Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  By the morning of December 23 the British invasion was well under way. The redcoats under Colonel Thornton had come slip-and-stumble through the muck of the marshes and the mire of the cypress swamp onto the fields of the Villeré plantation. Complete surprise had been achieved beyond their wildest dreams. The surprise was so great that at about ten-thirty a.m. Major Villeré, who was sitting on the veranda of his father’s plantation house with his brother, Celestine, “who was cleaning a fowling piece,” suddenly noticed flashes of red in the orange grove. Upon further inspection these proved to be British soldiers. Villeré immediately dashed for the back door, only to be greeted by a squad of redcoats led by Colonel Thornton himself, a drawn sword in his hand, and “with infinate mortification, the young creole surrendered.”

  The Villeré brothers were confined to a room with several guards, but, as Judge Walker tells us, “there were no braver men than the Villerés; their heritage was one of dauntless courage and chivalry.” Thus, when it seemed the guards were preoccupied, Major Villeré bolted through an open window, leaped a high picket fence “in the presence of some fifty British soldiers, some of whom discharged their arms at him,” and ran across the stubble fields into the cypress swamp. The British immediately gave chase, with Thornton’s stern admonition “catch him or kill him” ringing in their ears.

  We have the following version of what happened next from historian Walker:

  “He could distinctly hear the voices of his pursuers rallying one another and pointing out the course he had taken. His re-capture now seemed inevitable, when it occurred to him to climb a large live-oak and conceal himself in its evergreen branches. As he was about to execute this design, his attention was attracted by a low whine or cry at his feet. He looked down and beheld his favorite setter crouched piteously on the ground. What could Villeré do with the poor animal? Her presence near the tree would inevitably betray him . . . the imminent peril in which Jackson and his soldiers would be placed by the surprise of the city—these and other considerations [led him to conclude that] a sacrifice had to be made. The young creole seized a large stick and soon dispatched her. Concealing the dead body, he ascended the tree, where he remained until the British had returned to their camp.”

  That account sounds fanciful but may not be. Writing in 1856, Walker had known Villeré as an old man whose eyes still brimmed with tears whenever he told that part of the story. In any event, as soon as the coast was clear, Villeré made for the river, where he ran into a neighbor, Colonel Denis De la Ronde, who had also seen the redcoats. A day earlier, De la Ronde had reported to Jackson’s headquarters that he’d seen “strange sails” out on Lake Borgne, and Jackson had already sent out his two engineer officers, Majors Tatum and Latour, to investigate. Villeré and De la Ronde found a boat and rowed across the Mississippi to spread the word that the British were coming.

  By ten-thirty at least 1,600 redcoats were on the fields of Villeré’s plantation, with more arriving all the time. General Keane appeared on the scene and formed the men up, wheeled them right, and marched them past Villeré’s house to a point about a mile nearer New Orleans. They halted near the boundary between Villeré’s and De la Ronde’s plantations, and Keane established his headquarters in Villeré’s home. By this time it was noon. The soldiers were spread in a line from the river to the swamp, many talking about the wealth of spoils and “beauty” that lay in the city before them. They were allowed to stack arms and build fires to cook their rations. The day having turned warm, some bathed in the canal, and all got their first look at the mighty Mississippi. They had also taken time to raise the Union Jack in a tree while a band played “God Save the King.”

  Not everyone was so sanguine. Captain William Surtees, of the 85th Regiment, noted that “considerable discussion now began to take place amongst the knowing ones, as to the merits and demerits of our situation, in point of security. One officer of ours did not hesitate to assert that we were in a most unprotected and dangerous position.” Captain John Cooke, of the 43rd, recorded, “The soldiers were lounging about. . . . Those already landed having no retreat, it might have been conjectured that, like one of Caesar’s legions, they would have felled trees or made some stronghold in case of exigencies. But no such thing was done.” Lieutenant Gleig was even more blunt and pessimistic: “To put the country to the expense of sending thousands of men across the Atlantic for so mad a venture was little short of criminal.”

