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

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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 for the 1848 revolutions in Europe, which mostly failed. Hot political stuff. Lafittee drops other long term planning revolutionary ideas as well, somtimes pre-scheduled more than 50 years in advance.

In 1847, Lafitte travels to Europe right before the pre-planned 1848 revolutions, and funds Marx and Engels whom he meets there. (Marx of course has other high level American funding and sponsorship connections--& Marx after these failed revolutions comes to work for a New York City newspaper in the 1850s, run by an abolitionist that Lafittee name drops as well (read it!). This was the same set up of sponsoring "out of work revolutionaries as newspapermen" as Trotsky was to take advantage of 50 years later in New York City as well, by the way.

Lafitte comes across as a privateer revolutionary republican, someone on the front lines instead of a revolutionary planner himself. His "need to know" basis of information may have been limited in other words, to keep him a dedicated idealist for revolutions that were increasingly steered by self-serving secret socities in the 1800s without the revolutionaries' knowledge.

Lafitte was for universal equal rights for men and women, no state churches, secular laws over religious laws, and a form of economic democracy under his privateer commune-state. This Barataria commune/state was run from booty, he claims, that came entirely and stricly from legal privateering and, on the side, any justified smuggling in the process to escape corrupt customs officials that refused to deal with privateers or attempted to "impound" (i.e., steal for themselves) his high quality merchandise.

Lafitte's commune, like his entire life, can be located in the gray legal area between states and their "legal crimes"--just like his gray territorial area commune was between the Jefferson-Napoleon alliance deal of the Louisiana Purchase (exchanged for funding Napoleonic armies in Europe, through ironically the English Baring Brothers bank, that organized the French war machine) and the Spanish Empire/Texas/Mexico (around current day Galveston, TX. There was no Galveston then, and the Texas that was there was "the original Texas"--a poorly policed province of the Spanish Empire in Mexico, then next to the Lousiana Purchase with ill-defined borders between these where Lafitte set up shop.)

It still feels "politically sensitive" now to tell the truth about Lafittee since it deals with revolutionary politics, spycraft, secret financing, secret miltiary deals, secret socities, private armies, U.S. corruption, and much more because it is still continuing in the present in an unbroken chain European conspiratorial revolutionary actions that have always had worldwide revolutionary aims.

It is these political hot topics of revolutionary networks, espionage, spycraft, murders, and payment for criminal services rendered which probably embarrasses most nearsighted "American history" professors raising their students on a weak soup of "social studies" instead of deadly real geopolitical strategy and the Janus-faced qualities of political realities.

It is because such personalities and activities have been whitewashed out of most metanarratives that choose instead to pretend history is exclusively abstract social forces, proclaimed happenstance events, coincidences, and iterative activities. Sure this exists as well, though to deny there is more than that is misleading.

What led Lafittee to write then, to blow his revolutionary network's cover (even if there was a 107 year fuse), if with spies and revolutionaries clearly discretion is the better part of valor? It all seems to be involved in two complaints. First, was the refusal of the U.S. Government to recognize (or compensate) for his financing of the protection and defense of New Orleans during the several attempts of British invasion at New Orleans in the War of 1812-15. Lafitte provides much detailed information about various attempts at landings that could be cross-checked in British Napoleonic War era ship captain's records. The U.S. for its part, preferred to leave his role in saving New Orleans "undocumented" and ignored, and thus unrewarded. The second theme seems to be his complaint that the U.S. is increasingly making more deals with the bad guys of the British Empire and the Spanish Empire and rejecting extension of the American revolution, for instead, the desire to benefit only a small number of crony financiers and their corrupting politicians have completely different ideas about "development for themselves" instead of development for the people at large. Therefore, he doesn't mind stepping on some toes to set the record straight--with the caveat that everyone involved will be long dead by the time these memoirs were ordered to be published over 100 years later.

