Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Read online

  At the center of the approaching British land force were Creeks and Choctaws the British had recruited as their allies. Wearing British red coats over their bare legs, the Indians were flanked by confident—and more completely clad—Royal Marines. The British veterans expected Fort Bowyer to fall as easily as Washington had three weeks earlier. But as the combined force marched boldly toward Fort Bowyer, Lawrence’s men dampened their hopes. A barrage of cannon shot pinned the British down, halting their advance. As the ground force took cover and attempted to regroup, Lawrence concentrated on the seaside battle.

  Along the seawall, the American gunners had found the range and were making the cannonballs count, shooting away the bowsprit of the Hermes. Yet as great clouds of gun smoke enveloped both the fort and the ships, neither side seemed to be gaining the upper hand. The Americans were holding their own, but there was no reason to believe that the British, attacking from both sides, would not be able to wear them down and prevail once the Americans ran out of ammunition.

  Then, with a lucky shot, an American cannonball tore through the anchor cable that was holding the Hermes in firing position. Suddenly cut loose, the ship drifted helplessly toward the fort, carried by the incoming current. While sailors frantically tried to get the sails to catch the falling wind and carry the Hermes out of range of American guns, shots thudded into her hull and shredded the ship’s sails and rigging.

  Just as the crew managed to turn the ship, her keel scraped the sandy bottom. The Hermes had run aground. Trapped just six hundred yards from Fort Bowyer’s guns, the ship was now an easy—and stationary—target.

  With American artillery fire raining down, the British commander had no choice but to abandon ship. By seven o’clock that evening, the departing sailors set fire to the crippled vessel before fleeing to the British ships waiting safely out of range. As night fell, the great flames aboard the Hermes rose into the sky. For three hours, the ship burned slowly but steadily, a brilliant light show against the dark sea. Then the flames reached the gunpowder in the ship’s hold. In a moment, the Hermes exploded, blasted into fragments that rained down on the sea and shore.

  Waiting and Wondering

  Thirty miles away, the earth trembled. Feeling the ground shake in Mobile, Andrew Jackson looked south toward Fort Bowyer and there, at the horizon line, he saw the Hermes light the sky.

  From his faraway vantage he couldn’t be sure what had happened at Mobile Point. What he did know was that the reinforcements he had sent the day before had been turned back, their ship prevented from reaching the fort by the much larger HMS Hermes. If Lawrence and his men were to hold Fort Bowyer against the British, they would do so on their own. There was nothing else he could do.

  As he watched the sun rise the following morning, General Jackson still didn’t know whether Fort Bowyer was safe. More anxious hours would pass before a dispatch from Colonel Lawrence finally arrived, reporting the destruction of the Hermes and the flight of the three other British ships. The British had sustained significant casualties (thirty-two killed, thirty-seven wounded). The fort’s defenders reported just four dead and five wounded.

  Although the men defending Fort Bowyer had been outnumbered by roughly ten to one, Jackson’s strategy and Lawrence’s hard labors produced a victory. Lawrence’s band of 158 soldiers had prevented the British from winning a beachhead and, more important, gaining access to a harbor from which they might march overland to invade New Orleans. Washington may have fallen, but little Fort Bowyer still stood. The Americans had finally held.

  “Success has crowned the gallant efforts of our brave soldiers,” Jackson wrote, passing the good news to Secretary of War James Monroe in Washington.2 He intended to keep that success going.

  “Defence of Fort McHenry”

  Far away, a full one thousand miles to the north and east, another fort had just been bombarded by the British, and a major American victory had been won. The fight for the nation’s third-largest city would help launch a turnaround of U.S. military fortunes—and national morale would rise as Francis Scott Key’s poem about the events in Baltimore Harbor reverberated around the country.

