by H. W. Brands
Jackson refused. Even after Lambert loaded his troops on boats and withdrew to the ships that had brought them to the coast, Jackson held to the opinion that war was war till peace was declared. As yet no word of the settlement at Ghent had penetrated the Gulf. Jackson assumed, with most other Americans, that the negotiators in the Flemish city were waiting on the outcome of the battle for New Orleans. “As soon as their defeat reaches Ghent, we will have peace, in my opinion,” he predicted. But not till then.
Vincent Nolte was one of those who wanted Jackson to release the city from martial law. Nolte was an Italian-born German who had survived Napoleon, the plague, the fires of Mt. Etna, the New Madrid earthquake, and an epidemic of yellow fever before establishing himself as a commodities broker in New Orleans. His warehouse bulged with cotton and wool as the British approached the city in the autumn of 1814. Shortly after Jackson arrived, the American quartermaster commandeered Nolte’s inventory for uniforms and barricades. Nolte didn’t begrudge the taking, as he supported Jackson, to the point of joining him in the field. But he expected compensation for his loss. Jackson at first seemed agreeable. He appointed a commission to examine claims and recommend payment. The commission set a figure for Nolte’s loss in wool, but Jackson added a condition. The wool, he explained, had been used to make clothing for Tennessee militiamen. For this reason Nolte must be paid in Tennessee bank notes. Nolte felt cheated, as the Tennessee notes traded at sharp discount in New Orleans. But he held his tongue awaiting judgment on his 250 bales of cotton, which were worth far more than the wool.
“I produced my books,” he explained afterward, referring to the records on the cotton bales. “Two years before, they had been purchased from the richest cotton planter, Poydras, at 10 cents [per pound]. The price, meanwhile, had never been less than 10 to 11 cents, and the day before we received the news of their seizure, I had bought two small lots at 11H and 12 cents.” Nolte cited this figure in support of his claim for compensation at that level. Jackson rejected the price. Nolte must take the lower price prevailing after the first British landing, when it seemed as though the city might fall. “I made a written protest,” Nolte said, “but the general would not notice it. Then I determined to call on him in the hopes of awakening a sense of justice in him. He heard me, but that was all. ‘Are you not lucky,’ he asked, ‘to have saved the rest of your cotton by my defence?’ ‘Certainly, General,’ I said, ‘as lucky as any body else in the city whose cotton has thus been saved. But the difference between me and the rest is that all the others have nothing to pay and that I have to bear all the loss.’ ‘Loss,’ the general said, getting excited, ‘why, you have saved all!’”
Nolte tried a different tack. “I saw that argument was useless with so stiff-necked a man, and remarked to him that I only wanted compensation for my cotton, and that the best compensation would be to give me precisely the quantity that had been taken from me, and of the same quality.” Nolte suggested arbitration. Jackson rejected this as too complicated. “You must take 6 cents for your cotton. I have nothing more to say.” But Nolte wasn’t finished talking, and he continued to expostulate. Jackson brushed him off. “Come, sir, come,” he said. “Take a glass of whiskey and water. You must be damned dry after all your arguing.”
Nolte refused the drink. “General,” he said. “I did not expect such injustice at your hands. Good morning, sir.” And he walked out.
Jackson could hardly be asked to sympathize with speculators, even those who had fought on his side. Nolte and the other New Orleans merchants seemed to treat the troubles with Britain as a business expense. Jackson had no doubt that had the British won, Nolte and his ilk would have accommodated themselves to the new regime and carried on as before. Perhaps they had lost money in the defense of the city. If so, that was a cost they’d have to swallow. Jackson’s soldiers had lost far more in the previous two years, including many lives.
