Patriotic Fire (22 page)

Most of the British army had by now run back out of cannon and rifle range, but there were still large numbers of fleeing soldiers who had taken refuge in drainage ditches or shallow depressions in the ground, or behind the trees at the edge of the swamp. With the withdrawal of the bulk of their associates, those who remained behind attracted the undivided attention of American shooters. For these unfortunate souls, there was nothing under the sun to appeal to, neither mercy nor justice nor, for that matter, even common decency; the Americans shot at them relentlessly, and even the smallest flash of red moving above ground would bring a dozen bullets whistling overhead. If they tried to run for it, they were invariably shot down.

One retreating British soldier was particularly annoying to the Americans because, as he got what he thought was a safe distance away, he “would every now and then stop and display some gestures toward us that were rather uncomplimentary (patting his butt at us!).” A number of men were shooting at him, a Kentuckian said, but they were ineffective. In the Kentuckian’s outfit was a superior marksman known as Paleface, and the others urged him to take aim at the offending redcoat, which he did, killing him with a shot between the shoulder blades at a range of nearly three hundred yards.

Captain John Cooke, of the 43rd Regiment, remembered, “A wounded soldier who was lying amongst the slain two hundred yards behind us, continued without any cessation for two hours, to raise his arm up and down with a convulsive motion, which excited the most painful sensations amongst us; and as the enemy’s balls every now and then killed or maimed some soldiers, we could not help casting our eyes towards the moving arm, which really was a
dreadful magnet
of attraction: it even caught the attention of the enemy who, without seeing the body, fired several round shot at it.”

Other abominations starkly emerged. “A black soldier lay near us, who had received a blow from a cannon-ball which had obliterated all his features; and although blind, and suffering the most terrible anguish, he was employing himself in scratching out a hole to put his money into.” Cooke saw one officer of his regiment, “when a
grape shot
passed through both of his knees; at first he sank back faintly, but at length opening his eyes and looking at his wounds, he said, ‘Carry me away, I am chilled to death’; and as he was hoisted on the men’s shoulders, more grape shot passed his head; taking off his cap, he waved it; and after many narrow escapes he got out of range, suffered amputation of both legs, but died of his wounds on board ship, after enduring all the pain of the surgical operation and passing down the lake in an open boat.”

F
or the Americans, gazing over the rampart at the hideous mementos, the sight beggared the imagination, like a scene from the depths of Dante. The air stank of hot metal and gunpowder, of flesh and blood. A soldier from Kentucky wrote, “When the smoke had cleared and we could obtain a fair view of the field, it looked at first glance like a sea of blood. It was not blood itself, but the red coats in which the British soldiers were dressed. The field was entirely covered in prostrate bodies. In some places they were laying in piles of several, one on top of the other . . . in every possible attitude. Some laying quite dead, others mortally wounded, pitching and tumbling about in the agonies of death. Some had their heads shot off, some their legs, some their arms.”

Even Jackson was flabbergasted by the sight. “I never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection as on that day,” he later wrote, as scores of redcoats rose up like dim purgatorial souls with their hands in the air and began walking toward the American lines. “After the smoke of the battle had cleared off somewhat, I saw in the distance more than five hundred Britons emerging from the heaps of their dead comrades, all over the plain, rising up and coming forward and surrendering as prisoners of war to our soldiers.” These people, Jackson concluded, had fallen at the first fire and then hidden themselves behind the bodies of their slain brethren.

One was a British major who walked into the Kentucky lines of Paleface and Ambrose Odd waving a white handkerchief. When a private told him to surrender his sword, the major balked, looking for a proper officer to surrender it to, instead of a private “who looked like a chimnysweep.” But when the regiment’s colonel came by—he was the same Colonel Smiley who had earlier tended to the brave dying major—he ordered the priggish major to “give it up” to the private, which he did.

