by H. W. Brands
Jackson had already threatened the Louisianians; now he appealed to them. To the native-born Americans, he described the enemy in terms of the American Revolution. “They are the oppressors of your infant political existence with whom you have to contend,” he said. “They are the men your fathers conquered whom you are to oppose.” To the Frenchmen he cast the challenge differently. “They are the English, the hereditary, eternal enemies of your ancient country, the invaders of that you have adopted, who are your foes.” To the Spanish: “Remember the conduct of your allies at St. Sebastian’s, and recently at Pensacola, and rejoice that you have an opportunity of avenging the brutal injuries inflicted by men who dishonour the human race.” He appealed to them collectively, as free citizens of a republic. “Remember for what and against whom you contend: for all that can render life desirable, for a country blessed with every gift of nature, for property, for life, for those dearer than either, your wives and children, and for liberty, dearer than all.”
Jackson took special note of the black militia. The planters and other whites who initially resisted his call to arm free men of color had changed their collective mind, fearing the approach of the British, or perhaps the wrath of Jackson, more than they feared the idea of black troops. “Soldiers!” he addressed the black militia. “From the shores of the Mobile I called you to arms. I invited you to share in the perils and to divide the glory of your white countrymen. . . . I knew that you could endure hunger and thirst, and all the hardships of war. I knew that you loved the land of your nativity and that, like ourselves, you had to defend all that is most dear to man. But you surpassed my hopes. I have found in you, united to those qualities, that noble enthusiasm which impels to great deeds.”
Jackson’s authority to declare martial law and seize control of the militia was debatable at best. But he hadn’t possessed authority to invade Spanish Florida, and to the extent he worried about reprimand or other sanction from Washington, he could assume that his sin against civil liberties in New Orleans would probably appear less grave than his waging war on a country the administration wished to keep neutral. In any event, Jackson rarely respected authority per se. If the end was worthy—and he knew no end more worthy than the preservation of American liberty—most means were, too.
He let the lawyers argue while he prepared the defenses of the city. “The lakes in complete possession of the enemy will give me a large coast to watch and defend, and the difficulty of finding out their point of attack is perplexing,” he wrote on December 16. “But I trust with the smiles of heaven to be able to meet and defeat him at every point he may put his foot on land.”
The British victory over the American gunboats on Lake Borgne placed the initiative in the invaders’ hands, and they moved quickly to exploit their opportunity. It wasn’t easy. British ships deposited thousands of troops on an island at the entrance to the lake, where they prepared to shift to shallow-draft boats for transport toward the city. Conditions at the rendezvous point were disheartening. “It is scarcely possible to imagine any place more completely wretched,” recalled George Gleig, the redcoat who had admired the sublimity of Washington’s burning. “It was a swamp, containing a small space of firm ground at one end, and almost wholly unadorned with trees of any sort or description. . . . The interior was the resort of wild ducks and other water-fowl; and the pools and creeks with which it was intercepted abounded in dormant alligators.” The reason the alligators—which would come to terrify the British soldiers before the campaign was over—were dormant was that the winter weather was as nasty as Louisiana gets. A driving rain drenched the soldiers all day. As night fell the rain stopped and a heavy frost set in. The Britons in the battle force, used to the cold and wet, suffered but survived. The West Indians who had lately been added to the army fared worse. “Many of the wretched negroes, to whom frost and cold were altogether new, fell fast asleep and perished before morning,” Gleig wrote.
Crossing the lake required good luck, lest stormy weather swamp the boats; audacity, since the first arrivals on the opposite shore would be unable to defend themselves against American attack; and extraordinary effort, in the form of sixty miles of hard rowing. “Yet in spite of all this,” Gleig remembered, “not a murmur nor a whisper of complaint could be heard throughout the whole expedition. . . . From the General down to the youngest drum-boy, a confident anticipation of success seemed to pervade all ranks.” There was reason for the confidence, beyond the victories the troops had won in Europe and then at Washington. Defectors from the American side in New Orleans brought word of fear and disarray among the populace. Jackson commanded fewer than five thousand troops, they said, which made his force less than half that of the British. The defectors went on to describe the wealth of the city and the booty that awaited its capture—“subjects well calculated to tickle the fancy of invaders,” Gleig said, “and to make them unmindful of immediate afflictions, in the expectation of so great a recompense to come.”
