The Mystery of Jean Lafitte’s Grave
by
John J. Dunphy
Separating fact from fiction is no easy task when writing about Jean Lafitte. When he applied in March of 1813 to the French consul in New Orleans for a privateer’s license, he gave his age as 32 and named Bordeaux, France as his birthplace. Some historians believe Lafitte may have been born in Bayonne, France or on the West Indies island of St. Dominique. While France may have recognized Lafitte and his older brother, Pierre, as privateers, the British and Spanish whose ships they preyed on regarded the two as pirates. American authorities generally shared that opinion.
Although Lafitte sought a formal license to engage in privateering in 1813, he and Pierre appear to have begun preying on ships in the Gulf of Mexico at least a decade earlier. The brothers established their base of operations in the swamps and bayous of Louisiana’s Barataria Bay. Jean ruled the “Kingdom of Barataria,” as the pirates’ colony came to be called, as though it were an autonomous state. Lafitte’s men captured scores of Spanish vessels, many of which carried slaves. These pirates converted their booty into cash by holding auctions in the swamps near New Orleans that drew bidders from the business community of the Crescent City. To protect his pirate kingdom, Lafitte began to store vast quantities of gunpowder and cannonballs, an arsenal that would play a critical role in the Battle of New Orleans.
The United States had entered the War of 1812 with high expectations. Britain was locked in a bitter conflict with Napoleonic France, which made it seem quite vulnerable to Congress’s young “war hawks” such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Even a respected intellectual such as former President Thomas Jefferson thought that conquering Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.” The possibility of dramatically expanding American borders, in conjunction with repeated incidents of the British navy stopping American ships on the high seas to seize cargo it deemed contraband and pressing American sailors into British service, played a vital role in goading President James Madison and Congress to declare war on Britain.
Even while waging war against Napoleon, however, Britain proved to be a formidable foe for the young United States. France’s defeat in 1814 allowed Britain to concentrate its forces on its former colony. America’s most humiliating defeat occurred in August of that year when the American militia at Bladensburg, Maryland was soundly defeated, allowing the British to advance on the nation’s capital. President Madison fled to Virginia, while the British commanders feasted on the meal that had been prepared for the chief executive! The White House and U.S. Treasury were then burned.
The British tried to follow up this success by capturing the vital port of Baltimore but failed to force Fort McHenry to surrender, an American victory that inspired Francis Scott Key to pen “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Still, the loss of our nation’s capital proved devastating to American morale.
The war had never been popular in New England, where the Federalist Party continued to show strength. Gouveneur Morris, who had drafted the U.S. Constitution, openly called for New England and New York to secede from the Union, a proposal that a majority of Federalists came to support. The United States, barely a quarter of a century old, was in danger of dissolving. Only a dramatic military victory could defeat the British as well as those Americans who advocated secession.
Lafitte and the men of Barataria had remained neutral during the War of 1812. In late 1814, a British military delegation threatened to send a fleet to destroy Lafitte’s pirate kingdom unless the Baratarians assisted the British in their campaign to capture New Orleans. When New Orleans had been secured, the British army would move up the Mississippi and, acting in concert with British forces in Canada, utterly rout all American resistance.
If Lafitte threw in with the British, he and his Baratarians would receive full pardons for privateering as well as land within the British territory of North America. His Majesty’s army would free Pierre Lafitte, who was imprisoned in New Orleans and faced hanging for piracy. To sweeten the deal even further, the British offered Lafitte 30,000 pounds — more than $2 million in today’s money — if he and the Baratarians fought the Americans.
Lafitte told the delegation that he accepted the offer but needed two weeks to prepare his men for the campaign. He then contacted the Louisiana government and revealed the British plan. Despite the tempting offer, Lafitte’s loyalty belonged to his adopted homeland.
