from Tahiti to Jamaica would be supported by Sir Joseph Banks, and this idea never would have come about if it had not been for his accompanying Cook on his first voyage.  This was all in the future when Cook embarked on his first expedition in 1768, but these events illustrate the connection between Banks, Cook, Bligh,and the eventual mutiny on the HMAV Bounty, which is probably the reason I find James Cook fascinating.

During Cook’s three voyages the transit of Venus was documented, it was proven once and for all that there was no large southern continent that kept the globe in balance, and the hope of discovering a Northwest Passage was finally abandoned. Cook’s cartography skills created detailed maps of the coastlines of Australia, New Zealand, and many Pacific Islands, which he claimed for the British Empire, and he even sailed as far north as Alaska. Despite his far flung and note-worthy voyages, on the third and final voyage Cook was killed in a dispute in Hawaii over attempting to take a local chief hostage in hopes the Hawaiians would return some of their equipment stolen from the ship.  It  turns out Cook was not killed because he was a fallen god, even though this theory has long been regarded as the reason for his murder.  Cook was most likely killed over the tense interactions between his crew and the Hawaiians, but the short documentary clip below offers a bit more explanation as to what may have really happened.

Captain Cook was a talented navigator who made a significant contribution to the history of exploration, and his mapping of Australia was the catalyst that led to the colonization on this continent, even though this was largely Banks’ idea.  From what I gather via my reading, in Australia Cook is often regarded as being similar to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson in the US, but he also is considered to be somewhat of the villain in that his explorations of Australia led to the aborigines being dispossessed of their land.  Thus, he is not quite the shining icon previous generations made him out to be, but just like our founding fathers, he had his flaws and achievements.  There are several books that I read that discuss Cook’s travels in depth, and here is a tidbit about each:

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz.

Tony Horwitz is a journalist, but he is also known for having empathy towards how others interpret events. Horwitz will speak to anyone and everyone, and this man is never biased or curt. When he wanted to learn more about New Zealand gang members and how they viewed Cook’s legacy, he went and spoke with a few and found out many were mixed raced men who did not feel they fit in with mainstream society. Next, Horowitz recounts speaking with official leaders or kids smoking pot in Tahiti, which illustrates how this man will talk to anyone!

One fascinating thing about Horwitz is that around the time of the Gulf War he wrote the account of his travels in the Middle East in the book Baghdad Without A Map, and actually spoke to Muslims in hostile situations, such as attending the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In one breath people were telling Horwitz they hated America, but in the next they were asking him if he had ever been to Disneyland, and sharing how it was their dream to go there. Just as with the Baghdad book, in Blue Latitudes Horwitz’s journalistic and people skills allow us to glimpse into the minds of the modern day residents of the places Cook visited to discover how they view this man.

Horwitz visits many different Pacific Islands in his travels and provides the novice with a good introduction to the history and cultures of each place he stays in, which basically followed Cook’s travels, so there is a little bit of everything in here. The most intriguing aspect of the book is when Horwitz uses Cook’s journals to show the admiration he had for the aborigines in Australia, thus illustrating he was not completely the brash explorer many regard him to be.

Horwitz endeavors to learn more about what people have to say about this renowned explorer, so whether you love Cook or hate Cook, you kind of have to be in awe of all the places he visited and charted after reading this book.   If you want to learn more about Captain Cook and his adventures with an engrossing and first hand feel, then I suggest you read this volume.

The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain Cook by Nicholas Thomas

This historical text is a detailed examination of Cook’s voyages, and offers anthropological insights into the people this British expeditions encountered. The volume has fascinating moments, such as Cook’s observations about the starkness of the land on Easter Island, and including a ink drawing of the famous moai on Easter Island, which was created by Johann Forster.

Thomas’s historical account is very detail oriented, and a bit more critical of Cook than other authors have been.  I enjoyed reading his insights, but also felt perhaps some of the judgments about Cook were slightly biased, especially considering this explorer was a man of a different time.  I am not justifying the outcome of the age of exploration, but just feel that Cook was a man who could be admired when it came to his knowledge of geography, and his sense of equality, which probably had to do with his origins as a farmer’s son.  Cook had shortcomings, but in my opinion, there were other explorers who were far worse.

Cook always made sure his men received adequate provisions with fresh vegetables to ward off scurvy, which is something  that Thomas points in this book.  It is quite voluminous, and probably not recommended for someone who is just learning about Captain Cook, or who wants a more engaging read.  However, I do find this text to be a good reference on Cook’s voyages.  The index is comprehensive, and you can find many small details about his journeys by referencing it.

The Bounty by Caroline Alexander

This historical text probably seems unrelated to those who want to read more about James Cook, but it is definitely of interest for those who yearn to learn more about William Bligh, and what inspired him to become obsessed with hygiene and regimen on the HMAV Bounty. Once again we meet Joseph Banks, who is connected to Cook since he also sailed aboard the Endeavor.  During that voyage Banks had admired the quality of the starchy fruit produced by breadfruit trees in Tahiti, and came up with the far fetched idea of gathering seedlings to transplant in Jamaica.  Unfortunately, it was not simply a grandiose botany experiment, but the Royal Society’s rationale behind this was that it would make a cheap source of food for the slaves working on plantations in the Caribbean, which is one of the more unsavory aspects of the entire Bounty expedition.

William Bligh used many of Cook’s commanding strategies on the Bounty, but we learn that things dis not always go very well.  Bligh did not possess the charisma that Cook had with his men, and things definitely go South after the departure from Tahiti leading up to the mutiny on on April 28, 1789. This book is not about Cook, but history buffs will enjoy connecting the dots between Cook, Banks, and Bligh.  As I have long said, there would have been no famous mutiny on the part of Fletcher Christian if Banks had never sailed with Captain Cook and become mesmerized with breadfruit.  Bligh was appointed sailing master of on Cook’s last expedition, and he was also critical of how others handled the skirmish that resulted in Cook’s death.

 

 

 

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by Pam Keyes

The Short-Lived Military Camp on Grande Terre

December 3, 2013 in American History, general history, History, Louisiana History

 

This is a map drawn by Lafon in 1813 of Grande Terre, showing a proposed military battery which was never built.

This is a map drawn by Lafon in 1813 of Grande Terre, showing a proposed military battery which was never built.

