Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  Back in New Orleans the tension was palpable. While a company of old men stood guard in the deserted streets, women and their daughters gathered at a number of homes to sew bandages and make clothes, especially for Carroll’s tattered Tennessee soldiers. The sound of cannon fire from below the city rumbled through the night like distant thunder, while residents could only wonder and wait “with emotions that can be imagined, not described.” What with the British army’s reprehensible behavior at Hampton, Virginia, still fresh on everyone’s mind, it was reported that many of the women had concealed daggers on their persons.

  At eight-thirty the cannon fire from the Carolina ceased, and from the deck of the ship came the three signal rockets in rapid succession—red, white, and blue—of which Jackson and his commanders well knew the meaning. The British, who did not know, found out soon enough when “a fearful yell rose out of the dark and the heavens were illuminated on all sides by a semi-circular blaze of musketry.” According to Lieutenant Gleig, “Now began a battle of which no language were competent to convey any distinct idea; because it was one to which the annals of modern warfare furnished no parallel.” For Gleig and many of his brother officers and men—even General Keane himself—this was a flatly true statement. In the European wars to which they were accustomed, battles were not fought at night; instead the armies waited until daytime, when every man could be seen, and victory was usually gained by the army marching in line closest to the enemy and delivering withering volleys, then either holding its ground or marching even closer, causing the other to flee.

  That was not Jackson’s plan. During the bombardment he had stealthily maneuvered the American army forward to the very edges of the De la Ronde plantation, just opposite the British camp. First Coffee’s dismounted infantrymen, guided by Pierre Laffite and Colonel De la Ronde himself, burst into the British line at the far end of the field near the cypress swamp. Their object was to cut off the British line of reinforcement and supply that led from their landing site at the Villeré Canal and Bayou Bienvenue and then roll up the enemy’s right flank, pushing it toward the river. Major Thomas Hinds and his Mississippi dragoons remained on Coffee’s old line as a reserve and mobile force, since trying to negotiate at night the numerous fences, canals, and ditches that interlaced the plantations would certainly have injured or destroyed many of their horses.

  From the British perspective, rarely had men been so abruptly pitchforked into battle than those who were just arriving at the landing at the bayou’s terminus. With the entire field erupting in gunfire, these startled, hungry, weary troops who had just endured the grueling daylong row across the lake were herded by their commanders through the gummy marshes and the swamp and plunged straight into the cane-field fray.

  At the same time, Jackson had ordered forward the two regiments of U.S. regulars as well as the lawyer and merchant volunteers, who pitched into the British in their sheltering position behind the levee. A particularly fierce fight was put up by a British captain named Hallen and his 80-man outpost several hundred yards in front of the main enemy line. Try as the Americans might to evict the British from their position near the levee, they would not budge, and, since Hallen was continually reinforced, the Americans had no choice but to go around them.

  From then on what has come to be known as the Night Battle unavoidably began to assume the aspect of a wild melee in which lives were measured in anxious minutes. Scores of vicious little fights erupted in the darkness all over the field of several hundred acres, and it soon became a practical impossibility to keep order—it was “a war of detachments and duels,” as one participant put it. To make matters worse, a heavy fog had risen up from the river and swamps and covered the battlefield, mingling with the smoke from the many muskets and guns. Every available weapon was used: rifles, pistols, bayonets, gun butts, knives, hatchets, sabers, fence rails, and fists and strangling hands, accompanied by wild yelling, cursing, and the screaming of the wounded. The Choctaw Indians made good use of their tomahawks. The night was black as pitch, illuminated only by the flashes of gunfire against low-hanging clouds and the fog. “We fought with the savage ferocity of bull-dogs,” recalled Lieutenant Gleig, whose best friend was killed by a shot through the head and left lying on a dung heap.

  As prisoners were taken, and their units determined, both sides employed the ruse of calling out to the other that they were “friends.” A British major named Samuel Mitchell and a number of his people were captured in that way over in Coffee’s sector when Mitchell shouted out to some men he could barely see in the dark, “Are you the Ninety-third [the regiment of Highlanders expected to land at any time]?”

  “That’s right!” came the reply, but when Mitchell walked into the group he “was slapped on the shoulder by Captain John Donelson, Andrew Jackson’s nephew,” who informed him, “You are my prisoner, Major.”

  Mitchell was so angry that he refused to hand over his sword until it was taken from him forcibly, and he was led to the rear cursing furiously. Then the same thing happened to Donelson and his men after a British detachment responded to their query of “Who are you?” by shouting, “We are Coffee’s men.”

  The butchery went on for a full six hours, and men on both sides were shot by their own in the darkness and fog. The Americans had two six-pounder cannon moved up, but before they could be put in firing position the British attacked them. Jackson rode up and gave a demonstration of his legendary self-control, “indifferent to the shower of bullets which whistled around him.” He called out, “Save the guns, my boys, at every sacrifice!”

