Andrew Jackson (42 page)
Gleig’s regiment and two others—totaling sixteen hundred men, with two small cannons—landed on the southern shore of Lake Borgne after a very long day at the oars. The landing place was a reed-covered marsh where humans rarely ventured. With disaffected locals acting as guides, the invaders followed a canal south toward the Mississippi. The going was slow. The path by the canal was slippery, and numerous intersecting waterways had to be bridged. For the first few hours the country appeared as wild as the marsh where they landed, but eventually they reached the edge of the plantation country, where the stubble of harvested sugar cane replaced the tall river cane that covered much of the rest of the region. They passed orange groves and then some farmhouses. Moving as quickly as they could, they captured the inhabitants of the houses to prevent their giving the alarm that the enemy had landed. “But becoming rather careless in watching their prisoners,” Gleig recorded of the British troops guarding the captives, “one man contrived to effect his escape.”
T
his man was Gabriel Villeré, the son of Jacques Villeré, who had commanded the Louisiana militia before Jackson took over and who owned the plantation on which the British invaders now stood. The younger Villeré had been given responsibility for monitoring the approaches from Lake Borgne. His personal embarrassment at having been caught unawares now intensified his patriotism and spurred him to New Orleans to spread the alarm. He reached Jackson’s headquarters in the early afternoon of December 23.
Unwelcome though it was, Villeré’s report partly solved Jackson’s most pressing problem: learning where the enemy was. He expected to be outnumbered by the British, but as the defender he could stand a modest deficit in the balance of troop strength. What he
couldn’t
stand was being outflanked. Once that happened he’d lose the advantage of defense and probably lose the city. And the only way he could avoid being outflanked was to discover—or guess—where the enemy was.
With the report from Villeré’s plantation, he knew where at least part of the enemy was. But he couldn’t tell whether these troops were the spearhead of a larger landing force or a diversion designed to draw him away from the real invasion. And he wouldn’t know for days—until it was too late to correct a wrong guess.
He didn’t propose to wait. He would strike the invaders that very day—or night, by the time he got there. If they were the tip of the spear, he would blunt it and perhaps turn aside or at least slow the larger force to follow. If they were a diversion, a lightning strike would allow him to return to the city in time to meet the main blow.
“Perfectly convinced of the importance of impressing an invading enemy in the first moment of his approach with an idea of spirited resistance, I lost no time in making preparations to attack him that night,” Jackson explained to James Monroe afterward. “I was not ignorant of the inferiority of my force, nor of the hazard of night attacks with inexperienced troops. But the fears to be entertained from these sources were overbalanced by the greater evils to be apprehended from delay. . . . If the attack were postponed till the next day, the fate of New Orleans must depend on the result of a general engagement in which the chances of success would be greatly against us, while by bringing it on at night, the enemy not being able to ascertain our numbers would of course magnify them, and be thrown into perplexity at any rate, if not into consternation.” A night attack would also favor Jackson’s side in case retreat was necessary. He and his men knew the ground. The British didn’t.
Jackson cobbled together a force of some fifteen hundred troops drawn from his three army regiments, the Tennessee militia, and the New Orleans militia, and including two hundred black volunteers from Haiti (who feared anything that enhanced European power in the Caribbean and thereby threatened their country’s hard-won independence). His own troops were eager for the chance to fight the British. “It may not be altogether a Christian spirit, but I really would like to see some redcoats in front of us, just once if no more,” John Coffee had written his wife as the Creek campaign wound down. “Like all the rest of the boys, I am tired of thrashing redskins. . . . My men are so used to killing Indians that they are almost sorry for them. But they have no pity for the redcoats, who, they declare, are to be held responsible for all the devilment the Indians have done. Every one of my boys wants to get within fair buckrange of a redcoat.”
