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

band—”
    â€œHis best gunners?” Jackson inquired.
    â€œWhat then? Dominique, Captain of Artillery, Peter Vourage, Master of Guns, Jacques Mans, Maurice Fremont—but that is nothing. I talk about rights of man. I know whole story of your revolution, how bad they need guns, powder; what a shame, that is done, and I got five hundred guns, put away, dry—”
    â€œWith powder and shot?”
    â€œWith powder and shot,” Laffite nodded. “I say to myself, do you look into soul and conscience of every man who fight with you? Only good men fight for liberty? How is that, my general? You catalogue each one? Is it bad a tyrant should die with bullet from thief’s gun, no? Or maybe it make man a little better he fight for freedom? Burr is traitor—he never steal five cents; Arnold never steal a penny. You ask to what is Laffite loyal and why? Maybe to a dream, my general.”
    â€œThese gunners of yours,” Jackson answered, “have they artillery?”
    Laffite shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. “It can be found. For all the men who can serve them, I assure you, there will be cannon enough.”
    â€œI offer no pardons,” Jackson said.
    â€œTrue—”
    â€œWhen the danger is passed, I will be forced to order your arrest.”
    â€œNaturally.”
    â€œBut now we can shake hands,” Jackson said.
    You can see that this took considerably less than fifteen minutes.
    It is not our affair here to retell the story of the awful battle of New Orleans. That was the last time an enemy in any force set foot upon American soil, and God grant there will never be such a time again. There have been greater battles than that, but it is doubtful that there was ever one more terrible in the toll American arms took.
    For when the battle finished, after two horrible hours, the enemy had lost two thousand six hundred men in dead, wounded, and prisoners; our loss was seven dead and six wounded. And with that battle, our long revolution was finished and a country made here in America.
    But something should be noted. When Wellington’s veterans attacked our barricades, they expected rifle fire—yet the terrible toll was taken before they ever reached rifle range, by red-sashed, barefooted pirates under the command of Jean Laffite and Dominique You. They turned the tide of battle and made a victory out of defeat. They appeared for two hours on the stage of this country’s history, served the guns, their golden ear-rings flashing, plunged home the ramrods, jammed in the grapeshot, and built in front of the American lines a wall of accurate, devastating artillery fire.
    So the pirate chief came on the stage and left it. He is harder to trace after his moment of glory; in the roaring commerce of a new America, his enterprises collapsed, and even the people of New Orleans were inclined to smile a little at anything so romantic as red sashes and gold earrings. Two years later, the court records of Louisiana show a conviction and sentence to three years’ imprisonment for one, J. Laffite. The crime was waylaying a Mississippi flatboat loaded with casks of rum. So the mighty are fallen. It seems that when he came out of jail, he attempted to reestablish himself at Barataria, but the new Yankee administration was in no mood for anything so impractical as pirates, and in one month a police detachment ran him out and burned his hastily-contrived warehouses. Dominique You fatalistically accepted honest employment on a sailing vessel; and when Jean Laffite attempted to establish a small if somewhat illegal enterprise in New Orleans itself, a court order gave him just three days to leave the city and never again return.
    He drifted west to Galveston, and after a short residence there, got across the Mexican border just a few steps in front of the sheriff. And in the lonely province of Yucatan, in Mexico, he died, forgotten, without glory or shouting.
    They