Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  * 40 It has also been said that Laffite sometimes washed his hair with potash and gunpowder, which turned him into a redhead.

  * 41 Her two books The Baratarians and the Battle of New Orleans and Renato Beluche: Smuggler, Privateer and Patriot, 1780–1860, published by the Louisiana State University Press, are considered classics of the genre, but there are always those who will disagree.

  * 42 It is also known as Lake Barataria, but because of egress into the gulf it is probably more appropriately described as a bay.

  * 43 A few historians have damned Laffite and the Baratarians as lowlifes for dealing in the slave trade. That might be so, but if it is, the question arises as to how they would describe all those wealthy, upstanding citizens who owned the sugar and cotton plantations and bought the slaves to work them. Practically everybody in Louisiana who could afford slaves had one or more, including the so-called free men of color.

  * 44 Even the Baratarians must have thought this strange, since there no longer were any of His Majesty’s colonies in America.

  * 45 Despite their pretensions, the majority of the French and Spanish who had settled Louisiana were not descended from aristocrats but were the offspring of traders, soldiers and sailors, or even in many earlier cases deported criminals. Nevertheless, as they gained wealth and position, the Creoles assumed the trappings of the European upper crust and soon began to believe that they were aristocracy themselves.

  * 46 Vincent Nolte, a German-born New Orleans cotton and sugar merchant, wrote in his 1854 book Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres of his revulsion, while traveling through Kentucky, at discovering that so many of the backwoodsmen had let the fingernails on their thumbs and forefingers grow long, sharpening them with files. This, Nolte recorded, was for the purpose of “eye gouging,” a customary tactic of the time during fights. Nolte professed himself astounded at the number of one-eyed Kentuckians he encountered on his trip.

  * 47 According to a handbill for this affair, if the tiger beat the bear, it would then be sent against the last surviving bull, and if the bull happened to win, “several pieces of fire-works will be attached to his back, which will produce a very entertaining amusement.”

  * 48 This seizure became the subject of an almost decadelong three-way federal lawsuit. Not only had Patterson and Ross claimed the seized goods as a legitimate prize to be awarded to them and their men, but the United States attorney in New Orleans also claimed them on behalf of the U.S. government to sell as contraband for evaded customs duties. The Laffites themselves filed suit as well, asserting that the goods had been illegally seized since all their ships were accredited under the privateering laws of Cartagena.

  * 49 It was later widely repeated in print that the wife of Lieutenant General Edward Pakenham had come along, intending to become the duchess of Louisiana, or some such, when her husband secured the victory. But it was not so; Pakenham was a bachelor.

  * 50 This consisted, among other things, of being painted with kitchen grease and slops and getting dumped into a tub of bilgewater.

  * 51 Many military men of the day, especially admirals, were able to retire as wealthy men with great estates, owing to their shares in captured enemy property. The booty believed to be in New Orleans, however, dwarfed anything previously considered as a prize.

  * 52 The now deceased General Ross had been told by the War Office before he’d left England to cooperate with the navy but not to get involved in any action he considered militarily inadvisable from the army point of view. The inexperienced Keane had received no such instructions.

  * 53 Dysentery is usually contracted by ingesting bacteria-contaminated water or food. There was no cure then but to let it run its course, for better or worse.

  * 54 The story is told that before he entered the city proper Jackson was invited to refresh himself and have breakfast at a plantation just outside town. A genteel neighboring Creole lady had been superintending the meal for what she was told was “a great general.” Afterward she confronted the plantation owner and told him: “I worked myself almost to death to make your house comme il faut and prepared a splendid dejeuner and now I find that all my labor is thrown away upon an ugly old Kaintuck flat-boatman, instead of your grand General, with plumes, epaulettes, long sword and moustache!”

  * 55 These splendidly uniformed companies contributed inadvertently, and in some inconclusive way, to the ultimate British tactics that cost them the battle. Seeing all the various uniforms, the British wrongly concluded that each represented a full regiment of militia, rather than only a company.

  * 56 The fear by influential citizens and politicians of arming and training these men was based on two factors: that it would “place them on a too equal footing” with the whites and, second, that it would create in the city a large group of armed and trained blacks who might possibly turn on their white brethren. The solution to the latter issue was, after the emergency ended, to pay off the free men of color and then run them out of town—preferably out of state.

  * 57 Not only that, but the usually do-nothing legislature issued a proclamation of its own, urging all plantation owners to send as many slaves as they could spare to work on fortifications.

  * 58 Building the gunboats as the mainstay of America’s national naval defense had been the brainchild of the Jefferson presidency as a way to save money. Naval historian Teddy Roosevelt damned the reliance on them by the Jefferson and Madison administrations as, variously, “ludicrous, painful folly and stupidity,” “bungled,” and “humiliating,” and Jefferson himself as “the most incapable Executive that ever filled the presidential chair.”

  * 59 Laffite’s journal details a rather fanciful account of meeting Jackson on the street instead of at his headquarters, and some historians have accepted this version. It seems to me more likely that he would have gone instead to Jackson’s headquarters.

