John Barth - Letters

Now, from Andrew Cook IV’s earlier point of view there would have been everything to be said for a British victory: Thomas Jefferson himself fears that once possessed of Louisiana the British can hold it indefinitely, navigating with impunity from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and effectively bordering the United States at the Mississippi; and radical New England Federalists are maintaining publicly that British possession of Louisiana will signal dissolution of the Union and legitimize a New England Confederation. But our ancestor has become, however qualifiedly, a patriot: if he does not want the Indians driven into the Pacific, neither does he want the Union dissolved. (A French Louisiana would be another story: a third influence, to check both British and American expansion into the West…)

He fears, moreover, that the confrontation will be horrific. Cochrane will reinforce his expedition massively at Jamaica (There are rumors that Wellington himself is being sent to lead the army. In fact, Wellington has advised the British cabinet to relinquish their demand for an Indian free state and settle a treaty: in his view, the loss of Tecumseh and of naval control of the Lakes has lost the war). Andrew is no lover of General Jackson, the butcher of the Creeks, but he knows him to be a formidable officer; if the defense of New Orleans will be made difficult by the shortage of regular troops and armaments and by the ethnic diversity of its defenders — Spanish, Mexicans, Anglo-Saxons, West Indians, free blacks and “coloreds,” Creole French both Bourbon and Bonapartist, even Italians and Choctaws! — its invasion will be also, through a labyrinth of bayous where only the alligators and the Baratarians are at home.

It is our progenitor’s official hope, then— was, he reminds Andrée — that he can help turn the battle into a siege at worst, till the treaty is announced, by persuading each side that the other is decisively superior. With the aid of the Baratarians, perhaps Jackson can contain the invaders in a holding position; knowing Cochrane’s irresolution and his greed for prizes, Andrew even imagines that the admiral might be bought off with a negotiated indemnity, and the ransom ships then seized at sea by Lafitte’s privateers. It is exactly such audacious traffic that the U.S. Navy has tried to break up by destroying Barataria in September and arresting Pierre Lafitte and Dominique You (Jean’s older brothers, the latter under his nom de guerre): a move deplored by New Orleans merchants whose stock in trade comes from the privateers.

Thus Andrew’s official reasons. But we have seen how the Cooks and Burlingames fly from husband- and parenthood; how this Andrew in particular is in flight from the general Pattern of our past and the specific course of his life’s “first cycle” (in my view, he runs into and perpetuates what he flees, like King Oedipus). There is moreover his guilt concerning Andrée, and concerning dead Tecumseh. And that blow on the head…

Plus one thing more, Henry, which he does not list among his motives but mentions promptly (as though in passing) in this letter. Andrew reaches New Orleans in late November 1814; he puts himself in touch with his friend Jean Blanque of the state legislature, who introduces him to Jean Lafitte. Cook has sensibly assumed the name of his Gascon forebear André Castine: Lafitte and Blanque are fellow Gasconards, from Bayonne, home of the eponymous ham and the bayonet. They hit it off at once; Cook’s impression is confirmed that the French Creoles want neither a British victory, which would end their influence and their privateering, nor an overstrong Federal presence: Mayor Girod himself had disapproved of the navy’s raid on Barataria. Like Andrew, but for a different reason, they prefer uneasy balances of power: it is Cartagena’s rebellion against Spain, for example, that licenses their privateering. Lafitte and Blanque are convinced that the 5,000 Baratarians, their copious munitions and supplies, local knowledge and experience of combat, could turn the coming battle in either direction. They would prefer to fight on the American side, in exchange for a general pardon and tacit permission to reestablish their “business”; but despite their refusal of British overtures to cooperate against “the destroyers of Barataria,” Andrew Jackson has ill-advisedly proclaimed against them, calling them “hellish banditti.” Jean Lafitte himself has scarcely been able to arrange Pierre’s escape from the New Orleans Cabildo, where Dominique You still languishes in heavy irons. Indignantly they show Andrew the offending proclamations, as translated and reprinted in a month-old issue of the local French-language Bonapartist newspaper, L’Abeille. He reads; he politely tisks his tongue at Jackson’s sanctimonious imprudence. Then his eye is caught by a familiar phrase in a neighboring column: “…next, drawing from her purse the deadly letter-opener…” (“… ensuite, tirant de son sac à main l’ouvre-lettre mortel…”). It is from an installment of a serial fiction, Les lettres algériennes, par C.C.

