The character of the Lafitte revealed in the journal is not the suave pirate of popular imagination, but a moralistic paranoiac who hates the English but loves the Declaration of Independence, and whose professed sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden stands in stark contrast to the historical Lafitte's lifelong involvement in the slave trade. Louis, where he married a woman named Emily Mortimer and had children with her, dying in 1854 as a middle class man in his 70s. The book further claims Lafitte changed his name to John Laflin and retired to St.

According to this journal, Lafitte was a Sephardi Jew whose persecution at the hands of the Spanish led to his lifelong hatred of the Spanish (except, presumably, for the extended period in which he served as a spy for them). Laflin said he himself was a descendant of Jean Lafitte and had found the book in a trunk he had inherited. victory at New Orleans, for had it not been for the mistakes of the British and the determination of Andrew Jackson the battle and the war could easily have ended on British terms.

Ironically, the battle should never have been fought because a treaty signed 2 weeks before in Ghent, Belgium, had ended the War of. As explains, in 1948, a man named John Andrechyne Laflin went to the Missouri Historical Society with a document called The Journal of Jean Lafitte, which he claimed was the authentic memoir and scrapbook of the famed pirate. On the grounds of what is now Chalmette National Historical Park, the bloody Battle of New Orleans was waged on January 14, 1815.

Map of the battle of new orleans