In mid-September 1814, a letter was surreptitiously delivered to William C.C. Claiborne, governor of Louisiana. It came from a man he detested: Jean Lafitte, ruler of the island of Grand Terre and the Bay of Barataria near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Lafitte had grown rich and powerful as a pirate who preyed on American, English, and Spanish commerce during the second decade of the Napoleonic wars. In 1813, Claiborne had posted a notice declaring his readiness to give anyone who seized the suave brigand a reward of five hundred dollars. Lafitte retaliated by posting around New Orleans an offer of five thousand dollars to anyone who delivered Claiborne to him at Grand Terre.

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The letter from the outlaw made Claiborne's scalp tingle, not with rage but with panic. Lafitte informed the governor that he had just received an offer from one Nicholas Lockyer, captain of His Majesty's sloop Sophia, to join a British force in an assault on New Orleans. The expedition was intended to create a British colony along the Gulf of Mexico to match the one Great Britain already had in Canada. The conquest would neatly encircle the treacherous Americans, who had declared war on Great Britain in 1812 while it was embroiled in its death grapple with Napoleon Bonaparte.

Now Napoleon was beaten and in exile on the island of Elba. The veteran troops who had helped batter the French dictator into submission were rendezvousing in Jamaica before coming to America to settle affairs. Captain Lockyer urged Lafitte to join him in rescuing the French citizens of Louisiana from American 'oppression.' Control of New Orleans, near the Mississippi's mouth, would make the British the virtual rulers of the burgeoning American heartland, whose economy depended on the tons of cotton and grain shipped down the river each year for export. Lafitte had asked the British captain to give him two weeks to think it over. The pirate chieftain then promptly sent the letter to Claiborne with an offer to side with the Americans if he and his men were granted amnesty for their previous sanguinary careers.

To counter the British, Governor Claiborne had only half a dozen gunboats and a fourteen-gun schooner–a fleet that a single Royal Navy frigate could annihilate in five minutes. His army consisted of little more than seven hundred Regulars, commanded by an imperious stranger from distant Tennessee, forty-seven-year-old Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson, with whom the governor was barely on speaking terms.

In the eleven years since Claiborne had assumed governorship of the territory that Thomas Jefferson had purchased from Napoleon, the pompous bureaucrat had done little to conciliate the local French and Spanish Creoles to American rule. Instead, the governor specialized in writing self-pitying letters to Washington blaming everyone but himself for his unpopularity. 'I am not at the head of a United and Willing people,' he moaned. 'Our country is filled with spies and traitors.'

His attempts to organize a militia in New Orleans had been met with defiance and ridicule. When the French consul urged his fellow Gauls to respond to Claiborne's pleas, his windows were smashed. Militia from the northern part of the state, disgusted by the inertia of the locals, had deserted in droves. Dampening everyone's spirits was an acute shortage of guns and ammunition.

While Governor Claiborne chewed his fingernails, New Englanders far to the north were gathering in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss the possibility of seceding from the United States rather than continuing 'Mr. Madison's War.' Pint-sized President James Madison, Jefferson's successor, had been a disaster as a national leader. He had allowed Congress to vote Alexander Hamilton's Bank of the United States out of business in 1811, on the eve of declaring war on the British. As a result, the federal government was now broke. So worthless was the guaranty of the United States that Secretary of War James Monroe was reduced to riding from bank to bank in Washington, begging for loans to which he pledged his own credit.

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