Why You Can't Just Set Men Free

When I first read the Journal of Jean Laffite, I came across a passage that had me baffled. In it, Jean described how he and Pierre arrived in Mobile with a cargo of slaves that they had plundered from the Spanish, but the American customs tax was too high, so they could not unload and sell the slaves.  They turned back with their cargo in the direction of New Orleans, but could not sell them there, either,  and on the way they met a fishermen and gave him the slaves free of charge. What they could not sell, they gave away. That was when the Laffites realized they would need to find a base of operation in the New Orleans area where they would not have to go through American customs. Luckily, they found Grande Terre and Grande Isle.

The Passage about Giving Slaves to a Fisherman

"In November of 1804 we embarked for Cuba to capture our seventeenth vessel with a cargo of slaves. We set off for Mobile to sell the slaves, a very poor market, and lots of fees for right of entry of the Customs authority. We embarked for New Orleans and also had very little luck with the slaves. We took the boats back out to ocean in order to find a base to discharge the cargo. We found Grande Terre and Grande Isle, and we gave our slaves to a fisherman."

Why couldn't they simply have set the slaves free? Why did they have to give those people away, like a litter of kittens that had no resale value? Jean Laffite did not explain this, because to him it went without saying. The slaves had to go to a good home. They needed someone who would provide for them. They could not just be abandoned hungry and penniless to wander around like strays.

I later dramatized this predicament in a scene from Theodosia and the Pirates; The Battle Against Britain.

Excerpt from Theodosia and the Pirates: The Battle Against Britain

It is easy to become enslaved. Sometimes it happens suddenly. Sometimes it happens gradually. But you cannot expect to become free all at once. Biblical examples tell us that it requires at least forty years in the desert. Forty years is the time it used to take for most of the previous generation that had been born in slavery to die, and for those who were born free to take over the positions of leadership. In fact, chimpanzees, just like indigenous humans, tend to live about forty years in the wild, though much longer in captivity.

Photo Credit: The Daily Mail, UK
Chimpanzeessin Liberia, abandoned by their captors, beg for a handout

I recently read a news story about how the New York Blood Bank set up a virus testing laboratory in Liberia in 1974. They captured wild chimpanzees in order to run medical experiments on them. The captured chimpanzees lived on six little islands and were fed by their captors. They became totally dependent, even though they had once lived free. In 2005 the New York Blood Bank shut down their operation in Liberia, but they promised to care for the chimpanzees they had captured. The funds ran out last year. Now the chimpanzees are living on charity. Even though they are ostensibly free, they have become totally dependent on humans.

You can read the original news story here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3173127/The-heartbreaking-battle-save-66-chimpanzees-baby-left-starve-African-island-medical-firm-abandoned-finished-experimenting-them.html

When the Zionists settled in Palestine at the turn of the previous century, under the Ottoman Rule and later the British Mandate, they were the desert generation. When Israel acquired its independence in 1948, they were ready to be self-governing, and they had the ability to fight for their own freedom. Unfortunately, the country was then flooded with holocaust survivors who had not gone through the desert culling. They arrived with the values of dependency built in. That is why today, just like the chimpanzees in Liberia, Israel asks for handouts from the US.

The essence of slavery is not whips or chains or cages. You can tear off the manacles and open the cage door wide, but if the spirit is enslaved, the man is not free. Slavery is abject dependency.  The example of the liberated Liberian chimpanzees shows this very clearly.

The Price of Living in a House

Should everybody live in a house? Many people believe that this is a basic human right. Never mind that not all humans do live in houses. Some live in tents. Some live in igloos. Some are nomads. Some live in their vehicles or on board their ships. There are so many different ways of living, and who is to say that only one way is right?

Owning real estate is expensive, because it is often a target for robbery or taxation. It is easy to lay siege to someone holed up in a house, and without a standing army to protect the house from those intent on plunder, one might not stand a chance.  Are you willing to pay for that army? Or would you rather just move along? Miss just one payment of your property taxes and your title is gone!

"You can't sail away in a house," Jean Laffite says in Theodosia and the Pirates. Laffite spent most of his early adult life living on board a ship. But he was not unaware that countries such as Britain had vagrancy laws that made it illegal not to live in a house. At one time he and Pierre were arrested and thrown into prison while in England, on charges of vagabondage. Their crime? When questioned by police where they were living, they could not provide an address. They were living on board ship.

Aaron Burr, once the owner of the stately mansion, Richmond Hill, fell on hard times and found himself as a homeless exile in Europe. He often slept in brothels, not for the services offered, but because he needed a place to take shelter. Even when he returned to the United States, he was often in dire straits, and it became standard procedure for him to pawn his watch when in a financial pinch.

Aaron Burr's Watch

No matter how high our current station in life, and how much real estate we may own, it makes sense to remember that owning a house -- or even just renting one  -- is a burden that not everyone can support. Instead of making it a mandatory "human right", we should take into account that it's entirely optional, and there are many other ways of living to choose from.

