PAPER VI.—THE ROAD TO NEW ORLEANS—THE NIGHT ATTACK
By John Trotwood Moore
It was the last of April when I journeyed to New Orleans to study the battlefield I had wished so often to see. No battlefield has ever appealed to me as has that—none has come near it to me, in sentiment, except when I stood in the trenches of Valley Forge and saw the blizzard-swept lines where Patriotism stood in the last ditch.
Looking toward the British line.
New Orleans is easily the greatest signal victory ever won on American soil. History shows nothing in its class except King’s Mountain. Everything else in the Civil War that we now regard as decisive was an evenly matched, mathematically planned contest, between great armies, in which, so far as the records go, one lost about as much as the other, with victory at last on the banner of the side with the most troops, the most guns, the better equipment and the best food for marching men.
Shiloh, Stone River, Chickamauga, in the West—Bull Run, Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, in the East—these were all great steel-sheathed locomotives rushing full speed to a head-on collision.
And, after the collision, there was scrap-iron all around.
But New Orleans was a steel ram striking a man-of-war, and the man-of-war was not. There is only one way to explain the miracle of the unexpected—the incongruity of the Incongruous—and that is, Providence.
Now, Providence had selected Jackson for this job.
Five miles below the city the street car lines stop, but it is an interesting walk to clamber up on the bermuda and melilotus-covered levee and follow the river to the Chalmette battlefield. The air is soft and warm, the big river sweeps splendid along, the beautiful old homes on the banks peep sleepily out from pecan and great moss-covered oaks. Far away to the southeast stretch plain and forest.
No wonder they fought for it, you say. Who would wish to die in a fairer land, under sunnier skies?
Then you get a shock.
The field across which the British charged.
Just at the battlefield and where the unfinished Chalmette monument (and why should it remain unfinished, O, ye of little faith save in your scrambling for dollars?) looms up there is a repulsive derrick very nearly on the spot where Jackson’s grim lines ran up to the river, and where the Carolina’s fiery little battery spat at the Red Coats from their earthworks. All around are evidences of something that smells like Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Morgan or New York Life. It is a sugar refinery, said to be the biggest of its kind anywhere—a trust, and hence a thief by nature, and now it has butted into the battlefield, buying as it goes, and paying for the privilege of wiping sentiment out with sugar-coated pills. Its great banks already overtop the spot where Jackson stood under the moss-grown oaks. Its embankments shut out the sun of New Orleans. When it gets ready it will take the rest of the battlefield. The sight of it and its vandalism hurts, and the hurt was worse when I found that New Orleans did not care. Nay, I think from what I heard, that she was prouder of the refinery than she was of the battle; for everybody could tell me of the refinery, and no one knew anything of the battle save a little woman who kept the cottage and grounds where the half-completed Chalmette monument marked the spot of Jackson’s breastworks and glorious stand. She knew that Jackson’s breastworks ran down the row of trees at the lane, that his headquarters were right over there in that clump of old oaks, and that Pakenham was buried for six months under that pecan tree, where some old masonry showed there had been a grave. The rest of it I had to dig out of the library of the Historical Society.
An old fisherwoman who stood on the levee where Jackson’s line touched the river, and where the cotton bales were confiscated to help form the first line of breastworks, in answer to my question, told me, after expectorating a large quantity of snuffy fluid into the river, that she “had heurn of a right peart fight bein’ fit hereabouts when my mammy was a baby—but jes’ whur I can’t say.”
“That Jackson’s headquarters were right over there in that clump of oaks.” The trees alone were there, this house having been built after the original one was burned.
In his “Naval War of 1812,” Theodore Roosevelt thus graphically describes the place as he thought it was then: “Amid the gloomy semi-tropical swamps that covered the quaking delta thrust out into the blue waters of the Mexican Gulf by the strong torrent of the mighty Mississippi, stood the fair French city of New Orleans. Its lot had been strange and varied. Won, and lost once and again, in conflict with the subjects of the Catholic king, there was a strong Spanish tinge in the French blood that coursed so freely through the veins of its citizens; joined by purchase to the great Federal Republic, it yet shared no feeling with the latter save that of hatred to the common foe. And now an hour of sore need had come upon the city, for against it came the red English, lords of fight by land and sea. A great fleet of war vessels—ships of the line, frigates and sloops—under Admiral Cochrane, was on the way to New Orleans, convoying a still larger fleet of troop ships, with aboard them some ten thousand fighting men, chiefly the fierce and hearty veterans of the Peninsular War, who had been trained for seven years in the stern school of the Iron Duke, and who were now led by one of the bravest and ablest of all Wellington’s brave and able lieutenants, Sir Edward Pakenham.”
