Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Read online

  ALSO BY BRIAN KILMEADE AND DON YAEGER

  Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

  George Washington’s Secret Six

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Kilmeade, Brian, author. | Yaeger, Don, author.

  Title: Andrew Jackson and the miracle of New Orleans : the battle that shaped America’s destiny / Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger.

  Description: New York, New York : Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017027754 | ISBN 9780735213234 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735213258 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: New Orleans, Battle of, New Orleans, La., 1815. | Jackson, Andrew, 1767–1845—Military leadership. | Generals—United States—Biography. | United States—History—War of 1812—Campaigns.

  Classification: LCC E356.N5 K55 2017 | DDC 973.5/239—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027754

  Map illustrations by Daniel Lagin

  Version_1

  To the unsung men and women whose faithful military service has kept us free and made generals like Jackson famous. Your names and faces may not be known by the world, but you’ll never be forgotten by me.

  —BK

  Our situation seemed desperate. In case of an attack, we could hope to be saved only by a miracle, or by the wisdom and genius of a commander-in-chief. Accordingly, on his arrival, [Jackson] was immediately invested with the confidence of the public, and all hope centered in him. We shall, hereafter, see how amply he merited the confidence which he inspired.

  —Major Arsène Lacarrière Latour

  Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 1814–15: With an Atlas (1816)

  CONTENTS

  MAPS

  ALSO BY BRIAN KILMEADE AND DON YAEGER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1

  Freedoms at Risk

  CHAPTER 2

  How to Lose a War

  CHAPTER 3

  The Making of a General

  CHAPTER 4

  A River Dyed Red

  CHAPTER 5

  The British on Offense

  CHAPTER 6

  Jackson Unleashed

  CHAPTER 7

  Target: New Orleans

  CHAPTER 8

  Losing Lake Borgne

  CHAPTER 9

  The Armies Assemble

  CHAPTER 10

  The First Battle of New Orleans

  CHAPTER 11

  The Defensive Line

  CHAPTER 12

  Day of Destiny

  CHAPTER 13

  The British Withdraw

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  FOR FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  In the spring of 1781, the redcoats arrived in upland Carolina, and they brought terror with them. As they searched the countryside for the rebels, they turned the region the Jackson family called home into an armed camp. Elizabeth Jackson’s youngest son, Andrew, though barely fourteen years of age, hated their presence—and quickly learned just how costly the fight for liberty could be.

  On April 9, Andy and his brother, Robert, two years older, earned the wrath of the invading force by joining a battle to defend the local meetinghouse against a band of Tories reinforced by British dragoons. The fight went badly for the Americans, but the brothers, unlike a cousin who was severely wounded and captured, were lucky. They escaped and, after spending a night hiding in the brush, the two Jackson boys managed to reach their cousin’s home to deliver the news of his fate. Once there, however, their luck ran out: a Tory spy spotted their horses and informed the British of their whereabouts.

  A lesson in the cruelties of war was soon delivered. As the Jackson brothers stood helplessly at the point of British swords, the enemy set about destroying their aunt and uncle’s home. Determined to make an example of these rebels, the redcoats shattered dishes. They ripped clothing to rags. They smashed furniture. Then, with the house in ruins, the commanding officer decided upon one more humiliation. He chose Andy Jackson as his target.

  He ordered tall and gangly Andy Jackson to kneel before him and clean the mud from his boots. The boy refused.

  “Sir, I am a prisoner of war, and claim to be treated as such.”1

  Enraged by the young American’s defiance, the British officer raised his sword and brought it down on Jackson’s head. Had Andy not raised his arm to deflect the blow, his skull might have been split open. As it was, the blade gashed his forehead and sliced his hand to the bone. Not satisfied at drawing blood from Andy, the soldier turned and slashed at his brother, tearing into his scalp, leaving him dazed and bleeding.

  No one dressed their wounds. Instead, the Jackson brothers were marched forty miles, with neither food nor water, to join more than two hundred other rebellious colonists in a prison camp in Camden. There they were fed stale bread and exposed to the smallpox that raged among the prisoners kept in tightly packed conditions.

  Their mother, Elizabeth Jackson, had already lost too much. Her husband, Andrew Jackson Sr., had worked himself to death shortly before Andrew was born, leaving the pregnant Elizabeth with two, soon to be three, young sons in the rugged wilderness of upland South Carolina. She had raised the baby and his brothers as best she could and tried to protect them from the dangers of the war, but the boys had joined the fight despite her pleas. Hugh, the oldest, had died at age sixteen of heat exhaustion after a battle the year before. Elizabeth was not about to lose her remaining sons now.

