by John Barth
Or so for a dizzy moment he imagines, till he learns from a redcoated officer that it is Bayou Bienvenue whose muddy bank he sits on, not the Chesapeake: those are cypresses, not pines, and it is Christmas Day, 1814. The sailors who row him down to Cochrane’s headquarters are jeering openly at the soldiers encamped along the way; morale does not seem high. At the Villeré plantation, British GHQ, word has it that Cochrane and Pakenham are still arguing strategy. An army aide comes out to interrogate the rescued scouts: Andrew declares to him that the key to Jackson’s defense is two armed schooners anchored in English Turn, a bend of the Mississippi below the city. So long as they lie there, he swears, no approach by road to the American main line is feasible; but to destroy them will involve the construction of artillery batteries on the levee above.
Such exactly (Cook already knows) is General Pakenham’s plan. Gratified by this confirmation of its wisdom, the general proceeds to devote the next two days to the laborious construction of those batteries, while his army twiddles its thumbs and Admiral Cochrane sends crossly for the bearer of that information. Fickle strategist that he is, unused (as a navy man) to thinking of terrain, it nonetheless seems to him clear folly to delay the whole army’s advance in order to lay siege to a minor nuisance that can as easily be attended to when Jackson’s main line has been breached. When he discovers who it is who has confirmed Pakenham in this folly, he is ready to muster a firing squad at once—but the “Spanish fishermen,” on cue, swear that Cook is a defected Baratarian, erstwhile friend and now rival of Jean Lafitte; and Cook himself confesses at once to Cochrane that his information is fraudulent; that the admiral’s own assessment of the situation is entirely correct.
Shoot him, Cochrane orders. But Andrew then hands him a confidential letter purportedly from Jean Lafitte to General Jackson, affirming that if the British can only be led to attack those schooners first, the defense barricade will be impregnable to anything short of a full-scale artillery barrage. Shoot him! Cochrane commands, even more outraged. Andrew then asks, as his final request, a private word with the admiral and his closest aides, and as soon as the army men step outside, he draws the moral that Cochrane has not yet grasped. Let the army waste its time on the schooners (one will be abandoned and destroyed; the Baratarians will tow the other upriver to safety, from where it can strengthen the main line) and on a follow-up infantry assault, which American artillery will easily repulse, one hopes without too great loss of life. Pakenham then twice defeated, Cochrane can mount an artillery line of his own with the only heavy guns available—those from his fleet, superior in size and number to the Americans’—and make good his boast. Navy cannon will destroy the defense and most of the defenders; the marines can do the rest, with as much or little army assistance as they may require!
It is Andrew’s private hope that Pakenham’s assault will be just costly enough to persuade both commanders to await reinforcement. In fact, the Baratarians prove such excellent cannoneers that when Pakenham attacks on the 28th, his force is pinned to the mud for seven hours and obliged to a humiliating night retreat with 200 casualties, most of them dead, as against 17 on the American side. Mortified, the general accedes to “Cochrane’s” plan for an artillery duel. But it will require three days more to construct even rudimentary emplacements, while Jackson’s ditches and embankments grow daily deeper, higher, stronger, and the Americans’ morale improves with every new success…
In those three days, Andrew writes, given fair freedom of the British camp by Admiral Cochrane, I cast about for my next expedient. For tho I was assured that the Admiral’s guns, however superior, could not breach Jackson’s earthworks (in the event, all those tons of British cannonballs plough’d into the mud & but strengthen’d the walls!), and that the famous marksmanship of the Baratarians would carry the day, I was not confident that a peace would be sign’d, or we have news of it, before Army & Navy mended their differences, fetcht up their reserves, and made a mighty attempt to add Louisiana to the status quo ante bellum.
On the 29th he hears a valuable rumor: that Major General Gibbs, Pakenham’s second in command, thinks both his chief and Admiral Cochrane mad for planning to send infantry over ground so marshy that it cannot be entrenched, to cross a wide ditch (virtually a moat) and scale a high mud wall without proper fascines and ladders. Two days later he hears another: that one Lieutenant Colonel Mullens of the 44th Infantry Regiment, whose wife is among the officers’ ladies come over with the fleet, has been cuckolded by Admiral Malcolm of the Royal Oak, on which ship Mrs. Mullens is waiting out the battle; and that her husband is properly embittered by this state of affairs.