  Before dawn, on September 12, 1814, British troops had gone ashore east of Baltimore for a land assault on the city. The British ground forces had been stunned when, only minutes into the first skirmish, an officer on horseback returned at speed from the vanguard, calling for a surgeon. The infantrymen recognized the riderless horse that followed: it belonged to the commanding general, Robert Ross, the man responsible for the burning of Washington. He had fallen from his steed, mortally wounded with a musket ball to his chest. The old gentlemen’s agreement not to target officers had been breached during the Revolution—to the outrage of the British—and targeting officers had since become an accepted strategy.

  Despite Ross’s loss, the British were undeterred. At first light the next day, the people of Baltimore were awakened by the sound of mortars exploding overhead. A convoy of British frigates and a half-dozen bomb vessels were firing on Fort McHenry, which guarded the entrance to Baltimore’s harbor. The Americans had sunk ships in the channel to prevent the British from sailing in, hoping to keep them out of range of the town. A relentless barrage of mortar shells continued all day and into the night; the hollow projectiles, some of which weighed up to two hundred pounds, flew in a high arc, remaining in flight up to thirty seconds. Many exploded in midair, scattering deadly shrapnel in all directions, accompanied by exploding rockets that brightened the sky like fireworks. The artillery attack ceased briefly at one o’clock on the morning of September 14 when an attempt by British barges to land troops west of Fort McHenry was rebuffed, but the pounding soon resumed. Finally, shortly before dawn, the gunners ceased their fire.

  Five miles downstream from the port of Baltimore and in British custody, Francis Scott Key had watched the great fight unfold. Commissioned by President Madison to negotiate the freedom of a Maryland doctor detained by the British after the burning of Washington, Key was aboard a British ship awaiting the outcome of the battle. From the ship’s deck he watched the fireworks of the bombardment, then waited in the darkness, watching and wondering. He did not know what the silence meant, but he worried: Had Baltimore fallen? He paced the deck of the ship, periodically peering through a spyglass at Fort McHenry, fearing he would see, instead of the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack or a white flag of surrender.

  A feeling of pride swelled his breast as the morning mist cleared, revealing an American flag still flying over the fort. The British attack had failed.

  Finding an envelope in his pocket, Key began to compose a poem on the back of a letter, seeking to express the relief he felt. He had a tune in his head—once before, he’d written a celebratory poem to fit the melody—and he jotted down his thoughts and sentiments, as well as a couplet that would ring familiar in the ears of his countrymen for generations to come. “’Tis the star spangled banner, O! long may it wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”3

  That morning the Royal Navy withdrew, retreating to the Chesapeake. No longer held captive, Key landed in Baltimore and completed his ballad. A friend arranged for freshly printed broadside copies of the poem bearing the title “The Defence of Fort McHenry” to be distributed on the streets of the city, on September 17. Three days later, when the Baltimore Patriot and Evening Advertiser resumed publication, the newspaper published the poem in its pages.

  Earlier in the war, Francis Scott Key, a Federalist by affiliation, had opposed the decision to go to war. But recent events—the burning of Washington, the fight for Baltimore—had allied him with President Madison, who was calling for national unity after Washington’s destruction, exhorting “all the good people . . . in providing for the defense” of the nation.4 Though Key’s anthem was published anonymously, it would help the cause. In the coming weeks, it was reprinted in no fewer than seventeen newspapers, in states from Georgia to New Ha
mpshire, among them the Federal Republican of Georgetown, long an outspoken critic of both Mr. Madison and his war.5 Francis Scott Key’s four verses had sparked a patriotic fire that would help draw the nation together and, after years of defeats, America’s fighting spirit had been stirred. Washington may have fallen, but the Union Jack did not fly over Baltimore.

  Even so the British would strike again, reasonably believing that the greatest naval power on earth would ultimately be able to conquer New Orleans. The only thing standing in their way was Andrew Jackson.

  On to Pensacola

  After the Fort Bowyer victory, Jackson’s sense of elation was short-lived. He knew it was only a matter of time before the next attack. Without sufficient land forces to defend the entire coast, his job, above all, was to outguess his enemy. For the moment, Jackson himself would remain at Mobile. He would work his network of spies, monitoring British military moves from Florida to Louisiana and in the Caribbean.

