Patriotic Fire (12 page)

Having done this, Jackson and his staff rode over to the Place d’Armes to review his troops. Considering that the British army then descending on Louisiana was variously thought to number from 10,000 to 20,000 regulars, all veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Jackson didn’t seem to have much to work with. New Orleans offered him the following:

A battalion of local businessmen, lawyers, planters, and their sons, numbering 287 men, commanded by Major Jean Baptiste Plauché. They were colorfully uniformed*
 
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and high-spirited, but most of the companies had been organized for only about a month, and their fighting capabilities were untested. Likewise there were “two regiments of Louisiana State Militia, badly equipped, some of them armed with fowling pieces, others with muskets, others with rifles, some without arms, all imperfectly disciplined.”

Then there was an understrength battalion of 210 free men of color. It was composed mostly of the displaced Haitians, commanded by Major Jean Daquin, a bakery owner. Until Jackson got into the picture these people had, as usual, been treated badly. Claiborne and others had been reluctant even to arm them, and they were denied most of the rights of white volunteer soldiers. Jackson fixed that with another proclamation, in which he informed the blacks that they would be accorded the same amenities as the white soldiers, including equal standing, equal pay, a $124 enlistment bonus, and 160 acres of land after their term of service was up.*
 
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There were the Tennessee volunteers under General Coffee. This motley-looking crew numbered about 1,800, most of whom had fought with Jackson in the Creek War and at Pensacola. They were rough, tough, unshaven, buckskin- or homespun-clad, and generally wild and murderous-looking backwoodsmen—many wearing coonskin caps—who, according to one participant in the battle, carried nothing but their rifles, cartridge boxes, hatchets, knives, and powder horns. “They had no idea of military organization and discipline; they paid attention only to the more important part of their calling, which, according to their notions, was quietly to pick out their man, fix him in their aim, and bring him down.” The British would soon bestow upon them a derisive nickname of which the backwoodsmen became justly proud—the “dirty-shirts.”

Equally important, though also understrength, were the two regular U.S. Army regiments, the 7th and the 44th, numbering together 796 riflemen. To round things out was a company of 107 mounted Mississippi dragoons under Major Thomas Hinds, as well as a detachment of 18 friendly Choctaw Indians (soon to be enlarged to 62), commanded by Captain Pierre Jugat, who, for their part, would make things plenty disagreeable for the British, as they would soon find out.

Jackson could thus muster just under 3,000 men, many of questionable ability. With any luck, the promised 2,400-man force of Kentucky militia under Major General John Thomas, as well as General William Carroll’s 2,200 Tennessee volunteers, would arrive in time for the invasion. These upcountry reinforcements were coming by flatboat down the Mississippi, but so far no word had been received as to their whereabouts. Likewise, to arm them, Secretary of War Monroe had scraped up the money to order a shipment of five thousand rifles from the munitions factories at Pittsburgh, but nothing had been heard of this, either.

H
aving surveyed his army, Jackson now embarked on a weeklong survey of the city’s defenses. For a city so far removed from punctual help from the rest of the nation, New Orleans was practically defenseless in purely military terms—or so it seemed at the time—and any notion of defending it presented a problem of staggering difficulties. Neither the federal nor the Louisiana legislature had seen fit to appropriate any funds necessary to build the proper fortifications to protect the city. This appeared to be inviting calamity, but in fact, except for an invasion force marching overland to descend on the city from the north or east—as Jackson expected it to—New Orleans had fairly good natural defenses in the form of all those impassable bogs, marshes, and quagmires that make up the lower Mississippi River Delta. With that in mind, Jackson posted Coffee’s mounted infantry north, up at Baton Rouge, to defend against the possibility of an attack developing from there, and then he took his surveying trip.

With the engineer Major Latour as his guide, Jackson and his party visited what he considered the other most likely routes of an invading British army. The geometry of the problem was maddening; there were so many ways an enemy could come. First on his list were, of course, the eastern approaches to New Orleans from Mobile or points westward along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Chief among these was the Chef Menteur Road, running east-west along the coast, which had been built through impassable swamps. It could be fairly easily defended by a small force by blocking it with trees and other debris, Jackson concluded. He ordered the requisite number of troops and artillery posted, issued them their orders, and moved on.

Next was Bayou St. John, a water approach in which the British army would have to arrive in shallow-draft boats through Lake Borgne, a bay off the gulf that led through a narrow channel into Lake Pontchartrain, guarded by a half-finished fort called the Rigolets. Once into Pontchartrain, however, Bayou St. John branched nearly into the city, guarded only by a decrepit installation from colonial days, Fort St. John. Jackson ordered it strengthened and garrisoned.

