by H. W. Brands
The Americans got little rest that night. Jackson ordered the ramparts manned continuously. Troops slept on their arms, if at all. They knew that they were outnumbered and that the enemy had beaten the greatest general of Europe. They didn’t know how their own general compared with Napoleon or how they would perform under the hottest fire they could ever expect to see. Live or die, it would be the battle of a generation.
What Wellington liked most about his brother-in-law was his boldness. Pakenham might be no genius, but he understood that fortune favored the bold and believed that courage could fill in where genius failed.
As the British troops formed up in the predawn dark of January 8, every soldier listened intently for firing on the far side of the river. The sound would indicate that the regiment that had gone over was attacking the American guns there and that the main assault, by these waiting, listening troops, could begin. But the fog that had enveloped the plain and the river in the dark started to whiten with the dawn, and still no sound was heard from across the water, leaving the troops to wonder whether the attack would commence after all.
A second problem surfaced when Pakenham discovered that many of his troops lacked the ladders they’d need to cross the ditches and scale the American walls. Such mundane tools could be fully as vital as the muskets and bayonets the soldiers carried. The men might drown in the ditches or be pinned at the base of the walls.
Pakenham had been through enough battles to understand that things never happened as planned. The troops sent over the river were late; they would simply have to fight harder and make up for lost time. The infantry didn’t have enough ladders; they’d have to cross the ditches and scale the walls on one another’s backs. This was the hour. The assault must go forward.
The dawn of day discovered to us the enemy occupying two-thirds of the space between the wood and the Mississippi,” Arsène Latour remembered. It was a daunting sight: thousands of redcoats filling the plain, sixty or seventy men deep in a broad front, moving inexorably toward the American lines. Most of those on the American side had never seen a regular army in battle formation, certainly not one as large and impressive as this.
If Jackson was daunted he didn’t let on. As soon as it was light enough for his gunners to see their targets, he gave the order to fire. Battery Six got off the first salvo, followed by Batteries Seven and Eight. Before long all three batteries were firing without pause, ignoring the return fire from the British guns, shaking the soft earth of the riverside plain, and mixing plumes of powder smoke with the rising fog.
The destructive effect of the American fire on the British soldiers in the open field was appalling. The American gunners aimed low, and each round cut a bloody, gaping hole in the redcoat ranks. No army, it seemed, could endure such carnage. But the British did, to the amazement of the Americans. “Every discharge opened the column and mowed down whole files,” Latour recalled, “which were almost instantly replaced by new troops coming up close after the first.”
The British left made the swiftest progress. One especially intrepid company reached a redoubt where they engaged the Americans in hand-to-hand, bayonet-to-gunstock fighting. After a few furious minutes they drove the Americans away. Their success encouraged their comrades, who hoped it presaged a larger break in the American line.
Jackson feared what the British hoped, and he immediately determined that the redoubt must be retaken at whatever cost. Summoning fresh troops, he threw them against the redoubt. For a long moment the whole battle centered on this single hillock of mud. The earlier roles were reversed: the British now defended and the Americans attacked. The numbers, too, were switched; the Americans outnumbered the British at this critical spot on the field. And it was the American numbers that finally told. The British were forced to yield the position they had won so courageously. “Being opposed by overwhelming numbers,” George Gleig wrote of his comrades, “they were repulsed; and the Americans, in turn, forcing their way into the battery, at length succeeded in recapturing it with immense slaughter.”
Elsewhere on the field the lack of ladders among the British became a matter of life and mostly death. Members of two British regiments braved the American fire and reached the base of the American wall. “To scale the parapet without ladders was a work of no slight difficulty,” Gleig observed. “Some few, indeed, by mounting one upon another’s shoulders, succeeded in entering the works, but these were speedily overpowered, most of them killed, and the rest taken; whilst as many as stood without were exposed to a sweeping fire which cut them down by whole companies. It was in vain that the most obstinate courage was displayed. They fell by the hands of men whom they absolutely did 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 heads.” At this point, the failure of the British force across the river to capture the guns there became dismayingly evident. “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 destroyed without an opportunity being given of displaying their valour or obtaining so much as revenge.”
Unable to move forward, the British ranks held for a few more minutes under the murderous fire of the Americans, but finally they broke. Some of the men sought refuge in a ditch. Others simply ran for their lives. British officers rode to the ditch and ordered the troops there to re-form. They did so, reluctantly. “And now, for the second time, the column, recruited with the troops that formed the rear, advanced,” Arsène Latour wrote. “Again it was received with the same rolling fire of musketry and artillery, till, having advanced without much order very near our lines, it at last broke again, and retired in the utmost confusion. In vain did the officers now endeavour, as before, to revive the courage of their men; to no purpose did they strike them with the flat of their swords, to force them to advance. They were insensible to every thing but danger, and saw nothing but death, which had struck so many of their comrades.”
