Patriotic Fire (18 page)

A
shell
was a hollow ball filled with gunpowder that exploded on a timed fuse and threw deadly shrapnel in all directions. For closer-in work there was
canister,
a canlike container filed with iron musket balls that spread out in a large fan like a shotgun and could kill a dozen or more of the enemy with a single blast. Variations on canister fire were
grapeshot,
with balls the size of grapes and looking like a cluster of them.
Chain shot,
as the name implies, consisted of simply ramming a big iron chain down the barrel and flinging it at an approaching enemy line or column, mowing down or decapitating whoever was unlucky enough to be in the width of the chain. Also available, in a pinch, was what Jackson’s men called
landinage,
plain old scrap iron—nails, metal washers, screws, or what have you—put into a bag and sent flying toward an advancing enemy. Meuse points out that this last “had much the same effect as canister, though it was not quite as gentlemanly in its concept.”

P
akenham now understood that it wasn’t going to be easy to eject the Americans from their line, so he decided to blow them out of it. After a council of war with Cochrane, Gibbs, and Keane, it was agreed that thirty big cannons from the fleet would be brought up to silence the five pieces of American artillery that Pakenham had counted during his reconnaissance as well as the
Louisiana.

Since bringing up the fleet guns was going to take several days, Pakenham sought in the meanwhile to annoy the Americans with a series of night raids and reconnaissance operations through the cypress swamp, but Captain Jugat’s Choctaws, of whom it was said that “they could maneuver on logs like alligators,” were lying in wait and made short work of those people. The practice was quickly discontinued.

Then, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, Pakenham sent by flag of truce a protest requesting that Jackson stop the nightly “assassinations” of British sentries by the dirty-shirts. Jackson coolly replied that he was “repelling an invasion of his country” and was not at all concerned with gentlemanly warfare.

Pakenham’s delay had another effect that he had not counted on. Jackson used the time to dramatically strengthen his line. Working night and day like a disturbed colony of ants, the American soldiers and slaves dragged up cannon from other fortifications, for it was now assumed it would not be needed elsewhere, but here instead. They also continued to work on building up Jackson’s rampart, which at that point was only about waist high in most places and predominantly mud. It would need to dry out in order to make it more formidable.

As a “just in case,” Jackson began fortifying two other strong lines right behind his own—the first one about two miles back, called Line Dupre, and a second one a mile behind that called Line Montreuil, both named for the plantations they rested upon. This left no doubt that Jackson intended to fight it out to the finish.

During these days, “there was no rest for General Jackson,” according to one of his early biographers, “and what is more remarkable, he seemed to need none.” Still sick and still feeding himself from a few cups of cooked rice, which he ate in the saddle when he was not at his telescope studying the enemy, Jackson was usually out riding his lines exhorting his men to their tasks. After sundown he would pen encouraging messages to his far-flung outposts, such as, “Our troops have covered themselves with glory; it is a noble example and worthy to be followed by all.”

In the midst of all this, the riverfront scene was graced with an unusual spectacle. Around the big bend from the north, belching smoke and a shower of sparks, came the newfangled steamboat
Enterprise,
which tied up at the levee. It aroused a great deal of excitement in the city, which had seen only one of the craft before, in 1812, when a boat built by the Roosevelt family arrived with the promise of great things to come.

Indeed, the steamboat would become the future of New Orleans in later years, able to ascend the river against the current as well as descend it, but with the outbreak of war its production was severely reduced. The steamboat’s inventor, Robert Fulton, had gone into partnership with a Hudson River Valley neighbor of the Roosevelts, the wealthy Robert Livingston, who was the brother of Andrew Jackson’s aide Edward Livingston. Fulton and Robert Livingston had managed to secure from Congress a concession for operating steamboats on the Mississippi that amounted to an absolute monopoly, and it was to break this monopoly that the
Enterprise
had brazenly arrived, captained by a young officer named Henry Miller Shreve.

