The British column advancing along the swampland on the other side of the field fared better. They had to deal with fire from the Americans’ left flank, manned by Tennesseans under the command of Generals Coffee and Carroll, but they were out of range of the Louisiana.
Seeking to get a better understanding of the situtation, Pakenham dismounted and moved forward on foot for a better look at the American batteries and battlement. One thing was clear immediately: his limited artillery was inadequate in the face of such fire. He sent back word that work should begin immediately on an earthwork to bring forward his own guns.
Meanwhile, the Louisiana continued to bombard the troops closer to the levee, and the land guns mounted on the ramparts maintained a steady fire, aiming in particular at the small British artillery installations.
As the fight unfolded, Jackson received an uninvited visitor, one bringing news from Governor Claiborne.
In the city, he was told, there was talk of surrender: The residents knew about the British approach and their recent attacks, and had heard rumors of the enemy’s sheer numbers and military power. Jackson, eager to return to his spyglass and the fight before him, listened with growing impatience to talk of the state legislature and the concern that he might not prevail in the battle now raging outside.
Finally, he had had enough.
“Return to . . . your honorable body,” he said firmly, “and say to them from me, that if I was so unfortunate to be beaten . . . and compelled to retreat through New Orleans, they would have a warm session.”20
“Warm session”?
Jackson later elaborated on his meaning. If he could not defend it, he would burn the city, take up a position up the river, and cut off supplies to the British, thereby forcing them to leave the country. Quite simply, the British were not going to march victorious into any city that he was defending. Nor were any treasonous legislators with a doubtful allegiance to the United States of America going to raise the white flag.
With that, he went back to fighting his battle.
On the British side, Pakenham learned that his handful of artillery pieces were out of action, their carriages shot away. The American cannoneers got high marks for their marksmanship, and Pakenham, seeing that the attack on his left was going nowhere beneath the shower of iron from the Louisiana, decided to order a withdrawal.
The British soldiers, accustomed to prevailing in their battles, admitted to shame and indignation as they fell back. Their morale wasn’t aided by the fact that the American gunfire required a stealthy withdrawal, one that could not be completed until after dark, leaving many redcoats lying in the field waiting for sunset. A humiliating retreat had followed a proud march into battle, and Pakenham’s force slowly countermarched two miles back from the American line, making camp just beyond range of all but the largest of the enemy’s cannons.
Whatever the attack’s failures—surely Ned Pakenham hadn’t led them to the easy victory they expected—the general had managed to get a good look at the enemy position. The deadly American guns, Pakenham resolved, would be his next objective. If he was to succeed in overrunning the American line, the enemy artillery would have to be silenced first and, with only four-, six-, and nine-pound guns at hand, Pakenham ordered that the two eighteen-pounders already dragged to Villeré’s plantation be brought forward. And he ordered another eight guns to be brought from the fleet.
As Pakenham made his plans, Jackson supervised the installation of another gun at the center of his ramparts, this one a thirty-two-pounder. He knew the British would be back and better prepared, and he was going to be ready.
The New Year’s Day Artillery Fight
Aside from a few minor skirmishes, the opposing armies maintained their distance for three days. Jackson waited for the enemy to make the next big move, since his force, still smaller than Pakenham’s, was better protected behind the earthworks. But Jackson tolerated no idleness.
His aide-de-camp Major Latour observed that despite Jackson’s evident fatigue, “the energy manifested by General Jackson spread, as it were, . . . and communicated itself to the whole army. . . . If he ordered it to be done . . . immediately a crowd of volunteers offered themselves to carry his views into execution.”21
Jackson’s directives continued to radiate in all directions. At his orders, the city of New Orleans was scoured for needed guns and ammunition, since many freshly recruited militiamen had arrived without weapons. At the front, the commanding general hadn’t lessened the pressure to reinforce the earthworks, and the excavation continued without letup. From the British line, one soldier reported, “We could plainly perceive great numbers of men continually at work upon [the American ramparts], mostly blacks . . . but their white people also (the army, we conclude) were constantly employed upon it.”22 After noting that troops at the far end of the defensive line, closest to the swamp, had been badly outnumbered by the force Pakenham led several days earlier, Jackson sent more men to strengthen that flank, including more Tennesseans and Choctaws.
Aware that there was a chance his major line of defense could be overrun by Pakenham’s superior force, Jackson ordered his engineers to design and construct two secondary lines to the rear; one was a mile and a half west of the Rodriguez Canal, the other almost two miles closer to New Orleans. Jackson added more artillery batteries to the main front so a baker’s dozen guns protruded through the defensive wall, ranging from a small brass carronade near the swamp to the big thirty-two-pounder near the center.
Nor had Jackson neglected the opposite bank of the river. A team of 150 slaves worked to complete a parapet lining a canal there. From the Louisiana, Commodore Patterson’s men brought more cannons ashore—a twenty-four-pounder and two twelve-pounders—and dug them in at the right bank post. They were reinforced there by Brigadier General David Morgan and 450 Louisiana militiamen laboring at the earthworks.
But the British had been busy, too, readying to put in place a new strategy for a new year.