  Where would the British strike next? His first guess had been a good one: the British attack on Fort Bowyer confirmed that the enemy had hoped to use Mobile as a base for their move on Louisiana. But even after Lawrence and his guns had repelled them, who was to say the enemy wouldn’t return another day to the mouth of Mobile Bay with a much larger flotilla of ships, perhaps accompanied by Royal Marines and infantry?

  Jackson would take no chances. “We will be better prepared to receive them on the next visit,” he wrote to an old Tennessee friend serving in Congress.6 As he waited for reinforcements, he set about further improving the defenses at Fort Bowyer. He ordered Colonel Lawrence to salvage the cannons from the blasted wreck of the Hermes. If the British returned, they would find the fort even harder to take than before.

  Meanwhile, Jackson also plotted his next move: once Fort Bowyer was reinforced with the new guns, the best course, Jackson decided, would be to eject the British force from Pensacola, the next large port town some fifty miles east of Mobile.7 That seemed the obvious next step. As his aide-de-camp John Reid observed, unless Pensacola could be taken from British hands, “it was vain to think of defending the country.”8

  Pensacola was in Spanish territory, and the Spaniards were not proving friendly to the Americans. The Spanish governor, Don Mateo González Manrique, had granted the British Royal Navy safe harbor in Pensacola two months earlier, which meant that the British were free to land troops there for an overland assault on New Orleans—and the young country would be in danger as long as the British held the harbor. Taking it might not be easy, though; the British ships could repel a water attack, and any force attempting a land attack would meet up with unfriendly Red Sticks living in the swamps surrounding Pensacola.

  Knowing these dangers, Jackson decided he would attack nonetheless—only he would need reinforcements. As October tilted toward November, the task of refortification at Fort Bowyer neared completion and, leaving the place in Colonel Lawrence’s good hands, General Jackson led a column of five hundred army regulars headed for Pensacola. He and his troops took a circular route, looping north in order to meet up with General Coffee and, on October 25, the old friends joined forces. Coffee brought eighteen hundred men, each on horseback, all with their own rifles.

  The generals and their combined force crossed the Alabama River at the Fort Mims ferry. In the coming days, more Tennessee troops joined them—rangers from West Tennessee, militiamen from East Tennessee—and the ranks of the army swelled with 750 Choctaws and Chickasaws.

  Although his army now numbered more than four thousand troops, Jackson was politically very much on his own. In official correspondence, Secretary of State James Monroe warned Jackson away from Pensacola. President James Madison’s government was afraid that the United States, already at war with one powerful European foe, risked a war with Spain, too, if they threatened Pensacola. Yet Monroe had also made it known to Jackson in “strong terms” via back channels that the general “would receive all the support in the power of the government, relating to the Spaniards.”9 Monroe clearly understood the strategic importance of Pensacola in the battle with the British in the Gulf of Mexico. On the other hand, the savvy Jackson knew that if his move on Pensacola went badly, the blame would fall onto his shoulders.

  But duty called and Jackson proceeded toward Pensacola.

  The target lay nestled on the north bank of a protected bay. Although the town itself consisted of little more than a trio of parallel streets and a downtown public square, Pensacola possessed several protective ramparts. In particular, Jackson was concerned with Fort Barrancas, which Don Manrique had handed over to the British. Strategically essential, Barrancas sat nine miles to the southwest overlooking the opening to the harbor, which meant arriving ships were in its line of fire. To control Fort Barrancas was to control the finest harbor on the Gulf Coast.

  On November 6, Jackson’s army halted two miles west of Pensacola.

  First, the general tried approaching in peace.

  He sent Major Henry B. Piere of the Forty-Fourth Infantry forward under a flag of truce. Piere was to tell the Spanish commandant that he did not come with demands of war but with suggestions for preserving neutrality. Then he would present Jackson’s written demands: the United States wanted control of the fortifications around Pensacola, in particular Fort Barrancas, with its strategic overlook at the entrance to Pensacola Bay.

