Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans

by Brian Kilmeade

  On January 23, the people of the city gathered once again at the Place d’Armes, the city’s main square. A triumphal arch had been erected and festooned with evergreens and flowers. A dense throng of people packed the streets and the nearby levee. A battalion of New Orleans militiamen lined the path to the entrance of the cathedral. Spectators filled the balconies and windows overlooking the square. Eighteen young women lined the approach from the arch to the church, one for each of the eighteen states. Wearing white dresses and blue veils, the girls held flags and baskets. Everyone awaited the arrival of the victorious general.

  An artillery salvo announced his coming, and his appearance on horseback produced a deafening cheer from the crowd.

  Jackson dismounted, stepping onto the raised floor of the arch. Two girls placed a laurel crown on his head. On a path strewn with flowers, Jackson progressed to the cathedral’s entrance, where he was met by the abbé and his college of priests, all dressed in sacramental vestments. They entered the church, accompanied by the reading of an ode composed for the occasion. Its last couplet proclaimed, “Remembrance, long, shall keep alive thy fame / And future infants learn to lisp thy name.”8

  The Abbé Dubourg welcomed Jackson, thanking the man he called the city’s “deliverer.” He compared him to George Washington; he was among the first to do so but very far from the last. The cathedral could not accommodate the crowd of more than ten thousand people, but those admitted saw Jackson take a seat near the altar to the accompaniment of organ music. After the chanting of the hymn “Te Deum,” the Mass, lit by a thousand candles, came to a close as Jackson accepted the honors and his crown humbly. He told the hushed crowd, “I receive it in the name of the brave men who . . . well deserve the laurels which their country will bestow.”9

  With the ceremonies concluded, the crowd escorted Jackson to his quarters, but only after the general, hearing reports of the sisters’ all-night vigil on the eve of the battle, visited the Ursuline convent to thank them for their prayers.10 “By the blessing of heaven, directing the valor of the troops under my command, one of the most brilliant victories in the annals of war was obtained,” he said.11 That night, Jackson suspended the curfew, and the city of New Orleans would celebrate until dawn.

  Unfinished Business

  Despite the aura of victory, Andrew Jackson remained watchful. As his aide Major Reid observed, “[The enemy] had now retired; yet, from their convenient situation, and having command of the surrounding waters, it was in their power at a short notice, to reappear.”12 Just in case, Jackson left infantry regulars at the Rodriguez Canal, and he stationed Tennessee militiamen and Kentucky rifles near the landing place at the Villeré plantation.

  The British might find another target. “I have no idea that [the] enemy will attempt Fort Bowyer,” Jackson noted in a letter. “Still you cannot be too well prepared or too vigilant—[Admiral] Cochrane is sore, and [General] Lambert crazy; they may in this situation attempt some act of madness.”13

  Jackson’s hunch proved dead right: Fort Bowyer was in the British sights.

  As far as Admiral Cochrane was concerned, the American war wasn’t over, since no messenger from Ghent had yet reached American shores. And there was Fort Bowyer, just up the coast. A smaller navy force had failed to capture the fortification back in September, but now the admiral had sixty ships at his disposal and many thousands of troops. So, with what was now General Lambert’s army back aboard, the fleet set sail on January 27.

  Destination: Mobile Bay.

  Though the fort was surely a lesser target than New Orleans, this opportunity to regain lost prestige could hardly be passed by. And General Lambert wanted to dispel “the sullen carelessness [and] indifference” evident in his men after the beating they had taken at the Chalmette Plain.14

  On Wednesday, February 8, Cochrane’s armada landed three regiments of some five thousand men several miles from Fort Bowyer. Although the American commander, Colonel William Lawrence, ordered his guns to fire on the British, they would not be deterred: by Saturday, the muzzles of four eighteen-pounders, two six-pounders, a pair of howitzers, and eight mortars were pointed at the fort. The British were ready.

  Before opening fire, however, Captain Harry Smith, under a flag of truce, carried a demand from his commanding officer, General Lambert, to Colonel Lawrence.

