Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans

by Brian Kilmeade

  On the sixth, he had the Kentuckians with guns take positions at the Rodriguez Canal; the others would reinforce the secondary lines of defense.

  All week long, Jackson configured his troops with care. He chose the 430 men of the Seventh Regular Infantry to anchor his right, shoulder to shoulder with 740 Louisiana militiamen. Next came the Forty-Fourth Regiment, numbering 240 men, with the Kentuckians (500 in number) and the largest corps of all, 1,600 of his fellow Tennesseans, at the far left. The 230 Mississippi dragoons remained to the rear, with a mix of others completing the left bank army. The total came to almost 5,000 men. Across the river were roughly 1,000 troops, including some Kentuckians and more Louisiana militia.36 What Andrew Jackson had was a collection of Americans of all colors, creeds, and ethnic groups, melted into one fighting force, coming together to make military history.

  All but two of his cannons were embedded in the earthworks; only a new, not-yet-finished redoubt, with two 6-pounders, sat forward of the main line, giving it a commanding view of both the levee road and the front of the earthworks. The other eleven guns—a mix of 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-pounders—plus the big 32-pounder, were arranged in batteries at intervals along the main line. They were manned by a mix of navy gunners, Louisiana militiamen, and Baratarians.

  The ramparts themselves, the work of a fortnight and more of tedious, backbreaking labor, remained as varied as the men charged with defending them. At the base, the earthen wall ranged from fourteen to twenty feet in thickness; its height, too, depended upon where on the line a man stood. In some places, the ramparts reached just five feet, in others perhaps twice that, but the elevation was enhanced by the four-foot depth of the muddy canal at the foot.

  Jackson ordered the ramparts constantly manned and, as night fell on January 7, he rode the line. He and the men could hear hammering and digging sounds in the near distance but Jackson offered encouraging words, talking to gunners and soldiers, officers and infantry, the volunteers and the regulars. By order and by example, in every way he knew how, Jackson had readied his army, in mind and body, to defend New Orleans. The array of troops he had managed to assemble was truly remarkable: Tennesseans and Kentuckians on the left, battalions of Indians and Africans in the middle, dragoons from Mississippi in reserve, and a blending of regulars and militias from a mix of places distributed such that the length of earthworks was lined with American guns.

  After dining lightly, Jackson took to his sofa to try to sleep. Several of his aides lay on the floor, still in uniform, their guns and sword belts at their sides. On previous evenings, the night watch in the camp had been entrusted to alternating companies of soldiers, but on this Saturday night the entire army had been instructed to bed down with their weapons within reach.

  A few hours later, Jackson awoke in the darkness. The time was one o’clock, and he heard footsteps in the hall.

  “Who’s there?” he called.

  The sentry admitted a courier with a message from Commodore Patterson. Late the previous day, standing on the shore opposite the Villeré plantation, he had seen enemy forces loading cannons in the barges. He assumed that he and his west bank position would be their target. The navy man asked Jackson to send reinforcements to the opposite side of the river in case the British attacked there.

  Anxious and impatient, the general required only a moment to consider the matter before turning Patterson down. Time was too short for more men to reach Patterson—Jackson had already dispatched four hundred Kentuckians to reinforce Patterson and Brigadier General Morgan, the Louisiana militiaman posted with him. And nothing Patterson said persuaded Jackson that the major attack would be anywhere but on his own side of the Mississippi.

  “I have no men to spare,” he told the messenger.37 Patterson and Morgan were on their own. Jackson had no idea of the misstep he had just made, but he was uninterested in going back to sleep. Turning, he addressed the aides around him.

  “Gentlemen, we have slept enough. Rise. The enemy will be upon us in a few minutes.”38

  They would indeed, and not only in the way Jackson expected.

  The Ursuline Nuns

  Jackson enjoyed one advantage over Pakenham. As he and his officers dressed for battle, many of the devout women of New Orleans knelt just five miles away, praying that he and his soldiers would save the city.