The calculus of approaches to the city from the south proved difficult. First, there were any number of bayous, streams, and canals that, left unguarded and unobstructed, could have allowed the British through. Jackson ordered all of these blocked by felled trees, with guards from the state militia posted to watch them. (Lack of diligent enforcement of this order proved to be his greatest mistake.) And of course there was the Mississippi River itself, which might have become a huge highway for the ships of the British navy. As we have seen, though, the trouble with the river route was that the passes out of the gulf to access it were too shallow to permit entry of the big three-decker sixty- to eighty-gun British ships of the line, and even if their smaller men-of-war were able get over the bars, they’d face formidable obstacles, the first of which was Fort St. Philip, about sixty miles downriver from New Orleans. The fort was not in bad condition, but Jackson wisely ordered it strengthened, its wood barracks pulled down to prevent fires in case of bombardment, and a reinforced garrison of trained artillerists stationed inside. Then, on the trip back upriver, he visited Detour d’Anglais—English Turn.

English Turn was an almost two-hundred-degree bend where the river practically doubled back on itself about twenty miles below New Orleans. For sailing ships it was a challenge and often a trial even in peaceful times. As was no doubt pointed out to Jackson by Commodore Patterson, to negotiate the first part of the turn, whatever wind direction was available to get them there would be right in the ship’s face, making progress impossible until the wind changed direction, which could be hours, days, even weeks. (And until it did change favorably, the ships had to make for the banks and tie up to trees lest the swift current carry them back downriver.)

The French and Spanish colonists had thoughtfully built a small installation at English Turn, but Jackson ordered more batteries, then two additional batteries across the river, just in case. From these an unfriendly ship could be bombarded in an almost helpless state while waiting for the wind to change. It is not clear where Jackson got the extra artillery to brace up Fort St. Philip and English Turn, but a good bet might be that it came from those armed privateer ships and shore cannon that Patterson had captured in his raid on Laffite’s Baratarians.

Having done all this Jackson returned to New Orleans to be greeted with distasteful newspaper headlines complaining of his absence from the city. Jackson paid the criticism not the slightest attention. Nor did he just sit on his hands waiting for the British to arrive; his problems continued to be manifest. All through the ages a defending commander’s worst dilemma has been lack of knowledge of where and when the enemy would strike. Even though Jackson enjoyed the advantage of shortened interior lines, he was by necessity forced to disperse many of his troops over every possible venue of attack—leaving himself vulnerable at all of them—until he could divine the true intentions of the British. There wasn’t anything he could do about that, though, so he devoted himself to other enterprises.

First he went to the contentious Louisiana legislature and persuaded the state to pay for all the military improvements he’d requested.*
 
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He continued to press authorities in Washington, Tennessee, and Kentucky by express courier to discover the whereabouts of the reinforcements and arms he had expected by now. He made efforts to enlist more men from the city and state to defend against the invasion.

Jackson next reacted unwisely to another sticky problem. Members of the committee of defense, after declaring Jean Laffite’s original warnings about the British invasion to be forgeries, now paid a visit to Jackson. Ever since it had developed that Laffite’s communications had been proved perfectly genuine, Governor Claiborne as well as Edward Livingston, Laffite’s lawyer, had been urging Jackson to accept the Baratarians’ offer to join in the defense of New Orleans, but so far Jackson had clung stubbornly to his original sentiments in the negative.

Now the committee of defense, led by the Louisiana legislator and wealthy aristocrat Bernard de Marigny—who had urged accepting Laffite’s offer from the beginning—came to Jackson for another try, along with other committee members who had changed their minds. With the danger clearly at hand, Marigny explained, every available man and woman in the fractious city had now become coalesced toward the emergency. Older men were serving as police officers to free younger men for military service. Women were already wrapping bandages as well as making clothes and blankets for the militia and troops not yet arrived. The Ursuline nuns in their convent were readying their hospital.

Marigny’s main point was that manpower was still the critical factor, and that while all these fierce and battle-experienced Baratarians were presently in jail or on the run, it only made good sense to enlist their valuable services. Jackson was still having none of it. “The General was unrelenting,” Marigny wrote. “He told us these men were being pursued by the United States Civil Officers, that many were in prison . . . that he could do nothing about the matter.”

One factor in all of this might have been that Jackson appears to have taken a dislike to Marigny, who was young, handsome, somewhat of a sophisticated playboy about town, and generally acknowledged as the leader of French Creole society in New Orleans. He was also the son-in-law of the old Spanish
comandante
at Pensacola who, a few days after Jackson accepted his surrender, had produced a letter, which Marigny showed to Jackson. In it, the
comandante
showered Jackson with fulsome praise (“I kiss your feet . . .” and so on) and asked his son-in-law to open the doors of his elegant New Orleans home as headquarters for Jackson when he arrived there.