Another soldier surrendering himself was a young Irishman from the 44th Regiment who came into the American lines. As soon as he got over the rampart, he was trying to take off his cartridge box when an American noticed a red spot of blood on his white shirt. Asked if he was wounded, the young soldier “replied that he was, and feared pretty badly.” Several Americans began helping him remove his accoutrements when the soldier noticed one of the Tennesseans coming back from the river with a tin pot full of water, “and asked if he would please give him a drop.” The Tennessean did so, and no sooner had the Irishman taken two or three mouthfuls than he sank back down, dead.

Fifteen

B
y midmorning most of the firing had ceased, except for an occasional American cannon that let off a roar every now and then, like a lion who simply wanted to let everyone know he was still there. Jean Laffite, who was returning from an inspection of his stores of powder and flints at the Temple, got there just as the battle ended, and as he reached the rear of his batteries he did not know who had won. “I heard the rumble of cannons raging in the distance,” he said. When the gunfire slacked off, he remembered, “I feared that my supply of flints and powder were exhausted.” Laffite moved as fast as he could to the rampart: “I was almost out of breath, running through the bushes and mud. My hands were bruised, my clothing torn, my feet soaked. I could not believe the result of the battle,” he said, adding that “the spectacle presented before us by the battlefield was so horrible that we could not believe our eyes.”

Because they were touched at the tremendous suffering that had come to pass all over the ground in front of them, many of the Americans went out to try and help the more seriously wounded redcoats. In several instances the wounded British soldiers mistook these gestures of kindness as being some sort of attempt to “finish them off,” and several unarmed Americans were shot as a consequence.

Others went around collecting British muskets—a thousand or more—and sometimes the shoes of dead soldiers. Pakenham’s spyglass was found, as was General Keane’s elaborately embossed and engraved sword. A few weeks later, while still recovering from his wound aboard ship, Keane sent a letter to Jackson asking that his sword be returned to him, as it had sentimental value, and even offering to pay for it. Jackson, offended, ordered that the sword be returned, and it was.

A
lso by midmorning came a nasty little reminder of how fine the line is between glorious victory and ruinous defeat. A ruckus finally had broken out across the river on the west bank. Jackson, who was standing on the rampart with Major Latour, turned to see puffs of gun smoke and hear the racket of a battle in progress. Things had been so busy to his front this morning that he likely gave himself little time to worry about what was happening or going to happen over on the west bank. But now the proof was echoing back to him from across the river. At first it looked to Jackson as if the Americans were winning the battle. He could see some British sailors repelled from the American lines and heard the faint cheers of the American soldiers. Jackson called for three cheers from the men in his own line to answer and encourage them. These being delivered, it now seemed, upon closer study through the spyglass, that the British were winning, and indeed shortly thereafter there came to Jackson’s ears the unwelcome but unmistakable cheers of the British force.

Like the recently deceased Colonel Rennie, Colonel William Thornton was one of the most outstanding and resourceful officers in the British army. Doubtless he would have wished to have had his entire 85th Light Infantry Regiment with him that day, instead of a mere one-third of its number, but orders were orders, and Thornton, like any good officer, found ways to accomplish them, rather than figuring out reasons why he could not.

The American general Morgan had stupidly sent the 200 Kentuckians to man a thin line about a mile south of his own, an especially foolish move since the Kentuckians were truly a sorry lot, dressed in rags and rotten shoes, and even their own commander admitted that they were in no condition to fight. They had been marched all night after crossing the river, sometimes in knee-deep mud, arriving at Morgan’s position about four a.m. They had not eaten a meal in nearly twenty hours; worse, the weapons they had picked up in New Orleans were inferior—many of them were merely old fowling pieces or muskets with cartridges too large for the barrels. This was the kind of American “rabble” that the British had so long scorned and confidently expected to destroy.

Thornton and his men began landing just before daybreak about a mile south of where they had intended because their boats were caught in a strong river current. They made up for lost ground with a quick-time march, and soon came upon the Kentuckians and made short work of them. One of the boats with a carronade in its bow had rowed alongside the Americans’ position and given them a blast of grapeshot in their flank. At the same time, Thornton had formed his column into a line and, with bayonets glinting, marched them straight at the American positions.

