Their coming was a surprise. There were few trained soldiers to meet this army, and those were not the days of railroads, so that no troops could be brought in haste from afar. Those that gathered were nearly all raw militia, and they did not stand long before the British veterans who had fought in the wars with Napoleon. They were soon put to flight, and the British army marched into our capital city.
There they behaved in a way that their country has ever since been ashamed of. They set fire to the public buildings and burned most of them to the ground. The Capitol, the President's house, and other buildings were burned, and the records of the government were destroyed. Then, having acted like so many savages, the British hurried away before the Americans could get at them for revenge. That was a victory, I fancy, which the British do not like to read about.
They had been so successful at Washington that they thought they would try the same thing with another city. This time they picked out New Orleans, which was so far away from the thickly settled part of the country that they fancied it would be an easy matter to capture it. In this they made a great mistake, as you will soon see.
There was a general in the South who was not used to being defeated. This was Andrew Jackson, one of our bravest soldiers, who had just won fame in a war with the Indians of Georgia. He was a man who was always ready to fight and this the English found when they marched on New Orleans. There were twelve thousand of them, and Jackson, who had been sent there to meet them, only had half that many. And the British were trained soldiers, while the Americans were militia. But most of them were men of the backwoods, who knew how to shoot.
The Battle of New Orleans.
Some of you may have heard that Jackson's men fought behind cotton bales. That is not quite true, but he was in such a hurry in building his breastworks that he did put in them some bales of cotton taken from the warehouses. The British, who were in as great a hurry, built a breastwork of sugar hogsheads which they found on the plantations. But the cannon balls soon set the cotton on fire and filled the air with flying sugar, so the bales and the hogsheads had to be pulled out. It was found that cotton and sugar, while good enough in their place, were not good things to stop cannon balls.
Soon the British marched against the American works, and there was a terrible fight.
"Stand to your guns, my men," said Jackson to his soldiers. "Make every shot tell. Give it to them."
Many of the men were old hunters from Tennessee, some of whom could hit a squirrel in the eye, and when they fired the British fell in rows. Not a man could cross that terrible wall of fire, and they fought on until twenty-six hundred of them lay bleeding on the field, while only eight Americans were killed.