Gleig’s regiment and two others—totaling sixteen hundred men, with two small cannons—landed on the southern shore of Lake Borgne after a very long day at the oars. The landing place was a reed-covered marsh where humans rarely ventured. With disaffected locals acting as guides, the invaders followed a canal south toward the Mississippi. The going was slow. The path by the canal was slippery, and numerous intersecting waterways had to be bridged. For the first few hours the country appeared as wild as the marsh where they landed, but eventually they reached the edge of the plantation country, where the stubble of harvested sugar cane replaced the tall river cane that covered much of the rest of the region. They passed orange groves and then some farmhouses. Moving as quickly as they could, they captured the inhabitants of the houses to prevent their giving the alarm that the enemy had landed. “But becoming rather careless in watching their prisoners,” Gleig recorded of the British troops guarding the captives, “one man contrived to effect his escape.”
This man was Gabriel Villeré, the son of Jacques Villeré, who had commanded the Louisiana militia before Jackson took over and who owned the plantation on which the British invaders now stood. The younger Villeré had been given responsibility for monitoring the approaches from Lake Borgne. His personal embarrassment at having been caught unawares now intensified his patriotism and spurred him to New Orleans to spread the alarm. He reached Jackson’s headquarters in the early afternoon of December 23.
Unwelcome though it was, Villeré’s report partly solved Jackson’s most pressing problem: learning where the enemy was. He expected to be outnumbered by the British, but as the defender he could stand a modest deficit in the balance of troop strength. What he couldn’t stand was being outflanked. Once that happened he’d lose the advantage of defense and probably lose the city. And the only way he could avoid being outflanked was to discover—or guess—where the enemy was.
With the report from Villeré’s plantation, he knew where at least part of the enemy was. But he couldn’t tell whether these troops were the spearhead of a larger landing force or a diversion designed to draw him away from the real invasion. And he wouldn’t know for days—until it was too late to correct a wrong guess.
He didn’t propose to wait. He would strike the invaders that very day—or night, by the time he got there. If they were the tip of the spear, he would blunt it and perhaps turn aside or at least slow the larger force to follow. If they were a diversion, a lightning strike would allow him to return to the city in time to meet the main blow.
“Perfectly convinced of the importance of impressing an invading enemy in the first moment of his approach with an idea of spirited resistance, I lost no time in making preparations to attack him that night,” Jackson explained to James Monroe afterward. “I was not ignorant of the inferiority of my force, nor of the hazard of night attacks with inexperienced troops. But the fears to be entertained from these sources were overbalanced by the greater evils to be apprehended from delay. . . . If the attack were postponed till the next day, t
he fate of New Orleans must depend on the result of a general engagement in which the chances of success would be greatly against us, while by bringing it on at night, the enemy not being able to ascertain our numbers would of course magnify them, and be thrown into perplexity at any rate, if not into consternation.” A night attack would also favor Jackson’s side in case retreat was necessary. He and his men knew the ground. The British didn’t.
Jackson cobbled together a force of some fifteen hundred troops drawn from his three army regiments, the Tennessee militia, and the New Orleans militia, and including two hundred black volunteers from Haiti (who feared anything that enhanced European power in the Caribbean and thereby threatened their country’s hard-won independence). His own troops were eager for the chance to fight the British. “It may not be altogether a Christian spirit, but I really would like to see some redcoats in front of us, just once if no more,” John Coffee had written his wife as the Creek campaign wound down. “Like all the rest of the boys, I am tired of thrashing redskins. . . . My men are so used to killing Indians that they are almost sorry for them. But they have no pity for the redcoats, who, they declare, are to be held responsible for all the devilment the Indians have done. Every one of my boys wants to get within fair buckrange of a redcoat.”
