Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  “Shame! Shame!” the general called to them as he rode past. “Recollect that you are British. Forward, gentlemen, forward.” At this point, one British officer tells us, “the American line looked like a row of fiery furnaces.”

  As he neared the fray, Pakenham was hit in the right arm by a bullet, while another killed his horse. He immediately took the horse of one of his aides, Captain Duncan MacDougall, and proceeded forward, with MacDougall leading it by the bridle and Pakenham, waving his plumed hat in his one good hand, exhorting his men all the while, “with appeals to their ancient fame.” On reaching the battle area, Pakenham gave his final order, to bring up General Lambert’s reserve, but as the bugler was blowing the call, a missile of some sort struck his arm and the message was never received.

  Then grapeshot from one of Carroll’s batteries tore into Pakenham’s thigh and killed this second horse out from under him. As his aides were lifting the young commanding general up, another blast of grapeshot hit him in the stomach. The wound was mortal. Pakenham was carried to the rear and placed under a lone oak tree standing far back in the center of the field, where he died a short time afterward—“perished thus ingloriously in a war of unjust invasion against his own race and kindred,” in the opinion of Judge Walker, who also recorded that “the old oak still stands, bent and twisted—a melancholy monument of that great disaster of the British arms!”

  A lieutenant and a major from the 21st Regiment and about twenty men got across the ditch and managed to scale the rampart by standing on one another’s shoulders, but when the major, whose name was Wilkinson, raised himself above the top, he was greeted by a blast of rifle fire. The Kentuckians, however, were so moved by Wilkinson’s courage that they pulled him to safety behind the rampart. Walker tells us that a Major Smiley attempted to minister to the Englishman, saying, “Bear up, my dear fellow. You are too brave a man to die.”

  But Wilkinson fully understood his fate: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he replied. “It is all over for me. You can render me a favor; it is to communicate to my commander that I fell on your parapet and died like a soldier and a true Englishman.”

  After Wilkinson expired, the Kentuckians covered his body with their own flag. His was a particular English inconsistency “that did not seem to bother them in the least.” The reasoning behind it seemed to be that if a man has to go, he may as well go cheerfully, and in good spirits, while most Americans so wounded—being a more practical people—would have railed in curses and lamentations at the imminent prospect of their death.

  The lieutenant, whose name was Leavock, had meantime gotten over the rampart untouched, only to find himself in the unwelcome company of two Kentucky officers, whom he attempted to take as prisoners. The Kentuckians just laughed at him, however, and made him a prisoner instead, while the astonished lieutenant looked back to find that none of his brother soldiers had followed him but were cowering down in Jackson’s ditch. Later, when he was finally released, Leavock claimed to fellow officers that when he rose up over the rampart all the Americans—except for the two officers who captured him—had run away, but this does not seem to square with reality.

  By now General Keane had been critically shot in the neck and carried off the field. Also, according to accounts, General Gibbs had become like a man possessed, “riding around in circles,” shouting at and abjuring his scattered men, when he was struck simultaneously by several American bullets and mortally wounded. He, too, was carried from the field in pain and agony, still cursing not only his present situation but Colonel Mullins’s incompetence, the bad turn of the battle, and, some say, Pakenham himself; he died the next day.

  The British army had lost all three of its active field generals, seven colonels, and seventy-five other officers—that is, practically its whole officer corps.

  As an example of sublime naïveté, Lieutenant Gleig complained that the British soldiers “fell by the hands of men they could not see; for the Americans, without so much as lifting their faces above the rampart, swung their firelocks by one arm over the wall, and discharged them directly upon their [British] heads. The whole of the guns, likewise, from the opposite bank, kept up a well-directed and deadly cannonade upon their flank; and thus were they [the British army] destroyed without an opportunity being given of displaying their valor, or obtaining so much as revenge.”

  Gleig’s problem seems to be, as it was with the rest of the British apologists then present, that the Americans did not play by European rules of warfare. Paraphrasing Walker, perhaps the British should have thought about that before they came to invade somebody else’s country, and adjusted their lofty military customs accordingly.

