Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans

by Brian Kilmeade

  Jackson’s unyielding belief in the Republic and his instinct for democratic values help explain why later historians would refer to his time as the Age of Jackson.

  Epilogue

  The Hero’s Return: January 1840

  The instrument chosen by the Lord to get His will done, as Gideon was chosen in Biblical times, was General Andrew Jackson.

  —Wilburt S. Brown, The Amphibious Campaign for West Florida and Louisiana, 1969

  As the year 1839 drew to a close, Andrew Jackson faced a decision. He held an invitation in his hand: with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the big battle just weeks away—the “silver jubilee” the organizers called it—the city he had saved invited him to return to celebrate his greatest military triumph.

  The old man was honored, of course; he acknowledged that he had “sacrificed both property and health in the salvation of New Orleans.”1 He believed January 8 meant as much to American history as July 4, and his role in the victory was perhaps his greatest pride, despite having gone on to serve two terms as the nation’s seventh chief executive (1829–37) and to dominate his era, a common man, as Jackson saw himself, captaining the ship of state through enormous changes.

  But traveling all the way to New Orleans? That looked like a problem.

  For one thing, his health was poor. He had spent the last five months of his presidency confined to his bed after almost dying following another of the periodic lung hemorrhages that plagued him (the lead ball from his 1806 duel remained embedded in his lung). In contemplating a long trip, he feared the physical challenges of a jarring ride in winter weather.

  Another problem was that, despite his fame and considerable landholdings, he had little cash to spare. “I am out of funds,” he confided to his namesake nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson. Some years hadn’t been good on Jackson’s plantation, and Andrew Jr. had grown into a spendthrift, a constant drag on his famous father’s finances. But the general, whatever his health and circumstances, remained a proud man. “I cannot bear to borrow or travel as a pauper,” he admitted.2

  At seventy-two, Jackson was no longer young—but the opportunity to return to the Crescent City did bring back powerful memories. The tall earthworks at the Battle of New Orleans had truly elevated him; that was one reason he insisted on being called general rather than president.

  His defeat of the British had gained him respect in Washington, where, in February 1815, Congress had ordered a medal be struck—featuring his profile, dressed in his high-collared uniform—to honor his “splendid achievement.” Almost overnight, he had unexpectedly become a national figure, his fame exploding far beyond the bounds of New Orleans and the Southwest. In the nation’s cultural center, Philadelphia, a printmaker had produced a commemorative engraving; Jackson’s likeness, with his arched brows, the crest of hair atop his tall forehead, and his imperious expression, became recognizable across the land. Jackson entrusted Major John Reid with his correspondence and other papers in order that his aide might write an account of the battle. Although Reid died before completing The Life of Andrew Jackson, Major-General in the Service of the United States, the book, bearing the bylines of both Reid and John Henry Eaton, appeared in 1817. It would be the closest thing to an account of his part in the War of 1812 by Jackson himself.

  In the twenty-five years since the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson had seen vast changes. The once-unpopular President James Madison had emerged from the Second War of Independence a much-honored man. His successor, James Monroe, rode a wave of new prosperity and goodwill into an “era of good feelings,” as one Boston newspaper put it after Monroe’s inauguration in 1817.3 The westward boom that Jackson had foreseen brought soaring land values, rapid population growth, and the appearance of new and substantial towns. New states joined the Union, including Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, and Missouri. Foreign trade and shipping blossomed.

  Jackson continued to do his bit—and then some—after the war. His defeat of the Creeks had already cleared a great swath of territory for settlement, but in 1818, pursuing the Seminoles at President Monroe’s orders, he wrested Florida from Spain, and then served as its territorial governor. Jackson had emerged as the most important leader of his region. In 1823, as a U.S. senator from Tennessee, he had been positioned to run for the presidency. Though he won the most electoral votes in the four-man race of 1824, his lack of a plurality meant the contest was decided in the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams prevailed. The vote left a sour taste in Jackson’s mouth: another of the candidates, the former Ghent negotiator Henry Clay, had thrown his support to Adams and soon thereafter been named secretary of state. To Jackson, the deal was a dirty one—and he labeled Clay the “Judas of the West.”