Not even Pakenham, audacious as ever, could stem the retreat. “Sir Edward saw how things were going,” George Gleig wrote, “and did all that a general could do to rally his troops. Riding toward the 44th, which had returned to the ground but in great disorder, he called out for Colonel Mullens to advance. But that officer had disappeared and was not to be found. He therefore prepared to lead them on himself, and had put himself at their head for that purpose, when he received a slight wound in the knee from a musket-ball, which killed his horse. Mounting another, he again headed the 44th, when a second ball took effect more fatally, and he dropped lifeless into the arms of his aide-de-camp.”
Pakenham’s charge to the front had inspired his men, and now his death disheartened them—and cheered the Americans, who could see him fall. The Americans were additionally encouraged—and the British further disheartened—when two other British generals, Samuel Gibbs and John Keane, went down. “A great number of officers of rank had fallen,” Arsène Latour remembered. “The ground over which the column had marched was strewed with the dead and the wounded. Such slaughter on their side, with no loss on ours, spread consternation through their ranks, as they were now convinced of the impossibility of carrying our lines, and saw that even to advance was certain death. In a word, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of some officers to make their troops form a third time, they would not advance, and all that could be obtained from them was to draw them up in the ditch, where they passed the rest of the day.”
In George Gleig’s view, the critical event was the fall of Gibbs and Keane. “Riding through the ranks,” Gleig said of the two generals’ final effort to regather the troops, “they strove by all means to encourage the assailants and recall the fugitives, till at length both were wounded and borne off the field. All was now confusion and dismay. Without leaders, ignorant of what was to be done, the troops first halted and then began to retire, till finally the retreat was changed into a flight, and they quitted the
ground in utmost disorder.” Yet the British spirit wasn’t entirely broken. “The retreat was covered in gallant style by the reserve. Making a forward motion, the 7th and 43rd presented the appearance of a renewed attack, by which the enemy were so much awed that they did not venture beyond their lines in pursuit of the fugitives.”
Jackson was hardly awed by the British, and certainly not at this point in the battle, which had gone better than he had had any reason to hope. His untested troops had stood the shock of the vaunted British charge and repelled it gloriously. In the moment of victory he was tempted to pursue the retreating British and try to annihilate the whole army. But he quickly thought better of it. To pursue the redcoats onto the open plain, with untested troops that knew nothing of maneuver, would be reckless in the extreme. Better to remain behind the defenses that had served the Americans so well.
Just how well those defenses served the Americans—and how cruelly the British—became apparent in the aftermath. The serious fighting ended by eight in the morning. A short while later Jackson and the ranking active British officer, John Lambert, agreed to a ceasefire to allow each side to collect its wounded and bury its dead. George Gleig wasn’t part of the British hospital detail, but he wanted to assess the damage his comrades had suffered. “Prompted by curiosity, I mounted my horse and rode to the front,” he explained. What he observed burned an image in his brain. “Of all the sights I ever witnessed, that which met me there was beyond comparison the most shocking and the most humiliating. Within the narrow compass of a few hundred yards were gathered together nearly a thousand bodies, all of them arrayed in British uniforms. Not a single American was among them; all were English, and they were thrown by dozens into shallow holes, scarcely deep enough to furnish them with a slight covering of earth. An American officer 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, that their loss amounted only to eight men killed and fourteen men wounded.”
Arsène Latour visited the same killing fields. He may have passed Gleig, though neither had any reason to remark the meeting. “The whole plain on the left, as also the side of the river, from the road to the edge of the water, was covered with the British soldiers who had fallen,” Latour wrote. “What might perhaps appear incredible, were there not many thousands ready to attest the fact, is that a space of ground extending from the ditch of our lines to that on which the enemy drew up his troops, two hundred and fifty yards in length, by about two hundred in breadth, was literally covered with men, either dead or severely wounded.” Latour couldn’t count the bodies, but the British losses were obviously immense. “It cannot have amounted to less than three thousand men in killed, wounded, and prisoners. . . . Our loss was comparatively inconsiderable, amounting to no more than thirteen in killed and wounded.”
The winter of 1814–15 had been the darkest for America since the grim season of Valley Forge. As during that earlier crisis, the very existence of the republic was in danger. Federalists in Hartford plotted against the administration and perhaps against the Union, while a powerful British land and sea force prepared to invade the American South and slice the nation from bottom to top. Easterners and especially visitors to Washington, where the blackened ruins of the Capitol and the White House stood starkly amid a heavy December snowfall, couldn’t imagine that the British might fail to defeat the motley regiments of a general who had bested Indians but never confronted a real army. The only news from Ghent, three thousand miles of stormy ocean away, was that the British demands were extortionately unrealistic, designed to humiliate and dismember the country most Britons had never considered legitimate. One didn’t have to be an alarmist to imagine that spring would find the United States disunited, with New England seceded and the trans-Mississippi territories apportioned among the Europeans and Indians. The Boston Gazette made no secret where its seditious hopes lay. “Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America, who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison and Jefferson and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their faces against us for years, and spirited up the brutal part of the populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we, then, any longer be held in slavery and driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction?” The Madison administration struggled to convey an optimism it didn’t feel. Its mouthpiece, the National Intelligencer, mustered no more than a double negative as it looked toward the Mississippi: “Appearances justify the expectation of the British expedition not being ineffectually resisted.” Thirty-six years after George Washington had kept the American Revolution alive on a bleak hillside near Philadelphia, the experiment in republicanism seemed on the verge of dissolution.