Silent Marching
At nightfall on New Year’s Eve, half the British army advanced in near silence. They passed the position of their pickets, stopping just six hundred yards from the Rodriguez Canal. With two regiments on guard duty, the rest of the soldiers stacked their arms and went to work with the spades, picks, and sledges they carried.
Speed was of the essence: Pakenham’s men were constructing new gun emplacements and had only a few hours before the sun would rise, exposing them to the guns of the watching Americans. As the men mounded up earth, sculpting a small version of the American embankment behind which their gunners could take cover, Admiral Cochrane’s sailors dragged ten eighteen- and four twenty-four-pound carronades forward. They had rowed their heavy loads (the bigger guns weighed more than two tons) from the fleet at Ship Island and dragged them to the camp, using country carts designed for moving sugar barrels. Now they used the last of their strength to position the iron guns and their heavy carriages behind the new earthworks. They aimed them at the American camp.
As the sky brightened in the early hours, the American lookouts watched nervously. General Jackson and his men had heard the British at work in the darkness, and were anxious to see what the enemy had been up to. But the arrival of morning brought no clarity; a dense fog rolled in, completely concealing the field of battle.
Dread mounted as the fog lingered, leaving the Americans in uncomfortable anticipation of an attack. Interrogations of British deserters had revealed that Pakenham had called for major troop reinforcements. Once they arrived, everyone assumed he would attack, and it was possible that the sound in the night had been that of the fresh troops preparing. Then, just as the blanket of thick morning mist burned off around eight o’clock, the ominous calm gave way to the deafening din of artillery. The British were firing their newly advanced cannons at the American line. In particular, the British artillery aimed for the Macarty house, where they knew General Jackson made
his headquarters.
The guns hit their mark, and the shrill scream of rockets overhead accompanied the sounds of the house’s destruction. “Bricks, splinters of wood and furniture, rockets and balls,” Major Latour reported, “were flying in all directions.”23 In the minutes that followed, more than a hundred cannonballs, rockets, and shells crashed into the plantation house. Its porches were “beaten down, and the building made a complete wreck.” Miraculously, no one was hurt, and Jackson, as was his habit, had quickly departed—not to flee, but to fight. According to his adjutant Major Reid, it was Jackson’s practice, “on the first appearance of danger . . . instantly to proceed to the line.”24
From the front, Jackson could look upon the result of the enemy’s overnight labors as the British bombardment continued: There were three new gun emplacements, crescent-shaped batteries that offered the gunnery crews protection both from the American line and from guns fired across the Mississippi. Including three mortars and two howitzers, twenty-two guns had been positioned by the English on crude wooden platforms. In the interests of speedy installation, the British had brought forward barrels of sugar found at plantations they’d ransacked as a substitute for sandbags. Rolled into place upright, the hogsheads became a protective parapet atop the batteries.
Jackson also took in another ominous sight: Some two hundred yards to the rear of the British guns stood the brightly uniformed infantry. Again, two columns had been formed into battle array, one on either side of the field, ready to attack. Less obvious was a third, smaller party, hidden in the dense cover at the edge of the swamp.25
There was little Jackson’s men could do but hope their guns would hold off the invasion. And at the order of Jackson’s chief artillerist—“Let her off!”—the American guns were soon returning fire.26
The British had more guns than the Americans, but from their lower elevation on the plain, their aim was skewed, often shooting high above their marks, sending their loads soaring over the American line. Other shots thudded harmlessly into the soft earth of the embankment, though one arching round hit an American powder carriage; the explosion was so loud, the gunnery paused briefly and a distant cheer was heard from the British line. Another almost hit its mark when it grazed the Baratarian Dominique You, a gun commander and half brother of Jean Lafitte. Furious, he swore an oath even before binding up his wound: “I will pay them for that!”27
Meanwhile, General Jackson rode back and forth along the line encouraging his men. “Don’t mind these rockets, they are mere toys to amuse children,” he told them, calming the inexperienced soldiers and rallying the seasoned.28 His encouragement worked and the earthworks held; a few of the American guns were eventually silenced, but the parapet was little damaged by the English artillery. The Americans’ fire proved better directed and, within an hour, several of the enemy guns had been put out of commission.
On the other side of the line, General Pakenham watched as his options faded. The hogsheads of sugar were ineffective; cannonballs penetrated them as if the barrels were empty. The supply of ammunition was dwindling, and his artillery fire began to slow, then became irregular; finally, by midafternoon, the British had retired from the field. “When the batteries have silenced the enemy’s fire and opened his works, the position will be carried as follows . . .” read Pakenham’s written orders from the night before.29 But that had not happened. It was British artillery that had been silenced; no hole had been torn in the American line. No attack had been possible.
“We retired, therefore, not only baffled and disappointed, but in some degree disheartened and discontented,” Gleig observed. “All our plans had as yet proved abortive.”30 The British fighters still had nothing to show for the hardships they had suffered over the course of the preceding days—not to mention weeks.