  * 60 It is tempting to suggest that Adams’s harsh criticism stemmed from a lasting resentment of Jackson for having prevailed over his grandfather John Quincy Adams in the 1828 presidential election.

  * 61 These men were hustled off down the bayou in boats and held aboard the ship of the line Royal Oak. They were treated roughly until the Royal Oak’s captain discovered that one of their number had served as a groomsman in his wedding in New York before the war. “In consequence of this recognition, the captain of the Royal Oak caused a very elegant dinner to be prepared for the prisoners which was attended by all the ship’s officers of the Royal Oak and several other ships.”

  * 62 Here is another of the nagging historical discrepancies that seem to defy resolution. Several historians, including Remini, Jackson’s authoritative biographer, say it was Jean Laffite who warned Jackson about extending the line, but Laffite’s latest biographer, William C. Davis, reports that it was Pierre.

  * 63 General Brown believes that the sugar was emptied out and the barrels were then filled with earth but does not cite a source for this statement. Many others think that the barrels remained filled with sugar, which seems most likely.

  * 64 “The Star-Spangled Banner,” composed only a few months earlier, was not yet known west of the Mississippi.

  * 65 Parton was somewhat off in his estimate of fifty artillery pieces. The British had twenty-four guns total, while Jackson’s line contained sixteen, for a total of forty guns—still an impressive and volatile number that rattled windows in New Orleans, six or so miles away.

  * 66 Kemper was a cousin to Confederate major general James L. Kemper, a hero of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and later a governor of that state.

  * 67 Dudley Avery was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present generation of the McIlhenny family, owners and operators of the McIlhenny Company, which, since 1868, has manufactured Tabasco sauce at Avery Island, Louisiana. (Letter courtesy of Avery Island, Inc. archives)

  * 68 This officer was probably Lieutenant Colonel John Fox Burgoyne, illegitimate son of General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, who had disgraced him
self during the American Revolution by surrendering Saratoga, New York, in 1777.

  * 69 One of these guns, a heavy bronze howitzer, had markings that identified it as having been captured from the British at the surrender of Yorktown thirty-four years earlier. How it got to New Orleans is anybody’s guess.

  * 70 The thousand or so British muskets collected were just about the number Jackson needed to arm the Kentuckians and those of the militia who were poorly armed. He also figured the arms loss subtracted at least that number of British soldiers who could be brought against him.

  * 71 Finally Gleig decided to go into the frigid water after his dead ducks. He took off his clothes, he said, but for some mysterious reason not his thick woolen socks, and he lost one of them in the mud. In his narrative Gleig carries on about the lost sock as if it were somehow more significant than the lost victory before New Orleans. I raise this point only to demonstrate that there is no telling what young lieutenants in the field might do or think after a battle.

  * 72 A day earlier he had written an account to Secretary of War Monroe in which he summed up the entire action and singled out numerous individuals for special praise. It was in this document that my great-great-great-grandfather Major Montgomery was “mentioned in dispatches.”

  * 73 Including, one presumes, the governor’s wife, Madam Claiborne, who had declared him “the most remarkable man she had ever met,” after having been introduced to him a few weeks earlier as the mysterious “Monsieur Clement” by the hostess of the Elmwood plantation above New Orleans.

  * 74 Along the Carolina coast this construction is known as “tabby.”

  * 75 This account of the execution of the militiamen is taken entirely from James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson, which seems to offer the most accurate and extensive report.

  * 76 Namely, one that he expressed in a letter to President Madison when trying to get his privateering property back: that he had known of Patterson’s intended raid on Barataria and could have loaded his valuables on his ships and sailed away, but because of the impending crisis he chose to stay and help fight the British, even though it meant the loss of all his ships and property. This is vintage Laffite.

  Notes on Sources & Acknowledgments

  The most striking feature of researching this book was the dismaying number of contradictions and conflicts in the various historical accounts. Practically everything seems to be in dispute: troop strength, number of cannons, length of battles, population of New Orleans, spelling of names, distance on the battlefield, width of the Mississippi, number of British dead, and who said or did what, when, where, and to whom and for what motives. Just about the only facts not in dispute are the outcome of the battle and the dates on which it occurred.

  Having said that, I believe it is equally true that one can put together a fairly accurate account of the event. Official papers, especially the correspondence of Jackson with Secretary of War Monroe and with his officers, are the bedrock of the factual material. These I found in the book Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, a collection of the official dispatches, organized by S. Putnam Waldo, a Connecticut lawyer, in 1819, which is nothing more than a compilation of the Jackson correspondence found in his papers in the Library of Congress but just as valuable.

  Likewise, a year after the battle Arsene Lacarrière Latour, Jackson’s engineer, published most of these same documents, as well as additional immediate orders, in his running account of events, Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana, which includes a priceless atlas of maps of his own drawing that allow the reader to see in detailed close-up the battle areas in the various actions.

