But that night many of the women of New Orleans slept with small daggers in their bosoms. And well may the handsome Creole women of New Orleans have been afraid. Badajos, San Sebastian, Toulouse, all were friendly towns, only the garrisons being hostile to the English. And yet, General Napier, who was an eye witness to what he describes, tells how these same soldiers did at Badajos:
Jackson reached New Orleans December 2d, as stated, more fit for the hospital than the camp, and with only three weeks in which (as it proved) to prepare the defenseless city. But under the magic of that strange, positive, fiery man, the quick tempers of the impulsive inhabitants were welded to the white heat of desperate determination. And what a motley lot of defenders he found—About 800 new troops, regulars, raw and undrilled; Planches’ City Battalion, five hundred; two regiments of State militia, armed with fowling pieces, muskets, old rifles; a regiment of free negroes, or, as Jackson called them, “free men of colour,” and right well did they quit themselves in the fight—in all, about 2,000 men. Two little men-of-war-armed schooners, the Carolina and the Louisiana, lay in the river.
But Coffee and his Tennesseans were coming from Pensacola through the woods, and Jackson sent courier after courier to them, saying: “Don’t sleep till you reach me or arrive in striking distance.” Carroll, with other Tennessee and Kentucky troops, had floated down the Cumberland, the Ohio, and were now on the Mississippi. But he had only one gun to ten men until he overtook a boatload of muskets, and with these he drilled his men on the decks of his boat. To him Jackson sent a steamboat up the river with this message: “I am resolved, feeble as my force is, to await the enemy on his first landing, and perish sooner than he shall reach the city.”
Two thousand Kentuckians under Generals Thomas and Adair were also floating down the Mississippi, a ragged, defenseless and almost gunless crowd, without blanket or tents, and only one cooking kettle to every eighty men. And now it was the 14th day of December, and the British had been at the mouth of the river nearly a week.
On the evening of the 17th Coffee, one hundred and twenty-nine miles from New Orleans, received Jackson’s note. His horses were poor, three hundred of his men sick, but in three days he was there; but only with his picked men—800—all that could follow so rapid a march. Here is a description of them: “Their appearance was not very military. In their woolen hunting shirts of dark or dingy color and coperas-dyed pantaloons, made, both cloth and garments, at home, by their wives, mothers and sisters; with slouching wool hats, some composed of the skins of raccoons and foxes, with belts of untanned deerskins, in which were stuck hunting knives and tomahawks, hair long and unkempt, and faces unshorn.”
“Paying for the privilege of wiping sentiment out.” The Refinery’s work. The trees on the left were Jackson’s headquarters. The half-completed monument shows in the center of the picture.
Of their leader, Jackson, Roosevelt says, in his “Naval War of 1812:”
“Yet, although a mighty and cruel foe was at their very gates, nothing save fierce defiance reigned in the fiery Creole hearts of the Crescent City. For a master spirit was in their midst. Andrew Jackson, having utterly broken and destroyed the most powerful Indian confederacy that had ever menaced the Southwest, and having driven the haughty Spaniard from Pensacola, was now bending all the energies of his rugged intellect and indomitable will to the one object of defending New Orleans. No man could have been better fitted for the task. He had hereditary wrongs to avenge on the British, and he hated them with an implacable fury that was absolutely devoid of fear. Born and brought up among the lawless characters of the frontier, and knowing well how to deal with them, he was able to establish and preserve the strictest martial law in the city without in the least quelling the spirit of the citizens. To a restless and untiring energy he united sleepless vigilance and genuine military genius. Prompt to attack whenever the chance offered itself, seizing with ready grasp the slightest vantage point, and never giving up a foot of earth that he could keep, he yet had the patience to play a defender’s game when it suited him, and with consummate skill he always followed out the scheme of warfare that was best adapted to his wild soldiery.”
It was two o’clock, December 23, before Jackson learned that Keane, with 2,300 men, had landed and marched to the river’s bank, in six miles of New Orleans. Without a moment’s hesitation he drew up his thin, sallow form, struck his clenched fist on a table and said: “By the eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!”