Yet given that he still had to govern the city, he might have handled its leading citizens with greater tact. The first report of the Ghent treaty arrived in mid-February, seven weeks after its signing. But the report was only a newspaper column carried from the East Coast, saying that a treaty had reached Washington. Jackson insisted on notification from the War Department, from his superiors. The distinction seemed arbitrary to many of those under arms in New Orleans, who began seeking escape from military discipline. Some French nationals devised a scheme by which they appealed to the French consul in the city, who furnished documents declaring their freedom. French-speaking American citizens caught on to the game and, claiming French citizenship, were similarly rewarded.
Conceivably Jackson considered the safety of the city still at risk. After all, the war wasn’t over till the treaty had been signed and ratified. And the British could be expected to learn about this latest unrest, as they had learned about everything else, and might be tempted to test the city’s defenses again. But there was more involved. As in the instance of Nolte and the speculators, Jackson resented the narrow self-interest that lay at the heart of the subterfuge. Good men had died to defend the city, and these malcontents couldn’t wait the few days for the war to end definitively. Jackson probably considered himself magnanimous in merely ordering the consul and the duty-dodging Frenchmen out of the city.
By now the Louisiana legislature was back in session, and most of its leaders thought they, rather than a general from Tennessee, ought to be making law for Louisiana. One of its members, Louis Louaillier, published an article complaining of Jackson’s “abuse of authority.” Jackson thereupon had Louaillier arrested. The prisoner appealed to the civil court system, which likewise sought to reassert its authority. Federal judge Dominick Hall upheld Louaillier’s appeal and sent Jackson a writ of habeas corpus regarding Louaillier. Jackson seized the judge for abetting mutiny and exiled him from the city. “I have thought proper to send you beyond the limits of my encampment,” he explained, “to prevent you from a repetition of the improper conduct for which you have been arrested and confined.” The judge would remain outside the city until peace between the United States and Britain was ratified or until the British left the coast.
Hall’s exile was brief. The treaty had indeed arrived in Washington, as the earlier report had stated. And it was quickly ratified by the Senate. A special courier dispatched to New Orleans reached the city on March 13, barely twenty-four hours after Hall was deposited at the city limits. Jackson wasted no time in relaying the news to the inhabitants. “The commanding general, with the most lively emotions of joy and of gratitude to heaven, announces to the troops under his command that a treaty of peace between the United States and Great Britain was ratified and exchanged at Washington on the 17th of February. . . . In consequence whereof, he loses not an instant in revoking and annulling the general order issued on the 15th”—actually the 16th—“day of December last, proclaiming martial law. . . . And in order that the general joy attending this event may extend to all manner of persons, the commanding general proclaims and orders a pardon for all military offenses heretofore committed in this district, and orders that all persons in confinement under such charges be immediately discharged.”
Judge Hall could have contributed to the general joy by letting his past differences with Jackson go, but he followed a different course. He no sooner resumed his seat on the bench than he ordered Jackson to appear and explain why he should not be held in contempt of court for ignoring the habeas writ in the case of Louaillier.
Jackson knew perfectly well why he shouldn’t. “Whenever the invaluable rights which we enjoy under our own happy constitution are threatened by invasion, privileges the most dear, and which, in ordinary times, ought to be regarded as the most sacred, may be required to be infringed for their security,” he declared. “At such a crisis we have only to determine whether we will suspend, for a time, the exercise of the latter, that we may secure the permanent enjoyment of the former.” Suppose an election had been scheduled for January 8, Jackson said. Should h
e have neglected the defense of the city in order that his men might go to the polls? Only a fool would think so. Habeas corpus was similar. “How can the civil enjoyment of this privilege be made to consist with the order, subordination and discipline of a camp? Let the sentinel be removed by subpoena from his post, let writs of habeas corpus carry away the officers from the lines, and the enemy may conquer your country by only employing lawyers to defend your constitution.” Jackson acknowledged that his actions weren’t universally popular. But he refused to apologize, regardless of the cost to his reputation. “I am not insensible to the good opinion of my fellow citizens. I would do much to obtain it. But I cannot, for this purpose, sacrifice my own conscience or what I conceive to be the interests of my country.”
