Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  The psychology of the tactic was a leftover from the days of the rock, the club, the spear, and the sword, in which battles were won or lost in close combat with one side ultimately overwhelming and terrifying the other by dint of sheer audacity and ferocity. With the evolution of gunpowder and weapons of distance—rifles, cannons, and the like—personal physical prowess had become less and less important. Still, as military scholars continue to emphasize, most wars are fought on the strategies and tactics gleaned from the previous one, yet men commanding warriors of the nineteenth and even the twentieth century were slow to understand this.

  By the early nineteenth century it was generally understood that it was risky business to charge a heavily fortified line, and Pakenham had to have known this. After the Americans had brazenly and savagely attacked General Keane on the first night the British arrived, Pakenham at least ought to have concluded that he was not dealing with the kind of ineffective American militia the British had so far encountered in the war. Certainly, in his reconnaissance attack of December 28, he got a good look at Jackson’s rampart and must have realized that the Americans would continue fortifying more and more every day, so that the line he had faced on the twenty-eighth would doubtless be much stronger when he tried again eleven days later. And after the artillery duel of New Year’s Day, Pakenham should have understood that even all the newly arrived British artillery was no match for the American guns behind Jackson’s line.

  What is more, he should have noticed that he was being sucked into what amounted to a funnel, for while his own lines at the Villeré plantation were nearly a mile wide from the river to the swamp, the passable fields were so narrowed by the time he got to Jackson’s rampart that he could not employ his troops in line, only in column, which made them all the more vulnerable—a single cannonball could wipe out dozens of men.

  The smart move for Pakenham at that point probably would have been to send for the boats from the fleet and reembark to fight another day and at another place. Apparently, pride stood in his way. We have no record of what Pakenham thought of Jackson’s army, but he had certainly been tested by it so far. One may imagine that he simply refused to believe that his veteran soldiers could not rout a band of untrained militia. Cornwallis had made the same mistake at Yorktown thirty-four years earlier, a lesson apparently lost on the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law.

  Another strategy might have been to fix and hold Jackson’s army with a part of his command and somehow try a night crossing of the Mississippi by a much larger force, say, 4,000 men. To do this, of course, would have meant that his canal project would have to be successful, as it had not been on January 8. If this had worked out as planned, Pakenham would have had an overwhelming superiority on the west bank and could easily have marched the seven or eight miles up to the river opposite New Orleans. The problem then, of course, would be how to get across, since the river there is more than half a mile wide. One way would have been for the boats, as they disembarked the infantry, to row up the river and be waiting to ferry the men across when they came opposite New Orleans.

  If this scheme had worked, occupying New Orleans should have been fairly easy, since there were virtually no troops in the city itself to defend it. On the other hand, it, too, would have been a risky business, for Pakenham would have divided his army. But if the British had reached New Orleans, Jackson likely would have felt compelled to come out from behind his rampart to deal with them, thus exposing himself to open-field combat, which was a British strength, not an American one. Or the British could have marched through the city, down the levee road, and come up behind the American rampart, while the other force attacked it from the south in a pincers movement.

  It is also probably worth contemplating what might have happened if the 44th Infantry Regiment had not forgotten the fascines and scaling ladders and, in the dim light of dawn, before the Americans could see them clearly, had rushed forward and breached the ditch. Surely some part of the British force would have been able to get into the American positions. Then there would have come a test of wills and courage. It is one thing to fight from behind a fortified rampart, but quite another when the enemy is right upon you. Would the American militia have broken and run, leaving a gap for more and more British arms to pour through?

  When you consider the Americans’ audacious behavior during the night battle of December 23, it seems unlikely; still, if the British ever stood a chance on January 8, that would have been it. Of course, this is all armchair generalship, but no less interesting to ponder.

  As we have seen, the bodies of Generals Pakenham and Gibbs were eviscerated and shipped home. The viscera were allegedly buried under a pecan tree on Lacoste’s plantation, and legend has it that the tree never again bore pecans. There is a persistence on the part of some writers to romanticize—if that is the word for it—Pakenham’s death by suggesting that his new bride had accompanied him with the fleet, and that the poor woman had the dreadful experience of sailing home with the body of her husband preserved in a barrel of rum. That is nonsense; Pakenham was a bachelor.

  In any case, both Pakenham and Gibbs were immortalized in a remarkable marble sculpture now in the hall of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The statue depicts the two generals standing beside each other, with Gibbs’s hand on Pakenham’s shoulder, as if they were the closest of friends, watching the attack go forward. They each have a faraway gaze in their eyes that is quite touching.

  Admiral Cochrane sailed his fleet back to England, no doubt despairing of the fabulous prize money that had slipped so narrowly from his grasp. He was made a full admiral in 1821 and took command of British naval headquarters at Portsmouth. In 1824 he retired to a life of leisure in the countryside and died in Paris in 1832.

  Several months after the peace treaty was signed, and less than a month before the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, who was married to Pakenham’s sister, Kitty, wrote a letter to Pakenham’s brother, Lord Longford, lamenting his loss and blaming the British defeat on Cochrane. So disgusted was the Iron Duke that he condemned the whole campaign as a mere grab by Cochrane for plunder: “an evil design [that] defeated its own end.”

