Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Read online

  General Jackson repeatedly won reelection as well as the deep loyalty of his men. They liked what he said. He was often outspoken, and many shared his uncompromising views on defending settlers’ rights. With rumors of war, he was ready to defend his people and was just the man to rally westerners to the cause of American liberty. “Citizens!” he wrote in a broadside. “Your government has at last yielded to the impulse of a nation. . . . Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian czar? No—we are the free-born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world.”4

  Jackson understood the stakes of the war, and he recognized the strategy as only a westerner could. Of critical importance to victory in the West was a port city near the Gulf Coast. As Jackson would soon say to his troops, in the autumn of 1812, “Every man of the western country turns his eyes intuitively upon the mouth of the Mississippi.” Together, he observed, “[we are] committed by nature herself [to] the defense of the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans.”5

  The City of New Orleans

  New Orleans was important—so important, in fact, that upon becoming president a dozen years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had made acquiring it a key objective. Recognizing the city’s singular strategic importance to his young nation, he wrote, “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”6

  Knowing that Napoleon’s plan for extending his American empire had suffered a major setback in the Caribbean, where his expeditionary force had been decimated by yellow fever, Jefferson sensed an opportunity. He dispatched his friend James Monroe to Paris, instructing him to try to purchase New Orleans.

  Monroe had succeeded in his assignment beyond Jefferson’s wildest dreams. Recognizing his resources were already overextended in his quest to dominate Europe, Napoleon agreed to sell all of Louisiana. That conveyed an immense wilderness to the United States, effectively doubling the size of the new country. The Louisiana Purchase had been completed in 1803 and, at a purchase price of $15 million for more than eight hundred thousand square miles of territory, the land had been a staggering bargain (the cost to America’s treasury worked out to less than three cents an acre).

  The Louisiana city of New Orleans was the great gateway to and from the heart of the country. America’s inland waterways—the Ohio, the Missouri, and the numerous other rivers that emptied into the Mississippi—amounted to an economic lifeline for farmers, trappers, and lumbermen upstream. On these waters flatboats and keelboats were a common sight, carrying manufactured goods from Pennsylvania, as well as crops, pelts, and logs from the burgeoning farms and lush forests across the Ohio Valley, Cumberland Gap, and Great Smoky Mountains. On reaching the wharves, warehouses, and quays of New Orleans, the goods went aboard waiting ships to be transported all over the world.

  Although Louisiana became a state in April 1812, the British still questioned the legitimacy of America’s ownership of the Louisiana Territory—Napoleon had taken Louisiana from Spain and, to some Europeans, it remained rightfully a possession of the Spanish Crown. Jackson feared that sort of thinking could provide the British with just the pretext they needed to interfere with the American experiment—capturing New Orleans would be the perfect way to disrupt America’s western expansion.

  Now that America had finally gone to war, many nagging practical questions hung in the air in Washington. Who would determine America’s military strategy? Who would lead the nation to war? The generals of the revolutionary generation were aging or dead. The passing of George Washington had sent the nation into mourning thirteen years before, and no military leader had the stature to take the general’s place. Although the country had prevailed in the previous decade in a war on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, defeating pirate states that had attacked its shipping and held its men hostage, this was a bigger fight for even bigger stakes.

  Although neither Mr. Madison nor the members of Congress could know it in June 1812, the burden of protecting the West would eventually settle onto the narrow but resilient shoulders of General Andrew Jackson, a man little known and less liked outside his region. But first Jackson had to convince the men in Washington that a general from the backwoods was the one to lead the fight. That would be anything but easy.

  CHAPTER 2

  How to Lose a War

  Resolved, that we consider the war commenced against Great Britain under existing circumstances unnecessary, impolitic and ruinous.

  —Citizens of Lincoln County, Maine, August 3, 1812

  The Boston Evening Post soon dubbed the conflict “Mr. Madison’s War.” With no template to follow—he was the first American president ever to sign a formal declaration of war—James Madison was largely on his own.

  There was nothing battle-hardened about Madison. Soft-spoken as well as short, he weighed perhaps 120 pounds. Genteel in manner, he was sickly and bookish, with a face that bore the age lines of a man of sixty-one years. He was a far cry from the strategist George Washington had been and had little choice when it came to military matters but to rely on the advice of his counselors. Many of them also lacked war experience.

  Much of their guidance turned out to be less than sound. His advisers agreed that attacking Canada, which remained part of the British Empire, would be the perfect way to launch a war with Great Britain and to gain a key bargaining chip in future treaty negotiations. Henry Clay, for one, believed a land war with the United States’ neighbor to the north would end with “Canada at your feet.”1

  Madison’s usually reliable friend Thomas Jefferson added his voice from Monticello. He thought the capture of Canada a sure thing. “The acquisition of Canada this year,” he wrote, “will be a mere matter of marching.”2 All these words reflected the strong sense among American politicians that Canada, too, would like to be free of British rule and would welcome a liberating army from the United States. On the other hand, no one seemed to wonder what would happen if sending American troops north to invade Canada left the country’s long coast unprotected, and few seemed to be considering the bigger danger to the South—if the British took New Orleans, they could hamstring its economy and prepare to squeeze the young nation.

