‘A most destructive and murderous fire’
The 93rd (Sutherland) Regiment at the Battle of New Orleans
The Creole Queen, a modern replica of a steam-powered paddlewheeler, takes around 30 minutes to make the downstream voyage to Chalmette from the New Orleans waterfront. During those 30 minutes Creole Queen passengers learn a good deal about the great river that is hurrying them south. Here in Louisiana, they are told, the Mississippi is up to three-quarters of a mile wide and 100 or more feet deep; its levees, or artificially raised banks, are the responsibility of the US army’s Corps of Engineers; well over half of all America’s grain exports (destined for more than 100 countries) are shipped down this single watercourse; some part of the muddy waters flowing past New Orleans will have started out two months before and thousands of miles away in western Canada. Those facts underscore the Mississippi’s immense scale. They also serve as pointers to the river’s key role in US development. But for the Mississippi’s availability as ready-made highway and commercial outlet, the early nineteenth-century opening up of America’s Midwest would have been a much more challenging, and economically less productive, process. Hence the significance of what occurred at Chalmette where the Creole Queen moors and where its disembarking passengers are met – Chalmette being federal government property – by a US National Park Service ranger.
This, the ranger says, indicating a large and grassy area kept clear of buildings, is the site of one of America’s most important battles. Here on Sunday 8 January 1815, the ranger goes on, a hastily put together US army, under the command of Major-General Andrew Jackson, destroyed numerically superior British forces intent on occupying New Orleans and thereby strangling Midwest trade.
During their country’s War of Independence, Americans had prevailed more than once over the British. But those successes had depended in part on assistance from France. The Battle of New Orleans, as the Chalmette encounter is known, was different. This was an all-American victory. And it was won, the Park Service ranger tells his Creole Queen audience, by an army whose composition shows that the USA, as early as 1815, had begun welding its disparate ethnicities into a single nation. Fighting alongside Jackson’s regular troops were members of Louisiana’s Creole (and usually French-speaking) planter class, New Orleans ‘freemen of colour’, a buccaneer detachment from pirate-controlled Barataria Bay in the Mississippi delta, a Native American (principally Choctaw) contingent and – further travelled than any of these – a set of sometimes scruffily clad or ‘dirty shirt’ frontiersmen and settlers from upriver territories such as Tennessee and Kentucky. By Jackson’s British counterparts, most of them of aristocratic background, the American general’s polyglot troops were regarded with disdain, even contempt. But the Battle of New Orleans was to overturn all such preconceptions. At the battle’s conclusion – and this Chalmette confrontation lasted for barely two hours – British losses were well in excess of 2,000. American losses, as Andrew Jackson would report to President James Madison in Washington, numbered under 20.
Among the British dead were eight men from the Strath of Kildonan. James Fraser, Robert Gunn, Neil MacBeath and Samuel Matheson were killed in action at Chalmette on the morning of 8 January. Alexander MacBeath, Donald MacKay, Adam MacPherson and Duncan Matheson ‘died of wounds’ either that same day or shortly after.1
Those men had served in the British army’s 93rd Regiment. All of them, it can safely be guessed, were neighbours, friends or relatives of at least some of the other Kildonan people whose surnames they shared and who, 1,500 miles north of New Orleans, were that same January struggling through their second Manitoban winter. But the Kildonan men who – along with numerous others from Sutherland – were to die beside the Mississippi had left home long before any Kildonan family had cause to think of emigrating to Red River.
The sequence of events that brought Sutherland soldiers to Chalmette had its starting point in Strathnaver, the most westerly, and also most northerly, of the early nineteenth-century Sutherland Estate’s interior valleys. There, beside the road that today takes traffic through the strath and a mile or two from this road’s junction with a further road leading to Kildonan and Helmsdale, the 93rd Regiment’s beginnings are recalled in words inscribed on a metal plaque attached to a stone-built cairn or monument. This monument, its inscription announces, dates from 1914 when it was ‘erected by the officers and men of the 2nd Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders’, the 93rd’s successor unit. The event the monument commemorates – the mustering or assembling of the 93rd Regiment’s first set of soldiers – took place, on Sunday 24 August 1800, not far away at Langdale. There, between the road and the River Naver, some two or three hundred yards distant, is a flat and grassy area that can be seen to have the makings of a parade ground. Today this area is occupied by nothing other than a scattering of sheep. That summer Sunday in 1800, however, all must have been stir, noise and bustle hereabouts as 653 young men – a lot of them being seen off by parents and other family members – were lined up, provisioned and otherwise made ready for the start of their march out of Sutherland and into the wider world.