  Despite being reported by Judge Walker as killed at Waterloo, Major Sir Harry Smith stayed in the British army and became a lieutenant general. Later he was made a baron and appointed governor of the South African colony. After the Battle of New Orleans, he kept up an amicable correspondence with Edward Livingston, with whom he had negotiated on the fateful battlefield. He died in 1860.

  Following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Lieutenant George Gleig went back to Oxford, where he received a bachelor of arts degree. He later became an Anglican clergyman and ultimately chaplain-general to the British army; he died in 1888.

  General Keane, having recovered from being shot in the neck, went on to become governor of Jamaica, where, we are told, he engaged in his favorite sport, “spearing alligators.” Later he saw service in India, where he earned the title Lord Keane. He died on his estate in Ireland in 1845.

  Major General Sir John Lambert was one of those tapped by Wellington to fight Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. This he did at the head of his brigade, with distinction, and later he succeeded Keane as governor of Jamaica, where he died in 1848.

  Colonel Mullins, commander of the ill-fated 44th Regiment, was court-martialed in Dublin, Ireland, in June 1815. He was acquitted of the most serious charge, cowardice, but convicted of dereliction of duty for “shamefully neglecting and disobeying the order he had received from the late Major-General Gibbs, to collect the fascines and ladders.” From the transcript of his trial, it appears that Mullins was probably not guilty of much that he was accused of.

  What emerges through a fog of nineteenth-century military legal rhetoric is that Keane had ordered a subordinate officer to ascertain from the engineers precisely where the fascines and scaling ladders were located. In fact, they were in a redoubt (a small fort, often protected by artillery
) at the leading edge of the battlefield. But there was also an even more advanced British battery on the field, about a quarter of a mile ahead of the redoubt.

  It seems that there was a confusion in terminology, for upon the subordinate’s return the night before the battle, Mullins was left to understand that the ladders and fascines were in the advance battery, and not in the redoubt, which his regiment had passed right by on their way to the fight. The opinion of the court was that Mullins ought to have understood his orders more carefully and have gone personally to inspect the location of the scaling equipment, which he had been ordered to do, and that his remarks about his regiment being destined to become merely “a bridge of dead men across which the British army would cross” were proof enough that he was insufficiently enthusiastic about the attack.

  In any case, Mullins was cashiered from the army in disgrace, and he retired to his estate in Ireland, but for the rest of his life he went about like the Ancient Mariner, telling his side of the story to anyone who would listen.

  Of the Americans in the battle, Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson was made a captain and commanded the Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” and later became commandant of the Washington Navy Yard, until his death in 1839. Lieutenant Thomas Ap Catesby Jones, who commanded the gunboats during the Battle of Lake Borgne, also remained in the navy, but with the onset of the Civil War he resigned and joined the Confederacy. He commanded the Merrimac after her captain was wounded during the fight with the Monitor in the celebrated Battle of the Ironclads at Hampton Roads in 1862. He was killed six months later and buried in Richmond’s renowned Hollywood Cemetery.

  General William Carroll returned to Tennessee, where he was twice elected governor. He died in Nashville in 1844. General John Coffee also went back to Tennessee, where he resumed work as a surveyor. He helped to found the city of Florence, Alabama, before his death in 1832. General John Adair was elected governor of Kentucky and later served in the U.S. Congress. He died in 1840. After the battle of January 8, Jackson condemned the disorderly retreat of the Kentuckians, to which Adair took exception, and the two former friends entered into a lengthy and acrimonious public dispute, demonstrating yet again the kind of pride between states that existed in that day.

  General David B. Morgan, who had been in command of the west bank on January 8, returned to Louisiana politics. He, too, engaged in a protracted quarrel with Jackson, and others, over responsibility for the flight of American troops on the west bank. Jackson had blamed Morgan, who was in overall charge of the position, and Morgan, in turn, blamed the colonel of the Kentucky militia. Despite all the finger-pointing, the argument was, of course, moot: the battle was over; the Americans had won.

  In April 1815, Andrew and Rachel Jackson left New Orleans for their home, the Hermitage, in Nashville. He remained in command of the Southern District but turned over most duties to subordinates and resumed his cotton planting and horse racing. However, a border crisis in 1817 led him to invade Florida the following year and wrest it from the Spanish, which precipitated a diplomatic crisis in Washington that threatened war. Jackson was in the clear when Secretary of State John Quincy Adams arranged for the purchase of that territory from Spain.

  In 1823 Jackson was elected to the U.S. Senate, but his continuing hero status led a number of his friends to push him to run for president. In 1824 he was put up for president but lost to John Quincy Adams in an acrimonious political battle. In 1828 he ran again and won, although the acrimony was much more vicious and personal this time. Not only did Adams’s supporters dredge up the old adultery charges regarding Rachel, which had inspired so many duels, but they published a broadsheet infamously known as the “coffin handbill,” which depicted the six coffins of the Tennessee militiamen, along with inflammatory accusations from relatives of the executed men branding Jackson a cold-blooded murderer.