Even people who are well versed in Louisiana history probably never have heard of Camp Celestine. The pretty name  makes it sound like a Girl Scout gathering place, but in reality it was a failed military post on the marshy dunes of  Grande Terre island during May through June of 1813.
British ships had started blockading the Balize at the mouth of the Mississippi River in May 1813 during the War of 1812, and the HMS Herald had been steadfastly harassing shipping to and from New Orleans as the main feature of the blockade. American authorities were worried that the British might get ideas about using the bayou approach to New Orleans plus they    wanted to end the smuggling that had been going on from privateers in that area, so they decided to set up a small military garrison on Grande Terre. For some reason, the Laffites and Baratarian privateers were concentrated then more heavily 12 leagues away, on Cat Island near the mouth of Bayou LaFourche, so the American military encountered no obstacles. Militia earlier had been mustered into federal service as the Second Battalion of Louisiana Volunteers, under the command of Major H.D. Peire, and it was members of this force that stood ready to defend the island from the British and smugglers.
On May 6, 1813, Spanish authorities said pirates in an armed boat captured a Spanish schooner below English Turn on the Mississippi River, carried her out through the unguarded Southwest Pass, and brought the prize to Grande Terre, unaware that the Laffites and Baratarians were elsewhere. The captain also didn’t know an American force was present, until it was too late. The prize and cargo were seized, but the pirates escaped in their ship, according to a May 18, 1813, letter about the incident written by  Diego Morphy, New Orleans,  to Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, captain general of Cuba.
Apparently, other privateers got enough warning to stay away from Grande Terre while the Americans were there, because no other ships were seized. Major Peire decided to take the offense, and make an expedition to Cat Island, using barges filled with all the American forces and supplies. Interestingly, at almost the exact same time, Capt. Clement Millward of the nearby HMS Herald had the same plan, and sent out his launches with about 100 men to attack the Cat Island privateers. The five privateer schooners manned by Baratarians near Cat Island fought back soundly, defeating the British and severely wounding the leader of the British contingent, Lt. Edward Handfield, who had his left shoulder shattered by a musket ball.  A squall rose up, and the British boats were separated from their ship; the American forces were near enough to be caught in the storm as well, and the barges upset, losing all the supplies and two of the volunteer militia men. The American men seem to have scattered during the storm, as shortly afterward back on Grande Terre, a court martial convened for a trial of 10 to 15 mutineers and of Major Henry of the Volunteers. Authorities must have looked kindly on these men, for none of them were sentenced to death. Their supplies and guns totally lost, the Americans quickly left Grande Terre to the sand crabs and returned to New Orleans, defeated. Camp Celestine as a military post was now just a minor footnote in history, and the Laffites and Baratarians soon took advantage of this departure and shifted all their operations from Cat Island to Grande Terre, given its closer proximity to New Orleans. The HMS Herald was absent from the Gulf Coast for a couple of months due to damage from a hurricane that hit her home base of Nassau, and when she returned to the Balize, she gave a wide berth to the French privateers.

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by Aya Katz

Jean Laffite’s Curious Payment of Attorney Fees for the John Andrew Whiteman Defense

November 29, 2013 in American History, general history, Louisiana History

Jean Laffite regularly employed attorneys in the course of  his business, and legal fees were a big part of his ordinary expenses. How big a part we may never know, as we don’t have access to his ledger books. He does not usually mention attorney fees in his journal, even when recounting events that involved having Edward Livingston or John Grymes represent him and his interests in court.

One exception appears on p. 151 of the Journal of Jean Laffite, in which he laments having spent $9000 on the defense of “Jn Whitman” who despite all this effort on his behalf was nevertheless found guilty and hanged on March 2, 1818.

WhitmanEpisodeLaffitep151

“On the second of March Jn Whitman was hanged at New Orleans for having slain an officer of the confederate [sic] army in 1813. His trial had dragged out at length, until finally he could not acquit himself of the charge of having shot first. His lawyers cost me $9,000. The execution of Jn Whitman gave the newspapers a pretext to publish extensive false information about my commune.”

Who was “Jn Whitman”? What was he hanged for? Why was Jean Laffite willing to spend a small fortune to defend him? (Nine thousand dollars in the currency of the day would be worth well over $100,000 today.) I wanted to know!

When I began investigating, the first question was what given name was the abbreviation in the journal meant to stand for. “Jn” is what Jean Laffite used in his own signature. He used it to stand for his given name, which in French was “Jean”, but could also be spelled “John” in English or “Juan” in Spanish. Later, when Laffite changed his name to Lafflin, he signed it Jn Lafflin, Jn standing for “John”. Being trilingual, it is likely that Jean Laffite used whatever version of the Biblical given name suited him at the moment, and he considered what all three names had in common to be what identified the name: starting with a J and ending with an n. It seemed reasonable that the same abbreviation was used for the name of someone in his employ, and since Whitman sounds like an English name, John Whitman was the name intended.

I consulted with Pam Keyes on this question, and she replied there was no John Whitman among Jean Laffite’s captains. There was an Andrew Whiteman who turned state’s evidence. However, in very short time Pam Keyes was able to locate this article from the April 27, 1818 Issue of the Washington Review and Examiner of Washington, PA,  which told of the life, trial and hanging of Andrew Whiteman.

“New Orleans,March 4 (1818).
 On Monday last the awful sentence of the law was executed on Andrew Whitman, who had been convicted before the district court of the state of shooting at one M’Key with intent to commit the crime of murder, an offence which is made capital by statute.
       Whitman was a native of Philadelphia, where his connections, though not wealthy, are respectable. From the age of fifteen years, when he first went to sea in a merchant vessel, till he committed the crime for which he suffered death, his life has been a series of perilous adventures and moving accidents by flood and field. He served some time in the American squadron which in the year 1805 humbled the pirates of the Mediterranean; after receiving his discharge, he again betook himself to the merchant service, and was impressed into the British frigate La Virginie; being transferred to another vessel, he soon contrived to effect his escape to the United States. About the year 1812 he joined the piratical establishment at Barrataria, and it was under the banners of John Lafitte that he shot a custom house officer in the execution of his duty. In 1814 he deserted these his worthy associates, and betrayed Pierre Lafitte to the marshal. About this time he enlisted in the 44th United States regiment of infantry, and was in all the battles which took place during the invasion of Louisiana. Since the peace and subsequent reduction of the army, his career has been extremely vicious; his associates have commonly been the most abandoned villains who fly to New Orleans in order to escape the hand of justice at home; his residence has been in brothels and catalan shops, those sinks of iniquity and receptacles of plunder, where the experienced malefactors may find patrons and coadjutors and the uninitiated are sure to meet with prompters and instructors.
        We hope that the example of Whitman will convince the gang of assassins who infest the city of New Orleans, and whose crimes cry aloud to Heaven for punishment, that Justice, though slow, is sure. and will at last assuredly overtake them, although they may triumph in their wickedness and laugh at the idea of detection; above all, we hope it will convince them that the criminal laws of the states are equally just and terrible in their inflictions, and not a mere cobweb to be evaded by the ingenious or prostrated by the powerful.”

It appears that this Andrew Whitman must be the John Whitman to whom Jean Laffite referred in his journal, and in fact the man’s full legal name was John Andrew Whiteman. But this news item raises many more questions than it answers. If Whiteman, after serving the Laffites, betrayed them and gave information that led to the capture and imprisonment of Pierre Laffite in 1814, why would Jean Laffite spend a fortune on his defense in 1818? Also, if all the Baratarians who served in the Battle of New Orleans were pardoned for any crimes committed in contravention of the Revenue Laws, why would Andrew Whiteman be tried at all for something that happened in 1813 and should have been covered by the pardon?

Could it be that because Whiteman enlisted in 44th United States regiment of infantry prior to fighting in the Battle of New Orleans, he was not eligible for President Madison’s pardon? If he had stayed loyal to his original employers, the Laffites, would he have been immune from prosecution for something that he did in 1813 while in their employ? And if he was in fact a member of the 44th regiment, was he present at the Patterson-Ross raid, on the government’s side? If so, how could Jean Laffite see his way clear to helping such a man in any way?

The answers to these questions may in fact be linked to Daniel T. Patterson’s own double dealings with the British, which are detailed in the article by Pam Keyes:

http://www.historiaobscura.com/daniel-todd-pattersons-secret-visits-to-dauphin-island-in-1814/

Could John Andrew Whiteman have known something that might have implicated Daniel T. Patterson in treason? Was he threatening to tell? Is this why the powers that be decided he must die? Is that why Jean Laffite wanted him kept away from the hangman’s noose?