Those of the Kentuckians who had a weapon that would shoot fired a volley and then ran off in all directions, many into the swamps to hide. Given their poor condition, one could hardly blame them, except that it would certainly have been better, for appearances’ sake if nothing else, if they had marched to their retreat in formation rather than in such disarray. It reminded Lieutenant Gleig, who was there, of the rout of the Americans before the nation’s capital the previous summer.

Thornton then formed up for a march on Morgan’s main force, which he found a mile up the river, manning their overly long line. He began stretching out his files so that they covered the entire American position, and at the same time he organized about 100 sailors who had rowed them over, armed with pistols and cutlasses, to storm a two-gun battery of American field artillery that commanded the road along the river.

With a great shout, Gleig tells us, the sailors rushed up the road toward the guns, “but were met by so heavy a discharge of grape and canister that for an instant they paused.” This was apparently the action that Jackson and Latour had first witnessed from the rampart across the river, and that initially had made them think the Americans were winning.

When the rest of Thornton’s 85th charged the American lines, the sailors recovered themselves and rushed the guns again; this time the whole position came apart. “A panic seized the Americans,” Gleig wrote, “they lost their order and fled, leaving us in possession of their tents and of eighteen pieces of cannon.”*
 
⁶⁹

This was mostly true, except that there were only twelve cannons, the three in Morgan’s line and the nine under Patterson’s command in the rear, trained across the river. Luckily, Patterson was able to spike them and dump their powder into the water, before the British could gain control of them and turn them on Jackson’s line. Patterson then retired up the road with his aide, “alternately denouncing the British and the Kentuckians.”

Gleig notes, with apparent relief, that “in this affair our loss amounted to only three men killed and about forty wounded,” but, unfortunately, “among the latter was Colonel Thornton.” Gleig, however, was talking only about his own regiment; of the sailors, 4 were killed and 49 wounded, which reduced Thornton’s detachment by nearly 20 percent.

Morgan, meantime, had ridden off in a tizzy, trying to reorganize his troops. At first it appeared they would run all the way up to New Orleans, but finally their officers got enough control to form them at a canal about a mile behind their original line, where they could perhaps make another stand. This, however, as we shall see, would become unnecessary.

A
fter Pakenham was killed, his aide Major Sir John Tylden galloped back to find Major General Lambert, who was commanding the reserve, to inform him of the event and to notify him that he was now in command of the army. When he arrived at Lambert’s position, Tylden also told Lambert, “Your Brigade must move on immediately,” referring to Pakenham’s last order to throw in the reserves. Major Sir Harry Smith, however, now serving as Lambert’s military aide, had been watching the disorderly repulse of the British forces, and he reminded Tylden politely but firmly that “if Sir Edward [Pakenham] is killed, Sir John Lambert commands, and will judge of what is to be done.” What Smith worried about most at this point was not that the attack had failed, but that the Americans would now form up and attack
them,
“as the French would have done,” he added. He asked Lambert if he could take the brigade forward to cover this “most irregular retreat” until Lambert could ascertain the true state of affairs. Lambert agreed.

Having done this, Lambert ordered Smith and all the other staff officers to go to the rear and re-form the troops—“no easy matter in some cases,” according to Smith. Lambert studied the situation, “wondering whether, under the circumstances, he ought to attack” with the reserve brigade; he concluded that “it was impossible, and withdrew the troops from under a most murderous fire of round shot.”

The British admirals soon came to Lambert’s field headquarters, “with faces as long as a flying jib,” Smith remembers, for something resembling a council of war. Admiral Edward Codrington is mentioned, but one assumes Admirals Pultney Malcolm and Cochrane were there also. Codrington, whose job was to keep the men supplied with rations, stated, “The troops must attack or the whole would starve.” Smith piped up “rather saucily,” so he tells us, saying, “Kill plenty more, Admiral; fewer rations will be required.” Smith and apparently other staff men gave it as their opinion, after having gone around to find out how the “pluck” of the troops stood, that those who had made the attack wanted no more of the Americans. “We know the enemy are three times our number,” Smith told the council—getting the ratio of Americans to British soldiers wrong once again—and reiterated his conviction that Jackson was preparing to attack them. “Thornton’s people ought to be brought back and brought into our line,” Smith recommended. “The army is secure and no further disaster is to be apprehended.”