Pierre shortly escaped or bribed his way out of jail and rejoined his brother, but the pirates were disconcerted to learn that the Americans intended to repay Jean Lafitte for conveying such vital information by sending a force to destroy Barataria! Lafitte gave strict orders to offer no resistance. The Americans attacked on September 16, 1814 and the pirates fled into the swamp, leaving behind about $600,000 of stolen goods as well as their cannon-laden ships. The community’s buildings were put to the torch, and the Kingdom of Barataria was wiped from the face of the earth.
General Andrew Jackson arrived in New Orleans in November of 1814 to take command of the American forces. Recognizing the need to shore up the city’s defense, Jackson met with Lafitte and decided to enlist his support. Jackson had commandeered many of Lafitte’s cannons but was woefully short of gunpowder and cannonballs. Lafitte, on the other hand, had a plethora of both stashed in the nearby swamps. The Baratarians, as experienced privateers, were excellent artillerymen who could lob these cannonballs with uncanny accuracy at the British.
The Battle of New Orleans, which raged through late December of 1814 to mid-January of 1815, was a stunning victory for the United States. The long rifles of Jackson’s Tennessee and Kentucky marksmen combined with artillery batteries staffed by Lafitte’s men decimated the British. Although the New Orleans victory actually occurred after the Americans and British had signed the Treaty of Ghent that formally ended the War of 1812, Jackson and Lafitte’s triumph had profound consequences. Great Britain now respected the United States as a formidable power. The status of the young giant of the West had risen dramatically in the eyes of the world.
The victory had an equally momentous effect within American borders. Members of the Federalist Party from five states had held a convention in Hartford, Connecticut in December of 1814 and passed resolutions supporting the right of states to divert federal tax revenue for state defense and to shield citizens from military conscription. A delegation taking these resolutions to President Madison was preceded by news of the New Orleans victory.
The Federalists were now tainted in the eyes of most Americans as a clique of defeatists and secessionists. Voters abandoned the party in droves. Its presidential candidate in 1816 carried just three states. The Federalist Party — the party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton — was finished in American electoral politics.
President Madison issued a pardon for Lafitte and the Baratarians as a reward for their role in the Battle of New Orleans. Lafitte was free to begin a new life as a law-abiding citizen. After reacquiring at auction the stolen property and armed ships that had been seized during the raid on Barataria, however, he departed New Orleans and obtained a privateering license from the marque of Cartagena, a Columbian seaport. Lafitte established a new pirate kingdom known as Campeche at Galveston, Texas and resumed plundering ships in Gulf waters.
By 1818, unscrupulous merchants from as far away as St. Louis were purchasing merchandise that had been stolen by Lafitte’s band. When Campeche was destroyed by a hurricane, Lafitte and his men rebuilt their pirate community. Lafitte survived the wrath of nature. Surviving the wrath of a president proved considerably more challenging.
President James Monroe was angered that the man pardoned by his predecessor for heroic service during the Battle of New Orleans had returned to his old trade. His anger turned to outrage in 1820 when one of Lafitte’s men plundered an American vessel. Lafitte attempt to placate Monroe by hanging the miscreant, but the chief executive sent a war-brig to Campeche whose captain issued an ultimatum to Lafitte and his pirates: Vacate Campeche or face expulsion by U.S. armed forces. After stalling for time, Lafitte finally complied in 1821.
Now the story gets complicated.
After leaving Campeche, Lafitte is said to have established a third pirate kingdom on Mugeres Island, which is located off the coast of Yucatan. It failed to flourish, however, and the great Jean Lafitte was reduced to piracy pure and simple when he could not obtain a privateer’s license. Herbert Asbury, in The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, states that Lafitte entered the Indian village of Teljas, on the mainland, in 1826, where he died of a fever. The Lafitte Society of Galveston, Texas notes that Lafitte disappeared after escaping from prison in Puerto Principe, Cuba in February of 1822. There are no confirmed sightings of Lafitte after the early 1820s, while reports of his death in a sea battle in the Gulf of Honduras in 1823 are not confirmed by primary sources.
And now the story gets really complicated.
