Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Read online

  Jackson and his American soldiers would get no help from Ghent—and, in the coming weeks, the predictions of Ministers Gallatin and Clay would prove all too correct.

  Back to New Orleans

  Unaware of the dark turn in British negotiations, General Jackson nonetheless continued to move to the defense of New Orleans. He waited for no man—in Europe or in Washington—and under the cover of night, on November 7, 1814, he marched all but five hundred of his men into the woods on the outskirts of Pensacola. The town’s Spanish defenders, believing the Americans were still in their original camp, kept their guns pointed toward the nearly empty tents, while their British allies repositioned their warships to bear on the westward approach to Pensacola.

  At daylight, the token force Jackson left behind made a feint toward Pensacola from the west, while the much larger army, which Jackson had led around the town in darkness, attacked along the narrow beach from the northeast.

  Taking both the Spanish and the British by surprise, the combined force of Choctaws, Jackson’s infantrymen, and General Coffee’s brigade quickly overwhelmed the first band of startled defenders. As the Americans entered the town, Spanish musket fire raked the attackers from gardens and houses along the center street, but the Royal Navy was no help. Unprepared, their supporting fire came too late.

  The fight lasted only minutes, as the Spanish corps, numbering fewer than five hundred men, was no match for the attacking Americans. A U.S. Army lieutenant lowered the Spanish flag and Governor Manrique, looking old and ill, brandishing a white flag, appeared in the street looking for an American officer. General Jackson was summoned and rode into town with an escort of dragoons for the formal surrender.

  The Spanish agreed to relinquish control of Fort Barrancas, and Jackson sent men off to take charge of it, but before they could get there, the retreating British lit a fuse that ignited three hundred barrels of powder stored in its magazine. The explosion left the fort unusable, and the enemy fleet was seen heading out to sea.

  The British had relinquished the fort and, though Jackson had not won quite the victory he expected—he had come to capture Fort Barrancas, only to see it destroyed—Pensacola had been rendered defenseless. The British would not be able to use it as a base of attack, and Jackson needed to waste no men garrisoning the town or the blasted hulk that had been Fort Barrancas.

  General Jackson had repulsed the British at Pensacola. His men had sent one British warship to the bottom of the sea at Fort Bowyer, and twice the Royal Navy flotilla had been forced to abandon good harbors on the Gulf Coast. The British had hoped to enlist the rebellious Creeks into their ranks, but Jackson had vanquished his Indian foes, too.

  The preceding months had seen Andrew Jackson emerge as the best general in service to the American cause. President Madison knew it. So did James Monroe, who scurried around the ruins of Washington to find money for Jackson to pay his army’s bills. Despite the nation’s empty coffers, Monroe somehow came up with $100,000. And the secretary of war promised more troops would be sent to his winning general.

  But Jackson could felt the pressure rising. His health was far from perfect, with his left shoulder still nearly useless and his gut a constant discomfort. He saw the line he had to walk, taking care not to overcommit his inexperienced force while aggressively challenging the British. He would have to balance rage and reason as he took on his new task: by disrupting the larger British strategy—enemy ground troops wouldn’t be landing any time soon at either Pensacola or Mobile—he had put New Orleans directly into the line of fire.

  Suspecting the increased danger to New Orleans, Jackson pushed his men hard, hurrying back whence they had come. A mere three and a half days later, on November 11, 1814, they were back in Mobile.

  The general found a stack of letters waiting for him. Some had been mailed from Washington, where James Monroe sounded almost panicked. Word from his ministers in Ghent persuaded the secretary of state of the certainty of an imminent assault on New Orleans. The worried Monroe wrote to his Tennessee general he had “strong reason” to think that the British would soon attempt “to take possession of that city [on which] the whole of the states westward of the Allegany mountains so essentially depend.”16 Other letters had come from New Orleans, where Governor Claiborne feared an attack was imminent.

