Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans

by Brian Kilmeade

  Now, however, with eyes swollen from the smoke in the air, You stood by a silent twenty-four-pounder.

  “What! What! By the Eternal, what is the matter?” Jackson demanded. “You have ceased firing!”

  You looked up at Jackson. “Of course, general, of course!” he explained. “The powder is good for nothing—fit only to shoot blackbirds with, and not redcoats!”

  Jackson turned to an aide. Before galloping off, he ordered, “Tell the ordnance officer that I will have him shot in five minutes as a traitor, if Dominique complains any more of his powder.”15

  Just minutes into the battle, according to one Kentucky rifleman, “the smoke was so thick that everything seemed to be covered up in it.”16 But the woodsmen, armed with .38-caliber long rifles (the barrels were forty-two inches long), kept firing with deadly accuracy. Half-hidden in the dense cypress vegetation, they loaded their guns with balls and buckshot. Their fire was nearly constant and, according to one Louisiana merchant watching down the line, “the whole right of the British column was mowed down by these invisible riflemen.”17

  General Keane’s column had also fallen under intense fire, and Keane himself, with wounds in the neck and thigh, had been carried from the field. With him gone, the resolution of his men wavered and they began to fall back even as General Lambert’s forces advanced to reinforce the charge.18

  Some British troops had reached the Rodriguez Canal and tried to scale the earthen parapet. But firm footholds proved hard to find in the slippery mud and, without ladders, those who began the climb found the soft earth gave way, sending them sliding back down. From above, “a murderous discharge of musketry [caused] . . . a dreadful loss of men and officers.”19

  The immense battle was being fought across the breadth of the plain but, to the veteran British fighters, their enemy seemed close to invisible. From below, it appeared to the attackers as if the Americans, “without so much as lifting their faces above the rampart, swung their firelocks by one arm over the wall, and discharged them directly upon [our] heads.”20

  Even to a seasoned infantry officer who earned honors fighting Napoleon, this field of battle was overwhelming: “The echo from the cannonade and musketry was so tremendous . . . [that it] seemed as if the earth was cracking and tumbling to pieces, or as if the heavens were rent asunder by the most terrific peals of thunder that ever rumbled; it was the most awful and the grandest mixture of sounds.”21

  “And the flashes of fire looked as if coming out of the bowels of the earth.”22

  On the British right, General Gibbs went down. As Gibbs was carried from the field, Pakenham, together with his staff, galloped forward from his post well back from the front line. After removing his hat, the commanding general rode into midst of the battle.

  The men around him were “falling and staggering like drunken men from the effects of the fire.”23 Some were advancing, others retreating, but they responded to Pakenham’s desperate urging. “For shame,” he called to them, “recollect that you are British soldiers!”24 The troops had begun to re-form when a musket ball slammed into the general’s knee. When another rifleman shot his horse dead, Pakenham fell to the ground but, despite an arm that hung limp from still another wound, he demanded the mount of a junior officer. The general needed the help of an aide-de-camp to mount the animal and, just as he was attempting to settle into the saddle, an artillery round whistled in.

  A deadly iron ball ripped into Pakenham’s groin. This time, his spine mangled by the grapeshot, the general collapsed into the arms of his aide-de-camp.

  He, too, was carried to the rear, and the bearers laid their commanding general down beneath a great live oak tree in the center of the field, just out of firing range. The surgeon summoned to his side could do nothing, but the dying Pakenham was able to utter one last command. For the ear of John Lambert, the only British major general left standing, Pakenham whispered, “Tell him . . . to send forward the reserves.”

  Pakenham had fallen, well short of New Orleans, and would die quietly on the battlefield within the hour. General Gibbs, though in evident agony, survived into the next day, before joining Pakenham in death.25

  Barely two hundred yards away, Jackson’s men suffered miraculously few casualties behind their protective parapet. And in the convent, the nuns prayed on.