Getting those men together had not been easy. With a view to demonstrating her and her tenantry’s patriotism, the Countess of Sutherland (as the future Marchioness of Stafford was known prior to her father-in-law’s death in 1803) had committed to raising a regiment for service against France as far back as the opening months of 1799. The regiment, it had been announced, would be commanded by the countess’s cousin, General William Wemyss, who had previously been in charge of the Sutherland Fencibles, a 1,000-strong force raised on the Sutherland Estate in 1793 and intended, as all such fencible* corps were intended, for home defence duties. Stationed initially in the Scottish Lowlands, the Sutherland Fencibles (as noted earlier) had been deployed briefly in Ireland during that country’s 1798 uprising. Shortly after this the regiment was disbanded, but on the understanding that a large proportion of its officers and men would promptly join the new force Wemyss had undertaken to mobilise on his cousin’s behalf. At this point, however, things went seriously awry, few volunteers being forthcoming. The ‘delays and difficulties by which . . . recruiting [had] . . . been obstructed’, one of the Countess of Sutherland’s law agents reported, was due both to ‘a relaxation . . . of the ancient spirit of clanship’ and to some of the Fencible Regiment’s soldiers having picked up ‘crude and undigested notions’ – meaning pro-democracy ideas – when serving in the south of Scotland and in Ireland.2
This was an early indication that Sutherland Estate tenants – as became still more apparent in 1813 and subsequently – could no longer be counted on, as might once have been the case, to fall in line with edicts issuing from Dunrobin Castle. In response, estate managers employed a mix of stick and carrot. Each township, it would afterwards be recalled, was ‘required to furnish a rough census of those who were of the age for soldiers . . . If a father had three sons, two were demanded; and if he had two sons, one was demanded.’ Conscription of this kind, however, was accompanied by the issuing of written undertakings to the effect that tenants who provided General Wemyss with manpower would be left securely in possession of their landholdings. Those undertakings, when read carefully, turned out to be time-limited. Hence Patrick Sellar’s reaction when, in February 1813, Kildonan men then resisting eviction produced for Sellar’s inspection a number of the documents in question – documents Kildonan parents had understood to mean that, as long as they had sons in the 93rd Regiment, their tenancies would be inviolate. Sellar, as his co-factor William Young reported, found ‘the obligations . . . contained [in the papers he was shown] had expired’. Turning to the Kildonan men, Sellar ‘told them so’.3
Patrick Sellar doubtless thought that the end of the matter. But whatever the legal niceties, many Sutherland parents continued to be convinced, as was said later, that tenants ‘who sent their sons into the army’ had been told they ‘were never to be deprived of their land’. When, as happened in 1813, many such tenants in the Strath of Kildonan were nevertheless threatened with eviction, there was thus much bitter comment from people who, Patrick Sellar’s opinions notwithstanding, never ceased to believe that bargains solemnly made had been casually set aside. That is why William Young considered it ‘unfortunate’ that the promissory documents handed out in the course of the 1799–1800 recruitment drive had ever been distributed. But distributed they definitely were, the papers shown to Patrick Sellar in 1813 having originated, it can be surmised, in exchanges witnessed by Donald Sage, then a boy of ten, when William Wemyss staged an impromptu recruiting fair on what Sage called ‘the green’ adjacent to his father’s Kildonan manse.4
This was in May 1800 and General Wemyss, according to Sage, was accompanied by Major Gordon Clunes whose son William would afterwards become one of the Strath of Kildonan’s principal sheep farmers. ‘The majority [of the prospective soldiers] who assembled’, Sage remembered, ‘were tall, handsome young fellows who, at the verbal summons of the Countess’s ground-officer [or local land manager] . . . presented themselves before General Wemyss that he might have for the asking the pick and choice of them . . . To ingratiate himself with the [young men’s fathers]’, Donald Sage added, ‘General Wemyss . . . sent up to the manse [in advance of his getting there] . . . immense quantities of tobacco-twist and strong, black rapee snuff, together with . . . a large snuff-horn superbly mounted with silver.’ The tobacco, it transpired, was unappreciated. ‘Smoking’, according to Sage, was then ‘a luxury . . . utterly unknown to the men of Kildonan’ who also, it seems, preferred ‘lightcoloured’ and less potent snuff to the notoriously powerful ‘rapee’ favoured by Wemyss. But if the general’s gifts did not go down as well as they might have done, it was otherwise with Wemyss’s ‘promise . . . that the [recruits’] fathers should have leases of their farms’. This pledge was warmly received.5