From the bustle at headquarters and the mustering of the troops, the inhabitants of New Orleans soon discovered that the British had landed and were within six miles of the city. Alarm approaching panic convulsed many households, where lurid stories of a redcoat penchant for ravishing helpless women had been whispered for weeks and now were spoken in voices cracking from fear. Fathers readied their wives and daughters for flight upstream, while they buried the family cash and jewels in their gardens and oiled their rifles. Jackson, at the head of the column marching toward Villeré’s plantation, told Edward Livingston, a local who became his aide-de-camp, to try to calm the people. “Say to them not to be alarmed,” Jackson ordered. “The enemy shall never reach the city.”
Jackson’s implacable will could be terrifying—to enemies, to mutineers—but at times like this it was tremendously reassuring. When Jackson said the British would never reach the city, it was hard not to believe him. His vow alone didn’t dissipate the fear, but it did prevent a full-blown panic. New Orleans would give the general a chance to prove his mettle.
The march from the city took two hours, bringing Jackson within sight of the British just before dark. They weren’t surprised to see him, but they didn’t expect action before the next day. And they assumed they would be the ones initiating it. “As the Americans had never yet dared to attack,” Gleig wrote, “there was no great probability of their doing so on the present occasion.”
The British were hungry and cold and so kindled fires for cooking and warmth. Some of them observed the approach of a sailing vessel, which dropped anchor and furled its sails opposite the British camp. In the dark it was hard to identify the craft. Several supposed it was a British ship that had managed to elude the American forts downstream and would assist in the attack on New Orleans. Some of Gleig’s comrades hailed the ship, but they received no answer—till an American voice called out, in words that carried distinctly across the water, “Give them this for the honour of America!” The roar of cannons followed instantly, and antipersonnel grapeshot screamed through the night air, raking the groups gathered around the campfires. Scattering for their lives, the British returned the American cannon fire with muskets, which had no effect, and rockets, which “made a beautiful appearance in the air,” Gleig recalled, but which missed their target.
Jackson followed the artillery barrage with assaults at several points of the British lines. In the dark the British had no idea how many the Americans were or even where they were coming from. “Now began a battle of which no language were competent to convey any distinct idea,” Gleig wrote, “because it was one to which the annals of modern warfare furnish no parallel. All order, all discipline were lost. Each officer, as he succeeded in collecting twenty or thirty men about him, plunged into the midst of the enemy’s ranks, where it was fought hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, and sabre to sabre.”
The fighting lasted most of the night, and such was the confusion that both sides thought they had won. “The victory was ours,” Gleig asserted. “True, it was the reverse of a bloodless one, not fewer than two hundred and fifty of our best men having fallen in the struggle. But even at the expense of such a loss, we could not but account ourselves fortunate in escaping from the snare in which we had confessedly been taken.”
Jackson interpreted things differently. The enemy had been beaten back, the threat to New Orleans blunted. “The result equaled my expectations,” he wrote. “From every point on which we assailed him, he was repulsed.” Jackson thought he could have captured the entire British force if a heavy fog hadn’t set in, impeding operations even more than the dark alone had. “The main object, however, had been effected. The enemy, taken at surprise and thrown into confusion, was unable to penetrate our designs and feared to prosecute his own.”
In war, ties go to the defender. Jackson had the better of this argument, since the British failed in their effort to take New Orleans by surprise. And the strong showing of the Americans in the night battle of December 23–24 did wonders for the morale of the city. Jackson had said the British wouldn’t enter the city, and they hadn’t. Maybe he could keep them out after all.
