Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Read online

  This was also a responsibility he had long wished for. As he wrote Rachel from his quarters in Creek country, near the Coosa River, “I owe Britain a debt of . . . vengeance.”20

  In Jackson’s view, the enemy’s ultimate objective was clear enough: the British wanted New Orleans. Anyone who could read a map knew that by capturing the city, His Majesty’s forces would consolidate control of the North American continent from the Gulf Coast to Canada—and that could end the United States’ westward expansion. For Jackson, that prospect was unacceptable.

  In August 1814, his army was small. His Tennessee Volunteers had returned to their farms and shops after defeating the Indians, and he had just 531 enlisted soldiers. But Jackson’s knowledge of what the British might do was even smaller. He knew neither when the British warships might land nor how many troops they carried. What he was certain of was that he and his army had to move south immediately. With the Creeks disposed of, he could focus on protecting the coast from his European enemy.

  Two days after the Creek treaty was signed, Jackson and his little army set off toward the Gulf of Mexico, marching as quickly as they could. The new reality of a British threat fed an existing fear: those who read the papers already knew the British could be ruthless. The previous summer the Crown’s men, rampaging through the Virginia countryside, committed terrible atrocities. One woman seeking to escape was said to have been “pursued up to her waist in the water, and dragged on shore by ten or twelve of these ruffians, who satiated their desires upon her, after pulling off her clothes, stockings, shoes, etc.”21 Another report claimed a sick man was murdered in his bed. According to one congressman, “The town of Hampton, and the surrounding country were given up to the indiscriminate plunder of a licentious soldiery.”22 Such stories, linked with rumors of the impending British approach, prompted General Jackson, sitting in his saddle for four hundred miles, to think very hard about possible strategies for preventing the same from happening to the people of the Gulf Coast.

  Yet even for the most powerful military in the world, an attack on New Orleans would be no simple matter. The Royal Navy might lead the siege, but to get to New Orleans its ships would have to sail a hundred miles up the Mississippi. Along the way, they would face American guns, changing tides, and several sharp turns in the river, making for a slow and dangerous approach to their objective. Though he had no naval experience, Jackson understood these obstacles and guessed that the British would avoid a river assault.

  Assuming the British would launch an overland attack against the city, Jackson considered his possibilities. The Mississippi delta south of New Orleans, a swampy morass of bayous, would be practically impossible to march across. And the British had no easy land access from the north. Thus, Jackson and his advisers concluded that their enemy would come from the east.

  If the British were to send a land force from the east, where would they land? Jackson believed that the most likely site was Mobile, a city 150 miles to the east, with its own protected bay. When, on August 22, he rode into Mobile with his army, he was already thinking one move ahead. Although he had never visited New Orleans, he would, somehow, find a way to protect this city unlike any other.

  CHAPTER 5

  The British on Offense

  I have it much at heart to give [the Americans] a complete drubbing before peace is made, when I trust their . . . command of the Mississippi [will be] wrested from them.

  —Admiral Alexander Cochrane to Earl Bathurst, July 14, 1814

  Would New Orleans welcome America’s protection? The answer to that question was far from certain. The most important city in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was in transition. An American possession since 1803, Louisiana had been a state for only two years, and its loyalty to the Union was not yet proven.

  The young and precariously American city was also a place of contradictions. Though isolated amid low-lying mudflats, in a climate where withering tropical heat and violent hurricanes were normal, New Orleans had nevertheless become a center of European refinement and culture. An outpost of law and order in the wilderness, it was still home to more than a few outlaws. The most important city in the newest American state, it was French in spirit, but had also been a possession of both the British and the Spanish; many of its inhabitants didn’t even speak the language of their new government. In the event of invasion, Jackson would have to shape an unprecedented unity among a motley population of French colonials, Native Americans, freed slaves, American woodsmen, and even pirates.

  New Orleans had been a place of constant change simply because of its geography. A natural bank, or levee, had risen along a crescent-shaped turn in the meandering Mississippi and, over the centuries, Native Americans had found the spot, located about a hundred miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico, a convenient place to travel farther inland. Their overland route took them to a slow-moving stream at a water level different from the river’s (Andrew Jackson would soon come to know it as Bayou St. John), which, in turn, drained into a shallow body of water called Lake Pontchartrain. That enormous lake emptied into Lake Borgne and, eventually, the Gulf, north and east of what had become New Orleans.

  In 1718, an early European arrival in the region, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, founded a community at the watery crossroads and called it La Nouvelle-Orléans, in honor of France’s ruler, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans. The settlement began as little more than an array of shacks, and most of those were obliterated by a massive flood in 1719. Bienville supervised a rebuilding, with taller and sturdier levees constructed to protect his settlement, which, behind the wall of earth, sat several feet below the Mississippi at high tide. The growing town became the capital of French Louisiana in 1722, but later that same year a hurricane destroyed most of New Orleans’s buildings.