That day in Kildonan, or on other days like it, young man after young man stepped forward to be formally enlisted. One of them was William Gunn, then 22 and, at 5 feet 10½ inches, unusually tall by early nineteenth-century standards. Gunn, a military clerk noted, had a ‘fresh’ complexion, ‘brown’ eyes, ‘brown’ hair and was ‘round faced’. He signed up for ‘unlimited service’, the army recorded, and his ‘character’, according to regimental records, was ‘extremely good’.6
Did General Wemyss, despite his having handed command of the 93rd to others, remember the undertakings he had given to the father of Kildonan’s William Gunn and to the fathers of dozens of men like him when the general’s former recruiting sergeant, William MacDonald, came to Wemyss’s London home to ask for assistance in obtaining better treatment for Kildonan tenants who, though their sons remained in the 93rd, were about to be dispossessed? And was it a sense of his being under a continuing obligation to the parents of soldiers he had enlisted that caused Wemyss to be so helpful to MacDonald? There can be no definitive answer to those questions. But it is indubitably the case, as William Wemyss would have been well aware, that had pledges of the Kildonan type not been forthcoming, there would have been no Rèisimeid Chataich, or Sutherland Regiment, as the 93rd was known to its Gaelic-speaking rank and file. During 1799 the dearth of recruits had been such that Wemyss came close to abandoning his regiment-raising activities on the Sutherland Estate. But by the summer of 1800, thanks in large part to the policy of linking recruitment with immunity (as it was thought) from eviction, the general was able to muster at Langdale a force that became, despite its ranks being so thinned at Chalmette, the nucleus of one of the British army’s most formidable formations.*
Entered in the army pay list as the ‘93rd or Sutherland Regiment of Highlanders’, William Wemyss’s latest command attracted commendation after commendation from senior officers. Much of that praise stemmed from the conduct of its enlisted men. This was a time when the Duke of Wellington, the British military’s most eminent commander and the man who masterminded the ejection of Napoleon’s armies from Spain before going on to win the Battle of Waterloo, could describe his soldiers as ‘the very scum of the earth’, men who, prior to their being dragooned into the forces, eked out precarious livelihoods on the outermost margins of urban society. The troops paraded in front of General Wemyss in Strathnaver in August 1800 were of very different background. They were, it was said, ‘the children of respectable farmers’; ‘connected by the strong ties of neighbourhood and even of relationship’; ‘a sort of family corps’. Thus it transpired that, in an era when military order was customarily maintained by means of frequent floggings, one Sutherland Highlander company went ‘nineteen years without having a man punished’. Men of the 93rd, it seems, were ‘steady, attentive and . . . regular to a remarkable degree’; ‘highly valued’; ‘a picture of military discipline and moral rectitude’.7
From Inverness in September 1800 Rèisimeid Chataich was shipped to the Channel Islands. Two years later the regiment was back briefly in Scotland before being moved to Ireland. From there in 1805 the 93rd was despatched to South Africa where Britain, with a view to safeguarding trade routes to India and the Far East, aimed to seize Cape Town from the Dutch, then allied with Napoleon.
Take Marine Drive out of today’s Cape Town and, keeping Table Bay always to your left, you come after about 15 miles to Bloubergstrand, a Cape Town suburb where the outlook is dominated by Table Mountain, which rears up behind the city centre on the far side of the bay. Due west of Bloubergstrand is Robben Island, separated from Bloubergstrand’s sandy beach by a five-mile-wide strait. In this strait, on Friday 4 January 1806, there anchored the British invasion fleet which the 93rd Regiment had joined in Cork some months before.
