CHAPTER 10

The First Battle of New Orleans

Wellington’s heroes discovered that they were ill-qualified to contend with us in woods where they must fight knee-deep in water.

—Major Arsène Lacarrière Latour

As Villeré had rushed to Jackson’s headquarters, the British took stock of their position in preparation for their attack. Admiral Cochrane remained at the mouth of Bayou Bienvenue at Fisherman’s Village, while Keane made the Villeré dwelling house his army’s headquarters. The advance guard marched past the house and, bearing right, reached a larger road a short distance on. There the troops halted, taking in a view of more large plantations beyond. These great farms lined the flat, dry ribbon of land all the way to New Orleans.

Though the landscape was dotted with fruit trees, sugarcane was the main crop grown there. Ditches that fed into bayous and swamps to the north drained the fields that, now brown and scruffy, had yielded the year’s harvest to machete-wielding slaves and overseers. Bounded as it was on one side by the marshes and, to the south, by the Mississippi, the site seemed defensible, as good a place to pause before the attack as any. Stacking their guns within reach, Keane’s men formed a bivouac in the open fields. Here they would lay out their bedrolls for the night.

The levee—“a lofty and strong embankment, resembling the dykes in Holland, and meant to serve a similar purpose,” as George Gleig described it—protected the encampment, since the ground on which they camped was below the level of the water on the other side.¹ Exhausted from their journey through this strange terrain, the British posted a watch, positioning pickets at the periphery of their mile-long camp. Scouting parties dispersed to reconnoiter; some returned having helped themselves at the abandoned cabins and poultry yards they found, carrying hams, cheeses, wines, and other goods. Meanwhile, other soldiers dismantled nearby rail fences made of resinous cypress to build large fires. With smoke swirling into the sky, water was brought from the river.

“Fatigued,” General Keane noted, after their “long confinement in the boats,” the soldiers set about making an afternoon dinner.²

With two brigades of reinforcements soon to land to his rear at Bayou Bienvenue, General Keane planned to wait until the full force from Pea Island caught up. Some of the soldiers took advantage of the warm afternoon, washing up in the river. The relaxed air was broken briefly when, shortly after three o’clock, a bugle warning sent the troops scrambling for their guns. Within minutes, however, the all clear was sounded. A few American cavalrymen had been sighted but they quickly scampered—one of them wounded, the pickets claimed—when fired on by the British advance guard.

A calm set in once again in the camp. Tomorrow they would move on but, as the crisp December night fell, the men warmed themselves around their campfires, more comfortable and better fed than they had been in a week.

British confidence ran so high that Admiral Cochrane and General Keane had ordered the posting of handbills on plantation fences that announced their coming. “LOUISIANIANS! REMAIN QUIET IN YOUR HOUSES,” the flyers read. “YOUR SLAVES SHALL BE PRESERVED TO YOU, AND YOUR PROPERTY RESPECTED. WE MAKE WAR ONLY AGAINST AMERICANS!”³

The British, confident that the people of New Orleans were too newly American to have any sense of patriotism, were sure they would divide and conquer.

Firefight!

Shortly after seven o’clock, one of Keane’s lookouts atop the levee spotted a ship in the Mississippi just out of musket range. The British had been relaxed, unworried, laughter ringing out from time to time, but now the easy mood of the evening tensed.

Though silhouetted against the opposite bank, the large vessel defied identification. Might it be a Royal Navy cruiser coming to render assistance?

Or could it be the enemy?

With her sails furled, she wasn’t going anywhere. The British on the shore hailed the vessel but got no answer. They tried firing into the air but, once more, all remained quiet on the water. No response.

When the soldiers standing on the levee heard a loud splash, the noise remained a mystery. But aboard the USS Carolina, every sailor among the hundred-man crew knew the cause. They had cast a great weight into the sea—that sound had been the bow anchor striking the surface of the Mississippi.

When the anchor struck bottom, Commodore Patterson’s men pulled its cable taut. Slowly the eighty-nine-foot vessel came about, her bow pointing into the current flowing toward the sea. She stood steady and ready, her starboard side aligned with the shoreline a few hundred yards away.

In the quiet of the night, the American schooner had just become a floating battery. Armed with three long nine-pound cannons and a dozen twelve-pound carronades, she was perfectly positioned to unleash a broadside. The gunners carefully set their sights on “the [British] fires, like so many landmarks or beacons, enabl[ing] the Americans to point their guns accordingly.”⁴

At 7:30 p.m., the onlookers on the shore heard a deep, loud voice, speaking in English. The man’s exclamation echoed over the water.

