Andrew Jackson (45 page)

Arsène Latour visited the same killing fields. He may have passed Gleig, though neither had any reason to remark the meeting. “The whole plain on the left, as also the side of the river, from the road to the edge of the water, was covered with the British soldiers who had fallen,” Latour wrote. “What might perhaps appear incredible, were there not many thousands ready to attest the fact, is that a space of ground extending from the ditch of our lines to that on which the enemy drew up his troops, two hundred and fifty yards in length, by about two hundred in breadth, was literally covered with men, either dead or severely wounded.” Latour couldn’t count the bodies, but the British losses were obviously immense. “It cannot have amounted to less than three thousand men in killed, wounded, and prisoners. . . . Our loss was comparatively inconsiderable, amounting to no more than thirteen in killed and wounded.”

T
he winter of 1814–15 had been the darkest for America since the grim season of Valley Forge. As during that earlier crisis, the very existence of the republic was in danger. Federalists in Hartford plotted against the administration and perhaps against the Union, while a powerful British land and sea force prepared to invade the American South and slice the nation from bottom to top. Easterners and especially visitors to Washington, where the blackened ruins of the Capitol and the White House stood starkly amid a heavy December snowfall, couldn’t imagine that the British might fail to defeat the motley regiments of a general who had bested Indians but never confronted a real army. The only news from Ghent, three thousand miles of stormy ocean away, was that the British demands were extortionately unrealistic, designed to humiliate and dismember the country most Britons had never considered legitimate. One didn’t have to be an alarmist to imagine that spring would find the United States
dis
united, with New England seceded and the trans-Mississippi territories apportioned among the Europeans and Indians. The Boston
Gazette
made no secret where its seditious hopes lay. “Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America, who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison and Jefferson and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their faces against us for years, and spirited up the brutal part of the populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we, then, any longer be held in slavery and driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction?” The Madison administration struggled to convey an optimism it didn’t feel. Its mouthpiece, the
National Intelligencer
, mustered no more than a double negative as it looked toward the Mississippi: “Appearances justify the expectation of the British expedition not being ineffectually resisted.” Thirty-six years after George Washington had kept the American Revolution alive on a bleak hillside near Philadelphia, the experiment in republicanism seemed on the verge of dissolution.

And then, across the frozen fields and barren hopes of February, a blessed zephyr blew in from the South. Andrew Jackson had stood before New Orleans and defeated Wellington’s invincibles. The South was secure, and with it the West. And New England also, for the defeatism that fed the secessionist dreams of the radical Federalists evaporated in the sudden glow of Jackson’s triumph. Never had the mood of the nation changed so quickly, from despair to confidence. The republic survived. The Union was saved.

L
ouisiana is still American,” Mrs. Edward Livingston wrote her sister on the Thursday after the Sunday battle. “God has granted us a brilliant victory, and has spared the lives of those dear to us.” Louise Moreau de Lassy Livingston was the widow of a French officer who had been stationed in New Orleans, and was now the wife of Jackson’s attaché, Edward Livingston. With the rest of New Orleans she had endured the weeks of preparation for the battle, the heart-stopping rumors of what British soldiers did to innocent women, and the fearsome thunder of the artillery exchanges. “Such feelings cannot be described,” she told her sister. “The battle-ground is only a league from the city, and I could not only hear the booming of the cannon, as the house shook each time, but every musket could be heard also.” Yet she, with the others, had put faith in General Jackson. And they had been amply rewarded. “There never was a more glorious victory, nor one that cost less blood. Not a single father of a family was killed, and the joy of the people, thanks be to God, is unalloyed by private sorrow. Everybody thinks this battle will end the war, and that the enemy will at once re-embark. Should this prove the case, it is impossible to conceive a more brilliant success for American arms or one more full of disaster for the English.”

Jackson didn’t underestimate what he and his men had accomplished, but he wasn’t quite ready to call the war over. On the day of the battle itself, even as his soldiers on the left bank were slaughtering and capturing redcoats by the thousand, the American militia on the right bank gave him a fright by collapsing in the face of the belated British attack there. The next day he still couldn’t figure out exactly what happened. It was “strange and difficult to account for,” he told James Monroe. But the gist of the sorry tale seemed to be that at the moment of truth “the Kentucky reinforcements ingloriously fled, drawing after them, by their example, the remainder of the forces.” The defenders managed to spike the guns before leaving, thereby preventing the use of the weapons against their comrades across the river. But the defeat was galling and potentially dangerous. “This unfortunate rout had totally changed the aspect of affairs,” Jackson told Monroe. “The enemy now occupied a position from which they might annoy us without hazard, and by means of which they might have been enabled to defeat, in a great measure, the effects of our success on this side the river.” But then the complexion of things changed again, almost equally unaccountably. British general Lambert, clearly shaken by the disaster to the army he inherited, ordered the troops on the right bank to recross the river and join such of their fellows as had survived the bloody morning. “I need not tell you with how much eagerness I immediately regained possession of the position he had thus hastily quitted,” Jackson said.

The recapture of the left bank allowed Jackson to judge the battle of January 8 a complete success, but it gave him little cause to conclude that the single victory would end the war. Lambert’s army still sat a few miles outside New Orleans, and though it was in no shape to mount another assault, neither were the Americans in much condition to chase it away. The British fleet was anchored on the coast, with no American warships anywhere in sight. New Orleans might be safe, but the British could easily board their ships and harass some other part of the South. In fact the British did revisit Fort Bowyer, on Mobile Bay, and force its surrender. This incident merely strengthened Jackson’s refusal to consider the war over till he saw a treaty declaring it so.