General Sir David Baird, the officer commanding the 6,500 troops aboard the vessels moored off Bloubergstrand, had intended to disembark his entire force at daybreak on the morning following the fleet’s arrival. However, a stiff wind off the South Atlantic raised such a heavy swell that it was not until Sunday 6 January that it became possible to order Baird’s soldiers – the 93rd, now about 800 strong, in the vanguard – into the boats that were to carry them ashore. Minutes later, one of those boats, its naval oarsmen struggling to cope with a continuing and ‘tremendous’ surf, was driven towards rocks still to be seen at the north end of Bloubergstrand beach. The boat ‘no sooner touched’ those rocks, according to Major John Graham of the 93rd Regiment, ‘than she instantly turned bottom up and down went thirty-six of our noble fellows . . . They were so loaded with ammunition [and] accoutrements that they all went down directly; four only were saved of the forty in the boat.’8
Opposed by no more than a handful of Dutch ‘sharpshooters’ at Bloubergstrand, the rest of the Sutherland men landed safely. Two days later, by which point all of Baird’s force together with its supplies had been brought ashore, the invading army set off south in what – January being the height of the South African summer – Major Graham called ‘intense’ heat. ‘It is not perhaps in the power of language to describe our sufferings for want of water,’ Graham went on. Nor was this the end of his and his men’s difficulties. ‘It is impossible to give an idea of the badness of the ground over which our line had to advance; very deep sand and completely covered with a sort of brushwood which is something like a gooseberry bush with thorn prickles on it.’ Cape Town, then a settlement of some 16,000 people, was now within reach. Between the British and their objective, however, was a Dutch contingent of some 2,000 troops whose artillery was soon subjecting the 93rd to what John Graham called ‘heavy fire’. But this, he continued, ‘only served to increase the [93rd’s] rate of pace . . . At length . . . the order was given to charge and, to be sure, how [the Dutch] did run! . . . Next day we marched towards the town where a flag of truce very soon made its appearance. Several of the outworks were given up immediately, and on the 10th [of January] the whole capitulated.’9
Cape Town’s defenders, as acknowledged in General David Baird’s official account of proceedings, resisted more stubbornly than Major Graham indicated. But British casualties were certainly slight, and Cape Town, which would remain a British possession into the twentieth century, had equally certainly been secured. For the next eight years, the 93rd Regiment was a part of its garrison. This meant that at a time when much of the British army was engaged in the Peninsular War, the name given to Wellington’s often bloody campaign against Napoleon’s forces in Portugal and Spain, the 93rd’s soldiers – each of them pocketing a share of the ‘prize money’ distributed after Cape Town’s capture – saw nothing in the way of action against France. Nor were they to do so after their recall to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1814. Napoleon had by then been defeated and exiled (it was thought permanently) to Elba.* Still to be settled, however, was Britain’s continuing war with the USA. This was the conflict the Earl of Selkirk had intended his planned regiment to play some part in. That had not happened. But when, in September 1814, the 93rd, not long back from Cape Town, was ordered to make ready for a transatlantic voyage, it became apparent that men from Sutherland were, after all, to be drawn into combat in North America.
Fighting on that continent had been sporadic and inconclusive. The USA’s principal war aim, the annexation of Canada, had not been and would not be achieved. But Britain, despite its forces having temporarily occupied (and burned much of) Washington, had equally failed to deliver anything approximating to a knock-out blow. Now the British, already attempting to blockade the USA’s Atlantic coastline, were looking to obtain control of New Orleans (a city which had been French, Spanish and French again before its acquisition by the USA in 1803) with a view to gaining a chokehold on the Midwest’s strategically crucial access to the sea.
By way of Barbados and Jamaica, the 93rd Regiment, which spent nearly as much time afloat as ashore during 1814, was accordingly conveyed in a new invasion fleet (this one 50 vessels strong) to the Gulf of Mexico. There in mid-December the Sutherland Highlanders, along with several other regiments under the overall command of General Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, were put ashore in the vicinity of Lake Borgne, a shallow saltwater lagoon to the east and south-east of New Orleans. But if this 1814 landing was a little bit reminiscent of the lead-up to the 93rd’s assault on Cape Town, that was the end of any similarity between the Sutherland men’s New Orleans experiences and those that had gone before in South Africa. In the New Orleans case, practically everything that could have gone wrong for the 93rd Regiment, and for the rest of the British expeditionary force, not only did go wrong but did so catastrophically.