One interesting bit of counterfactal historiography entertained by Lafitte does come across as quite plausible. Suppose, he asks, if he decided to sit out the War of 1812 in his Galveston commune? Or, more interestingly, what if he did ally with the British in the War of 1812 when they approached him numerous times with highly lucrative deals, attempting to pay him as an private ally to support their British attack on the U.S. at New Orleans? Lafitte refused the British alliegance offers, and instead plowed his whole fortune into protecting New Orleans (privately without being hired to) recognizing the seriousness of the lack of protection that the mouth of the Mississippi had against the British then, which the U.S. government was ignoring as well, he says, by the shoddy or non-existent defense works he sees there and the terrible condition of the starving and shoeless troops of Gen. Jackson which arrive only after Lafitte had fended off the British by himself once. Lafitte spends copiously to outfit and maintain Jackson's shoddy troops after they begrudingly arrive in little condition to fight.

So, from all the war materiels he provided to the underfunded and ill equipped Jackson--Lafitte's hundreds of ships, tons of ammunition, thousands of clothes/boots, rifles, training, leadership, skilled engineers for landworks--the U.S. perhaps might have lost both the War of 1812, and the whole American revolution, it being finished off by 1815. Poof. No more. It would be the "British Empire from sea to shining sea."

This is because Britain, by then successfully going up the unprotected Mississippi, could link up with British troops in Canada already waiting there to come south. Thus the British could retake the American colonies from both the Mississippian west and the Atlantic east, the Gulf of Mexico south, and the Great Lakes North ending the revolution and putting British law in place once more. Lafitte didn't want to see this British north-to-south link up happen down the Mississippi River.

The astounding wealth of the Lafittes is only hinted at in some jaw dropping offhanded comments--with the huge numbers of ships he owned (hundreds upon hundreds--once the U.S. seized he wrote "seveal hundreds" (yawn, I have more) of his ships in New Orleans, which obviously represented only a fraction). He details the contents and detailed records of seizures of others himself. These detailed records, he says, comes from his private 'Barataria Corporation' (so to speak) files, that he kept after he burned it down. The fine grained ridiculousness and hyper-documented quality of parts of his texts in these areas only seem to show its accuracy because only a dull accountancy sheet and a mafia don wanting to make sure that his employees weren't stealing all the booty out from under him would want to remember or track these things from the second they were unloaded at Barataria to where they were put into use or sold/smuggled.

His Barataria commune seems a surreal admixture of a hard nosed "lean and mean" corporation, though with well paid (even well loved) employees, devoted to privateering and smuggling, and all run by a hyperrich "kind hearted mafia don" as the CEO who designs his lair as a revolutionary experiment in enlightened despotism--a utopia where privateer workers have really more rights and protections and freedoms than did the citizens of the United States at that time--or any other.

As a presumed primary document written by a spurned revolutionary angry at how the corrupt wealth in the U.S. was destroying the American revolution he cherished so much, he is quite willing to ruin reputations of the corrupters in the process--all the fake patriots and supposed "good guys" in the American historical narrative that were totally corrupt to the core, he says.

He drops dozens of names and many instances of double dealing or crimes that went unpunished or unreported by so called "American heros" that can be followed up. Lafitte sheds light on a period in the U.S. when revolutionary ardor was cooling, to the chagrin of people like him, who considered himself wholly supportive of the U.S. democratic experiment in self-rule (as it put it) "to opppose the British Dragon." He has nothing except ill will for Spain's hundreds of years of tyranny in the New World as well.

However, by the mid 1800s, which was the period Lafitte was writing American elites started to support the Spanish and British Empires once more as trading partners, slowly ousting ideas that would please the revolutionary ardor and equality policies promoted by international privateer Jean Lafitte.

Philosphically, Lafitte himself blamed the coming of both self-sourcing state navies as well as the railroads as another factor that removed the viability of his isolated utopian commune. Railroads, as he saw it, only allowed the expansion of Washington-based political crony corruption across the U.S.; it additionally destroyed the local viability of democracy and his commune's geopolitical isolation from state land based army supply lines. As Lafitte himself conjectures it was a combination of the railroads and better transportation across land for state army tyrannies that slowly forced out his more autonomous commune jurisidictions, wiped out the Native Americans, and he claims-- incrasingly wiped out U.S. democracy. "Development for the people" and equality along a frontier was jettisoned in the U.S. he notes for development for only the rich.

