Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans

by Brian Kilmeade

  Jackson himself supervised. On his horse, he was a constant presence, vigilant and refusing to sleep. One of Rachel’s nephews, a captain in the Tennessee militia, soon observed the toll the intense days were taking on the general. “Uncle Jackson,” he wrote home, “looks very badly at present, and has broken very much.”4

  His body suffering, Jackson’s spirit was strong. When one British prisoner reported to him that Admiral Cochrane had sworn he would take his Christmas dinner in New Orleans, Jackson had a sharp answer.

  “Perhaps so,” he snapped, “but I shall have the honor of presiding at that dinner.”5

  London’s Christmas Gift

  On the other side of the line, the British needed some bucking up. The cold, damp weather sat heavily on the exposed soldiers, another hardship after the bitter journey in the barges.

  The regular boom of the guns aboard the Carolina and now the Louisiana continued to endanger life and limb. Even on Christmas Day the British troops had to remain ever-wary of incoming rounds and shrapnel. As one group of officers shared a Christmas dinner made from their dwindling stock of provisions, they heard a loud scream. The men raced outside the little building where they had been eating and found a soldier mortally wounded by a cannonball. “Though fairly cut in two at the lower part of the belly,” George Gleig reported, “the poor wretch lived for nearly an hour, gasping for breath.”6

  The risks were constant. Anyone who ventured into the no-man’s-land between the two encampments was a target for sharp-eyed American snipers and, once night fell, any exposed Britishers were in danger of periodic hit-and-run volleys from American cavalry and stealthy visits from the Choctaws. Some five dozen Indians armed with tomahawks and bands of Tennesseans with long rifles made deadly work of sneaking up on—and killing—British sentries. The British thought this behavior uncivilized but it had its effect. As one British quartermaster reported, the invaders were robbed of “much time for comfortable rest.”7

  Then, at two o’clock on Christmas afternoon, the British got a gift that lifted their spirits. The Americans were still digging on their side of the battlefield-to-be, but their pickets, stationed forward of the line, heard loud cheering from the British position. When pistol shots rang out and an artillery salvo was fired, everyone snapped to attention.

  Were the British attacking?

  They were celebrating. In the enemy camp, a name ricocheted from unit to unit: the Honorable Sir Edward Pakenham, major general, had arrived. And the happy news lifted morale instantly.

  To the British fighters, “Ned” Pakenham was one of them. He had proved himself on battlefields across Spain and France. Though born to the nobility as the son of an earl, he wasn’t afraid to put himself at risk. In helping defeat Napoleon, he repeatedly demonstrated his valor, charging headlong into enemy ranks; his rout of one French force had earned him the nickname Hero of Salamanca. He had been injured in battle many times, including two musket wounds to the neck. The first, it was said, left the legendary fighter with a pronounced tilt to his head; the second, sustained years later, left him with his military posture restored.8

  A survivor on his own terms, Pakenham was also brother-in-law to the formidable Duke of Wellington, who admired his leadership. “My partiality for him does not lead me astray when I tell you he is one of the best we have,” Wellington said of Pakenham. (The Iron Duke himself would not go to America; he was both dubious at the likely outcome—“I don’t promise myself much success there,” he mused—and otherwise engaged in Paris, where he was wrapping up affairs after being named British ambassador to France.) But on the outskirts of New Orleans, Sir Edward had something new to prove: this campaign was his first independent command and, if he succeeded in taking the city, he carried with him a paper commissioning him as the governor of the captured territory.9

  Shortly after his arrival, General Pakenham set off for an inspection of the front to see for himself the nature of the landscape and the position of his enemy. Almost immediately, he began to question the decisions made by General Keane and Admiral Cochrane; soon he was furious, recognizing the dangerous position he had been handed.

  He and his new command were in a box, with a narrow path of attack that was confined by the river on one side and the swamp on the other. Dead ahead there was an American force busily digging itself in. Behind lay a narrow path of retreat. The source of supply was the fleet, moored sixty miles away, with only small open boats to deliver food, men, and munitions. Communications were poor.