  Sometime around ten p.m. the 1,100-man regiment of 93rd Highlanders began to arrive on the field, and these strapping six-footers lent much needed weight to the British defense. Around midnight Jackson decided to call off the attack; his men were exhausted, ammunition was running low, and the constant stream of British reinforcements was tipping the balance against him. Between those considerations and the fog, darkness, and gunsmoke, which made command and control almost impossible, Jackson sent messengers to Coffee and Colonel Ross of the 7th Regiment of regulars to fall back, but small pockets of soldiers, unable to disengage, continued to fire at one another for several hours more.

  At first, Jackson had determined to renew the attack at dawn, but as more information came in he thought better of it. Now he knew that the 93rd Highlanders had arrived as well as other regiments and artillery. His men were neither trained nor drilled to withstand the methodical massed-fire tactics of European infantry conflicts. Many of them didn’t even have bayonets, while the British did. They were, basically, Indian fighters—at least those who had been in any battles at all—and the night battle had been in the nature of an Indian-style fight. That they were willing to continue despite the fact that they had no idea of the campaign’s outcome or whether they would live or die is testimony enough to their reconciliation with Jackson’s antique sense of honor.

  Tomorrow, though, would bring a far stronger force against Jackson’s already exhausted men. While he pondered matters in the darkest hours before dawn, Jackson must have been struggling with his own basic instincts. He had always been a fighter, not a defender; when a situation called for action, Jackson inevitably was the aggressor—in the school yard, the courtroom, the dueling field, during the Creek War, against the Spanish at Pensacola—but here reason called for something contrary to those impulses that drove his complex soul. The mental processes that formed Jackson’s decision are not known; nor is it known whether or not he consulted his commanders. About an hour before dawn he gave the order to retire the army away from the British, back five or six plantations up toward New Orleans. He would return to his field headquarters on the Rodriguez Canal and there, with his astronomical telescope with which to watch the enemy, reorganize, fortify, and await developments. He wrote a simple dispatch to Secretary of War Monroe: “As the safety of the city will depend on the fate of this army, it must not be incautiously exposed.” In retrospect, this was his wisest decision of
the entire campaign.

  When streaks of daylight lit the swamps and stubble fields, the killing ground presented a horrific apparition to Lieutenant Gleig. “In wandering over the field the most shocking and disgusting sights everywhere presented themselves [and] wounds more disfiguring or more horrible I certainly never witnessed. A man shot through the head or heart, lies as if he were in deep slumber . . . but many had met their death from bayonet wounds, sabre cuts or heavy blows from the butt-ends of muskets and the consequence was that not only were the wounds themselves exceedingly frightful, but the very countenances of the dead exhibited the most savage and ghastly expressions. Friends and foes lay together in small groups of five or six—nor was it difficult to tell the very hand by which some of them had fallen. Nay, such had been the deadly closeness of the strife that, in one or two places, an English and American soldier might be seen with the bayonet of each fastened in the other’s body.”

  After searching for some time, Gleig finally located the body of his dead companion, a Captain Grey, who “had been shot through the temples by a rifle bullet so small as scarcely left any traces. Lifting him upon a cart I had him carried down to head-quarters house, now converted into a hospital, and having dug a grave for him at the bottom of the garden, I laid him out there as a soldier should be laid, arrayed not in a shroud, but in his uniform. Even the privates I brought with me to assist in his funeral mingled their tears with mine.”

  Gleig then visited the hospital, where “every room was crowded with wretches mangled and apparently in the most excruciating agonies. Prayers, groans and, I grieve to add [being himself the son of a clergyman], the most horrid exclamations smote upon the ear wherever I turned. Some lay upon the straw with eyes half closed and limbs motionless; some endeavoured to start up, shrieking with pain, while the wandering eye and incoherent speech of others indicated the loss of reason, and usually foretold the approach of death. There was one among the rest whose appearance was too horrible ever to be forgotten. He had been shot through the windpipe and the breath making its way between the skin and the flesh had dilated him to a size absolutely terrific. His head and face were particularly shocking. Every feature was enlarged beyond what can well be imagined; whilst his eyes were so completely hidden by the cheeks and forehead as to destroy all resemblance to a human countenance.”

  In one room Gleig came across a number of officers, all of whom he knew. “One had been shot in the head and lay gasping and insensible; another had received a musket-ball in the belly, which had pierced through and lodged in the backbone. [He] was in the most dreadful agony, screaming out and gnawing the covering under which he lay.”

  British casualties amounted to 276 officers and men, of which 46 had been killed, and 64 were taken prisoner. Jackson had 213 casualties, of which 24 were killed, and 74 were taken prisoner, including a number of “the most respectable citizens of New Orleans,” who had formed the rifle company of Captain Thomas Beale. This company had blundered into a large detachment of the newly arriving 93rd Highlanders. Among those made prisoners were the former mayor of New Orleans, the president of the Bank of Louisiana, a number of lawyers, and the port customs collector.* 61

  Despite Jackson’s insolent, bloodthirsty, and ultimately unsuccessful attack, the British remained in their positions, hallooing to one another about how they had whipped the Americans and sent them flying, though none among them could again claim they had gone unmolested. They had, in fact, been thoroughly molested, and, at least so far, Jackson’s assertion “By the Eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil” was nearer to the truth than not. The fact was, the British veterans so accustomed to massive daylight clashes in which long orderly lines of infantry formally marched against enemies, heralded by drums and bugles and regimental flags flying, had been shaken by being jumped at night, Indian-style, by an enemy they considered to be woefully inferior. The British commanders, for their part, were shocked as well by the ferocity of the assault. Colonel Thornton, who had watched U.S. militia run away at Washington and elsewhere, observed darkly, “This boldly attacking us in our camp is a new feature in American warfare.”

