Letters полностью

But how is it I am here, he now asks with us, who last was leaving Maryland for Louisiana, newly risen from the dead, with Mr. Key’s anthem ringing in my ears? Why did I not return straightway to Castines Hundred? Why do I not now, instead of back to Galvez-Town & Jean Lafitte?

This last, at least, he finds easy to answer to his satisfaction: his Fort Bowyer postscript to (posthumous) Letter #1 had implored Andrée to come with the twins to New Orleans, where he now professes to hope to find them, under Lafitte’s protection, upon his return. And the other questions?

He reviews his official motives. In William Patterson’s house in Baltimore, where he recuperated, it was believed that the destruction of Washington on the one hand and on the other the British defeats at Plattsburgh, Lake Champlain, and Baltimore would bring the treaty commissioners at Ghent to an understanding, perhaps before 1815 commenced. But the question remained open whether such a treaty would bind the signatories to their status quo ante bellum or uti possidetis—before the fighting started or after it should end. Thus Admiral Cochrane’s race to restore his fortunes by taking New Orleans, and General Jackson’s to reach that city and muster an army in time to defend it.

Now, from Andrew Cook IV’s earlier point of view there would have been everything to be said for a British victory: Thomas Jefferson himself fears that once possessed of Louisiana the British can hold it indefinitely, navigating with impunity from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and effectively bordering the United States at the Mississippi; and radical New England Federalists are maintaining publicly that British possession of Louisiana will signal dissolution of the Union and legitimize a New England Confederation. But our ancestor has become, however qualifiedly, a patriot: if he does not want the Indians driven into the Pacific, neither does he want the Union dissolved. (A French Louisiana would be another story: a third influence, to check both British and American expansion into the West…)

He fears, moreover, that the confrontation will be horrific. Cochrane will reinforce his expedition massively at Jamaica (There are rumors that Wellington himself is being sent to lead the army. In fact, Wellington has advised the British cabinet to relinquish their demand for an Indian free state and settle a treaty: in his view, the loss of Tecumseh and of naval control of the Lakes has lost the war). Andrew is no lover of General Jackson, the butcher of the Creeks, but he knows him to be a formidable officer; if the defense of New Orleans will be made difficult by the shortage of regular troops and armaments and by the ethnic diversity of its defenders — Spanish, Mexicans, Anglo-Saxons, West Indians, free blacks and “coloreds,” Creole French both Bourbon and Bonapartist, even Italians and Choctaws! — its invasion will be also, through a labyrinth of bayous where only the alligators and the Baratarians are at home.

It is our progenitor’s official hope, then—was, he reminds Andrée — that he can help turn the battle into a siege at worst, till the treaty is announced, by persuading each side that the other is decisively superior. With the aid of the Baratarians, perhaps Jackson can contain the invaders in a holding position; knowing Cochrane’s irresolution and his greed for prizes, Andrew even imagines that the admiral might be bought off with a negotiated indemnity, and the ransom ships then seized at sea by Lafitte’s privateers. It is exactly such audacious traffic that the U.S. Navy has tried to break up by destroying Barataria in September and arresting Pierre Lafitte and Dominique You (Jean’s older brothers, the latter under his nom de guerre): a move deplored by New Orleans merchants whose stock in trade comes from the privateers.

Thus Andrew’s official reasons. But we have seen how the Cooks and Burlingames fly from husband- and parenthood; how this Andrew in particular is in flight from the general Pattern of our past and the specific course of his life’s “first cycle” (in my view, he runs into and perpetuates what he flees, like King Oedipus). There is moreover his guilt concerning Andrée, and concerning dead Tecumseh. And that blow on the head…