  Some of the fleeing soldiers exclaimed to others that they had heard an order to retreat, but that did not seem to be the case either; by now the entire British army was in irredeemable disarray. The hapless Scotsmen of the 93rd were still standing in the field when “that thirty-two pounder, filled to the muzzle with musket balls, poured its charge directly, at point blank range, right into the head of the column, literally leveling it with the plain”—laying low, as was afterward computed, 200 men. Finally the Scotsmen had stood all they could stand and fled to save themselves, leaving behind them two-thirds of their number, dead or bleeding on the field. The battle was only twenty-five minutes old from the opening shots, and already from the British standpoint it had become a shambles.

  Most of the British army had by now run back out of cannon and rifle range, but there were still large numbers of fleeing soldiers who had taken refuge in drainage ditches or shallow depressions in the ground, or behind the trees at the edge of the swamp. With the withdrawal of the bulk of their associates, those who remained behind attracted the undivided attention of American shooters. For these unfortunate souls, there was nothing under the sun to appeal to, neither mercy nor justice nor, for that matter, even common decency; the Americans shot at them relentlessly, and even the smallest flash of red moving above ground would bring a dozen bullets whistling overhead. If they tried to run for it, they were invariably shot down.

  One retreating British soldier was particularly annoying to the Americans because, as he got what he thought was a safe distance away, he “would every now and then stop and display some gestures toward us that were rather uncomplimentary (patting his butt at us!).” A number of men were shooting at him, a Kentuckian said, but they were ineffective. In the Kentuckian’s outfit was a superior marksman known as Paleface, and the others urged him to take aim at the offending redcoat, which he did, killing him with a shot between the shoulder blades at a range of nearly three hundred yards.

  Captain John Cooke, of the 43rd Regiment, remembered, “A wounded soldier who was lying amongst the slain two hundred yards behind us, continued without any cessation for two hours, to raise his arm up and down with a convulsive motion, which excited the most painful sensations amongst us; and as the enemy’s balls every now and then killed or maimed some soldiers, we could not help casting our eyes towards the moving arm, which really was a dreadful magnet of attraction: it even caught the attention of the enemy who, without seeing the body, fired several round shot at it.”

  Other abominations starkly emerged. “A black soldier lay near us, who had received a blow from a cannon-ball which had obliterated all his features; and although blind, and suffering the most terrible anguish, he was employing himself in scratching out a hole to put his money into.” Cooke saw one officer of his regiment, “when a grape shot passed through both of his knees; at first he sank back faintly, but at length opening his eyes and looking at his wounds, he said, ‘Carry me away, I am chilled to death’; and as he was hoisted on the men’s shoulders, more grape shot passed his head; taking off his cap, he waved it; and after many narrow escapes he got out of range, suffered amputation of both legs, but died of his wounds on board ship, after enduring all the pain of the surgical operation and passing down the lake in an open boat.”

  For the Americans, gazing over the
rampart at the hideous mementos, the sight beggared the imagination, like a scene from the depths of Dante. The air stank of hot metal and gunpowder, of flesh and blood. A soldier from Kentucky wrote, “When the smoke had cleared and we could obtain a fair view of the field, it looked at first glance like a sea of blood. It was not blood itself, but the red coats in which the British soldiers were dressed. The field was entirely covered in prostrate bodies. In some places they were laying in piles of several, one on top of the other . . . in every possible attitude. Some laying quite dead, others mortally wounded, pitching and tumbling about in the agonies of death. Some had their heads shot off, some their legs, some their arms.”

  Even Jackson was flabbergasted by the sight. “I never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection as on that day,” he later wrote, as scores of redcoats rose up like dim purgatorial souls with their hands in the air and began walking toward the American lines. “After the smoke of the battle had cleared off somewhat, I saw in the distance more than five hundred Britons emerging from the heaps of their dead comrades, all over the plain, rising up and coming forward and surrendering as prisoners of war to our soldiers.” These people, Jackson concluded, had fallen at the first fire and then hidden themselves behind the bodies of their slain brethren.

