The Journal of Jean Lafitte : The Privateer-Patriot's Own Story [Paperback]

Jean Laffite (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1994

This is a reprint of the book published in 1958. It is the controversial account of Jean Laffite's life after he was supposed to have died in Yucatan in 1826.

Product Details

• Paperback: 153 pages
• Publisher: Dogwood Press; 1st edition (1994)
• ISBN-10: 0964684608
• ISBN-13: 978-0964684607
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,595,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars diary of a revolutionary, information still hot after 160 years, June 4, 2006

By 

Mark D. Whitaker (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Journal of Jean Lafitte : The Privateer-Patriot's Own Story (Paperback)

Lafitte lived longer than you think, was incredibly rich, and was deeply involved in secret spy networks as a courier for the revolutionary left.

Lafitte's memoires are an English translation of 160 year old handwritten manuscripts in French, first published in the late 1950s according to his wishes, though written before 1850.

This is the era before railroads, before the widespread use of the steam engine, or even the steamboat, or any major roads in the United States. Wooden ships still ruled the seas, the navies of the world, and people's lives.

Its setting is the entire Atlantic Rim, a hotbed of revolution and uncertain outcomes of nascent state formation in the Americas when European Empires still formally dominated most of it.

The story it tells is of an episodically written memoir by the Franco-American-Caribbean social revolutionary and privateer Jean Lafitte, after he faked his death and continued his revolutionary funding life. Before his faked death, Lafitte is at pains to stress--over and over with almost aristocratic insistence and disdain--that he is a "privateer", a gentleman legal pirate under governmental authorization of letters of marque instead of a grubby selfish pirate of the high seas.

He's additionally what could be called a "privateer CEO," running his own tiny statelet at Barataria, near present day Galveston, TX. Its economy was based on legal privateering contracts and less legal smuggling. Lafittee is equally insistent--over and over--that he is only a "smuggler" due to the increasing pressure of working against corrupt U.S. customs officials that disliked legal privateers like himself, and besides, the American people get what they wanted--no questions asked and no overhead surcharges.

As an unapologetic smuggler and an unapologetic privateer, Lafitte denies the epithet 'pirate' because of his authorized letters of marque--from as many as five separate countries simultaneously!

Some of his words sound like the ratiocinations of a Mafia don unused to being contradicted or interrupted while justifying his actions to help the poor and needy (that of course first depend on his hard tacticts to help himself) though these painful attempts at self-justification in the text give it even more verisimilitude.

What is more interesting about this narrative, is that he is additionally unapologetic because his smuggling was in service of social revolutionary goals, instead of petty selfishness. This revolutionary angle is the core of the narrative, packed with details.

As a privateer revolutionary, Lafitte describes himself as an enigma to his era, never revealing anything about himself except to his second wife--who herself he describes as an abolitionist activist in Philadelphia. He, as well as his sons, all lived under separate assumed names--though kept in contact.

Only later "after he had died" (so his story for public consumption went, and he spread many stories simultaneously about it to confuse), does he live in various cities. He "promises with his brother on New Years day xxxx" not to ever take the same route twice, or ever visit TX, LA, or Florida again." He comes to live in various places, mostly sporadically by design, like Philadelphia and St. Louis. During this period after his faked death, he eventually gives in to requests to write his memoirs, with the promise that they will remained sealed for 107 years after his real death. They are that explosive.

Lafitte is personally and deeply involved in the complicated international revolutionary politics of his era. On the one hand, this was the era when privateers were being inched out of power as state hired Navy forces in European and North/South American states, and branded increasingly as "criminals and pirates" if they resisted, when, it was only due to changing policies on naval support that they were being jettisoned. Privateers were state friends only a few short years before. Lafitte lived in this changeover period. The period he writes of would be from the close of the American Revolutionary war to the 1850s.

On the other hand, he is a social revolutionary who hides this double life from everyone. Lafitte writes to set the record straight on this double life in a "diary of a revolutionary in the age of sail," where the freedom of the seas and the "transport parity" between individuals and states were equal for the well outfitted on the open sea. For an anachronistic comparison that keeps the feel for this technological, transport, and military parity, attempt to think of Lafitte with several hundred of his own private aircraft carriers--all kept clean and spotless with their centrally trained crew and generous supply lines. This is the type of world we are talking about. This is why most states of Europe relied upon privateers.

And what an expose it is into this world. If people's lives seemed taller then, it is because states were much shorter then--the transport and military parities made Lafitte basically equal to all states in his immediate vicinity and even overseas in Europe. He was a wanted ally as much as a feared enemy, sometimes both at once.