  Jackson himself is the subject of many biographies, almost all of them useful. The earlier ones at times, for reasons of poor communication, lack of documentary materials, or sheer embellishment, occasionally skew the material. But this is usually counterbalanced by the fact that the biographer himself lived either during the age of Jackson or directly after it, and spoke personally with men who were present at the fight. Alexander Walker, for instance, had become a city judge in New Orleans when he wrote Jackson and New Orleans in 1856, forty-one years after the battle. He had the opportunity to interview veterans of the war, who would have been in their sixties or seventies, but he often records as fact their embroidery or faulty memories. The same is true of John Reid and John Eaton’s The Life of Andrew Jackson, published in 1817. James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson (1861) is a trained historian’s account but frequently cites Walker’s sometimes fanciful reportage as fact.

  Of the more modern works on Jackson, Marquis James’s The Life of Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain (1933), Burke Davis’s Old Hickory (1977), and Robert Remini’s The Life of Andrew Jackson (1988) are each entertaining and contain much useful factual information. In addition, Remini has written a lively and powerful account of the episode in The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory (1999).

  Major Howell Tatum’s Journal, the recollections of another of Jackson’s engineers, published by Smith College in 1922, has a straightforward, if bland, account of the battle but contains corroborative material. Vincent Nolte, the German cotton merchant, published Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres in 1854 and was an eyewitness, if a rather low-ranking one, to the fight. Benson Lossing’s Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812 (published in 1867) is especially useful for its lovely pencil drawings of military sites, including the Rodriguez Canal, the Macarty house, De la Ronde’s plantation, and so on.

  The Louisiana Historical Quarterly is a fountain of useful information. Published by one of the nation’s oldest historical societies, it contains countless memoirs, recollections, arguments, and accounts of the battle and events leading up to it. Miraculously, its issues, dating back to the nineteenth century, can be read and downloaded online simply by joining the Louisiana Historical Society for a very reasonable membership fee.

  If the Quarterly is a fountain, the Williams Research Center in New Orleans is a perfect geyser. This wonderful facility, housed in an old former courthouse in the heart of the French Quarter, contains practically every original document, diary, and journal relating to the Battle of New Orleans and has an extremely polite, generous, knowledgeable, and helpful staff.

  The British seem to have brought more diarists to the battlefield than did the Americans. There is, of course, the prolific Lieutenant George Gleig, who in 1827 published his first account, The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans Under General Ross, Pakenham and Lambert; his embarrassingly embellished revision of it was issued six years later in an American edition: A Subaltern in America; Comprising His Narrative of the Campaigns of the British Army, at Baltimore, Washington, During the Late War.

  An excellent account by a high-ranking officer is that of Colonel Alexander Dickson, who was the chief of the British artillery during the invasion. His recollections are contained in the Dickson Papers at the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich. Also used extensively were the memoirs of Captain John Henry Cooke, A Narrative of Events in the South of France and of the Attack on New Orleans in 1814 and 1815, Benson Earl Hill’s Recollections of an Artillery Officer, and the Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith.

  Several modern British historians have written books or papers with a decidely slanted point of view and occasionally take quarrelsome exception to the American accounts of such things as “booty and beauty” (untrue!), the intention of Pakenham’s reconnaissance attack on December 28 (never intended as an actual attack), the relative strengths of the two armies (the British were outnumbered), and so on. Among these are Robin Reilly’s The British at the Gates and the work of Carson I. A. Ritchie, who claims, among other things, that diarists Gleig, Hill, and Cooke gave unreliable accounts of the battle. Reilly’s and Ritchie’s are nevertheless well-written and instructive arguments and should be paid close attention.

  Very useful for the Creek War segment were The Amphibious Campaign for West Florida and A
labama, by General Wilbert S. Brown; Tecumseh, by R. David Edmunds; and Andrew Jackson and the Creek War by James W. Holland. For the War of 1812 in general, see Donald R. Hickey’s War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict; Roger H. Brown’s The Republic in Peril; Frank Owsley’s Struggle for the Gulf: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans; and Walter Lord’s Dawn’s Early Light. For the Battle of New Orleans itself, the Historic Research Study, Chalmette Unit, Jean Laffite National Park and Preserve, by James A. Greene, is invaluable for meticulous and unvarnished research. Samuel Carter III’s Blaze of Glory is a lively and entertaining account. And Tim Pickles has published a neat illustrated book on the subject for the English Osprey Series with many interesting facts and interpretations. Also, in 1965, the sesquicentennial of the battle, the Battle of New Orleans, 150th Anniversary Committee of Louisiana, caused to be published a series of nine little gems of pamphlets on specific aspects of the battle, addressing such topics as The Weapons of the Battle of New Orleans, Negro Soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans, Plantation Houses at the Battle of New Orleans, and the like.

  The naval aspects of the campaign are well covered by Theodore Roosevelt in The Naval War of 1812, which is entertaining, instructive, insightful, and about as good as it gets on the subject.

  The Life of Edward Livingston by Charles Havens Hunt, published in 1864, remains the best work on that interesting and vital individual.

  Figures regarding the relative values of the American dollar and British pound during the period under examination, vis-à-vis what they would be worth today, were obtained from the Internet consortium of economists published jointly by Wake Forest University and the University of Miami. It can be accessed by typing into your search engine “How much is that?” The scholars who developed this resource are to be highly commended for providing a valuable, informative, and worthwhile service.