  The word of imminent battle had reached the households of New Orleans. Many women—wives and sisters and mothers of soldiers—feared not just for the men they loved as they prepared to fight the enemy. Rumors spreading dread of what a mob of conquering British soldiers might do to the women and to New Orleans if the city fell had been circulating, too. Determined to lend their voices and entreaties, female residents had made their way on the night of January 7 to the Ursuline convent.

  The women joined the sisters in a vigil at the Chapel of Our Lady of Consolation. There the nuns had moved their most honored icon to a prominent place over the altar. It was a wooden sculpture of Our Lady of Prompt Succor. Five years earlier the large carved statue had arrived from France: dressed in a sweeping golden robe, her head adorned with a great crown, Mary held the child Jesus in her arms. Another statue of Our Lady of Prompt Succor was said to have miraculously defended the nuns in the past; in one of the great fires that had swept New Orleans, the flames had approached the convent but had been turned away by a sudden change in the wind’s direction when a nun placed a statue of Our Lady in the window. The convent was one of the few buildings in the city that survived the fire.

  Now, the people of New Orleans were hoping for more divine intervention. With the great statue of a wordless Blessed Virgin looming over the nuns and the women of the city, the nearly inaudible whispers of petitioners sent skyward pleas, “implor[ing] the God of battles to nerve the arm of their protectors, and turn the tide of combat against the invaders of their country.”39

  During the night, more and more women thronged to the chapel. Within its walls, some wept, while others called out for divine intervention. Vows were made, including one by the Mother Superior, Sainte Marie Olivier de Vézin, who had previously offered General Jackson the services of the Ursuline sisters in caring for the wounded.

  In the early hours of January 8, she made a fresh promise, this time to God. If the Americans prevailed in the day’s battle—and that remained a mighty if—a solemn mass of Thanksgiving would be held in celebration and remembrance every year into the distant future.

  In not so many hours, the outcome would be known.

  CHAPTER 12

  Day of Destiny

  These d—d Yankee riflemen can pick a squirrel’s eye out as far as they can see it.

  —Anonymous British prisoner of war

  A flagstaff stood at the center of the American line, defiantly flying the American colors. On January 8, 1815, the question of the day was, Would it still wave at sunset?

  General Edward Pakenham, like Jackson, had also retired to his bed the night before, but he’d risen a little later, at five o’clock. In the predawn darkness he and his army, once again, had advanced toward the Americans; now, with the sky in the east just gaining the vague reddish tinge of dawn, he listened. From his position near the middle of the Chalmette Plain, the British commander wanted nothing more than to hear the sounds of William Thornton’s guns echoing across the Mississippi.

  The new waterway at the Villeré plantation had broken through to the river two days before, making possible the planned launch of Thornton and his men the previous night. But, to his acute regret, Pakenham would learn soon after waking that the wished-for gunfire would be delayed. Nor would he see a rocket fired from the opposite shore, the agreed-upon signal for success in breaching Patterson’s works.

  Colonel William Thornton and his entire mission were running late, very late indeed.

  Thanks to the failure of Admiral Cochrane’s design for a temporary lock between the river and the bayou, most of the Britis
h ships had grounded in the canal. The hastily constructed dam at the near end of the canal extension had given way, permitting the water in the lock to run off toward Lake Borgne. That meant only a few of the craft in the planned forty-seven-boat flotilla reached the river’s shallows before the larger barges grounded in the mud of the canal. Royal Navy sailors had set to work to drag more boats to open water, but less than two-thirds of the boats, many of them small, had made it through. When Thornton’s amphibious force finally departed, it had shrunk to fewer than five hundred men.

  Worse yet, given all the delays in maneuvering the boats through the makeshift canal, they sailed eight hours late.