By way of a maze of hard-to-navigate bayous and other waterways between Lake Borgne and the Mississippi, Pakenham’s force was eventually transported by boat on to one of the few dry-land routes giving access to New Orleans from the south. This route consisted of a strip of territory immediately adjacent to the Mississippi’s left or eastern bank. At Chalmette, where the British were to be repulsed so decisively, that strip was less than a mile wide. Because repeated Mississippi floods had deposited a great deal of silt on the river’s banks, the ground here and elsewhere in the vicinity sloped gently downwards from those banks to a broad expanse of cypress swamp. This latter feature, as can be seen by taking a trip to one of present-day Louisiana’s surviving examples, consisted of evergreen conifers festooned in Spanish Moss and standing in up to several feet of slow-moving or stagnant water. Terrain of that sort – made all the more uninviting by its being inhabited by alligators, snakes and snapping turtles – was, and is, effectively impenetrable. This meant that, after an initial encounter with the advancing British during the night of 23 December 1814, General Jackson’s obvious tactic was immediately to withdraw northwards with a view to creating as strong as possible a defensive line between the Mississippi to his right and the swampland to his left. This Jackson did, choosing to make his stand behind the so-called Rodriguez Canal on the northern boundary of what was then the Chalmet Plantation.
Some seven miles downstream from New Orleans, at that time a rapidly growing town of 25,000 or so people, this was one of dozens of sugarcane plantations occupying the productive and relatively dry soils next to the riverbank. Because it was winter, Chalmet’s sugarcane had long since been harvested by the plantation owner’s slaves, meaning that, from Jackson’s position, his men had a clear field of fire across many hundreds of yards of stubble.
A British probe towards the American frontline – an operation involving the 93rd and several other units – was driven off on 28 December. Another British attack, on New Year’s Day, was just as unsuccessful; and for the next week – while Pakenham’s troops, their days and nights made miserable by untypically icy and wet weather, regrouped to the south – Andrew Jackson was free to add to the makeshift but highly effective fortifications his men had already thrown up alongside the Rodriguez Canal.
This canal was not, and had never been, any kind of navigation channel. Instead it was an abandoned and mostly dried-up trench created years before in order to direct water downhill from the Mississippi into the swampland to the east, thereby powering a mill which had stood at the canal’s lower end. Jackson’s soldiers, aided by slaves from nearby plantations, were to spend several days digging out and reflooding the canal, soon six or more feet deep and perhaps 10 to 12 feet wide. The muddy earth thus excavated was meanwhile used – in combination with fence-posts, tree-trunks, cotton bales and other materials of that kind – to construct, on the canal’s northern rim, a rampart equipped all along its length with concealed firing positions interspersed, here and there, with emplacements for such artillery pieces as Jackson had managed to acquire.
If this rampart and its defenders were to be overwhelmed, it was clear to Sir Edward Pakenham and his staff, the Rodriguez Canal would first have to be rendered passable by filling stretches of it with what the military called fascines. These usually consisted of pre-prepared bundles of brushwood. At Chalmette, for self-evident reasons, the brushwood was replaced by sugarcane. But the purpose remained as before – to provide attacking troops with safe passage over the canal and to provide, in addition, a solid footing for the ladders that, if they were quickly to scale a parapet with a six or seven feet frontage, the attackers would need to have readily to hand.
Accomplishing first the canal crossing and next the ascent of the American parapet, while all the time exposed to artillery and small-arms fire from well-protected enemies, would have been desperately difficult even if everything had gone exactly as General Pakenham intended. Everything did not.
When, under cover of a low-lying mist on the morning of Sunday 8 January, Pakenham mounted a last, and ultimately disastrous, assault on Jackson’s line, his main thrust was intended to break through this line where he and his senior officers judged it weakest: towards the line’s merger with the cypress swamp on the British right. However, that thrust soon stalled. This was partly because the attackers, being short of big guns and artillery ammunition, had not managed to silence American cannons which – manned in some cases by pirate gunners from Barataria – cut swathes through the red-coated figures massing in front of them. Still more decisive in determining the battle’s outcome, however, was a calamitous failure to bring up the fascines and ladders on which the entire British battle plan depended. The task of rushing this key equipment forward had been entrusted to soldiers of the 44th (East Essex) Regiment. But they had bungled it badly – so badly that the 44th’s commander, Colonel Thomas Mullens, would afterwards be court-martialled and dismissed the service. At Chalmette itself, meanwhile, the consequences of those lapses were immediate and, for the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders, tragic.