  In short, as Pakenham saw it, the first fight with the Americans had left the British with an “ominous result,” a position of real “jeopardy.”10 One of his officers reported that Pakenham was so angry that his cursing was overheard by men of all ranks.

  Still, he had a job to do: he would have to extricate his force; he had to devise and execute a plan that he thought would work. He convened a meeting of the advisers he’d brought with him, together with Keane and Cochrane and their officers.

  Sitting in the parlor of the Villeré house—the owner was with his Louisiana militiamen, awaiting the battle on other side of the line—Pakenham didn’t mince words. “Our troops should have advanced to New Orleans immediately [on December 23],” he told them. That failure, he said, was an “error.”11 If they had marched straight on, rather than pausing for the night, the city might already be theirs.

  Keane and Cochrane shifted the subject to the fight of December 23, attempting to portray the battle as a British victory. Keane claimed that he and his men had held their ground and “repulsed” the attacking Americans who, after attacking, had “thought it prudent to retire [from the field of battle].”

  Pakenham disagreed. He saw the night battle quite simply as a “defeat.”12

  That brought the discussion around to their present position.

  Pakenham told the officers around him that he was considering a full withdrawal. A better plan could be made, he believed. The entire operation could begin afresh. This fine British force could be deployed elsewhere and odds of a big victory increased.

  At this, Admiral Cochrane exploded.

  The seasoned navy veteran would have none of it. Cochrane rejected Pakenham’s argument: he didn’t see defeat—far from it. And the very suggestion that he, his men, and his plan had failed made him immensely angry.

  The now-furious Cochrane challenged Pakenham: if the general’s army couldn’t do the job of taking New Orleans, he threatened, Cochrane’s sailors and marines of the Royal Navy would storm the American lines and move on New Orleans.

  “The soldiers could then,” he taunted Pakenham caustically, “bring up the baggage.”13

  For a moment, the men were at an impasse.

  Pakenham was taken aback by Cochrane’s outrage, but he knew he needed the admiral’s willing cooperation. Under these circumstances, there could be no wholesale rethinking of the strategy, and he realized he had no choice but to relent. As the guns of the Carolina and the Louisiana continued to send cannonballs into the British encampment, Pakenham resigned himself to trying to make the best of what he recognized was a wretched situation.

  He would begin by destroying the Carolina.

  A Shattering Surprise

  On December 27, Andrew Jackson awakened from his first sustained sleep in three days. Following a quiet day of supervising the digging on the American side, the general, to his dismay, found that the British had decided to begin this new day with a barrage of artillery fire shortly after seven o’clock.

  Jackson hurried to the dormer windows on the top floor of the Macarty mansion. He saw that the British objective was neither his army nor the line at the Rodriguez Canal. Instead, the enemy cannons bombarded the USS Carolina, which had annoyed them with its guns for several days.

  Billowing smoke revealed the position of the British guns, dug in downstream on the levee. Standing near them was General Edward Pakenham himself, comm
anding an artillery battery that, as far as Jackson knew, hadn’t even existed just the day before. And the guns were new to the battle, too, longer and with greater range than the ones his men had faced four days before.

  A corps of officers had arrived with Pakenham, one of whom was artillery commander Colonel Alexander Dickson. Regarded as one of the ablest gunners in the Royal Army, he had been Wellington’s artillery commander and fought with Pakenham at Salamanca, Spain. He had immediately taken charge of the guns that, after arriving on the bayous in boats and barges, had been dragged along the path toward the river by horses. Cochrane promised larger guns would follow but, as of Christmas Day, the Royal Artillery had on hand a pair of nine-pounders, four six-pounders, four three-pounders, and two five-and-a-half-inch howitzers.

