And scared stiff.
Jackson was both law and idea, and in twenty-four hours, by his own calm and intrepid bravery, his own self-assurance and fiery determination, he had the impulsive inhabitants ready to fight to the death.
On December 8, 1814, just one month to a day before the great battle was fought, a splendid double-deck battleship, the Tornant, flying the British admiral’s flag, and the advance guard of the great host, anchored off Chandeleur’s Island. There were two ways to reach New Orleans—up the Mississippi, or in the open bay through Lake Borgne, thence a march across the level delta straight to the city.
The English chose the latter. Five little American gunboats with 180 men lay in Lake Borgne, and these put up a gallant fight against the forty-five barges and one thousand men who finally grappled with them and took them with cutlass, pike and pistols.
And there, at noon, December 23, 1814, on the banks of the Bayou Bienvenue, a lonely, marshy place, and the last place that Jackson thought they would land, the British, 1,900 strong, under General Keane, one of the ablest officers of the command, landed without opposition and even without the knowledge of Jackson, who was beyond the city, near Lake Pontchartrain, expecting them there. In two hours he had four hundred more troops, a force larger that day than Jackson’s entire available command, and in nine miles of New Orleans, on a dead level plain, bounded on one side by the river and the other by the marshes of the lake.
It was a plain, easy march to New Orleans, and if he had marched at it that afternoon it would have been his before night. And why did he not? For only one reason—neither Pakenham nor Keane nor any general or soldier of all the British army supposed for an instant that there was anything before them but a lot of cowardly backwoodsmen whom they could brush away with their bayonets or stampede with a single charge.
And who, indeed, were these men? Who was their commander, and what had they done on battlefield before? Speaking of Pakenham’s utter defeat of the French Field Marshal Soult, but a short time before, the English historian, Napier, says: “He was opposed to one of the greatest generals in the world, at the head of unconquerable troops. For what Alexander’s Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal’s Africans at Cannae, Caesar’s Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon’s Guards at Austerlitz—such were Wellington’s British soldiers at this period.... Six years of uninterrupted success had engrafted in their natural strength and fierceness a confidence that made them invincible.”
And here is the same author’s description of how Pakenham fell on Salamanca, routing the best soldiers of continental Europe:
“It was five o’clock when Pakenham fell on Thomieres.... From the chief to the lowest soldier, all of the French felt that they were lost, and in an instant Pakenham, the most frank and gallant of men, commenced the battle. The British columns formed lines as they marched, and the French gunners, standing up manfully for their country, sent showers of grape into the advancing masses, while a crowd of light troops poured in a fire of musketry, under cover of which the main body endeavored to display a front. But bearing onward through the skirmishes, with the weight of a giant, Pakenham broke the half-formed lines into fragments and sent the whole in confusion upon the advancing support, spreading terror and disorder upon the enemy’s left.”
Pakenham, and the army under him at New Orleans, were the pick of Wellington’s troops, who had driven Bonaparte’s greatest general across the Pyrenees. They had conquered at Rodrigo, Badajos, San Sebastian, Toulouse, Salamanca. They laughed at raw backwoods militia, with not even a bayonet to their long, uncouth rifles. And what were they in victory? Was there any real ground for fear that they would carry out their threats of Beauty and Booty in New Orleans? When Jackson rode along in the afternoon of December 23 to the front to meet the British, women and children surrounded him in consternation. “Say to them,” he said to Livingston, “that no British soldier shall enter the city unless over my dead body. I will smash them, so help me God!”