Ode to Privateers

Today on Historia Obscura, we have the first poem about the Battle of New Orleans.

The First Battle of New Orleans poem

Notably absent is any mention of Jean Laffite. To correct this omission, I have written a different poem about the same topic.

Sketch of Jean Laffite by Lanie Frick

Ode to Privateers

by Aya Katz

There are men who die for their nation,

    Who unselfishly give up their lives

There are men who live for their station,

    Who prevail without sacrifice.

There are women who raise up their children,

      And scrub floors and clean bottoms and nurse,

At the end of the day they want payment

      In undying love and remorse.

But the love that is true does not barter

Or require one to suffer to pay

For the care and affection a baby

Ought always to have anyway.

Now Britain was one kind of mother

Who demanded a fee for her love,

And she forced former children to serve her,

And she never accepted rebuff.

She kidnapped, indentured those sailors,

     Who had never agreed they should serve

And she thought she could live off the payments

     That others were making to her.

But Americans swore they were freemen,

      And only would work for their gain

And they never consented to fiefdom

     To serve under England or Spain.

Now Madison turned to the Congress

     And he asked that a war be declared

Against Britain, that unruly mother,

     Who forced sailors under her care.

But the coffers of war they were empty,

     And the army and navy were poor

And American patriot  menfolk

    Were not ready to set out to war.

They had sworn that they never would live for

    Another, and only alone for their gain,

And who wants to die for the right to

     Avoid paying taxes again? 

If not for the brave privateers who

Had always made war for their gain,

Who would set aside natural fear for

The right to know freedom again?

When the British approached Jean Laffite and

Required that he help them regain

Their colonial holdings, discreetly

  He sent word to Americans then.

He said:  "Though you're holding my brother,

   "In that dirty old Cabildo jail,"

"I will never agree to serve Britain,

    "And I  do want your side to prevail."

But Patterson, hearing the news that

    The British were near Mobile Point,

Instead of defending Ft. Bowyer,

    Came and ransacked closer to home.

He took all the ships that Laffite had,

   The stores were to serve as his spoils,

And he feasted on chocolate and Seegars

    And he cared not the British to foil.

So it came that when Jackson came marching

     His ragtag troops for their stint,

They were shoeless and all out of powder,

    And awfully short on the flint. 

And up spoke Laffite: "Let me help you,

      "I have men, and cannons and flint,

"I have barrels and barrels of powder,

      "We will fight for you, just let us in! "

There are men who fight for their nation,

     Because in fighting they gain,

And together they vanquished the British,

    Who were crushed so that few did remain.

And the British, they begged to be let go,

    And America won on that day,

And not because taxes or duties

   Or regular armies held sway.

For the men who have chosen no thralldom,

     And who fight every day for their bread,

Are the ones who are ready when called on,

     Who can shoot at the foe until dead.

There are men who will fight but are fearful,

     And who miss because of that fear,

But the reason we all are still here is

    Because there were once privateers.

Professionals and Government Men in the Service of War

In the end, a peace treaty was signed, and all was right with the world, and the British and the Americans remembered that they were brothers. And they proceeded to eliminate the competition to their hegemony, and they harried privateers without let until there were no privateers left either side of the Atlantic. And there were taxes laid, and there were duties levied, and the Americans paid the British the debt they owed to Napoleon for the Louisiana Purchase. And there followed the Panic of 1819.

But once upon a time,  the British and the Americans were at war, and they used their professional Navy men to fight each other, and their professional Navy men often made mistakes that might easily have cost either side the war. But still they were more concerned with law and order than with winning. 

The British Visit to Laffite

The British enlisted the aid of Jean Laffite, but he sent word to the Americans that the British planned to attack Ft. Bowyer, and the Americans, hearing this, sent Commodore Patterson to destroy Jean Laffite and his fleet of light ships that sailed in shallow waters.

And the Patterson expedition took the light vessels that the privateers had and they did not use them in battle, but only kept them from being used in service of their own cause. And even though Patterson knew there would be an attack on Ft. Bowyer, he did nothing to help the Americans at that fort.