At first Jackson accepted the offer, but apparently he thought better of it afterward. When he got to New Orleans, he curtly declined Marigny’s offer of hospitality and instead established his headquarters on Royal Street. Perhaps Jackson was suspicious of the in-law connection between Marigny and the Spanish
comandante
and fingered Marigny as possibily disloyal—maybe even a spy. Who knows? History is silent on the matter, but the relationship between the American general and the patriotic and influential young New Orleans Creole remained chilly throughout the campaign.

Soon events began to overtake the citizens of New Orleans, for on December 12 the British invasion force arrived offshore. Fears that had drifted obscurely regarding His Imperial Majesty’s intentions suddenly began to clarify themselves with alarming rapidity.

Laffite, for his part, was still persona non grata in the city and, with an arrest warrant hanging over him, was more or less hiding out at the homes of plantation owners whom he knew and had had dealings with in the smuggling business. According to one story, among them was Elmwood in Tchoupitoulas, above New Orleans, where Laffite had no sooner arrived than “a servant announced the approach of the carriage of another guest.” The guest, it turned out, was none other than the beautiful wife of Governor Claiborne.

The horrified mistress of the manor sent away all of her servants “except a trusted one named Henrietta, whom she warned to address Monsieur Laffite as Monsieur Clement.” Laffite was much amused by this ruse and entered into it “with all his ease and natural grace.” Throughout the afternoon and evening Mrs. Claiborne was charmed and coquettish, never realizing that the man she was flirting with and her husband each had a price on the other’s head. When she returned to New Orleans, she “was extravagant in her praise of the most remarkable man she had ever met.”

Eight

I
t was certainly not as if an invasion was unexpected; warnings had been abundant, the most recent arriving on December 8 in an unsigned letter from Pensacola delivered by a friendly Choctaw Indian to Commodore Patterson, the New Orleans naval commander, when he returned to the city from his inspection tour with Jackson. The anonymous writer began, “Dear Sir . . . a very large force of the enemy is off this port, and it is generally understood New Orleans is the object of attack. I am not able to learn how, when or where the attack will be made, but I heard they have vessels of all descriptions, and a large body of troops.”

Not only was the source of this communication mysterious, it also seems odd that it was conveyed in such fashion, since Jackson had stationed a U.S. garrison at Pensacola, and surely if there had been a large British fleet offshore someone among them would have seen it and sent the information along in a less surreptitious fashion.

When Patterson showed Jackson the letter, the general was skeptical, wondering if it might not be a ruse to steer him in the wrong direction. Patterson, however, took more stock in it and ordered his squadron of five sloop-rigged gunboats, a dispatch boat, and a tender to redouble their already sharp lookout on the approaches to Lake Borgne, which he had always considered the most likely approach for an amphibious invasion of the city.

This tough and valiant little flotilla represented just about all of Patterson’s command. He also had the 85-foot, 230-ton sloop of war
Carolina
mounting fourteen guns and partially manned by sailors from New England. The much larger ship
Louisiana,
a corvette, mounting sixteen guns, was also under his command, but she remained tied up at the city wharves because Patterson could find no sailors to man her—for the unforgivable reason that the navy offered no bounty for signing on and that pay on merchant vessels was much higher. The gunboats, on the other hand, were fully manned, but no match for any of the large ships of the British navy. The sailors derisively called them “Jeffs,” after Thomas Jefferson, who had ordered scores of them built on the theory that they could substitute for a proper world-class navy. They were strictly coastal craft, sloop-rigged, shallow-draft, black-hulled, about 45 feet long and 80 tons, armed with four or five small cannon each, and sailed by a crew of twenty.*
 
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The gulf flotilla was commanded by a naval lieutenant with the interesting name of Thomas Ap Catesby Jones, whose assignment was to be Jackson’s eyes for the expected invasion.

Reconnoitering off the coast of Mississippi on December 10, two of Jones’s gunboats came upon what must have been a breathtaking sight. There in the deep blue waters to the east they beheld in the distance a line of tall white sails, stretching as far as the eye could see. These could only be the British warships, an assumption further investigation soon confirmed. The gunboats shadowed them at a respectful distance for the two full days it took to get the enemy armada assembled and anchored off the north end of the Chandeleur Islands, near the mouth of Lake Borgne. For the larger ships this was as far as they could go, because of the shallowness of the lake, but there were also a number of smaller sloops of war and other armed vessels attached to the fleet, which took station at Ship and Cat islands, closer to the lake, so about all Jones could do was watch and report their movements to Patterson in New Orleans.

