Patriotic Fire (21 page)

When Gibbs’s column was still more than three hundred yards away, General Adair tapped one of his Kentucky marksmen from behind.

“See that officer on the gray horse?” he said, pointing to a British major who was riding alongside the leading column. “Snuff his candle!”

The Kentuckian took careful aim, squeezed the trigger, and Major Whitaker toppled from his horse, dead. A British quartermaster, E. N. Borroughs, had seen this from his perch on the balcony of the De la Ronde plantation house and marveled that “at a distance of nearly three hundred yards . . . the bullet passed through his head, out at the right temple and went on.” Historian Robert Remini notes: “The final great action in the Battle of New Orleans, which had been anticipated for over a month, had finally begun.”

T
he air was rabid with death and gun smoke, an inferno of cannon and rifle fire belching flame, lead, and red-hot iron; the great
boom
of the big guns and
zing
of musket balls; the strange, mournful music of the battlefield set against the most unearthly sounds of all, the
whoosh
of the British rockets and the shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying. It was Sunday morning, January 8, 1815, and all this noise began racketing back to New Orleans. The Sabbath church bells had already begun to toll, and the bewildered and apprehensive women with their children clutching at their skirts went inside to pray to God that their men could hold back the British.

When the mist had nearly cleared and the first rays of sun broke over the Chalmette plantation that morning, the dirty-shirt Americans beheld a sight that must have been breathtaking. Taking up most of the half-mile-long sugarcane fields before them was the red-coated British army, coming on in columns, each several hundred yards long, to the beat of drums and blare of bugles. With their higher-ranking officers prancing about on horses taken from local plantations, it must have been a stirring spectacle.

These were emotion-packed minutes: if the British broke the American line Jackson faced dismal consequences, since his two rearward lines were not nearly so strong and a retreating army never fights as fiercely as one that has not been beaten where it stands.

Despite the heavy fire from the Americans, the British came on relentlessly. Unlike the Americans—who were fighting together for the first time and, in most cases, were fighting
at all
for the first time—the British army was made up of trained professional soldiers, and was all tradition. History passes along many descriptions of men making a charge or ground assault against an enemy position. Contemporary accounts usually describe them as marching with their heads down, as if they were moving into a strong wind or a rainstorm, or in some cases at a crouch, so as to expose as little of themselves as possible. But when the British marched, they
marched,
ramrod straight, in tight formation and drawn up tall, daring the enemy to do his damnedest.

The dramatic rattle of the British drums was aimed at establishing a marching cadence, but the drums also had another purpose: to unsettle and strike fear in the enemy, sounding that steady
rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat
as the red-coated columns drew nearer and nearer, defying shot and shell and rifle fire.

In the American lines the apprehension was powerful and electrifying. All the boasting and hallooing was now just alluring nonsense in the face of this majestic British juggernaut. Conscious of their own inferiority in dress, in training, in experience, the Americans by now must have become at least dimly aware that here, today, they were the keepers of the national destiny; that if they fled, they would let down their nation and their flag. For some it was more personal: the Creoles had families in New Orleans, and the British army’s desecrations against civilians were well publicized.

For each of these Americans, privately and characteristically, their single overarching determination boiled down—as it has always boiled down, ever since men have organized to fight one another with rocks, clubs, or guns—to the understanding that they were not going to cut and run, for the simple, honest fear of not wanting to disgrace themselves in front of their comrades.

Fourteen

O
n the British right the skirmishers of the 95th Regiment waded across the ditch in front of Jackson’s line and, since no fascines or scaling ladders had yet arrived, began desperately trying to carve steps into the rampart with their bayonets. The leading companies of the 44th stopped, directly against their orders, which were to carry the American position at bayonet point, and began to shoot at the Americans, but when they were answered by a ruinous volley from Carroll’s Tennesseans and Adair’s Kentuckians, they ran away, setting into motion a chain of events that would soon shudder through the entire British army.

