Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  Having ruled out other approaches, Cochrane pored over his charts and maps and decided that the most sensible way into New Orleans lay through Lake Borgne, and from there to ascend one of the various bayous that flowed into it just below the city. This would require a herculean effort for almost everyone concerned, since Lake Borgne was shallow and the entire army would have to be rowed in small boats across some sixty miles of treacherous open water. But there was no getting around it from the admiral’s point of view, and so while in Jamaica he set about buying or building forty shallow-draft barges to transport the army from the big ships to the point of invasion.

  By this time the whole adventure seemed to be turning into a risky proposition, which more prudent men at that point might have abandoned. To achieve victory Cochrane surely must have assumed they would need complete surprise. But what if the bayous were all obstructed? What if he was discovered? After all, it was not easy to hide a 10,000-man army, even in the remote wilds of the Louisiana coast of 1814, and an amphibious landing under fire was (and still is) the most dangerous of all military operations. Yet Cochrane had his orders, which were to invade, conquer, and secure Louisiana and the Mississippi River for the British crown, and he believed he had the most skilled, best-equipped, best-trained, bravest, and most experienced troops in the world.

  There was something more: the aforesaid beauty and booty. The notion had to have crossed Cochrane’s mind of the fabulous prize money he personally would receive from the sale of the goods piled up in New Orleans warehouses—estimated to be worth some $15 million.* 51 As admiral commanding, Cochrane would get the lion’s share, but with that much at stake it must also have been on the minds of all those 20,000-plus soldiers and sailors, too, who would likewise get their cut. And so with only Cochrane and General Keane and their staffs to ponder the formidable obstacles, the men of the fleet and their cargo of soldiers pressed on, seemingly blissfully unaware of the perils.* 52 But these were confident, determined—even arrogant—men, the vanquishers of the mighty Napoleon, immolaters of the American capital. Listen to Lieutenant Gleig’s journal entry for November 26, 1814: “In half an hour all the canvas was set, and the ships moved slowly from the anchorage, till, having cleared the headlands, and caught the fair breeze, they bounded over the water with the speed of eagles, and long before dark the coast of Jamaica had disappeared.”

  Had Gleig and his comrades in arms fully understood the character, courage, and indomitable will of Andrew Jackson and his cobbled-together crew of Tennesseans, Kentuckians, New Orleans lawyers and merchants, “undisciplined militia,” U.S. Army regulars, free men of color, and Baratarian “pirates,” they might have worried some.

  As the Canada geese and migratory ducks began to arrive in the Gulf Coast marshes and the hardwood trees finally flamed into a riot of color, Andrew Jackson was getting fidgety. Despite the pleas of Governor Claiborne and others, he had continued to make his headquarters at Mobile, convinced that “any true military man” would first land the British army there or at Pensacola or some point farther west, then march cross-country to Baton Rouge, above New Orleans, and fall upon the city from the north, rather than try to attack it from the swampy morasses to the south. He was wrong, of course, but could not know it at the time; all he did know, in fact, was that there was likely a large British fleet bearing down on him, carrying an army of Wellington’s veterans, while he could muster only a couple of undersized regiments of U.S. regulars, militia from Tennessee and, he hoped, Kentucky, as well as an uncertain number of volunteers, conscripts, and raw recruits of dubious loyalty from New Orleans.

  To an ordinary man of the time this surely must have been a terrifying prospect, but not to Andrew Jackson, who, as Teddy Roosevelt noted, “had hereditary wrongs to avenge on the British,” and he hated them with an implacable fury that was absolutely devoid of fear.

  Many of the pleas for Jackson to come to the city and personally take charge were made by his old friend from his first days in Congress, the lawyer Edward Livingston—the same Edward Livingston who presently represented Jean Laffite and his so-called hellish banditi.