  Shortly after the presidential election, Rachel Jackson died at the Hermitage on December 22, 1828. Jackson had loved her all through the years, fought his duels over the honor of her name, watched her grow portly and loved her still, when he could have had more or less any woman he pleased after New Orleans, and did not. Rachel had been his rock, his anchor; and now he was alone. The personal attacks against Andrew during the political campaign had wounded Rachel and caused her to declare that she would “rather be a doorkeeper in the House of God” than live in the White House.

  Andrew Jackson was inaugurated on March 4, 1829, the seventh president of the United States, and immediately the political and social climate in Washington underwent a wrenching change.

  Jackson was an American original, whose world rested on moral principles as immutable as the laws of nature. He was the first populist president, the first to publicly and actively campaign in his own behalf, the first to come from west of the Appalachians—a rough country backwoodsman, dueler, and brawler, in stark contrast to the courtly Virginians and staid New Englanders who previously had held the office. The rumor mills ground out all kinds of unsavory reports: White House doors flung open to the rabble, and drinking, cursing, gambling, and brawling now become the hallmarks of America’s highest office. It was claimed that the carpets of the president’s mansion were muddied from the boots of the vulgar frontiersmen who were his friends, men who had never known a utensil besides a knife and who always ate at the dinner table with their fingers.

  Yet Jackson’s vision of America was as sweeping as the great prairies of the West. He saw the nation as a great, expanding panorama filled with appalling risks and soaring promise, and with wealth and happiness as its God-given design. He had grown up in poverty in the abominable Waxhaw canebreaks, lost his entire family to war, and then bootstrapped himself to become president of the United States. If he could do it, Jackson reasoned, then anybody could.

  There were constant battles, as always. Jackson despised the notion of a national bank, which Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists had established, because he thought it would inevitably become corrupt, and this put him in direct contention with the monied interests. The abuses and intrigues of Washington were as unrelenting then as they are today, and Jackson soon found himself at odds even with members of his own party. In 1830 the powerful South Carolina firebrand John C. Calhoun, Jackson’s own vice president, went on the stump against his leader over the issue of high protective tariffs imposed by a Federalist Congress. The South Carolinians declared the tariffs invalid under what they said was the theory of nullification (i.e., that the states were entitled to disregard any federal law they deemed to be against their interests). Jackson threatened to enforce the tariffs with federal troops, and the issue was defused. But here lay the underpinnings of the schism that eventually led to civil war, with the question of slavery only then beginning to insinuate itself seriously into the equation. If nothing else, Jackson had managed to postpone the inevitable for three more decades.

  He was reelected in 1832, but not before he signed into law the still-controversial Indian Removal bill, which eventually resulted in some fifteen thousand Cherokees being rounded up from their eight million acres of territory in Georgia and force-marched nearly two thousand miles to what is now Oklahoma. (The Creeks and Chickasaws had already agreed to be moved, and had left their lands by then.) Nearly 20 percent of them died from starvation or exposure to rain, sleet, and snow in what became known as the Trail of Tears. There was an outcry of indignation against this harsh act, and many of Jackson’s other policies were equally controversial, but when he departed office in 1837 he was, among other things, generally credited as being the father of the modern Democratic party.

  He retired afterward to the Hermitage, where, though in ill health but much revered, he was ever open to political discussions. Many who came through Nashville wanted to see him, and he was always accommodating. He lived until 1845 and was buried in the garden next to Rachel.

  In 1851 the Place d’Armes in New Orleans was renamed Jackson Square, and a few years later a life-size statue of the general was erect
ed there, depicting Jackson sitting on his rearing horse and waving his hat. It is there today, and Jackson Square is almost always filled with tourists, a focal point of one of the world’s cities of destination.

  It is often noted that history is written by the victors, and this became a sore subject with Jean Laffite and at least some of the Baratarians. Although Jackson commended them, they did not feel that they received their due in the official reports, which of course were what the press studied to publicize the battle. Jean was especially incensed that none of Jackson’s dispatches mentioned the large quantities of gunpowder, flints, and other armaments that he had donated to the campaign.

  When Commodore Patterson and Colonel Ross began auctioning off what Laffite claimed as his property, which among other things consisted of fifteen armed privateering ships, Jean persuaded his old partners—who remained among the wealthiest and most influential citizens of New Orleans—to surreptitiously repurchase them for him, which they did. While he was waiting for his lawsuit against the government to be settled (it was now before the U.S. Supreme Court), Laffite resumed his old activities, preying on Spanish shipping under letters of marque from Cartagena.

  Since Patterson’s raid on Grand Terre, it had become apparent to Jean that Barataria was no longer a safe place to conduct business, and he decided to relocate to what is now Galveston Island, about three hundred miles to the west. This he did in 1816 with some five hundred of his men. Others decided to stay on at Grand Terre and engage in the tamer pursuits of fishing and shrimping, with a little smuggling on the side, but not privateering. Some of their direct descendants lived on the island until the 1940s, and others reside in the general area today. Some of the Baratarians moved into town, including Louis Chighizola (Nez Coupe), who peddled fruit in the old French Market till the end of his days.