Plus, transport ease Lafitte complains brought carpetbaggers who were socially clueless to Lafitte's utopian community, which frightened their senses of more extreme inequality and hierarchy (or worse, he says, they knew about him and wanted to destroy him because such equalities provided a "bad example for cowering workers"--to see a working example of such frameworks.)

He recounts several deals where carpetbaggers or what would soon be called filibusterers attempted to hire Lafitte as a miltiary hired gun for private development--i.e., to steal someone else's territory or Indian territory to set up a rich man's tyranny, without any care for equal civil rights. Lafitee refused to support such projects of stealing Indian land for private developers, and even defended Native Americans against such things.

Lafitte frowns on the increasing takover of private financiers of the United States government for development, instead of frontiersman, as well as describes various attempts of financiers to woo him as their hired gun for filibustiering territory (like William Walker would do soon after in Latin America). Instead of an outlaw frontier town, Lafitte's commune was a very ordered place, a court system, civil marriage ceremonies, religious freedom, removal of ethnic bias. However, it was increasingly pressured on the outside by the unequal racist U.S. Anglo-Saxon polity that supported slavery and hated the French equally. Lafitte found the Anglo-Saxon dominated culture of U.S. democracy scheming to remove his less hierarchical system of government, as well as scheming to demote the political equality of French Acadaians in Louisiana. The Acadians were detested by the British (that pushed them out of Canada 50 years earlier) and boorish Anglo-Americans alike (that were moving in after the Louisana Purchase and shocked at the ethnic equalities in New Orleans--then, before Anglo-America imported its racial caste and slave culture structure to it.)

His communes had more civil freedoms than the United States--even if economically speaking they were parasitiacal and based on privateering. However, this can hardly be more parasitical for the way the United States "developed" itself against the Native Americans for instance. Lafitte comes across as a champion of the Native Americans, in refusing to be hired to steal their land by East coast private developers attempting to hire him for the project. One memorble quote, paraphrasing, "if the U.S. had given the French full acceptance instead of only hostile toleration, there would have been nothing like the racist frontier was that the English Americans made their permanent policy." He says the same for the Indians, since the French in Canada had a completely different policy on such things than the British in Canada.

A lot of counterfactual "what if's" throughout the Lafitte text does provide a lot for thought, similar to the "outside looking in" views of DeToqueville in his 1840s book _Democracy in America_. It's interesting to compare DeToqueville's and LaFitte's comments on the expanding racist, corrupt Anglo-America, side by side--seen from his Barataria compound and a reflection of having to abandon it at the point of a gun.

In short, Lafitte seems to feel his shunting from the revolutionary limelight is undeserved. He seems to have written his memoires to make his part played in American history more explicit, and as revenge for betrayal. Served up over 100 years later, revenge is definitely best served cold though some of the information still is politically hot now.

It is this independent actor part he played that messes up much of the pabulum that is taught for "American history". These are real stories of individuals mostly purged to make way for artificial (and unreal) myths about "abstract social forces", "coincidences," and "unplanned events", and "iterative long term effects" only. Lafitte puts 'back in' the power, corruption, and lies of frontier development American style, whether from the two faced "American heroes" he dealt with (whether selfish tyrannical military officers or corrupt judges and newspapermen), written from the point of view of an increasingly spurned revolutionary ardor.

Lafitte's story puts us in the thick of an era (that has yet to end...actually...) dominated by secret societies, revolutionary ardor, betrayal, observations, and some of the most ice cold hearted comments about life, observations about human psychology, cowardice, heroism, motivation, other's human vanity (and how to take advantage of it and employ it or force it to one's will), and general living you will ever see.

So pick up the book, and go back to when the British Empire still entirely ruled the world's seas and was plotting to destroy the young American revolutionary experiment. And perhaps almost did. Except for Lafitte? You decide. This book will certainly make you more curious to follow up some of the information he relays. The Lafitte text fills in some interesting gaps in the early 1800-1850 revolutionary period as well as Naval history in general.