A New Plan
The redcoats’ morale was at low ebb. To retreat was not in the nature of the Royal Army; however, as the year 1815 began, Wellington’s veterans had been forced to retrace their own steps for the second time in a week. Having to laboriously drag their ordnance back to their own lines after dark on New Year’s Day only added to the sense of insult. British casualty counts were at least twice the American losses.
Dysentery was taking hold in the camp, and rations were poor, the army having exhausted the resources of the surrounding plantations. The men subsisted on “maggoty pork and weevily biscuit.”31 The coffee supply had been depleted. The round-the-clock harassment by American snipers and artillery continued, and the rate of desertion was rising. The siege was lasting far longer than the invaders had expected, and the easy and glorious victory they anticipated had not come to pass.
Andrew Jackson and the Americans had proved formidable foes, but Sir Edward Pakenham was undeterred. He had faced the finest armies in Europe. He had delivered the decisive blow in victories that won Great Britain, Wellington, and himself great honor. And here, on the American Gulf Coast, his enemy was little more than a ragtag array of volunteers. They ranged from dandily dressed New Orleans gentlemen to the “dirty shirts,” men armed with “duck guns.” This band was led by a broken-down country lawyer whose only claim to military fame was the defeat of some underequipped Indians.
Certain he could still defeat the Americans, Pakenham summoned his officers to a brief meeting: Ned had a plan. To capture New Orleans, his army had to accomplish one simple thing: blast through Jackson’s fortification. To do that, he explained, they must hurl the army, with even greater force than before, at their opponents—but this time they would do it after pummeling the enemy into near submission with its own guns.
The key was a direct attack on the American line on the west bank. Once the guns across the river had been captured, they could turn Patterson’s cannons back on Jackson’s army, catching the Americans in a cross fire between the west bank artillery and Pakenham’s Chalmette batteries. Then the main force of the ever-enlarging British army would drive through the American earthworks in the biggest attack yet.
To do so, however, boats from the bayous and Lake Borgne would have to be taken overland to the Mississippi since there was no waterway linking the bayou to the river. Pakenham proposed rolling the boats on timbers, but Admiral Cochrane suggested an alternative: his men could extend the waterway from the Villeré canal to the levee. Initially, Pakenham had his doubts, but Cochrane got the nod.
The excavation of the waterway would take days, so crews of soldiers and sailors went to work on January 2, in four six-hour shifts. By Friday, January 6, it was done. And, on the American side, the ramparts had grown taller, thanks to the continued exertions of men with shovels.
That same day, Pakenham’s spirits got a real lift. More reinforcements arrived, adding two full regiments to an army that now exceeded eight thousand men. And these men were superb soldiers. One of Pakenham’s generals sang their praises: “Two such corps would turn the tide of a general action. We were rejoiced!”32 Ammunition for the guns was brought forward, some of it in the knapsacks of the arriving infantry. The work of preparing cartridges was undertaken; more than four hundred men spent their days packing powder and shot. The notion of an imminent victory, of shared spoils after the capture of the city, began once again to take hold among the invaders.
On Saturday, January 7, Pakenham confidently issued his orders. William Thornton was to lead the west bank attack force. Using vessels floated into the Mississippi via the newly dug canal, his two regiments, together with 200 sailors and 400 marines, would embark at midnight. He and his 1,300 men were to land at daylight and capture the American force on the right bank.
On firing a rocket to signal their success, the main attack on the works overlooking the Rodriguez Canal could begin. Pakenham had reason to feel optimistic. After all, he had the finest fighting force in the world and, if his scouts had it right, a considerable advantage in both men and artillery. What didn’t he have? Andrew Jackson and the American commitment to victory.
On the night of January 7, General Jackson retired early. The intelligence of the preceding hours, gained from prisoners captured on the river, led him to one conclusion: the British attack was imminent; almost certainly it would come with dawn the following day.
He had seen for himself through his spyglass that the British camp was a den of activity. Major Latour told him that the British were bundling sugarcane stalks and making scaling ladders, to be used, they supposed, to bridge the moat and climb the American earthworks.
The overextended general understood very well that a few hours’ rest could only help him do his duty: the past week had been enervating, as changeable as the weather.
After the fight on the first, there was good news on January 2: some three thousand new militiamen, most from Kentucky, would soon arrive to join Jackson’s melting-pot army. Every man mattered in this tough fight and, as Jackson watched for the Kentuckians on the third, he wrote to Secretary of War James Monroe: “I do not know what may be [the Britishers’] further design—Whether [they will] redouble their efforts, or . . . apply them elsewhere.”33
On the fourth, the Kentuckians did arrive, but they were poorly armed (fewer than one in ten carried a rifle) and so badly clothed the men visibly shivered as they walked through New Orleans. A frustrated General Jackson observed, “I have never in my life seen a Kentuckian without a gun, a pack of cards, and jug of whiskey.”34
His anticipation of another British attack elevated his impatience with everyone around him. When he discovered that promised shipments of ammunition had not arrived from the city, he summoned Governor Claiborne, the man charged with providing munitions. Jackson warned the intimidated Claiborne, “By the Almighty God, if you do not send me balls and powder instantly, I shall chop off your head, and have it rammed into one of those fieldpieces.”35
Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Page 15