  Dickson and his men had positioned them to destroy the Carolina. Wishing to keep their strategy secret—as well as to avoid drawing fire from the Carolina—the guns had been brought to the levee after dark on Christmas night. Colonel Dickson ordered that the guns be spaced out over a distance of several hundred yards, and trenches were dug into the rear of the levee to protect the guns from returning fire. The barrels were set just above grade, and the carriages rested on lengths of wood repurposed from nearby fencing to prevent the heavy iron weapons from sinking into the soft ground. With their work nearly completed before dawn on December 26, the redcoats camouflaged the guns with bundles of sugarcane stalks left on the fields after the harvest. The British withdrew before daylight; they would wait a day before firing, since needed artillery rounds were still arriving on the bayous.

  After sunset, the British had gone back to work. They made their final preparations and, at 2:00 a.m., the gunners lit fires to heat the nine-pound balls. The artillerymen had their orders: General Pakenham wished them to commence fire at daylight.

  On the morning of December 27, with the firing under way and the booms of the British guns filling his ears, Jackson issued an order that the Louisiana, presently moored less than a mile upstream from the Carolina, sail out of range. The Carolina returned the British fire with her twelve-pounder, the only gun aboard with the range to hit the British position from the ship’s mooring on the far side of the Mississippi.

  Jackson watched helplessly as deadly accurate British gunnery began to take its toll. Within a half hour, a cannonball baked in a fire as hot as a blacksmith’s furnace crashed through the deck of the Carolina. It came to rest deep in the ship’s main hold, beneath the control cables, a spot difficult for the crew to reach. The hot shot soon ignited a fire whose flames spread rapidly and, within minutes, the uncontrollable blaze was consuming the schooner from within.

  More hot shot struck the ship. With several fires threatening to envelop the vessel, the crew had no alternative but to abandon ship. As nine o’clock approached, with flames licking closer and closer to the powder magazine belowdecks, the crew, some of them Lafitte’s pirates, managed to roll two of the ship’s cannons overboard before they clambered into the Carolina’s boats, pushed off, and rowed madly for shore.

  When the powder in the hold exploded, windows rattled miles away in New Orleans. Shattered and flaming remnants of the schooner, sent skyward by the blast, hissed into the water and fell to earth as far away as the opposite side of the Mississippi. In the momentary quiet that followed, ash and debris continued to rain down—and the soldiers on the American line heard shouts and cheers from the British side.

  Then the enemy fire resumed and, with knowing dread, Andrew Jackson observed that the British had shifted the trajectory of their cannon fire toward the last of the American warships. The USS Louisiana, though more than a mile upstream, had just become the target.

  Her crew had unfurled her sails, but the Louisiana, aided by no more than a whisper of wind and fighting the Mississippi current, could make no headway upstream; that was her only escape route. To the men across the river, British and American alike, the outcome seemed inevitable—but one option remained to save her from the British fire that was now breaking over her quarterdeck. If the wind could not deliver the ship to safety, then manpower would have to do the job.

  The Louisiana’s boats went over the side, followed by her sailors as they clambered into position at their oars. As if to emphasize the importance of their errand, a shell smashed into the deck of the immobilized ship.

  With great ropes tethered to the ninety-nine-foot sloop, the sailors strained at their oars. Other men standing in the shallow water near the shore pulled on ropes, too, but once the cables were taut, the scene seemed frozen, with the little boats, like children tugging on their mother’s apron strings, striving to pull the immobilized Louisiana to safety.

  At first: nothing. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the mother ship began to move. Despite continued fire, fortune was with the Americans and the oarsmen managed to pull the Louisiana the half mile needed to get out of the range of the British ordnance.

  This time the Americans cheered and, with the cessation of British artillery fire, the day’s hostilities came to an end.

  A British Assault

  The assault on Patterson’s little flotilla had blown up one ship and driven the other out of range. Although that action made a direct attack on Jackson’s line more feasible, General Pakenham still lacked clear knowledge of his opponent’s power and position. The persistent American snipers and militia cavalry patrolling the area between the armies had limited British reconnaissance, a problem that, Pakenham knew, he must correct.