Captain Percy's Folly

But luckily for the Americans, the British had incompetent officers who did not know how to attack a fort in shallow waters, and Captain Percy, after heavy loss of life,  ended up having to blow up his own ship and return to Pensacola, beaten.

Jean Laffite and the Battle of New Orleans

But still the Americans were not ready, and when Andrew Jackson set out to New Orleans, he did not even have the gunpowder and the flints that would be necessary to beat the British,  And all the while he was denouncing Jean Laffite and his men as banditti, he eventually realized that he needed their help. 

So the banditti were temporarily pardoned and enlisted and Jean Laffite supplied the gunpowder and the flint that won the Battle of New Orleans. And after the peace was signed, and after the Martial Law was lifted, and after life went back to normal. the ships that were pilfered were not returned, the gunpowder and flints were not paid for, and eventually, Jean Laffite and other privateers were run out of town, and outlawed and persecuted, until they were heard from no more.

That is the story of that war, in which neither side really won, and in which both sides agreed they disliked privateers more than they disliked each other. And it was decided we needed a stronger army and a stronger Navy, all at taxpayer expense. And the entire point of the American Revolution was forgotten.

It happened two hundred years ago, more or less. 

Changing Public Perception of Privateers

Have you noticed that certain occupations, professions and trades, which used to be perfectly respectable, seem to come under fire at a particular juncture in time, and all of a sudden people find themselves under attack and on the defensive for doing something that had been perfectly fine just a short time earlier?

The moral indignation that goes with these attacks can be the most puzzling thing of all to people whose practices suddenly come under fire. New words are used as epithets or old words are conjured up to blacken their name which had never applied before.

Take the term "puppy mill". Recently it has been used to tar and feather anyone in the dog breeding business. Do you sell puppies for a living? Do you tear them away from their mother's bosom and ship them off to strangers? You must be a very bad person. Puppies, for God's sake! Why can't you find something decent to do for a living, like sell health insurance or lottery tickets, instead?

And the person thus attacked doesn't even understand what happened. Yesterday, this was a good and decent way to make a living, and all of the sudden the only right way to get a new dog is from a shelter, where they have been "rescued", And sometimes these "rescued" animals are taken by force from their owners.

I am not myself a dog breeder, nor have I ever been, nor do I plan to become one, but I know a few, and I see how their life has been made harder by the changing fashion concerning the right and the wrong of dog breeding.

The same thing happened to Jean Laffite. He was a respectable privateer, and they branded him as a pirate. But it was not just to him that it happened. It happened to many others. One day it was a respectable profession, a decent way to make a living, and then, almost overnight, it wasn't anymore.

How did that happen and why? That is going to be the topic of my talk in Galveston this October.

Daughters of El Cid: The Importance of Feeling Important

Romantic fiction, as opposed to naturalist fiction, is intended to make the reader feel important, while identifying with important people in a story. Naturalist fiction tends to do the opposite, making the reader feel unimportant, while identifying with insignificant characters in a story.

However, it is not always simply a matter of identifying with kings and princesses, as in a fairy tale or a Disney movie. Sometimes the important person in a piece of romantic writing is a child or a slave or a pauper, who is seemingly powerless, but still manages to make a big difference not only for himself, but also for others in the story. Sometimes in a naturalist piece of fiction, a character can be wealthy or powerful, but rendered ineffectual by anxiety or fear or the psychological inability to act.

I have always enjoyed stories about people who, no matter their social position, are able to make a real difference in the big world that surrounds them. But I have read literary theory to the effect that what makes naturalist fiction more appropriate for today's readers is that they are powerless to make a difference in the big world, so they must focus on their small lives instead. As if the average person in the 19th century, who read romantic fiction, somehow had more of a say in the big, wide world.

And then, paradoxically, we see memes that say: "People died to give you the right to vote. People shed blood to give you a voice. Now go out and vote. It is the only way for you to make a difference."

Really? People died to make sure that we can answer a multiple choice question? Yes or No. True or False. Red or Blue. Is there any true self-expression in that? How can you make a difference by merely flipping a switch or filling in a line or blacking out a circle? Isn't it obvious that the people who shed the blood to let us vote were making a difference, while our actual vote makes no difference at all?

