Jean Lafitte was born around 1780. Little is known of his childhood. When he was in his twenties, he began a life of crime, specifically piracy. He established a warehouse in New Orleans where he would sell goods taken by his older brother Pierre. Pierre was a pirate in the Caribbean. After the Jefferson administration passed the Embargo Act to stop goods from England and France from coming into the nation, the brothers had to get out of New Orleans. They established a pirate port on an island in Barataria Bay south of Louisiana. There their smuggling and pirate operations made them very rich. But they were cheating the U.S. of customs duties. In 1814, a Navy ship with a group of gunboats attacked Barataria Bay and captured most of the Lafitte ships. They escaped and took to the seas again during the War of 1812 as both pirates and privateers. Lafitte became famous. He had a reputation for being charming and handsome. He liked to drink, gamble, and he loved the ladies. He treated captured crews well and sometimes returned their ships to them after he stole all their cargo. The peak of his fame came when he offered his pirates to Gen. Andrew Jackson to help defend New Orleans from an invading British army. A pardon was dangled. Lafitte’s men manned one of Jackson’s ships on the Mississippi and others formed three artillery companies. This artillery tore into the British as they tried to reach the American line on Jan. 8, 1815. Jackson might not have won the battle and moved on the presidency without Lafitte’s help.
After the war, Jean had trouble going straight. He established a colony called Campeche at Galveston. It was similar to the one at Barateria. He lived in a mansion with a moat around it. His pirates sometimes captured slave ships. They would get half the proceeds from the government auction in New Orleans. After one of his pirates capture an American merchant ship, an American warship was sent to crack down. Lafitte and his men fled without a fight. He continued his piracy in a series of bases in the Caribbean. For a while he was a privateer for Simon Bolivar of Great Colombia. In Feb., 1823, he went after two merchant ships, but they turned out to be armed and turned on his ship and pummeled him with cannon fire. Lafitte was mortally wounded. Thus died one of the most famous pirates in American History.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Lafitte
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/jean-lafitte
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