  On the West Bank

  The attack across the river—Pakenham’s best hope, his only hope—occurred altogether too late. Pakenham himself was beyond hearing, but more than an hour into the attack, the sound of gunfire could finally be distinguished across the water.

  The pop, pop, pop of a musketry volley was followed by the boom of artillery. Colonel Thornton’s force was attacking the forward line of Captain Morgan’s Louisiana militia.

  Far behind schedule at launch, Thornton’s mission had been further delayed by the boatmen’s complete failure to anticipate the strong Mississippi currents. Once the British boats were well launched into the river, the driving waters carried them far downstream from the intended landing place. By the time they reached the opposite shore, the redcoats had a four-mile march north toward their objective—and it would be a trek accompanied by the sounds of the battle already begun across the river at the Chalmette Plain. To their chagrin, Thornton and his men could also see Patterson’s guns just ahead, firing freely at the wave of attacking redcoats across the river.

  More determined than ever, however, Thornton’s band of soldiers, sailors, and marines attacked the breastwork manned by the advance guard of Louisiana militia. Unlike the great berm that loomed over the Chalmette battlefield, the west bank ramparts proved to be no great obstacle to the British. At first, artillery fire slowed their advance, but, noting the Americans’ right flank was poorly protected, Thornton ordered his troops to sweep left and attack there. Seeing that they would soon be overrun, many of the militia troops simply fled.

  Patterson, watching from his redoubt a few hundred yards away, recognized that the tide ran against him. Before the British force could reach him, he ordered his men to spike the guns. A length of iron rod was hammered into the vent, or touchhole, at the rear of each gun. The guns would not fire again until the spikes were removed, a time-consuming and laborious process. Then the Americans retreated.

  The west bank battle was over; the British now controlled the position. Yet there were no true winners: Thornton was wounded in the fight and Patterson had walked away unscathed. The British had the guns but the artillery had been rendered entirely useless—Jackson’s men at the Rodriguez Canal would not be fired upon by Patterson’s guns, this day or any other. The fight would become a postscript to the terrible tragedy that had befallen General Pakenham’s force on the opposite bank.

  There, as the only British major general still standing, Lambert by default had become the ranking officer of the New Orleans mission. He had watched as the regiments Pakenham had sent into battle were shredded by Jackson’s firepower. His two regiments remained largely intact; they had been held in reserve that morning. But he had no doubt he was left to shoulder a great defeat, that his job now was to begin to plan his exit. In the coming hours, he would order Thornton—against the recommendations of Admiral Cochrane—to abandon the hard-won west bank and rejoin the main British force.

  A Flag of Truce

  The guns had quieted across the field by the time a flag of truce reached Jackson at midday. With the outcome of the battle no longer in doubt, he had retired to his quarters at the Macarty house. Before doing so, he walked the entire length of the American line and, in the company of his staff, he stopped at each command. He addressed the men and their officers, offering “words of praise and grateful commendation.” To his troops, he seemed the most erect, warm, and relaxed version of himself, the proud victor.26

  The enemy’s courier brought him a request for a cease-fire so the British could bury their dead. The signer was General Lambert—a name unknown to Jackson
—but the two men soon agreed to terms.

  Though it was the official end of the battle, a more poignant surrender had occurred earlier when, on the left of the American earthworks, some Kentucky riflemen noticed a white flag waving. The Kentuckians held their fire and, as word moved up the line, the din of gunshots ceased. In the quiet, a fresh gust of wind cleared the dense gun smoke, and the Americans could see the bearer of the white handkerchief. A British officer, he held the makeshift pennant high on a sword or a stick. Some said he was a major, and epaulets decorated his shoulders.

  He stepped over the breastwork and was quickly surrounded by Americans. One of the Tennesseans, “a private all over begrimed with dust and powder,” demanded his sword. The enemy officer hesitated until an American officer ordered, “Give it up!”

