Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  Having done this, Lambert ordered Smith and all the other staff officers to go to the rear and re-form the troops—“no easy matter in some cases,” according to Smith. Lambert studied the situation, “wondering whether, under the circumstances, he ought to attack” with the reserve brigade; he concluded that “it was impossible, and withdrew the troops from under a most murderous fire of round shot.”

  The British admirals soon came to Lambert’s field headquarters, “with faces as long as a flying jib,” Smith remembers, for something resembling a council of war. Admiral Edward Codrington is mentioned, but one assumes Admirals Pultney Malcolm and Cochrane were there also. Codrington, whose job was to keep the men supplied with rations, stated, “The troops must attack or the whole would starve.” Smith piped up “rather saucily,” so he tells us, saying, “Kill plenty more, Admiral; fewer rations will be required.” Smith and apparently other staff men gave it as their opinion, after having gone around to find out how the “pluck” of the troops stood, that those who had made the attack wanted no more of the Americans. “We know the enemy are three times our number,” Smith told the council—getting the ratio of Americans to British soldiers wrong once again—and reiterated his conviction that Jackson was preparing to attack them. “Thornton’s people ought to be brought back and brought into our line,” Smith recommended. “The army is secure and no further disaster is to be apprehended.”

  Lambert agreed, and Colonel Dickson was sent to give the command for Thornton’s return, which was why it was unnecessary for Morgan’s men to make another stand.

  Jackson, however, had been displeased with Morgan’s performance. He therefore sent across the river to finish the job several hundred reinforcements under the elderly French general Jean Robert Humbert, who had served in the French revolutionary army and who, in 1798, led the infamous force of French soldiers and adventurers in the unsuccessful invasion to expel the English from Ireland.

  According to Judge Walker, Humbert was apparently something of a character. He never went anywhere dressed other than in his old French army uniform, with a French revolutionary military hat on his head and carrying his polished, inlaid sword under his arm. He spent his days drinking cognac and playing dominoes in one of the local coffeehouses. Sufficiently tanked up by the afternoon, he would march down the streets of New Orleans belting out “La Marseillaise” and other French martial tunes at the top of his lungs, with an army of cheerful children following after him.

  Before Humbert’s arrival, Jean Laffite was sent across the river with a message from Jackson to Morgan. It said:

  Sir:

  This will be handed to you by Mr. Lafitte whom I have sent to you as a man acquainted with the geography of the country on your side of the river, and will be able to afford you any information you may want with respect to the canals and bayous by which the enemy will attempt to penetrate. I have also sent Gen’l Humbert, a man in whose bravery I have unbound confidence, for the purpose of carrying the enemy if necessary at the point of the bayonet. It is my determination he shall be dislodged at all events and I rely upon you to accomplish it, they are not more than four hundred strong and your task not a difficult one. We have beat them here at all points with a loss on their side of at least a thousand men.

  Brig-Gen. Morganright side of the river

  Andrew JacksonMaj-Gen., Comdg.

  The problem with Humbert’s commanding the reinforcement was resentment at his being a Frenchman. It may also have had to do with his being “one of the characters” of the town, as has been described above.

  As soon as the British danger had presented itself in early December, Humbert was among the first to volunteer his services, and after the British landing he would ride day in and day out personally scouting their positions in the face of flying bullets; serving as an aide to Jackson, he volunteered for anything the commanding general wanted him to do, no matter how dangerous. Jackson had not known the fifty-seven-year-old Humbert before coming to New Orleans, but in the weeks before the British actually landed, he came to realize that his new acquaintance was a general with real military experience in European wars—in fact, was the only fighting general among them all, when it came to anything more than battles with Indians—and Jackson would rely on him implicitly.

  The trouble was, Morgan and Governor Claiborne did not agree on Humbert’s replacing Morgan as commander on the right bank. A heated discussion ensued, with Morgan arguing that his militia officers would not follow a Frenchman with no formal commission in the U.S. Army and Claiborne apparently concurring.

  When Humbert could produce no direct orders from Jackson relieving Morgan, the Louisiana general refused to relinquish command. Humbert, after dispersing his reinforcements to Morgan’s lines, returned across the river in disgust, saying to Jackson that the American officers on the west bank had declined to serve under a Frenchman. This might have proved serious, even fatal, except that the British by then had been ordered to withdraw from the right bank, which they did in rude fashion, setting fire to a beautiful plantation château in order to mask their escape behind its smoke.

  Late that afternoon, when the American cannonading had finally stopped, Lambert sent Sir Harry Smith over to the American lines to see if a truce could be arranged for the British to remove their dead and wounded. Smith arrived at a point about three hundred yards in front of the American rampart, where his orderly blew a bugle and waved a white flag to attract attention. Jackson sent out his aide Major Butler to find out what they wanted, and Smith gave Butler a letter for Jackson that was signed only “Lambert.” When Butler took the letter back to the Macarty house, the general glanced it over in a lawyerly way and told him to return it to the messenger with the response that “he [Jackson] would be happy to treat with the commander-in-chief of the British army, but that the signer of the letter had forgotten to designate his authority and rank, which was necessary before any negotiations could be entered upon.”