Lafitte considers himself an American patriot against imperialisms of British and Spanish Empires in the New World. The letters describe how he faked his death at a convenient time of his life when his fortunes were low (soon after the U.S. Government forced him to burn down his Barataria commune; he organizes this self-destruction of the commune within several weeks quite calmly and with respect to the U.S. Navy officers who ordered him, entertaining them during the interim and showing them around. This would be near present day Galveston, TX--even though it was out of U.S. jurisdiction to give such orders since Texas was not the United States then! The threat would certainly have been backed up by a "Barataria-U.S. War" unless Lafitte had complied. According to Lafitte he should have been decorated (and really he wanted financial compensation) as a War of 1812 hero for his defense of New Orleans. Next, embittered, though still an idealist--and still connected--Lafitte and his whole family went underground to continue to serve the revolutionary and democratic equality cause that America he felt had increasingly stopped serving.


Let's address misconceptions before we go further. This book has not been "debunked" by (isn't that ALWAYS the case?) mysterious nameless and unverifiable unknowns in the above so called hit-and-run review.

Instead, for you, dear reader, inconveniently ignored by the reviewer above who didn't even read the book in my opinion, the book's introduction notes that the U.S. Library of Congress has verified the age of papers of the originals as from the era and dates in question. Second, as for the content, I would argue that much of it seems accurate as well, because it fits many names and relationships that could only have been known by such a parapolitical insider like the revolutionary privateer Lafitte. Third, the State of Texas shelled out big cash for the originals and they are considered a prideful part of their official history. These three points should be enough to verify its age, contents, and legitimacy.

Fourth, Lafitte is claimed to have left instructions that it was only to be published well over 100 years after his real death, around 30 years after his faked death. This is a record of these "lost years," which were perhaps just as full as the rollicking life as a commune-CEO-privateer-leader of Barataria with hundreds of ships and millions of dollars of booty being moved through daily, and his own court system at his disposal and virtually limitless access to wealth from his five letters of marque.

Fifth, it should hardly be surprising that people who are in the thick of such social situations fake their deaths since the same still occurs in the present for the same rationales and, in a less extreme sense of mere "identity change", in witness protection programs. Therefore, taking all this in, no one should be shocked at the pratices of or the activities of Lafitte that he blithly discusses. Such intrigue is all the more likely to be the common coin of innately double revolutionary lives as Lafitte, given his amazing high level connections with French royalty (the revolutionary empire of the Bonapartes), as well as U.S. governmental actors that increasingly desired to smother (according to Lafitte) the real story about his life and his aid in the War of 1812. The U.S. government refused Lafitte payment for his services and materials, and attempted to ignore him after the War of 1812 despite his many trips to Washington, D.C. Soon after these trips, the U.S. "makes Lafitte an offer he can't refuse" in the early 1820s, and Lafitte burns down his Barataria compound for them. He then plants his faked death stories soon after these turnabouts.

Other Lafitte brothers were well connected enough to have served as major leaders of Napoleonic Armies in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, as well as one was involved in organizing an attempt to spring the British-jailed Emperor Napoleon from St. Helena.

Jean Lafitte himself claims to have aided financially Karl Marx and Frederich Engels during a funding visit to Paris, where he couriered his personal funds and funds from other American bankers sympathetic to communism (or simply wanting to control it, without idealists Lafitte's knowledge of that level of it). Marx and Engels of course are the hired cribbers of the League of the Just, who wrote the League's Communist Manifesto (which didn't have Marx's name on it and was not associated with him for decades by the way). The League (and obviously Jean Lafitte) wanted it to be ready... Read more ›

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good historical overview, September 12, 2003

By 

"asaintlouisprivateeye" (St. Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Journal of Jean Lafitte : The Privateer-Patriot's Own Story (Paperback)

For people trying to learn more about time historical events of Jean Lafitte, this is a good read. But do not think that this is the actual journal of "The Terror of The Gulf". Instead, it has been proven, that this is actually the journal of a man living in St. Louis in the 1800s who believed himself to be Jean Lafitte. The author has a superb knowledge of events of the time, but his knowledge of such places like New Orleans and Galveston Island in Texas is lacking. Jean Lafitte loved Galveston and established a community and government on the island, including a house that he named "Maison Rouge" that he loved dearly. For a man that loved a locale such as this, one would think that that more emotion and detail would be given. None the less, it gives a good insight into the history of the time and how people thought. I also suggest "Jean Lafitte: Prince of Pirates" for learning a lot about the Gentleman Pirate himself.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, June 24, 2009

By 

A. Hadaway (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Journal of Jean Lafitte : The Privateer-Patriot's Own Story (Paperback)

No one knows if these are really lafitte's writings. Sounds like only he could have written it, so its kind of confusing. I actually got an original copy in very good condition from when it first came out.