Even if that statement represents the ultimate in hyperbole, what he goes on to say makes more sense, which is that the reason the men accustomed themselves to the miserable conditions was that “every one looked forward to the future. From the General down to the youngest drum-boy [there was] a confident anticipation . . . of the ample reward in store for them [meaning, of course, their share of the fabulous prize money]; the expectation of so great a recompense to come.”
As the army began assembling at Pea Island, British intelligence officers were engrossed in reconnoitering actual landing spots for the invasion. Pea Island was very close to the Mississippi shore, from which it would have been fairly simple to put the army on the easiest route into New Orleans—the Chef Menteur Road across the Plain of Gentilly, which Jackson himself had been surveying just a few days earlier when he learned of the capture of his gunboats. That obviously must have been under consideration, but for some reason Cochrane rejected it. Perhaps it was because the British had learned that the Americans were blocking the Chef Road and didn’t want to force a battle on an approach with swamps on both sides. If so, the decision would have been a sound one, since an infantry commander’s worst nightmare is to attack on such a narrow front that maneuvering becomes a practical impossibility. It may have been General Keane who rejected the idea on those grounds, but that is doubtful, given his subservience to Admiral Cochrane.
In any case, on December 18, while the army was still being ferried to Pea Island, two British officers had themselves rowed the thirty miles to the opposite side of the lake, to a winter-bleak blackwater river called Bayou Bienvenue. At its entrance they came upon a cluster of palmetto-thatched stilt houses known locally as the Spanish Fishermen’s Village. As the name implies, these were the residences of the forty or so Spaniards—with a few Portuguese and Italians thrown in—who worked the rich waters of Lake Borgne, bringing their pirogues full of shrimp, oysters, turtles, crabs, and fish to the seafood markets in New Orleans.
As noted, British officers had earlier approached these Spaniards on the lake—or perhaps it had been the other way around—but now the Spaniards, who resented American control of Louisiana and knew the lake backward and forward, quickly began cooperating with Admiral Cochrane and his people. Thus, with two of the Spanish fishermen as guides, the British scouting party proceeded to investigate the bayou, which was about a hundred yards wide and six feet deep. To their astonishment and delight, they discovered that, unlike all the other water approaches below New Orleans, Bayou Bienvenue had not been blocked as Jackson had ordered. After they had traveled by pirogue about eight miles along the twisting stream, Bayou Bienvenue branched off into Bayou Mazant, and after another four miles it became too shallow for the larger British barges to navigate. Here, where the Villeré Canal entered the bayou, would of necessity be the British jumping-off point.
At first sight, the position must have looked perfectly awful to the reconnaissance officers. It was in the middle of nowhere in a wretched, boggy marsh (then called a “prairie,” but known less affectionately as “land of the trembling earth”). That is what Lieutenant Gleig described when he arrived a week later: “The place where we landed was as wild as it is possible to imagine. Nothing could be seen except one huge marsh covered with tall reeds; not a house nor a vestige of human industry,” he said (apparently forgetting about Villeré’s canal). Through this godforsaken morass, where the dense reeds grew eight feet tall, the soldiers slogged for a long arduous mile, often sinking to their knees in muck, until they reached a dark and forbidding cypress swamp. The swamp was barely possible to navigate except by stumbling through mire between the knobby trees and wading across the many crisscrossing streams. As darkness fell, the British scouting party emerged onto a wide stable plain, covered with the close-chopped stubble from the autumn harvest of sugarcane. At this point they were about a mile from the Mississippi River, which lay due southwest. In the distance they could see a few slaves toiling away. Beyond that was a large orange grove and, beyond that, the elegant Creole-style home of Major General Jacques Villeré, commander of the Louisiana state militia. The Spanish fishermen had thoughtfully provided the two British officers with rough fishermen’s clothing; so disguised, the little reconnaissance party moved casually through the fields, past the orange trees drooping with ripe fruit, and toward the tall