  Slaves brought from Senegal dug drainage canals and built higher levees, and as they pushed the water back, Bienville’s village grew into a good-size town. As settlers poured in, New Orleans gained its first cathedral and a convent for Ursuline nuns. The Ursuline sisters established a school for girls and a hospital where soldiers and slaves alike were treated for ailments common to the region, like malaria and yellow fever. When the Seven Years’ War in Europe shifted the political landscape (the 1756–63 conflict was known to Americans as the French and Indian War), Louisiana was ceded to Spain. But the Spaniards’ luck during their decades in charge proved no better than that of the French. Three major hurricanes hurtled through; a great flood swamped most of lower Louisiana in 1782; and two great fires nearly flattened the city of New Orleans in 1788 and 1794.

  Nevertheless, by the time of Mr. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans had become a European-style city with an aura such that a contemporary visitor described the place as a “French Ville de Province.”1 The oldest quarter was a central checkerboard of streets, the Vieux Carré, which retained a grid planned long before by French royal engineers. In the next decade, the population more than doubled to eighteen thousand inhabitants.

  In the heat and humidity of its bayou country, lower Louisiana proved a perfect melting pot for blending cultures. There were slaves and free persons of color and many Native Americans (the area had once been Choctaw territory). During and after the French and Indian War, French-speaking Acadians from Canada’s maritime provinces had been expelled by the British, and thousands of them took refuge in Louisiana. These “Cajuns” established their own unique culture in nearby bayous. A German community had been established upstream. On New Orleans’s streets and wharves, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and French were spoken. River trade had lured many frontiersmen from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, adding English speakers to a city where once they had been few.

  When war was declared in 1812, Louisiana had no long-term allegiance to the United States, but the British increasingly interfered with trade, and goods quickly accumulated at the city’s docks, generating profits for no one. Louisiana’s governor, Will
iam Charles Cole Claiborne, had been dispatched from Washington—first appointed to the post by President Jefferson and then elected after statehood—but the city’s powerful Creoles, as white New Orleanians of Spanish or French heritage were called, had little respect for him. In truth, no one in New Orleans controlled the levers of power, and the city’s competing interests coexisted but didn’t necessarily cooperate.

  This was amply demonstrated by the fact that a brash band of privateers—some called them pirates—sold their contraband openly in New Orleans, flouting the law. They paid no customs duties on the coffee, linens, silks, iron, mahogany, spices, and wine they smuggled into the city using hollowed-out cypress canoes and other flat-bottomed boats adapted to the marshy waterscape of the delta. Although they operated outside the law, these men were essential to the local economy and publicly advertised their wares. Few among New Orleans high society showed a willingness to crack down on the purveyors of much-desired bootlegged goods.

  Persuading the city’s population of sturdily independent peoples to support one another and fight together would be Jackson’s first challenge: corralling a throng of rich and poor, blacks and whites, speakers of many tongues, Americans and men of mixed allegiance wouldn’t be easy.

  Yet there was still a chance that cooler heads would prevail, and a diplomatic end to the war might be reached before any confrontation with the British took place at or near New Orleans. On the other side of the Atlantic, in fact, there were a number of Americans vitally concerned with avoiding what loomed as a potential military disaster in Louisiana.

  The Negotiations: Ghent, Belgium

  Many months before, President Madison had sent his diplomats to discuss an end to the conflict with representatives of the British Crown. After many delays, the ministers from both countries finally sat down together in August 1814 to talk treaty. If the Americans had hoped the end of the French wars would lead the British to tender peace offerings, they were very much mistaken. Even on day one of the talks, the U.S. envoys understood—perhaps more than anyone in Washington—the very real British threat to the Gulf of Mexico.

  One of them, Albert Gallatin, had kept his ears and eyes open on his way to Ghent, in Flanders, the site of the peace talks. He was an old friend of President Madison’s, having previously served as secretary of the treasury. During a stopover in London in the spring, Gallatin had heard things.

  Some of what he picked up was common street knowledge. The London Times stated in its pages the position that many Britons held: “Mr. Madison’s dirty swindling maneuvers in respect to Louisiana and the Floridas remain to be punished.”2 A few members of Parliament even called for New Orleans to be handed over to Great Britain. The dutiful Gallatin took notes of the chatter and wrote home, relaying it to Secretary of State James Monroe.

  “To use their own language,” he warned, “[the British] mean to inflict on America a chastisement that will teach her that war is not to be declared against Great Britain with impunity.”3 Gallatin added ominously that he had heard whispers that a force of between fifteen and twenty thousand men was on its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Their aim was clearly to deliver punishment, not peace, to the colonies they’d lost thirty-one years before.

  After writing from London, Gallatin had made his way across the English Channel where he joined forces with the rest of the American negotiating team, including the sharp-spoken Kentucky politician Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, son of founding father John Adams, the most experienced of the American envoys.

  As Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay had helped persuade his colleagues in Congress to declare war, asserting that capturing Canada would be a simple matter. Two years later, humbled by American military failures in Canada and elsewhere, Clay resigned as Speaker to accept the posting to Europe. There he hoped his considerable negotiating abilities would help salvage an honorable peace.