Aboard the huge flagship
Tonnant
Admiral Cochrane was growing impatient to start the invasion. He had sighted the shadowing gunboats and realized the Americans had become aware of his presence, but they would not know precisely where and when his army would strike. In order to keep them in the dark as long as possible, Cochrane knew he would have to dispose of the pesky gunboats that were keeping an eye on him and gave the order, “Clear the lakes,” setting into motion a fierce little battle that opened the campaign.

Jones’s orders from Patterson had been to defend New Orleans from the Rigolets, the narrow channel from Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchartrain, only a few miles from the city. A small fortification, Fort Petites Coquilles, was still under construction there, but it presently contained a number of artillery pieces. Patterson’s idea was that between the fort and the gunboats enough U.S. firepower should be available to drive off a British attempt to enter Lake Pontchartrain.

Patterson never got to find out whether or not that was so. As soon as Cochrane arrived he sicced his small, heavily armed sloops and corvettes on Jones’s gunboat flotilla, and no sooner had these medium-draft war craft entered the lake than they promptly ran aground. Jones had by now moved farther up the lake, anchoring off what was little more than a glorified marsh appropriately called Malheureux Island. From there he watched and awaited developments, which proceeded apace. On the afternoon of December 13, the Americans could see through their spyglasses a number of small barges being lowered into the water by the larger ships. At sunrise the next morning they noted that the barges were entering Lake Borgne and rowing toward them in a long line, half a mile wide. There were forty-five in all, occupied by no fewer than 1,500 British sailors and marines, armed with sabers, hatchets, pistols, and muskets. In addition, the bow of each barge mounted a carronade, a small cannon extremely lethal at close range.

Jones took cognizance of his orders and prepared to move farther up the lake to assume his positions at the Rigolets, but here nature foiled him; there was no wind. Not only that, but a strong current flowing out of the lake was actually pushing him
toward
the fierce-looking little barges; all he could do at that point was drop anchor, prepare for the worst, and pray for wind. Of course, Jones couldn’t have known the odds exactly, but he surely knew they were not in his favor. His force totaled 182 men against whatever number the barges contained, and even though his five boats were more heavily armed, the forty-five barges were maneuverable, being pulled by oars, while the becalming wind had left his boats dead in the water.

All morning the gunboat crews watched, resigned to their fate, while the line of barges rowed steadily toward them, stretched out closely abreast. At one point midmorning the American sailors became puzzled, and possibly a little relieved, when the line of barges stopped, oars were pulled in, and they dropped anchor. But soon the anchors were weighed and the rowing began again in earnest. It turned out the commander of the barge army had decided to stop and feed his men lunch before the battle began.

As has been aptly pointed out by the historian Wilburt S. Brown, the best move for Jones at that point would probably have been to burn or blow up the gunboats to keep them from falling into British hands, then make for shore in their dinghies—even swim for it, if need be—to fight another day. But Jones figured his orders called for him to stand and fight the enemy, and that if he did not, his name would go down in disgrace. So he ordered his crews to double-shot their guns and prepare to fight to the last extremity. Then he ran up the (anti-)boarding nets, which, as one witness recorded, “left the gunboats looking as if they were draped in giant spider webs.”

Just before eleven a.m. on December 14 the battle began. Jones fired first because some of his guns were longer-ranged than the carronades in the bows of the barges. This did damage, but not enough, since he was outnumbered by more than five to one. Still, the Americans cheered when two of the barges were blown to splinters and their occupants dumped or blown into the cold water. Fifteen barges soon detached themselves and began rowing directly toward Jones’s gunboat. Moments later the British opened fire, and Jones was among the first struck, with a musket ball in his shoulder. As he was being carried below he turned over command to his second officer, shouting, “Keep up the fight! Keep up the fight!” just as a blast of British grapeshot struck his second down.

The lead barge was occupied by the expedition commander, Captain Nicholas Lockyer—the same Lockyer who several months back had approached Jean Laffite at Grand Terre on behalf of the British. His boat plowed into Jones’s, and the British sailors and marines quickly chopped through the boarding nets. A hand-to-hand slaughter commenced. Superior numbers soon told on the Americans, and the boarding crews quickly turned Jones’s boat’s cannons on the other gunboats, which themselves were being overwhelmed. It took another bloody hour and a half, but in the end the predictable came to pass: 10 Americans were killed, 35 wounded, and most others captured. The British came away with 17 killed and 77 wounded, including Lockyer, plus five American gunboats with all their armaments and several boatloads of prisoners. Andrew Jackson had not only lost his “eyes” on Lake Borgne, he had lost its defense as well, a circumstance that shortly would bring on near disaster.

