New Orleans.
So, said I to myself, you have found a rival before reaching your journey’s end. But I felt little inclination to deal in the flesh of swine, or apprehensive of very formidable opposition from my new acquaintance. We rode on to Lexington, chief town of Kentucky, a flourishing place, where I heard much talk of a certain highly-gifted lawyer, who, during the elections for Congress, had distinguished himself by his pugilistic prowess in the streets and taverns. This man, who soon afterwards became more and more celebrated, was Henry Clay, whose exterior was no way calculated to give a high idea of his intellectual qualities, but who had already acquired great fame as an orator.
“A horrible custom was at that time almost universal amongst the inhabitants (for the most part rough and brutal people) of the Western States. It was that of allowing the finger-nails to grow until they could be cut into the shape of small sickles, which were used, in the quarrels and fights that continually occurred, to scoop out the eyes of an opponent. This barbarous art was called gouging. During our ride through Kentucky, we saw several persons who wanted an eye, and others who had lost both. The excitement then prevalent in the United States on account of the misunderstanding with England, was much greater in the western provinces than on the seaboard, and the feeling of irritation in the former was very considerable. Passing through Frankfort on my way to Louisville, I learned that the Kentucky State Legislature was just then sitting, and I determined to witness its proceedings, in order to compare it with the Territorial Legislature of Louisiana, which was composed of the strangest mixture of born Americans, and of French and Spanish creoles. Hardly had I entered the hall, when I heard a very animated orator indulging in a violent diatribe against England. ‘We must have war with Great Britain,’ he said. ‘War will ruin her commerce! Commerce is the apple of Britain’s eye—there we must gouge her!’ This flower of rhetoric was prodigiously applauded, and I could not deny that for a Kentucky audience it must have a certain poetical charm.”
Thus, sketching by the way a state of society which a lapse of forty years has fortunately greatly altered for the better, Mr Nolte reached Louisville. The Ohio had been for some days frozen, and his boats, with his friend and partner, Hollander, were fast bound in the ice some distance higher up the stream. “Three days afterwards, just as we sat down to dinner, the whole house was violently shaken; glasses, plates, and bottles fell from the table—most of the guests sprang up, with the cry: ‘There is the earthquake, by jingo! There is no humbug about it!’ and ran out into the street. The commotion was soon over, and people returned to their houses. Early next morning I learned that the shock had broken up the ice on the river, and that several boats had come down to Shippingport, a little town about a league off.” Among them were Nolte’s craft, and he continued his journey, presently quitting the clear transparent stream of the Ohio, and entering the slimy waters of the Mississippi. In voyages of that kind it was customary to bring-to at nightfall, and make fast the boats to the shore until next morning, snags and sawyers rendering progress unsafe during the darkness. On the evening of the 6th February 1812, the halting-place was hard by the little town of New Madrid. About twenty boats, which had left Shippingport together, were there assembled. “It was a bright moonlight night,” says Mr Nolte; “at eleven o’clock my partner, Hollander, had gone to bed, and I was sitting at a little table drawing a caricature of President Madison—who had just published a flaming proclamation, calling upon the nation to ‘put on armour and warlike attitude,’ but who was said to be himself completely under petticoat government—when a terrible report, like the sudden roar of cannon, echoed without, immediately succeeded by innumerable flashes. The Mississippi foamed up like the boiling water in a kettle, and then again receded with a rushing sound; the trees of a little wood near to which we had moored our boats, cracked, broke, and were overthrown. The terrible spectacle lasted for several minutes: there seemed no end to the vivid lightning, to the alternate rise and fall of the troubled water, and to the crash of falling trees. Hollander, startled from his sleep, called out, ‘What is that, Nolte?’ I could only tell him that I myself did not know, but took it for an earthquake. I went on deck. What a sight! The river, which had resumed its ordinary course, was covered with floating trees and branches, borne rapidly along by the current. Of the town, only a few very distant lights were to be seen. It was a real chaos. Our little crew consisted of three sailors, whom want of employment, in consequence of the embargo, had driven to Pittsburg, and of a river-pilot. They told me that the other boats had all cut loose from the shore and floated on, and asked me if we should not do the same. It struck me that if, under ordinary circumstances, it was unsafe to proceed by night, it must be doubly dangerous now that the river was covered with floating trees. And so we remained where we were. The rising sun showed us the unfortunate city of New Madrid more than three parts destroyed, and flooded, with here and there one of the wretched inhabitants making his way out of the ruins. Our boats were in the centre of a sort of island formed by falling trees, and several hours passed before we could extricate ourselves. At Natchez, which we reached on the thirty-second day, and where we remained a week, we heard full particulars of the earthquake, but we saw nothing of any of the boats that had surrounded us on the evening of the 6th February. At New Orleans, the only sign perceived of the commotion was a swinging to and fro of the chandeliers in the ball-room, and the sickness and fainting of a great number of ladies. This remarkable earthquake commenced in the north-west of Missouri state, was felt more or less throughout Louisiana, and extended through the Gulf of Mexico to Caraccas, where it played great havoc, destroying nearly the whole city, and swallowing up or reducing to poverty forty thousand persons. Nothing more was ever heard of the boats, and if we had not remained stationary we should doubtless have shared their fate.”