  For more than three months, Jackson’s secret informants—a merchant in Havana, a spy in Pensacola, well-connected Indian chiefs, and others—warned of British invasion plans. Now, however, the arrival of the flood of ever-more-anxious letters from Washington and New Orleans meant that reports of a British attack no longer seemed exaggerated.

  On Tuesday, November 22, 1814, Andrew Jackson and his army began a new trek, this time to Louisiana to defend America’s heartland from a looming enemy.

  CHAPTER 7

  Target: New Orleans

  I expect at this moment that most of the large seaport towns of America are . . . laid to ashes; that we are in possession of New Orleans, and have command of all the rivers of the Mississippi valley and the lakes, and that the Americans are now little better than prisoners in their own country.

  —Lord Castlereagh, British foreign secretary

  The armada in Jamaica’s Negril Bay was stunning to see. Along a four-mile stretch of pristine white beach, a forest of tall masts swayed in the gentle tropical breezes. No one on the west coast of Jamaica or anywhere else in the Caribbean had seen anything like it before. The fifty large vessels, each flying the Union Jack, amounted to the largest naval force ever assembled in the hemisphere.

  On November 26, 1814, the hardened old Scotsman in command surveyed his flotilla, proud of its power. He watched with care as his captains carried out his orders to set sail. After months of planning, this was an exhilarating moment.

  High on the poop deck of the eighty-gun HMS Tonnant, fifty-six-year-old Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Forrester Inglis Cochrane, his hair turned white, looked older than his years. His courtly manner revealed his pedigree: he was a younger son of an earl. Though softened by age—round through his middle, jowls overhanging his high collar—Cochrane revealed a steelier side. As one of the admirals in his command remarked, Cochrane was “a rough, brutal, and overbearing officer.”1

  From his flagship, he looked upon five other ships of the line, each armed with seventy-four guns; his enemy, the U.S. Navy, had no ships that were their equal. There were eight three-masted frigates with thirty-eight or more cannons, along with smaller two-masted brigs and schooners with a single mast. Lower in the water sat the sloops of war and barges, along with uncounted transports and other smaller craft. As one observer remarked, the vessels were “so closely wedged together that to walk across the decks from one to the other seemed, when at a little distance, to be far from impracticable.”2

  Cochrane had risen in the ranks during the war with Napoleon. After commanding the HMS Ajax in Egypt, he served in Martinique, Santo Domingo, and then in Guadeloupe, where he won a knighthood and earned the assignment to take on the United States. Sir Alexander had bided his time since the Americans had declared war on Great Britain two years before, but his charge now was to bring home victory, a task he accepted with grim determination.

  He had sworn to “give to Great Britain the command of . . . New Orleans.” He had promised to hand the Americans “a complete drubbing before peace is made.” He would deliver to the king complete “command of the Mississippi.”3 And now he had the force to do it: the more than ten thousand Royal Navy sailors and officers that manned the formidable show of sail around him constituted just half of the British force Cochrane would soon send into battle. Belowdecks, an army of foot soldiers waited as British tars hoisted the sails of the fleet.

  Since his arrival in Jamaica nine days earlier, Cochrane had watched a parade of vessels sail in from Ireland and France and, like the Tonnant, from the Chesapeake Bay. After dropping anchor in Negril Bay, the warships disgorged
thousands of troops dressed in red and green and even tartan uniforms. There were detachments of engineers, artillerymen, and rocketeers. The ground troops under the command of Major General John Keane included two black regiments from the West Indies.

  Only a few men among this amphibious force had been certain of their destination. But this day the word got around and reached the ear of Lieutenant George Gleig, of the Eighty-Fifth Light Infantry. Gleig, who would help write the story of Cochrane and the invading force, noted in his journal, “It was soon known throughout the fleet that the conquest of New Orleans was the object in view.”4

  So far in 1814, the Americans had done little to persuade Cochrane they were worthy opponents. He and his ships had delivered the army to Maryland that had so effortlessly overrun Washington. True, the siege at Baltimore in September had failed after a sharp-eyed sniper killed Robert Ross, Cochrane’s commanding general, and Fort McHenry at the mouth of Baltimore Harbor proved more resilient than expected. But that only upped Cochrane’s desire to vanquish the Americans once and for all.