The people who frame those multiple choice questions have all the power. What it is that we are voting about is more important than what we vote. But we are effectively cut off from any representation there, where it counts, in the secret, smoke filled rooms where all the real decisions are made. (Or are those rooms smoke-free these days? I have no idea.)

Statue of El Cid
(from the wikipedia)

Theodosia and the Pirates, both parts, is a fairy tale set in a time when it still was possible for a person of humble origins, like Jean Laffite,  to make a big difference. In one sense, these are stories about fairy princesses: both Theodosia Burr and Denise Laffite are figurative daughters of  El Cid, a legendary savior of his country, who was forced to go into exile and was branded a traitor, due to political machinations. El Cid straddled party lines, represented both Christians and Moslems, and ruled over a pluralistic state for the benefit of all. And without a single ballot having to be cast!

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

(Things that will help you to think about what the chapters of the book mean)

http://mystories.sweetbeariesart.com/2014/06/16/reading-guide-part-1-theodosia-and-the-pirates-the-war-against-spain/

http://mystories.sweetbeariesart.com/2014/06/19/reading-guide-part-2-theodosia-and-the-pirates-the-war-against-spain/

http://mystories.sweetbeariesart.com/2014/06/21/reading-guide-part-3-theodosia-and-the-pirates-the-war-against-spain/

http://mystories.sweetbeariesart.com/2014/09/08/theodosia-and-the-pirates-reading-guide-part-4/

http://mystories.sweetbeariesart.com/2014/09/08/theodosia-and-the-pirates-part-5-a-reading-guide/

The Grandmother Behind the Man

Today is National Grandparents' Day. Of course, most people have grandparents, and family history, and ways in which the ancestral story shapes their development. But not everybody gets to meet every one of his grandparents. Theodosia, for instance, met neither of her paternal grandparents, because they were dead by the time that her father was two.

Aaron Burr, Sr. was the second president of Princeton University, back when it was not even called Princeton.  Burr was a theologian knowledgeable in the classics. It was his erudition, rather than his piety, that somehow was passed down to Theodosia, through her father,

Theodosia's grandmother, Esther Edwards Burr, left behind a Journal, the better for us to know her.

These were absent grandparents who still left quite a mark on the granddaughter who never got to meet them. But for Jean Laffite, who lost his mother as an infant, his grandmother was not a forgotten memory or a series of letters on a page. His mother having died shortly after he was born, Zora Nadrimal, Jean Laffite's grandmother, served him in place of a mother. It was she who taught him to read and to write (in Spanish) and who oversaw all his first lessons. She also instilled in him the desire to avenge the death of his grandfather at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.

Jean Laffite inscribed one of his family bibles with the words: "I owe all my ingenuity to the great intuition of my grandmother..." They say that behind every great man is a woman. But it's not often that this woman turns out to be his grandmother!

The Economics of Privateering and of Piracy

Theodosia and the Pirates

The title Theodosia and the Pirates is meant facetiously. Jean Laffite and his close associates were not pirates. The phrase was used to conjure up all those salacious stories of what may have happened to Theodosia Burr Alston once she and the Patriot disappeared from the pages of history. But I had her meet up with Jean Laffite, instead, and rather than being captured, she was rescued. Only the most prudish of readers would regard what happened to her in the pages of my novels as a fate worse than death.

But beyond the issue of whether Theodosia did anything wrong in associating with Jean Laffite comes the more intellectually challenging issue of determining whether Jean Laffite did anything wrong by plying his trade as a privateer. Was he, as so many eminent historians still allege, merely  a pirate?

This very much turns on the meaning of the term pirate. Is a pirate just a "sea robber" (שודד ים) as I was brought up to believe? Or is there more to piracy than this? If you have a special license to rob people at sea, does this absolve you from the accusation of being a pirate?Is a letter of marque enough? And where does earning a living come into all this? Are you a pirate only if you make money off robbing people at sea? If you do it for a higher cause, does it mean you are not a pirate?