  What Lambert evidently intended to accomplish here was to conceal the mortifying fact of Pakenham’s death, but he could not fool Jackson with this sleight of hand, and presently Major Smith returned with another letter, this one designating John Lambert as commander in chief of the British forces.

  Like the armistice letter itself, the negotiations were somewhat sticky. Jackson was worried about what a truce would mean to his beleaguered forces on the right bank of the river. Accordingly, he said he would agree to a truce until noon the next day, January 9, on the left bank, but not on the right bank, and only if Lambert would confirm that neither side was to reinforce its detachments on the right bank.

  The next morning Smith went out with a “rather large” burial party, equipped with entrenching tools, as well as some surgeons to bring off the wounded. Since Jackson did not want a lot of British soldiers and officers near his lines—for fear they might do a little reconnoitering—the procedure was established that the Americans would bring the British dead to a spot on Bienvenue’s plantation, which had been staked off near the place where Smith had originally come with his flag of truce. An “immense” grave was then dug by the burial party, while the Americans carried the bodies on the “clumsy and unwieldy” scaling ladders that the British had left on the field.

  A somewhat solemn ceremony was observed, according to Smith, who was there to supervise. The Americans carefully laid the bodies on the ground on their side of the line, where they were received by the British burial party. They were straightened and the big toes tied together with string. Then they were thrown into the hole by the hundreds, “as fast as we could bring them,” Smith said, adding, “A more appalling spectacle cannot be conceived than this common grave.” It especially could not have gone well for the burial party, many of whom wept when they recognized friends or favorite officers.

  Pleasant relations did not overtake the two enemies during this somber period. Smith had words with Major Butler, whom he later described as “a rough fellow,” who came out “with a drawn
sword and no scabbard.” After Butler made a crack about the British dead and wounded, Smith retorted by telling him the British were going to attack again and drive the Americans out of their lines with bayonets. He then asked Butler why he carried a drawn sword with no scabbard.

  “We have thrown away the scabbard,” Butler told him, “so long as you Britishers are on our soil.”

  Smith then got into a contentious encounter with Captain Maunsel White, a wealthy plantation owner. Dismissing the heaps of British dead as “a skirmish, a mere skirmish,” Smith seemed to be downplaying the defeat to the American officer.

  “One more such skirmish,” White told him coldly, “and devilish few of you will get back home to tell the story.”

  Lieutenant Gleig nearly had a run-in as well. Since he had been on the right bank with Thornton, he had gone to the scene of the burial to see for himself the magnitude of the failure. He took note that “an American officer [probably either Captain Humphrey or Captain White] stood by, smoking a cigar, and apparently counting the slain with a look of savage exultation, and repeating over and over to each individual that approached him, their loss amounted only to eight men killed and fourteen wounded.

  “I had every inclination to pick a quarrel [duel],” Gleig wrote later, “but he was on duty and an armistice existed.”

  The curious thing about these exchanges and so many others like them during the engagement is that the British officers appeared to view war as a sort of game, with rules and niceties and an etiquette all their own, a sentiment embodied perhaps in the droll remark later attributed to Wellington after his final victory over Napoleon: “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

  These soldiers of the American South knew precious little about any of that, beginning with Jackson himself, who had seen “Butcher” Tarleton’s British marauders during the American Revolution hang, rape, burn, and kill, including members of his own family. Jackson’s Americans might have been rude, but they were certainly not barbarians, and they also did not regard the conflict as some kind of gentlemen’s tea party arrayed with guns. Instead they viewed the Englishmen as contemptuous invaders and intruders in their country, and on their own soil; from everything they’d heard and read, the British had been the perpetrators of the vilest acts of cruelty against an American people who simply wished to be let alone. The British might respond by saying that this was only a matter of perspective, and perhaps it was, but the Americans—especially Andrew Jackson himself—did not see it that way and would not rest until the enemy was ejected once and for all.

  The day had become gray and clammy and was covered in a light fog. Back in the British lines, the mood of the men matched the weather. Everyone was blaming the 44th Regiment for failing to bring up the scaling ladders and fascines. Many of these dead cats were thrown at Colonel Mullins himself, who was placed under arrest and sent back to the fleet in disgrace until a court-martial could be convened. Gleig remembered that “if you attempted to converse [with the soldiers] on the subject of the late defeat, they would end with a bitter curse upon those to whose misconduct they attributed their losses.” Not only that, but some of the soldiers were so venomous that they seized the deserter Galvez, the Creole Spaniard, on the theory that he must be an American spy, since he had told them that the part of Jackson’s line they assaulted was weak and manned only by untrained militia. They dragged him to a tree and hanged him.

  On the other side of the river, where the truce had never been declared, Patterson had got his batteries working again and even moved some of the guns closer to the British position, from which he hurled cannonballs at them all day and night.

  The hospital, located in the De la Ronde plantation house, presented ghastly sounds and sights, including, according to one officer, “a basket nearly full of legs severed from these fine fellows, most of which were still covered with their hose.” General Keane suffered from his wounds in the same room where the bodies of Pakenham and Gibbs were laid out side by side.