And then, across the frozen fields and barren hopes of February, a blessed zephyr blew in from the South. Andrew Jackson had stood before New Orleans and defeated Wellington’s invincibles. The South was secure, and with it the West. And New England also, for the defeatism that fed the secessionist dreams of the radical Federalists evaporated in the sudden glow of Jackson’s triumph. Never had the mood of the nation changed so quickly, from despair to confidence. The republic survived. The Union was saved.
Louisiana is still American,” Mrs. Edward Livingston wrote her sister on the Thursday after the Sunday battle. “God has granted us a brilliant victory, and has spared the lives of those dear to us.” Louise Moreau de Lassy Livingston was the widow of a French officer who had been stationed in New Orleans, and was now the wife of Jackson’s attaché, Edward Livingston. With the rest of New Orleans she had endured the weeks of preparation for the battle, the heart-stopping rumors of what British soldiers did to innocent women, and the fearsome thunder of the artillery exchanges. “Such feelings cannot be described,” she told her sister. “The battle-ground is only a league from the city, and I could not only hear the booming of the cannon, as the house shook each time, but every musket could be heard also.” Yet she, with the others, had put faith in General Jackson. And they had been amply rewarded. “There never was a more glorious victory, nor one that cost less blood. Not a single father of a family was killed, and the joy of the people, thanks be to God, is unalloyed by private sorrow. Everybody thinks this battle will end the war, and that the enemy will at once re-embark. Should this prove the case, it is impossible to conceive a more brilliant success for American arms or one more full of disaster for the English.”
Jackson didn’t underestimate what he and his men had accomplished, but he wasn’t quite ready to call the war over. On the day of the battle itself, even as his soldiers on the left bank were slaughtering and capturing redcoats by the thousand, the American militia on the right bank gave him a fright by collapsing in the face of the belated British attack there. The next day he still couldn’t figure out exactly what happened. It was “strange and difficult to account for,” he told James Monroe. But the gist of the sorry tale seemed to be that at the moment of truth “the Kentucky reinforcements ingloriously fled, drawing after them, by their example, the remainder of the forces.” The defenders managed to spike the guns before leaving, thereby preventing the use of the weapons against their comrades across the river. But the defeat was galling and potentially dangerous. “This unfortunate rout had totally changed the aspect of affairs,” Jackson told Monroe. “The enemy now occupied a position from which they might annoy us without hazard, and by means of which they might have been enabled to defeat, in a great measure, the effects of our success on this side the river.” But then the complexion of things changed again, almost equally unaccountably. British general Lambert, clearly shaken by the disaster to the army he inherited, ordered the troops on the right bank to recross the river and join such of their fellows as had survived the bloody morning. “I need not tell you with how much eagerness I immediately regained possession of the position he had thus hastily quitted,” Jackson said.
The recapture of the left bank allowed Jackson to judge the battle of January 8 a complete succes
s, but it gave him little cause to conclude that the single victory would end the war. Lambert’s army still sat a few miles outside New Orleans, and though it was in no shape to mount another assault, neither were the Americans in much condition to chase it away. The British fleet was anchored on the coast, with no American warships anywhere in sight. New Orleans might be safe, but the British could easily board their ships and harass some other part of the South. In fact the British did revisit Fort Bowyer, on Mobile Bay, and force its surrender. This incident merely strengthened Jackson’s refusal to consider the war over till he saw a treaty declaring it so.
His stern attitude sat poorly with the people of New Orleans. Like Mrs. Livingston, most of them wanted to celebrate. And many did. A parade was held to honor the victorious general. Children threw garlands, and the city’s odist proclaimed:
Hail to the chief! who hied at war’s alarms,
To save our threatened land from hostile arms. . . .
Jackson, all hail! our country’s pride and boast,
Whose mind’s a council, and who’s arm an host. . . .
Remembrance long shall keep alive thy fame,
And future infants learn to lisp thy name.
Honest joy and relief informed the hosannas, but so did a desire to have done with martial law. The residents of New Orleans had never liked it, but with the British at the door they couldn’t object inordinately. Now that the British had been beaten back, the residents called for a return to civil law, including normal business and access to the courts.
