Patriotic Fire (20 page)

P
akenham did not know exactly how many men Jackson had in his army, but he assumed there were more than his own 10,000. Aside from the 1,400 men he was sending across the river under Colonel Thornton, Pakenham intended to attack the canal line with 5,500 infantry, supported by artillery and rockets. The remaining 2,000-man infantry brigade under the newly arrived General John Lambert—the 7th Fusiliers and the 43rd Foot—would be in reserve, ready to exploit any breakthrough.

The plan was that 2,600 infantry under General Gibbs would attack Jackson’s far left, near the swamp, where there were fewer cannon, while an equal number under General Keane would attack near the center. This decision had been reached by Pakenham after he’d ascended a pine tree with a spyglass and thoroughly studied the American position. He saw that the rampart was not as high or wide on Jackson’s left, an observation he had also made during the reconnaissance attack on December 28. As if to cement his judgment, a Spanish informer, one Señor Galvez, “made [his] way out of the American cordon on the night of [January] 6th and informed General Pakenham most positively that the whole left of the works was held by militia imperfectly organized, not regularly armed
and totally unprovided with bayonets!
”

Depending on developments, Keane would either move left to support Gibbs, should he be successful, or move right and attack near the river, if Thornton’s assault across the river was triumphant and the American guns were taken and turned on Jackson’s lines from behind. Meanwhile, a force of several hundred redcoats under Colonel Rennie was to move down the levee road and capture the little redoubt that Jackson had predicted “will give us trouble.” It was a complicated plan, requiring much coordination, and during the heat and confusion of battle, even in the best of times, things rarely go exactly as planned.

On the night of January 7 Pakenham sent an aide to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Mullins of the 44th Regiment. His would be the first regiment in line next morning, and his crucial task was to carry the fascines and heavy ten-foot scaling ladders to the ditch. This equipment, which had been constructed by the engineers, would be found at a forward redoubt about five hundred yards from the American lines. Pakenham had told his aide to make sure Mullins understood his instructions.

“Nothing could be clearer,” Mullins had replied, and the aide returned satisfied that the colonel knew his orders. After he had gone, however, Mullins turned to his adjutant and moaned, “My regiment has been ordered to execution. Their dead bodies are to be used as a bridge for the rest of the army to march over.” Clearly, here was an officer who did not wish to be in charge of the leading regiment of the assault.

Meanwhile, Pakenham was inspecting the deepening of the Villeré Canal in preparation for bringing the boats across for Thornton’s assault on the west bank. He still did not like what he saw. A dam had been built near where the cut in the levee was to be, in order to hold the water in the canal, since the river was low and would otherwise run out into the river when the final cut was made. Pakenham asked the engineer if he was certain the dam would hold and suggested building a second one, just in case. The engineer assured him that the present dam was all that was needed.*
 
⁶⁸

As luck would have it, the engineer was wrong, and as soon as the final cut in the levee was made at about nine p.m.—the intended time of Thornton’s departure—the dam burst and most of the water drained out of the canal. Thus the boats had to be hauled nearly a mile through the mud of the canal by sailors and anyone else who could be dragooned to help. But it took all night, and even then none of the larger boats could be moved through the canal. By dawn it was decided that Thornton would have to go on with what he had, and so, instead of 1,400 British infantry arriving on the west bank well before daylight, he now could bring only about 500, crammed into the few small boats available.

Unfortunately, no one had bothered to wake Pakenham and tell him of this misfortune, and he was understandably “greatly agitated” when he found out about it. According to Captain Smith, “the general complained, ‘The dam, as you heard me say it would, gave way, and Thornton’s people will be of no use whatever to the general attack.’ ” He may or may not have believed this entirely, because right up until the time of the attack Pakenham kept listening for the sounds of Thornton’s movements across the river. In any event, the failure to wake Pakenham and alert him to the situation had dire effects. If he’d had time to think about it, he might have sent as many of Thornton’s men as possible across the river in the boats then available and had them come back for more; he might have called off the attack before all the men had moved forward and waited for all of Thornton’s regiment to get established on the west bank. As it was, he did neither.

