MAP
SHEWING THE LANDING OF THE
BRITISH ARMY
its several Encampments and fortifications
on the Mississippi and the works
they erected on their Retreat; also the
different posts Encampments and fortifications
made by the several Corps of the
American Army during the whole campaign.
By Major A. LACARRIERE LATOUR,
Late principal Engineer 7th Military District, U. S. Army, 1815.
STRUTHERS & CO., ENGR’S, N.Y.
Feverish activity followed. General Coffee above Baton Rouge received Jackson’s summons on the evening of December 17, and marched the next morning with twelve hundred and fifty men. In two days he made one hundred and twenty miles, camping on the night of December 19 within fifteen miles of New Orleans, with eight hundred men.[496] Carroll, with the Tennessee brigade which left Nashville November 27, arrived at New Orleans December 21, and a squadron of mounted Mississippi volunteers hurried down. The British also lost no time. Their advance disembarked on the Isle aux Poix in Lake Borgne on the night of December 14, and during the following week all the boats and seamen of the fleet were occupied in transporting seven thousand men, with their equipment, thirty miles from the fleet to the island. During the night of December 18 two British officers reconnoitred the head of Lake Borgne.[497] At the mouth of Bayou Bienvenu, not fifteen miles from New Orleans, was a fishermen’s village. The fishermen were Spaniards, with no love for the United States, and ready to accept British pay. They received the two British officers, and conveyed them in a canoe up the bayou to the Villeré plantation on the bank of the Mississippi only six miles from New Orleans.[498] There, at their leisure, Lieutenant Peddie of the quartermaster’s department and Captain Spencer of the “Carron” selected the line of advance for the British army, and returned, unmolested and unseen, through the bayou to the lake and the Isle aux Poix.
Only December 21, two days after the British reconnaissance, was an American picket of eight men and a sergeant placed at the fishermen’s village,[499] where they remained thirty-six hours without learning that British officers had been on the spot, or that the fishermen were all away, acting as pilots for the approaching British boats. Meanwhile the troops at Isle aux Poix were ready to move almost as soon as Lieutenant Peddie could return to show them the way. At ten o’clock on the morning of December 22 the light brigade—sixteen hundred and eighty-eight rank-and-file,[500] under Colonel Thornton, who had led the advance at Bladensburg—embarked in boats, and after a day on the lake arrived the next morning, December 23, at daylight, without giving alarm, at the fishermen’s village, where they surprised and captured the picket, and then passing up the bayou five miles, landed at a point about three miles from the Mississippi River. No attempt at concealment was made.[501] The troops were formed in column, and found no obstacles to their march except the soft ground and the ditches. Through reeds and cypress swamp they made their way about three miles, when their advance suddenly entered open fields skirted by an orange-grove, with the broad Mississippi beyond. They were on the Villeré plantation; and they surprised and captured Major Villeré and his militia company, in his own house at noon-day, after a march of three miles with sixteen hundred men, from a point which had been recognized by Jackson as one of two or three necessary avenues of approach.
The record of American generalship offered many examples of misfortune, but none so complete as this. Neither Hull nor Harrison, neither Winder nor Samuel Smith, had allowed a large British army, heralded long in advance, to arrive within seven miles unseen and unsuspected, and without so much as an earthwork, a man, or a gun between them and their object. The disaster was unprecedented, and could be repaired only by desperate measures.
CHAPTER XIII.
The defence of New Orleans resembled the defence of Washington until the moment when in each case the British expedition came within sight. Jackson was even slower than Winder to see the point of danger or to concentrate his forces. At Washington, Winder took command July 1, and the British expedition arrived August 16; at Mobile, Jackson took command August 16, and the British expedition arrived December 14. In neither case was the interval seriously employed for defence. So much was Jackson misled that he collected no troops, and made no inquiry as to the military means at his disposal at New Orleans. Had he gone there September 1, he would have felt the want of arms and equipment, and would have been able to supply them. During the summer, while yet among the Creeks, he was said to have made requisition for a quantity of war material to be sent to New Orleans;[502] but he certainly showed no interest in its shipment or the causes for its delay in arrival. The arms should have reached New Orleans in October, when he would have had ample time to correct any failure or want of supply. He could have used, in case of necessity, the steamboat “Enterprise,” which was then regularly plying on the Mississippi, and was not the only steamboat on those waters.[503] If New Orleans was deficient in many articles of military necessity, the fault was not wholly in the War Department.