  In the next moment, holding the weapon in both hands, the man who represented the Crown handed his sword to a humble American soldier, executing a polite bow as he did so.27

  No one on the Chalmette Plain remained in doubt as to the victor in the Battle of New Orleans.

  The Bloodied Field

  With the roar of artillery in the distance, the women gathered at the Cathedral of St. Louis had continued to pray. The doors were open as usual to the people of the town, but this morning’s High Mass was said to “a congregation of shuddering women.”28 Their fears were fed by the sounds of war.

  “The cannon [fire] . . . seemed like one continued peal of tremendous thunder,” wrote one lady of the city. She and her neighbors listened in horror. “We were prepared to run . . . knowing that if [the British] got the upper hand . . . our lives would be destroyed.”29 Instead, many sought spiritual solace in the pews beneath the cathedral’s twin towers. The service was conducted by the Very Reverend William Dubourg, the vicar apostolic. He offered up the holy sacrifice of the Mass to the accompaniment of collective prayers of the citizenry at the cathedral and the pious sisters of the Ursuline convent, all seeking the success of General Jackson and the troops on the Chalmette Plain. According to one later account, a courier entered the chapel in the middle of the Mass, crying, “Victory is ours!”30 Were the community’s supplications being answered?

  On the Chalmette Plain, the firing had stopped. Long before any official word arrived from the front, rumors of a big victory traveled up the riverbank, neighbor to neighbor. The people of New Orleans ran into the streets; in place of distant gunfire, cheers of joy echoed. When a messenger from the battlefield arrived, riding a worn-out-looking horse, he hurried about, asking surgeons, apothecaries, and anyone with a cart to come to the field of battle. There were wounded to be tended, too many to count—most of them British.31

  Back at the Rodriguez Canal, said one soldier, the scene was “a sea of blood.” The illusion resulted from hundreds of red uniforms obscuring the stubble of last year’s sugarcane crop. The letting of blood had indeed been great, leaving an unfathomable number of dead and dying soldiers prostrate on the Chalmette Plain. In some places the bodies were so numerous that it seemed possible to walk without ever touching the ground for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards.32

  The lines of attack could easily be read in the array of dead. The terrible carnage was at its worst near the center of the field, but other broad bands of slain soldiers commemorated the British assaults near the levee and by the swamp.

  There were rows and stacks of bodies even before the field surgeons began their work. Some corpses had no heads, while others were missing arms or legs. The lifeless faces were a distillation of fear and pain; the dying men’s expressions had been frozen as they screamed or cried. Oddly, some looked to have been laughing.

  There were stirrings amid the corpses. Wounded men moaned and screamed and called out for help but, as the astonished Americans watched from the ramparts, hundreds of the British got to their feet, men who had “fallen at our first fire upon them, without having received so much as a scratch.”33 Some of the cowards ran for the British line; others surrendered. Said Jackson later, “I never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection as on that day.”34

  No two accounts of the battle, whether written that that week, that month, that century, or in the many decades since, would agree on the exact casualty count, but all agreed it was stunningly high. According to one British infantry captain, “three generals, seven colonels, seventy-five officers, . . . a total of seventeen hundred and eighty-one officers and soldiers, had fallen in a few minutes.”35 Some writers elevated the number—General Keane reported 2,030, other sources have said 3,000. Jackson initially gave Monroe an estimate of 1,500, a number he later revised to 2,600.

  The American losses on the Chalmette Plain on January 8 amounted to no more than a dozen dead. More would be killed on the west bank and in skirmishes in the days following, but the battle, indisputably, was a far greater disaster for the British. General Jackson’s earthworks and his unlikely melding of men had held. The city of New Orleans no longer feared a British invasion.

  For the nation, the meaning was larger, too. Against all odds, General Jackson had preserved the mouth of the Mississippi for America. At the center of the muddy earthworks, atop its staff, untouched by British hands and overlooking the Chalmette Plain, the Stars and Stripes still waved.