When the President wrote that he was young and undecided whether he would hunt grizzlies or write poetry, I, for one, am glad he hunted the grizzly. Imagine any man standing on the melilotus-covered levees of the Father of Rivers and tracing from horizon to horizon the faint penciling of a sky so blue that it flushes at times into purple, corralling in the compass of its circle, now an old mansion, pecan-shadowed and wisteria-crowned, now a meadow, cattle-dotted and sheened with little lakes, now groves of oak and ash, moss swept with hoariness, now fields beyond, broad in their Southern fullness, big in benisons of eternal summer—imagine this true picture, and then hearing from the Far North the sepulchral croak of a sophomoric bullfrog: “Amid the g-l-o-omy semi-tropical s-w-a-a-mps that covered the q-u-a-king delta!”
I failed to see the gloomy swamps, and the only things that ever quaked there were the bull-bellied British, marching nearly a century ago for the lust and plunder on this fair Creole city, utterly unconscious that any foe worthy of their steel and stomachs stood before them, until suddenly out of the sunset and shadows of the memorable day of the evening of their landing Jackson’s grim Indian fighters fell on them in the darkness and fought them to a finish, as they fought all beasts, at close quarters, with clubbed guns and bear-knives.
That was the night of December 23d, 1814, the beginning of the battle of New Orleans.
Old breastworks, primrose-covered.
Let us briefly go back and bring events from our last paper—Jackson in the wilderness of Alabama, victor of an Indian war, remover of the strong allies of the Spaniard and British—the red, menacing, butchering wedge that was thrust in between the two parts of the young Republic. It really deserves a chapter itself, and that chapter might well be headed, “What Jackson Did to the Spanish.” Briefly, it is this:
Jackson, having finished the Indian War, marched, May, 1814, homeward, amid the plaudits of the pioneer West, disbanding his army at Fayetteville, Tennessee, and receiving an ovation and banquet in Nashville. He is appointed by the President Major General in the United States Army, and later, by his influence and the great fear and respect the Indians had for him, he closed a treaty with them at Fort Jackson, and the Southern territory to Florida (which belonged to Spain), became the Republic’s. And now, Jackson was free to turn on the treacherous and double-dealing Spaniard, who had secretly helped Britain in the Indian War, and, even then, contrary to her sworn neutrality, was housing and feeding British troops at Pensacola and other portions of her territory, and permitting them, five thousand strong, to rendezvous in Pensacola preparing for the expedition which they knew was already on the high seas bound for New Orleans.
As stated in our last paper, these were the darkest days of the Republic. Only Jackson could have saved it. He alone was the cog that fitted squarely into the wheel of things.
Jackson struck squarely out from the shoulder at the Spanish. He violated our treaty with Spain openly when he marched on Pensacola, for to his straight soul he saw more honor in doing a thing openly and aboveboard than in doing it treacherously and slyly, as Spain had done all along. If he had not whipped the British at New Orleans, we would have had a war with Spain on our hands. He had to act quickly. The British had come and were coming faster. By August, 1814, the sleepy town of Pensacola had awakened to new life—and the life was red—red English. Eight or ten English battleships lay in her harbor; regiments of negro soldiers from the West Indies went ashore, with other British, soldiers, all drilling daily. The English were repairing the forts, and their commander and the Spanish governor slept under the same roof.
“Its great banks already overtop the spot where Jackson stood.”
There were rumors of a great force coming, but no one knew where it would strike. Jackson learned it first from the Pirate Jean La Fitte, and that pirate’s story and the gallant fight his crew made handling a battery of guns at New Orleans is a story in itself.