When Edward Livingston heard the news, he acted to have the
Enterprise
seized for illegal operation, but Jackson stopped him. The general sent for Shreve and told him that inasmuch as New Orleans was under martial law, Shreve should assume that he and his crew and steamboat fell under that category, and so should “hold him self in readiness” for any instructions. Shreve agreed, but was soon besieged with requests from citizens that he put women and children aboard the boat and steam them north out of the danger zone. This he did, but only after a dangerous contretemps with Jackson, who could have had him shot for disobeying orders. In the end Jackson came to depend heavily on Shreve.

Jackson sent Shreve upriver to look for the missing munitions boats, and dangerously downriver, past the British positions, to deliver reinforcing guns, powder, and personnel to Fort St. Philip. This Jackson deemed necessary after he received word that Cochrane had launched an expeditionary force of warships up the Mississippi, presumably to cooperate with whatever Pakenham’s next move would be. They had already captured the Balize, a small fort at the river’s mouth, and after nearly a week of excruciating twisting, turning, and beating upriver they were approaching Fort St. Philip. When Jackson asked the captain if he could get the munitions and supplies down to the fort, Shreve told him he could with twenty-four hours to do it. He used the time to situate cotton bales all over the port side of the
Enterprise,
which would be exposed to gunfire from the British. Fortunately, a fog rolled in the night of Shreve’s run and he was not noticed. Coming back, the British were so surprised by his appearance that by the time they got to their guns he was out of range. It was the first use of a steamboat in war operations.

When the
Enterprise
was finally safe at her dock in New Orleans, Captain Shreve volunteered to Jackson as an artilleryman and was assigned to Captain Humphrey’s Battery No. 1. Shreve’s good and valuable work during the battle was partly responsible for his getting the Fulton-Livingston steamboat monopoly broken, and in later years he became so successful a river man that the city of Shreveport was named after him.

At the same time, after conferring with Commodore Patterson, Jackson decided to position a sizable battery on the opposite (right bank) side of the river to enfilade the British flank, should they decide to make further attacks. This they set up in an old brick kiln, with two long twenty-four-pounders, which most likely had been blown ashore when the
Carolina
exploded. Over the next week he added five more guns to that side of the river. In addition, he ordered General David Morgan, who commanded the 500-man Louisiana state militia, to cross over from his encampment at English Turn to the right bank of the river and begin building fortifications in case the British tried a landing there (which was precisely what would come to Pakenham’s mind). To help accomplish this, Jackson sent over his engineer Latour and Jean Laffite, who knew the territory.

Meantime, in New England things had progressed for the worse. Two weeks earlier a convention had opened in Hartford, Connecticut, whose purpose was described by the one-word headline in the Hartford
Courant:
“
SECESSION
!”

Hit hardest, first with Jefferson’s embargo and now by the British blockade, the New Englanders were determined to end what they derisively called “Mr. Madison’s War,” even at the risk of splitting the Union. Sympathy with England was openly expressed, with such luminaries as George Cabot of Boston branding the war “unjust” and “morally wrong.” It was reported that some New Englanders had even tried to free British prisoners-of-war from an American prison ship. Newspapers, especially in Boston, were rabidly antiwar and pro-secession.

When news of all this reached Jackson, he proposed a handy solution: “I would hang them all,” he said.

I
t took until New Year’s Eve to haul up the big British naval guns. It had been a stupendous task, dragging these iron monsters through the greasy swamps and bogs and then across the muddy cane fields. The night was foggy and the Americans could not see what the British were up to, but they could hear all sorts of banging and hammering and other loud noises, racketing out of the gloom a few hundred yards in front. The British artillerymen and sailors, 500 of them, worked through the night and day, as they had ever since the order was given to bring up the guns.

They had no heavy-lifting tripods, such as are used in the field to hoist artillery (aboard ship, the heavy lifting was done by the yardarms), and so all movement of these six-thousand-pound guns was accomplished by hand. Then there was the problem of how to protect the batteries once the guns were in place. Since digging only a few inches produced water, excavation was not the answer. Someone came up with a solution of using some of the sugar barrels or hogsheads that had been piling up on the plantations ever since the embargo and the blockade.*
 
⁶³

These were laboriously hauled or rolled on their sides to the batteries and stacked in such a way as to afford some protection to the gun crews—at least that’s what was hoped. Finally all the banging and racketing ceased. The British army then moved forward as quietly as possible to a position about five hundred yards from the American line and just behind the artillery batteries. By Pakenham’s order, the artillery bombardment that was to crush the Americans was to begin at first light, but first light brought an impenetrable fog of the kind seen only in those reaches of coastal Louisiana. As they waited for it to lift, the British were startled to hear the tunes of several musical bands wafting out of the fog. They were playing gay martial music: “La Marseillaise,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Chant du Départ.” The British waited, thus serenaded for several hours, until ten a.m., when the mist began to clear and the artillery gunners started to light their firing matches.