In the meantime, artillerymen and engineers had been busy all night setting up batteries about seven hundred yards from Jackson’s line. At about four a.m., on January 8, 1815, the army was moved forward quietly for attack at first light. Many marched in high spirits, confident that they would be away from this miserable plain and feasting in New Orleans by nightfall. Others, who had heard the same promise before, felt differently.

Thirteen

T
here were many things to unsettle Jackson’s peace of mind that night, not the least of which was the situation on the west bank of the river. What exactly the British intended to do there he did not yet know, but he believed that by dispatching the 400 Kentucky reinforcements he had done all he could. In fact, he hadn’t; he had treated the west bank almost as an afterthought, though that is somewhat understandable, since the bulk of the British army was directly before him. If Jackson had known precisely what the situation was on the west bank, it might have given him much more pause.

It will be remembered that a week earlier he had ordered the 600 inexperienced militia under General David B. Morgan, then posted at English Turn, to cross the river and set up a defense of the west bank. To facilitate this, Jackson sent engineer Latour to assist Morgan in establishing a line similar to his own. Morgan was a forty-two-year-old Massachusetts Yankee who had arrived in New Orleans a decade earlier and become a politician. He was a slightly pudgy man whose most popular likeness shows him dressed in buckskins like a backwoodsman, instead of as the Louisiana legislator he was.

Unfortunately, Morgan did not seem to appreciate the skill of military engineering. When Latour began laying out a line up near the plantation of “fat old Doctor Flood,” Morgan rejected it as being too far away from Patterson’s marine batteries, which were trained across the river to catch the British in flank if they should try another attack. He might have had something there, considering that if the British were to cross to the west bank in force, Patterson would have to rely on Morgan for protection, as he had none of his own.

The problem was that the site selected by Morgan for his redoubt was nearly two thousand yards long, more than a mile—and almost twice as long as Jackson’s fortification, which contained 5,000 men, compared with the measly 800 that Morgan could now muster, including the newly arrived Kentuckians. Morgan had begun work on his line only four days earlier. He employed the labor of some 500 slaves, but in that short a period they could do little more than throw up a shallow, mile-long earthwork behind the ditch they had dug for the dirt. There were twelve American guns on the west bank, but only three of them in Morgan’s line; the rest belonged to Commodore Patterson’s batteries facing east across the river.

After studying the British preparations from the west bank for several hours on the evening of January 7, Patterson had seen enough. He had watched boat after boat move through the cut in the levee and heard the cheers of the sailors and redcoats as they entered the river. What Patterson concluded from this was that he and Morgan were going to be attacked the next morning and apparently with the bulk of Pakenham’s troops. It would make perfect sense that, instead of assaulting Jackson’s strong line, they were going to bring their main force across the Mississippi, roll over the small body of Americans there, and enter New Orleans from the west bank of the river. Patterson supposed that once the enemy had landed, and put his cross-river batteries out of action, the British could simply row the empty boats upriver and have them waiting for their infantry when they arrived, to carry them across the river into an undefended city.

Patterson did not at all like the looks of Morgan’s line—never had, actually—and it became evident, even to this navy man, that more soldiers were urgently needed. Accordingly, after conferring with Morgan, late that night he sent a messenger to Jackson.

Jackson and his staff had been sleeping on blankets on the downstairs floor of the Macarty house, fully dressed, we are told, although they had “removed their sword belts.” When the messenger arrived Jackson asked, “Who’s there?” and was given Patterson’s message.

“Hurry back,” he replied, “and tell General Morgan he is mistaken. The main attack will come on this side [of the river], and I have no men to spare. He must maintain his position at all hazards.”

According to Jackson’s watch it was past one a.m. He told his resting aides, “Gentlemen, we have slept enough. Rise. The enemy will be on us in a few minutes. I must go and see Coffee.”

During the next several hours, to the rattle of drums, Jackson’s men were herded into their positions along the embrasure. They were lined up four deep, one man to shoot and then return to the rear of the line to reload, while the second man stepped up and did the same, and so on, to ensure a continuous front of fire. The artillery pieces were readied for action; powder bags and fuses were brought up; cannonballs were set out, as well as canister, grape, and chain shot; boxes of nails, musket balls, and rusty scrap iron were placed close at hand.

