Patriotic Fire (13 page)

During the solid week of constant rowboat relays that it took to assemble the whole army at Pea Island, the men lived “upon this miserable desert without tents or huts or any covering to shelter them from the inclemency of the weather. After having been exposed all day to a cold and pelting rain, we landed upon a barren island, incapable of furnishing even fuel enough to supply our fires. Many of the wretched negroes to whom frost and cold were absolutely new,” Gleig wrote of the Jamaican freedmen regiments, “fell fast asleep, and perished before morning.” And if it was bad for the soldiers, think also of the sailors who had to row them back and forth around the clock without getting out of their boats during the eighty-mile round-trip. Gleig’s next observation, however, is almost enough to make his entire narrative suspect from the historian’s point of view: “Yet in spite of all this, not a murmur nor a whisper of complaint could be heard throughout the whole expedition.”

Even if that statement represents the ultimate in hyperbole, what he goes on to say makes more sense, which is that the reason the men accustomed themselves to the miserable conditions was that “every one looked forward to the future. From the General down to the youngest drum-boy [there was] a confident anticipation . . . of the ample reward in store for them [meaning, of course, their share of the fabulous prize money]; the expectation of so great a recompense to come.”

A
s the army began assembling at Pea Island, British intelligence officers were engrossed in reconnoitering actual landing spots for the invasion. Pea Island was very close to the Mississippi shore, from which it would have been fairly simple to put the army on the easiest route into New Orleans—the Chef Menteur Road across the Plain of Gentilly, which Jackson himself had been surveying just a few days earlier when he learned of the capture of his gunboats. That obviously must have been under consideration, but for some reason Cochrane rejected it. Perhaps it was because the British had learned that the Americans were blocking the Chef Road and didn’t want to force a battle on an approach with swamps on both sides. If so, the decision would have been a sound one, since an infantry commander’s worst nightmare is to attack on such a narrow front that maneuvering becomes a practical impossibility. It may have been General Keane who rejected the idea on those grounds, but that is doubtful, given his subservience to Admiral Cochrane.

In any case, on December 18, while the army was still being ferried to Pea Island, two British officers had themselves rowed the thirty miles to the opposite side of the lake, to a winter-bleak blackwater river called Bayou Bienvenue. At its entrance they came upon a cluster of palmetto-thatched stilt houses known locally as the Spanish Fishermen’s Village. As the name implies, these were the residences of the forty or so Spaniards—with a few Portuguese and Italians thrown in—who worked the rich waters of Lake Borgne, bringing their pirogues full of shrimp, oysters, turtles, crabs, and fish to the seafood markets in New Orleans.

As noted, British officers had earlier approached these Spaniards on the lake—or perhaps it had been the other way around—but now the Spaniards, who resented American control of Louisiana and knew the lake backward and forward, quickly began cooperating with Admiral Cochrane and his people. Thus, with two of the Spanish fishermen as guides, the British scouting party proceeded to investigate the bayou, which was about a hundred yards wide and six feet deep. To their astonishment and delight, they discovered that, unlike all the other water approaches below New Orleans, Bayou Bienvenue had not been blocked as Jackson had ordered. After they had traveled by pirogue about eight miles along the twisting stream, Bayou Bienvenue branched off into Bayou Mazant, and after another four miles it became too shallow for the larger British barges to navigate. Here, where the Villeré Canal entered the bayou, would of necessity be the British jumping-off point.

At first sight, the position must have looked perfectly awful to the reconnaissance officers. It was in the middle of nowhere in a wretched, boggy marsh (then called a “prairie,” but known less affectionately as “land of the trembling earth”). That is what Lieutenant Gleig described when he arrived a week later: “The place where we landed was as wild as it is possible to imagine. Nothing could be seen except one huge marsh covered with tall reeds; not a house nor a vestige of human industry,” he said (apparently forgetting about Villeré’s canal). Through this godforsaken morass, where the dense reeds grew eight feet tall, the soldiers slogged for a long arduous mile, often sinking to their knees in muck, until they reached a dark and forbidding cypress swamp. The swamp was barely possible to navigate except by stumbling through mire between the knobby trees and wading across the many crisscrossing streams. As darkness fell, the British scouting party emerged onto a wide stable plain, covered with the close-chopped stubble from the autumn harvest of sugarcane. At this point they were about a mile from the Mississippi River, which lay due southwest. In the distance they could see a few slaves toiling away. Beyond that was a large orange grove and, beyond that, the elegant Creole-style home of Major General Jacques Villeré, commander of the Louisiana state militia. The Spanish fishermen had thoughtfully provided the two British officers with rough fishermen’s clothing; so disguised, the little reconnaissance party moved casually through the fields, past the orange trees drooping with ripe fruit, and toward the tall levee of the river. Once there, according to reports, they climbed the levee, noting the road running beside it into New Orleans, just nine miles north, then climbed down the other side and had themselves a drink of “the cool and sweet water” of the Mississippi River.