“Instantly the whole American line, from the swamp to a point near its center, was ablaze,” said British quartermaster Borroughs from his vantage point on De la Ronde’s balcony. “In less time than one can write it, the 44th Foot was literally swept from the face of the earth. In the wreck and confusion that ensued within five minutes the regiment seemed to vanish from sight—except the half of it that lay stricken on the ground. Every mounted officer was down at the first fire. No such execution by small arms has ever been seen or heard of.”

Following Pakenham’s revised orders, Keane had begun his diagonal march across the field toward the point where Jackson’s rampart intersected with the cypress swamp. Unfortunately, Pakenham had forgotten to tell Colonel Sir Alexander Dickson, his chief of artillery, of the change in plans, and thus, as Keane’s brigade started to march in front of Dickson’s guns, he had no choice but to cease firing for fear of hitting his own troops. Arriving first on the scene at the head of Keane’s brigade was the proud, tall 93rd Regiment of Scotsmen, wearing plaid tartan trousers and playing “Monymusk” on their bagpipes. They, too, were expecting to find the ditch filled with fascines and the scaling ladders against the rampart, but in this they, too, were disappointed. When the members of Mullins’s 44th, who were dragging up the scaling equipment, saw the regiment’s leading companies coming back toward them in flight, they dropped the ladders and fascines in the field and joined the others in a rush for the rear.

The commander of the 93rd, Colonel Dale, who had earlier given the regimental surgeon his watch and a letter to his wife, ordered his men to halt so he could appraise the situation. At that point he was fatally shot, just as he had predicted. General Gibbs came rushing through the smoke and noise and gloom hollering for Colonel Mullins and threatening to “hang him from the highest tree in that swamp” for forgetting the scaling gear. But Mullins was nowhere to be found.

O
ver on the left by the levee, three companies of infantry under Colonel Rennie stormed the redoubt in front of the rampart that Jackson had declared “will give us trouble.” The Americans who were manning it were outnumbered, but a good deal of hand-to-hand fighting occurred before those who remained managed to scramble across a plank laid over the ditch and find safety behind the rampart. In what turned out to be a tragic case of “leading by example,” right behind them came Rennie and two of his officers, who scaled the rampart. Looking back, Rennie shouted to his men, “Hurrah boys, the day is ours!” just as a volley from the New Orleans Rifles struck and killed all three men, who pitched headlong down into the ditch. Seeing this, the other redcoats fled in disorder, some along the levee, some along the road, and some along the riverbank. Captain Humphrey, with his eternal cigar, blasted them with his cannons, and so did Patterson’s marine battery from across the river, until the riverbank was littered with dozens of dead and wounded British.

Historian Walker tells us that “a discussion arose” as to who had the honor of bringing down Colonel Rennie. “Mr. Withers, a merchant of New Orleans, and the crack shot of the company, settled the controversy by remarking: ‘If he isn’t hit above the eyebrows, it wasn’t my shot.’ ”

Rennie’s body was dragged out of the ditch, and “it was found that the fatal wound was in the forehead.” Withers, therefore, was assigned the quaint custom of sending Rennie’s watch and other valuables to his widow, who was among the wives aboard ship with the fleet off Lake Borgne.

Right about this time Captain Cooke, who was nearby behind the redoubt from which Rennie’s men were retreating, observed that “at this momentous crisis a droll occurrence took place; a company of blacks emerged out of the mist carrying ladders, which were intended for the three light companies on the left of the attack.” But, Cooke continues, “they were so confounded by the multiplicity of noises that they dropped the ladders and fell flat on their faces”; then he launched into a long dissertation on the proper employment of scaling ladders by men under fire, concluding that “only the very elite of an army” should be used for such a critical and dangerous enterprise.

By this time the battle was at its most pitiless intensity. According to Cooke, “The echo of the cannonade and musketry was so tremendous that the vibration seemed as if the earth was cracking and tumbling to pieces [and] the heavens were rent asunder by the most terrific peals of thunder that ever rumbled and produced an intermingled roar surpassing strange.”