  If America was to fight in Canada, it might as well bring enough troops to win. Accordingly, several westerners, most notably Andrew Jackson, wrote to Madison to volunteer their military assistance. Jackson suggested moving 2,500 of his men to Canada within three months. But Washington never issued orders for Jackson’s men to move, and Jackson became increasingly certain that the East Coast men Madison had running the war effort were incompetent.

  Guiding the charge toward Canada was Madison’s secretary of war, William Eustis, who had served as a regimental surgeon during the American Revolution. Neither a strategist nor a soldier, Eustis lacked battle experience, and it soon showed. Within six months, everyone in Washington knew that Dr. Eustis was no better prepared than Madison to direct the nation’s military affairs.

  Eustis’s strategy had called for attacking Canada on three fronts. The first assault, which was to be launched from Fort Detroit, was directed by another veteran of the Revolution, General William Hull, who hadn’t been in uniform for thirty years and looked like the grandfather he was with a shock of white hair. Though ordered to move on the British at a nearby Canadian fort, he folded when his men, along with a community of women and children, were bombarded by British guns. Hull surrendered Fort Detroit and the entire North-Western Army of the United States to a British and Indian force half its size.

  The second assault, opened near Niagara in October 1812, also went badly wrong, this time because of division and lack of discipline within the American forces. When New York militiamen refused to cross the Niagara River into Canada to reinforce Ohio troops fighting the British, 950 Ohio militiamen were taken prisoner.

  Desperate
for a victory, Secretary of War Eustis placed all of his hope in the third assault. In a letter to Major General Henry Dearborn, another elderly warhorse who hadn’t seen combat in three decades, Eustis warned him that he needed good news in time for Washington’s January session: “Congress must not meet without a victory to announce to them.”3 Fighting in the vicinity of Lake Champlain, Dearborn and his men also failed. Some of the militia under his command refused to cross the border. Those who did march on Canada skirmished briefly with the enemy, only to find themselves, with the coming of darkness, shooting at one another. They retreated—from the British and their own friendly fire—ending the year’s Canadian assault.

  So much for what John Randolph of Virginia had told his fellow congressmen would be a “holiday campaign.”4 With the arrival of the year 1813, James Madison knew his war strategy needed to change.

  The president felt embattled. Congress and the nation were deeply divided. During the congressional debates concerning the declaration of war, Madison’s party had called the conflict a necessity, “a second war of independence.” On the other side of the aisle, the Federalists regarded going to war as foolhardy and unnecessary, and they had unanimously voted against the president’s war declaration. Though the War Hawks had prevailed, with bad news from the front, opposition voices had only grown louder.

  There were too few troops to protect American cities, especially those on the coast, including Washington. The U.S. Navy had performed relatively well at sea, sinking a few British ships, but those victories meant little. The two dozen warships of the American fleet were outnumbered at least thirty to one by the Royal Navy, and already more enemy ships were arriving to blockade American ports.

  Yet the divided Congress was often unwilling to provide funding for the military. The North, as demonstrated by the refusal of the New England militiamen to fight in Canada, was far from committed to the war. (From afar, Jackson offered a solution to the problem of soldiers refusing to fight: “I would hang them all.”5) Even if Madison had the money and unity he needed, his military leaders were not what they should be: his generals were old, his secretary of war was incompetent, and his secretary of the navy was usually intoxicated. As the year 1812 ended, Madison faced a painful truth: those who wrote the military histories would surely wonder at the misguided way the United States had launched its Second War of Independence.

  A Sense of Betrayal

  Both Tennessee governor Willie Blount and his confidant General Andrew Jackson saw the immediate danger in the West of the British-supported Indians, and Jackson told Blount, on July 3, 1812, that he was ready and willing “to penetrate the Creek towns . . . [to] obtain a surrender of the captive and the captors.”6 But Jackson’s offer to Washington, volunteering the services of his 2,500 Tennessee militiamen to serve the cause, produced no orders to march.

  For months, Jackson awaited word from the War Department. He could do nothing but bide his time at the Hermitage and complain angrily about the “old grannies” in Washington.7 Only in November did he get word from Governor Blount, writing on behalf of President Madison, ordering Jackson to protect the territory of the Mississippi Valley. Finally, the men in Washington were recognizing the needs of the West! Jackson was to assemble a force and proceed to New Orleans immediately to defend it from a likely British invasion.

  Jackson issued a call to arms, and a flood of farmers, planters, and businessmen, many of them descendants of Revolutionary War veterans, poured into Nashville. These Volunteers, as their ranks would be called, were eager to fight for their country, to protect their homes, and to serve General Jackson.