  From their position, all the British could see of the American force were the unimpressive cavalry patrols, which, Dickson reported, consisted of men wearing “a kind of blanket dress.” The volunteer soldiers had been issued no uniforms, but were dressed in woolen shirts, homemade trousers, and hats of wool or raccoon skin. With long hair and scruffy, unkempt beards, these woodsmen carried “long muskets or rifles.”14

  On December 28, Pakenham organized his force to advance for the purpose of “reconnoit[ering] the enemy’s position, or to attack if . . . practicable.”15 He wanted to get closer, to get a better sense of how large Jackson’s force was, to try softening up the defenses. The Americans still had to prove themselves to the war-hardened Pakenham.

  A frosty morning mist had burned off when four British regiments, commanded by General Keane, advanced along the edge of the swamp. Four other regiments stepped off along the levee road, led by General Samuel Gibbs, who had arrived with Pakenham as his second in command. Artillerists supported both columns, prepared to bombard the Americans with mortars and rockets.

  As the redcoats moved closer to the American line, the rising sun in a clear sky revealed a breastwork before them that, in some places, had reached five feet in height. The American line spanned the terrain from the riverbank to the cypress swamp. When Edward Livingston had brought Jean Lafitte to inspect the line of defense a few days earlier, the privateer had immediately spied a vulnerability. “Lafitte thinks our line to afford complete protection ought to be extended through the first wood, to the cypress swamp,” Livingston told Jackson.16 Out of respect for Lafitte’s understanding of the local terrain and impressed by his grasp of military tactics, Jackson acted upon the suggestion at once, ordering the line to be extended deep enough into the swampy perimeter that any skirting the end of the defense was a practical impossibility.

  Accompanying his men on horseback, Pakenham was surprised to see the muzzles of at least five big guns protruding through the crude crenellations along the top of the parapet. The built-up ramparts were clearly still a work in progress, varying greatly in height and thickness along a line that seemed to bend back on itself near the cypress swamp to follow its boundary.

  Jackson’s men had constructed redoubts for four artillery batteries. Since the ground softened to a soggy mix of mud and groundwater at a depth of three feet, the general had once again adopted someone else’s idea, one that may have been suggested by a ditch-digging sla
ve. The suggestion was to bring bales of unshipped cotton, warehoused in the city, to fill and stiffen the muddy hollows. Jackson ordered it done, and girdled by iron rings, the bales were buried beneath a layer of dirt, with wooden platforms for the guns mounted on top. Two of the cannons were good-size twenty-four-pounders. Two of the gunnery crews were Baratarians, who had arrived that very morning, “red-shirted, bewhiskered, rough and desperate-looking men, all begrimed with smoke and mud.”17

  As the British approached, the outnumbered American pickets in the fields fired volleys but quickly retreated. Pakenham’s columns marched forward and soon came within half a mile of the Rodriguez Canal. The oncoming British troops made an impressive sight in their colorful uniforms of red, gray, green, and tartan, marching to the beat of drums and the call of bugles. To the novice soldiers on the American side this was their first real look at the mighty British war machine on the march. Even as rockets began exploding overhead and British artillery lobbed shells and deadly iron toward the American line, the disciplined British “veterans moved as steadily and closely together as if marching in review.”18

  When the American gunners began returning fire, however, their aim proved deadly: “Scarce a bullet passed over, or fell short of its mark,” Gleig recorded, “but all striking full into the midst of our ranks, occasioned terrible havoc.”19 Master Commander Daniel Patterson and the men aboard the Louisiana, moored on the opposite bank of the Mississippi, fired a broadside that swept the line of redcoats along the levee. Over the next several hours, the ship’s guns would maintain a constant fire, bombarding the British with eight hundred shots, now that the enemy was back in their range.

  Hearing the screams of their wounded, the British column hesitated and then stopped. At the order of their officers, the men by the levee sought shelter in ditches, behind tall reeds, finding whatever cover they could.