  Standing poised to order the main attack, his men in readiness, Pakenham, an experienced military tactician, understood exactly what the delay at the watercourse meant for the battle. “Thornton’s people,” a resigned General Pakenham said to a trusted officer beside him, “will be of no use whatever to the general attack.”1 With the night move across the water badly delayed, the general faced a momentous decision. Attack head on, or wait for Thornton’s men to breach the flank?

  Observing Pakenham’s agitation—and knowing how crucial Patterson’s guns might be to the success or failure of the day’s fighting—one of his adjutants, Captain Harry Smith, suggested a rapid retreat in the last moments before sunrise. “We [will be] under the enemy’s fire so soon as discovered,” he warned. There might be time to reset the plan and return another day.

  After almost a fortnight of delays and setbacks, Pakenham rejected the idea.

  “I have twice deferred the attack,” he replied. “We are strong in numbers now comparatively. It will cost more men, [but] the assault must be made.”

  Smith tried once more, again urging delay, but Pakenham’s mind was made up.

  “Smith, order the rocket to be fired.”2

  With a whistling message skittering across the sky, the British marched forward.

  “That is their signal for advance, I believe,” said General Andrew Jackson, hearing the hiss and bang of the first rocket. It shot skyward from the edge of the swamp, followed by a second, this one from the other side of the field.3

  Since 4:00 a.m., Jackson’s men had been awake, armed, and ready behind their earthworks. Suddenly alert, as after the crack of the pistol shot signaling the start of a horse race, the American artillerists stood by, their loggerheads red-hot and ready to fire their guns. The soldiers peered over the ramparts. The rifles and muskets had been loaded. In that moment, every heart began to beat more rapidly.

  But to the Americans’ surprise, the enemy remained unseen. A thick morning fog hugged the ground, obscuring the oncoming army.

  The British Ranks

  Pakenham’s orders, written and issued the night before, divided his forces on the Chalmette Plain into three brigades.

  Under the command of General Samuel Gibbs, the main attack was to come from the British right. At the vanguard would be the Forty-Fourth Infantry, an Irish regiment ordered to collect the three hundred bundles of sugarcane and sixteen ladders from an earthen redoubt partway to the American line. On reaching the canal, they were to throw the cane stalks into the ditch and then raise the scaling ladders. Two regiments of infantry, along with three companies of rifles, were charged with protecting the column’s right from any counterattack and to provide cover as the Forty-Fourth approached the ditch. If all went well, the larger body of Gibbs’s brigade would follow the Forty-Fourth. Crossing the ditch on the canes and scaling the ladders over the earthworks, they would penetrate the previously unbreakable American line and be face-to-face with American forces.

  But this plan would fall apart, when whether intentionally or unintentionally, the Forty-Fourth would leave the canes and ladders behind, realizing perhaps that running full speed into the teeth of lethal American fire would amount to a suicide mission. Carrying ladders instead of pointing guns, they would be easy targets for Jackson’s skilled marksmen.

  Barely a half hour before dawn, a dismayed General Gibbs discovered the blunder. Without the ladders, Gibbs’s men had no way to scale Jackson’s wall. Knowing this, Gibbs instantly ordered the regiment to retreat some five hundred yards and bring the ladders forward, but, when first rocket’s report echoed, the men with the heavy ones were still well behind the van and moving “in a most irregular and unsoldierlike manner.”4

  The outraged General Gibbs bellowed at Thomas Mullins, the leader of the Forty-Fourth, threatening to hang him from the “highest tree in that swamp.”5 But, the error made, it could not be undone, and Mullins’s crucial failure would become the subject of debate for generations of historians.6 (Mullins himself faced a court-martial back in England; though convicted of having neglected orders, he was cleared of the charge of having done so willfully.)

  Whatever the cause of the mistake, the British plan to scale the earthworks had been foiled and, for Mullins’s men, the consequences on January 8 were awful. “In less time than one can write it, the 44th Foot was literary swept from the face of the earth,” recorded Quartermaster E. N. Burroughs. “No such execution by small arms has ever been or heard of.”7

  On the opposite flank, a smaller force of companies commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rennie was to advance along the riverbank. Their objective was to overrun Jackson’s new forward redoubt—at any cost. Pakenham needed its two guns, with their line of sight across the field, to be silenced, thereby preventing a slaughter of British troops as they reached the Rodriguez Canal and clambered up the earthworks.