  Back in New Orleans, neither Jackson nor anyone else was aware that a British army was gathering just below the city. For this he has been strongly criticized by numerous historians, including the notable Henry Adams, who complained that “the record of American generalship [in the War of 1812] offered many examples of misfortune, but none so complete as this,” by which he meant incompetence. No other American general, Adams went on, however inept—and, as we have seen, there were a great many of these—“had allowed a large British army, heralded long in advance, to arrive within seven miles unseen and unsuspected, and without so much as an earthwork, a man, or a gun between them and their object.” This censure is somewhat unfair, since Jackson had ordered the Bienvenue and all the other bayous blockaded and guarded against just the sort of thing that was happening right now.* 60 On the other hand, ultimate responsibility for seeing that those orders were carried out belonged to Jackson alone. What he should have done, in retrospect, was require that General Villeré, the major’s father, personally inspect all the bayous and put in writing when and how each of them had been blockaded and guarded.

  Such “examples of misfortune,” of course, were not limited to the American army. When the first brigade of British infantrymen was fully on the field, and without apparent opposition, Colonel Thornton, a most daring officer, proposed to Keane that they march immediately for New Orleans without waiting for the rest of the army. They could be in the city within a couple of hours. Keane turned him down. Why he did so remains something of a mystery. It could have been that Keane had put credence in the information obtained from the captured picket that Jackson had 12,000 to 15,000 men in New Orleans, as opposed to the Spanish fishermen’s rosy picture. At least he couldn’t be sure, and perhaps, like General James Longstreet two generations later at the Battle of Gettysburg, he didn’t want “to fight a battle with only one boot on.”

  On the other hand, here in fact was a golden opportunity. Jackson’s main fighting force, the brigades of Coffee and Carroll, were encamped a full four miles above New Orleans, completely unaware that anything was amiss. If the British could get an advance force into the city before the Americans reacted, and with more coming all the time, they would be very hard to dislodge. But Keane was a cautious commander. What remains unclear is why he and Cochrane did not develop a plan beforehand for such an immediate attack. It might have been that they felt it was best to get the entire army into the field and there to destroy, European-style, the American resistance once and for all; we shall probably never know. In any event, the British soldiers rested at their leisure all afternoon and into the evening before they discovered that the capture of New Orleans was not going to be a pushover.

  At about two p.m. on the twenty-third, things began to happen nearly all at once at Jackson’s headquarters, beginning with the desperate clatter of a horse’s hoofs down Royal Street. First a man named Rousseau rushed in with the wild and dazzling news that British soldiers were all over Villeré’s plantation. No sooner had he spoken these words than Major Villeré and Colonel De la Ronde arrived, breathless and mud-stained, and confirmed the story, which had to be translated for Jackson from the French. At about this time Major Tatum, Jackson’s engineer who had been sent out that morning with Major Latour to investigate the report of “strange sails on the lake,” also arrived to reconfirm the news.

  Jackson was perplexed. Might this not merely be a feint, and the real invasion come elsewhere? Or might it not be part of a two-pronged, or even three-pronged, attack? Of course, he could not be sure, but Jackson was a
man of action, not a ditherer. According to Walker, “The general drew up his figure to its full height, and with an eye of fire and an emphatic blow upon the table with his clenched fist, exclaimed in a voice that slipped like a knife through the ribs: ‘By the eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!’ ”

  Then Jackson did what many reasonable men of the day would do under the circumstances. He poured everyone a glass of strong drink before declaring, “Gentlemen, the British are below, we must fight them to-night.”

  This was unassailably a bold and daring decision, given the uncertainties Jackson faced. If he had jumped the wrong way, the general might have found his army fighting a British force nine miles south of the city while the main enemy attack developed from another location. Yet absent any firm evidence of that distinct possibility, Jackson did what so many failed commanders have been reluctant to do over the ages, which was to “march to the sound of the guns.” Walker points out the irony: “Here was a farmer—lawyer—general who had never commanded a regiment of regular soldiers in his life,” going up against the renowned veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, led by a professional soldier (Keane) “who had fought under [Generals] Abercrombie, Moore and Wellington.” What Jackson realized was that the redcoats on General Villeré’s plantation were only the advance guard; therefore time was on his side, but only for the moment, for the rest of the enemy army would soon follow, like the Goths to Rome.

