Defenses on the West Bank of the River.
Realizing that the enemy might suddenly throw a force across the river, and by a flank movement up the right bank gain a position opposite the city, from which, by shot and shell, he might compel a surrender, Jackson sent Major Latour, chief of his engineer corps, to the west side, with orders to select a position most suitable for a fortified line in the rear of General Morgan's camp. Bois-Gervais Canal, three miles below New Orleans, was fixed upon, and one hundred and fifty negroes from the plantations near at once set to work. In six days they completed the parapet, with a glacis on the opposite side.
Commodore Patterson removed from the Louisiana a number of her guns, which he placed in battery in front of Jordon's plantation, on the right bank, with which he did important service to the end of the campaign. This formidable battery was formed to give a deadly flanking fire on the enemy's ranks from the opposite bank of the river. It was manned and served by sailors, mostly landed from the Carolina when she was burned. They had been enlisted about the city after the gunboats were destroyed; men of all nations, not a third of them speaking the English language. The constant daily fire of this battery caused the British to fall back from Chalmette's and Bienvenue's houses and to seek safer quarters in the rear, after the artillery duels of the twenty-eighth.
Captain Henly, of the late ship Carolina, was placed in command of a strong redoubt on the bank of the river, opposite New Orleans, around which was a fosse twenty-five feet in width, the earth from which was thrown up to form a steep glacis, from the summit of the wall serving as a parapet to the brink of the fosse. Here a battery of two twenty-four pounders commanded at once the road and the river back to the swamp.
The Tennesseans, placed on the left, and operating in the undergrowth of the woods of the swamp, were a continual terror to the British sentinels and outposts. Clad in their brown hunting-dress, they were indistinguishable in the bush, while with their long rifles they picked off some of the British daily. The entrenchment line was being daily strengthened.