Andrew Jackson (44 page)

At once the boats were readied, and the troops—a mix of infantry and marines, totaling some fourteen hundred—were chosen for the crossing. But ill luck plagued the endeavor. The same softness of soil that permitted the rapid excavation now inhibited the movement of the boats, as the just-moved dirt slumped back into the ditches whence it had come. The larger boats bottomed on the mud, blocking passage of the other vessels. Only enough boats to carry a quarter of the crossing force reached the riverbank, and these were hours behind schedule. They were supposed to cross during the night of January 7, that they might storm the American batteries on the far bank before dawn the next day. But midnight came and went, and the boats were nowhere near their goal.

J
ackson discovered the British strategy about the time the canal diggers broke through to the Mississippi. A half mile separated the American and British lines, and though Jackson and his scouts had observed general activity on the British side, they couldn’t tell what that activity signified until some British prisoners revealed just enough to allow Jackson to piece the puzzle together. He acknowledged being impressed at the undertaking and the “infinite labor” it entailed. He considered trying to interdict the digging but concluded that an offensive operation against it was too risky.

This left him to decide how to reinforce the right bank against the British sortie. The prisoners didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, how strong the thrust across the river would be. Jackson had to parry the thrust, but to send more troops over than were absolutely necessary would weaken his main defenses on the left bank. He assigned the right bank to a combination of militia from Louisiana and Kentucky and hoped for the best.

The prisoners similarly did not reveal
when
the British attack would occur. Jackson certainly would have liked to know, to make the final preparations for defense. For two weeks his men and the supporting slaves had worked feverishly, and they continued to labor around the clock. Jackson examined the results of their efforts several times daily. The ditches they had dug would slow an infantry advance. The wall—or berm, really—that they had built with the dirt from the ditches and with anything else that looked solid, including more cotton bales, afforded protection for his riflemen and musketeers. Jackson could think of little he’d left undone. When the British attacked, most of the redcoats would have to march straight up the plain toward the American entrenchments. At that point the question would come down to the nerve of the men. With enemy cannon fire raining down upon them, would they hold their ground against the famously relentless approach of the British infantry?

I
n the afternoon of the 7th it became evident that the enemy’s design was to attack,” Arsène Latour wrote. “Though at so great a distance we could not distinctly see what was passing in the enemy’s camp, we perceived that a great number of soldiers and sailors were at work, endeavouring to move something very unwieldy, which we concluded to be artillery. With the assistance of a telescope in the upper apartment of headquarters, we perceived the soldiers on Laronde’s plantations busy in making fascines, while others were working on pieces of wood, which we concluded must be scaling ladders. The picket guards near the wood had moreover been increased and stationed nearer each other.” The British activity intensified as the daylight diminished. “Shortly after night-fall we distinctly heard men at work in the enemy’s different batteries. The strokes of hammers gave ‘note of preparation’ and resounded even within our lines; and our outposts informed us that the enemy was re-establishing his batteries.”

The Americans got little rest that night. Jackson ordered the ramparts manned continuously. Troops slept on their arms, if at all. They knew that they were outnumbered and that the enemy had beaten the greatest general of Europe. They didn’t know how their own general compared with Napoleon or how they would perform under the hottest fire they could ever expect to see. Live or die, it would be the battle of a generation.

W
hat Wellington liked most about his brother-in-law was his boldness. Pakenham might be no genius, but he understood that fortune favored the bold and believed that courage could fill in where genius failed.

As the British troops formed up in the predawn dark of January 8, every soldier listened intently for firing on the far side of the river. The sound would indicate that the regiment that had gone over was attacking the American guns there and that the main assault, by these waiting, listening troops, could begin. But the fog that had enveloped the plain and the river in the dark started to whiten with the dawn, and still no sound was heard from across the water, leaving the troops to wonder whether the attack would commence after all.

A second problem surfaced when Pakenham discovered that many of his troops lacked the ladders they’d need to cross the ditches and scale the American walls. Such mundane tools could be fully as vital as the muskets and bayonets the soldiers carried. The men might drown in the ditches or be pinned at the base of the walls.

Pakenham had been through enough battles to understand that things never happened as planned. The troops sent over the river were late; they would simply have to fight harder and make up for lost time. The infantry didn’t have enough ladders; they’d have to cross the ditches and scale the walls on one another’s backs. This was the hour. The assault must go forward.

T
he dawn of day discovered to us the enemy occupying two-thirds of the space between the wood and the Mississippi,” Arsène Latour remembered. It was a daunting sight: thousands of redcoats filling the plain, sixty or seventy men deep in a broad front, moving inexorably toward the American lines. Most of those on the American side had never seen a regular army in battle formation, certainly not one as large and impressive as this.

If Jackson was daunted he didn’t let on. As soon as it was light enough for his gunners to see their targets, he gave the order to fire. Battery Six got off the first salvo, followed by Batteries Seven and Eight. Before long all three batteries were firing without pause, ignoring the return fire from the British guns, shaking the soft earth of the riverside plain, and mixing plumes of powder smoke with the rising fog.

The destructive effect of the American fire on the British soldiers in the open field was appalling. The American gunners aimed low, and each round cut a bloody, gaping hole in the redcoat ranks. No army, it seemed, could endure such carnage. But the British did, to the amazement of the Americans. “Every discharge opened the column and mowed down whole files,” Latour recalled, “which were almost instantly replaced by new troops coming up close after the first.”

The British left made the swiftest progress. One especially intrepid company reached a redoubt where they engaged the Americans in hand-to-hand, bayonet-to-gunstock fighting. After a few furious minutes they drove the Americans away. Their success encouraged their comrades, who hoped it presaged a larger break in the American line.