In 1952, Stanley Clisby Arthur published Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover, a biography that drew upon material provided by one John Andrechyne Lafflin of Kansas City, Missouri, who claimed to be the great-grandson of the privateer-private. Lafflin, who argued that his famous ancestor’s name should be spelled with two f’s, possessed what he maintained were his great-grandfather’s journal as well as a family Bible that detailed Lafitte’s life after vanishing from history in the early 1820s. The journal was discovered in an old trunk owned by the family, Lafflin said. Arthur, grateful for the historical material that Lafflin provided, dedicated the book to him.
Lafflin, who is now deceased, had Lafitte’s journal published by Vantage Press, the vanity press firm, in 1958. The original journal, as well as the family Bible, are on display at the Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center in Liberty, Texas.
The journal has Lafitte born on April 22, 1782 at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the son of a French father and a mother who was a Sephardic Jew. His maternal grandfather, according to this account, was persecuted by the Inquisition and died of starvation in a Spanish prison. Jean and Pierre were educated at schools on Martinique and St. Croix. It was on the latter island, Lafitte’s alleged journal tells us, where they took a course in psychology so they could gain a better understanding of human nature. The reader is left to surmise to what extent a knowledge of psychology, which did not exist as an academic discipline until the late nineteenth century, aided Lafitte during his career as a privateer and pirate.
Young Jean affirmed his Jewish heritage by marrying Christine Levine, a Danish Jew who lived in the Virgin Islands, and bore the pirate three children before dying of fever. He married 23-year old Emma Hortense Mortimore at Charleston, South Carolina in 1832, a union recorded in the family Bible owned by Lafflin. Lafitte fathered two sons by his second wife: one who died at age 12, and Jules, who lived to carry on the ancestral line.
The retired pirate changed his name to Lafflin in an effort to escape his past and establish a new life. He moved to St. Louis, where he founded a gunpowder business known as Lafflin, Lafflin and Smith. The gentleman rover took time away from work to travel to Europe in 1847, according to a journal entry, where he met such celebrities as Alexis DeTocqueville, Louis Braille, Louis Daguerre and even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Arthur reproduced a two-page letter in Gentleman Rover that Lafitte supposedly wrote from Brussels in which the pirate stated that he intended to finance Marx’s activities but refused an invitation to help compose the Communist Manifesto. In another letter reproduced in Gentleman Rover, Lafitte states his intention to introduce Marx’s writings to a promising young Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln.
After the death of his son, the family of three moved to southwestern Illinois. Lafitte evidently was already familiar with the East Side. His journal bears dated entries when he visited such towns as Belleville, Carlinville, Edwardsville and Bethalto. The Bethalto references is especially intriguing., since it is dated May 4, 1846. It is a matter of historical record that the community now known as Bethalto was not called by that name until the mid-1850s.
According to Arthur, the adventurer whose name once struck terror in the hearts of merchant ship crews in Gulf waters perished because of a good deed. Lafitte learned that an aged, indigent friend and his wife, who lived on a farm outside of Edwardsville, were hungry and ill. He journeyed in the rain to their home and discovered them cold as well. Always the good Samaritan, Lafitte chopped some wood for the couple, thus getting even wetter. He came down with pneumonia the next day and died in Alton on May 5, 1854 at age 77.
Jules and Emma both wrote entries in the family Bible to note Lafitte’s death. Following a Mass, Lafitte was supposedly buried in the northwest section of a Catholic cemetery located about a mile north of Alton. Jules and his mother left Alton that summer, never to return. Emma, according to this account, never remarried and died in Philadelphia in 1885.
Lafitte’s alleged journal is written in French, a language that John Lafflin, a railroad engineer, claimed he didn’t know. The Vantage Press edition of the journal contains a letter from David C. Mearns, chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, attesting that the paper on which the journal is written appears to be from the early nineteenth century.
John Lafflin claimed in 1958 that his grandfather took him to visit the pirate’s grave in 1922. Don Huber, Alton Township Supervisor and local historian, has affirmed that a Catholic cemetery indeed once existed at the present-day 700 block of Northdale Drive in Alton, adjacent to the Confederate Cemetery. Known simply as the “Old Catholic Cemetery,” it was used for burials only from 1848 to 1858. The cemetery records were destroyed years ago in a fire, however. The site is now heavily wooded, and the tombstones were carried off over the years by vandals.
