Very quietly, later, he ate a little rice and dozed on a sofa—the only sleep he had, say several reputable historians, for four days and nights thereafter, and he started to meet the enemy with a little over two thousand men.
I am willing to stake my claim, previously made, that this man was one of the greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic on this one act alone. Here were the British, more than a match for him in numbers, equipment and confidence. So sure were they of taking the city that they had loafed along all afternoon and now had gone in a jolly camp at sunset, on the banks of the great river, preferring to march into the city in the morning, and not at night. They were disciplined and bayonetted, jolly as a lot of schoolboys, and brave as men get to be, full of fun and fight. I cannot think of another general, from Washington to Lee, from Gates to Grant, who would not have said: “I will fight them in the morning; this evening I will prepare. I will barricade, I will entrench, I will throw up my wall between them and the city.”
And this would have been fatal. In broad daylight Keane would have whipped them. He would have whipped Jackson’s troops that night but for the darkness, but for the darkness and the grizzled, homespun clothed men, who had cat-eyes for night fighting, who had stalked deer and panther and Indians in the shadows of it, who could steal in and steal out and use their knives in close places.
This was December 23, but that night he won the greater battle of January 8.
He fell on them like a panther from the darkness of the swamp.
He gave them a jolt that Soult, nor Ney, nor Napoleon had ever given. He taught them a warfare they had never dreamed of before. He took the sand out of their craws and the conceit out of their boasting mouths.
When he finished with them, at midnight, they decided they had gone far enough toward New Orleans for that day, and several others. They threw up entrenchments and waited for more troops.
They were hacked, demoralized, beaten!
And this is the way that Jackson did it. For my part I think it a far prettier fight than he made two weeks later, when he finished the blow.
Jackson put his troops in motion about three o’clock, amid alarm guns and beating of drums. But he himself galloped to the river bank and signalled to the little Carolina to drop down. Then he put spurs to his horse and galloped after the dust cloud going down the road to the Rodriguez Canal. I could see it all so plainly as I stood on the banks of the river and saw the same landscape before me. The lean, sallow, booted man, his long legs dangling underneath his horse’s belly, galloping seemingly to defeat. This man of destiny, this man who believed in himself, this man who knew that God Almighty had sent him to whip the British, just as he knew he would kill Dickinson.