Cooke remembered seeing one of his friends, a Lieutenant Duncan Campbell, “running about in circles” and falling down only to get up again and run in more circles. It turned out that a grapeshot had torn open his forehead and rendered him blind. He was carried off to the rear, Cooke tells us, “and in a state of delirium and suffering he lived for a few days.”

B
ack over on the British right, where the main attack under Gibbs had been expected to fall, a terrible and dangerous situation had developed, and the thousand tartan-clad Scotsmen of the 93rd Highlanders were beginning to undergo an ordeal of horrifying proportions.

When Colonel Dale was shot, right after ordering the regiment to halt, nobody in the subordinate command appeared to know what to do next. So the men remained there, in perfect marching formation, “standing like statues” with their regimental flags fluttering in the thin breeze, right in front of Jackson’s rampart, while the American gunners and riflemen blasted away at them. They were not even told to fire back.

“The American batteries were playing upon them with awful effect, cutting great lanes through the column from front to rear, and huge gaps in their flanks.” Some 600 of the Scotsmen were killed or wounded.

Meantime, Gibbs’s other regiments were running up against a perfect firestorm from Carroll’s and Coffee’s Tennesseans and Kentuckians that no soldier on earth could long withstand. One of the Kentuckians, a man with the wonderful name of Ambrose Odd, was so short that he could not see over the rampart, and so he jumped atop it and began to fire at the British soldiers. When a colonel told him to get down, he replied, “Well, I’d like to know how I can shoot until I can see something!”

At one point Jackson ordered his artillery batteries to cease firing for a few minutes and let the clouds of smoke blow away, in order to fix the British troops clearly for more of the same. In Battery No. 3 he observed Captain Dominique You standing to his guns, his broad Gallic face beaming like a harvest moon. Though he was a short and squat man, he looked much larger now, his eyes burning and swelling from the powder smoke. Jackson declared, “If I were ordered to storm the gates of hell, with Captain Dominique as my lieutenant, I would have no misgivings of the result.” During this momentary lull a strange incongruity occurred: the band of Beale’s New Orleans Rifles resounded up and down the line playing “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail, Columbia”—in fact, throughout the entire engagement this band would play continuously every patriotic tune in its repertoire, though much of it could not be heard over the noise of the battle.

As the men in Jackson’s line looked over the rampart at the stunned British host before them, the Americans were astonished at the number of red-coated lumps lying on the field. The morning was so humid and still that the gunpowder smoke did not drift away in the wind as Jackson had hoped, but “simply pancaked lazily toward the ground, as if the very air itself was exhausted.”

Soon the order was received to recommence firing, and the “horrid concert” erupted once again.

“Stand to your guns!” Jackson roared. “Don’t waste your ammunition. See that every shot tells! Give it to them, boys; let us finish the business today!” he told them.

Pakenham had watched in mortification as the deflated soldiers of the 44th and 21st Regiments streamed back toward the rear and declared, “Lost from want of courage!” When he rode out in front and tried to get them turned around, General Gibbs clattered up in a towering rage: “I cannot control my men!” he claimed. “They won’t obey me!” Pakenham began rallying them “with reminders of the glory they had acquired in Egypt and elsewhere,” leading them himself into the gloom and roar of battle. Along the way they passed by hundreds of men in little bunches, cringing in depressions or drainage ditches from the American fire.

“Shame! Shame!” the general called to them as he rode past. “Recollect that you are British. Forward, gentlemen, forward.” At this point, one British officer tells us, “the American line looked like a row of fiery furnaces.”

As he neared the fray, Pakenham was hit in the right arm by a bullet, while another killed his horse. He immediately took the horse of one of his aides, Captain Duncan MacDougall, and proceeded forward, with MacDougall leading it by the bridle and Pakenham, waving his plumed hat in his one good hand, exhorting his men all the while, “with appeals to their ancient fame.” On reaching the battle area, Pakenham gave his final order, to bring up General Lambert’s reserve, but as the bugler was blowing the call, a missile of some sort struck his arm and the message was never received.