Andrew demonstrates for his companions his remarkable ability to imitate the speech and manners of rural Anglo-Americans and proposes to intercede for the Baratarians with General Jackson, under the name of Andrew Cook of Maryland. He then inquires about this “C.C.” A pregnant Spaniard, Lafitte tells him with a smile: current mistress of Renato Beluche, an old comrade and fellow buccaneer with a peculiar fancy for expectant mothers. He Jean has been instilled by his Jewish grandmother with an animosity toward all things Spanish (the Inquisition killed her husband and drove the family to Haiti, where Jean and his brothers were sired by their Gascon father); but “Uncle Renato,” a New Orleans Creole of Tourainian descent, does not share this prejudice. As for his special taste in women, Beluche declares it to be a matter of sweetened complexions, the convenience of nonmenstruation, and the freedom from responsibility for by-blows; but Jean attributes it to Renato’s mother’s having been left pregnant at her husband’s death, and to young Renato’s solicitude for her.

Satisfying himself that Consuelo is, at least until her term, in good hands (Beluche has set her up in a flat on Conti Street, near Jean’s own mistress, and prevailed upon friends at L’Abeille to translate and publish her fiction. When delivery time comes he will see to her accouchement, give the newborn a generous birthday gift, and look for another expectant beauty in need of protection), Andrew presses his inquiry no further, but decides to use some other English name in his dealings with Jackson.

It is this ready and thorough improvisation of identities which Lafitte finds most appealing in our ancestor. Himself at this time a suave 32-year-old who for a decade already has been chief among the Baratarian captains, he relishes pseudonyms and disguises, but has no gift for facial change and the imitation of speech. When Andrew now alters before their eyes the set of his jowls, the flare of his nostrils, the cast of his eyebrows and the pattern of his facial wrinkles, along with his stance, apparent height, and timbre of voice (he becomes “Jonathan Barlow, elder nephew of the late American minister to France: born in New England, educated in Paris and London, now come down from Kentucky as confidential observer for his old friend Henry Clay”), Lafitte offers him at once the post of minister of magic in whatever new Barataria might rise from the ashes of the old when the British are turned back.

But first they must be turned, and to their turning our forebear credits himself with three significant contributions. Early in December Andrew Jackson arrives, gaunt with dysentery and the rigors of his march from Florida, and assumes command of the city’s defenses. He inspires morale; he moves with industry and intelligence to fortify or block the likeliest approaches; but he has not enough men. In particular he lacks trained sailors and cannoneers, and heavy weapons for their use. Reinforcement is on the way, from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, but it is all cavalry and infantry. Delegations of Creole citizens petition him in vain to enlist the Baratarians. To the bilingual “Ambassador from Kentucky” (whom he trusts for “speaking like a proper American and not a damn’d Frenchie”) Jackson confides that he has begun to regret his proclamation, but fears he will be thought irresolute if he rescinds it. “Johnny Barlow” opines that his friend Henry Clay, in such a situation, would subtly shift his stand and refuse the next such petition on jurisdictional instead of moral grounds: Baratarian leaders are in jail awaiting federal prosecution, and he Jackson has no authority to release them. “Barlow” will then see to it that the petitioners and the federal district judge get the hint; when prosecution is suspended and the Baratarians are released, Jackson may accept their service and materiel without having solicited them. The matter of pardon can be postponed until after the emergency. Jackson will thus have at his disposal the best sailors and cannoneers in the world, at no cost to the U.S. Treasury, together with an exquisite network of strategic information. Any contradictions of his proclamation will pass unnoticed; the Baratarians’ role can be ignored or understated in official dispatches to Washington; their prosecution can even be resumed at some future date, with or without giving them covert advance warning and time to escape.