Arthur’s biography as well as the journal and family Bible upon which he drew for the controversial biography have won more than a few converts to the view that Lafitte is buried in Alton. A doctoral candidate in education at the University of Illinois, while vacationing with his wife in the bayou country near New Orleans in the early 1960s, was astounded when their guide concluded his account of Lafitte by noting that he was buried in the southwestern Illinois city. Alfred Leavell, Jr. utilized Arthur’s book and the alleged journal when writing his 1966 Master’s thesis about early Alton history at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
Alan Harrison, a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, made a presentation in 2000 to Alton Museum of History and Art board members and several city officials in which he stated that he believed Lafitte might well be buried in Alton. Harrison examined entries in Lafitte’s journal against old St. Louis City Directories and other sources. The rate of correlation was quite good, and he concluded that the journal was authentic.
Reputable historians have long declared Lafitte’s journal a fraud, however. Charles Van Ravenswaay, director of the Missouri Historical Society, denounced the journal in a 1953 letter to Alton High School history teacher Don Lewis. Van Ravenswaay argued that there was no proof of Lafitte’s residence in St. Louis or his supposed ownership of a gunpowder business.
Arthur’s biography includes a photograph of an alleged Manuel De Franca painting of Lafitte, his second wife and their two sons, that was said to be done in St. Louis around 1842. The original painting, according to the caption, hangs in Lafflin’s home. Van Ravenswaay said that the painting did not correspond in style to De Franca paintings in the collection of the Missouri State Historical Society. He also maintained that the clothing worn by the people in the painting was historically inaccurate for the 1840s. Van Ravenswaay and Lewis, now both deceased, were convinced that the journal was a fraud. Arthur’s Lafitte biography was hopelessly flawed, they concluded, and Jean Lafitte could not possibly be buried in Alton.
Still, no amount of academic skepticism likely will ever discourage the true believers. Visitors to the River Bend have been known to stop by The Second Reading Book Shop to ask for directions to “the cemetery where Jean Lafitte is buried.” Rumors still abound that Lafitte might have buried some of his pirate’s loot in the area, although — thankfully — no excavations have been attempted. Lafitte undoubtedly would be pleased to know that his mystique has continued into the twenty-first century.
Bibliography
Arthur, Stanley Clisby. Jean Laffite, Gentleman Rover. New Orleans: Harmanson, 1952.
Asbury, Herbert. The French Quarter: An Informal History of the French Underworld. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1938.
“Biographical Notes from the Lafitte Society of Galveston, Texas.” accessed at 3:35 pm on 8/10/07 at www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Lafitte
Brookkhiser, Richard. “Conscientious Objectors,” Time, March 26, 2007.
Dunphy, John J. “Is Jean Lafitte Buried In Alton?” Springhouse Magazine (Volume 24, Number 5).
Groom, Winston. “Saving New Orleans,” Smithsonian (August 2006).
Hillig, Terry. “Researcher says Jean Lafitte is buried in Alton cemetery,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 10, 2000.
Hunter, Sue-Ann. “Famed pirate isn’t buried here,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph, May 11, 1972.
Lafitte, Jean. The Journal of Jean Lafitte: The Privateer-Patriot’s Own Story. New York: Vantage Press, 1958.
Leavell, Jr., Alfred. “An Early History of Alton, Illinois: 1817–1865. Unpublished Master’s thesis completed at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 1966.
Maddox, Teri. “Searching for Jean Lafitte,” Belleville [IL] News-Democrat, April 20, 2000.
Reeves, Sally. “Searching for Lafitte the Pirate,” accessed at 1:05 pm on 8/10/07 at http://www.frenchquarter.com/history/jeanlafitte.php
Waley, Dave. “Research finds famed pirate may be buried in Alton,” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph, February 1, 2000.