Jackson feared what the British hoped, and he immediately determined that the redoubt must be retaken at whatever cost. Summoning fresh troops, he threw them against the redoubt. For a long moment the whole battle centered on this single hillock of mud. The earlier roles were reversed: the British now defended and the Americans attacked. The numbers, too, were switched; the Americans outnumbered the British at this critical spot on the field. And it was the American numbers that finally told. The British were forced to yield the position they had won so courageously. “Being opposed by overwhelming numbers,” George Gleig wrote of his comrades, “they were repulsed; and the Americans, in turn, forcing their way into the battery, at length succeeded in recapturing it with immense slaughter.”

Elsewhere on the field the lack of ladders among the British became a matter of life and mostly death. Members of two British regiments braved the American fire and reached the base of the American wall. “To scale the parapet without ladders was a work of no slight difficulty,” Gleig observed. “Some few, indeed, by mounting one upon another’s shoulders, succeeded in entering the works, but these were speedily overpowered, most of them killed, and the rest taken; whilst as many as stood without were exposed to a sweeping fire which cut them down by whole companies. It was in vain that the most obstinate courage was displayed. They fell by the hands of men whom they absolutely did not see, for the Americans, without so much as lifting their faces above the rampart, swung their firelocks by one arm over the wall, and discharged them directly upon their heads.” At this point, the failure of the British force across the river to capture the guns there became dismayingly evident. “The whole of the guns, likewise, from the opposite bank, kept up a well-directed and deadly cannonade upon their flank; and thus were they destroyed without an opportunity being given of displaying their valour or obtaining so much as revenge.”

Unable to move forward, the British ranks held for a few more minutes under the murderous fire of the Americans, but finally they broke. Some of the men sought refuge in a ditch. Others simply ran for their lives. British officers rode to the ditch and ordered the troops there to re-form. They did so, reluctantly. “And now, for the second time, the column, recruited with the troops that formed the rear, advanced,” Arsène Latour wrote. “Again it was received with the same rolling fire of musketry and artillery, till, having advanced without much order very near our lines, it at last broke again, and retired in the utmost confusion. In vain did the officers now endeavour, as before, to revive the courage of their men; to no purpose did they strike them with the flat of their swords, to force them to advance. They were insensible to every thing but danger, and saw nothing but death, which had struck so many of their comrades.”

Not even Pakenham, audacious as ever, could stem the retreat. “Sir Edward saw how things were going,” George Gleig wrote, “and did all that a general could do to rally his troops. Riding toward the 44th, which had returned to the ground but in great disorder, he called out for Colonel Mullens to advance. But that officer had disappeared and was not to be found. He therefore prepared to lead them on himself, and had put himself at their head for that purpose, when he received a slight wound in the knee from a musket-ball, which killed his horse. Mounting another, he again headed the 44th, when a second ball took effect more fatally, and he dropped lifeless into the arms of his aide-de-camp.”

Pakenham’s charge to the front had inspired his men, and now his death disheartened them—and cheered the Americans, who could see him fall. The Americans were additionally encouraged—and the British further disheartened—when two other British generals, Samuel Gibbs and John Keane, went down. “A great number of officers of rank had fallen,” Arsène Latour remembered. “The ground over which the column had marched was strewed with the dead and the wounded. Such slaughter on their side, with no loss on ours, spread consternation through their ranks, as they were now convinced of the impossibility of carrying our lines, and saw that even to advance was certain death. In a word, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of some officers to make their troops form a third time, they would not advance, and all that could be obtained from them was to draw them up in the ditch, where they passed the rest of the day.”

In George Gleig’s view, the critical event was the fall of Gibbs and Keane. “Riding through the ranks,” Gleig said of the two generals’ final effort to regather the troops, “they strove by all means to encourage the assailants and recall the fugitives, till at length both were wounded and borne off the field. All was now confusion and dismay. Without leaders, ignorant of what was to be done, the troops first halted and then began to retire, till finally the retreat was changed into a flight, and they quitted the ground in utmost disorder.” Yet the British spirit wasn’t entirely broken. “The retreat was covered in gallant style by the reserve. Making a forward motion, the 7th and 43rd presented the appearance of a renewed attack, by which the enemy were so much awed that they did not venture beyond their lines in pursuit of the fugitives.”

J
ackson was hardly awed by the British, and certainly not at this point in the battle, which had gone better than he had had any reason to hope. His untested troops had stood the shock of the vaunted British charge and repelled it gloriously. In the moment of victory he was tempted to pursue the retreating British and try to annihilate the whole army. But he quickly thought better of it. To pursue the redcoats onto the open plain, with untested troops that knew nothing of maneuver, would be reckless in the extreme. Better to remain behind the defenses that had served the Americans so well.

Just
how
well those defenses served the Americans—and how cruelly the British—became apparent in the aftermath. The serious fighting ended by eight in the morning. A short while later Jackson and the ranking active British officer, John Lambert, agreed to a ceasefire to allow each side to collect its wounded and bury its dead. George Gleig wasn’t part of the British hospital detail, but he wanted to assess the damage his comrades had suffered. “Prompted by curiosity, I mounted my horse and rode to the front,” he explained. What he observed burned an image in his brain. “Of all the sights I ever witnessed, that which met me there was beyond comparison the most shocking and the most humiliating. Within the narrow compass of a few hundred yards were gathered together nearly a thousand bodies, all of them arrayed in British uniforms. Not a single American was among them; all were English, and they were thrown by dozens into shallow holes, scarcely deep enough to furnish them with a slight covering of earth. An American officer stood by smoking a cigar, and apparently counting the slain with a look of savage exultation, and repeating over and over to each individual that approached him, that their loss amounted only to eight men killed and fourteen men wounded.”