Jackson decided to act. He wrote to the Secretary of War, “If the hostile Creeks have taken refuge in Florida and are there fed, clothed and protected; if the British have landed a large force, munitions of war and are fortifying, and stirring up the savages, will you not say to me, raise a few hundred militia, which may be quickly done, and with such regular force as can be conveniently collected make a descent upon Pensacola and reduce it? If so, I promise you the war in the South shall have speedy termination, and English influence be forever destroyed with the savages in this quarter.”
Jackson received an answer six months later, full of sound and meaning nothing, or, if anything, that he mustn’t do it. In the meanwhile he had done it, for the British became bolder, threw off all restraint, and prepared to sally from the neutral port of Pensacola to take Mobile. Jackson sent back to Tennessee through the wilderness for his old fighters. And they came, so eager to fight again under their idolized leader that many paid as high as eighty dollars for the privilege of being substituted for those who could not go. Jackson wrote again and again to the Secretary of War, imploring him, lecturing him: “How long will the United States pocket the reproach and open insults of Spain?... Temporizing policy is not only a disgrace but an insult to any nation.... If permission had been given me to march against this place twenty days ago I would ere this have planted the American eagle; now we must trust alone to our valor and the justice of our cause.” And after a long series of correspondence with the two-faced Spanish governor, Jackson ended his talk with him: “In future I beg you to withhold your insulting charges against my Government for one more inclined to listen to your slander than I am; nor consider me any more as a diplomatic character, unless so proclaimed to you from the mouth of my cannon.”
It was now in early fall. The Tennesseans under Coffee and Carroll were pouring down South to him, past the old battlefields of the Creeks, now an open road to Mobile and New Orleans.
Before they arrived he had strengthened Mobile, and the immortal Lawrence had fought them off from Fort Bowyer, killing 162, wounding the vaunting Colonel Nichols himself, and sending them crestfallen back to Pensacola.
Then, from La Fitte, whom the British had attempted to bribe, he first knew that New Orleans would be attacked, and he waited no longer. He marched on Pensacola and took it, and the English fleet and army vanished at the first thunder of his guns.
But where? To New Orleans, where their great fleet on the high seas was now headed—a fleet with a convoy of ten thousand fighting British. And Coffee and his Tennesseans still in the wilderness!
November 25th, 1814. Good news! Coffee and his Tennesseans are at Mobile. But that is not New Orleans, and a hundred miles of wilderness lie between.
Jackson reached New Orleans December 2d. I hesitate to try to picture him as he appeared to the gay, well fed, well bred people of that Creole town. Chronic dysentery since two years before, terrible in its pains and griping on his nerves and temper.
In the Howard Library, New Orleans, the librarian of which is William Beers, undoubtedly the best living authority of Jacksonia, and a scholar and natural-born bibliophile, I was shown many courtesies and gathered some most interesting facts. Mr. Beers ranks Judge Walker’s book first on Jackson, because he was an accurate, scholarly historian, who got his information first-hand from survivors of the great battle who lived with him in his native city. “Parton’s book was not even secondary, but tertiary,” said Mr. Beers. “He took freely from Walker and gave but scant credit.” Here is Judge Walker’s description of Jackson’s arrival in New Orleans, written while many eye-witnesses were living, in 1855:
“Along the road leading from Ft. St. John to the city, early in the morning of December 2d, 1814, a party of gentlemen rode at a brisk trot from the lake towards the city. The mist which during the night broods over the city had not cleared off. The air was chilly, damp, uncomfortable. The travelers, however, were hardy men, accustomed to exposure and intent upon purposes too absorbing to leave any consciousness of external discomfort. The chief of the party, which was composed of five or six persons, was 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 complexion was sallow and unhealthy; his hair was iron gray, and his body thin and emaciated, as of one just recovered from a lingering sickness. But the fierce glare of his bright and hawk-like eye betrayed a soul and spirit which triumphed over all the infirmities of the body. His dress was simple and nearly threadbare. A small leather cap protected his head, and a short Spanish blue cloak his body, whilst his feet and legs were encased in high dragoon boots, long ignorant of polish or blacking, which reached to his knees. In age he appeared to have passed about forty-five winters—the season for which his stern and hardy nature seemed peculiarly adapted.”