  Traveling the long distance to their prison, she managed to persuade their jailers to include them in a prisoner exchange. But freedom didn’t mean safety. Robert had fallen dangerously ill, his wound infected, and the family of three had many miles to travel—on just two horses. Robert, delirious, rode one, and the exhausted Elizabeth the other.

  Andrew walked. He made the journey barefoot, since the British had taken his shoes. Although all three made it home through driving rains, Robert died two days later. Elizabeth had no time to nurse her grief—or her remaining son. As Andrew recovered from a fever, she set off for Charleston, where two of the nephews she helped raise were prisoners. She would never return. After completing a 160-mile journey, much of it through enemy territory, she became i
ll with cholera and died. Andrew would learn he was an orphan when a small bundle of her clothes was returned to his home.

  Andrew Jackson would never forget the pain and humiliation of that summer. His father, mother, and brothers were dead. He himself bore the memory of British brutality, his forehead and hand forever marked by the British officer’s sword, a reminder of the callous cruelty that had destroyed his family.

  His mother may have left him alone, but she had not left him without words to live by. Years later, he would report that she had told him, “Make friends by being honest and keep them by being steadfast. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue for slander—settle them cases yourself!”2

  Andy wouldn’t forget her advice, and he would take care to settle more than just slander. Great Britain had left him an orphan, and one day he would settle that score.

  CHAPTER 1

  Freedoms at Risk

  These are the times which distinguish the real friend of his country from the town-meeting brawler and the sunshine patriot. . . . The former steps forth, and proclaims his readiness to march.

  —Major General Andrew Jackson

  On June 1, 1812, America declared war. After a hot debate, James Madison’s war resolution was passed by a vote of 19–13 in the Senate and 79–49 in the House of Representatives, and, once again, the new nation would be taking on the world’s premier military and economic power: Great Britain.

  Twenty-nine years had passed since the colonists’ improbable victory in the Revolutionary War, and for twenty-nine years the British had failed to respect American sovereignty. Now, the nation James Madison led had reached the limit of its tolerance. Great Britain’s kidnapping of American sailors and stirring up of Indian tribes to attack settlers on the western frontier had made life intolerably difficult for many of America’s second generation, including those hardscrabble men and women pushing the boundaries westward.

  Though reluctant to risk the new nation’s liberty, Madison was now ready to send a message to England and the world that America would stand up to the bully that chose to do her harm. The unanswered question was: Could America win? Less than thirty years removed from the last war, and with virtually no national army, were Americans prepared to take on Britain and defend themselves, this time without the help of France? The world was about to find out.

  In fact, so many Americans opposed the war that the declaration posed a real risk to the country’s national unity. The Federalist Party, mainly representing northerners whose economy relied on British trade, had unanimously opposed the war declaration. Many New Englanders wanted peace with Britain, and it was likely that some would even be willing to leave the Union in order to avoid a fight.

  Yet peaceful attempts at resolving the conflict with Britain had already been tried—and hadn’t helped the economy much. Five years earlier, when a British ship attacked the U.S. Navy’s Chesapeake, killing three sailors and taking four others from the ship to impress them into service to the Crown, then-president Thomas Jefferson had attempted to retaliate. To protest this blatant hostility, Congress passed the Embargo Act, prohibiting overseas trade with Great Britain. Unfortunately, the act hurt Americans more than the British. In just fifteen months, the embargo produced a depression that cruelly punished merchants and farmers while doing little to deter the Royal Navy’s interference and hardening New England’s resistance to conflict. Further attempts at legislative pressure in the early years of James Madison’s presidency had little effect, and British impressment had continued. By the time of the war declaration in June 1812, the number of sailors seized off the decks of American ships had risen to more than five thousand men.

  To many, including Andrew Jackson, then forty years old, the attack on the Chesapeake alone had been an insult to American pride that demanded a military response. As Jackson wrote to a Virginia friend after learning of the Chesapeake’s fate, “The degradation offered to our government . . . has roused every feeling of the American heart, and war with that nation is inevitable.”1

  Yet America had waited, and the losses at sea mounted. At the same time, attempts to pacify the British had only resulted in further losses in America’s new territory, “the West,” which ran south to north from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, bounded on the west by the Mississippi. There British agents were said to be agitating the Indians. For many years, the Five Civilized Tribes in the region (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) had maintained peaceful relations with the European arrivals. But as more and more white settlers moved into native territories, tensions had risen and open conflict had broken out. In some places, travelers could no longer be certain whether the Native Americans they encountered were friendly; for inhabitants of the frontier, that meant the events of daily life were accompanied by fear. Stories circulated of fathers who returned from a day of hunting to find their children butchered, and of wives who stumbled upon their husbands scalped in the fields.