It's also good to remember that real estate ownership, while sometimes difficult to come by, is open to all, if they can afford it. It is not always the case that powerful, important or famous people own real estate, and that members of minorities who are less powerful do not. At a time when Aaron Burr was destitute and Jean Laffite lived mostly on board ships, Marie Villard, who was a free black woman and the mother of many of Pierre Laffite's children, owned a house on Bourbon Street in New Orleans,

How much did Marie Villard's house cost? In 1819, at a time when the common free laborer was lucky to make a dollar a day, its market value was $9,000.00. This was before VA loans or Fanny Mae, and houses were purchased in cash, or, at best,  in four easy installments, consisting mostly of the principal, with very little interest.

Should a house to live in be a "human right"? I don't think so. Should people be thrown into prison if they don't have a fixed abode? No. Should you have to prove the address where you reside in order to be able to cash a check or take a job? I don't think so. I think you should be able to live any way you choose, provided you are not hurting anyone else.

Sometimes powerful men find themselves homeless, while unassuming single mothers own real estate. This can happen in a relatively free market, where the government does not interfere, and the right to the pursuit of happiness is guaranteed, but not the right to free housing at anyone else's expense.

Karl Marx and Jean Laffite: Owning the Means of Production

Was Jean Laffite a Marxist? I don't think so. I think he was a self-made wealthy person who believed in free enterprise, and who had a keen sense of the importance of property ownership. Reading his letter of protest to James Madison, you can see how pained Laffite was to have his property confiscated by the United States government.  Jean Laffite kept his money in a Swiss bank, divided it equally between the children of his two wives upon his death, and in all other respects followed the laws of contracts when divvying up the spoils on his privateering ships.The owner of the vessel was always paid a much larger share than the lowliest crew member, but each was paid a percentage of the take. Obviously property ownership was important to Jean Laffite, and he rewarded people based on their material contributions to the success of his ventures. He also donated money to causes he believed in, among them the liberation of slaves; and he took great pride in being able to do so.

But could Laffite  have supported Marx financially, as is suggested by some sources? I think that is entirely possible, given that what Marx may have said when he was young  and how it is interpreted today are two different things.

Young Karl Marx as he appeared in 1839
Source: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/photo/marx/images/39km1.jpg

Young Karl Marx is to be distinguished from old Karl Marx. To read some English translations of Young Karl Marx's works, you might want to follow this link:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Young_Marx.pdf

Could such an idealistic and ambitious young man have caught the eye of the aging Jean Laffite as someone whose cause was worth supporting?

Confession: I have not actually read Das Kapital.  I am also fairly sure that neither had Jean Laffite before he died, because this magnum opus by Marx  was not published until long after Laffite's death. But even if portions of it were available while Jean Laffite was alive, I am pretty sure he could not have read them, as they were in German.

If you would like to try reading it, Das Kapital  can be found free online here:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu56552327;view=1up;seq=5

It's all very long and very detailed and kind of hard to get a feel for  in one sitting. For instance, in the passage below, Marx is talking about how gold is used as currency, where it derives its value from, whether it is in itself a commodity and how it empowers private people in private business.  He even quotes Christopher Columbus as saying that gold is a "wonderful thing"  in a letter from Jamaica dated 1503.

Even if Jean Laffite, who was himself by no means a scholar, had tried to read some of Marx's works in manuscript, he could have read for a long time without encountering anything that sounded the least bit "Marxist."

One of the catch-phrases of Marxism is that workers should own the means of production.  But what does that actually mean? And how would it apply to privateering?

It was during the industrial revolution that tasks such as spinning and weaving, which had formerly been performed privately in the home, came to be done in factories by workers who did not own the equipment on which they were working . In the United States, immediately after the War of 1812, many businesses were incorporated and investors contributed funds and received stock in return, for the purposes of textile production. During the Panic of 1819, when the United States repaid to Britain the debt that it owed to Napoleon for the Purchase of Louisiana, many of these businesses went bankrupt or were on the verge of bankruptcy, due to a shortage of specie. But in order to prevent a general economic collapse, instead of allowing all these businesses to fail, the government passed debtor relief laws whose overall effect was to go to fiat currency instead of specie based currency. In the Western territories, confidence in paper money was so low that people went back to the barter system, using whiskey to index the value of all other commodities. Jean Laffite lived through all of that. At the time of his death, he was probably also aware of the extreme conflict of interest between the industrialized northern states, as opposed to the agrarian south.

Jean Laffite used the term "wage slavery", which refers to people who are paid a wage for working in other people's businesses. rather than owning their own business and getting a share of the profits. He expressed in his journal a desire to liberate wage slaves. Marx is known to have written of the extreme tedium and soul destroying monotony of working in a factory as a mere laborer. Jean Laffite's crew members were anything but wage slaves. The work they did was exciting, and they were motivated to work hard because unless there was a prize, they got paid nothing. They were not marking time to earn money by the number of hours that they served. They were paid for results, not for effort!