I
n the days leading up to the Battle of Lake Borgne Jackson had shown calm immediacy and determined leadership, but never an outright sense of urgency. He had even wanted Rachel to join him in New Orleans and wrote her saying so on the morning of December 15, before going out with staff to reconnoiter the Plain of Gentilly, which he considered a possible invasion route. It was there that a courier found him with word of the defeat and capture of the gunboats the previous day, and this bad news seems to have energized him as never before.

Considering that he was yet so ill from dysentery he could barely stand up, it is remarkable that Jackson became such a whirlwind of activity in the days that followed. His companions noticed that he was becoming thin as a scarecrow, his menu consisting only of a bowl of grits and some toast in the morning and a little rice for dinner and supper. Unless pressed with something else, he would often lie on a couch in his headquarters to save energy, perhaps taking a sip or two of brandy. But with the news of the gunboat calamity and the British invasion now plainly imminent, Jackson sprang into action. He published another proclamation (written by Livingston) in which he told the diverse population to put aside any remaining animosities, and for anyone who didn’t harsh measures were in store. He issued a flurry of orders calling up the militia and sending them to man the various forts protecting the city. He sent a battalion of the free men of color and some militia to the Chef Menteur Road with orders to block and defend it. Orders went out to General Coffee at Baton Rouge and General Carroll, by then at Natchez, to hurry their forces to New Orleans—which they did, arriving on December 20—and he dispatched scouts far upriver to see if they could locate the missing 2,300 Kentuckians.

He also sent a dispatch telling Rachel to postpone her trip.

Earlier Jackson had asked the Louisiana legislature to suspend the writ of habeas corpus so that Patterson could impress a number of the unemployed sailors hanging around the waterfront to man the idle
Louisiana,
but this was refused. Now, after learning that the gunboats had been captured and that the British were close by, the legislature went into an absolute panic that one can only envision—what with all their customary gesturing and shouting in various languages. That was enough for Jackson, and he promptly took the ultimate step, on December 16, 1814, of putting the state under martial law. This established a curfew, closed the city coming and going, and permitted impressment of sailors, as well as any other able-bodied males, who were sent into the militia.

The martial law proclamation established Jackson as being in supreme command over everything, and—though he later himself conceded that it was probably unconstitutional—his authority became absolute, including the right to execute civilians as spies. As one writer observed, “The man had met the hour,” and it was a good thing, too, because there wasn’t a moment to lose; it was understood that the invasion could start at any time, in any place.

A
s soon as Lake Borgne had been cleared, Cochrane began launching the British army toward an assembly point at the mouth of the Pearl River, near what is today Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. Probably at Pensacola, Cochrane took on “certain Spaniards,” former officials who once lived in New Orleans when it was a Spanish colony, and who were more than willing to give the British the lay of the land. Also at some point Cochrane’s people made contact with a group of Spanish fishermen who worked Lake Borgne, and doubtless plied them with money for information on possible invasion routes. The assembly-point destination for the army was Ile aux Poix, or Pea Island, a boggy piece of marsh ground so desolate and remote it was hoped the landing would go undiscovered. It did, but it put an awful strain on the men.

When the victorious barge force returned to the fleet anchorage after defeating the American gunboats, the navy began loading the army into them for the forty-mile row across the lake. The soldiers were crammed in so tightly (about thirty men, with all their equipment, on a twenty-foot boat, plus rowing crews) that they had no room even to move their legs or adjust position during the grueling ten-hour trip. As if that weren’t enough, the weather suddenly turned against them, as it often will in these climes. Contrary to popular opinion, New Orleans at times can be seemingly one of the coldest places on earth—if not by actual thermometer readings, then at least by what modern-day meteorologists adjust for, such as wind-chill factor. Being as it is between a giant swamp and a giant river, there is always much humidity in the air, making even a moderate cold chilling to the bone. When a winter wet front comes in from the west and collides with arctic air pushing down from the north, the weather in New Orleans can become disagreeably cold. If a rare series of these frontal events occurs, it can be brutal, especially to people exposed to the elements, and apparently that is what happened to the British army in its open boats during the voyage into Lake Borgne.

In the daytime there would be drenching rains that soaked the men; then at night the temperature would dip below freezing and their clothing would actually freeze to their skin. Here is Lieutenant Gleig’s recollection of Pea Island: “It is scarcely possible to imagine any place more wretched. It was a swamp containing a small space of ground at one end and almost wholly unadorned with trees of any description. The interior was the resort of wild ducks and other water-fowl; and the pools and creeks abounded in dormant alligators.”