  The 1828 election ended differently when changes in voter eligibility (property requirements for suffrage were eliminated in most states, quadrupling the electorate) helped Jackson prevail. He had a gift for intuiting what the common man wanted, but his victory also seemed preordained: His friend Edward Livingston had spoken for many when he told Jackson, back in 1815, “General, you are the man. You must be President of the United States.”4 Barely a dozen years later, Livingston’s prognostication came true.

  Andrew Jackson was far from the only person whose prospects had been changed by the battle. Edward Livingston, for one, had prospered. He had become a Louisiana congressman (1823–29) and a U.S. senator (1829–31). His friendship with the general proved lasting, and during Jackson’s presidency, Livingston had been a key confidant as secretary of state (1831–33) and minister to France (1833–35).

  Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson’s former subordinate in the Tennessee militia and an opponent in the 1813 gunfight that left Jackson gravely wounded, had resurfaced as a powerful U.S. senator from Missouri (and a valuable Jackson ally) during Jackson’s presidency.

  In contrast, Governor William Claiborne continued to have an uneasy relationship with his varied Louisiana constituency; he died young, at just forty-two years of age, in 1817.

  Some of the military men who served with Jackson had risen in the ranks, but others floundered. Daniel Todd Patterson’s service in New Orleans gained him a captaincy and, for a time, the ship he commanded was the legendary USS Constitution (the frigate had gained its nickname, “Old Ironsides,” during Mr. Madison’s War). At the time of his death, in 1839, Patterson was commander of the Washington Navy Yard.

  Thomas ap Catesby Jones remained in the U.S. Navy, gaining a minor place in American literature after he crossed paths with a navy deserter named Herman Melville, who would memorialize him as Commodore J——in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851).

  The militia general William Carroll returned to civilian life and was twice elected governor of Tennessee. John Coffee returned to real estate speculation, often in partnership with his friend Andrew Jackson.

  The least likely of Jackson’s men, the Baratarian pirates, had won his respect and appreciation for their artillery skills and, in his general orders after the Battle of New Orleans, he acknowledged as much: “The general cannot avoid giving his warm approbation of the manner in which [the privateers] have uniformly conducted themselves while under his command. . . . The brothers Lafitte have exhibited the same courage and fidelity, and the general promises that the government shall be duly apprised of their conduct.”5 In February 1815, they received their pardons but the life of the straight and narrow proved difficult. Jean Lafitte resumed privateering, eventually from a new base of operations at the port of Galveston in Spanish Texas. Lafitte died in 1823 of wounds sustained in a ship-to-ship battle but his legend lived on: the swashbuckler would fire the imaginations of novelists and scriptwriters. His brother Pierre, once more a pirate, operated out of an island base between Cuba and Mexico. He died of fever in 1821 and was buried in a convent churchyard in northeastern Yucatán.

  Some of Jackson’s fellow fighters in the Indian wars had gone on to fame and fortune. Sam Houston�
�s enduring popularity won him the governorship of Tennessee before he went west to Texas. There he would serve as both president of the short-lived Republic of Texas and as governor of the state of Texas after it joined the Union.

  Davy Crockett became a U.S. congressman and later died at the Alamo, but not before writing his colorful, if rather folkloric, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834). At the time of his death a decade after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, William Weatherford—Jackson’s worthy Red Stick opponent, once known as Red Eagle—had become a planter, horse breeder, and owner of three hundred black slaves, residing on a farm near the site of Fort Mims.6

  On the other side of the line, Sir John Lambert and John Keane—unlike the deceased generals Pakenham and Gibbs—made it back to Europe alive. Both joined the Duke of Wellington in defeating Napoleon once more, this time at the Battle of Waterloo, on June 18, 1815. Both Lambert and Keane went on to serve in Jamaica, administering the civil government of the colony. Lambert died a general, in 1847, but Keane, raised to a peerage after service in India, died a baron, in 1844.