  Cochrane’s interest in beating the Americans was personal. Many years before, he had fought in the American Revolution, but it had been an older brother, Charles, who died at the hands of the rebellious colonists. At the deciding battle of that war, in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, a cannonball parted Charles Cochrane’s head from his body. That painful loss, it was said, led to Sir Alexander’s hatred of Americans. He had nothing but contempt for the “American character.” He dismissed the former colonists as no better than dogs: “Like spaniels,” he said, “they must be treated with great severity.”5

  Cochrane had another motive, too. Back in Scotland, Sir Alexander would inherit neither property nor title. That meant New Orleans, an immensely valuable prize, represented exactly the change in fortune he needed (among the crew, there was talk of the “beauty and booty” to be had in the Louisiana city). For hundreds of years, the law of the seas had permitted officers and crew to share in the spoils of war and, with exports at a standstill because of the war, New Orleans’s warehouses were packed with sugar, tobacco, hemp, and, in particular, bales of cotton. The goods were worth a great deal of money, perhaps £4 million. As the commander, Cochrane’s portion of the plunder would be the largest of all.

  British confidence ran high. Among the many ships departing Negril Bay were cargo vessels for carrying off the spoils, together with civilian administrators and barristers, an admiralty judge, customs officials, and tax collectors. It was a battalion of bureaucrats, complete with wives and daughters, a British team ready to take control of the city they planned to capture. And Cochrane had promised his naval superiors at the Admiralty in London he would deliver a resounding triumph. It was inconceivable that these American upstarts could hold out against the most powerful military force in the world.

  Though not all Cochrane’s forces had arrived, the fleet would delay no longer. More British soldiers were expected any day, along with General Sir Edward Pakenham, who was to take command of the invading army. But the British force was about to be on its way to New Orleans without him.

  There, Cochrane vowed to his men, he would have his Christmas dinner.

  Arriving in New Orleans

  What Admiral Cochrane could not know was that, a thousand miles north on the Gulf Coast, another man with a personal stake in the war was headed to New Orleans to stop him. Andrew Jackson, born in a log cabin, was very different indeed from the high and mighty Cochrane, whose family roots lay in a great castle in Scotland. Jackson wasn’t looking to win fame or enhance his wealth but, like Cochrane, he had a personal grudge against the country that had killed his brother. And both men knew the stakes.

  Jackson didn’t know for sure that Cochrane’s force was on its way from Jamaica, but he suspected the British navy would be coming—and soon. Accordingly, he had chosen an overland route from Mobile. He wished to gather intelligence on the way; as he wrote to Monroe, he wanted “to have a view of the points at which the enemy might effect a landing.”6

  Before leaving Pensacola, Jackson had written to Rachel, confiding how ill he felt. “There [were] eight days,” he wrote to his wife of the preceding month, “that I never broke bread.” He had consulted an army doctor, who administered an herbal concoction containing mercury. Jackson reported the purgative cleansed his system but—no surprise, given how thin he already was—it left him “very weak.”7

  Though Jackson was a man whose sense of duty seemed to empower him to press on no matter his physical condition, he could lower his guard with Rachel. When they first met a quarter century before, he had arrived seeking only a bed at the boardinghouse that Rachel’s widowed mother ran. Instead, the long-orphaned Jackson found a family to replace the one he had lost. In particular, the strapping young man had been drawn to the handsome young woman who had recently escaped a violent first marriage. In each other the two found solace.

  In two decades of marriage, he and Rachel had shared public embarrassment when the shadowy status of her divorce from her first husband became public. She had matured into a short and plump woman, he ever more gangly, wasted by his battle with dysentery and other intestinal problems. But Andrew and Rachel developed an intimate bond. Despite a shared dislike of being separated, over the preceding thirteen months they had spent no more than thirty days together. As the British approached, he realized he needed to be with her.