The matter is currently under investigation by Pam Keyes.  I am looking forward to seeing what else may be found to shed light on this mystery.

 

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by Pam Keyes

Daniel Todd Patterson’s Secret Visits to Dauphin Island in 1814

November 24, 2013 in American History, general history, History, Louisiana History

Daniel Todd Patterson

Daniel Todd Patterson

Daniel Todd Patterson, commander of the New Orleans Station, made a curious visit to New Orleans notary John Lynd in late summer 1814 to record a document testifying to his continued assistance with an unnamed stranded ship at Dauphin Island, not far from Mobile. He said in the document that he was assisting the ship captain (again unnamed) with offloading cargo and supplies and bringing them to New Orleans.

Found in New Orleans’ historic treasure trove of the Notarial Archives, the Patterson document is odd for a few reasons. Chief among these reasons is Dauphin Island was quite some distance on the Gulf Coast from New Orleans, and British warships such as HMS Herald had been keeping a steady blockade of all sea traffic to and from New Orleans since early 1813. Patterson’s small fleet of gunboats could not battle a British ship full of trained sailors, yet in the document he says he is taking one boat out to the stranded ship and making a series of long trips to offload the items. The second reason the US commander’s action is strange is why would he take such an interest in assisting a ship while risking losing  one of his boats, plus placing himself at risk of capture from one of the British ships? The third reason the mission was odd is the most bizarre: during the late summer of 1814, the British forces were making concerted preparations for invading New Orleans, including forays among the Indian tribes along the Gulf Coast, and they had set up a temporary base camp at Dauphin Island (proof of this is the fact that in the late 20th century, treasure hunters uncovered a cache of unused British uniform buttons at Dauphin Island, supplies that were intended to be used at New Orleans by occupying forces.)
History books of the War of 1812 on the Gulf Coast do not tell the story about Patterson’s visits to Dauphin Island in late summer of 1814. What was he really doing there? The main thing we read about Patterson during that time period is his “defeat” of the Baratarians at the Laffite brother’s smuggling base of Grande Terre, a raid by all of the New Orleans naval flotilla in which not a single shot was fired at the American forces. And then, of course, Andrew Jackson arrived on the scene at New Orleans in December 1814, and Patterson provided naval support and men to help Jackson against the British, culminating in the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans on Jan. 8, 1815. Historian Robert Remini went so far as to call Patterson “one of the most important and valuable figures in the defense of New Orleans.”

The question remains, however: what was a US naval commander doing going back and forth to Dauphin Island at a time when British forces were present there? If he was spying on them, reports of such endeavors do not appear in any official US records. Since he was able to go back and forth to New Orleans without interference from the blockaders, it looks more likely that he was spying *for* the British forces, acting as a double agent.

And then there’s the weird coincidence of the British attack on Fort Bowyer near Mobile and Dauphin Island which occurred at almost the same time in mid September 1814 as the Patterson-Ross raid on Grande Terre. The British ships failed in their mission to take Fort Bowyer even though the US Naval forces were all busy way off to the west approaching Grande Terre  to arrest Baratarians and seize goods and ships.  One of the British ships at Fort Bowyer was the HMS Sophie. Capt. Nicholas Lockyer of the Sophie had less than two weeks previous tried to bribe Jean Laffite at Grande Terre to join the British forces. The Sophie was supposed to return to Grande Terre within a fortnight to get Laffite’s reply, but the ship and crew never did. The timing coincidence is mysterious. The truth of what really happened behind the scenes will probably never be known.

A check of New York native Daniel Todd Patterson’s genealogy is interesting: his father came to the US in 1750 from Ireland, and was a British soldier in the US during the French and Indian War. His paternal uncle was the first Royal Governor of Prince Edward Island. Patterson’s mother was from the socially prominent and wealthy Livingston family of New York, so he was a kinsman of New Orleans attorney Edward Livingston, who just happened to represent privateers Jean and Pierre Laffite in legal matters. Livingston’s familial connections to Patterson were not known by their New Orleans contemporaries.

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by Aya Katz

Eerie Coincidences in Jean Laffite Research and Other Spooky Stories as Told by Pam Keyes

October 30, 2013 in American History, general history, History, Louisiana History

PamKeyesPam Keyes is the Research Coordinator of the Laffite Society and a well known expert on the history of Jean Laffite and of the artifacts and written evidence that are available on the life of the famous privateer. In this interview we talked about some strange and eerie happenings surrounding her research. 

 

Aya Katz: You have been researching Jean Laffite’s history nearly all your life. Have there been coincidences or eerie happenings that involved the research into the Laffite past?

Pam Keyes: There was the time I ran across Laffite’s Bar & Grill restaurant at St. Louis. I found that restaurant during the trip to St. Louis and Alton LaffiteRestauratto find the cemetery at Fosterburg where Jean laffite is said to be buried, so happening across that restaurant was very eerie. But it is just one of the strange things I’ve run across in Laffite studies, and I’m not the only one who has had such experiences. Jack Davis said before he started writing the Pirates Laffite book, when he was living in London for a year, he ran across a US Civil War themed restaurant that had a wall-size painting of Jean Laffite, along with paintings of Generals Butler and Sherman. Why the London.restaurant had placed Laffite in there was a total mystery. But one of the spookiest stories is the one about the attic windows in the convent of the Ursuline nuns.

Aya: Tell me the story of the attic windows.

Pam Keyes: This actually happened to me on a visit to New Orleans in November 2001. There was a legend I had heard about the casket girls, the young ladies who were brought over in the early 1700s to become brides of the plantation owners. When they first arrived in New Orleans, they stayed in the attic rooms, and some of these girls became sick and died before they ever got married. The legend is that a few of these girls haunted the Ursuline Convent and that they became vampires, preying at night on the tourists in the French Quarter. The legend was you could tell when the vampires were loose because the shutters of the attic windows of the Ursuline Convent would be open. On my visit to New Orleans, I went out alone one night around 9 p.m. when it was dark, with a full moon. My hotel was on Chartres, a couple of blocks away from the Ursuline Convent, which I had to walk by on my way to the St. Louis Cathedral as I planned to sit in the square and people watch. As I walked by the big convent building, I remembered the story about the casket girls/vampires, and checked out the dormer windows of the attic: the shutters weretightly together, as theyhad been earlier that day. I laughed to myself about the silly story and proceeded on to Jackson Square as planned. I sat down on a bench and watched the people walking by for about an hour, then decided I had better walk back to my hotel before it got too late and dangerous to be alone. At the corner of the Ursuline Convent, I stopped and looked up at the full moon, then over to the convent attic: the dormer shutters were all wide open! I made it back to the hotel in record time, and did not venture out in the dark again for the rest of the trip.

Aya Katz:What was the earliest eerie event that happened when you were researching the Laffite history?

Pam Keyes: Hmn, earliest eerie event would be a hard one to pick from. There was the time in the 1980s when I almost got killed by a lightning bolt in the French Quarter, that was pretty dramatic; but my favorite strange event was the time the Jean Laffite signed statement plopped into my lap at the New Orleans Public Library in 2003. But since you asked for earliest, it’s got to be the lightning story from the 1980s.

Aya Katz: What happened?