levee of the river. Once there, according to reports, they climbed the levee, noting the road running beside it into New Orleans, just nine miles north, then climbed down the other side and had themselves a drink of “the cool and sweet water” of the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi is perhaps a half mile wide at this point, and on both sides for twenty miles below the city its banks were lined with more than fifty sugar plantations. These varied in size according to the terrain, but from the Villeré plantation northward toward the city, each farm after the next fronted the river for about half a mile and extended back toward the cypress swamp about a mile, consisting of from six hundred to eight hundred acres. As was to be expected, most were owned by Creoles—Jumonville, Lachapelle, Chalmette, Rodriguez, Lacoste, Guichard, and so forth. With an eye, no doubt, to the vagaries of the river, many owners had built comfortable villas in the Creole style, one- or two-story affairs with tall windows and wide verandas all around. But others, in flagrant disregard of hydrographic reality, constructed expansive three-story mansions facing the river, with broad, crushed-shell avenues leading up to them, framed with rows of moss-draped live oaks. Many had their own canals extending from the levee to the swamp in order to drain the land in case of torrential rains or if the river topped the levee. According to the engineer Latour, if the river actually broke a major gap in the levee (which had happened more than once), the result would be calamitous; the whole area—fields, homes, sugar refineries, swamps, and all—would be flooded and remain under ten to twelve feet of water for up to six months.
Accordingly, on December 18, the two-man scouting party returned to Pea Island and made its report: the bayou was passable, although the landing spot and its distance from high ground left much to be desired for a 10,000-man army to negotiate. Yet it offered a priceless advantage: cover and concealment. If the army arrived quickly and moved swiftly, it could take New Orleans in half a day, before the Americans knew what had happened to them. When this news was conveyed to the fleet, Cochrane and Keane themselves sailed over to Pea Island for an inspection and review of the army. They apparently brought with them some interesting guests—a number of Florida Indian chiefs and some of their families, whose arrival merits mention here.
The Indians might accurately be described as military observers, consisting as they did of the heads of various tribes—mostly those few Choctaws still hostile to the United States—who had been among those that the British had been training in Pensacola until they were so rudely interrupted by Jackson’s arrival. After Jackson’s attack, they and their tribesmen had scattered into the wilds, but the British, under the enterprising machinations of the ubiquitous Colonel Nicholls, had somehow managed to round them up and persuade them to join the expedition against New Orleans. This was done on the theory that if the Indians could only see the mighty British army in action against the discounted American militia, they would regain their confidence and rejoin the effort to overthrow the United States all over the Southern region. At first, getting the Indians interested was a tall order; after they had been chased from Fort Bowyer at Mobile, and then watched Jackson run the British ignominiously out of Pensacola, they had quickly formed an impression of “the remorseless energy and ferocity of Sharp Knife,” as Andrew Jackson had become known to them, a man they did not particularly wish to tangle with again. “Hence they were timid, cautious and wily.”
But Nicholls was not a man to be undone.
Shortly after Jackson had departed Pensacola, Nicholls marched his detachment, dressed to the nines, into the Choctaws’ forest villages. “The chiefs greatly admired the gay uniforms, the large cocked hats and nodding
plumes, the golden epaulets and highly-finished swords and scabbards,” the historian Alexander Walker tells us. But that was only the first act; the second was as old as the white man’s relationship with American Indians. “The British plied them with rum, the greatest of the foes of the poor Indian. They got drunk as Choctaws always have done since their knowledge of alcohol,” Judge Walker recorded, and under its spell they pledged to aid the British for “as long as the supply of rum was continued.” These chiefs, then, sober or drunk, were on hand to see the great victory promised them by the British officers, after which, if they would only assist by rallying their people against the Americans, all their lost lands and tarnished dignity would be restored.