On New Year’s morning, 1815, Cochrane’s artillery mounts its barrage. The infantry await behind to make their assault as soon as Jackson’s wall is breached. Forty minutes later, so accurate is the Baratarians’ reply, half the British cannon are out of action; by afternoon the infantry must be withdrawn without ever attacking; that night the surviving ship’s guns, so toilsomely emplaced, must be toilsomely retrieved through the marsh. The Americans are jubilant and scarcely damaged; the thrice-repulsed British suffer nearly a hundred additional casualties and a great loss of face, confidence, guns, and ammunition.
Pakenham and Cochrane are now equally humiliated… but to Andrew’s distress they do not abandon the siege. Aside from the burning of Washington (in which action George Cockburn was the driving spirit) Cochrane has won no victories in this fast-concluding war; and Sir Edward Pakenham (Andrew has now learned) carries a secret commission to be the first royal governor of Louisiana. They agree to wait for the reinforcements and supplies en route from Havana and then mount an overwhelming attack from both sides of the Mississippi: if American cannon can be captured on one flank and turned against the center while fascines and scaling ladders are positioned, Jackson’s defense will be breached by sheer force of numbers. It will not be inexpensive, they agree: but the prize, and the salvaging of their reputations, is worth the cost.
I understood, writes Andrew, that my efforts to discourage them had but raised the stakes, and that as their troops grew the more disheartened, their commanders turn’d the more stubborn. Unable now to prevent a grand battle, I was obliged to see not only that it fail, but that it fail miserably, beyond that of re-enactment.
He is not surprised that, after the New Year’s Day fiasco, Cochrane no longer seeks his advice; indeed, he discreetly avoids the admiral’s sight. From those Baratarian spies among the Spanish fishermen he picks up a third valuable rumor: that Admiral Malcolm has let General Pakenham know that he will be much obliged if Lieutenant Colonel Mullens can be assigned some particularly hazardous duty in the coming action. And from the cynical foot soldiers he learns further that Pakenham has chosen his critic, General Gibbs, to lead the main assault on the American center. At Gibbs’s desperate insistence the corps of engineers is building ten-foot ladders and heavy fascines of ripe sugarcane, the only available material. Lieutenant Colonel Mullens’s 44th Regiment is under Gibbs’s command: it wants no military expertise to guess what “particularly hazardous duty” lies ahead for Mrs. Mullens’s husband, whom Andrew now befriends and apprises of the rumors current.
He was a dour, melancholical fellow, this Mullens, Andrew reports, but neither a coward nor a fool. Unsurprised & bitter as he was to learn the scheme against himself, his first thot was for his men. When his orders came down on the evening of January 7, and he was ask’d if he understood them, he reply’d: ’Twas clear as day: his regiment were order’d to their execution, to make a bridge of their bodies for Sir Edward to enter New Orleans upon.
Nevertheless, he musters his men and marches them that night toward their position, stopping en route to pick up their burden at the engineers’ redoubt. Ladders and fascines are strewn everywhere; but their makers not being among the units ordered into combat next morning, they and their officers have retired. Cursing their good fortune and his ill, Mullens goes in search of someone authorized to give him official consignment
of the gear—until Andrew, who has accompanied him thus far, finds the opportunity he has sought and makes his third and final contribution to the Battle of New Orleans.
I pointed out, he reports to Andrée, that his orders specify’d taking delivery of the fascines & ladders and proceeding with them to the front, to be ready for attack at dawn. But to appropriate that equipage without a sign’d release from the engineering battalion would be to exceed his authority. If no officer was present to consign the ladders to us, I argued, the dereliction was the engineers’, not ours. We would do better to arm ourselves & take our stations for battle without the ladders, than to take the ladders without authorization.
Seductive as this logic is, Mullens fears court-martial. But dawn is approaching; they have wasted a quarter hour already at the redoubt; Andrew resolves the matter by having Mullens deputize him to find the appropriate engineering officer and bid him rouse his men to fetch the ladders and fascines forward, while Mullens sees to it the 44th are in position. Otherwise their tardiness might be imputed to lack of courage. Mullens shrugs, moves the regiment on—and Andrew does nothing.