The Mississippi is perhaps a half mile wide at this point, and on both sides for twenty miles below the city its banks were lined with more than fifty sugar plantations. These varied in size according to the terrain, but from the Villeré plantation northward toward the city, each farm after the next fronted the river for about half a mile and extended back toward the cypress swamp about a mile, consisting of from six hundred to eight hundred acres. As was to be expected, most were owned by Creoles—Jumonville, Lachapelle, Chalmette, Rodriguez, Lacoste, Guichard, and so forth. With an eye, no doubt, to the vagaries of the river, many owners had built comfortable villas in the Creole style, one- or two-story affairs with tall windows and wide verandas all around. But others, in flagrant disregard of hydrographic reality, constructed expansive three-story mansions facing the river, with broad, crushed-shell avenues leading up to them, framed with rows of moss-draped live oaks. Many had their own canals extending from the levee to the swamp in order to drain the land in case of torrential rains or if the river topped the levee. According to the engineer Latour, if the river actually broke a major gap in the levee (which had happened more than once), the result would be calamitous; the whole area—fields, homes, sugar refineries, swamps, and all—would be flooded and remain under ten to twelve feet of water for up to six months.

A
ccordingly, on December 18, the two-man scouting party returned to Pea Island and made its report: the bayou was passable, although the landing spot and its distance from high ground left much to be desired for a 10,000-man army to negotiate. Yet it offered a priceless advantage: cover and concealment. If the army arrived quickly and moved swiftly, it could take New Orleans in half a day, before the Americans knew what had happened to them. When this news was conveyed to the fleet, Cochrane and Keane themselves sailed over to Pea Island for an inspection and review of the army. They apparently brought with them some interesting guests—a number of Florida Indian chiefs and some of their families, whose arrival merits mention here.

The Indians might accurately be described as military observers, consisting as they did of the heads of various tribes—mostly those few Choctaws still hostile to the United States—who had been among those that the British had been training in Pensacola until they were so rudely interrupted by Jackson’s arrival. After Jackson’s attack, they and their tribesmen had scattered into the wilds, but the British, under the enterprising machinations of the ubiquitous Colonel Nicholls, had somehow managed to round them up and persuade them to join the expedition against New Orleans. This was done on the theory that if the Indians could only see the mighty British army in action against the discounted American militia, they would regain their confidence and rejoin the effort to overthrow the United States all over the Southern region. At first, getting the Indians interested was a tall order; after they had been chased from Fort Bowyer at Mobile, and then watched Jackson run the British ignominiously out of Pensacola, they had quickly formed an impression of “the remorseless energy and ferocity of Sharp Knife,” as Andrew Jackson had become known to them, a man they did not particularly wish to tangle with again. “Hence they were timid, cautious and wily.”

But Nicholls was not a man to be undone.

Shortly after Jackson had departed Pensacola, Nicholls marched his detachment, dressed to the nines, into the Choctaws’ forest villages. “The chiefs greatly admired the gay uniforms, the large cocked hats and nodding plumes, the golden epaulets and highly-finished swords and scabbards,” the historian Alexander Walker tells us. But that was only the first act; the second was as old as the white man’s relationship with American Indians. “The British plied them with rum, the greatest of the foes of the poor Indian. They got drunk as Choctaws always have done since their knowledge of alcohol,” Judge Walker recorded, and under its spell they pledged to aid the British for “as long as the supply of rum was continued.” These chiefs, then, sober or drunk, were on hand to see the great victory promised them by the British officers, after which, if they would only assist by rallying their people against the Americans, all their lost lands and tarnished dignity would be restored.

In the meantime, they provided a curious spectacle for the British soldiers, most of whom had never before seen an American Indian. One captain who encountered a number of them described their faces as being “like masks,” and they were “perfectly naked, with the exception of a girdle round their loins, with a dirty blanket or the skin of a wild beast slung round their necks . . . the eyes are generally dark with a sullen expression, the nostrils are distended from which hang[s] a metal ring; the upper part of the bridge of the nose scarcely rises above the face, which is tattooed, which gives a truly savage aspect. In the afternoon they decorate themselves by rubbing their cheeks with a sort of red ochre, and intermingling with the hair the bright plumage of various birds.”