  His message in short: Surrender your fort.

  Looking out at his powerful enemy from the confines of the highly flammable wooden fort, Lawrence asked for time. He wanted two hours to consider the offer, which included a promise that, if he declined to accept Lambert’s terms, he could evacuate the women and children inside Fort Bowyer. He had watched helplessly for the preceding three days. With only 360 men in his command, he faced overwhelming odds.

  Lawrence saw no alternative but to surrender. To fight would be to waste lives in an unwinnable battle, and his officers seconded his decision. At noon, on February 12, 1815, Lawrence and his men marched out of Fort Bowyer, accompanied by twenty women and sixteen children. They laid down their arms and yielded the fort to the British.

  When he heard what happened, Jackson expressed to Monroe his mortification at the handover. It had occurred without a shot being fired but, worse yet, the capitulation of Fort Bowyer cleared the way for the British to enter Mobile Bay and besiege Mobile.

  The news took Jackson back in time: Months before, he had foreseen a British strategy that began with Mobile. Now, it seemed, the sequence of events he feared most was about to unfold. Could this signal a new offensive cycle?

  In a matter of hours, however, the momentum shifted for good when, the next day, the British frigate HMS Brazen sailed into view. Fresh from an Atlantic crossing, she brought word of the Treaty of Ghent. Cochrane and his generals were ordered to end hostilities and prepare to sail home.

  Yet for Andrew Jackson, the war would be over only when he knew for certain it was over; he could never take Admiral Cochrane’s word for that.

  The Slow Pace of Peace

  On the evening of February 14, 1815, a messenger carrying a leather document box arrived at the borrowed home in Washington occupied by James Madison. Eager hands opened the cast brass lockset to reveal a thick sheaf of papers.

  A cover letter from Henry Clay explained the contents. Accompanied by many position papers prepared in the negotiation process, there was the all-important Treaty of Ghent, sealed and signed and very official. The treaty was brief (just eleven articles) and to the point, beginning with its most basic assertion: “There shall be a firm and universal Peace between His Britannic Majesty and the United States.”

  Mr. Madison submitted the document to the Senate without delay. It was read aloud three times to the assembled body, and some senators wondered at the absence of any reference to impressment and the harassment of neutral trade, two of the main reasons for declaring war two and a half years earlier. Nor was there mention of navigation of the Mississippi. Nevertheless, when the key question was asked in proper parliamentary fashion—“Will the Senate advise and consent to the ratification of this treaty?”—the resulting vote was for ratification, thirty-five yeas, no one opposed. On February 17, a second copy arrived in Washington from London, this one bearing the signature of the prince regent.

  The men of the government could finally relax: Mr. Madison’s War was over.

  A thousand miles away, however, in his headquarters on Rue Royale in New Orleans, General Jackson still awaited the news. Not that rumors hadn’t reached him—on February 19, a clipping from a London newspaper appeared that reported the war had ended—but Jackson continued to refuse to lower his guard until he got the official word from Washington. Even after Edward Livingston returned from a further negotiation with Admiral Cochrane over prisoner exchanges with news that the HMS Brazen had brought word of a peace treaty, Jackson suspected the reports of a peace deal were merely a “stratagem.”15

  To many in the ci
ty, the hero of New Orleans began to seem like their jailer with his insistence that the draconian restraints of martial law remain in place. With the war over to their satisfaction, merchants resented the general’s tight rein on commerce. Militiamen wanted to be released from duty to return to their civilian lives but, despite their pleas, Jackson continued stubbornly to insist that he needed formal notification from the secretary of war.

  A woman’s touch, however, eased some of the tension.

  Nine months had elapsed since the surrender of the Creek chief William Weatherford, an event that had prompted Andrew Jackson’s last visit home. Rachel had, in turn, postponed her December trip to New Orleans after the British arrived on the city’s doorstep. When news of the January 8 victory reached Rachel, she decided the couple had been separated long enough. Though winter travel posed worrisome dangers, Mrs. Jackson set out, along with other Tennessee officers’ wives, for New Orleans.