  Livingston was a curious character, born into the wealthy and famous family of the Hudson River Valley who were among the Founding Fathers. After graduating from Princeton he became, in turn, a lawyer, a congressman, and later mayor of New York City, until, it was claimed, a trusted assistant mishandled city funds, which caused Livingston to go bankrupt and in 1804 leave New York for a fresh start in New Orleans. There he married into a wealthy Creole family, and because he spoke flawless French was accepted at all levels of social and political society.

  Livingston was no particular admirer of Governor Claiborne and had recently organized a committee of defense, which vied with the legislature’s Committee of Public Safety, chaired by the governor. From this eminent position he argued persuasively and privately with Jackson to include Laffite and the Baratarians in the New Orleans defense force. Livingston’s reasoning was well founded; he cited Laffite’s written offer to have the Baratarians fight for the United States and the fact that many of the privateers were skilled artillerymen, having served aboard their fighting ships as cannoneers and, if worse came to worst, as cutlass men or pistoleers.

  Jackson was as yet unmoved, but he finally responded to the calls from New Orleans on November 22 by saddling up with his staff and journeying over the dingy trails from Mobile in a pouring autumn rain, personally scouting out for himself any possible landing sites for a British invasion. By that time the general had become wracked with severe dysentery, an excruciatingly painful, emaciating—even life-threatening—disease that bore only a scant comparison to its milder cousin diarrhea.* 53 When he arrived in New Orleans nine days later, gaunt and pallid, Jackson could barely stand up, but, cheered on by grateful crowds, he was able to ride into the city in a carriage thoughtfully provided by a wealthy landowner.

  To some his appearance might not have inspired confidence: his clothes and boots were filthy from a week on the trail, his face was prematurely wrinkled for his forty-seven years, and his great head of hair had gone gray. He was sallow and appeared frail from the dysentery and from the bullet wound in his shoulder received during the disgraceful gunfight with the Benton brothers. But later that day, when he appeared on the balcony of his headquarters on Royal Street, there was something in his voice and his icy blue eyes that convinced the gathered crowd that the city’s salvation had arrived. In contrast to Governor Claiborne, who had tried to maintain leadership but often seemed wishy-washy to his diverse constituency, Jackson emitted an unshakable aura of defiance that few could mistake. From the moment he arrived he was like a rock in the surf of chaos and fear, and his very presence, wrote one newspaper (pilfering a phrase from the Song of Solomon), “was like an army with banners.”* 54

  With Livingston translating his words into French for the largely Creole crowd, Jackson “declared that he had come to protect the city, that he would drive the British into the sea or perish in the effort.” He told the citizens “to cease all differences and divisions and unite with him . . . to save the city. . . . If you are not for us, you are against us, and will be dealt with accordingly,” a dire warning to spies and wafflers. All these words “produced an electric effect,” and a cry arose from the streets: “Jackson has come!”

  That very day Jackson got down to business. First he needed to supplement his staff to suit the emergency. Edward Livingston became an aide-de-camp and chief proclamation writer. Major Arsene Lacarrière Latour, a local architect, military engineer, and mapmaker, was also called into service to supplement Jackson’s own engineer staff officer Howell Tatum. Latour would become indispensable to Jackson because of his knowledge of the area; one year after the war he would write a firsthand account of the battle that has likewise become indispensable to students of the campaign. Other aides would be added in the days to come, including some surprising choices.

  Having done this, Jackson and his staff rode over to the Pla
ce d’Armes to review his troops. Considering that the British army then descending on Louisiana was variously thought to number from 10,000 to 20,000 regulars, all veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Jackson didn’t seem to have much to work with. New Orleans offered him the following:

  A battalion of local businessmen, lawyers, planters, and their sons, numbering 287 men, commanded by Major Jean Baptiste Plauché. They were colorfully uniformed* 55 and high-spirited, but most of the companies had been organized for only about a month, and their fighting capabilities were untested. Likewise there were “two regiments of Louisiana State Militia, badly equipped, some of them armed with fowling pieces, others with muskets, others with rifles, some without arms, all imperfectly disciplined.”