Of the chiefs themselves, this officer recorded that he did not see them “in their real costume,” as the British had given them red “sergeant’s jackets,” some “covered with gold lace, but were
sans culottes . . .
and resembled those figures descending the broad stairs at the Italian Opera-house into the infernal regions in the ballet of La Fauste.”

C
ochrane decided to land Keane’s army via Bayou Bienvenue and the barges were reassembled at Pea Island. It was calculated that only one-third of the army could be moved at a time, and the first group to go was an 1,800-man detachment led by Colonel William Thornton, to be followed closely by Keane and Cochrane. So with what must have been an absorbing experience on Pea Island now behind them, the troops climbed into the boats for the thirty-mile pull across Lake Borgne.

Nine

C
onfident as he might have been that his order to block all bayous had been carried out, Jackson, as a further precaution, on December 19 issued orders to Militia General Jacques Villeré to have each of these waterways guarded around the clock. Ironically, responsibility for Bayou Bienvenue fell to none other than General Villeré’s son Major Gabriel Villeré, who at that very moment was stationed with a company of militia on his father’s plantation near the head of the bayou.

When he received the order, apparently on December 21 if not earlier, Major Villeré dispatched a picket to the mouth of the bayou consisting of “a sergeant, eight white men, and three mulattoes.” These men entered the swamps the same day and by evening arrived at the Spanish Fishermen’s Village, a mile or so upriver from the actual mouth of the bayou. There they found but one man, who claimed he was sick and who told them that the rest of his fishermen friends were working on the lake. This was true enough, except they weren’t out there fishing; the treacherous Spaniards had hired out their boats and services to the British for the crossing.

Probably because of the weather, instead of setting up their outpost in the marshes at the mouth of the bayou, Villeré’s picket cravenly opted to station themselves in the shelter of the village’s houses, well up the bayou, and it was there, the next night, that the advance party of the British invasion force found them. Villeré’s people initially attempted to hide behind one of the huts, but after the first few barges had passed they dashed to the edge of the bayou for a boat in which to escape. They were seen by the British, however, according to Judge Walker’s account, and four of the dozen were captured trying to drag the boat into the bayou.

“Four others were taken on land,” Walker wrote. “Of the four remaining, three ran into the cane breaks, thence into the prairie, where they wandered about all day until worn down with fatigue and suffering, they returned to the village, happy to surrender themselves prisoners. One only escaped, and after three days of terrible hardships and constant perils, wandering over trembling prairies, through almost impervious cane breaks, swimming bayous and lagoons and living on reptiles and roots, got safely into the American camp.” By that time, though, his warning was a day too late; the Americans already knew.

From that day to this, Major Villeré’s violation of the order to block the canal has never been satisfactorily accounted for and, after the battle, resulted in his court-martial on a variety of charges, including treason. The most likely explanation is that since the Villerés used the bayou to get onto Lake Borgne, which was in turn reached through their canal, the young major had arbitrarily convinced himself that it was an unlikely invasion route and that it would be too much trouble later to clear the scores of large trees that would have been felled to block it. If that was so, he at the least would have been guilty of gross negligence and dereliction of duty.

W
ith the reality of the crisis now urgently upon him, Jackson was once again faced with the question of what to do about Jean Laffite and his Baratarians. After Jackson’s rejection to the committee of defense of Laffite’s offer to help on grounds that the Baratarians “were being pursued by United States Civil Officers, and that many were in prison,” Bernard Marigny, and probably Edward Livingston too, had neatly removed this argument by consulting with Federal District Judge Dominick Hall, who told them if they could persuade the Louisiana legislature to pass a resolution suspending prosecution of the Baratarians, he would have them released from jail. That was promptly accomplished; and not only that, but the judge provided Laffite personally with a “safe conduct pass,” which allowed him to come out of hiding and into the city. There he was escorted to Jackson’s Royal Street headquarters by his friend Major Latour, where a meeting was held.*
 
⁵⁹

Though Jackson had sworn to have nothing to do with the obnoxious Baratarians, when he finally met Laffite in person something made him change his mind. Perhaps he had been expecting a desperado, a man in a pirate’s suit: bandana, striped shirt, cutlass, and eye patch. Instead he met a man dressed as a gentleman and with the manners and mien of a gentleman. Although Jackson never recorded his impression in his own memoirs, surely this new apprehension of the leader of the “banditi” must have thrown the commanding general off a bit, and on the favorable side, for this time he listened to what Laffite had to say.