  Several weeks later, the general welcomed his wife; throughout their long marriage, he would always mourn their separations. She arrived with their adoptive son Andrew Jr. on whom the general doted. The moment was one of pure delight for Jackson.

  As for Rachel, her arrival amounted to more than a reunion with the man she loved: having never visited a city larger than provincial Nashville, New Orleans was a grand revelation to her. The Jacksons were the guests of Edward Livingston and his stylish wife. Louise Livingston took a liking to the unaffected Mrs. Jackson, despite her visitor’s dowdy clothes and an unfashionably sunned complexion, the result of managing their plantation in her husband’s absence.

  The Jacksons became the guests of choice around town at “balls, concerts, plays, theaters, [etc.],” even though, Rachel allowed, “we don’t attend the half of them.”16 But one they did go to was a great ball to celebrate George Washington’s birthday.

  The site of the February 22 gala was the French Exchange where, for three days, preparations had been under way for the grand evening. Flowers abounded, as did colored lamps that, from the rear, illuminated transparencies painted on varnished glass. One read, “Jackson and Victory: they are but one.” Jackson, taking an advance look at the decorations, took note of it. He inquired lightly, “Why did you not write ‘Hickory and Victory: they are but one’?”17

  Supper was served and dancing followed. When the hero took the floor with Rachel in his arms, the crowd was transfixed. To some observers, the savior of the city and his lady looked mismatched. The slim and girlish divorcée that Jackson had married twenty-one years before had aged into a rather stout, round woman; the poorly nourished Jackson looked more haggard and angular than ever.

  To one Creole gentleman still smarting over Jackson’s refusal to lift his martial law decree, the sight invited a snide remark. “To see these two figures, the general a long, haggard man, with limbs like a skeleton, and Madame la Generale, a short, fat dumpling, bobbing opposite each other like half-drunken Indians, to the wild melody of Possum up de Gum Tree, and endeavoring to make a spring into the air, was very remarkable.”18 Though some made fun, the ladies of the city raised a subscription to purchase jewels for presentation to the well-liked Mrs. Jackson.

  At last, on March 8, 1815, having received “persuasive evidence” of ratification of the treaty, Jackson released the reins. He dismissed the Louisiana militia and, after official word arrived, on March 13, he issued orders for Generals Carroll and Coffee to march their commands without delay back home. He expressed his thanks and admiration.

  “Farewell, fellow soldiers. The expression of your general’s thanks is feeble,” he said in his closing address, “but the gratitude of a country of freemen is yours—yours the applause of an admiring world.”19

  Finally, the Hero of New Orleans could go home. In early April, accompanied by a small band of devoted officers and men, he and Rachel began a slow progress northward. They were feted in Natchez and other towns on the way and, as they neared Nashville, an ever-larger throng of Volunteers escorted the victor and his wife. The state’s politicians, wishing to share in Jackson’s newfound radiance and renown, would give yet another banquet, but his desired stopping place was the Hermitage.

  When his adoring public delivered him to his home, Andrew Jackson addressed his friends and neighbors, both in welcome and in farewell. For most of the last eighteen months, Jackson had been a stranger, a warrior and traveler away from home, and the time had taken a toll. He looked more sinewy than ever, carrying perhaps 145 pounds on his six-foot-one-inch frame.20 But his blue eyes remained as penetrating as ever, his posture still ramrod straight, despite the hardships of the war.

  During his months away he had become accustomed to addressing crowds; his Tennessee apprenticeship as a regional politician and judge may have prepared him for greater things, but it had been the trial that was the Battle of New Orleans that made him not merely a public man but a national figure, a man whose name and accomplishments had been celebrated in newspapers and taverns across the country.

  But his homecoming in Nashville meant a great deal to him. “Your friendship and regard,” he told the crowd, “is a rich compensation for many sacrifices and many labors.”