  A third force—consisting of General Keane, in command, and the Ninety-Third Highlanders and Ninety-Fifth Rifles—was to move on the center of the earthworks. Pakenham left in reserve the latest arrivals, the Seventh Fusiliers and the Forty-Third, led by General John Lambert.

  The British drew closer, marching in rank and file to bugle and drum, but, before the forms of the men themselves could be distinguished, the brilliant red hues of their uniforms permitted the American gunners to gauge the distance. As Jackson’s men aimed their guns, strains of “Yankee Doodle” were heard behind the American ranks. The Yankees gave three cheers and then blasted the entire line of redcoats with a round of fire.

  The oncoming British, still marching through the low-lying fog, saw “cannon-balls tearing up the ground and crossing one another, and bounding along like so many cricket-balls through the air.”8

  Truly, the fight had begun.

  The Bloodiest Parade

  From the ramparts, the entire field of battle was visible to General Jackson. To his left, a British column, some sixty men across and marching in close ranks, walked out of the mist near the swamp. The sky was suddenly alight with a shower of rockets and, on the opposite side of the field, an even larger British force emerged, advancing en masse. For the American officers watching from behind the earthwork, two-thirds of the Chalmette Plain appeared suddenly to be occupied by a very determined enemy. It was a relentless red wall of British soldiers marching toward them.

  As they charged the American gun emplacements, the Twenty-First Regiment looked down the huge barrel of the biggest American cannon, the thirty-two-pounder. Charging forward, advancing in double-quick time, George Gleig and his men failed to reach the gun position before the weapon discharged. Packed with musket balls, the load “served to sweep the center of the attacking force into eternity.”9

  Although the Twenty-First fell into disarray, the troops behind continued to push forward.

  On the left, Colonel Rennie’s force advanced rapidly, making for the crescent-shaped battery. Despite intense rifle and artillery fire, some of which came from across the river where Patterson’s guns were now in action, the British closed rapidly on their objective. Rennie led the British attackers. He took a shrapnel wound in the calf, but that didn’t stop him. He managed to leap through a gun embrasure a moment after its cannon fired, calling to his men, “Hurra, boys, the day is ours!”1
0

  An instant later, on the exposed rear of the unfinished gun emplacement, Rennie fell. A musket ball entered his skull just above the eyebrows, lodging in his brain. He’d become an easy target for the marksmen in Captain Beale’s Rifles, and the same volley that killed him took the lives of several men around him. Seeing the danger, the others in his company turned and fled.

  When the main British force approached the center of the American line at a distance of two hundred yards, rifle fire erupted: the enemy walked into “a sparkling sheet of fire.”11 Farther along the line, the charging British soldiers met with the same shower of musket balls. Jackson’s forces, crowded behind the parapets, took turns: One man in front fired, then fell back to reload, making way for the next soldier to empty his gun into the mass of oncoming humanity. Some riflemen fired as quickly as they could reload; others sighted carefully from the top of the breastwork, took deliberate aim, then shot.12

  Standing high on the parapet with a panoramic view of the field, Jackson surveyed the battle unfolding beneath him. He offered repeated exhortations.

  “Stand to your guns, don’t waste your ammunition,” he cried.

  “See that every shot tells!”

  “Give it to them, boys; let us finish the business today!”13

  He was the backbone.

  As the battle continued, supplies were running low, and tempers were running high. Jackson moved along the line but stopped at gun battery number three, under the command of the Baratarian Dominique You. A short, barrel-chested man, the pirate had impressed the general. (“If I were ordered to storm the gates of hell, with Captain Dominique as my lieutenant,” Jackson said, “I would have no misgivings of the result.”)14