 Pam Keyes:My then-husband and I were walking around looking at various shops in the French Quarter in one of those light misty rains that usually happens at least once a day in New Orleans because it is so close to the Gulf. I had brought my umbrella for both of us to use, and we were both under it as we walked down Chartres from Jackson Square (yes, Chartres again). We had just been to the Cabildo to look around and I was most vexed to not find anything whatsoever there on display regarding Laffite (the little portrait by Jarvis was in archival storage). There was a bookstore, the Librarie, in one of the old buildings that looked enticing, and my husband went inside the open door but I had to wait outside for a minute to take down my umbrella, had just done so, and barely had stepped onto the stoop when all at once there was a BOOM! as a bolt of lightning hit the cast iron lightpost about four feet from the door. My hair was all electrified, and there was a strong smell of ozone, but I wasn’t hurt. The shopkeeper and my husband were quite amazed, and the shopkeeper said in all his years of having that French Quarter bookstore, he’d never seen lightning hit a street light. Wish I could say I found a really rare book cheap there, to make the story neater, but alas I did not.

Aya Katz: That was a close call! Tell me about the Jean Laffite signature that just fell in your lap.

Pam Keyes: I had looked for some 35 years to no avail for a Jean Laffite signature for sale in autograph collections, etc., and had pretty much given up hope of ever finding one. All the known ones were in collections at federal archives and universities. The first one I actually got to touch had already been found by William C. Davis in the Notarial Archives, so when I went to New Orleans on a visit in late 2001, I looked at that one, and I realized there had to be a lot more around New Orleans somewhere. Since Davis already had combed the New Orleans area archives for Laffite items that were cataloged as such, I decided to strike out and look at some of the materials relating to the Laffite associates, like Vincent Gambie aka Jean Roux. I found a listing for two court cases involving him in the archives at the New Orleans Public Library, and requested the originals to view. Unlike the Notarial Archives, there was no close supervision at the city library special collections department, and I didn’t even have to wear gloves to handle the original documents, which were in plain manila folders. The librarian handed me the folder, then turned his back to me and went back to a different area of the stacks. I opened up the folder, and a folded slip of old paper fell out, into my lap. I retrieved it and opened it up, and got a shock as there before me was an authentic Jean Laffite signature on a July 1815 document. Jean had attested that some runaway slave had been working for Gambie on his ship at Barataria. I looked at the front of the folder, where the contents were listed: the statement signed by Laffite was not there. I looked back at the librarian, he was out of sight. I had found a previously unknown Laffite signature, and the way it was not archived, it could have easily been stolen. I took the paper over to the librarian in the back, and showed it to him, saying it hadn’t been noted on the folder and needed to be, because it was vulnerable to theft. The librarian to my disgust acted like it was no big deal. I had to wonder what else wasn’t properly archived there. Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of these documents in 2005, so it probably was lost then, but I still have a copy of the whole court case, including the signature.

Aya Katz: Do you have any other spooky stories?

Pam Keyes:I do have another spooky story, but it’s more about Andrew Jackson than Laffite. My ex-husband was from Mississippi, and we often went there to visit on vacation. One of my favorite places was Natchez. On one visit, we went on a trip to see the plantation houses up and down the Mississippi from Natchez, and because I was especially interested in one sort of off the regular tourist trail, we went to see Springfield Plantation, where Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson got married and spent their honeymoon. Back in the early 1980s, the plantation was owned by a railroad company, and one of their employees was living there and serving as caretaker of the home, giving occasional tours of the house. The layout was the typical early plantation style first floor, with big main foyer and hall, and rooms off to each side of the hall. Many of the original furnishings remained, according to the caretaker, as he led us down the hall. He proceeded into one room that was painted a sunny yellow and boasted a big fireplace with a large mirror to one side, and I noted a pianoforte to my right as I walked into the room. The tour guide continued his spiel about the house, said the room we were in had served as the music room at the time the Jacksons were married there, and in the early 1800s, but no more, as there was no piano anymore. What! I thought, and quickly looked back to where I had seen the pianoforte. It was gone, and as the saying goes, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

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by Aya Katz

Was the Journal of Jean Laffite an Original, a Copy or a Forgery?

October 19, 2013 in American History, Ancient History, Caribbean History, general history, History, Louisiana History, Texas History

largelaffitecopybook

This photo of the Laffite family copybook on the left and the Journal of Jean Laffite n the right was contributed by Pam Keyes. Both documents were acquired by the Sam Houston Regional Library from John A. Laffite.

What is the difference between a forgery and a copy? How can you tell something is a good copy of an original document and has not been altered? And if it is, indeed, a copy, how do you go about recognizing alterations in the copied document? What is the distinction between a facsimile and just a copy, and is every good forgery a facsimile?

These are questions that come up over and over again in life. Sometimes people rely on physical evidence to determine the age of a document, based on the age of the papyrus it is written on or the ink it is written in. If it’s a clay tablet, carbon dating can help establish its age.

But the age of a copy is not conclusive when it comes to the question of when the original might have been written. Here is one example: we have many, many copies of the Old Testament. But we have no original. That does not mean that there was no original; it may have been written so long ago that it would have been destroyed by now, and the only reason we know about it is because of the copies. It is also possible that the original of some or all of the books was not written down but passed orally from one generation to the next, so that the scribe or scribes who first wrote it down were not the authors of the text. The original might have been a sequence of memorized words that passed from one living brain to the next until someone transcibed it. Once transcribed, this text was copied extensively. The copies were not forgeries. They were not meant to pass for originals. They were merely meant to transmit and preserve the text. Copies are all we have.

The copies were made by scribes, and their job was to write down word for word, letter by letter the same things as the scribe who came before them did. But sometimes a scribe made an error. Sometimes the error is so obvious that any modern reader of Hebrew could point it out and correct it, as if it were a typo. But because the scribes were sworn to copy exactly what was written and not add or subtract a jot, when they spotted an error, they just kept copying it word for word, letter for letter. Over the generations, quite a few errors accumulated.

In addition to all this, since the Old Testament is composed of more than one book, written at more than one time, by more than one author, there are arguments about which books are more authentic or which are just something that got inserted much later and really does not belong there. And also, some things have been intentionally altered by later scribes to go along with changing social mores and religion. Biblical scholars often have to use document-internal evidence to try to ferret out what is what. And the discovery of an older copy, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Kaifeng Scrolls, which may have been less open to more modern tampering, can shed some light on what the original is more likely to have been like.

Having established that authorship and scribeship are separate issues, we should also take into account the difference between the copy of a document’s textual content and a facsimile copy which is meant to represent exactly how the original document looked, even though it is not the original.

In the case of the Old Testament, scholars now understand that when the text was first set down in writing, it could not have been in the Assyrian script in which Hebrew is currently written, which was borrowed from Aramaic and imported into use for Hebrew after the Babylonian exile. Instead, early Hebrew was written in letters more nearly resembling the ancient Phoenician alphabet. But as much as the letters were different in appearance, it was still the same alphabet with a one to one correspondence of symbols to symbols. Hence the text has come down to us letter by letter transcribed, though the letters look entirely different from those in the original. The text matters. What it looks like, considering that there is no original, does not matter. Nobody claims that any of the scrolls that we currently have access to, however ancient, is a facsimile copy of an original.

In all these cases, none of the copies are deemed to be forgeries, just because they are not original. Forgery, for the purposes of this discussion, would only occur if a modern person tried to create an older looking scroll and pass it off as something that it is not. But even in the event of such an attempt, most of the text would still be an accurate copy of another copy. The thing that would make it a forgery would be trying to pass a new copy off as an old copy. It would not change the document’s validity as some sort of copy of a very old document that no one currently living has ever seen the original of.