After five years’ absence, Mr Nolte found New Orleans greatly increased in size, but very little improved with respect to the character of its inhabitants, who had added to their former bad qualities a taste for lawsuits and chicanery, introduced amongst them by an immigration of greedy advocates from the Northern States. Mr Nolte—who, as somebody said of him, many years later, when he was an inmate of the Queen’s Bench at the suit of the litigious and crack-brained ex-duke of Brunswick, was all his life the plaything of misfortune, and whose best concerted and most prudent plans were invariably marred by some unforeseen incident or disaster—had no sooner taken and furnished a house in the chief city of Louisiana than news came from Washington of war having been declared against England—a crushing blow to our poor adventurer’s well-founded hopes of extensive and profitable transactions with the great European houses who wished him well and favoured his enterprise. There was no help for it; he could but cross his hands and pray for peace. The Mississippi was blockaded by British men-of-war. The state of things at New Orleans resembled the intolerable monotony and inactivity of a calm at sea, with the difference that the latter can last but a few days or weeks, whilst the former might endure for years. The only incidents that varied the monotony of life at New Orleans during that war were of an unpleasant nature. In August 1812, a frightful hurricane drove on shore eighteen of the ships in harbour, and unroofed nearly the whole city. A few months later, Mr Nolte broke his right arm at the elbow by a fall from his horse, and the limb ever afterwards remained stiff and crooked. Party-spirit ran high; private scandal, quarrels, and duels, were resorted to by the restless and disreputable citizens of New Orleans as a refuge from ennui. This portion of Mr Nolte’s book abounds in curious details. “The whole neighbouring coast was kept in a state of alarm by the piracies of the brothers Laffitte from Bayonne, by Jauvinet, Beluche, Dominique, Gamba, and others, who might be seen promenading the streets of New Orleans in broad daylight, and wholly unmolested. They had their friends and connections and warehouses in the city, and sold, almost openly, their stolen goods, especially English manufactures. But the slave trade was their great resource. They captured Spanish and other slavers on the high seas, and took them to their chief depôt, the little island of Barataria on the coast near New Orleans, whither the planters, chiefly of French extraction, went to purchase the slaves—for one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, instead of six hundred or seven hundred, which they would have paid in the market—and conveyed them to their plantations, up the numerous bayous or creeks intersecting that district. And as the pirates would be paid in hard dollars, specie soon began to be rare in the city.” Brought into contact, by certain banking operations, with reckless and unscrupulous men, Mr Nolte managed to get involved in a couple of duels, in which his stiff arm was of course highly disadvantageous to him, and, with his usual good luck, he received a bullet in his leg, which he still carries about with him. A serious danger put a temporary end to these squabbles. An attack was expected from the English, and General Jackson made his appearance at New Orleans with fifteen hundred men, the most efficient amongst whom were five hundred riflemen who had served with Jackson in the Indian war, and were known as Coffee’s Brigade, from their commander’s name. These were the fellows who picked off the British officers from behind the cotton-bale barricades, of which the materials proceeded from Mr Nolte’s stores. Trained in repeated encounters with the savages, they were the sort of men Sealsfield has so vividly painted, totally ignorant of military organisation and discipline, but inaccessible to fear, perfectly cool in danger, of great presence of mind and personal resource, and, above all, unerring marksmen. Mr Nolte, although his stiff arm exempted him from service, did not choose to see his friends go out to fight and himself remain behind—the less so that he was already suspected of partiality to the English—and he joined the light company of a battalion of militia, several of whose officers had served under Napoleon. According to Mr Nolte’s account, Jackson, blustering, presumptuous, and overweeningly self-confident, would have led his militia and irregulars to certain destruction at the hands of the well-drilled British troops, but for the advice given him by Livingston, who acted as one of his aides-de-camp, to consult a French emigrant major named St Gême, who had formerly been in the English