  Then there was an understrength battalion of 210 free men of color. It was composed mostly of the displaced Haitians, commanded by Major Jean Daquin, a bakery owner. Until Jackson got into the picture these people had, as usual, been treated badly. Claiborne and others had been reluctant even to arm them, and they were denied most of the rights of white volunteer soldiers. Jackson fixed that with another proclamation, in which he informed the blacks that they would be accorded the same amenities as the white soldiers, including equal standing, equal pay, a $124 enlistment bonus, and 160 acres of land after their term of service was up.* 56

  There were the Tennessee volunteers under General Coffee. This motley-looking crew numbered about 1,800, most of whom had fought with Jackson in the Creek War and at Pensacola. They were rough, tough, unshaven, buckskin- or homespun-clad, and generally wild and murderous-looking backwoodsmen—many wearing coonskin caps—who, according to one participant in the battle, carried nothing but their rifles, cartridge boxes, hatchets, knives, and powder horns. “They had no idea of military organization and discipline; they paid attention only to the more important part of their calling, which, according to their notions, was quietly to pick out their man, fix him in their aim, and bring him down.” The British would soon bestow upon them a derisive nickname of which the backwoodsmen became justly proud—the “dirty-shirts.”

  Equally important, though also understrength, were the two regular U.S. Army regiments, the 7th and the 44th, numbering together 796 riflemen. To round things out was a company of 107 mounted Mississippi dragoons under Major Thomas Hinds, as well as a detachment of 18 friendly Choctaw Indians (soon to be enlarged to 62), commanded by Captain Pierre Jugat, who, for their part, would make things plenty disagreeable for the British, as they would soon find out.

  Jackson could thus muster just under 3,000 men, many of questionable ability. With any luck, the promised 2,400-man force of Kentucky militia under Major General John Thomas, as well as General William Carroll’s 2,200 Tennessee volunteers, would arrive in time for the invasion. These upcountry reinforcements were coming by flatboat down the Mississippi, but so far no word had been received as to their whereabouts. Likewise, to arm them, Secretary of War Monroe had scraped up the money to order a shipment of five thousand rifles from the munitions factories at Pittsburgh, but nothing had been heard of this, either.

  Having surveyed his army, Jackson now embarked on a weeklong survey of the city’s defenses. For a city so far removed from punctual help from the rest of the nation, New Orleans was practically defenseless in purely military terms—or so it seemed at the time—and any notion of defending it presented a problem of staggering difficulties. Neither the federal nor the Louisiana legislature had seen fit to appropriate any funds necessary to build the proper fortifications to protect the city. This appeared to be inviting calamity, but in fact, except for an invasion force marching overland to descend on the city from the north or east—as Jackson expected it to—New Orleans had fairly good natural defenses in the form of all those impassable bogs, marshes, and quagmires that make up the lower Mississippi River Delta. With that in mind, Jackson posted Coffee’s mounted infantry north, up at Baton Rouge, to defend against the possibility of an attack developing from there, and then he took his surveying trip.

  With the engineer Major Latour as his guide, Jackson and his party visited what he considered the other most likely routes of an invading British army. The geometry of the problem was maddening; there were so many ways an enemy could come. First on his list were, of course, the eastern approaches to New Orleans from Mobile or points westward along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Chief among these was the Chef Menteur Road, running east-west along the coast, which had been built through impassable swamps. It could be fairly easily defended by a small force by blocking it with trees and other debris, Jackson concluded. He ordered the requisite number of troops and artillery posted, issued them their orders, and moved on.

  Next was Bayou St. John, a water approach in which the British army would have to arrive in shallow-draft boats through Lake Borgne, a bay off the gulf that led through a narrow channel into Lake Pontchartrain, guarded by a half-finished fort called the Rigolets. Once into Pontchartrain, however, Bayou St. John branched nearly into the city, guarded only by a decrepit installation from colonial days, Fort St. John. Jackson ordered it strengthened and garrisoned.

