“Why is that?” Jackson demanded.
“The powder!” You replied. “It is not good. The cannon balls, they fall short.”
Jackson said, “I’ll remedy that!” He ordered an aide to see to it that the Baratarians received the best ammunition possible. The General was heard to say later, “Were I ordered to storm the very gates of hell with Dominique You as my lieutenant, I would have no misgivings as to the outcome.”
Jean and Pierre Laffite acquitted themselves with honor in the battle for New Orleans. They and their men were given Presidential pardons, clearing the slate of past crimes, and for some time after the city was saved, they were great heroes. They were wined, dined, and cheered wherever they went.
Perhaps the brothers became bored with respectability. At any rate they drifted back into piracy. They pulled out of their old haunts and moved to Galveston to set up operations, and for several years they carried on business in the slave trade. In 1820, Jean Laffite boarded his favorite boat, The Pride, and sailed away into legend. There were stories that he died in Yucatan. Some claimed that he carried on his piracy in the Mediterranean. Still others said that he settled in France and lived to be an old man. All recorded history of Jean Laffite ended when he sailed from Galveston. Pierre Laffite was said to have lived in Louisiana to an old age and to have died a poor man.
The quality and the quantity of piracy subsided along with the fortunes of the brothers Laffite. But not smuggling. Smuggling was to continue to plague the Customs Service, and some of the smuggling would make the Laffites look like amateurs.
5
THE DARK YEARS
Slavery was the issue which exploded into the Civil War in 1861, but twenty-eight years before the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter, the nation was on the edge of open war over a dispute involving the Federal government’s right to force the collection of customs duties.
The spirit of revolt flamed high in South Carolina in 1832–1833. It was fed, too, by sympathy in Virginia and Georgia and other agricultural states which bitterly opposed the system of protective tariffs as being oppressive to the farm states.
Did the central government have the Constitutional right to force the collection of duties in a state which opposed such collections? No! said the “Nullifiers,” who favored striking down the Federal tariff laws. They insisted that any state had the right to withdraw from the Union if it so desired.