  When Alexander Forrester Inglis Cochrane retired from the Royal Navy, in 1824, he was commander of the Plymouth navy headquarters; he died in Paris, in 1832.

  Colonel William Thornton became a lieutenant general and received a knighthood in 1836. Subject to delusions—perhaps a consequence of head wounds sustained years earlier—he shot himself in 1840. Captain Nicholas Lockyer recovered from the several wounds he sustained on Lake Borgne and served a long career in the Royal Navy, dying aboard the ship he captained, the HMS Albion, at age sixty-five in 1847.

  The Ursuline nuns who had prayed for victory on January 8, 1815, rose from their knees after the firing stopped and, hospital cots at the ready, welcomed the wounded to their school. They nursed men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and even British soldiers. One novice, Sister Sainte Angèle Johnston, was fondly remembered by her patients. Most of the nuns spoke only French; Sister Angèle, a native of Baltimore, was one of the few who spoke English. “Wait until the little sister . . . comes,” one wounded soldier said to another. “She will understand you and give you what you want.”7

  In the years after the war, the Ursuline nuns remained true to the promise that Mother Superior Olivier de Vézin had made to the Almighty. To this day, on January 8, the Ursuline nuns conduct an annual Mass of Thanksgiving in honor of Our Lady of Prompt Succor and the Battle of New Orleans.

  Remembering the Battle of New Orleans

  In the months and years after the battle, there was much hand-wringing in Great Britain concerning the great defeat at New Orleans. Cochrane and Keane got the blame—Wellington himself thought an attack via Lake Borgne foolhardy, a violation of his cherished principle that an army must always be in contact with its base. Wellington also believed Cochrane’s greed for plunder distorted his military judgment and preparations.

  On the American side, military historians have argued over how Bayou Bienvenue could have been left open to the British (a court-martial convened on the matter in 1815 exonerated young Gabriel Villeré). A case has been made repeatedly that Jackson’s force was vulnerable and that, had Admiral Cochrane and General Keane listened to the pleading of Colonel Thornton on December 23, 1814—he is said to have argued for immediately marching on New Orleans as the British had at Washington—then Jackson might have lost the Battle of New Orleans. As with all such hypotheticals, however, no firm conclusion can ever be reached.

  Jackson’s failure to properly defend the west bank raises another what-if. Many military historians believe that, given only slightly altered circumstances, the capture of Patterson’s position could have been catastrophic to the American cause.

  Some analysts blame the failure of the British campaign on the lack of secrecy; their attack on the Americans was not a surprise. The explanation for that has been alternately assigned to loose British lips and to Jackson for his cultivation and use of intelligence sources. In the same way, the debate continues to swirl about troop numbers: Did the British have five thousand effectives? Six thousand? Nine thousand? Or many more? The Americans certainly had fewer, but there is no agreement as to how many on that side, either.

  In the end, though, everyone understood—then and now—that Jackson was the man of the hour, the man who met his moment standing atop his earthworks. He was ready to fight to the last man, to give his own life, and to burn the city of New Orleans before surrendering it to the British.

  He made a series of decisions that have come to be seen as wise, even profound, in the eyes of most commentators: his double-time march on Pensacola; his flexible approach to defending the city of New Orleans; his surprise attack on December 23; his choice to shift from offense to defense; his decision before the big day to make his stand at the Rodriguez Canal and then to remain safely behind his ramparts after January 8, 1815.

  On the other hand, his stubbornness alienated the populace of New Orleans after the victory at the Chalmette Plain. And he failed to designate a second in command: he might have died, for example, in the cross fire on December 23; if he had, could anyone else have held his army together? Yet his single-mindedness in leadership won the allegiance of his troops through a mix of intimidation and fatherly affection. They would fight heroically, despite the rockets zooming crazily overhead, rather than risk the wrath of Old Hickory.