If Lafitte can be believed (he marshals an incredible array of evidence--and one asterisked note in the text from the editors note that some such documents he talks about still exist in some archives to cross verify some astounding claims), then his refusal to be bought off by the British Empire and participate in the recolonization of the United States via New Orleans certainly deserves more than a footnote to history. Lafittee may indeed be called a "Later Founding Father", a preserver of the American Revolution as the British attempted to destroy it in the international U.K.-Napoleonic Global War era.

The names themselves and their relationships alone would be a hot topic for any master's thesis to attempt to verify or qualify! Lafitte considered his journal so scandalous he said it was not to be published until 107 years after his writing. When it is connected with information in Epperson's The Unseen Hand concerning the Civil War and European financial attempts to dominate the early United States mentioned in _Pawns in the Game, the "Lafitte text" seems right on the money--highly accurate, intelligent, and perceptive.

On the whole, Lafittee has become painted as a pirate by the winners who wrote the brainwashing histories. However, if these Library of Congress verified 1820s-onward papers are true (and they are to both Texas and the Library of Congress) they can speak to us now of how much Lafitte was a winner in his era who was forced underground even further than he was already, after the US Army forced him at gunboat to destroy his Barataria/Galveston 'commune' in the 1820s (or they would) even if he was not in U.S. jurisdiction.

It would be hard (and pointless) to make up the Lafitte text, and it would be particularly hard to defraud the U.S. Library of Congress. Some of the "mistaken" things he mentions due to the era's scientific knowledge ring true as well. Even though I would like to see photocopies of the original documents (which are supposedly in the original 1958 first edition), this cheap paperback version (cheaply bound, though servicable) will interest anyone with a taste for pirates (excuse me, Mr. Lafitte, I mean "privateers of marque"), utopian communities, and the ideals of the American Revolution ("that sacred document" he writes, of the Declaration of Independence). As Lafitte writes, he sees its increasing betrayal--with U.S. racial issues and wealth disparities contributing to the failures of the U.S. to live up to its own revolutionary ideals to instead become a rich man's country only for the rich.

I've been reading this parapolitical genre for years and this Lafitte text really filled in lots of the holes of the continuity of the revolutionary societies of the late 1700s throuh the commencement of the American Civil War.

This "gray time" of just what was happening in this period is just where Lafitte's puzzle piece privateer story with its high French royal connections and revolutionary career commences. The period covered is from the close of the Ameican Revolution through the 1820s demotion of his utopian commune, and onward (increasingly episodically after his faked death) is very interesting.

This would make a fine movie. There are some rather poignant scenes he relates. Oh, what if the U.S had developed along all these little autonomous communes, we can only ask, instead of the consolidated financiers of railroads and corruptions they brought (and bought) in their wake, in both civil politics skewing as well as corporate domination skewing?

Lafitte's ideal still rings true 200 years later. In many ways it is a dated book, though the topics it treats are quite timeless in their ideals. Whether it was Lafitte or the translator it is hard to judge, though there are some very touching observations well phrased, even poetical.

It is this kind of untouched upon and completely uncommented upon synchronicity only noticable to the well read (ahem, me) that was most impressive. To be this impressed, however, depends upon lots of other readings to 'fit' Lafitte into the cumulative revolutionary and secret society story of the late 1700s through the Ameican Civil War.

In my opinion, a lot of the name dropping surreally fits. This could only have been done in my opinion with either first hand knowledge of the era or with the knowledge of books published by the 1970s onward. However, the Lafitte text was published first in the 1950s. This is further security that it is a rare type of primary document, a "diary of a revolutionary."

Only the "real McCoy"--or here the real LaFitte--would have been making such connections that have only surfaced from the 1970s.

All in all, a worthy contribution to American history, pirate/privateer history, and naval history, because it crystallizes a moment in time very well. Lafitte is quite a character. If you want to complicate your life and your view of American history, this book is for you. It provides many fine grained name-dropping details that assuredly would check out from French records or British records elsewhere, as some the editors note already do.

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.

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.