Nor did it hurt Laffite’s case that Jackson, who already had many of Laffite’s cannons (courtesy of Commodore Patterson’s raid), had found to his dismay that New Orleans could offer very little in the way of ammunition and gunpowder to fire them, or flints for small arms either, and that none of those essentials appeared at this point to be forthcoming from the government at Washington. Laffite, of course, still had all of these items in abundance, squirreled away at the Temple and other secret caches in the swamps, and again he offered them to Jackson, as well as the services of his trained cannoneers and savvy swamp guides. Considering this offer to be somewhere between “a match made in heaven” and “a pact with the devil,” Jackson concluded pragmatically that Laffite and his men could prove useful to the cause; or, as Professor Wilburt Brown aptly puts it, “Angels appear in curious shapes, at times; perhaps this was an answer to a prayer.” Thus the “hellish banditi” were enlisted into the U.S. forces and helped to shape the outcome of the most dramatic and decisive battle so far in American history.

The Baratarians were organized into two artillery detachments, one under Dominique You and the other under Renato Beluche, and they were sent to outposts east of the city. Others enlisted to man the idle corvette
Louisiana
and supplement the crew of the
Carolina,
while still others were formed into companies of “marine artillery.” Laffite himself was given an unofficial post as aide-de-camp to Jackson, who instructed him to supervise the defenses leading into the city from Barataria Bay. To that end Jackson wrote a note to give to the major commanding in that sector: “Jean Laffite has offered me his services to go down and give every information in his power. You will therefore please to afford him the necessary protection from Insult and Injury and when you have derived the information you wish, furnish him with a passport for his return, dismissing him as soon as possible as I shall want him here.”

C
ochrane’s confidence at making short work of New Orleans had gotten a significant boost when the Spanish fishermen informed him that Jackson’s force included no more than 5,000 men in the entire state, poorly armed militia at that, and that those in New Orleans were scattered at various places around the city. That confidence was shaken, however, upon interviewing one of Major Villeré’s captured pickets, a Mr. Ducros, son of a wealthy sugar planter, who told him and General Keane that Jackson’s army was nearly 20,000 strong—12,000 to 15,000 armed men in the city and 4,000 more at English Turn. He was further disturbed the next day when two American emissaries, one of them a doctor, rowed out to the British fleet under a flag of truce to try and secure paroles for Lieutentant Jones and his captured sailors. Cochrane instead imprisoned the two aboard ship so they could not disclose his strength and posted people to listen to their conversation behind thin cabin walls. They, too, were overheard to remark on an American army considerably stronger than the one the Spanish fishermen had indicated. This information—or rather
mi
s
information, if not
di
s
information—came to figure prominently in the actions of the British commanders, and not favorably so. For his part, Cochrane declared publicly that he would be having his Christmas dinner in New Orleans, to which Jackson, when he got wind of it, replied: “That may be so, but I shall be seated at the head of the table.”

B
y the morning of December 23 the British invasion was well under way. The redcoats under Colonel Thornton had come slip-and-stumble through the muck of the marshes and the mire of the cypress swamp onto the fields of the Villeré plantation. Complete surprise had been achieved beyond their wildest dreams. The surprise was so great that at about ten-thirty a.m. Major Villeré, who was sitting on the veranda of his father’s plantation house with his brother, Celestine, “who was cleaning a fowling piece,” suddenly noticed flashes of red in the orange grove. Upon further inspection these proved to be British soldiers. Villeré immediately dashed for the back door, only to be greeted by a squad of redcoats led by Colonel Thornton himself, a drawn sword in his hand, and “with infinate mortification, the young creole surrendered.”

The Villeré brothers were confined to a room with several guards, but, as Judge Walker tells us, “there were no braver men than the Villerés; their heritage was one of dauntless courage and chivalry.” Thus, when it seemed the guards were preoccupied, Major Villeré bolted through an open window, leaped a high picket fence “in the presence of some fifty British soldiers, some of whom discharged their arms at him,” and ran across the stubble fields into the cypress swamp. The British immediately gave chase, with Thornton’s stern admonition “catch him or kill him” ringing in their ears.