Take the fictional pirate, Ragnar Danneskjöld, from Ayn Rand's  Atlas Shrugged. Seen as a patriotic pirate, he robs government vessels and repays 100% of the money taken from citizens by the government back to those whose money it was. I remember that when I first discussed this with my father, he laughed and said: "That's not a pirate! It's an altruist! He doesn't get paid for his work." In order to make his work pay, Ragnar Danneskjöld would have had to have taken a cut of the taxpayers' money that he was returning.

And therein lies the problem: you cannot get justice without paying for it, one way or another. You can't win a lawsuit without paying the court costs and the attorney fees. You can't win a war, without paying for the war. And once you pay for it, it does not feel entirely like justice. Everyone wants freedom to be free of charge. But it can't be. There's a price. There is always a price.

Jean Laffite ran a viable business. He had vessels he kept up and crews who were given a share in the profits. He sold goods on the open market. He had a family to support. When his business was manufacturing gunpowder, he got paid for the finished product over and above the price of the raw ingredients. When his business was privateering, he ran it for a profit, too. He may have charged below market for the goods he sold, but it was still more money than it cost him to get it from those he  plundered. He made enough to support his crews, his employees, his partners and his family. He was a better businessman than most capitalists. 

Is it bad that Jean Laffite made a profit? Should he have merely donated his services free of charge? In my opinion, anything that appears to be "free" usually carries hidden fees. When war is not financed privately, it is waged at the expense of the public and it ends up costing much more.

Who should pay for Waging War?

Who should pay for every lawsuit? The losing side should be saddled with attorney fees and court costs. That way, they will have lost something real, not simply what was not rightfully theirs in the first place. Who should pay for every war? The loser. That and only that will keep the peace from being broken again hastily. 

When privateers are used in battle against the enemy, they naturally cause the other side to bear the greater financial burden of the war. No taxation against one's own people is necessary. Instead, the people get to buy plundered goods at below cost, helping to finance the privateer's establishment. It's a win-win situation. 

Privateers are law abiding businessmen who only plunder the enemy. There is a price for every war. Privateering makes sure that it's the enemy that pays that price. And what if a war is unwinnable? Then there is no profit in starting it in the first place. And no privateer will go to war under such conditions. This is another reason privateering helps to put limits on war.

Why did I call it Theodosia and the Pirates ? Because throughout the long story, we get to see through Theodosia's eyes as the true meaning of piracy is understood. We witness the slow evolving process as  Theodosia discovers for herself that Jean Laffite is no pirate at all, but the greatest patriot she has ever met, greater even than her own father.

Patriotic Dissent

Can you be critical of the actions of your government without being seen as unpatriotic? Can you be reverent of the founding documents of your country, but disparaging of the founders, some of whom helped to draft those documents? Can you love America while criticizing important Americans? Or even Americans in general?

 I once heard someone say that she really admired the Quran, but she hated Moslems. It sounded so funny to me at the time. I chided her on this, asking how that was possible, and she said that Moslems universally misinterpret their holy book. I have since heard someone say the same thing about the Bible and Christians.

Any really broad use of a term invites misunderstanding, which is why I changed the blurb of Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain from what it used to be to this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1618790099/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_dp_RYBbub1JWTMS5

What was the blurb like before? It was more or less the words to the War Against Spain book trailer:

When understood in context, these words are very patriotic and show reverence to America's ideals, as put forth in the constitution. But when read out of context, they can be seen as unpatriotic.

That is actually what Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain is all about. How can you remain loyal to the ideals of your country when your countrymen violate them with impunity? Do you have to go underground with your patriotism?  If you can't practice freedom openly, do you have to furtively support those ideals? Is your country the land, the people, the government or the ideals?

It is young Jules who expresses some of these questions toward the end of the book.

We don't have to put anyone's head on a plate to set the record straight. Nor is it unpatriotic to point out when any governmental action or citizen's attitude is in conflict with the founding documents.

But since people who have not read the book may not know this is what it is about, it is best to be a bit more expository in the descriptive blurb. They can wait until after they have read the book to ponder what it would mean to be "more American than the Americans."