  Within minutes the alarm guns had been fired in New Orleans and the cathedral bells rung, spreading the news with electric rapidity throughout the city. Jackson immediately began issuing marching orders, to Coffee, to Carroll, to the free men of color, to the battalions of New Orleans volunteers, the regulars, and the militia: everyone was to assemble in front of the British position on the Plain of Chalmette.

  Amid all this activity the general fumed. “I will smash them,” he exclaimed. “So help me God!” At one point he noticed a number of women and children in the streets, wailing and crying, and ordered Livingston to “say to the ladies not to be uneasy. No British soldier shall enter the city as an enemy, unless it is over my dead body.” To guard against the possibility that this was merely a feint or just one part of a multipronged attack, Jackson left the various militia at their posts north and east of the city, as well as the Baratarian artillerists, who could not have moved their guns down in time anyway. In the lengthening shadows, Jackson’s battalions began to arrive, including Captain Jugat’s band of Choctaws with their knives and tomahawks.

  Meantime, he had consulted with Commodore Patterson, reaching an agreement that the fourteen-gun Carolina would quietly drop down in the river’s current to a point nearly beside the British position. This was one of the truly inspired ideas of the battle, for to suddenly bring half that ship’s artillery in broadside against an unsuspecting British army would certainly wreak havoc. When they were sufficiently bombarded, Patterson was to fire off a red, a white, and a blue rocket, which would be the signal for Jackson to attack. Thus, as darkness closed in, Jackson had assembled a welcoming committee for the invaders, rude in more ways than one, that was to have a lasting impact on the campaign thereafter.

  As the sun began to set and purple shadows fell over the stubble cane fields and orange groves on a short Southern winter day, Jackson’s army organized itself. At some point Latour arrived to report that he had made a study of the British position through his spyglass and estimated the force at Villeré’s as numbering between 1,600 and 1,800, a remarkably accurate assessment. The general sat astride his horse at the gates of Fort St. Charles on what is now Esplanade Avenue, with Laffite, Latour, Livingston, and others beside him. That was the rallying point for the troops, as the various militia, volunteers, and U.S. Army regulars assembled in marching formation. Some of the units—Plauché’s volunteer lawyers, bankers, and merchants, for example—had to run all the way into town from their post at Fort St. John. “Ah, here come the brave creoles!” Jackson was said to have remarked to one of his aides. Then they began to march out of the city about a mile south to the Montreuil plantation, which was fifteen plantations (about ten miles) above where the British had assembled. “As they advanced along the levee,” Walker tells us, “hundreds of snowy handkerchiefs were waved towards them and bright eyes from every window and balcony cheered their hearts and warmed their courage.”

  From Montreuil’s, with General Coffee’s mounted riflemen leading the way, Jackson marched his men forward in perfect silence to form a line on an old abandoned canal on the Rodriguez plantation, about two miles from the enemy. He set up his field headquarters in the Macarty plantation house. An old Creole planter who had taken an interest in the stars sent Jackson his astronomical telescope, which proved a godsend. From the second-story balcony—or, even better, the third-story dormers—Jackson could view the entire British line with this powerful optical instrument, while the British, having neither such an elevated observation post nor a telescope of their own, did not enjoy a similar advantage.

  By four p.m. the bulk of the American army had arrived. First blood was drawn when a mounted reconnaissance party came too close to the British advance pickets: two men were wounded as well as a horse killed. The Americans had moved into position so quietly, however, that the British never suspected an attack in force that night. As a matter of fact, they did not foresee an attack at all, based on their experience with American militia at Washington and elsewhere. “Militia never attack” had become a military axiom for them.

  As a further precaution against a multipronged assault, Jackson reluctantly directed Carroll’s strong force of freshly arrived Tennesseans to the Plain of Gentilly, where another branch of Bayou Bienvenue emptied. From there Carroll could either defend against an attack or serve as a ready reserve. Luckily for Carroll, on the way down the Mississippi his force had intercepted one of the munitions shipment boats sent from Pittsburgh by the War Department. No one, apparently, had thought to tell the arms manufacturer to ship the weapons with all deliberate speed, and so, to get a better deal, he agreed that the keelboat captains could stop along the way and buy and sell other cargo, thus delaying their arrival almost indefinitely. In any event, Carroll was delighted to have overtaken the munitions boat, since many of his men had come unarmed, expecting to be equipped at New Orleans. Now Carroll had eleven hundred new muskets, which he used to drill his soldiers on their flatboats as they steered slowly down the Mississippi. He also set his blacksmiths to manufacturing fifty thousand cartridges.