  But before he could arrive in the town to present the American case, Piere and a small escort took artillery fire from one of the city’s fortifications. They retreated to consult with Jackson.

  Jackson was a man with a hair-trigger disposition, but he could also be a man of calm in chaos when necessary. In this case, he held his temper and tried a second peaceable approach, this time sending as his emissary a Spanish prisoner captured the previous day. Through the messenger, Jackson demanded an explanation for the firing on his men. Governor Manrique hedged, blaming the British. They had fired on Piere without the governor’s authorization, he claimed, and he assured Jackson that he would, of course, talk with Jackson’s representative.

  That evening, Major Piere, now welcomed by the governor, went to Pensacola to deliver Jackson’s demands. The governor read Jackson’s note: “I come not as the enemy of Spain; not to make war but to ask for peace.” But though Jackson used words of peace, his demands hinted at the consequence of war should his request be ignored. The governor should give him Barrancas, he insisted—and he gave the Spaniard one hour to respond. Governor Manrique deemed the terms unacceptable, insisting that his duty did not permit him to do as Jackson asked. Piere brought the news back to the American camp.10

  Done negotiating, Jackson grimly laid out his plan for storming the town. Manrique left him no alternative: they would have to do this the hard way.

  Meanwhile, in Ghent . . .

  The American diplomats in Europe didn’t have it much easier, as the peace negotiations proceeded at a snail’s pace. The British commissioners had to write home to London whenever the Americans made a proposal, forcing the U.S. delegation to spend weeks waiting in the three-story house they shared on the Rue des Champs.

  The American team had little in common. John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Albert Gallatin disagreed over the style and tone of their responses to the British demands and differed in style of life, too. As the days and weeks passed, Adams couldn’t help but notice when, rising to read his Bible before dawn, he heard Henry Clay retiring to his room after a long night of cigars, port, and cards. About the only thing the envoys agreed upon was what they told their betters in Washington: “We need hardly say . . . that there is not at present, any hope of peace.”11

  When the news had arrived, on October 1, of the August burning of Washington, John Quincy Adams spent a sleepless night worrying about the fortunes of his country. A habitual diarist, he found, on the morning after hearing of his capital’s capture, that his sense of shock remained so great that “it was almost impossible to w
rite.”12

  The American team had little choice but to continue talking until a subtle British move shocked them anew. The British asked that the treaty include two Latin words: uti possidetis. Meaning “as you possess,” the term specified that the land held by each side at ratification of the treaty would remain with its possessor.

  The precise purpose of the simple little phrase wasn’t clear, but Gallatin thought he knew. He had suspected for some time that the British were attempting to capture the mouth of the Mississippi, writing to Monroe six weeks earlier, “It appears to me most likely that their true and immediate object is New Orleans.”13 Now that they had introduced this term into the treaty, he was even more certain. If the British were able to conquer New Orleans before the treaty was signed, America’s westward expansion would be cut off, and the future shape of the United States would be determined by the British.

  From a distance of five thousand miles from New Orleans, the diplomats could do little. They could issue warnings that Jackson and his men were in grave danger; they could wring their hands at the worrisome prospect that their independent nation was in danger. (As Gallatin wrote to the U.S. ambassador to France, “A belief is said to be entertained that a continuance of the war would produce a separation of the Union, and perhaps a return of the New England states to the mother country.”)14

  Gallatin was right to be worried. Late in 1814, delegates of the New England states met secretly in what became known as the Hartford Convention to discuss their complaints about Madison and his war. Several delegates pushed for secession even as the British moved toward New Orleans.

  For now, the thought of secession was only one of the looming difficulties. The diplomats considered all the obstacles and could offer no optimism at the likelihood their negotiations would succeed. As Clay bluntly put it to Monroe, “The safest opinion to adopt is . . . that our mission will terminate unsuccessfully.”15