“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.