Now, it is possible the British would have lost the battle even with their scaling equipment: the marines assigned to cross the Mississippi in 50 boats at midnight, capture the American cannon on the west bank, and open fire on Jackson’s center at dawn to signal the attack, are delayed by mud slides and adverse current; they reach the west bank only at dawn—their force reduced from 1,400 to less than 500 by confusions, desertions, and garbled orders—and find themselves swept by the current five miles below their appointed landing place. The guns are not even approached, much less captured, until well after the main assault has failed.
But the missing ladders and fascines are indisputably crucial. When General Gibbs, by dawn’s early light, sees the 44th in position without them, he claps his brow, rushes over to Pakenham, and vows to hang Mullens from the highest cypress in the swamp. Pakenham himself angrily orders Mullens and 300 of his men to return for the ladders, authorization or no authorization. But it is a quarter-mile trip each way, and the gear is heavy. From the engineers’ redoubt they hear the first shots of the battle. Dozens of the 44th refuse to pick up the equipment and return to the line; scores of others, fearing court-martial, assume their burden but take their own time, hoping the assault will have been made or abandoned before they get there.
Even now Mullens is inclined to comply, however sluggishly, with his orders. But Andrew confesses to him that he himself deliberately disobeyed the colonel’s command to rouse up the engineers; that he had done so to save the 44th from suicide, and will answer for his action to any court-martial; that it is Mullens’s feckless complaisance with his superiors that has lost him his wife; and that should he return to the line now, either Gibbs will shoot him for not ordering the regiment forward, or his men will shoot him for doing so, or the Americans will shoot them all. Be a man, Andrew ironically exhorts him: Stay here & lay the blame on me.
Mullens does, and disappears from our story (he will live to be court-martialed for incompetence; of his marital affairs no more is known). Fewer than half of the 300 return to the line; of those, many feign or suffer confusion, throw away the ladders and fascines, and open random fire. Jackson’s cannoneers reply with a barrage that blows them into panic retreat. They ignore Gibbs’s orders to regroup and charge. Pakenham himself, finding Mullens vanished, leads the remnants of the 44th some three dozen yards forward, and is killed by Baratarian grapeshot. Gibbs takes his place, gets as close as twenty yards from Jackson’s ditch, and is cut down by rifle fire. Major General Keane, third in command, falls a few minutes later trying to rescue Gibbs. The few intrepid British who actually manage to cross the ditch and scale the embankment are immediately killed or captured.
The Battle of New Orleans is less than half an hour old, and effectively over. Major General Lambert of the reserve units, unexpectedly promoted from fourth in command to commander in chief, orders his men to attack. They refuse. He then orders retreat, and is willingly obeyed. Most of the rest of the army are pinned to the muddy plain by Jackson’s barrage. At 8:30 A.M. the riflery ceases, the attackers having crawled back out of range; the artillery is sustained with deadly effect into early afternoon, when Lambert sends a flag of truce and begs leave to remove his wounded and bury his dead. They total 2,000, as against half a dozen Americans killed and seven wounded.
’Twas a scene to end an Iliad, writes Andrew, that huge interment in the bloody bog; I resolved to take advantage of it to recross the lines & resume my Odyssey. But that same sudden swoon, which had afflicted me in the bayou on Christmas Eve day, now smote me again as I mingled with the burial parties. Once more I awoke to think myself on Bloodsworth Island, and found myself on the shores of Louisiana! I had been fetcht back to Lake Borgne as one of the wounded; recognized now by Admiral Cochrane’s sailors, I was detain’d a virtual prisoner, as accessory to the Mullens affair. Had news of the Peace not reacht us ashore at Fort Bowyer (which Cochrane seized to console himself for the loss of New Orleans) instead of aboard ship, I had surely been return’d to England in irons or hang’d from the yardarm for a spy. But in the officers’ chagrin (and the enlisted men’s rejoicing) at that same news, I contrived on St. Valentine’s Day to hide myself in the Fort till my captors departed. I then posted to you the letter begun off Bermuda the summer before (which seem’d already a hundred years since), and made my way back to New Orleans, to await your arrival with the twins, when we should commence a new life in new surroundings. Whilst awaiting you there, I thot to complete that other letter begun in Washington, which I was not to finish until Rochefort in the July to come.