  Jackson’s use of Carroll’s division was cautious and wise, but it also subtracted more than 2,400 men from his infantry. Still, Jackson knew that it is a foolish commander who goes into battle without a strong and ready reserve, either to forestall a losing fight or to take advantage of a success. (A note on troop numbers: each of the various official reports, as well as figures calculated by historians, cite different strength figures for both sides throughout the battle. For instance, Jackson in his official report stated that the British force opposing him on December 23 numbered 3,000. Latour, who also was there and wrote the first history, says there were 4,000 and possibly as many as 5,000. Others say there were fewer than 2,000. Likewise, on the American side, it was estimated by Jackson himself that he had only 1,500 men, but Latour gives the figure at 2,100, citing a unit-by-unit breakdown. It is probably safe to say that the two armies on that night—at least at the beginning—were fairly evenly matched at about 2,000 men each.)

  The British had stood on American soil unmolested all day, and now, as darkness fell, they lounged about their campfires cooking supper. “Not content with the salt meat and rum allotted to them by the Commissary, small parties were permitted to go out in pursuit of more desirable delicacies. Spreading themselves over the country they penetrated every house, every dairy and negro cabin, pig-sty and poultry-yard, seized everything that was eatable or drinkable and bore it into camp. The officers were allotted the first choice of these luxuries, which consisted of ham, cheese, poultry, wine, br
andy and other delicacies with which the houses of the planters are always abundantly supplied.”

  The night was chilly and cloudy but not yet cold, and many of the redcoats who had endured the ordeals at Pea Island and the long, uncomfortable row across the lake dropped off to sleep after finishing what they considered sumptuous dinners. Pickets and reconnaissance parties reported no contact with Americans after the dustup with the U.S. cavalry patrol. With the round-the-clock ferrying operation going as planned, most of the British army would be in the field by the next afternoon, and there would be time enough then to deal with the Americans.

  At about seven p.m., British soldiers posted near the levee noticed that a large schooner was moving slowly downriver. This ship was unlighted, and they could perceive no movement aboard her in the darkness. Like a ghost ship coming out of the mist, the schooner slowly made its way over to the bank where the British were encamped. Less than a hundred yards from the levee, the splash of an anchor was heard. Many of the soldiers assumed the ship was British, sent to guard their flank on the march into New Orleans the next day. Others thought she was probably a merchantman. They hailed her but received no answer. They fired rifle shots to attract her attention, but the ship remained enigmatic, silent as a tomb. Someone informed the officers, who came out for a look, but no one could surmise the meaning of the mystery ship.

  At half past seven she revealed herself.

  Those who were still watching reported that they saw large firing matches lit. Suddenly the gunports snapped open and, according to Lieutenant Gleig, a “commanding voice” was distinctly heard to say: “Give them this for the honor of America!” At that, the right side of the ship burst into an orange sheet of flame and “a perfect tornado of grape-shot swept down numbers in the camp.”

  Manned in part by the experienced Baratarian artillerymen, the seven starboard cannons of the Carolina wreaked chaos on the British position. The gun crews aimed at the campfires around which the men were resting, blasting pots, pans, kettles, and men. “The scene beggared all description. No mob could have been in a more utter state of disorganization,” one British officer said. The entire field was swept by fire, and the soldiers “ran wildly to and fro” until Colonel Thornton dashed out and ordered the men to take shelter under the levee. “Against this destructive fire we had nothing to oppose,” reported Gleig. The Carolina kept up its fire for a solid hour, during which “the men lay down at full length, listening in painful silence to the pattering of grape-shot and the shrieks of the wounded in the field . . . who were knocked and tossed about like logs of wood, by the remorseless shot of the schooner.”