“Now, damn their eyes, give it ’em!”⁵

In the next moment, brilliant muzzle flashes revealed the full outline of the ship. The accompanying thunder of cannons preceded by barely a heartbeat the crash of grapeshot. Well-aimed shot struck the British fires, scattering burning wood and blazing embers; kettles crashed to ground. The cannon fire landed “like so many thunderbolts amongst the astounded troops.”⁶ Men were knocked to the ground; others were wounded and killed in their sleep.

The calm of the evening, all in a minute, gave way to complete havoc. The British soldiers raced for their arms, looking at the sky and out to sea as the enemy warship continued to pound the camp with regular and accurate fire.

Ground Attack

The king’s troops found shelter behind the levee, but their answering muskets did little harm, and the guns of the USS Carolina continued to lob deadly iron into the camp. Some soldiers worked to extinguish the fires and to drag wounded men, unable to seek cover on their own, to safety. British artillerists managed to discharge a few rockets in the direction of the ship, but the skyrockets, too, failed to do damage.

After ten minutes the bombardment from the Carolina slackened—but Andrew Jackson’s second surprise was about to be delivered.

Lying prostrate behind the levee, British soldiers heard the report of muskets from the vicinity of their sentinels; there, with no moon to illuminate their attackers, the advance guard “mistook every tree for an American.”⁷ As the sporadic gunshots gave way to rapid volleys, a new sense of alarm swept through the British ranks. The realization dawned that the Americans were launching another assault—and this one was coming not from the water but from the land.

Jackson’s main force had marched along the river to the Rodriguez Canal; once there, at Jackson’s orders, they had moved in near silence to within five hundred yards of the British sentinels and formed a line perpendicular to the river. Two brass fieldpieces were readied, and the troops had waited for the Carolina to begin her bombardment.

Now they attacked. With Jackson’s line advancing on the stunned British defenders, the artillerymen with their six-pounders began a deadly fire that crashed into the besieged encampment.

Jackson had dispatched Coffee’s mounted Tennesseans, together with Beale’s Rifles and the Mississippi dragoons, to his left. This substantial force also included Pierre Lafitte and some of his Baratarians.⁸ Together, this secondary force had skirted the swamp behind the Villeré plantation and, on hearing the musket fire from the main front, Coffee’s vanguard also attacked, driving into the rear of the British right flank.

The tactic was the classic pincer move Jackson favored. To the British, already back on their heels, the effect was frightening, giving them the sense, Lieutenant Gleig reported, that “the heavens were illuminated on all sides by a semi-circular blaze of musketry.”⁹

To the battle-hardened British troops, however, this was nothing new. Colonel Thornton ordered his men into action, and two battalions charged the main line of oncoming Americans. Many men fell but the British penetrated the American line. Catching sight of the American artillery position, they made a bold push for the guns, managing to wound some of the draft horses and upset one of the cannons. But the marines charged with protecting them took to heart General Jackson’s words.

“Save the guns, my boys,” he called to them, “at every sacrifice!”¹⁰

Seeing what was unfolding before him, Jackson then spurred his horse and charged into the fray. He was “within pistol shot, in the midst of a shower of bullets, . . . urging on the marines.” The fighting was so hot that one of Jackson’s officers questioned whether the general wasn’t “expos[ing] himself rather too much.”¹¹ But they held the guns and moved forward.

Meanwhile, General Coffee, who had ordered his men to dismount in order “to give them a freer and more certain use of the rifle,” attacked the right flank of the British.¹² The fresh fire from these superior marksmen was murderous, made more terrifying by the blackness of the night. Beale’s Rifles joined Coffee’s men, adding to the pressure on the British.

Having softened up the redcoat ranks with their gunfire, the Americans advanced into the darkness and into their camp. Muzzle fire flashed in the gloom but, even at close range, the darkness and clouds of gun smoke made it nearly impossible to distinguish friend from foe. Shouts of “Don’t fire, we are your friends!”¹³ rang out as both Americans and British encountered friendly fire in the confusion.

Wary of shooting their own, infantrymen fought hand to hand, bayonet to bayonet, and sword to sword. The British used their guns as clubs, and the Tennesseans who carried tomahawks and hunting knives didn’t hesitate to use them. In the darkness, officers lost control of their men, and soon it was each man fighting his own duel in the dark. “No man could tell what was going forward in any quarter,” reported Gleig, “except where he himself chanced immediately to stand; no one part of the line could bring assistance to another, because, in truth, no line existed. It was in one word a perfect tumult.”¹⁴ The entire assault was a shock to the invaders: as Colonel Thornton observed, “This bold attacking us in our camp is a new feature in American warfare.”¹⁵

As the fighting entered its second hour, the clouds began to break and a quarter moon cast its ghostly light on the field of battle. At first, the direction of the light better illuminated the faces of the American attackers, giving the British a decided advantage. But soon a ground fog rolled in off the river, decreasing visibility again. Finally, with conditions worsening near nine o’clock, Jackson ordered his men to withdraw from the field. They had accomplished enough for one night. Though localized skirmishing continued for some time, most of the Americans marched back upriver, halting at a canal on a nearby plantation. The British retired to their camp.