One of the strange things about the lives of all great men is the almost certain fact that some grossly untrue story, picturesque lie or exaggerated half-truth of some personal trait will be started and cling to them for all time.
For a half-bred lie always outruns a full-blood truth.
The universally accepted misrepresentation of Jackson’s character is that he was an uncouth backwoodsman, half-spelled, ill-bred and a bragging bully.
“The beautiful old homes on the banks peeped sleepily from pecan and oaks.”
As a matter of fact there never lived a man of greater natural dignity, of finer manners or more courtly grace when he wished than Andrew Jackson, in spite of his violent outbursts of passion at times. In 1858, one of the finest old ladies of New Orleans told this story to James Parton:
The new aide-de-camp, Mr. Livingston, as he rode from the parade ground by the General’s side, invited him home to dinner. The General promptly accepted the invitation. It chanced that the beautiful and gay Mrs. Livingston, the leader of society then at New Orleans, both Creole and American, had a little dinner party that day, composed only of ladies, most of whom were young and lively Creole belles. Livingston had sent home word that General Jackson had arrived, and that he should ask him to dinner, a piece of news that threw the hospitable lady into consternation. “What shall we do with this wild General from Tennessee?” whispered the girls to one another, for they had all conceived that General Jackson, however becoming he might comport himself in an Indian fight, would be most distressingly out of place at a fashionable dinner party in the first drawing-room of the most polite city in America. He was announced. The young ladies were seated about the room. Mrs. Livingston sat upon a sofa at the head of the apartment, anxiously awaiting the inroad of the wild fighter into the regions sacred hitherto to elegance and grace. He entered, erect, composed, bronzed with long exposure to the sun, his hair just beginning to turn gray, clad in his uniform of coarse blue cloth and yellow buckskin, his high boots flapping loosely about his slender legs, he looked the very picture of a war-worn noble commander. He bowed to the ladies magnificently, who all arose at his entrance as much in amazement as politeness. Mrs. Livingston advanced to meet him. With a dignity and grace seldom equaled, never surpassed, he went forward to meet her, conducted her back to the sofa and sat by her side. The fair Creoles were dumb with astonishment. In a few minutes dinner was served and the General continued during the progress of the meal to converse in an easy, agreeable manner, in the tone of society, of the sole topic of the time—the coming invasion. He assured the ladies that he felt perfectly confident of defending the city, and begged that they would give themselves no uneasiness in regard to it. He arose soon and left the table with Mr. Livingston. In one chorus the young ladies exclaimed: “Is this your backwoodsman? Why, madam, he is a prince.”
Jackson had indeed arrived, but never did a defender find so helpless and utterly unprepared a city. The city was a bickering, divided thing, not a fortification, not a battery mounted, not an idea even, and scarcely any law.
And scared stiff.
Jackson was both law and idea, and in twenty-four hours, by his own calm and intrepid bravery, his own self-assurance and fiery determination, he had the impulsive inhabitants ready to fight to the death.
On December 8, 1814, just one month to a day before the great battle was fought, a splendid double-deck battleship, the Tornant, flying the British admiral’s flag, and the advance guard of the great host, anchored off Chandeleur’s Island. There were two ways to reach New Orleans—up the Mississippi, or in the open bay through Lake Borgne, thence a march across the level delta straight to the city.
The English chose the latter. Five little American gunboats with 180 men lay in Lake Borgne, and these put up a gallant fight against the forty-five barges and one thousand men who finally grappled with them and took them with cutlass, pike and pistols.
And there, at noon, December 23, 1814, on the banks of the Bayou Bienvenue, a lonely, marshy place, and the last place that Jackson thought they would land, the British, 1,900 strong, under General Keane, one of the ablest officers of the command, landed without opposition and even without the knowledge of Jackson, who was beyond the city, near Lake Pontchartrain, expecting them there. In two hours he had four hundred more troops, a force larger that day than Jackson’s entire available command, and in nine miles of New Orleans, on a dead level plain, bounded on one side by the river and the other by the marshes of the lake.