  But Clay, like Gallatin, was deeply worried as the August meetings with the British representatives got under way. Although Madison had agreed to the proposal for peace talks back in January, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, and the men around him had dragged their feet ever since. Clay had to ask himself: Why are there so many delays in sending a team to talk peace?

  Tall and congenial, Henry Clay was a hail-fellow-well-met sort of man who liked his liquor. He could walk into a roomful of strangers and depart with new friends, even if, as a demon cardplayer, he had managed to take some of their money. Now, in Ghent, those same gambling instincts put Minister Clay on edge. He could smell risk when he encountered it, and he had come to think the British were slow to open the treaty talks for a reason: With a large force from Great Britain attacking the United States, mustn’t the odds favor the superior British troops? he thought. Clay believed the Crown’s representatives were awaiting news of battlefield successes in North America. In the meantime, the king’s statesmen had little incentive to negotiate.

  This all made painful sense to Clay. He was a man who understood better than most the advantage of having bargaining chips on one’s own side of the table. And British victories on the battlefield could provide just that to his enemy.

  When, at last, the Britons did sit down to present their terms of peace on the afternoon of August 8, 1814, at one o’clock, the aura of doom darkened for Madison’s diplomats. The demands made on behalf of Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh were harsh, involving unacceptable limitations on fishing rights in the Atlantic as well as a large buffer zone for the Indians in the center of the North American continent.

  The American envoys recognized that the British demands were those of a conqueror—and that the United States had by no means been conquered. At least not yet.

  In the days that followed, the British and American negotiators continued to meet and exchange notes about possible treaty terms. But they made little progress. As Clay wrote home to Secretary of State Monroe ten days into the talks, “I am inclined to think . . . that their policy is to consume as much time as possible . . . [in] the hope that they will strike some signal blow, during the present campaign.”4

  Both sides in the Ghent negotiations awaited news from the front.

  “Bloody Noses”

  As the peace negotiators talked across the Atlantic, an express messenger arrived in Mobile, bringing Jackson bad news. His hunch had been correct: the British were indeed planning to land along the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans. The dispatch Jackson received at five o’clock on the evening of August 27, 1814, reported that three warships, the HMS Hermes, Carron, and Sophie from the Royal Navy station at Bermuda, had already landed a small force of men and armaments at Pensacola in Spanish Florida.

  With British boots on the ground just fifty miles east of his station, Jackson wondered what might happen next. A large invasion seemed likely; another source, this one writing from Havana, reported that a loose-lipped British officer had bragged about a plan to capture Pensacola, to move on to Mobile, then to march overland to New Orleans.5 London had already sent thirteen additional warships with ten thousand troops aboard, the officer claimed, with still more soon to follow.6

  When Jackson looked at his own forces, they seemed laughably small. He had arrived with his five-hundred-man Third Infantry force and found that Mobile was manned by just the Thirty-Ninth Tennessee Regiment. Scattered over his large southwestern command—from Tennessee to the Gulf Coast—were fewer than two thousand more troops. Only the Third and the Thirty-Ninth had ever seen combat.

  That night Jackson put pen to paper, writing home to Tennessee, asking to be reinforced with the entire state militia. In particular, he wanted General Coffee and his cavalry. He wanted Cherokees and artillerymen, and he needed transport and supplies.

  Action was required; the threat was real. “Before one month,” he warned, “the British . . . expect to be in possession of Mobile and all the surrounding country.” If he did not get the support he needed, he
was not sure he could stop the British from taking this key port and then moving on to New Orleans.

  But Jackson couldn’t afford to sit around waiting for reinforcements: his first task would be to get Fort Bowyer into fighting shape. Because of its location thirty miles south, at the opening of Mobile Bay, Fort Bowyer would be the first line of defense if British ships moved on Mobile. Enemy vessels would have to pass within range of the fort’s guns as they sailed through the narrow channel at the entrance to the bay. But from Jackson’s position, that was both good and bad: its location was certainly a strategic advantage, but, having been abandoned due to a lack of men a few months earlier, Fort Bowyer was far from ready to repel a sustained attack.

  Jackson needed a man he could trust to get the fort back in line. He chose Lieutenant Colonel William Lawrence for the task. A career U.S. Army officer from Maryland, Lawrence set out immediately from Mobile for the seaside battery. A tall, stern man with a full head of curly brown hair, he loaded his 160 infantrymen into boats along with supplies and all the munitions he could muster.

  On reaching Fort Bowyer, Lawrence saw the challenge before him. The semicircular battery was really just a wall of sand and earth. With its low walls lined on the inside with resinous pine boards, the fort could be set afire by one well-placed shell. No hardened shelter protected the fort’s ammunition and, worst of all, more than half of its twenty guns were mounted on outmoded Spanish carriages, making them difficult to aim and operate.

  Lawrence and his men threw themselves into the task and, with the British expected to arrive at any moment from their new base at Pensacola, worked night and day, reinforcing the little bastion on the spit of sand with wood, stone, sand, and whatever else came to hand. Even after sunset, the Americans remained ready for action, always expecting to see British sails on the horizon. They didn’t know how many days they had to prepare.