During the very hours when Jackson was repelling Britian’s initial thrust toward New Orleans, the American diplomats at Ghent concluded a peace treaty with their British counterparts. Adams, Clay, and the others were still expecting a slow winter when, in early December, they started to detect a softening in the British position. The Americans gradually inferred that the simultaneous Congress of Vienna wasn’t going the way the British had hoped. As it had for generations, Europe mattered more to Britain than America did, and the British government felt increasing pressure to terminate the hostilities across the Atlantic. Wellington himself weighed in with a damp blanket. “I feel no objection to going to America,” the Iron Duke declared, “though I don’t promise to myself much success there.” Meanwhile he sent an encouraging note to American peacemaker Gallatin: “In you I have the greatest confidence. I hear on all sides that your moderation and sense of justice, places you above all the other delegates, not excepting ours.”
Gallatin was grateful for the encouragement but even more appreciative of the abandonment by the British negotiators of the most onerous of their early demands. They accepted the prewar status quo as the territorial basis for peace, they dropped the idea of an Indian state, and they fell silent on navigation of the Mississippi.
Gallatin persuaded his colleagues to reciprocate. Adams and Clay continued to quarrel, but neither they nor the others could disguise their relief at the prospect of escaping the war with nothing lost save Washington’s public buildings, some private property, and considerable American pride. They exceeded instructions by no longer insisting on a British renunciation of impressment, but they rationalized that the end of the European war had made the issue moot. They relinquished their indemnity claims, which had been a daydream all along. And they forgot about forswearing alliances with Indians, on the assumption that the peace would last and neither side would have occasion to employ Indians against the other.
The reciprocal concessions led to a treaty. On December 24 the delegates exchanged signatures and handshakes. “The terms of this instrument are undoubtedly not such as our country expected at the commencement of the war,” Clay wrote Monroe, in one of the rare understatements of Clay’s political life. “Judged of, however, by the actual condition of things, so far as it is known to us, they cannot be pronounced very unfavorable. We lose no territory, I think no honor.” Adams received the copies of the treaty from his British counterpart. “I told him I hoped it would be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States,” Adams recorded. That night he thanked God for the peace and offe
red “a fervent prayer that its result may be propitious to the welfare, the best interests, and the union of my country.”
Like the others, including the British, young James Gallatin was simply glad the war was over. “The British delegates very civilly asked us to dinner,” he wrote on Christmas Day. “The roast beef and plum pudding was from England, and everybody drank everybody else’s health. The band played first ‘God Save the King,’ to the toast of the King, and ‘Yankee Doodle,’ to the toast of the President. Congratulations on all sides and a general atmosphere of serenity; it was a scene to be remembered.” Gallatin added, after the excitement of the signing and dining wore off, “Although I am only seventeen years of age, I feel much older.”
New Orleans celebrated Christmas in more subdued fashion. Though the city sighed with relief at Jackson’s repulse of the first British landing, everyone knew the real battle was yet to come. Many prepared for the worst, notwithstanding Jackson’s strong showing at the Villeré plantation. The British army was now known to be much larger than Jackson’s force, and in a full-scale battle this generation of redcoats had never been beaten. A rumor began circulating that Jackson had a plan for retreat in the event the British proved too strong and that on leaving the city he would set it afire. The inhabitants whose attachment to the city was deeper than their attachment to the United States wondered whether Jackson might be more dangerous to their interests than the British were. The speaker of the Louisiana senate made so bold as to ask Jackson’s adjutant, Robert Butler, whether Jackson did indeed intend to burn the city if it couldn’t be held. When Butler inquired why he asked, the speaker said frankly that the legislature wanted to know whether to consider surrendering the city to the British. It was fortunate for the speaker and the leaders of the legislature that Jackson at this time couldn’t spare a minute from his preparations against the next British attack, or he might have had the lawmakers arrested for treason. As it was he ordered Governor Claiborne to keep an eye on them and seize the first ones who made a move toward surrender.