service in Jamaica, and now commanded a company in the battalion in which Mr Nolte had enrolled himself. “This officer had been a great deal with Moreau, when the latter, on a visit to Louisiana a few years previously, had scanned, with the critical eye of a tactician, the position of New Orleans and its capabilities of defence. St Gême rendered General Jackson and the American cause the great service of making him understand that, in the open field, the English would surround him and his handful of inexperienced followers, who had but the name of soldiers, would utterly rout and certainly capture them; and he pointed out to him the M’Carthy canal as the position which Moreau had himself fixed upon as the most defensible, especially for raw troops.” Mr Nolte, who writes impartially, and without visible leaning either to English or to Americans, praises Jackson for the self-command (a quality he did not often display) with which he waived his own wishes in deference to the opinion of the French general (he must have been mad to have disregarded it), and abandoned plans which assuredly, if carried out, would have led to the annihilation of his army and the capture of New Orleans. Livingston, by whose representations he was induced to take counsel of the French major, was a much better lawyer and statesman than warrior, according to Mr Nolte, and showed himself but little where bullets were flying. When the position decided upon was to be taken up and redoubts built, the ground was found to be swampy and slimy, and the earth unavailable for any sort of fortification, whereupon a French engineer suggested the employment of cotton bales. The plan adopted, Jackson would lose no time. “It was observed to him,” says unlucky Mr Nolte, lugubriously, “that he certainly might have plenty of cotton in the city for six or seven cents a pound, but its conveyance would cause a day’s delay, whereas a barque, already laden with cotton, and whose departure for the Havana had only been prevented by the arrival of the English squadron, lay close to the shore. It had on board two hundred and forty-five bales, which I myself had shipped just before the invasion, and sixty others belonging to a Spaniard of New Orleans. I was ill-pleased, when they could have had cheap cotton for six or seven cents in the town, to see them land, from a ship all ready to sail, my best quality, which had cost me ten or eleven cents, and I said as much to Livingston, who was my usual legal adviser in New Orleans, and whom I fell in with at Battery No. 3. He was never at a loss for an answer. ‘Well, Nolte,’ said he, ‘since it is your cotton, you will not mind the trouble of defending it.’ A reply which was the foundation of the story that, when the owner of the cotton complained of its seizure, Jackson sent him a musket, with the message that upon no man was it so incumbent to defend the bales as upon their owner, and that he therefore hoped he would not abandon them.” Mr Nolte’s whole account of the operations at New Orleans is clear and graphic, but that brief campaign has been so often described that we are not induced to dwell at much length upon his narrative, although it contains some passages that, proceeding from an actor on the American side, possess particular interest. On the left wing were the best sharpshooters of Kentucky and Tennessee, invisible in the cypress wood, and loading their rifles with three or four buckshot besides the bullet. Their good weapons and sure aim sent destruction through the ranks of the English, who saw no foe, but beheld all their officers picked off. The whole right flank of the English column was raked by this deadly fire, whilst in front the American batteries kept up an uninterrupted discharge. “From time to time,” says Mr Nolte, “when the smoke blew aside, I and my company obtained a view over the battle-field, and there we saw the whole English centre retreating, throwing away their fascines, and a staff-officer on a black horse gallop forward, his hat in his hand, which he angrily waved as if threatening the flying column. Suddenly, struck by several bullets, he fell backwards from his horse—some soldiers wrapped him hastily in blankets and carried him off. We learned in the evening that the staff-officer was the commander-in-chief, General Pakenham.” The fight was soon over. As Mr Nolte justly observes, it was a butchery rather than a battle. The Americans, completely sheltered, had but some thirty men killed and wounded, whilst their opponents had to deplore the loss of many hundred good soldiers, than whom none braver ever bore muskets, but whose commander’s good fortune was, upon that occasion, unfortunately not equal to his often-tried valour, and who, moreover, was misled by false information.