In the meantime, they provided a curious spectacle for the British soldiers, most of whom had never before seen an American Indian. One captain who encountered a number of them described their faces as being “like masks,” and they were “perfectly naked, with the exception of a girdle round their loins, with a dirty blanket or the skin of a wild beast slung round their necks . . . the eyes are generally dark with a sullen expression, the nostrils are distended from which hang[s] a metal ring; the upper part of the bridge of the nose scarcely rises above the face, which is tattooed, which gives a truly savage aspect. In the afternoon they decorate themselves by rubbing their cheeks with a sort of red ochre, and intermingling with the hair the bright plumage of various birds.”
Of the chiefs themselves, this officer recorded that he did not see them “in their real costume,” as the British had given them red “sergeant’s jackets,” some “covered with gold lace, but were sans culottes . . . and resembled those figures descending the broad stairs at the Italian Opera-house into the infernal regions in the ballet of La Fauste.”
Cochrane decided to land Keane’s army via Bayou Bienvenue and the barges were reassembled at Pea Island. It was calculated that only one-third of the army could be moved at a time, and the first group to go was an 1,800-man detachment led by Colonel William Thornton, to be followed closely by Keane and Cochrane. So with what must have been an absorbing experience on Pea Island now behind them, the troops climbed into the boats for the thirty-mile pull across Lake Borgne.
Nine
Confident as he might have been that his order to block all bayous had been carried out, Jackson, as a further precaution, on December 19 issued orders to Militia General Jacques Villeré to have each of these waterways guarded around the clock. Ironically, responsibility for Bayou Bienvenue fell to none other than General Villeré’s son Major Gabriel Villeré, who at that very moment was stationed with a company of militia on his father’s plantation near the head of the bayou.
When he received the order, apparently on December 21 if not earlier, Major Villeré dispatched a picket to the mouth of the bayou consisting of “a sergeant, eight white men, and three mulattoes.” These men entered the swamps the same day and by evening arrived at the Spanish Fishermen’s Village, a mile or so upriver from the actual mouth of the bayou. There they found but one man, who claimed he was sick and who told them that the rest of his fishermen friends were working on the lake. This was true enough, except they weren’t out there fishing; the treacherous Spaniards had hired out their boats and services to the British for the crossing.
Probably because of the weather, instead of setting up their outpost in the marshes at the mouth of the bayou, Villeré’s picket cravenly opted to station themselves in the shelter of the village’s houses, well up the bayou, and it was there, the next night, that the advance party of the British invasion force found them. Villeré’s people initially attempted to hide behind one of the huts, but after the first few barges had passed they dashed to the edge of the bayou for a boat in which to escape. They were seen by the British, however, according to Judge Walker’s account, and four of the dozen were captured trying to drag the boat into the bayou.
“Four others were taken on land,” Walker wrote. “Of the four remaining, three ran into the cane breaks, thence into the prairie, where they wandered about all day until worn down with fatigue and suffering, they returned to the village, happy to surrender themselves prisoners. One only escaped, and after three days of terrible hardships and constant perils, wandering over trembling prairies, through almost impervious cane breaks, swimming bayous and lagoons and living on reptiles and roots, got safely into the American camp.” By that time, though, his warning was a day too late; the Americans already knew.
From that day to this, Major Villeré’s violation of the order to block the canal has never been satisfactorily accounted for and, after the battle, resulted in his court-martial on a variety of charges, including treason. The most likely explanation is that since the Villerés used the bayou to get onto Lake Borgne, which was in turn reached through their canal, the young major had arbitrarily convinced himself that it was an unlikely invasion route and that it would be too much trouble later to clear the scores of large trees that would have been felled to block it. If that was so, he at the least would have been guilty of gross negligence and dereliction of duty.