It was a plain, easy march to New Orleans, and if he had marched at it that afternoon it would have been his before night. And why did he not? For only one reason—neither Pakenham nor Keane nor any general or soldier of all the British army supposed for an instant that there was anything before them but a lot of cowardly backwoodsmen whom they could brush away with their bayonets or stampede with a single charge.
And who, indeed, were these men? Who was their commander, and what had they done on battlefield before? Speaking of Pakenham’s utter defeat of the French Field Marshal Soult, but a short time before, the English historian, Napier, says: “He was opposed to one of the greatest generals in the world, at the head of unconquerable troops. For what Alexander’s Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal’s Africans at Cannae, Caesar’s Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon’s Guards at Austerlitz—such were Wellington’s British soldiers at this period.... Six years of uninterrupted success had engrafted in their natural strength and fierceness a confidence that made them invincible.”
And here is the same author’s description of how Pakenham fell on Salamanca, routing the best soldiers of continental Europe:
“It was five o’clock when Pakenham fell on Thomieres.... From the chief to the lowest soldier, all of the French felt that they were lost, and in an instant Pakenham, the most frank and gallant of men, commenced the battle. The British columns formed lines as they marched, and the French gunners, standing up manfully for their country, sent showers of grape into the advancing masses, while a crowd of light troops poured in a fire of musketry, under cover of which the main body endeavored to display a front. But bearing onward through the skirmishes, with the weight of a giant, Pakenham broke the half-formed lines into fragments and sent the whole in confusion upon the advancing support, spreading terror and disorder upon the enemy’s left.”
Pakenham, and the army under him at New Orleans, were the pick of Wellington’s troops, who had driven Bonaparte’s greatest general across the Pyrenees. They had conquered at Rodrigo, Badajos, San Sebastian, Toulouse, Salamanca. They laughed at raw backwoods militia, with not even a bayonet to their long, uncouth rifles. And what were they in victory? Was there any real ground for fear that they would carry out their threats of Beauty and Booty in New Orleans? When Jackson rode along in the afternoon of December 23 to the front to meet the British, women and children surrounded him in consternation. “Say to them,” he said to Livingston, “that no British soldier shall enter the city unless over my dead body. I will smash them, so help me God!”
But that night many of the women of New Orleans slept with small daggers in their bosoms. And well may the handsome Creole women of New Orleans have been afraid. Badajos, San Sebastian, Toulouse, all were friendly towns, only the garrisons being hostile to the English. And yet, General Napier, who was an eye witness to what he describes, tells how these same soldiers did at Badajos:
Jackson reached New Orleans December 2d, as stated, more fit for the hospital than the camp, and with only three weeks in which (as it proved) to prepare the defenseless city. But under the magic of that strange, positive, fiery man, the quick tempers of the impulsive inhabitants were welded to the white heat of desperate determination. And what a motley lot of defenders he found—About 800 new troops, regulars, raw and undrilled; Planches’ City Battalion, five hundred; two regiments of State militia, armed with fowling pieces, muskets, old rifles; a regiment of free negroes, or, as Jackson called them, “free men of colour,” and right well did they quit themselves in the fight—in all, about 2,000 men. Two little men-of-war-armed schooners, the Carolina and the Louisiana, lay in the river.
But Coffee and his Tennesseans were coming from Pensacola through the woods, and Jackson sent courier after courier to them, saying: “Don’t sleep till you reach me or arrive in striking distance.” Carroll, with other Tennessee and Kentucky troops, had floated down the Cumberland, the Ohio, and were now on the Mississippi. But he had only one gun to ten men until he overtook a boatload of muskets, and with these he drilled his men on the decks of his boat. To him Jackson sent a steamboat up the river with this message: “I am resolved, feeble as my force is, to await the enemy on his first landing, and perish sooner than he shall reach the city.”
Two thousand Kentuckians under Generals Thomas and Adair were also floating down the Mississippi, a ragged, defenseless and almost gunless crowd, without blanket or tents, and only one cooking kettle to every eighty men. And now it was the 14th day of December, and the British had been at the mouth of the river nearly a week.