From the bustle at headquarters and the mustering of the troops, the inhabitants of New Orleans soon discovered that the British had landed and were within six miles of the city. Alarm approaching panic convulsed many households, where lurid stories of a redcoat penchant for ravishing helpless women had been whispered for weeks and now were spoken in voices cracking from fear. Fathers readied their wives and daughters for flight upstream, while they buried the family cash and jewels in their gardens and oiled their rifles. Jackson, at the head of the column marching toward Villeré’s plantation, told Edward Livingston, a local who became his aide-de-camp, to try to calm the people. “Say to them not to be alarmed,” Jackson ordered. “The enemy shall never reach the city.”
Jackson’s implacable will could be terrifying—to enemies, to mutineers—but at times like this it was tremendously reassuring. When Jackson said the British would never reach the city, it was hard not to believe him. His vow alone didn’t dissipate the fear, but it did prevent a full-blown panic. New Orleans would give the general a chance to prove his mettle.
The march from the city took two hours, bringing Jackson within sight of the British just before dark. They weren’t surprised to see him, but they didn’t expect action before the next day. And they assumed they would be the ones initiating it. “As the Americans had never yet dared to attack,” Gleig wrote, “there was no great probability of their doing so on the present occasion.”
The British were hungry and cold and so kindled fires for cooking and warmth. Some of them observed the approach of a sailing vessel, which dropped anchor and furled its sails opposite the British camp. In the dark it was hard to identify the craft. Several supposed it was a British ship that had managed to elude the American forts downstream and would assist in the attack on New Orleans. Some of Gleig’s comrades hailed the ship, but they received no answer—till an American voice called out, in words that carried distinctly across the water, “Give them this for the honour of America!” The roar of cannons followed instantly, and antipersonnel grapeshot screamed through the night air, raking the groups gathered around the campfires. Scattering for their lives, the British returned the American cannon fire with muskets, which had no effect, and rockets, which “made a beautiful appearance in the air,” Gleig recalled, but which missed their target.
Jackson followed the artillery barrage with assaults at several points of the British lines. In the dark the British had no idea how many the Americans were or even where they were coming from. “Now began a battle of which no language were competent to convey any distinct idea,” Gleig wrote, “because it was one to which the annals of modern warfare furnish no parallel. All order, all discipline were lost. Each officer, as he succeeded in collecting twenty or thirty men about him, plunged into the midst of the enemy’s ranks, where it was fought hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, and sabre to sabre.”
The fighting lasted most of the night, and such was the confusion that both sides thought they had won. “The victory was ours,” Gleig asserted. “True, it was the reverse of a bloodless one, not fewer than two hundred and fifty of our best men having fallen in the struggle. But even at the expense of such a loss, we could not but account ourselves fortunate in escaping from the snare in which we had confessedly been taken.”
Jackson interpreted things differently. The enemy had been beaten back, the threat to New Orleans blunted. “The result equaled my expectations,” he wrote. “From every point on which we assailed him, he was repulsed.” Jackson thought he could have captured the entire British force if a heavy fog hadn’t set in, impeding operations even more than the dark alone had. “The main object, however, had been effected. The enemy, taken at surprise and thrown into confusion, was unable to penetrate our designs and feared to prosecute his own.”
In war, ties go to the defender. Jackson had the better of this argument, since the British failed in their effort to take New Orleans by surprise. And the strong showing of the Americans in the night battle of December 23–24 did wonders for the morale of the city. Jackson had said the British wouldn’t enter the city, and they hadn’t. Maybe he could keep them out after all.
D
uring the very hours when Jackson was repelling Britian’s initial thrust toward New Orleans, the American diplomats at Ghent concluded a peace treaty with their British counterparts. Adams, Clay, and the others were still expecting a slow winter when, in early December, they started to detect a softening in the British position. The Americans gradually inferred that the simultaneous Congress of Vienna wasn’t going the way the British had hoped. As it had for generations, Europe mattered more to Britain than America did, and the British government felt increasing pressure to terminate the hostilities across the Atlantic. Wellington himself weighed in with a damp blanket. “I feel no objection to going to America,” the Iron Duke declared, “though I don’t promise to myself much success there.” Meanwhile he sent an encouraging note to American peacemaker Gallatin: “In you I have the greatest confidence. I hear on all sides that your moderation and sense of justice, places you above all the other delegates, not excepting ours.”
