Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation by Howard Fast Page A

reputable men.
    You must remember, that was a bad time; and bad times then were a good deal worse than bad times today. The country had been driven into a war it did not want and for which it was ill-prepared. The regular armies had been smashed, partly by the enemy, partly through the machinations of a group of traitors who had their headquarters at Hartford, Connecticut, and who had not only sold their honor for power, but were ready to sell their country, too. Defeat in war, partition of the nation, loss of independence and freedom, all that was acceptable to them if only it would destroy democracy and put them into the seat of power.
    But they are not our story; they failed, as other groups of their nature failed, before and since then. Our story concerns a pirate and a general. The pirate we have met; the general’s name was Jackson, and he came from Tennessee, which has raised up a good many sound men in the course of years.
    When everything was lost and the traitors would have withdrawn all armies from the field and made peace, Jackson recruited his own army. He raised it from Kentucky and Tennessee men, men who knew a horse and a rifle when they saw one and were also not ignorant of a thing called freedom. Properly, they were not a regular army, not even what they called, in those days, the militia, but a people’s army of armed citizens. The enemy was to call them “dirty-shirts” for the long, gray homespun hunting frocks they wore instead of uniforms. They were intent upon the preservation of the union because it involved so deeply their own preservation; let the union be dismembered, and they would be a fringe of homeless nobodies on a lost frontier.
    There were between two and three thousand of them, and they marched south with Andrew Jackson to lead them. They picked up some regular troops on the way, and they drove the Seminole Indians back into the swamps. They taught Spain a lesson in Florida, and then they marched west to where Wellington’s veterans were preparing to land at New Orleans and deal a death blow to the Union.
    When Governor Claiborne of New Orleans received Jean Laffite’s letter, he was inclined to act upon it. It contained the first definite and precise information concerning the British attack on New Orleans, and it offered, in defense of the city, a group of tried if undisciplined fighting men. But when he read it to his council, they pointed out to him that since such a degree of honor was obviously impossible in a pirate, therefore it was a forgery.
    So he sent it on to General Jackson, who was approaching New Orleans with his army of frontiersmen. Then he sent what troops he had to destroy the pirate’s stronghold at Barataria.
    Jean Laffite had his sources of information too, and when he heard of the governor’s decision, he sent for Dominique You.
    â€œBy God,” he told Dominique, “it is hard like the devil to be an honest man.”
    â€œAnd what for?” Dominique demanded. “Let them send their soldier down here. We smash them—pouf!”
    â€œWe don’t smash them.”
    â€œI think you crazy, so help me God. You don’t want to be governor of Louisiana?”
    And everyone agrees that Laffite’s answer, then and afterward, was, “What kind of damn fool land make me a governor? You want to live there?”
    â€œSure.”
    Laffite said, “You’re just a fool, Dominique. How much it cost for a deal to get Pierre out of jail?”
    â€œMaybe five thousand dollar,” Dominique said hopelessly.
    â€œGo get him out.”
    And that was that, and when Governor Claiborne’s little army showed up, the pirates were gone, cleared out completely; his victorious return to New Orleans was marred only by the fact that Pierre Laffite had disappeared from the city jail.
    So much for the record, but when you try to get at the root of what motivated that strangest of all pirates, Jean Laffite, even the