On the evening of the 17th Coffee, one hundred and twenty-nine miles from New Orleans, received Jackson’s note. His horses were poor, three hundred of his men sick, but in three days he was there; but only with his picked men—800—all that could follow so rapid a march. Here is a description of them: “Their appearance was not very military. In their woolen hunting shirts of dark or dingy color and coperas-dyed pantaloons, made, both cloth and garments, at home, by their wives, mothers and sisters; with slouching wool hats, some composed of the skins of raccoons and foxes, with belts of untanned deerskins, in which were stuck hunting knives and tomahawks, hair long and unkempt, and faces unshorn.”
“Paying for the privilege of wiping sentiment out.” The Refinery’s work. The trees on the left were Jackson’s headquarters. The half-completed monument shows in the center of the picture.
Of their leader, Jackson, Roosevelt says, in his “Naval War of 1812:”
“Yet, although a mighty and cruel foe was at their very gates, nothing save fierce defiance reigned in the fiery Creole hearts of the Crescent City. For a master spirit was in their midst. Andrew Jackson, having utterly broken and destroyed the most powerful Indian confederacy that had ever menaced the Southwest, and having driven the haughty Spaniard from Pensacola, was now bending all the energies of his rugged intellect and indomitable will to the one object of defending New Orleans. No man could have been better fitted for the task. He had hereditary wrongs to avenge on the British, and he hated them with an implacable fury that was absolutely devoid of fear. Born and brought up among the lawless characters of the frontier, and knowing well how to deal with them, he was able to establish and preserve the strictest martial law in the city without in the least quelling the spirit of the citizens. To a restless and untiring energy he united sleepless vigilance and genuine military genius. Prompt to attack whenever the chance offered itself, seizing with ready grasp the slightest vantage point, and never giving up a foot of earth that he could keep, he yet had the patience to play a defender’s game when it suited him, and with consummate skill he always followed out the scheme of warfare that was best adapted to his wild soldiery.”
It was two o’clock, December 23, before Jackson learned that Keane, with 2,300 men, had landed and marched to the river’s bank, in six miles of New Orleans. Without a moment’s hesitation he drew up his thin, sallow form, struck his clenched fist on a table and said: “By the eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!”
Very quietly, later, he ate a little rice and dozed on a sofa—the only sleep he had, say several reputable historians, for four days and nights thereafter, and he started to meet the enemy with a little over two thousand men.
I am willing to stake my claim, previously made, that this man was one of the greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic on this one act alone. Here were the British, more than a match for him in numbers, equipment and confidence. So sure were they of taking the city that they had loafed along all afternoon and now had gone in a jolly camp at sunset, on the banks of the great river, preferring to march into the city in the morning, and not at night. They were disciplined and bayonetted, jolly as a lot of schoolboys, and brave as men get to be, full of fun and fight. I cannot think of another general, from Washington to Lee, from Gates to Grant, who would not have said: “I will fight them in the morning; this evening I will prepare. I will barricade, I will entrench, I will throw up my wall between them and the city.”
And this would have been fatal. In broad daylight Keane would have whipped them. He would have whipped Jackson’s troops that night but for the darkness, but for the darkness and the grizzled, homespun clothed men, who had cat-eyes for night fighting, who had stalked deer and panther and Indians in the shadows of it, who could steal in and steal out and use their knives in close places.
This was December 23, but that night he won the greater battle of January 8.
He fell on them like a panther from the darkness of the swamp.
He gave them a jolt that Soult, nor Ney, nor Napoleon had ever given. He taught them a warfare they had never dreamed of before. He took the sand out of their craws and the conceit out of their boasting mouths.
When he finished with them, at midnight, they decided they had gone far enough toward New Orleans for that day, and several others. They threw up entrenchments and waited for more troops.
They were hacked, demoralized, beaten!
And this is the way that Jackson did it. For my part I think it a far prettier fight than he made two weeks later, when he finished the blow.
Jackson put his troops in motion about three o’clock, amid alarm guns and beating of drums. But he himself galloped to the river bank and signalled to the little Carolina to drop down. Then he put spurs to his horse and galloped after the dust cloud going down the road to the Rodriguez Canal. I could see it all so plainly as I stood on the banks of the river and saw the same landscape before me. The lean, sallow, booted man, his long legs dangling underneath his horse’s belly, galloping seemingly to defeat. This man of destiny, this man who believed in himself, this man who knew that God Almighty had sent him to whip the British, just as he knew he would kill Dickinson.