The Old Testament is not the only book to be subject to this kind of scrutiny or to require this type of analysis. Many a copied document can be found which has no original extant, and all can be subjected to the same type of analysis.

Take what is commonly known as “The Journal of Jean Laffite.” Ostensibly this was an original document presented by John A. Laffite, aka John Andrechyne Laflin, aka John Nafsiger or John Matejka, as the original, unaltered one and only journal of the famed privateer. Some have claimed it to be a forgery, created by the man who presented the document to the public. But even if it is a forgery, what exactly would that mean to those who are interested in the text rather than in the artifact in which the text is embedded?

The Journal as an artifact is a kind of notebook written upon by an ink pen, with a number of old newspaper clippings inserted within, and with some drawings and other extraneous matters. To determine its age would allow us to know if it was written at the same time as the text purports to have been written, but it does not tell us who is the author of the text, nor when the text was composed.

Composing a text and writing it down are two very different things. In some cultures, oral texts are passed on from one generation to another until one day someone writes them down. The person who transcribes these oral texts is not the author. That person is merely a scribe. Authentication of the text, in the event the scribe is suspected of having invented it, involves finding other versions of the same text elsewhere, circumstantial evidence of the existence of the text that long predates the writing and also text internal evidence that indicates through linguistic cues just how old the text really is.

In determining whether the Journal of Jean Laffite text is a hoax devised in the twentieth century or a genuine text from the period and by the person it is ascribed to, here are some of the issues that must be addressed:

  •  The language in which it is written: in this case, a Creole French patois common to the Cuba-Haiti islands sprinkled with some hispanicisms. According to linguist Gene Marshall, who studied and translated it, the writing is in a style common before 1850.
  • The spelling and other idiosyncracies not common to all writers of the dialect.
  • The story it tells in terms of its detail and accuracy.
  • Whether it is similar to other such documents, if any are available
  • The voice of the author or narrator, and whether it conforms to the voice of other available documents known or believed to be written by Jean Laffite in the latter part of his career.
  • The handwriting, but not necessarily as proof of scribeship or authorship, but as possibly pointing to the author or the scribe of the original document, in the event that it is a forgery.

If the text is genuine, but the particular copy which we have available at the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center is not the original or not of concurrent age with the text, then it may well be a financial loss to the institution that purchased it, as its market value would be greatly reduced. But its value as a historical text would in no wise be diminished, if the sequence of words that it enshrines is a genuine and authentic transcription of a text whose author was the privateer Jean Laffite. That is the difference between the value of a forgery and the value of an accurate copy of a text.

It is said that John Andrechyne Laflin, aka John A. Laffite, aka John Nafsiger, did not speak French at all. It is said that those French speakers he had access to were not speakers of that dialect of French used in the Journal. It is known that there was not just one copy of the journal but at least two, as another copy was lent to Madeleine Fabiola Kent, who used it as background information when writing her novel The Corsair. If all these facts are true, and if indeed it were to turn out that John A. Laflin/Laffite/Nafsiger did copy the text of the Journal of Jean Laffite in a hand that looks very much like that of the famous privateer’s, then he could not have been its author, though he may have been a forger. If he was a forger, what did he forge? A copy of an original. But the very existence of the copy tends to corroborate the existence of an original.

How could a man who did not read or write French forge a document in a French Creole? One way is if he was indeed an expert artist, by looking at the original not as a text at all, but as a picture that must be copied line by line, angle by angle, correctly, much in the way a photocopier duplicates a text or a photo without understanding what it is copying. To do this, a forger has to be a great savant or a great artist. There is no evidence that John Andrechyne Laflin/Laffite/Nafsiger had that kind of skill or talent. Even if he did, the Journal of Jean Laffite is probably not a facsimile copy of the original journal, because it incorporates genuine newspaper clippings into the notebook in which the journal is copied.

Even if there was no forgery, and the document known as the Journal of Jean Laffite was actually written by the hand of Jean Laffite himself, it is still a copy. There is nothing blotted out. The text flows without interruption. Clearly this is a composed text whose composition took place elsewhere than in this notebook. The copy we have is just a copy. And there were other copies, for it was Jean Laffite’s stated intention to leave a copy for each of his grandchildren, of whom there were several.

When examining the Journal of Jean Laffite for purposes of proving its authenticity or lack of same, it is also good to keep in mind the following basic rules of thumb:

  • Though Jean Laffite may be the author, this does not mean that everything he wrote was true – or for that matter, that anything he wrote was true. People have been known to prevaricate when telling the story of their lives. They have even been known to misremember. Therefore, finding an inaccuracy or historical untruth does not necessarily cast doubt on the authenticity of the text.
  • If the language of the text is very different in one or more sections than in the body of the work, it is more likely that those parts are not part of the original document but were added or embellished upon later.
  • Suspected alterations should be judged by the four corners rule for document interpretation: the internal consistency of the document will determine what parts must be errors or extraneous.

A forgery is an attempt to create a facsimile copy that passes for an original. A forged signature, for instance, to be effective, needs to duplicate an original signature almost identically. A copy that is not a forgery is merely the transmission of a text through duplication. It need not look the same in its typography or handwriting. Sometimes a copy is also a forgery. But being a forgery does not necessarily prove that a copy is a bad copy. In fact, the better the forgery, the more a copy resembles the original.

REFERENCES

http://www.historiaobscura.com/an-interview-with-pam-keyes-about-jean-laffite/ (For background on Jean Laffite scholarship.)

http://www.bubblews.com/news/1356968-what-is-forgery-and-why-is-it-wrong (About Forgery and the artistry it involves)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Memoirs-Jean-Laffite/dp/0738812536 (Gene Marshall Translation and commentary)

http://www.livescience.com/8008-bible-possibly-written-centuries-earlier-text-suggests.html (For what the Hebrew letters used to look like during the period when the Hebrew Bible was first written down.)

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by Aya Katz

An Interview with Pam Keyes about Jean Laffite

September 30, 2013 in American History, Caribbean History, general history, Louisiana History, Texas History

PamKeyes

  • Pam Keyes is the Research Coordinator of the Laffite Society and a well known expert on the history of Jean Laffite and of the artifacts and written evidence that are available on the life of the famous privateer. In this interview, I asked her questions concerning Jean Laffite that have been preoccupying me for some time.

Pam discusses her own history with the Laffite Society and its precursors, the primary documents that she has examined herself that pertain to Jean Laffite, the evolution of Jean Laffite’s signature, the controversial Journal of Jean Laffite, and the way Jean Laffite may have viewed himself.

 

  1. Could you tell us a little of how you came to know about Jean Laffite and to take an interest in his life story?

I first came across Jean Laffite when I was nine years old and my parents and I went to a double feature movie in 1964 at the drive-in featuring the 1958 “The Buccaneer” along with Danny Kaye’s movie “The Five Pennies.” I was quite enthralled by the movie (not to mention the extreme charisma of Yul Brynner who played Jean Laffite) and the message of how Laffite helped the Americans even after they blew Barataria to bits. There was even a Classics Illustrated comic book about the movie which I got at the neighborhood grocery store that week, and well, everything just sort of snowballed from there. Of course I found out from the encyclopedia that the movie had been romanticized by DeMille, and there was no governor’s daughter, nor Corinthian pirated American ship, etc., but the basic story was true. 

