Jean Lafitte: Barataria Smuggler, Battle of New Orleans Ally, Spanish Spy

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Jean Lafitte's birth around 1780 is disputed, with claims for France, Saint-Domingue and a Sephardic Jewish family. With his brother Pierre he exploited the 1807 Embargo Act, running a smuggling base at Barataria Bay south of New Orleans, where shallow channels kept the Navy's deep-draft ships out and pirogues carried goods to city merchants. They laundered stolen cargo by clearing small legal loads through customs and filing outgoing manifests that matched contraband picked up in the bayous. Governor Claiborne jailed Pierre and offered $500 for Jean. In September 1814 British officers arrived on HMS Sophie offering land, money and a pardon; Lafitte stalled and passed their letters to American officials, yet Commodore Patterson raided Barataria anyway, seizing ships, 80 men and about $500,000.

Andrew Jackson, who had called the smugglers hellish banditti, accepted their help. Lafitte advised extending the American line into a cypress swamp, and his gunners under Dominique You and Renato Beluche manned key cannon at the Battle of New Orleans. President Madison pardoned the Baratarians in early 1815. Lafitte then spied for Spain as agent Number 13 and in 1817 founded Campeche on Galveston Island, a privateer colony of over 2,000 people run from his red fortress, Maison Rouge, under forged letters of marque from an invented nation. After a captain attacked an American ship, the USS Enterprise forced him out in 1821 and he burned the settlement. In February 1823, off Honduras, he attacked what he took for merchant ships in fog; they were armed Spanish privateers, and he was mortally wounded and buried at sea.

• After the governor's bounty went up, anonymous posters offered $500 for the capture of the governor.
• With Jim Bowie and others, he exploited an 1818 law that paid informers half the auction price of seized enslaved people, then bought them back at government auctions with legal papers.
• His flagship at Galveston was the Pride.
• He had a long relationship with Catiche Villard, a free woman of color, and they had a son.
• Legends claimed he faked his death or plotted to rescue Napoleon, and forged diaries surfaced decades later.