Andrew Jackson (41 page)
The offensive would start at New Orleans. The city controlled the lower Mississippi, which provided ready access to the interior of the continent and thereby allowed a link to British forces in Canada. New Orleans, moreover, had psychological value that transcended geography. The United States was a novelty in world affairs, a country founded not on kinship or shared history or language but on an idea: that people could govern themselves. The English didn’t reject the notion entirely. Their Parliament was premised on just such thinking. But British self-government was restricted to the responsible classes, unlike the American version, which was rapidly evolving from republicanism to democracy. And democracy was dangerous, whether practiced in North America, where pushy democrats would perennially grasp for more land, or imported to England, where the lower classes would get unsettling ideas. New Orleans was a test case for the American mode of political organization. Its polyglot population shared nothing of history or language or culture. If the American idea of self-government could work in New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, it could work anywhere. The thought was appalling.
Approaching New Orleans was easy enough during peacetime. That, of course, was why the city was located where it was, on the left bank a bit more than one hundred miles above the main channel’s entrance to the Gulf. But if the approach was easy, it was almost always slow. The river made several turns below the city, and these typically required sailing ships to stop and wait for a change of wind or at least a change of tide. After a voyage of weeks or months, a few hours or even days meant little to a merchant vessel. But to a hostile warship, such a delay would probably be fatal, as the French and then the Spanish and now the Americans had identified the bottlenecks and located gun batteries accordingly. Reducing an enemy squadron to kindling would be little more than target practice.
Yet if a direct approach upstream was impossible, other approaches to the city were not simply feasible but inviting. Indeed, an enemy commander had a choice of routes. He could land troops on the shore of Lake Borgne, east of the city, and march in from there. He could penetrate Lake Pontchartrain, west of Borgne, and send a force south to the city. He could move north from Barataria Bay or from some point west. This required crossing the Mississippi, which entailed difficulty but commensurate chance of surprise. A fourth route to New Orleans was the longest. An enemy might land at Pensacola or Mobile Bay and skirt north of Lake Pontchartrain to Baton Rouge. Once captured, this lightly defended town would allow the enemy to close the Mississippi above New Orleans, isolating the city. A march downriver would complete the job.
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his fourth route was the one Jackson had hoped to preclude by taking Pensacola and chasing the British off. He couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t return, but he had the other approaches to worry about as he headed toward New Orleans in late November. The prospect should have discouraged him. The British owned the sea, which gave them mobility he lacked. The army they were bringing—from the Chesapeake, with reinforcements from the Caribbean—substantially outnumbered his. They possessed the advantage of the offensive, being able to choose their approach to the city. And given the restiveness of the population of New Orleans and Louisiana, they had reason to expect support or at least acquiescence from the locals.
Jackson couldn’t change the balance of power in the Gulf or the geography of the Mississippi delta. But he could hope to alter the mood of the people he was charged to defend. He reached New Orleans on December 1 and discovered that John Windship was right about the irredentist and seditionist tendencies of the French and Spanish inhabitants. (He didn’t have a chance to meet Windship, who had just died of one of the endemic diseases to which he thought he had become inured.) A few of the foreign-born openly hoped for defeat, circulating stories that a British victory would restore Louisiana to Spanish control. Others disguised their desires in defeatism, contending that Jackson’s pitiful force of militia and volunteers could never defeat Britain’s battle-hardened troops. The negative feelings of those who hoped for the worst spread, provoking fear among those who wished for better.
Jackson confronted the issue, and the populace, with characteristic boldness. “The Major General commanding has with astonishment and regret learned that great consternation and alarm pervade your city,” he proclaimed to the citizens. He didn’t deny that there were grounds for concern. “It is true the enemy is on our coast and threatens an invasion of our territory.” But proximity and threat were hardly the sum of the story. “It is equally true, with union, energy, and the approbation of heaven, we will beat him at every point his temerity may induce him to set foot upon our soil.” Jackson said he had heard the rumors that a victorious Britain would restore Louisiana to Spain. “Believe not such incredible tales. Your government is at peace with Spain.” Jackson couldn’t say how long the United States would be at peace with Spain; news of his raid on Pensacola was still crossing the Atlantic. But for now the danger came from Britain—“the vital enemy of your country, the common enemy of mankind, the highway robber of the world.” Jackson hoped good sense would prevail against the seditious rumors. But he was prepared to supplement sense where its effects fell shy. “The rules and articles of war annex the punishment of death to any person holding secret correspondence with the enemy, creating false alarm, or supplying him with provision. . . . The general announces his unalterable determination rigidly to execute the martial law in all cases. . . . He will separate our enemies from our friends. Those who are not with us are against us, and will be dealt with accordingly.”
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ackson might have waited for exhortation to have its effect, but on the very day the papers of New Orleans published his proclamation, word arrived that British vessels had captured American gunboats on Lake Borgne. As the lake was less than a day’s march from the outskirts of New Orleans, this severely compressed Jackson’s schedule for sorting the sheep from the goats.
He responded, as decisively as ever, by seizing complete control over the city and all within it. “Major General Andrew Jackson, commanding the Seventh United States Military District, declares the city and environs of New Orleans under strict martial law,” a new proclamation read. It specified what martial law meant. “Every individual entering the city will report at the Adjutant General’s office, and on failure, to be arrested and held for examination. No person shall be permitted to leave the city without a permission in writing signed by the General or one of his staff. No vessel, boat, or other craft will be permitted to leave New Orleans or Bayou St. John without a passport in writing.” A strict curfew took effect. “The street lamps shall be extinguished at the hour of nine at night, after which period persons of every description found in the streets, or not at their respective homes, without permission in writing as aforesaid and not having the countersign shall be apprehended as spies and held for examination.”
Jackson complemented martial law by taking charge of the Louisiana militia. His experience with the Tennessee militia had taught him the difficulty of making soldiers out of ordinary young men. But the Louisiana militia presented a challenge of a different order. He reviewed the militia companies in the Place des Armes on December 18, and as he gazed out across the square he must have wondered how he was going to defend the city with such a motley bunch. The ranks included Americans and Frenchmen and Spanish, whites and blacks and persons of mixed race, poor and middling and rich. Some mustered willingly, others with great reluctance. Some hoped for success, others for failure. Most simply hoped to survive whatever Jackson had in store for them. All knew they’d be fighting British regulars, the best battlefield soldiers in the world.
The sight of his new troops hardly inspired Jackson’s confidence—which simply meant that
he
had to inspire confidence in
them
. The Creek campaign had already shown Jackson to be a capable tactician; the defense of New Orleans would prove him a master, and a brilliant organizer as well. But what truly set him apart from other generals was his ability to motivate his men. Many of them loved him, starting with those who named him Old Hickory on the march home from Natchez. Nearly all of them feared him, including the would-be mutineers he threatened with cannon fire and everyone who heard the sad story of John Wood.
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.”
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ackson’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.”
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he 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.”