My local library had a couple of books about the Battle of New Orleans in the children’s section, but nothing else. When I got a bit older, around 11 or 12, I found Madelyn Fabiola Kent’s novel “The Corsair” in the adult section, and read it voraciously. I did not know at the time that Ms. Kent had used one of the Jean Laffite journals for background information for her novel. Puberty hit, and my interest in Laffite dropped off by the wayside until I was around 15, when I started looking for more about Laffite. This was not easy to do, considering I lived in Oklahoma, some 750 miles from New Orleans, and at the time there was no such thing as the internet, only letters.

In Antique Trader’s newspaper which the library carried, I found a classified ad listing a copy of Stanley Arthur’s “Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover,” and purchased it. I remember it was quite exciting to learn from that book that there were Laffite manuscripts and journals around, and that a descendant was living in Kansas City in the 1950s when the book was published. I wanted to see the frontispiece 1804 portrait of Laffite in person, and I was sure that the museum at Kansas City probably had it, so I convinced my parents to take me to Kansas City on a search. No portrait was found, nor any other leads on that trip, and I returned dejected, but not ready to give up.

I placed an ad in the Kansas City Star newspaper asking for information about the Laffite portrait from anyone who knew anything about it. One of John A. Lafitte’s old neighbors in Kansas City responded and gave me the name and address of the descendant’s ex-wife, Lacie Surratt, who had remarried and moved to Spartanburg, S.C. Lacie gave me the name of her friend Audrey Lloyd, a Laffite researcher in Midland, Texas, and Audrey in turn pointed me to Robert Vogel, who was just at that time starting a new group called The Laffite Study Group, based in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. Vogel led me to longtime Laffite researchers Ray and Sue Thompson at Gulfport, Miss., Dr. Jane de Grummond, a history professor at Louisiana State University, John Howells, a Laffite enthusiast at Houston, Texas, and historian Dr. Jack D.L. Holmes.

We all carried on a lengthy correspondence over the years. Vogel came to visit me in Oklahoma when he was on his way down south one year, and I visited Dr. de Grummond at her home in Baton Rouge three times, but most of us never met face to face. I had corresponded with Howells for 25 years before I met him at Galveston in the late 1990s when I went to a meeting of the Laffite Society, a group which had formed after the Laffite Study Group disbanded around 1991. I also met Lionel Bienvenue, who served as historian at Chalmette Battlefield, around the time the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park was being created. I was a member of the citizen input group for plans for the park in the 1980s.
 There’s a lot, lot more I could relate, but that’s the gist of how my interest in Laffite started. My favorite movie to this day is the 1958 Buccaneer.

  1. What primary documents have you examined over the years concerning Jean Laffite’s life? The signature of Jean Laffite in his letter to President Madison is quite different from the signature in the Journal of Jean Laffite. Is this dispositive of the issue of authenticity of the journal? Do you think the same man could have made both signatures? How does each of the signatures compare to other signatures attributed to Jean Laffite in other documents?
LaffitetoMadisonSignature

The signature of the letter to President Madison

 

The very first primary document signed by Jean Laffite that I ever saw was his 1815 letter to President Madison. I was 11 years old at the time, walking through a manuscript display at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., when I spotted the Laffite letter. Somehow, I intuitively knew even then that Jean had not written the body of the letter, with the incorrect spellings, etc. Some years later, after seeing other Laffite manuscripts, this early assumption on my part turned out to be valid. The signature, however, is correct for Jean at that period of his life. Both Jean and Pierre Laffite’s signatures changed over the years: Pierre’s, due to ill health; Jean’s, due to a psychological shift, based upon my study of the few available manuscripts available. There are several notarial documents in the New Orleans Notarial Archives signed by Pierre, but only a few that are signed by Jean, and all bear a rather small understated form of his pre-Battle of New Orleans signature, usually with the first name being shortened to Jn with a strike through the first name from the cross on the double t’s, and the surname enclosed in a circle paraph.

In the New Orleans city archives at the New Orleans library, I happened across a previously unknown Jean Laffite signed document when I opened up a case file pertaining to Vincent Gambie from 1815, and a statement signed by Jean Laffite quite literally dropped into my lap. This one bore a transitional signature, still small, but without the strike-through. Some Laffite manuscripts I have only seen in exact copies and color photographs, such as the Oct. 4, 1814 French letter Jean Laffite wrote to Edward Livingston at a very tumultuous time in Jean’s life. This one has the first name struck through, and the last name circled to focus importance on the Laffite surname.

Next up for examination is the Laffite signature on the Le Brave ship’s articles document, from August 18, 1819 (the original is at the federal archive at Fort Worth, ironically the closest authentic Laffite manuscript to me, but I have never been there in person. I do, however, have an exact photographic image of the complete manuscript). The Le Brave signature is bold, larger than any of the preceding signatures, but with the same slant and same general form, with some significant differences: the strike through on the first name has now become an underline, and the first and last names are one unit. No longer is the Laffite name by itself encircled, but underlined with a fancy paraph that ties the bottom of the two f’s together. The ink pressure is heavy and fluid, with no hesitation. The whole body of the Le Brave document appears to be in the same penmanship as the signature, and that is interesting, too, as every millimeter of the paper is used on the right margin, sometimes with a curious dash where no dash is really needed. The handwriting is very legible. The next sample, also a photograph, is an 1819 letter to James Long which Jean Laffite wrote and signed (this is in the Mirabeau Lamar collection at the Texas State Archives, Austin.) The handwriting and penmanship are virtually identical to the Le Brave document.

Laffitesignaturestwo197

The real test of a Jean Laffite signature and penmanship awaited me in examining first hand the Laffite Journal collection at Sam Houston Library, Liberty, Texas. I had the exact size color images of the Le Brave document of 1819 with me to compare side by side with the Laffite Journal signatures and handwriting. The Laffite Journal itself was a match, but some of the accompanying manuscript was not. Based on this comparison, it is my (admittedly layman) opinion that the Laffite Journal is authentic and not a forgery. No inconsistencies with the handwriting were found within the entire Laffite Journal. As for the language of the Journal, which at first glance appears to be an archaic Creole French, linguist Gene Marshall said it is polyglot with mixtures of English, Spanish and French, and shows a good command of grammar for the time

LaffiteScrap1817Signature

Jean Laffite signature from the Journal

  1. The letter to President Madison contains a number of spelling errors as well as a poor choice of vocabulary. He spelled sentiment with an initial letter “c”, even though it is a French word borrowed into English and spelled in English the same as in French. He used the word “notorious” to describe himself and his associates without realizing that it had a bad connotation. What do his spelling errors and diction choices tell us about Jean Laffite’s command of English, his command of other languages, such as French and Spanish, his education and his social class?

Although Jean Laffite appears to not have been able to write fluently in English, he could read it fluently, as evidenced by his apparent favorite news publication, the Jeffersonian political editorial newspaper Aurora of Philadelphia, Penn. The fact that he was highly literate in a language not his own demonstrates that either he had had advanced schooling, or was intelligent enough to teach himself. According to historical accounts by contemporaries, Jean seems to have been better at conversational English than the written form, so perhaps he did teach himself by being around English speakers. This ability to do business in three languages plus a knowledge of proper manners helped secure his social status, too, as a middle man bridge between the rough, mostly illiterate ship captains, and the old French and Spanish families of New Orleans and environs.