In the dark, for one last time, Jackson inspected his entire fortification, walking down the length of the line to Coffee’s position at the far end of the cypress swamp. From Battery No. 1 he passed by his battalion of New Orleans businessmen. Reaching Battery No. 2 he gave encouraging words to the regulars of the 7th Infantry Regiment. Halfway between Batteries No. 2 and No. 3, his party was nearly overpowered by the aroma of strong coffee, which, according to adjutant Butler, “was black as tar and could be smelled twenty yards away.” It was emanating from the camp of Captain Dominique You, where several of the Baratarians were huddled around a large tin-coated drip pot, ladling boiling water over coffee grounds and frying cornbread, beignets, and bacon.

“That smells like better coffee than we can get,” Jackson remarked. “Where did you get such fine coffee? Maybe you smuggled it in?”

“Mebbe so,
Zeneral,
” chuckled the irrepressible privateer. He told his men to pour a cup for the commander, and as Jackson proceeded toward Battery No. 4, near the big American flagstaff, he was overheard to say, “I wish I had fifty guns on this line, with five hundred such devils as those fellows behind them.”

As Jackson passed by the men, he spoke to a number of them personally, especially those he knew from Tennessee. The mood was neither frigid nor light. As to the emotions a man feels on confronting an enemy, one whom he will actually
see
at any moment, there is no known expression in the English language; his mind can only work through an abstract collage of uncertain thoughts. This morning the men stood or squatted, honing knives, cleaning weapons, talking in low tones, smoking, writing letters by firelight, or dreaming restlessly of violence. It lay ineradicably at the bottom of their minds that within hours they could be killed or mutilated. Nevertheless, they were ready to hold their ground.

On Jackson went, saluting the battalions of the free men of color and spreading encouragement and confidence to the 44th’s regulars and the Tennesseans of Generals Carroll and Coffee. Echoing Colonel William Prescott’s famous order at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Jackson told them, “Don’t shoot, boys, until you see the whites of their eyes.”

O
ver in the British lines simultaneous preparations were being made. Captain Cooke records that there was an uncommon atmosphere of gaiety and boisterousness among the soldiers, who had been told that at last they were going into New Orleans. Walking through the camp with a companion, Cooke observed a “looseness and bawling in the sugar-cane bivouac which we had never seen or heard before within sight of an enemy and on the eve of an attack. We agreed that there was a screw loose somewhere.”

Cooke lamented, “I do not remember ever looking for the first signs of daybreak with more intense anxiety than on this eventful morning. It augured not of victory; an evil foreboding crossed my mind, and I meditated in solemn reflection. All was tranquil as the grave, and no camp fires glimmered from either friends or foes.” The earlier laughter, one suspects, was mostly braggadocio, mirthless as the cold, bland smile of the Sphinx.

Likewise, quartermaster Surtees felt that no good would come of the enterprise: “I own I did not at all feel satisfied with what I had seen and heard, and retired to rest with a considerable degree of despondency on my mind. . . . I almost felt confident of its failure.”

Pakenham was vexed by the failure caused by the breaking of the dam in the boat canal. It threatened to upset an important part of his plan: the overcoming and seizure of the American guns on the west bank in order to turn them upon the rear of the American positions. When the dam collapsed and the soggy mud began sinking back into the canal, hundreds of soldiers and sailors were set to work to drag the boats through the muck. The plan had been for Thornton’s people to have crossed by midnight and to have been formed up and in good marching order on the west bank by four a.m. at the latest, so as to capture the American weapons and direct them against Jackson’s lines in concert with the main British assault. Now Sir Edward could only fret and wonder and hope.

As dawn approached, only about twenty of the forty-two boats that had been brought from the fleet could be hauled down the canal and launched into the Mississippi River, but it was finally decided to go ahead with these and hope for the best. With muffled oars, Thornton’s party at last shoved off just before dawn but was soon caught in the swift main current and carried several miles below the place they had planned to make shore, thus setting them back even farther. Lieutenant Gleig explains, “Day had already broke, while they were yet four miles from the [American] batteries, which ought to have been taken hours ago.”