Gallatin was grateful for the encouragement but even more appreciative of the abandonment by the British negotiators of the most onerous of their early demands. They accepted the prewar status quo as the territorial basis for peace, they dropped the idea of an Indian state, and they fell silent on navigation of the Mississippi.
Gallatin persuaded his colleagues to reciprocate. Adams and Clay continued to quarrel, but neither they nor the others could disguise their relief at the prospect of escaping the war with nothing lost save Washington’s public buildings, some private property, and considerable American pride. They exceeded instructions by no longer insisting on a British renunciation of impressment, but they rationalized that the end of the European war had made the issue moot. They relinquished their indemnity claims, which had been a daydream all along. And they forgot about forswearing alliances with Indians, on the assumption that the peace would last and neither side would have occasion to employ Indians against the other.
The reciprocal concessions led to a treaty. On December 24 the delegates exchanged signatures and handshakes. “The terms of this instrument are undoubtedly not such as our country expected at the commencement of the war,” Clay wrote Monroe, in one of the rare understatements of Clay’s political life. “Judged of, however, by the actual condition of things, so far as it is known to us, they cannot be pronounced very unfavorable. We lose no territory, I think no honor.” Adams received the copies of the treaty from his British counterpart. “I told him I hoped it would be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States,” Adams recorded. That night he thanked God for the peace and offered “a fervent prayer that its result may be propitious to the welfare, the best interests, and the union of my country.”
Like the others, including the British, young James Gallatin was simply glad the war was over. “The British delegates very civilly asked us to dinner,” he wrote on Christmas Day. “The roast beef and plum pudding was from England, and everybody drank everybody else’s health. The band played first ‘God Save the King,’ to the toast of the King, and ‘Yankee Doodle,’ to the toast of the President. Congratulations on all sides and a general atmosphere of serenity; it was a scene to be remembered.” Gallatin added, after the excitement of the signing and dining wore off, “Although I am only seventeen years of age, I feel much older.”
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ew Orleans celebrated Christmas in more subdued fashion. Though the city sighed with relief at Jackson’s repulse of the first British landing, everyone knew the real battle was yet to come. Many prepared for the worst, notwithstanding Jackson’s strong showing at the Villeré plantation. The British army was now known to be much larger than Jackson’s force, and in a full-scale battle this generation of redcoats had never been beaten. A rumor began circulating that Jackson had a plan for retreat in the event the British proved too strong and that on leaving the city he would set it afire. The inhabitants whose attachment to the city was deeper than their attachment to the United States wondered whether Jackson might be more dangerous to their interests than the British were. The speaker of the Louisiana senate made so bold as to ask Jackson’s adjutant, Robert Butler, whether Jackson did indeed intend to burn the city if it couldn’t be held. When Butler inquired why he asked, the speaker said frankly that the legislature wanted to know whether to consider surrendering the city to the British. It was fortunate for the speaker and the leaders of the legislature that Jackson at this time couldn’t spare a minute from his preparations against the next British attack, or he might have had the lawmakers arrested for treason. As it was he ordered Governor Claiborne to keep an eye on them and seize the first ones who made a move toward surrender.
Yet he acceded to the lawmakers’ concerns on another count. As the British drew near, the New Orleans committee of safety reconsidered the earlier decision to shun Jean Laffite and the pirates of Barataria. No one in the city had more experience at arms than these soldiers of fortune. At the moment of crisis, prudence required overlooking past indiscretions.
Jackson had to be convinced. He doubted the Baratarians’ loyalty, which had never been to anything beyond their own self-interest. And he doubted even more their willingness to take orders. For Jackson, discipline remained the sine qua non of successful military operations. What pirate ever submitted to discipline?