The 93rd, advancing to the sound of bagpipes, accounted for a substantial part of a detachment – subsidiary to the main attack force – deployed towards the British left and consequently moving forward near the Mississippi’s eastern shore. Overall command on this flank had been devolved to one of Pakenham’s senior colleagues, General John Keane, who, on seeing the debacle developing to his right, ordered the 93rd to wheel round with a view to reinforcing the faltering British effort in that quarter. This meant that the Sutherland men, instead of approaching Jackson’s defences on a comparatively narrow front, found themselves strung out in a long line not far short of the Rodriguez Canal, its waters as impassable to them as to everyone else on account of the necessary fascines still being missing. A diary kept by one of the 93rd’s junior officers, Lieutenant Charles Gordon, describes the carnage that now ensued. ‘The enemy’, Gordon wrote, ‘could perceive us plainly.’ As a result, he and the men around him were subjected to ‘a most destructive and murderous fire . . . of round[shot], grape[shot], musquetry, rifle and buckshot’. Making matters worse was a lack of orders. Keane had been badly wounded. Pakenham had been killed. So had the 93rd’s own commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Dale. The 93rd, in consequence, was instructed neither to push on nor to fall back. On the British right, other formations were already in retreat. The 93rd, however, stood – ‘like statues’ it was said – for minute after minute while, in Lieutenant Gordon’s words, ‘officers and men . . . were mowed down by ranks’.10
From both sides, tributes were afterwards paid to the Sutherland men’s refusal to give ground. An American spoke about their ‘cool determined bravery and undaunted courage’. A British officer commented that ‘nothing could exceed [their] steadiness and gallantry’. But was there perhaps a further factor in the 93rd’s apparent unwillingness to become part of what another British officer called the ‘confusion’ and ‘flight’ developing all around them? Most of the men that same officer saw quitting the Chalmette battlefield in ‘utmost disorder’ were veterans of repeated Peninsular engagements. They were unlikely to have survived those engagements – many of them on a far larger scale than the Chalmette clash – had they not sometimes abandoned positions it had become suicidal to hold. Apart from its brief encounter with Cape Town’s badly outnumbered defenders, however, the 93rd, prior to its participation in the New Orleans campaign, had no experience of having been under fire. The Sutherland men’s motionless acceptance of the devastation inflicted on them at Chalmette might indeed have been the product of unmatched valour. But it may also have owed something to a lack of the sort of initiative that led more hardened soldiers to put their own preservation ahead of any obligation to wait for orders that, with so many commanders out of action, were a very long time coming.11
Not until instructed to do so by General John Lambert, on whom overall command devolved following Pakenham’s death, were the 93rd’s survivors at last to withdraw. By this point, the regiment’s killed, wounded and missing numbered somewhere between 500 and 550 – well over half the total strength fielded an hour or two before.12
Because Andrew Jackson had no intention of confronting his beaten, but still capable, enemies in the open, the British were able to pull back unmolested. Their immediate destination, two or three miles from Chalmette, was the fine home (its ruins still just visible today) built ten years earlier on the riverside plantation belonging to one of Louisiana’s wealthiest sugarcane growers, Pierre Denis de la Ronde. Here the army’s surgeons established a field hospital and set about the amputations which, in early nineteenth-century conditions, were the favoured method of treating battlefield wounds that were otherwise liable to become rapidly and fatally gangrenous.
‘The scene now presented at [de] la Ronde’s’, a British artillery officer wrote later, ‘was one I shall never forget. Almost every room was crowded with the wounded and the dying . . . I was the unwilling spectator of numerous amputations; on all sides nothing was heard but the piteous cries of my poor countrymen . . . The 93rd Regiment had suffered severely; and I cannot describe the strange feelings created by seeing a basket nearly full of legs severed from these fine fellows.’13
Among those treated that day at the de la Ronde plantation was a Sutherland man whose surname has not been preserved but whose first name was John or (in Gaelic) Iain. At Chalmette he had been standing beside his brother when the brother’s head was removed entirely by an American cannonball. Now Iain was to lose an arm shattered at the elbow by a bullet. What followed was promptly incorporated into one of those grisly tales military men tell by way of attempting to mitigate the impact of what today is labelled posttraumatic stress.