And the troops went down so merrily to death in that cloud of dust—what pathos, what patriotism, what sublime ignorance of what they were up against, what blind faith in Jackson and God went forth that day to fight the conquering, red English, who knew no such word as defeat, no such tactics as retreat. Marines, raw troops who hardly knew how to drill, and one little battery, in all, 884; flashy Creoles, gaudily equipped and making much noise, the battalion of St. Domingo, “men of color,” 210; Choctaw Indians, 18; Coffee’s Tennessee Volunteers, mounted riflemen, 563; Beall’s Orleans Rifle Company, 62; Mississippi Dragoons, 107, in all 2,131.
And this crowd were going to drive the victors of Toulouse, San Sebastian, Salamanca and Badajos into the river, and do it at night, and not a hundred bayonets on their guns and only two little six-pound cannon!
It was six o’clock and the British were having a jolly good time, with campfires burning merrily and abundance of supper for hungry, healthy stomachs. And now it is seven o’clock and suddenly a little gunboat looms out in the twilight of the river before them, a queer looking little craft to them, and they crowd up on the bank to look at it. It came steadily on, its guns trained on the crowd of soldiers on the bank, who were laughing, jollying and bantering it with empty jokes. “Can it shoot?” “What is it?” “Give it a few from a musket,” are the shouts, and they fired on the little Carolina with muskets and out of the gathering darkness came:
“Now, boys, for the honor of America. Give it to them” And, to their consternation, there was poured into the joking crowd a regular hell of grape and shell, driving the British pell-mell to camp and arms and the levee banks.
Jackson had reached the Bayou Bienvenu about four o’clock and formed his thin lines as far across the plain as he could, to flank the enemy. Notices were stuck up everywhere, signed “Keane and Cochrane:” “Louisianans, remain quietly in your homes; your slaves will be preserved to you and your property respected. We make war against Americans!”
The Carolina floats down to the river opposite Jackson. He sends an aide aboard and gives her commander his orders to drop down and open on the British camp. It was an hour before the waiting Jackson heard her guns two miles below, and then he advanced, Coffee, regulars, marines, Indians, negroes, artillery, forward, with blazing guns and American yells and the British caught a circle of fire.
No man can paint that battle in the dark, for no man ever saw such a fight in the dark before. The English fought nobly, but Jackson went right in on them, his men using their knives and rifle butts, and in the mix-up they knew not front from rear, nor friend from foe. Powder smoke settled, gray and sulphurous over the plain, half dimming an already cloud-dimmed moon. The fog added to it, and out of it, on the river, thundered the guns of the Carolina pouring shot into their ranks, and before them the sheeted fire of Jackson’s battery, up the levee, poured it in from the front. They fought by companies, battalions, squads. They charged around in the darkness and under clouds of smoke and fog, and heard strange backwoods yells and ungodly oaths, and felt strange bear-knives rip into their vitals from out of the dark. They fell back, fighting, to the river bank, to the camp of trees. They charged and drove the Tennesseans time and again before the naked, cold bayonet, but each time they came back before clubbed guns and tomahawk and bear-knife. It was a riot, not a battle; a butchery, not a fight; a stabbing contest in the dark, where the bear killers and Indian fighters had all the advantage.
At midnight Jackson collected his men, fell back to the canal and began there to throw up the long line of entrenchments over which the vaunted British battalions never put their foot.
Keane was stopped, shocked, chagrined; his troops dumbfounded. Three hundred and three lay dead or wounded in the field, and sixty-four had run off or been captured.
And now before them, entrenched, lay the same intrepid backwoodsman who had violated all the rules of warfare in fighting them hand-to-hand in the night, when, if he had waited a few more hours, the city had been theirs.
They had gone far enough. They would entrench and await Pakenham and the ten thousand embarking troops. They would take the city later.
Shakespeare did not write his plays to live, but to make a living.
There is no greater coward than he who despairs.