With the reality of the crisis now urgently upon him, Jackson was once again faced with the question of what to do about Jean Laffite and his Baratarians. After Jackson’s rejection to the committee of defense of Laffite’s offer to help on grounds that the Baratarians “were being pursued by United States Civil Officers, and that many were in prison,” Bernard Marigny, and probably Edward Livingston too, had neatly removed this argument by consulting with Federal District Judge Dominick Hall, who told them if they could persuade the Louisiana legislature to pass a resolution suspending prosecution of the Baratarians, he would have them released from jail. That was promptly accomplished; and not only that, but the judge provided Laffite personally with a “safe conduct pass,” which allowed him to come out of hiding and into the city. There he was escorted to Jackson’s Royal Street headquarters by his friend Major Latour, where a meeting was held.* 59
Though Jackson had sworn to have nothing to do with the obnoxious Baratarians, when he finally met Laffite in person something made him change his mind. Perhaps he had been expecting a desperado, a man in a pirate’s suit: bandana, striped shirt, cutlass, and eye patch. Instead he met a man dressed as a gentleman and with the manners and mien of a gentleman. Although Jackson never recorded his impression in his own memoirs, surely this new apprehension of the leader of the “banditi” must have thrown the commanding general off a bit, and on the favorable side, for this time he listened to what Laffite had to say.
Nor did it hurt Laffite’s case that Jackson, who already had many of Laffite’s cannons (courtesy of Commodore Patterson’s raid), had found to his dismay that New Orleans could offer very little in the way of ammunition and gunpowder to fire them, or flints for small arms either, and that none of those essentials appeared at this point to be forthcoming from the government at Washington. Laffite, of course, still had all of these items in abundance, squirreled away at the Temple and other secret caches in the swamps, and again he offered them to Jackson, as well as the services of his trained cannoneers and savvy swamp guides. Considering this offer to be somewhere between “a match made in heaven” and “a pact with the devil,” Jackson concluded pragmatically that Laffite and his men could prove useful to the cause; or, as Professor Wilburt Brown aptly puts it, “Angels appear in curious shapes, at times; perhaps this was an answer to a prayer.” Thus the “hellish banditi” were enlisted into the U.S. forces and helped to shape the outcome of the most dramatic and decisive battle so far in American history.
The Baratarians were organized into two artillery detachments, one under Dominique You and the other under Renato Beluche, and they were sent to outposts east of the city. Others enlisted to man the idle corvette Louisiana and supplement the crew of the Carolina, while still others were formed into companies of “marine artillery.” Laffite himself was given an unofficial post as aide-de-camp to Jackson, who instructed him to supervise the defenses leading into the city from B
arataria Bay. To that end Jackson wrote a note to give to the major commanding in that sector: “Jean Laffite has offered me his services to go down and give every information in his power. You will therefore please to afford him the necessary protection from Insult and Injury and when you have derived the information you wish, furnish him with a passport for his return, dismissing him as soon as possible as I shall want him here.”
Cochrane’s confidence at making short work of New Orleans had gotten a significant boost when the Spanish fishermen informed him that Jackson’s force included no more than 5,000 men in the entire state, poorly armed militia at that, and that those in New Orleans were scattered at various places around the city. That confidence was shaken, however, upon interviewing one of Major Villeré’s captured pickets, a Mr. Ducros, son of a wealthy sugar planter, who told him and General Keane that Jackson’s army was nearly 20,000 strong—12,000 to 15,000 armed men in the city and 4,000 more at English Turn. He was further disturbed the next day when two American emissaries, one of them a doctor, rowed out to the British fleet under a flag of truce to try and secure paroles for Lieutentant Jones and his captured sailors. Cochrane instead imprisoned the two aboard ship so they could not disclose his strength and posted people to listen to their conversation behind thin cabin walls. They, too, were overheard to remark on an American army considerably stronger than the one the Spanish fishermen had indicated. This information—or rather misinformation, if not disinformation—came to figure prominently in the actions of the British commanders, and not favorably so. For his part, Cochrane declared publicly that he would be having his Christmas dinner in New Orleans, to which Jackson, when he got wind of it, replied: “That may be so, but I shall be seated at the head of the table.”
Patriotic Fire Page 14