  One was a British major who walked into the Kentucky lines of Paleface and Ambrose Odd waving a white handkerchief. When a private told him to surrender his sword, the major balked, looking for a proper officer to surrender it to, instead of a private “who looked like a chimnysweep.” But when the regiment’s colonel came by—he was the same Colonel Smiley who had earlier tended to the brave dying major—he ordered the priggish major to “give it up” to the private, which he did.

  Another soldier surrendering himself was a young Irishman from the 44th Regiment who came into the American lines. As soon as he got over the rampart, he was trying to take off his cartridge box when an American noticed a red spot of blood on his white shirt. Asked if he was wounded, the young soldier “replied that he was, and feared pretty badly.” Several Americans began helping him remove his accoutrements when the soldier noticed one of the Tennesseans coming back from the river with a tin pot full of water, “and asked if he would please give him a drop.” The Tennessean did so, and no sooner had the Irishman taken two or three mouthfuls than he sank back down, dead.

  Fifteen

  By midmorning most of the firing had ceased, except for an occasional American cannon that let off a roar every now and then, like a lion who simply wanted to let everyone know he was still there. Jean Laffite, who was returning from an inspection of his stores of powder and flints at the Temple, got there just as the battle ended, and as he reached the rear of his batteries he did not know who had won. “I heard the rumble of cannons raging in the distance,” he said. When the gunfire slacked off, he remembered, “I feared that my supply of flints and powder were exhausted.” Laffite moved as fast as he could to the rampart: “I was almost out of breath, running through the bushes and mud. My hands were bruised, my clothing torn, my feet soaked. I could not believe the result of the battle,” he said, adding that “the spectacle presented before us by the battlefield was so horrible that we could not believe our eyes.”

  Because they were touched at the tremendous suffering that had come to pass all over the ground in front of them, many of the Americans went out to try and help the more seriously wounded redcoats. In several instances the wounded British soldiers mistook these gestures of kindness as being some sort of attempt to “finish them off,” and several unarmed Americans were shot as a consequence.

  Others went around collecting British muskets—a thousand or more—and sometimes the shoes of dead soldiers. Pakenham’s spyglass was found, as was General Keane’s elaborately embossed and engraved sword. A few weeks later, while still recovering from his wound aboard ship, Keane sent a letter to Jackson asking that his sword be returned to him, as it had sentimental value, and even offering to pay for it. Jackson, offended, ordered that the sword be returned, and it was.

  Also by midmorning came a nasty little reminder of how fine the line is between glorious victory and ruinous defeat. A ruckus finally had broken out across the river on the west bank. Jackson, who was standing on the rampart with Major Latour, turned to see puffs of gun smoke and hear the racket of a battle in progress. Things had been so busy to his front this morning that he likely gave himself little time to worry about what was happening or going to happen over on the west bank. But now the proof was echoing back to him from across the river. At first it looked to Jackson as if the Americans were winning the battle. He could see some British sailors repelled from the American lines and heard the faint cheers of the American soldiers. Jackson called for three cheers from the men in his own line to answer and encourage them. These being delivered, it now seemed, upon closer study through the spyglass, that the British were winning, and indeed shortly thereafter there came to Jackson’s ears the unwelcome but unmistakable cheers of the British force.

  Like the recently deceased Colonel Rennie, Colonel William Thornton was one of the most outstanding and resourceful officers in the British army. Doubtless he would have wished to have had his entire 85th Light Infantry Regiment with him that day, instead of a mere one-third of its number, but orders were orders, and Thornton, like any good officer, found ways to accomplish them, rather than figuring out reasons why he could not.