  General Jackson and his multiethnic, multigenerational army made up of people from every American social class and occupation had come together to do what Napoleon had failed to do: destroy the finest fighting force in the world. Thanks to Jackson’s military instincts, his impeccable planning, and his ferocious leadership, America had prevailed in the most important fight of its young life.

  CHAPTER 13

  The British Withdraw

  We, who only seven weeks ago had set out in the surest confidence of glory, and, I may add, of emolument, were brought back dispirited and dejected.

  —George Gleig, A Narrative of the Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans

  General Jackson took nothing for granted. He watched the British camp like a hawk from the top of the Macarty house and, on his orders, American artillerymen kept up a constant barrage of round shot and mortar shells. He wanted the British to know their American enemy was both vigilant and determined.

  Jackson considered ordering a ground attack on his wounded foe, but to come out from behind his ramparts to fight the British—they were still a far larger and better-trained force—and to do so in an open plain? He and his counselors decided that such a battle need not be fought and that to undertake it might even provoke the enemy to renew their attack.1

  Such worries seemed all the more real when Jackson got word from Fort St. Philip, sixty miles downstream on the Mississippi, that five of Admiral Cochrane’s gunships were firing on the fortification. American gunners managed to keep the British vessels out of cannon range, but the British still bombarded the fort with long-range mortar shells. That the British still had designs on New Orleans seemed hard to deny, but after nine days of indecisive artillery exchanges (the British fired more than a thousand rounds, killing just one American and wounding seven) Cochrane’s ships sailed away on the night of January 17. Fort St. Philip was pockmarked but intact.2

  Jackson might have prepared a trap for the enemy’s land force. If General Lambert’s army wasn’t going to advance, the troops would have to retreat from the Chalmette Plain. The American woodsmen with their long rifles could have made the wounded enemy run a hellish gauntlet as they retraced the narrow path through swampland to the shore before embarking, one barge at a time, to be relayed across Lake Borgne. But as Jackson wrote to James Monroe, that also seemed an unnecessary “risque.”3

  Finally, Jackson’s patience paid off. On January 19, he awoke to find “the enemy [had] precipitately decamped.”4 The British had stoked their nighttime campfires to lull the American pickets into thinking all was as usual. Then, at midnight, the army wordlessly began an all-night march through the mud, back along th
e Bayou Bienvenue to the Fisherman’s Village. Nine days had been required to improvise a roadbed along the creek, stiffening the muddy morass with reeds and tree limbs.

  Finally, the British were truly gone. Even the late General Pakenham had departed. Disemboweled and submerged in a hogshead of rum, the remains of the British commander had begun the journey home to Ireland, there to be interred in the family vault in County Meath, a few miles from Dublin.

  Contrary to widespread expectations—his own, Parliament’s, Admiral Cochrane’s, and others’—General Pakenham would never be the governor of Louisiana.

  A Celebration in New Orleans

  Jackson made his way back to the city he had saved. On January 20, returning for the first time in nearly a month, he marched his army into the heart of New Orleans.

  The streets were lined with “the aged, the infirm, the matrons, daughters and children,” recorded one adjutant. “Every countenance was expressive of gratitude—joy sparkled in every feature, on beholding fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, who had so recently . . . repell[ed] an enemy [who came] to conquer and subjugate the country.”5

  The men of New Orleans and the other defenders were welcomed home, as Jackson’s aide Major Reid saw it, in “a scene well calculated to excite the tenderest emotions.”6 The sense of relief in the city was enhanced by the disparity in casualty totals on the battlefield: British dead and wounded exceeded a thousand, but there were remarkably few American widows and orphans.

  A man of simple religious faith, Jackson wished to give thanks to the “Ruler of all events,” as he put it. He wrote to the Abbé Dubourg at New Orleans’s cathedral, requesting that Dubourg organize a “service of public thanksgiving” for “the signal interposition of Heaven in giving success to our arms against the enemy.”7