Iain, it appears, was prone to getting into fights with other soldiers. So no sooner had a surgeon (operating as always in that era without recourse to anaesthetics) sawn through Iain’s arm than one of his comrades, stretched out on a neighbouring bench or table, leaned across and (in Gaelic) told Iain that with his right arm now missing he would never again be able to land a blow on anyone. Iain, however, was not having this. Taking hold of his newly sheared-off limb, still within reach of his remaining hand, he swung it towards his tormentor, telling him, or so the story went, that he should think himself honoured to be the last man to feel the weight of what had been a powerful fist.14
Back at Chalmette, meanwhile, a two-day truce had been agreed in order to permit the burial of the dead. Something of what this entailed is evident from the subsequent writings of a junior officer, William Gleig, who had earlier been taken to the de la Ronde home to receive treatment for a minor head wound. ‘Prompted by curiosity’, Gleig commented, ‘I mounted my horse [on the first day of the truce] and rode to the front . . . Of all the sights I ever witnessed, that which met me [there] was beyond comparison the most shocking . . . Within the narrow compass of a few hundred yards were gathered together nearly a thousand bodies, all of them arrayed in British uniforms . . . They were thrown by dozens into shallow holes . . . Nor was this all. An American officer stood by, smoking a cigar, apparently counting the slain with a look of savage exultation and repeating, over and over to each individual who approached him, that [the American] loss amounted only to eight men killed and fourteen* wounded.’15
Also going about among the dead was another American whose emotions were more mixed than those of his cigar-smoking compatriot, this man’s daughter reporting that he had been ‘moved to tears’ by the killing of so many ‘magnificent Highlanders’. ‘After the battle’, the same woman went on, ‘my father took a bible from the body of one of the Highlanders. It had his name . . . and had been given him by his mother.’16
In mid-February, just prior to their evacuation by the Royal Navy, the remnants of Britain’s New Orleans invasion force learned that the Chalmette slaughter took place more than a fortnight after US and British diplomats, meeting in Europe, had agreed an end to their countries’ war. Nothing of this was known, however, in the course of a now demoralised British army’s long retreat to the Gulf coast. ‘We who only seven weeks [before] had set out in the surest confidence of glory’, wrote William Gleig, ‘were brought back dispirited and dejected. Our ranks were woefully thinned . . . our clothing tattered and filthy.’17
Every day it rained, Gleig recalled. Some nights, even this far south, there were hard frosts: ‘Thus we were alternately wet and frozen.’ For the most part, Andrew Jackson’s men did not seriously harry their defeated opponents. They did, however, subject British troops to constant psychological pressure. ‘To our soldiers’, William Gleig wrote, ‘every inducement was held out to desert.’ Often these blandishments took the form of printed handbills thrown towards sentries in the night. Their Americans pursuers, soldiers found, were ‘offering [them] lands’ and stressing ‘the superiority of a democratical government’. Whether or not in response to propaganda of this sort, there were indeed desertions from the British side. It is unclear if absconders included men from the 93rd Regiment. But it can certainly be argued that a 93rd survivor would have done better to try his luck in the USA than to go home. It would be a long time before there was anything approximating to ‘democratical government’ in Sutherland. Nor, 15 years on from the Strathnaver muster of 1800, would any soldier returning to that district have any chance of finding there ‘lands’ of the sort to be had for the asking in America. By 1815, a good deal of Strathnaver was in Patrick Sellar’s exclusive occupation. Soon he would be renting the greater part of it.18
*The term was a contraction of ‘defencible’.
*The 93rd’s enduring reputation derives not least from its soldiers having constituted ‘The Thin Red Line’ against which a Russian cavalry charge foundered during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.
*From which Napoleon would escape in 1815 as a prelude to organising the campaign that culminated in his final defeat at Waterloo.
* As indicated earlier, US losses were actually slightly less than stated here.