  Portrait of Andrew Jackson around the time of the Battle of New Orleans. His defeat of the British army won him fame and the U.S. presidency. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  This caricature of Jean Laffite is one of many attempts to capture his likeness. There are no authenticated drawings of him during his lifetime, though later portraits were painted from descriptions by those who knew him. Considering his shabby past, Laffite probably did not wish to have his picture made public. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  Generals John Coffee and William Carroll, both of Tennessee, were two of Jackson’s trusted commanders whose troops held down the critical left side of the American line. (COFFEE, COURTESY THE HERMITAGE; CARROLL, COURTESY THE TENNESSEE HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

  General Sir Edward Pakenham was killed during the battle and his remains were sent back to England in a cask of rum. Brother-in-law to the Duke of Wellington and a competent commander, he inherited a bad field position and made the worst of it. (COURTESY THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON)

  General David Morgan of Louisiana, commander of the troops on the west side of the river, suffered loss of face when his men broke and ran as the British attacked on December 8, 1814. (COURTESY THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM)

  Admiral Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British naval expedition, was thought by many to have organized the attack on New Orleans in order to secure for himself the valuable prize money associated with the capture of the city. (COURTESY NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON)

  Commodore Daniel Todd Patterson was instrumental in the victory by bringing to bear the fire of his two U.S. Navy ships on the British army—especially during the early days of the battle. (COURTESY CHRYSLER MUSEUM OF ART)

  This bird’s-eye depiction by Hyacinth Laclotte of the Battle of New Orleans on the day of the final British attack is thought by some to have derived from a sketch by Arsene Lacarrière Latour, Jackson’s chief engineer. It shows Jackson’s headquarters at the Macarty house on the left; Colonel Rennie’s attack on the American right; the main attack of the British on the American center and left in which Generals Pakenham, Keane, and Gibbs fell; and Jackson’s reserves behind the lines. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  Another version of the battle depicting British colonel Rennie’s attack on the far right of the American line. Rennie and several of his subordinates were killed just as they reached the top of the barricade. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  A third representation, showing the fury of the fighting on the final day of the battle. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  A depiction of the Battle of Lake Borgne rendered several decades after the battle, showing the fierce little British barges attacking the American gunboat flotilla. (COURTESY CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

  The Macarty plantation house, where Jackson kept his head-quarters from the beginning of the battle. Positioning himself at the little dormer on the third floor, he used a telescope given him by an amateur astronomer to watch British positions and movements more than a mile distant. (FROM AN 1860S WOODCUT DRAWING BY HISTORIAN BENSON LOSSING)

  One of the many paintings of the Battle of New Orleans that immortalized Andrew Jackson and his scruffy, thrown-together army. Depicted here is the popular but false notion that the Americans fought behind a barricade of cotton bales. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  The bold pirate/privateer Dominique You, who manned his guns on the barricade throughout the battle, was thought to be the brother of Jean Laffite. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  Another fanciful illustration of the final day of the Battle of New Orleans, this one showing soldiers of the battalion of free men of color, as well as American frontiersmen dressed in buckskin. (COURTESY THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION)

  Generals Sir Edward Pakenh
am and Samuel Gibbs, killed on the battle’s last furious day, depicted here in a remarkable marble sculpture in the hall of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. There is something quite touching about the faraway gaze in their eyes, as if they were watching the defeated British army pass in review. (COURTESY THE WARBURG INSTITUTE, LONDON)

  Ten

  Morning presented no better aspect for the British army. Leaving aside Lieutenant Gleig’s abominable stroll across the battlefield, the wretched dawn brought a new rain of hell from the Carolina, which by now had moved to the opposite bank of the river, well out of musket range, to continue unleashing her broadsides. Far from a mere harassing fire, it killed and maimed without warning, putting every redcoat’s nerves on edge. Worse for Keane’s army, by midmorning Carolina was joined by the much larger and more powerful sixteen-big-gun Louisiana—manned primarily by Jean Laffite’s expert Baratarian cannoneers—which anchored about a mile upstream and also began to blast the British positions. Captain Surtees recorded that one shot hit a corporal and went right through him: “He gave himself a sort of shake, and fell lifeless upon the earth.” Surtees himself nearly became a victim. “We had scarcely left a little wooden hut behind which we had taken our abode . . . when Bang! comes an eighteen pound shot right through the house, just at the very spot where we had a minute or two before been sitting.”