He has other thoughts as well. It is getting on to March; for some weeks no new installments of Les lettres algériennes have appeared in L’Abeille, though its heroine (Corinna!) has been left in parlous straits, abandoned by her protector and captured by pirates off Port-au-Prince. Andrew goes to Conti Street, makes inquiries, learns that while “C.C.” is in reasonably good health, her child, a daughter, died at birth on that same St. Valentine’s Day. Further, that Renato Beluche, no longer interested in her, has paid her rent through May and gone with the Lafittes to Grande-Terre Island (the site of Barataria) to discuss the resumption of their privateering. Understandably, Andrew does not dwell upon the reunion, but in the next passages of his letter his I turns not infrequently into a we.
He remains in New Orleans (in the Conti Street lodgings) until May, “consoling” himself (the term is his) as best he can while awaiting his family’s appearance. “Uncle Renato,” grateful, keeps him employed forging false bills of lading and other useful documents. With Jean Lafitte, Andrew’s relations grow even closer (except with Consuelo, he resumes the name André Castine). Whereas Beluche is interested in the rebel Simón Bolivar and the Mexican revolt against Spain, Lafitte is actively supporting the colony of Bonapartist exiles at Champ d’Asile. Andrew harmonizes their interests by encouraging a French and Mexican alliance against Spain; if it should succeed, Bolivar might head a federation of republics comprising most of Central and South America, while his French or Creole counterpart might found a nation from western Louisiana to the Pacific!
Consuelo, weary of America and homesick for Andalusia, even for Algiers, is not interested. Lafitte is, and proposes rescuing Napoleon from Elba to lead the campaign. As mentioned in the postscript to his “Washington” letter, Andrew doubts the feasibility of that scheme—until early April, when news reaches Louisiana that the emperor has already escaped, landed at the Gulf of Juan, and struck out for Paris! Beluche shrugs and sets about the commissioning of a ship and the assembling of a crew to begin taking Spanish prizes under license from Bolivar; Lafitte presses “André” to join him in establishing another Barataria somewhere west of New Orleans. Andrée does not appear, or reply to his letter.
In May, despairing of your coming here, & doubting my welcome at Castines Hundred, we sail’d for France, writes Andrew. His errand
is to interest Napoleon—whose reascendancy in Europe Lafitte never doubts—in the “Louisiana Project,” to the extent of sending French ships and men “to aid the cause of Mexican independence” once the military situation in Europe is in hand. On the advice of Jean Blanque he carries by way of credentials a forged letter from Mayor Girod of New Orleans (who had in fact been as interested as Lafitte in the Elba mission), appealing to the emperor “on behalf of all French Creoles.” The voyage is financed jointly by Lafitte and Beluche, the latter on condition that Andrew see to Consuelo’s safe return to her homeland.
As they traverse these waters (where Mrs. M. and I now reenact together certain separate youthful passions), Consuelo endeavors, we cannot know how successfully, to reenact their earlier shipboard affairs. She has decided that the novel is a worn-out fad; she adduces as evidence the fact that she herself has ceased reading anything in that kind. Andrew’s information that Samuel Richardson himself, the father of the epistolary novel, had said essentially the same thing (quoting his booksellers, in letters dated 1758 and 1759), she takes as validation of her stand. The true romanticismo, she now believes with Mme de Staël, is the active life; despite her weariness with America, she is prepared to exchange both literary fame and the domestic joys of wife- and motherhood to hazard the world at the side of a lover in the advance guard of history, so to speak.
Andrew gently reminds her that Mme de Staël, at last report, seemed to have put by both fiction and action for reflection. And, “transported by longing for [his] own family,” he permits himself “a panegyric on parenthood, conjugal fidelity, & domestical bliss,” for all which, he declares to Consuelo, she is in his opinion more admirably suited by temperament than for literary, political, or sexual adventuring. His friend mistakes his meaning, agrees at once, and “flinging herself upon [his] neck, with tears of joy accept[s his] proposal!”