 

  1. How many copies of The Journal of Jean Laffite were there when John Andrechyne Laflin first made it public? Were they each believed to be in the hand of Jean Laffite? Is it possible that the original document could have been copied by hand by someone else so that each Laffite heir could have a copy?

We only know about two copies of the Laffite Journal: the one that Madelyn Kent read for her background material in The Corsair, and which she obtained from John A. Lafitte, who borrowed it from a cousin (so he said), and the Laffite Journal which is in the collection at Sam Houston. No copies of the one read by Kent are known to exist, but it is known that John A. did have to sue her in order to get it back. The cousin who owned it has never been found. The Laffite Journal we do have copies of is definitely a copy of an original document, but it is a copy made by the same person as who wrote the first, that is, it is completely in the Jean Laffite handwriting of the authentic Le Brave document of 1819. There are no mistakes crossed out, and the writing goes into the right hand edge, even into the gutter of the journal book. I used to own a similar autobiographical journal, an ms written by a Connecticut shipbuilder in 1848 for his descendants, and it also was a handwritten copy, one of five written for his grandchildren. There were no writing mistakes in it, either. Stylistically it was very similar to the Laffite Journal, leading me to believe in the 1840s, that was the thing some men did, was write out the stories of their lives for their descendants. The thing that is striking about the Laffite Journal is he starts right off saying he doesn’t want his descendants to release the contents of the journal until 1952 (one hundred and seven years from the start of the journal). John A. Lafitte could not read French, so he couldn’t read that, but interestingly, 1952 is precisely when the contents of the journal did begin to be released.

  1. In the case of those who are firm in their belief that the Journal of Jean Laffite is a forgery, what evidence do they base this conclusion on? Has the the Journal been discredited to the satisfaction of all reputable historians or is this still an open question in historical circles?

There are many reasons why so many people consider the Laffite Journal a forgery, but the main one is the fact that the person who is first known to have had it, John A. Lafitte, was a proven con man whose abused wife secretly told her friend Audrey Lloyd that “he made it all up” and studied how to age paper and ink, etc., etc.

This pretty much damned John A. Lafitte and the Journal collection in historical circles, but only long after he had died. There are signs in the Laffite collection at Sam Houston that some things were obviously added and altered to enhance the value of the collection, and the whole collection went though two fires, one at John’s A’s house, and one at a tv station. He tried to sell the collection to autograph dealer Charles Hamilton at first, and Hamilton was quite enthusiastic about it, but then fishtailed out. The collection was sold shortly before John A’s death for $15,000 to Texas autograph dealer William Simpson, and Simpson had his friend, John Howells, examine it in detail for a couple of years before selling it to former Texas governor Price Daniel. (Howells had the collection sitting underneath his coffee table for those two years while he tried to authenticate it with examinations of the handwriting and paper). When the Laffite Journal first became public, historians Jane de Grummond and Harris Gaylord Warren both thought it was authentic back in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. de Grummond believed in its authenticity until she died. I don’t know if Warren changed his mind, I didn’t correspond with him. Robert Vogel is extremely anti-Laffite Journal, a position he shared with Ray and Sue Thompson.

Because there was so much doubt about the circumstances surrounding the Laffite Journal’s provenance, most serious historians of later years haven’t even bothered to examine it in detail themselves. The only one who has done so is William C. Davis, who spent three days looking at it. He based his unbiased conclusion that it wasn’t authentic on the surrounding material in the collection, plus historical inaccuracies in the translated journal. He is not a handwriting expert, so did not make a comparison in that respect. He weighed it solely based on its historical aspects, and noted that there is nothing in it that wasn’t in some book or newspaper article published before the Laffite Journal came to light. One current historian who does think it is authentic is Winston Groom, but he never conducted an onsite examination of the Laffite Journal and collection, confining his research to telephone questions of the Sam Houston archivist at the time, Robert Schaadt (who also believes in the authenticity of the Laffite Journal).

The final chapter remains to be written about the Laffite Journal, though; it has never successfully been proven to be a forgery, nor has it ever been proven to be authentic. It remains in a gray, enigmatic haze. With modern technology, the question of its authenticity could be determined forensically, but no one wishes to do this. Sometimes people prefer to let things stay a mystery even when an answer can be obtained.

 

  1. Is there any documentary evidence, such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports or other official documents to verify the lineage of the descendants of Jean Laffite?

Re documentary evidence of descendants of Jean Laffite, there is only a bit regarding the birth and death of his son by his black mistress, Catherine Villard. There are some indications that he had a daughter, Adele, by Catherine. Adele’s descendants seem to mostly be in Puerto Rico now. The black descendants of both Pierre and Jean Laffite are hard to track because during the 1800s, most passed for white and intermarried with whites by hiding any traces of their black lineage. This is especially true of Cubans who migrated to Puerto Rico. Several direct descendants of Pierre Laffite and his black mistress Marie Villard have been located, and there is every reason to believe that Jean could have just as many. Regarding the white wives and marriages for Jean given in the Laffite Journal, no documentary evidence has been found. Likewise, no evidence has been found for Jean’s white children, except for one statement from the Sallier family of Lake Charles that a daughter of their family was named for Denise Laffite.

7.   What can we learn about the character of Jean Laffite from the various letters to the editor that he was known to have sent in during his lifetime? What were his politics? How did he see himself as a public figure?

Jean Laffite did not leave many letters from which to interpret how he felt about things, or even what his personality was like, but the one prominent letter to the editor which he did write gives some clues about who he was, and his self-image. This letter, published in the Aurora newspaper of Oct. 3, 1815, was written while Jean was staying in Baltimore before proceeding to Washington, D.C., to try to get an audience with President Madison. The weekly Aurora publication of Philadelphia was the pre-eminent Jeffersonian publication of its time nationally. Jean’s choice of this newspaper to publish his letter shows that he shared its pro Jeffersonian democracy and anti-Federalist sentiments. It is not surprising that he would like this editorial stance, given that the paper was heavily sympathetic to the French and Napoleon.

In the letter Jean takes issue with lies that have been published in various gazettes the past two years calling him a pirate who preyed on American ships, and says he has letters of marque which prove that he and those working for him were privateers. and he never committed an act of piracy. He further states that if anyone can show that he or those he ordered did commit an act of piracy or injustice, they should contact the appropriate officials and he would willingly appear to answer any such charges. He did not want people to call him a pirate, because in those days, pirates were hung. Privateers, who were licensed by their letters of marque from Cartagena or Buenos Ayres to take Spanish ships, were respectable captains who made fortunes legally from their captured prizes. Pirates were regarded as ruffian murderers who thought nothing of torturing captured crews in truly horrible ways. Privateers were thought of as captains who treated their captured prizes humanely. Pirates were regarded as scum. Privateers were honorable, and often gentlemen. However, the only true difference between the two often just boiled down to a piece of paper with a seal attached, a paper which might or might not be legitimately from Cartagena or Buenos Ayres.

What can be learned about Jean from that letter to the editor? He wanted to be regarded as a proper gentleman privateer captain, someone who could be respected. He cared about his social standing, not just in the New Orleans area, but at large, which is why he wrote the letter to the editor.