  On reading the accounts in most textbooks, the student comes away with the sense that the War of 1812 ended in a draw. Furthermore, if weights were assigned to the gives and the takes as specified in the Treaty of Ghent, Lady Justice’s scale would likely find they balance, more or less, as the two sides come out about even. No territory changed hands; Great Britain made no promises regarding impressment; the world went back to the peaceable business of trade.

  But General Jackson knew better: he had saved New Orleans; if he had not, the postwar history of his nation would have been different indeed.

  The General’s Last Stand

  At the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson lived the life of a recluse, old and infirm, rarely leaving home and avoiding public appearances. He and his family worried that a simple cold—and the accompanying cough—could endanger his life. Yet the general’s old determination still burned and, in December 1839, he decided that neither his fragile health nor his straitened finances could be allowed to stand in the way of a trip to New Orleans for the silver jubilee.

  He saw a higher purpose: the journey, he believed, would forward the cause of democracy. As he told President Martin Van Buren, “My whole life has been employed to establish and perpetuate our republican system [and] if I should die in the effort, it cannot end better than endeavoring to open the eyes of the people to the blessings we enjoy.”8

  Jackson borrowed against the sale of his cotton crop to defray the costs; he simply had to make the journey.

  On Christmas Eve, he left Nashville in a carriage, with his traveling companion, his nephew, Major Donelson. The roads were rough, snow-covered in places, and four long days were required to travel the 125 miles to the mouth of the Cumberland River. There he boarded the Gallatin, a steam-powered packet boat headed down the Ohio River.

  If Jackson had had his way, he would have been accompanied by Rachel, but the stresses of the 1828 election a dozen years earlier had cost him dearly. So many insults were cast at both husband and wife that Rachel remarked to a friend just before ballots were cast, “I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than live in that palace in Washington.” Just days after the close of the hard-fought electoral battle, Rachel Jackson was indeed summoned by her Lord, stricken with an intense pain in her left arm, shoulder, and chest. Suddenly, the president-elect was in mourning for the love of his life.

  As the Gallatin steamed south—the ship was named after Albert Gallatin, one of the men who had negotiated the Treaty of Ghent and, later, served as President John Quincy Adams’s minister to the Court o
f St James’s—Jackson observed many signs of how, in his lifetime, his nation had changed, shifting from a largely agricultural society to one increasingly based on industry. The advent of new technology meant that regularly scheduled steamboats made his march home from Natchez, back in the spring of 1813, seem like a quaint historical oddity. More than a thousand steamers now plied the Mississippi, making travel more rapid, predictable, and comfortable.

  The general and his entourage arrived in New Orleans right on schedule, on the morning of Wednesday, January 8. The convoy had grown to five steamboats and, on stepping ashore at ten o’clock, Jackson, ignoring his illnesses and age, impressed the crowd of an estimated thirty thousand people.

  Hatless, his hair a striking silver, and looking heartier than he felt, the general saluted the spectators as he rode in a carriage, part of a procession to the familiar confines of the Place d’Armes. For many hours, he would endure receptions, a service in the cathedral, speechifying, a reunion with officers from the army that defended the city, and fireworks.

  Although the exhausted Jackson excused himself from a scheduled trip to the Chalmette Plain, even his political enemies cheered him that day. As one opposition newspaper reported, “[We] forgot the politician and thought only of the man—welcom[ing] him as the ‘Hero of New Orleans’ and the fearless defender of his country.”9

  If the Battle of New Orleans had made the man—and rising to the challenge as he did can certainly be said to have been Jackson’s most essential rite of passage—then he did the same for his nation. He saved not only New Orleans from the British but preserved the Union.

  But Andrew Jackson had stood in Pakenham’s path. If he had not, the entire Gulf Coast might have been returned to Spain or remained in British hands.