But does any of that mean that Jean Laffite favored nationalizing the factories and letting the government run them? I don't think so. On the contrary, he probably favored the privateering model, which is one that acknowledged the rights of owners of ships to the greater share of the spoils, but paid each crew member a specified percentage of the take.

Who actually did nationalize all the privateering vessels? In Cartagena. it was Simon Bolivar who did this. The last vessel that Jean Laffite is known to have served on was the General Santander, which belonged to the government of Colombia. There Jean Laffite, for the first time in his adult life, did not own the means of production, but was a mere government employee. In the United States, privateering was greatly curtailed as well, giving rise to a national defense that consisted of both a standing army and a standing navy, and discouraged the private waging of war for profit.

Can any modern day American warrior say that he owns the war machinery that he uses?

Not  everything is as it seems. Nationalization actually takes the means of production out of the hands of the workers. Socialism is the very opposite of privateering. And it stands to reason that if Jean Laffite supported Marx's position on the workers owning the means of production, he thought it meant a restoration of privateering in all trades and business, rather more nationalization of ships and factories. Jean Laffite was no Marxist, as that term is currently understood.

And how about Marx himself? I have no idea. I would have to read all his works before I could form a coherent opinion on the matter. But I can tell you this: I have a really strong hunch that he did not want people living off hourly wages. He wanted them to own things.

One of the memes floating around the internet today goes something like this: "Jesus was not a Christian. Mohammad was not a Moslem. Buddha was not a Buddhist. They were just people who had something to say." Is it possible that Karl Marx was not actually a Marxist?

Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain

Does it take a Hero to make it a Plot?

Today, I came across this blog post on my Facebook feed. It is very well written, which is why I am sharing it here.

https://medium.com/human-parts/my-cousin-is-not-a-hero-262c7fc12f36

I think it's a somewhat fictionalized blog post in which the protagonist -- who may or may not be the author -- argues that most people do not have a coherent plot to their lives precisely because they are not heroes. Things happen to them randomly --  sometimes even very big things -- but they totally fail to rise to the occasion, decline to learn any lessons and continue to be more or less the same person they were at the start of the story.

If this were true, most people would be sitcom character, like Homer Simpson or Archie Bunker. To be totally untouched and unchanged by every experience would in itself be a heroic trait, I would think. One can be an anti-hero or a comic hero, but still remain a hero somehow, by dint of sheer intransigence.

That blog post -- My Cousin is not a Hero --  is well written or it would not have caught my eye. But is it true? And isn't there a plot hidden somewhere in this story about the non-hero cousin and his meaningless, but eventful life?

I am both a writer and an editor, and, yes, I have seen would-be novels that had plenty of events and no coherent plot. A plot does not consist merely of a series of chronologically ordered events, no matter how stirring. There has to be conflict build up, a climax and a denouement. But does the hero have to change? And if so, how much?

According to K.M. Weiland, there is such a thing as a flat character arc, in which the novel has a plot, but the protagonist does not change.

http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2014/06/flat-character-arc-1.html

According to Weiland:

Next to the positive change arc, the flat character arc is the most popular storyline. Also called the “testing arc,” the flat arc is about a character who does not change. He already has the Truth figured out in the beginning of the story, and he uses that Truth to help him overcome various external tests.

But to have a plot, the character still has to overcome something, be tested and for there to be an outcome that has some sort of emotional as well as ideological meaning to the reader.

The problem with people who tell you that "real life" has no plot is not that they lead uneventful lives. And it is also not that they are impervious to change.  It's also not necessarily that they are not heroic. Some very heroic people fail to recognize the significance of their lives.  It's because they have no interesting vantage point from which to view the events that do happen in their lives. Most people do indeed change over a lifetime, both on the inside and on the outside. But they don't tend to shift their vantage point to learn what can be learned from their story. Or, alternatively, their vantage point shifts with the circumstances, so they cannot appreciate how very much they have changed. They have no perspective. They maintain no Olympian vision. Which is not to say that a third person observing them from a distance might not make a perfectly riveting story out of their lives.

Jean Laffite was indeed a hero. And he did write his own life's story. I enjoyed reading it. And it did provide a certain amount of perspective, before I could start my own version of that story. But for every person in real life that we can think of to write about, there are as many different perspectives from which to view them as there are authors. That's why a book about Jean Laffite by me is different from a book written about Jean Laffite by anybody else.

There is the story with its bare bones facts. There is the character of the protagonist who may or may not change during the story.  But there is also the framing process, in which the author decides on perspective. Without a frame of reference, there cannot be a plot.

A picture of a frame from the wikipedia

Most people's lives do have a plot. They are just standing too close to see it. And for every life story, what the plot actually is depends on where you are standing. Perspective matters just as much as character does. Even the lesson that we glean from the story of the non-heroic cousin is a moral colored by the viewpoint of the author.