  The American general Morgan had stupidly sent the 200 Kentuckians to man a thin line about a mile south of his own, an especially foolish move since the Kentuckians were truly a sorry lot, dressed in rags and rotten shoes, and even their own commander admitted that they were in no condition to fight. They had been marched all night after crossing the river, sometimes in knee-deep mud, arriving at Morgan’s position about four a.m. They had not eaten a meal in nearly twenty hours; worse, the weapons they had picked up in New Orleans were inferior—many of them were merely old fowling pieces or muskets with cartridges too large for the barrels. This was the kind of American “rabble” that the British had so long scorned and confidently expected to destroy.

  Thornton and his men began landing just before daybreak about a mile south of where they had intended because their boats were caught in a strong river current. They made up for lost ground with a quick-time march, and soon came upon the Kentuckians and made short work of them. One of the boats with a carronade in its bow had rowed alongside the Americans’ position and given them a blast of grapeshot in their flank. At the same time, Thornton had formed his column into a line and, with bayonets glinting, marched them straight at the American positions.

  Those of the Kentuckians who had a weapon that would shoot fired a volley and then ran off in all directions, many into the swamps to hide. Given their poor condition, one could hardly blame them, except that it would certainly have been better, for appearances’ sake if nothing else, if they had marched to their retreat in formation rather than in such disarray. It reminded Lieutenant Gleig, who was there, of the rout of the Americans before the nation’s capital the previous summer.

  Thornton then formed up for a march on Morgan’s main force, which he found a mile up the river, manning their overly long line. He began stretching out his files so that they covered the entire American position, and at the same time he organized about 100 sailors who had rowed them over, armed with pistols and cutlasses, to storm a two-gun battery of American field artillery that commanded the road along the river.

  With a great shout, Gleig tells us, the sailors rushed up the road toward the guns, “but were met by so heavy a discharge of grape and canister that for an instant they paused.” This was apparently the action that Jackson and Latour had first witnessed from the rampart across the river, and that initially had made them think the Americans were winning.

  When the rest of Thornton’s 85th charged the American lines, the sailors recovered themselves and rushed the guns again; this time the whole position came apart. “A panic seized th
e Americans,” Gleig wrote, “they lost their order and fled, leaving us in possession of their tents and of eighteen pieces of cannon.”* 69

  This was mostly true, except that there were only twelve cannons, the three in Morgan’s line and the nine under Patterson’s command in the rear, trained across the river. Luckily, Patterson was able to spike them and dump their powder into the water, before the British could gain control of them and turn them on Jackson’s line. Patterson then retired up the road with his aide, “alternately denouncing the British and the Kentuckians.”

  Gleig notes, with apparent relief, that “in this affair our loss amounted to only three men killed and about forty wounded,” but, unfortunately, “among the latter was Colonel Thornton.” Gleig, however, was talking only about his own regiment; of the sailors, 4 were killed and 49 wounded, which reduced Thornton’s detachment by nearly 20 percent.

  Morgan, meantime, had ridden off in a tizzy, trying to reorganize his troops. At first it appeared they would run all the way up to New Orleans, but finally their officers got enough control to form them at a canal about a mile behind their original line, where they could perhaps make another stand. This, however, as we shall see, would become unnecessary.

  After Pakenham was killed, his aide Major Sir John Tylden galloped back to find Major General Lambert, who was commanding the reserve, to inform him of the event and to notify him that he was now in command of the army. When he arrived at Lambert’s position, Tylden also told Lambert, “Your Brigade must move on immediately,” referring to Pakenham’s last order to throw in the reserves. Major Sir Harry Smith, however, now serving as Lambert’s military aide, had been watching the disorderly repulse of the British forces, and he reminded Tylden politely but firmly that “if Sir Edward [Pakenham] is killed, Sir John Lambert commands, and will judge of what is to be done.” What Smith worried about most at this point was not that the attack had failed, but that the Americans would now form up and attack them, “as the French would have done,” he added. He asked Lambert if he could take the brigade forward to cover this “most irregular retreat” until Lambert could ascertain the true state of affairs. Lambert agreed.