  The calculus of approaches to the city from the south proved difficult. First, there were any number of bayous, streams, and canals that, left unguarded and unobstructed, could have allowed the British through. Jackson ordered all of these blocked by felled trees, with guards from the state militia posted to watch them. (Lack of diligent enforcement of this order proved to be his greatest mistake.) And of course there was the Mississippi River itself, which might have become a huge highway for the ships of the British navy. As we have seen, though, the trouble with the river route was that the passes out of the gulf to access it were too shallow to permit entry of the big three-decker sixty- to eighty-gun British ships of the line, and even if their smaller men-of-war were able get over the bars, they’d face formidable obstacles, the first of which was Fort St. Philip, about sixty miles downriver from New Orleans. The fort was not in bad condition, but Jackson wisely ordered it strengthened, its wood barracks pulled down to prevent fires in case of bombardment, and a reinforced garrison of trained artillerists stationed inside. Then, on the trip back upriver, he visited Detour d’Anglais—English Turn.

  English Turn was an almost two-hundred-degree bend where the river practically doubled back on itself about twenty miles below New Orleans. For sailing ships it was a challenge and often a trial even in peaceful times. As was no doubt pointed out to Jackson by Commodore Patterson, to negotiate the first part of the turn, whatever wind direction was available to get them there would be right in the ship’s face, making progress impossible until the wind changed direction, which could be hours, days, even weeks. (And until it did change favorably, the ships had to make for the banks and tie up to trees lest the swift current carry them back downriver.)

  The French and Spanish colonists had thoughtfully built a small installation at English Turn, but Jackson ordered more batteries, then two additional batteries across the river, just in case. From these an unfriendly ship could be bombarded in an almost helpless state while waiting for the wind to change. It is not clear where Jackson got the extra artillery to brace up Fort St. Philip and English Turn, but a good bet might be that it came from those armed privateer ships and shore cannon that Patterson had captured in his raid on Laffite’s Baratarians.

  Having done all this Jackson returned to New Orleans to be greeted with distasteful newspaper headlines complaining of his absence from the city. Jackson paid the criticism not the slightest attention. Nor did he just sit on his hands waiting for the British to arrive; his problems continued to be manifest. All through the ages a defending commander’s worst dilemma has been lack of knowledge of where and when the enemy would strike. Even though Jackson enjoyed the advantage of shortened interior lines, he was by necessity forced to disperse many of his troops over every possible venue of attack—leaving himself vulnerable at all of them—until he could divine the true intentions of the British. There wasn’t anything
he could do about that, though, so he devoted himself to other enterprises.

  First he went to the contentious Louisiana legislature and persuaded the state to pay for all the military improvements he’d requested.* 57 He continued to press authorities in Washington, Tennessee, and Kentucky by express courier to discover the whereabouts of the reinforcements and arms he had expected by now. He made efforts to enlist more men from the city and state to defend against the invasion.

  Jackson next reacted unwisely to another sticky problem. Members of the committee of defense, after declaring Jean Laffite’s original warnings about the British invasion to be forgeries, now paid a visit to Jackson. Ever since it had developed that Laffite’s communications had been proved perfectly genuine, Governor Claiborne as well as Edward Livingston, Laffite’s lawyer, had been urging Jackson to accept the Baratarians’ offer to join in the defense of New Orleans, but so far Jackson had clung stubbornly to his original sentiments in the negative.

  Now the committee of defense, led by the Louisiana legislator and wealthy aristocrat Bernard de Marigny—who had urged accepting Laffite’s offer from the beginning—came to Jackson for another try, along with other committee members who had changed their minds. With the danger clearly at hand, Marigny explained, every available man and woman in the fractious city had now become coalesced toward the emergency. Older men were serving as police officers to free younger men for military service. Women were already wrapping bandages as well as making clothes and blankets for the militia and troops not yet arrived. The Ursuline nuns in their convent were readying their hospital.