Then grapeshot from one of Carroll’s batteries tore into Pakenham’s thigh and killed this second horse out from under him. As his aides were lifting the young commanding general up, another blast of grapeshot hit him in the stomach. The wound was mortal. Pakenham was carried to the rear and placed under a lone oak tree standing far back in the center of the field, where he died a short time afterward—“perished thus ingloriously in a war of unjust invasion against his own race and kindred,” in the opinion of Judge Walker, who also recorded that “the old oak still stands, bent and twisted—a melancholy monument of that great disaster of the British arms!”

A lieutenant and a major from the 21st Regiment and about twenty men got across the ditch and managed to scale the rampart by standing on one another’s shoulders, but when the major, whose name was Wilkinson, raised himself above the top, he was greeted by a blast of rifle fire. The Kentuckians, however, were so moved by Wilkinson’s courage that they pulled him to safety behind the rampart. Walker tells us that a Major Smiley attempted to minister to the Englishman, saying, “Bear up, my dear fellow. You are too brave a man to die.”

But Wilkinson fully understood his fate: “I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he replied. “It is all over for me. You can render me a favor; it is to communicate to my commander that I fell on your parapet and died like a soldier and a true Englishman.”

After Wilkinson expired, the Kentuckians covered his body with their own flag. His was a particular English inconsistency “that did not seem to bother them in the least.” The reasoning behind it seemed to be that if a man has to go, he may as well go cheerfully, and in good spirits, while most Americans so wounded—being a more practical people—would have railed in curses and lamentations at the imminent prospect of their death.

The lieutenant, whose name was Leavock, had meantime gotten over the rampart untouched, only to find himself in the unwelcome company of two Kentucky officers, whom he attempted to take as prisoners. The Kentuckians just laughed at him, however, and made him a prisoner instead, while the astonished lieutenant looked back to find that none of his brother soldiers had followed him but were cowering down in Jackson’s ditch. Later, when he was finally released, Leavock claimed to fellow officers that when he rose up over the rampart all the Americans—except for the two officers who captured him—had run away, but this does not seem to square with reality.

By now General Keane had been critically shot in the neck and carried off the field. Also, according to accounts, General Gibbs had become like a man possessed, “riding around in circles,” shouting at and abjuring his scattered men, when he was struck simultaneously by several American bullets and mortally wounded. He, too, was carried from the field in pain and agony, still cursing not only his present situation but Colonel Mullins’s incompetence, the bad turn of the battle, and, some say, Pakenham himself; he died the next day.

T
he British army had lost all three of its active field generals, seven colonels, and seventy-five other officers—that is, practically its whole officer corps.

As an example of sublime naïveté, Lieutenant Gleig complained that the British soldiers “fell by the hands of men they could 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 [British] heads. 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 [the British army] destroyed without an opportunity being given of displaying their valor, or obtaining so much as revenge.”

Gleig’s problem seems to be, as it was with the rest of the British apologists then present, that the Americans did not play by European rules of warfare. Paraphrasing Walker, perhaps the British should have thought about that before they came to invade somebody else’s country, and adjusted their lofty military customs accordingly.

Some of the fleeing soldiers exclaimed to others that they had heard an order to retreat, but that did not seem to be the case either; by now the entire British army was in irredeemable disarray. The hapless Scotsmen of the 93rd were still standing in the field when “that thirty-two pounder, filled to the muzzle with musket balls, poured its charge directly, at point blank range, right into the head of the column, literally leveling it with the plain”—laying low, as was afterward computed, 200 men. Finally the Scotsmen had stood all they could stand and fled to save themselves, leaving behind them two-thirds of their number, dead or bleeding on the field. The battle was only twenty-five minutes old from the opening shots, and already from the British standpoint it had become a shambles.