His stern attitude sat poorly with the people of New Orleans. Like Mrs. Livingston, most of them wanted to celebrate. And many did. A parade was held to honor the victorious general. Children threw garlands, and the city’s odist proclaimed:

Hail to the chief! who hied at war’s alarms,

To save our threatened land from hostile arms. . . .

Jackson, all hail! our country’s pride and boast,

Whose mind’s a council, and who’s arm an host. . . .

Remembrance long shall keep alive thy fame,

And future infants learn to lisp thy name.

Honest joy and relief informed the hosannas, but so did a desire to have done with martial law. The residents of New Orleans had never liked it, but with the British at the door they couldn’t object inordinately. Now that the British had been beaten back, the residents called for a return to civil law, including normal business and access to the courts.

Jackson refused. Even after Lambert loaded his troops on boats and withdrew to the ships that had brought them to the coast, Jackson held to the opinion that war was war till peace was declared. As yet no word of the settlement at Ghent had penetrated the Gulf. Jackson assumed, with most other Americans, that the negotiators in the Flemish city were waiting on the outcome of the battle for New Orleans. “As soon as their defeat reaches Ghent, we will have peace, in my opinion,” he predicted. But not till then.

V
incent Nolte was one of those who wanted Jackson to release the city from martial law. Nolte was an Italian-born German who had survived Napoleon, the plague, the fires of Mt. Etna, the New Madrid earthquake, and an epidemic of yellow fever before establishing himself as a commodities broker in New Orleans. His warehouse bulged with cotton and wool as the British approached the city in the autumn of 1814. Shortly after Jackson arrived, the American quartermaster commandeered Nolte’s inventory for uniforms and barricades. Nolte didn’t begrudge the taking, as he supported Jackson, to the point of joining him in the field. But he expected compensation for his loss. Jackson at first seemed agreeable. He appointed a commission to examine claims and recommend payment. The commission set a figure for Nolte’s loss in wool, but Jackson added a condition. The wool, he explained, had been used to make clothing for Tennessee militiamen. For this reason Nolte must be paid in Tennessee bank notes. Nolte felt cheated, as the Tennessee notes traded at sharp discount in New Orleans. But he held his tongue awaiting judgment on his 250 bales of cotton, which were worth far more than the wool.

“I produced my books,” he explained afterward, referring to the records on the cotton bales. “Two years before, they had been purchased from the richest cotton planter, Poydras, at 10 cents [per pound]. The price, meanwhile, had never been less than 10 to 11 cents, and the day before we received the news of their seizure, I had bought two small lots at 11H and 12 cents.” Nolte cited this figure in support of his claim for compensation at that level. Jackson rejected the price. Nolte must take the lower price prevailing after the first British landing, when it seemed as though the city might fall. “I made a written protest,” Nolte said, “but the general would not notice it. Then I determined to call on him in the hopes of awakening a sense of justice in him. He heard me, but that was all. ‘Are you not lucky,’ he asked, ‘to have saved the rest of your cotton by my defence?’ ‘Certainly, General,’ I said, ‘as lucky as any body else in the city whose cotton has thus been saved. But the difference between me and the rest is that all the others have nothing to pay and that I have to bear all the loss.’ ‘Loss,’ the general said, getting excited, ‘why, you have saved
all
!’”

Nolte tried a different tack. “I saw that argument was useless with so stiff-necked a man, and remarked to him that I only wanted compensation for my cotton, and that the best compensation would be to give me precisely the quantity that had been taken from me, and of the same quality.” Nolte suggested arbitration. Jackson rejected this as too complicated. “You must take 6 cents for your cotton. I have nothing more to say.” But Nolte wasn’t finished talking, and he continued to expostulate. Jackson brushed him off. “Come, sir, come,” he said. “Take a glass of whiskey and water. You must be damned dry after all your arguing.”

Nolte refused the drink. “General,” he said. “I did not expect such injustice at your hands. Good morning, sir.” And he walked out.

J
ackson could hardly be asked to sympathize with speculators, even those who had fought on his side. Nolte and the other New Orleans merchants seemed to treat the troubles with Britain as a business expense. Jackson had no doubt that had the British won, Nolte and his ilk would have accommodated themselves to the new regime and carried on as before. Perhaps they had lost money in the defense of the city. If so, that was a cost they’d have to swallow. Jackson’s soldiers had lost far more in the previous two years, including many lives.

Yet given that he still had to govern the city, he might have handled its leading citizens with greater tact. The first report of the Ghent treaty arrived in mid-February, seven weeks after its signing. But the report was only a newspaper column carried from the East Coast, saying that a treaty had reached Washington. Jackson insisted on notification from the War Department, from his superiors. The distinction seemed arbitrary to many of those under arms in New Orleans, who began seeking escape from military discipline. Some French nationals devised a scheme by which they appealed to the French consul in the city, who furnished documents declaring their freedom. French-speaking American citizens caught on to the game and, claiming French citizenship, were similarly rewarded.

Conceivably Jackson considered the safety of the city still at risk. After all, the war wasn’t over till the treaty had been signed and
ratified
. And the British could be expected to learn about this latest unrest, as they had learned about everything else, and might be tempted to test the city’s defenses again. But there was more involved. As in the instance of Nolte and the speculators, Jackson resented the narrow self-interest that lay at the heart of the subterfuge. Good men had died to defend the city, and these malcontents couldn’t wait the few days for the war to end definitively. Jackson probably considered himself magnanimous in merely ordering the consul and the duty-dodging Frenchmen out of the city.