Jackson addressed these words, significantly, not to Judge Hall but to his “fellow soldiers,” whose approbation he valued far more than that of the court. Jackson consented to appear in Hall’s court, yet he refused to answer a series of questions put to him by the prosecuting attorney. He had drafted a defense of his actions and previously submitted it to the court, only to have the court reject it. “Under these circumstances,” he told Hall, “I appear before you to receive the sentence of the court, and have nothing further to add.”
Hall pronounced the expected verdict of guilty and imposed a fine of one thousand dollars. Jackson quietly left the courtroom and stepped outside—to be greeted by a large crowd shouting its own verdict, of delirious support for the hero. All dignity was lost in the surge of enthusiasm. Jackson had walked to the courthouse, but now he was made to ride in a carriage commandeered for the purpose. The horses were released from the traces that the people might have the honor of pulling him back to his quarters. Everyone shouted for Jackson, and more than a few muttered against Hall. Jackson calmed them long enough to caution against violence. Upon reaching his house he wrote a bank draft for one thousand dollars and sent it to the court, secure as ever in his own rectitude and a bit surprised at his popularity.
The war had been hard on Rachel Jackson. During its early phase, when her husband was fighting the Red Sticks, the news from the front alternately emphasized privation and danger, and though Jackson tried to calm her fears, she rightly guessed he was telling her less than the whole story. She couldn’t decide which was worse: knowing or not knowing all he faced. “I received your letter by express,” she wrote of a message that told of an engagement a few weeks before Horseshoe Bend. “Never shall I forget it. I have not slept one night since. . . . I cried aloud and praised my God for your safety.” She hoped he would be able to come home at least briefly before completing the campaign. “My dear, pray let me conjure you by every tie of love, of friendship, to let me see you before you go again.” Like most people of her time, including her husband, Rachel suffered from various maladies doctors could only vaguely diagnose and couldn’t effectively treat. The strain of Jackson’s absence—her worries for his safety, her responsibility for the Hermitage—aggravated her condition. “I have borne it until now it has thrown me into fevers. I am very unwell. . . . How long, oh Lord, will I remain so unhappy? No rest, no ease. I cannot sleep. . . . I never wanted to see you so much in my life.”
Jackson replied as soon as Rachel’s letter arrived. “I have this moment received your letter . . . and am grieved to think of the pain my absence occasions.” But duty required that they remain apart awhile longer, as she must realize. “When you reflect that I am in the field and cannot retire when I please . . . I am in hopes that your good sense will yield to it yet a little while with resolution and firmness.” He wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him; their reunion would come the more quickly the harder he applied himself to the current task.
As he always did in writing Rachel, Jackson told her to give his love to their son. “Say to my little darling Andrew that his sweet papa will be home shortly, and that he sends him three sweet kisses.” After the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, he instructed Rachel once more to kiss Andrew, adding, “Tell him I have a warrior’s bow and quiver for him.”
Jackson and Rachel were reunited in Nashville that spring following the surrender of William Weatherford. But their time together was short, as he soon turned south again, as commander of the Seventh District. From July 1814, when he went to Fort Jackson to make peace with the Creeks, till after the Battle of New Orleans, the war kept them apart. But as soon as word of the great victory of January 8 reached Nashville, Rachel set out south with some other wives of Tennessee officers. “May God preserve them from accident,” Jackson wrote on learning of their winter departure down the Cumberland.
Rachel arrived in late February. The joy of the lovers’ reunion certainly repaid some of the pain of separation, although like most intimate moments in history its details went unrecorded. And like most reunions, this one was both more and less than the partners had anticipated. Rachel hadn’t realized what a hero her husband was to the Americans in the city or how he annoyed the French and other Europeans. While the former embraced her in their enthusiasm for Jackson, the latter poked fun at her homespun appearance. Vincent Nolte described one of several dinners held in their honor, before adding snidely (and in part inaccurately): “After supper we were treated to a most delicious pas de deux by the conqueror and his spouse, an emigrant of the lower classes, whom he had from a Georgia planter, and who explained by her enormous corpulence that French saying, ‘She shows how far the skin can be stretched.’ To see these two figures, the general a long, haggard man, with limbs like a skeleton, and Madame la Generale, a short, fat dumpling, bobbing opposite each other like half-drunken Indians, to the wild melody of Possum up de Gum Tree, and endeavoring to make a spring into the air, was very remarkable, and far more edifying a spectacle than any European ballet could possibly have furnished.”