  A major Shawnee uprising in the Indiana Territory in 1811 escalated the fear. And as the bloodshed increased, there were reports that the British were providing the Indians with weapons and promising them land if they carried out violent raids against American settlers. For Andrew Jackson, the threat had become too close for comfort when, in the spring of 1812, just a hundred miles from his home, a marauding band of Creeks killed six settlers and took a woman hostage. Jackson was certain the British were behind the attack on the little settlement at the mouth of the Duck River.

  Westerners like Jackson fumed at the government’s inability to resolve the country’s problems, but their clout in Washington was limited. The decision makers from Virginia and New England had little sympathy for their inland countrymen. Eastern newspapers poked fun at the hill folks’ backward ways, and much of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains remained mysterious and wild, with few good roads and even fewer maps. The dangers faced by westerners were not felt by easterners, and their anguished demands for retaliation were scorned and dismissed by those whose wallets would be hurt by the war.

  But eventually, despite many politicians’ disdain for their hick neighbors to the west, Washington politics had begun to shift along with the nation’s growing population. The West had gained new influence in the elections of 1810 and 1811, when the region sent a spirited band of new representatives to the Capitol. These men saw British attitudes toward the United States as a threat to American liberty and independence; they also saw the need for westward expansion, a move that the British were trying to thwart. Led by a young Kentuckian named Henry Clay, they quickly gained the nickname War Hawks, because, despite the risks, they knew it was time to fight.

  Clay became Speaker of the House and he, along with the War Hawks and like-minded Republicans from the coastal states, put pressure on the Madison administration. Now, after years of resistance, Madison listened, and with Congress’s vote, the War of 1812 began. America decided to stand up for its sovereignty on the sea and its security in the West.

  The War Hawks in Washington were ecstatic about the declaration of war, and so was Jackson in Tennessee. At last he would have the chance to defend the nation he loved, to protect his family and friends—and, personally, to take revenge on the nation that had left him alone and scarred so many years before.

  The Boy Becomes a Man

  A quarter century before, Jackson had swallowed his grudge. When the Treaty of Paris made U.S. independence official in 1783, the orphaned sixteen-year-old adopted America as his family.

  Relatives had taken him in after his mother’s death. He became a saddler’s apprentice, then, his ambitions rising, he clerked for a North Carolina attorney. Andrew Jackson’s cobbled-together upbringing would serve him well, though he also gained a reputation as a young man who loved drinking, playing cards, and horse racing.

  Admitted to the bar to practice law at age twenty, a year later he accepted an appointment as a public prosecutor in N
orth Carolina’s western district. That took him beyond the boundaries of the state, to the other side of the Appalachians. Jackson arrived in a region that, a few years after his arrival, became the state of Tennessee.

  The red-haired, blue-eyed, and rangy six-foot-one young man made an immediate impression in Nashville, a frontier outpost established just eight years earlier. As Jackson put down roots, he became one of its chief citizens as his and his city’s reputations grew. His rise gained momentum after he met Rachel Donelson, the youngest daughter of one of Nashville’s founding families. Dark-eyed Rachel was the prettiest of the Donelson sisters and full of life. It was said she was “the best story-teller, the best dancer, . . . [and] the most dashing horsewoman in the western country.”2 Jackson was smitten, and after she extricated herself from a marriage already gone bad, he took her as his wife.

  As a lawyer, a trader, and a merchant, Jackson bought and sold land. By the time Tennessee joined the Union, in 1796, he had won the respect of his neighbors, who chose him as their delegate to the state’s constitutional convention. Jackson then served as Tennessee’s first congressman for one session before becoming a U.S. senator. But he found life in the political realm of the Federal City frustrating—too little got done for the decisive young Jackson—and he accepted an appointment to Tennessee’s Supreme Court. In the early years of the nineteenth century, he divided his energies between administering the law and establishing himself at his growing plantation, the Hermitage, ten miles outside Nashville. “His house was the seat of hospitality,” wrote a young officer friend, “the resort of friends and acquaintances, and of all strangers visiting the state.”3

  His next venture into public service would suit him better: thanks to his strong relationships and sound political instincts, he was elected major general of the Tennessee militia, in February 1802. Maintained by the state, not the federal government, the militia was provisioned by local men who supplied their own weapons and uniforms and served short contracts of a few months’ duration. Leading the militia was a good fit for Jackson’s style, because it gave him the chance to serve the people he loved with the freedom he needed and the challenge he craved.