  Jackson’s rhetorical style, once wooden and strident, had become the voice of a wise elder. In that manner, and cherishing the warm welcome, he explained what the events just ended signified.

  “The sons of America,” he went on, “have given a new proof how impossible it is to conquer freemen fighting in defense of all that is dear to them. Henceforward we shall be respected by nations who, mistaking our character, had treated us with the utmost contumely and outrage. Years will continue to develop our inherent qualities, until, from being the youngest and the weakest, we shall become the most powerful nation in the universe.”21

  Andrew Jackson, once and for all, had evened an old score. This time it had been the British who left the battle bloodied and defeated. The Union was intact. He had proved himself to the powers in Washington. A war that could have ended in partition instead closed with the rise of an army of new American heroes with Andrew Jackson at its head. Thanks to the scarred orphan, never again would America be invaded by a foreign power, and the enemy it defeated would one day become an ally.

  General Jackson’s War

  Back in the summer of 1812, a Federalist pamphleteer had dismissively nicknamed the conflict “Mr. Madison’s War.”22 Madison’s political opposition didn’t want to go to war and, once it was declared, they wanted to tar him with it. But in 1815, with the return of peace and Jackson’s big triumph, the stain rapidly faded. The press coverage helped: the Niles’ Weekly Register spoke for many Americans that February and March: “The last six months is the proudest period in the history of the republic,” its columns asserted. “[We] demonstrated to mankind a capacity to acquire a skill in arms to conquer ‘the conquerors of the conquerors of all’ as Wellington’s invincibles were modestly styled,” Furthermore, the Register’s editors concluded, “Who would not be an American? Long live the republic! . . . Last asylum of oppressed humanity! Peace is signed in the arms of victory!”23

  The brilliance of the victory in New Orleans overshadowed the dark humiliation of the burning of the public buildings in Washington; in time, with the blurring of memory, the nation’s recollections of the war would center on Andrew Jackson. Mr. Madison’s War would become General Jackson’s War. He was remembered as having restored America’s honor.

  The end of the war and its best moments—a handful of sea battles won by U.S. warships, the rocket’s red glare that illuminated a giant flag in Baltimore (memorialized by the barrister Francis Scott Key), and, most of all, the Battle of New Orleans—provided Americans with a new sense of nationhood. In Europe, particularly among the inhabitants of Great Britain, a new recognition emerged that their American cousins couldn’t be regarded merely as poor relations; one had to respect a people who stood up and defended themselves against the British Empire. Onc
e dismissed by George Gleig as “an enemy unworthy of serious regard,”24 the American military—whether regular or militia, army or navy or marines—had become a force to be reckoned with.

  General Andrew Jackson had melded a largely amateur force into an army, one that had vanquished a sophisticated force perhaps twice its size. His attack on December 23 had been a masterstroke, one that stunned the British and bought Jackson and the defenders of New Orleans essential time. The general had marshaled his limited naval resources to harry the British from the Mississippi. He had improvised a brilliant defensive strategy. He had exercised restraint and discipline. He deployed his men in a way that took advantage of their strengths as riflemen and minimized their weaknesses. His tactics forced General Pakenham’s well-drilled force to confront American strengths on U.S. terms.

  Despite a lack of formal military training, Jackson proved himself to be the ablest general in the war. Significantly, he was also a man capable of inspiring other men to do their duty. That mix of confidence and resolution boded well for a future foray into the realm of politics. As both a general and a politician, he pursued fixed goals because he had a vision for his country.

  He wasn’t a complicated man, but he possessed—and was possessed by—an extraordinary certainty. He was a man who could be fired by anger. Jackson hadn’t been much of a student; his mother’s forlorn wish for him to join the ministry died even before she did. His intelligence was not book-learned; he operated on instinct and experience. His orientations were the essential verities: duty to country (at first that meant region but, with the life-changing events in Louisiana, it became nation); duty to God; and duty to family, not only, in the narrow sense, to his relations but also to his neighbors, whom he regarded as his brothers and his sisters, and to his men and those who voted for him, whom he regarded as children given unto his care.