A
signal had been prearranged for the start of the main attack at first light: a rocket was to be fired from the British positions in front of Jackson on both the left and the right. At this, Thornton’s people across the river would begin firing at Jackson’s line with the captured American guns and, at the same time, the British columns would immediately march forward. But as dawn approached there had been none of the telltale sounds of battle echoing from the west bank, and Pakenham had to assume that, at best, Thornton’s attack would yet be forthcoming, only probably not in time to coincide with his own—certainly an ominous development.

Pakenham rode to the levee and listened anxiously for the sounds of Thornton’s battle across the river. He then turned to an aide and declared, “I will await my plans no longer,” and spurred his horse forward toward Jackson’s line, where his army waited silently for its orders. First he went to Keane, who was posted nearer the levee. Now he made a fatal decision.

Realizing that Thornton’s force was now unlikely to silence Patterson’s nine heavy guns on the west bank, and wishing to spare Keane’s brigade from the worst of Patterson’s enfilading fire, Pakenham told Keane that when the attack began he was to march his men in a right oblique, a diagonal move, toward General Gibbs, which would carry them nearer to the center, toward the cypress swamp and farther away from Patterson’s guns. And then he rode off to Gibbs’s column, the main one.

Here fate’s sleight of hand, which can deal out ironies in spades, dealt a big one that day. When Pakenham found Gibbs, who was to lead the main assault, he received startling news—Colonel Mullins’s 44th Regiment, which was supposed to bring forward the scaling ladders and fascines, had failed to do so. This “extraordinary blunder” was most alarming. Gibbs had ordered the regiment and Mullins back for the equipment, but with the approach of daybreak every second must count if they were to achieve any surprise at all, and that counted for everything.

Pakenham ordered one of his own aides, Major Sir John Tylden, to rush forward and discern the situation with the ladders and fascines. Other commanding officers were staring at their timepieces and, at the first faint rosy glows of dawn, wondering what the holdup was. Over in the 93rd Highland Regiment, its commander, Colonel Robert Dale, seemed “grave and depressed” when he was informed by the regimental physician that there had been trouble getting Thornton’s men across the river. Instead of answering the doctor, Dale, with the detached air of a condemned man, handed him his watch and a letter, saying, “Give these to my wife; I shall die at the head of my regiment.”

While awaiting news of the scaling equipment, Pakenham’s aide Major Sir Harry Smith suggested to him that, given the situation with the boats and now this misfortune with the scaling ladders, the attack might best be postponed. Pakenham was having none of it. “I have twice deferred the attack. We are strong in numbers comparatively. It will cost more men, and the assault must be made.” Smith, however, again cautioned delay. “While we were talking,” Smith said, “the streaks of daylight began to appear, although the morning was dull, close and heavy, the clouds almost touching the ground: Pakenham shook his head. ‘It is now too late,’ he said.”

Tylden returned shortly and reported that Mullins’s Irishmen had finally found the heavy gear and were moving in a “most irregular and unsoldier-like manner, with the fascines and ladders,” but he concluded that by now they “must have arrived at their situation in column.” In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth; the Irishmen were still struggling with the scaling equipment when Pakenham turned to Smith and said, “Smith, order the rocket to be fired.” Captain Cooke of the 43rd Light Infantry, which was in reserve that morning, later deemed it “the Fatal,
the ever-fatal rocket,
” and, as it turned out, he was certainly right.

Cooke’s regiment was posted on the left, near the river, and when the rocket went off with its great
whoosh,
no one knew what it meant. The projectile whizzed all around the sky, Cooke reported, “backwards and forwards in such a zig-zag way that we all looked up like so many philosophers, to see if it was coming down upon our heads.” As Latour remembered it, he was standing with Jackson near the center of the line when the rocket went up. “That is the signal for their advance, I believe,” the general said. The rocket finally landed in the Mississippi and, after a moment of silence, suddenly there came a huge cannonade from the British lines on Jackson’s left, near the cypress swamp.

The thick fog had begun to lift coincident with the rise of dawn, and Jackson’s artillery replied in kind. “The Americans opened upon us from right to left,” remembered Lieutenant Gleig, “a fire of musketry, grape, round-shot, and canister, which I have certainly never witnessed any more murderous.” Within seconds, according to Captain Cooke, “were the cannonballs tearing up the ground, criss-crossing each other [especially those from Patterson’s battery across the river] and bounding along like so many cricket-balls.”