It was a mark of Jackson’s devotion to Rachel that he never uttered a negative word about the figure she cut or intimated in the slightest manner that she didn’t fit perfectly into any setting in which she found herself. Nolte and others might mock her frontier ways, but Jackson closed his ears to the criticism and opened his eyes only to her.
Meanwhile he couldn’t help realizing that in the eyes of most of America, he was the greatest hero since Washington. A Philadelphia printmaker wrote him with an urgent request: “My friends and many citizens of this City have called upon me to cause a painting of the Battle of New Orleans to be engraved in the best manner. . . . I beg you, sir, to have the goodness to furnish me with a ground plan of the fortifications, a sketch of the appearance of the country taken from within our lines looking down the road towards the British as they were advancing, a description of the times of the battle that will be the most favourable and interesting to make the picture from, and situations you were in at those times—what officers stood near you, their rank, etc.” A painter and an engraver had already been commissioned to execute the work. They required only the raw materials for their art. “Be pleased, sir, to inform me whether there is a portrait of yourself, by whom painted, and whether I can be permitted at the time it will be wanted to have it here for the use of the engraver. Have the goodness, sir, also to inform me whether it is your intention of visiting our City, and if so, at what probable time. I have engaged our first rate portrait painter to paint your portrait for me on your arrival, by your permission.”
Jackson’s reply to this request has been lost. But he did sit for portraits, and he cooperated with artists and authors attempting to provide the American people with pictures—actual and literary—of what their army had accomplished at New Orleans. He spoke to journalists and endorsed the plan of aide John Reid to publish an account of the southern campaign. “I think it very proper that the public should be made acquainted with the opportunities he has had of acquiring full and correct information on the subject,” Jackson said. “He had and now has charge of my public papers and has ever possessed my unlimited confidence.”
Yet none of the paintings, prints, or literary rendering
s captured Jackson as he really looked during most of the two years in which he won his military reputation. At the beginning of the Creek campaign his left arm and shoulder had been unusable, still mending from his fracas with the Bentons. He had to be helped onto his horse and could consult maps and books only awkwardly. He needed help to write and couldn’t even feed himself properly.
This last handicap would have been more of a problem if his stomach had been able to tolerate regular food. From childhood Jackson had been painfully thin. To some extent his slimness probably reflected a high metabolic rate, sometimes manifested in the intense, almost electric energy that seemed to radiate from his person. But it may well have indicated, too, the presence of parasites. As common as malaria was in the Carolinas and the river valleys of the interior, if Jackson avoided the disease he would have been luckier than very many of his neighbors. Intestinal parasites were equally prevalent but more diverse. The most virulent pathogens—for cholera and typhoid fever, for instance—often killed their hosts. But many others, typically unnamed, merely caused chronic diarrhea and other discomforts that people in preindustrial countries—then and later—simply learned to live with.
Jackson lived with intestinal troubles, though they caused him more discomfort than most of his contemporaries suffered. The difficult conditions of the Creek campaign—the lack of food and shelter, the exposure to the elements—aggravated his distress to the point where he often could barely sit up. If the army was in camp, he would prop himself in a chair or dictate correspondence from his cot. On the march he would lean forward in his saddle as though hugging his horse. Not even in New Orleans, as civilized a place as existed in the American West, could he find comfort. “I have had a serious attack of dysentery that reduced me very much,” he wrote to a friend in February 1815. “I have not been clear of it for four months, except ten days after my first arrival at this place.”