  Jackson was not at all satisfied by the results of the January 8 repulse, and never would be, so long as there was a British soldier left on American soil. He viewed his enemy as a wounded lion—hurt, but still very dangerous. As the British major Sir Harry Smith had feared, Jackson by now had determined to attack the British, with hatchets and tomahawks if need be, but since he had collected so many of their muskets from the battlefield, he could now arm his whole army.* 70 Yet when Jackson asked for the advice of his aides and generals, the consensus was a resounding “no.”

  “Your object is gained. The city is saved,” said Edward Livingston, who went on to argue that it would not be worthwhile to risk the lives of its “worthiest citizens and rob so many families of their heads!”

  “If we were beaten back,” cautioned General Adair, “it would be with great loss of both officers and men, and might encourage the enemy to renew the attack. Most of our men are militia and without discipline, and if once beaten they could not be relied upon again.”

  Livingston had made a lawyer’s argument, and Adair a general’s, but in the end the conclusions were the same.

  Jackson accepted this sage advice and returned to his old tactics of shelling the British by day and conducting his “hunting parties” by night, which became even more effective after the disheartening repulse of January 8. “Of the extreme unpleasantness of our situation,” wrote Lieutenant Gleig, “it is hardly possible to convey any adequate conception.

  “We never closed our eyes in peace,” he complained. “Tents we had none, and heavy rains now set in, accompanied by violent storms of thunder and lightning which, lasting during the entire day usually ceased towards dark and gave place to keen frosts. Thus were we alternately wet and frozen. The outposts [pickets] were attacked and compelled to maintain their ground by dint of hard fighting.”

  Captain Cooke’s recollections did not come off any better. He complained bitterly of the American shelling, including that following a funeral for a fellow officer who had died of wounds. “The night after this burial a shell exploded over a hut in which two officers of our regiment were sleeping, which cut off the feet of Lieutenant D’Arcy. One of his feet was driven so deep into the soft mold [mud?] that it was obliged to be dug out the following day.

  “On some days we did not taste food, and when we did it was served out in such small quantities as only to tantalize our appetites,” Cooke remembered. If that weren’t enough, one morning before daylight a great rush of water into everyone’s blankets announced that the Mississippi had overflowed, due to all the recent rains, and “nothing but a sheet of water was to be seen.” All day and into the night, Cooke reported, the men, “enveloped in blankets, shivering, stood around like polar bears on their hind legs.”

  Jackson spared them nothing, not even psychological warfare. Lieutenant Gleig recalls that “inducements such as printed papers, offering lands and money were held out by the enemy to desert,” and that “many desertions began daily to take place and became before long so frequent, that the evil rose to be of a serious nature. In the course of a week many men quitted their colours, and fled to the enemy.”

  Still, it was going to take more than a bit of cold and damp and artillery harassment for Cochrane and the other British admirals to give up their dream. Doubtless they could almost smell all that fabulous booty in New Orleans, out of which their own cuts would be large enough to ensure them each a comfortable retirement. Of course, they also had their reputations to protect. How poorly it would reflect on these vaunted admirals to have sailed a large British army of professional veterans halfway around the world only to have it repulsed by American militia is anybody’s guess, but one can assume that the Admiralty would be displeased, if not distressed. Since it was apparent that another march against Jackson’s line had now become a practical impossibility, the navy men concocted yet another scheme.

  As early as January 1 they had sent such of their ships as could ascend the Mississippi to do so
and, bristling with big guns—more than a hundred of them—to blow Jackson and his army off of their imposing rampart, or to land large numbers of troops behind him, or to sail up and shell New Orleans itself into capitulation, or a combination of all three.

  To effect this, they had already captured the Balize, a small, weak American fort on the southeast pass of the river, where it finally empties into the gulf. On January 9, the morning after the battle at the ditch, the vanguard of this fleet appeared off Fort St. Philip, a critical installation located on a bend about seventy river miles below Jackson’s battlefield on the left bank. It then proceeded to bombard the American bastion with the obvious mind of reducing it so that their ships could pass by unmolested.

  The fort was commanded, however, by Major Walter Overton, a U.S. Army regular, who had other ideas entirely.

  Fort St. Philip, it will be remembered, was the fort that Jackson had ordered significantly strengthened. Overton had dispersed his powder and ammunition magazines all over the fort, so that if one was blown up he could use another. He had removed anything combustible to guard against fire and built bomb shelters for the men. The fort commanded fields of fire both up and down the river, and, because it was surrounded by “an impenetrable morass,” was virtually impervious to ground attack. Fort St. Philip boasted thirty-four guns: two big thirty-two-pounders, twenty-nine twenty-four-pounders, a huge thirteen-inch mortar, and two howitzers of lesser caliber. It was manned by 406 soldiers and sailors, including detachments of regulars from the United States artillery and the 7th Infantry Regiment, a company of Louisiana volunteers and a company of free men of color, as well as the only gunboat that had not been captured on Lake Borgne, with its forty-man crew.