We have the following version of what happened next from historian Walker:

“He could distinctly hear the voices of his pursuers rallying one another and pointing out the course he had taken. His re-capture now seemed inevitable, when it occurred to him to climb a large live-oak and conceal himself in its evergreen branches. As he was about to execute this design, his attention was attracted by a low whine or cry at his feet. He looked down and beheld his favorite setter crouched piteously on the ground. What could Villeré do with the poor animal? Her presence near the tree would inevitably betray him . . . the imminent peril in which Jackson and his soldiers would be placed by the surprise of the city—these and other considerations [led him to conclude that] a sacrifice had to be made. The young creole seized a large stick and soon dispatched her. Concealing the dead body, he ascended the tree, where he remained until the British had returned to their camp.”

That account sounds fanciful but may not be. Writing in 1856, Walker had known Villeré as an old man whose eyes still brimmed with tears whenever he told that part of the story. In any event, as soon as the coast was clear, Villeré made for the river, where he ran into a neighbor, Colonel Denis De la Ronde, who had also seen the redcoats. A day earlier, De la Ronde had reported to Jackson’s headquarters that he’d seen “strange sails” out on Lake Borgne, and Jackson had already sent out his two engineer officers, Majors Tatum and Latour, to investigate. Villeré and De la Ronde found a boat and rowed across the Mississippi to spread the word that the British were coming.

B
y ten-thirty at least 1,600 redcoats were on the fields of Villeré’s plantation, with more arriving all the time. General Keane appeared on the scene and formed the men up, wheeled them right, and marched them past Villeré’s house to a point about a mile nearer New Orleans. They halted near the boundary between Villeré’s and De la Ronde’s plantations, and Keane established his headquarters in Villeré’s home. By this time it was noon. The soldiers were spread in a line from the river to the swamp, many talking about the wealth of spoils and “beauty” that lay in the city before them. They were allowed to stack arms and build fires to cook their rations. The day having turned warm, some bathed in the canal, and all got their first look at the mighty Mississippi. They had also taken time to raise the Union Jack in a tree while a band played “God Save the King.”

Not everyone was so sanguine. Captain William Surtees, of the 85th Regiment, noted that “considerable discussion now began to take place amongst the knowing ones, as to the merits and demerits of our situation, in point of security. One officer of ours did not hesitate to assert that we were in a most unprotected and dangerous position.” Captain John Cooke, of the 43rd, recorded, “The soldiers were lounging about. . . . Those already landed having no retreat, it might have been conjectured that, like one of Caesar’s legions, they would have felled trees or made some stronghold in case of exigencies. But no such thing was done.” Lieutenant Gleig was even more blunt and pessimistic: “To put the country to the expense of sending thousands of men across the Atlantic for so mad a venture was little short of criminal.”

Back in New Orleans, neither Jackson nor anyone else was aware that a British army was gathering just below the city. For this he has been strongly criticized by numerous historians, including the notable Henry Adams, who complained that “the record of American generalship [in the War of 1812] offered many examples of misfortune, but none so complete as this,” by which he meant incompetence. No other American general, Adams went on, however inept—and, as we have seen, there were a great many of these—“had allowed a large British army, heralded long in advance, to arrive within seven miles unseen and unsuspected, and without so much as an earthwork, a man, or a gun between them and their object.” This censure is somewhat unfair, since Jackson had ordered the Bienvenue and all the other bayous blockaded and guarded against just the sort of thing that was happening right now.*
 
⁶⁰
On the other hand, ultimate responsibility for seeing that those orders were carried out belonged to Jackson alone. What he should have done, in retrospect, was require that General Villeré, the major’s father, personally inspect all the bayous and
put in writing
when and how each of them had been blockaded and guarded.

Such “examples of misfortune,” of course, were not limited to the American army. When the first brigade of British infantrymen was fully on the field, and without apparent opposition, Colonel Thornton, a most daring officer, proposed to Keane that they march immediately for New Orleans without waiting for the rest of the army. They could be in the city within a couple of hours. Keane turned him down. Why he did so remains something of a mystery. It could have been that Keane had put credence in the information obtained from the captured picket that Jackson had 12,000 to 15,000 men in New Orleans, as opposed to the Spanish fishermen’s rosy picture. At least he couldn’t be sure, and perhaps, like General James Longstreet two generations later at the Battle of Gettysburg, he didn’t want “to fight a battle with only one boot on.”