This desire for respectability is quite likely the reason why the Laffites assisted Jackson and the Americans during the British invasion of Louisiana. Jean and his brother Pierre were already socially accepted by the French residents of New Orleans as middlemen for smuggling ventures, but they seem to have both wanted acceptance by the Americans and fractious Gov. William C.C. Claiborne as well. Jackson’s lack of flints, powder, and skilled artillerymen provided the perfect opportunity to gain respect, especially after the Americans destroyed the Laffite base at Grande Terre a few months before and jailed several Baratarians captured there, and after Pierre had spent a miserable summer in the Cabildo jail before escaping. The Laffites could have packed up and left for other places, but they stayed put to help, because that’s what they both wanted to do. Why? It seems quite obvious they wanted to be thought honorable, even in the face of extreme adversity from those they would help. A presidential pardon had been extended to them, but neither Laffite ever accepted one.

Jean Laffite gained prominence over his brother Pierre in the aftermath of the Battle of New Orleans, but something happened that soured him on New Orleans and made him want to not rest on his laurels. Jean did not become a hero overnight. New Orleans politics were as corrupt then as they are now, and the Laffites found themselves fighting to get restitution for the losses they had suffered from the Baratarian raid. Most of it went into the pockets of raiders Patterson and Ross. Jean made his trip to the East Coast in late 1815 to try to get restitution from the president, but the mission was a failure. He must have been very depressed upon his return, enough so a mapping expedition into Arkansas territory with his friend Arsene Latour seemed like a good idea to get away from it all. He accepted a new role along with Pierre as a spy for Spain, even though they had preyed on Spanish ships. Jean made a coup on Louis Aury and assumed control of Galveston, a place where he finally realized his potential without the domineering brother Pierre nearby.

This happy state of affairs wouldn’t last long, though, as the severe hurricane of Sept. 12, 1818, made a direct hit on Galveston and nearly decimated the Laffite camp. Jean was strong enough emotionally to take charge of the recovery efforts and was able to get food and water to the other survivors, but things were never as good after that. The year of 1819 was a year of financial ruin for the United States, and it was likewise a horrible year for Jean Laffite, as his newly purchased ship Le Brave, with his signed and fully written ship’s articles onboard, was caught in an act of piracy off the Belize by US authorities. The captain and crew, with two exceptions, were found guilty of piracy in New Orleans and sentenced to be hung. Jean Laffite had reached his nadir, his name was attached to a pirate ship. Under US pressure and protection, he abandoned Galveston not long before the Le Brave pirates were strung from the yardarms at New Orleans.

Jean and Pierre drifted toward Las Mujeres, then split apart. Jean got caught by Cuban authorities but due to some friends there got put in the hospital and managed to escape, then made it to Cartagena to get a commission as a privateer on the General Santander. He was a licensed privateer again, but not for very long, as he ran afoul of merchants in Kingston who petitioned for his arrest due to piracy on merchant vessels in the Bay of Honduras and Balize. A newspaper account in the Gaceta de Colombia claimed he had died in a sea battle with two Spanish vessels off the Honduran coast, but it seems like too neat and tidy an ending. He needed to disappear, considering there was a noose waiting for him in Kingston. Newspaper stories were easy to make up. So did he give up the sea life and return to the US under an assumed name, as the Laffite Journal indicates? Well, since the handwriting and signature of the Laffite Journal of the 1840s is identical to that of the Le Brave ship’s articles of 1819, the answer must be yes.

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by Jerilee Wei

Was Your Ancestor A United States Sea Fencible?

September 2, 2013 in American History, Louisiana History

As a life long student of history, the first time I came across the term “sea fencible” I was shocked to learn that this British naval militia term for the men who were in a naval militia to provide defense in times of war between France and Britain — also applied to the seafaring men who protected the cities of Baltimore, Boston, New York, Norfolk, and Philadelphia between 1813 and 1815.  This little known Congressional Act passed by Congress on July 26, 1813 during the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain allowed for ten separate companies to protect the ports and harbors of the United States.  The officers received monthly pay, rations, and uniforms. The pay ranged from $23 on the low end to $40 for Captains. The enlisted sea-fencibles who were generally boatswains, gunners, and privates received pay that ranged from $12 for privates up to $20 for a boatswain.  The United States sea fencibles only existed from July 26, 1813 to February 27, 1815 when Congress repealed the act and then replaced it with the Corps of Sea Fencibles.

Oddly, the commanding officers were under the direction of the army while the rest of these Sea Fencible company was under the direction of the Navy.  Typically, a company consisted of a total of 107 men, officers and enlisted combined.  Currently, there is a push to establish a comprehensive list of War of 1812 ancestors made possible by the War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files at Fold3.com.  Because there are over 7.2 million pages within 180,000 files that are in extremely poor condition restoration efforts are a huge undertaking.  Donations are being sought: Preserve The Pensions for this very worthy cause of making these pension records free and available to all historians, genealogists, and public seeking to know this little known part of history during the War of 1812.

In the meantime, it might be fun to contribute to the preservation of knowing who severed as a sea fencible under the officers listed below from other sources that a bound to exist in books, documents, and hidden away in historical society collections.  Was one of your ancestors one of them?  If so we’d love to hear from you, please include any document citations.

Alphabetical List of Known Sea Fencible Officers That Served in the War of 1812

*Note:  Dates are date of rank.

Adams, William P. 1st Lieutenant, Massachusetts, June 21, 1814

Addison, William H, Captain. Maryland – April 27, 1814

Barker, Peleg, Captain, New York, July 11, 1814

Bayner, Richard, 1st Lieutenant, North Carolina, August 7, 1813

Boner, John, 3rd Lieutenant, North Carolina, August 7, 1813

Brooks, Frederick, Captain, North Carolina, August 7, 1813

Bunbury, M. Simmons, Captain, Maryland, October 1, 1813

Contourier, John J., 1st Lieutenant, South Carolina, August 4, 1813

Cummings, James J., 1st Lieutenant, North Carolina, August 1, 1813

Davis, John S., Captain, New Hampshire, June 27, 1814

Du Bose, John, Captain, August 1, 1813

Dubose, John , Captain, South Carolina, August 4, 1813

Foy, Gregory, 1st Lieutenant, Maryland

Gill, John, Captain, Maryland, November 25, 1813

Gorsuch, Gerard, 3rd Lieutenant, Maryland

Green, George W., 1st Lieutenant, Maryland

Hardwick, John, 3rd Lieutenant, August 1, 1813

Isaacs, John M., 3rd Lieutenant, New York, July 2, 1814

Kalm, John, 1st Lieutenant, Delaware, July 22, 1814

Lytke, William, 2nd Lieutenant, North Carolina, August 1, 1813

McNair, George, 3rd Lieutenant, Maryland

Mitchell, Bird B., 2nd Lieutenant, North Carolina, August 7, 1813

Morris, Lemuel, Captain, New York, August 4, 1813

Newell, Thomas M., Captain, Georgia, August 1, 1813

Newman, James, 2nd Lieutenant, Maryland

Nicols, Abraham, 1st Lieutenant, Georgia, August 1, 1813

O’Neal, Ferdinand A., 2nd Lieutenant, Georgia, August 1, 1813

Robinson, Caleb P., 2nd Lieutenant, Maryland

Russell, William, 1st Lieutenant, New York, June 4, 1814

Tabor, Pardonr, 2nd Lieutenant, New York, June 18, 1814

Terry, Noah, Captain, New York – June 18, 1814

Williamson, John M., 1st Lieutenant, New York – June 18, 1814

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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