But even in those days the fame of American gunners was as wide as the seas.
All of the following day was spent by the British in burying their one hundred and twenty dead—you can see the white gravestones to-day if you will take the trouble to climb the hill behind the little town—but it took them a week to repair the damage caused by the battle. And so deep was their chagrin and mortification that when two British ships put into Fayal a few days later, and were ordered to take home the wounded, they were forbidden to carry any news of the disaster back to England.
To Captain Reid and his little band of fighters is due in no small measure the credit of saving New Orleans from capture and Louisiana from invasion. Lloyd's squadron was a part of the expedition then gathering at Pensacola for the invasion of the South, but it was so badly crippled in its encounter with the privateer that it did not reach the Gulf of Mexico until ten days later than the expedition had planned to sail. The expedition waited for Lloyd and his reinforcements, so that when it finally approached New Orleans, Jackson and his frontiersmen, who had hastened down by forced marches from the North, had made preparations to give the English a warm reception. Had the expedition arrived ten days earlier it would have found the Americans unprepared, and New Orleans would have fallen.
Captain Reid and his men, landing on their native soil at Savannah, found their journey northward turned into a triumphal progress. The whole country went wild with enthusiasm. There was not a town or village on the way but did them honor. The city of Richmond gave Captain Reid a great banquet, and the State of New York presented him with a sword of honor. But of all the tributes which were paid to the little band of heroes, none had the flavor of the concluding line of a letter written by one of the British officers engaged in the action to a relative in England. "If this is the way the Americans fight," he wrote, "we may well say, 'God deliver us from our enemies.'"
THE PIRATE WHO TURNED PATRIOT
How many well-informed people are aware, I wonder, that the fact that the American flag, and not the British, flies to-day over the Mississippi valley is largely due to the eleventh-hour patriotism of a pirate? Of the many kinds of men of many nationalities who have played parts of greater or less importance in the making of our national history, none is more completely cloaked in mystery, romance, and adventure than Jean Lafitte. The last of that long line of buccaneers who for more than two centuries terrorized the waters and ravaged the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, his exploits make the wildest fiction appear commonplace and tame. Although he was as thorough-going a pirate as ever plundered an honest merchant-man, I do not mean to imply that he was a leering, low-browed scoundrel, with a red bandanna twisted about his head and an armory of assorted weapons at his waist, for he was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, from all I can learn about him, he appears to have been a very gentlemanly sort of person indeed, tall and graceful and soft-voiced, and having the most charming manners. Though he regarded the law with unconcealed contempt, there came a crisis in our national history when he placed patriotism above all other considerations, and rendered an inestimable service to the country whose laws he had flouted and to the State which had set a price on his head. Indeed, we are indebted to Jean Lafitte in scarcely less measure than we are to Andrew Jackson for frustrating the British invasion and conquest of Louisiana.
Though the palmy days of piracy in the Gulf of Mexico really ended with the seventeenth century, by which time the rich cities of Middle America had been impoverished by repeated sackings and the gold-freighted caravels had taken to travelling under convoy, even at the beginning of the nineteenth century these storied waters still offered many opportunities to lawless and enterprising sea-folk. But the pirates of the nineteenth century, unlike their forerunners of the seventeenth, preyed on slave-ships rather than on treasure-galleons. Consider the facts. On January 1, 1808, Congress passed an act prohibiting the further importation of slaves into the United States. By this act the recently acquired territory of Louisiana, over which prosperity was advancing in three-league boots, was deprived of its supply of labor. With crops rotting in the fields for lack of laborers, the price of slaves rose until a negro fresh from the coast of Africa would readily bring a thousand dollars at auction in New Orleans. At the same time, remember, shiploads of slaves were being brought to Cuba, where no such restrictions existed, and sold for three hundred dollars a head. Under such conditions smuggling was inevitable. At first the smugglers bought their slaves in the Cuban market, and running them across the Gulf of Mexico, landed them at obscure harbors on the Louisiana coast, whence they were marched overland to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The smugglers soon saw, however, that the slavers carried small crews, poorly armed, and quickly made up their minds that it was a shameful waste of money to buy slaves when they could get them for nothing by the menace of their guns. In short, the smugglers became buccaneers, and as such drove a thriving business in captured cargoes of "black ivory," as the slaves were euphemistically called.