Mr Nolte does ample justice to the coolness, energy, and resolution of General Jackson, and shows that even the gasconades and exaggerations in which he constantly indulged had their use, since he thereby deluded his own people, and all the prisoners taken by the English concurred in such formidable accounts of the forces at his disposal as could not fail to influence the proceedings of the invaders. But after the affair of the 8th January, Jackson, prodigiously elevated by his triumph, was anxious to assume the offensive. For the second time he was indebted to Livingston for sound advice. “What would you have more?” said the lawyer; “the city is saved; the English will not renew the attack. Against troops like those, whose intrepidity amidst the most frightful slaughter you yourself have witnessed, what is the use of exposing yourself and your handful of men to be roughly handled, to the diminution of your glory and at risk of valuable lives?” As in the case of the position, the general took his aide-de-camp’s sensible advice, and, as is not unusual, got the whole credit of adopting the only rational course. Livingston, some of whose eulogists have made of him a hero as well as a lawgiver, was seized, it appears from Mr Nolte’s version of the campaign, with a bad colic on the evening of the 7th, just after it became known that the English would attack next morning, and retired into New Orleans, where he next day received news of the action. An hour afterwards he was back in camp—the English and the colic having retreated together. Another of Jackson’s volunteer aides-de-camp, also a lawyer, was off into the city before daybreak on the 8th, without even a pretext, and passed the morning riding about the streets, shouting out that the foe was at hand, and calling upon all to arm and hasten to the field—whereas all capable of bearing arms were in the field, except a few skulkers like himself. No notice was taken of these gentlemen’s shy behaviour, and Jackson, in his despatch, drawn up by Livingston, thanked his military and voluntary aides-de-camp “for their cool and deliberate bravery!”
The cotton bales used for the redoubts, and a quantity of blankets that had been taken from Mr Nolte’s warehouse during his absence from the city, gave rise to discussions which brought out the least favourable side of Jackson’s character. Immediately after the embarkation of the English, a commission was appointed to settle all claims. Mr Nolte’s was for 750 blankets and 245 bales of cotton. The former he was allowed for at the price of the day on which the English landed—namely, eleven dollars a-pair; but when the order was submitted to Jackson for his signature and ratification, he said that as the blankets had been taken (almost forcibly) by the Tennessee riflemen, they should be paid for in Tennessee notes—then worth 10 per cent less than New Orleans paper-money. Mr Nolte was fain to submit to this shabby trick, worthy of a Connecticut pedlar. As regarded his cotton he had much more trouble. He produced the invoice, proving that he had bought it, two years previously, at 10 cents a pound, from a well-known wealthy cotton-grower. He claimed that price, with the addition of two years’ interest. During the whole of that time, it had never been lower than 10 to 11 cents a pound, and a few days before the landing of the English he had bought some at 12½ cents. But when the British troops were on shore, and close at hand, there was a panic; markets fell, the timid realised at any price, and a small parcel of cotton of the same quality was sold at 7 cents. When Mr Nolte’s claim was submitted to Jackson, he allowed it, and said the cotton must be paid for at the price it would have fetched upon the day the American troops marched out of the town. No notice being taken of Mr Nolte’s written protest against such manifest injustice, he went to Jackson, then in all the intoxication of his triumph, and of the exaggerated homage paid him by his countrymen, and very well disposed to exert the arbitrary power given him by the military law he still quite unnecessarily maintained—a stretch of authority for which it will be remembered that he was afterwards fined by the civil tribunals. In reply to Mr Nolte’s representation and remonstrance—
“‘Aren’t you very lucky,’ he asked, ‘to have saved the rest of your cotton through my defence of the city?’
“‘Certainly, general,’ answered I, ‘as lucky as every other man in the place, but with this difference, that it costs them nothing, and that I have to bear all the loss.’
“‘Loss?’ cried the general, getting rather angry—‘loss? You have saved everything!’