Lambert agreed, and Colonel Dickson was sent to give the command for Thornton’s return, which was why it was unnecessary for Morgan’s men to make another stand.

Jackson, however, had been displeased with Morgan’s performance. He therefore sent across the river to finish the job several hundred reinforcements under the elderly French general Jean Robert Humbert, who had served in the French revolutionary army and who, in 1798, led the infamous force of French soldiers and adventurers in the unsuccessful invasion to expel the English from Ireland.

According to Judge Walker, Humbert was apparently something of a character. He never went anywhere dressed other than in his old French army uniform, with a French revolutionary military hat on his head and carrying his polished, inlaid sword under his arm. He spent his days drinking cognac and playing dominoes in one of the local coffeehouses. Sufficiently tanked up by the afternoon, he would march down the streets of New Orleans belting out “La Marseillaise” and other French martial tunes at the top of his lungs, with an army of cheerful children following after him.

Before Humbert’s arrival, Jean Laffite was sent across the river with a message from Jackson to Morgan. It said:

Sir:

This will be handed to you by Mr. Lafitte whom I have sent to you as a man acquainted with the geography of the country on your side of the river, and will be able to afford you any information you may want with respect to the canals and bayous by which the enemy will attempt to penetrate. I have also sent Gen’l Humbert, a man in whose bravery I have unbound confidence, for the purpose of carrying the enemy if necessary at the point of the bayonet. It is my determination he shall be dislodged at all events and I rely upon you to accomplish it, they are not more than four hundred strong and your task not a difficult one. We have beat them here at all points with a loss on their side of at least a thousand men.

Brig-Gen. Morganright side of the river

Andrew JacksonMaj-Gen., Comdg.

The problem with Humbert’s commanding the reinforcement was resentment at his being a Frenchman. It may also have had to do with his being “one of the characters” of the town, as has been described above.

As soon as the British danger had presented itself in early December, Humbert was among the first to volunteer his services, and after the British landing he would ride day in and day out personally scouting their positions in the face of flying bullets; serving as an aide to Jackson, he volunteered for anything the commanding general wanted him to do, no matter how dangerous. Jackson had not known the fifty-seven-year-old Humbert before coming to New Orleans, but in the weeks before the British actually landed, he came to realize that his new acquaintance was a general with real military experience in European wars—in fact, was the only fighting general among them all, when it came to anything more than battles with Indians—and Jackson would rely on him implicitly.

The trouble was, Morgan and Governor Claiborne did not agree on Humbert’s replacing Morgan as commander on the right bank. A heated discussion ensued, with Morgan arguing that his militia officers would not follow a Frenchman with no formal commission in the U.S. Army and Claiborne apparently concurring.

When Humbert could produce no direct orders from Jackson relieving Morgan, the Louisiana general refused to relinquish command. Humbert, after dispersing his reinforcements to Morgan’s lines, returned across the river in disgust, saying to Jackson that the American officers on the west bank had declined to serve under a Frenchman. This might have proved serious, even fatal, except that the British by then had been ordered to withdraw from the right bank, which they did in rude fashion, setting fire to a beautiful plantation château in order to mask their escape behind its smoke.

L
ate that afternoon, when the American cannonading had finally stopped, Lambert sent Sir Harry Smith over to the American lines to see if a truce could be arranged for the British to remove their dead and wounded. Smith arrived at a point about three hundred yards in front of the American rampart, where his orderly blew a bugle and waved a white flag to attract attention. Jackson sent out his aide Major Butler to find out what they wanted, and Smith gave Butler a letter for Jackson that was signed only “Lambert.” When Butler took the letter back to the Macarty house, the general glanced it over in a lawyerly way and told him to return it to the messenger with the response that “he [Jackson] would be happy to treat with the commander-in-chief of the British army, but that the signer of the letter had forgotten to designate his authority and rank, which was necessary before any negotiations could be entered upon.”