  Jackson had little time to organize and train his new recruits before they started for New Orleans in January 1813. Loaded into thirty boats, Jackson and more than two thousand men floated down the Cumberland River only to run into trouble. A cold snap blocked the river with ice, delaying the troops for four days. The unusually severe weather also brought frequent rain, hail, and snow, making the troops miserable. Jackson himself fell ill “with a severe pain in the neck and head,” but he recovered.8 When the ice melted, the boats continued on but not without accident. The difficult passage took five weeks and cost one boat and three lives.

  On reaching Natchez, Mississippi, eight hundred miles downriver from Nashville, Jackson and his officers made camp, drilled their Volunteers, and, with each passing day, grew more impatient. As instructed, they awaited orders regarding their final push toward New Orleans.

  While encamped outside Natchez, Jackson took the opportunity to strengthen his relationships with his officer corps. Chief among them was John Coffee, Jackson’s old friend and sometime business partner. Coffee was an imposing figure, with shoulders as broad as Jackson’s were narrow, an ideal commander for Jackson’s cavalry. There were other good men in Jackson’s inner circle, including his chief aide-de-camp, Thomas Hart Benton, a young Nashville lawyer who had impressed Jackson with his diligence, and John Reid, Virginia-born and -educated, whose writing skills earned him the role of Jackson’s secretary. Jackson also named William Carroll, a Nashville shop owner originally from Pennsylvania, to be brigade inspector.

  The pause also allowed Jackson to begin the process of turning inexperienced volunteers into a fighting force. He and his officers watched as their troops cleaned and tested their weapons. The men practiced packing and unpacking their kits in order to be ready to march at a moment’s notice. To a man, they were eager to take on the British forces said to be bearing down on New Orleans.

  Finally, on March 15, 1813, a much-anticipated letter from the War Department arrived—only to humiliate and infuriate Jackson and his men, who had sacrificed their time, their money, and, in some cases, their lives to travel to defend New Orleans. As a result of America’s many failures early in the war, General John Armstrong had replaced William Eustis as secretary of war in January, and Armstrong had decided to upend all of Eustis’s strategy. “On receipt of this Letter,” General Armstrong had written, “consider [your corps] as dismissed from public service.”9 Armstrong’s focus would not be on the South but on the East Coast, where he thought the greatest jeopardy lay.

  At first Jackson was confused about the missive’s meaning. Could Armstrong really be telling him to disband his army and turn back? But the brief and pointed orders from the new secretary of war left no room for interpretation. The Volunteers were to abandon their plans to defend New Orleans and return home. Jackson’s confusion gave way to shock and then anger. Eustis had been bad, but this move from Armstrong scarcely seemed an improvement.

  Not that Jackson wouldn’t be happy to go home. Deeply devoted to Rachel, his wife of almost twenty years, he carried a miniature portrait of her with him. They doted on four-year-old Andrew Jr., the boy the aging and childless couple had adopted as their own when one of Rachel’s sisters-in-law birthed twins in 1808. The general would like nothing better than to be reunited with his family.

  But what of New Orleans? As James Madison himself had put it years earlier, New Orleans held the key to “the country on the West side of the Mississippi.”10 Who would protect that essential port if Jackson turned back?

  And what of the other military objectives on the Gulf Coast? For months, Jackson had argued that to defeat Great Britain, America needed to keep Florida’s deep-water harbors out of British hands. Many of these small cities along the Gulf remained under Spanish rule, and the British were forming alliances with the Spanish in order to control the coast. Whoever held those forts was a threat to the likes of Mobile, as well as to the ultimate prize, New Orleans.

  Yet in the face of what Jackson saw as the urgent need to protect the Gulf Coast and the mouth of the Mississippi, Secretary of War Armstrong had not issued battle orders; he had told the general and his men to go home. Not only that, but Armstrong’s letter specified that Jackson was to confiscate his men’s weapons and to “take measures to have [them] delivered” to James Wilkinson, the overall co
mmander of the American forces in the West.11 Essentially, Armstrong was asking Jackson to disband his army, disarm his men, and leave them to find their way home as best they could. They would not be paid, nor would they be issued supplies.

  Jackson faced a dilemma: he must follow orders—but to do so would put his men in grave danger.

  Like Jackson, many of the men were sick; unlike Jackson, many of them were young and inexperienced. Together, when commanded by a seasoned leader, they could defend themselves from the British and Indians, but alone and scattered, they would be easy prey. Abandon them? Jackson was a tough man, but he wasn’t cruel. Yes, he would obey the order to march home but he must do it his way.

  He set about composing a reply.

  “Must our band of citizen soldiers wander and fall a sacrifice to the tomahawk and scalping knife of the wilderness; our sick left naked in the open field and remain without supplies, without nourishment, or an earthly comfort?”12 To do that, Jackson wrote, would be to choose their destruction.

  That he simply would not do. If he had his choice, he would have led his men on defend New Orleans, since he was eager to “meet the invader and drive him back into the sea,”13 as he had promised his recruits they would do together. But his more immediate concern was the well-being of the men in his charge.

  As ridiculous as it seemed, he would have to turn his men around and lead them back to Nashville.