Counting the Dead

On the morning after, surgeons on both sides worked to save what lives they could. Jackson’s surprise attack inflicted serious damage: 24 Americans were dead, 115 wounded, and 74 missing and presumed captured. But enemy casualties were much greater: according to one British source, the toll was more than 500 men. Roughly a square mile in area, the battlefield was tragic to behold, and even a veteran of the French wars like George Gleig was stunned by the carnage. “Not only were the wounds themselves exceedingly frightful, but the very countenances of the dead exhibited the most savage and ghastly expressions. . . . Such had been the deadly closeness of the strife that . . . an English and American soldier might be seen with the bayonet of each fastened in the other’s body.”¹⁶

Most of the wounded Americans were carried back to New Orleans, while the injured British were treated at the Villeré plantation, where a makeshift field hospital was established. Doctors amputated limbs and bandaged wounds, while soldiers buried the dead. The wounded British healthy enough to travel were loaded aboard the barges and taken to the fleet. Their beds on land would be needed soon enough; more casualties would surely follow.

General Keane was stunned at the outcome of this first real battle with General Jackson’s makeshift army. The Americans had penetrated deeply into the British camp; the British had yielded ground. They had won it back, but what would have happened had Jackson not withdrawn his men? Unable or unwilling to believe that fewer than two thousand Americans could have done such damage to his force of roughly the same size, Keane exaggerated the size of the American force in his report of the battle, more than doubling the actual count.

The intimidation factor of the great Royal Army was beginning to fade; the Americans had held their own. The fight had temporarily halted the advance of the British, and the Americans had demonstrated to their enemy that they could fight the best military in the world. In the hours before the battle, those British who had faced the American militia outside Washington hadn’t felt “the smallest sensation of alarm” at seeing American troops nearby. “We held them in too much contempt to fear their attack.”¹⁷ A dozen hours later, however, they had been shocked into acknowledging that these American forces, under the command of Andrew Jackson, were a high-caliber opponent.

Most of Jackson’s troops were inexperienced; the fresh mix of militiamen and regulars and volunteers had never fought together until that day. Yet the American officers and their men seemed to possess a dangerous mix of military skills that caught the British off guard—initiative, strategic thinking, determination, and fighting techniques. Many of them were superb marksmen, their guns deadly accurate, and even in hand-to-hand combat the American soldier had held his own.

Above all, Andrew Jackson demonstrated he was a man to be reckoned with. In just five hours he had formulated a combined land-and-sea assault plan, assembled a dispersed and diverse force, marched it undetected to the enemy camp, and reduced the king’s attackers to near total confusion. Then he and his men had slipped away just as they had come.

Newly aware of how potent their opponents could be, the British recognized the need to exercise caution—meaning that, once again, the Americans had bought themselves time, precious hours and even days to dig in, to establish a solid line of defense at their new camp.

Less than two miles away from the British, Jackson was determined to hold the line, to halt a British march on New Orleans.

December 24, 1814

Under very different circumstances, the British and American peace commissioners met that same day, an ocean away, in Ghent, Belgium. Assembling at a former monastery on the Rue des Chartreux, the teams of negotiators arrived on Christmas Eve afternoon to sign an agreed-upon treaty of peace.

The document actually decided little; it was essentially an agreement to halt hostilities. The first article stated, “There shall be a firm and universal Peace between His Britannic Majesty and the United States,” but, amazingly, key issues such as impressment and harassment of trade, the very matters that had led to the American war declaration, were not mentioned.

Henry Clay thought it was a “damn bad treaty,” but, like everyone else, he wanted the war to be over.

The American copies of the treaty would cross the Atlantic in a small leather document box; with delays due to stormy weather, it would take thirty-eight days to reach New York. The treaty wouldn’t reach President Madison’s study in Washington until February 14, 1815. As for New Orleans, the news of the peace would come far too late to avoid the casualties sustained by both sides in the interim. Just as important, the treaty’s terms would not be in full force and effect until the governments in both capitals ratified the document.

Thus, the future of the city of New Orleans and the territory of Louisiana—as well as the lives of many men—hung in the balance. The pressure stayed on General Jackson. Now that he knew the route the British assault would take, his job would be to establish a solid defensive line.