  In a perfect world, he wrote to Rachel, he might travel home to the Hermitage and “return to your arms on the wings of love and affection, to spend with you the rest of my days in peaceful domestic retirement.”8 But knowing that he had to travel to New Orleans for the biggest battle of his life, he instead asked for her to travel to him. “It is my wish,” he had written from Mobile, “that you join me at . . . New Orleans.” He would arrange for her to travel by riverboat in early December. In the meantime, he traveled toward the city on horseback.

  Jackson’s plan had allowed twelve days for the trek. Against the odds, his army reached its destination in ten, covering some three hundred miles, slogging through forests and fields. Where they could, Jackson’s army followed the Federal Road but often had to blaze its own trail. His soldiers cut down many trees to support the horses and wagons as they crossed flooded streambeds.

  On nearing New Orleans Jackson and his officers had been ferried across Lake Pontchartrain, landing after dark on the last day of November. When the morning haze burned off the large lake, they headed south for the last half-dozen miles, paralleling the meandering waters of Bayou St. John.

  According to witnesses who saw them, Jackson stood out as the oldest of the riders, “a tall, gaunt man, of very erect carriage, with a countenance full of stern decision and fearless energy, but furrowed with care and anxiety.” His iron gray hair peeked out from beneath the leather cap he wore to keep off the morning chill. Tall dragoon boots, much in need of polish, protected his legs, but even the loose blue cloak that hung from his shoulders couldn’t hide how emaciated the man was. His complexion looked “sallow and unhealthy,” but “the fierce glare of his bright and hawk-like gray eye betrayed a soul and spirit which triumphed over all the infirmities of the body.”9

  One lady of the neighborhood who saw Jackson on the morning of December 1, 1814, as he rode along the Bayou St. John road, said he looked like “an ugly, old Kaintuck-flat-boatman.”10 She was a native of New Orleans, a Creole. She would not be the last Creole to look askance, at least at first, at the general charged with saving their city.

  Meeting the General

  As Jackson neared the city limits, carriages were sent to greet him, and the general and his aides gratefully accepted the offered ride. Seated in unaccustomed luxury, they looked with curiosity at the city they were to defend.

  The cobbled streets of New Orleans were abuzz with expectation at meeting the man some already called the “Savior of New Orleans.” As Jackson’s carriage arrived at 106 Rue Royale,
the handsome house chosen for his headquarters, he was greeted by the men of the town decked out in ties, gloves, and hats for the occasion. Everyone expected the British, but first they would welcome this tall Tennessean.

  Climbing down from his carriage, Jackson was greeted by Governor Claiborne and the city’s mayor, an affable Creole named Nicholas Giroud. As gray skies gave way to rain, the assembled crowd listened to Claiborne and Giroud give speeches in preparation to handing off responsibility for the city’s defense to General Jackson. But mostly those in attendance wanted to hear from this gaunt American. What would the rough soldier from upriver have to say to a city of French and English speakers, merchants and pirates, freemen and slaves, woodsmen and Indians, a city that wasn’t even sure it wanted to be American?

  Unfortunately for Jackson, he spoke no French at all, but he was saved by his old congressional colleague Edward Livingston, who spoke it fluently. From the second-floor gallery, Jackson spoke to the crowd and Livingston translated for his friends and neighbors. Jackson assured them of his determination, promising to “drive their enemies into the sea, or perish in the effort.”11

  Jackson’s words were met with cheers, but Livingston knew New Orleans high society well enough to understand that his neighbors were still unsure what to make of this weathered general. A transplant from New York, Livingston understood what it took to win the approval of the Creole upper class. He had worked hard to be accepted, but it was only when he married Louise Davezac, a well-born young widow from French Santo Domingo, that he had felt secure. With Louise on his arm, his entrée to the French culture of New Orleans was assured and, from their home on Royal Street, the Livingstons had become central figures in the city’s society.12