Twelve

W
hen a midmorning breeze suddenly blew the fog off the cane fields an astounding spectacle unveiled itself to the British army. One officer compared the lifting of the fog to “a change of scene at a theater.” In fact, what they were now beholding, strangely enough, was a great American military parade.

It was New Year’s Day 1815, and despite indications that the redcoats had been up to something with all that banging and hammering, Jackson had decided that some kind of celebration was in order and decreed that a grand military review be held in the open cane fields just behind the American lines. Citizens of New Orleans, ladies and children mostly, came down in their carriages to watch.

Soldiers brushed the mud and dirt off their uniforms and wiped their shoes and hats to give the best possible impression. Marching bands began by entertaining the crowd with all kinds of tunes*
 
⁶⁴
as the approximately 4,000-man American army formed up in regiments and companies to parade past its commander, who was putting the last touches on his finest dress uniform at his headquarters in the Macarty plantation house.

Then all hell broke loose.

The British artillery was grouped in six batteries, including one for rockets, and at ten a.m. they began blasting away as one, with “unexampled celerity.” Singled out for particular attention was the Macarty house itself, which was wrecked by more than one hundred cannonballs during the first ten minutes. Miraculously, neither Jackson nor any of his staff was injured. Covered with plaster dust, they quickly rushed out to form up the army for battle.

It must have been a wild scene. Lieutenant Gleig describes how “mounted officers were riding backwards and forwards through the ranks, bands were playing and colors floated in the air. In a word, all seemed jollity and gala.” Then the British batteries opened up. “The ranks were broken, the different corps dispersing, fled in all directions while the utmost terror and disorder appeared to prevail. Nothing but confused crowds could be observed.
Oh,
” he lamented, “
that we had charged at that instant!
”

His lament was all too true, because it did not take the Americans long to collect themselves and get back behind their fortifications, which were in fact the safest place on the field. During the first ten minutes or so of confusion, if the British had swiftly attacked they might well have succeeded, having caught the Americans so off their guard. Those were not Pakenham’s orders, however, because he had not anticipated fog, nor its sudden lifting to reveal the American army out of its lines and on parade, and it seems to have caught him off his guard as well. His plan was to knock out the American artillery batteries with counterbattery fire of his own and then send his splendid veterans over the ditch to deal with these American upstarts. If the British artillerists had been supplied with shell (antipersonnel) as opposed to shot (antifortification) ammunition, they might well have caused a great deal of loss of life, but that was not the case.

I
n the American lines Jackson went with his staff from battery to battery, despite the hail of iron. First he came to Captain Enoch Humphrey’s battery, where the old artilleryman stood, “dressed in his usual plain attire, smoking that eternal cigar, coolly leveling his guns and directing his men.”

“Ah,” Jackson exclaimed, according to historian Walker, “all is right. Humphrey is at his post and will return their compliments presently.”

Just then Robert Butler, Jackson’s adjutant, rushed up to the battery, covered from head to toe with white plaster dust from the Macarty house.

“Why, Colonel Butler,” Jackson roared. “Is that you? I thought you were killed.”

“No, General; only knocked over,” Butler replied.

Meanwhile, Captain Humphrey was sighting in on the British batteries, “structures of a narrow front and slight elevation, lying low and dim upon the field.” Adjusting a twelve-pounder with exactness, he quietly gave the word, “Let her off.”

For the next hour and a half an artillery duel “so loud and rapid shook the delta as had never before been heard in the western world.” So wrote historian James Parton, and he was probably correct, assuming that he was referring to the western part of the United States. “Imagine,” he went on, “fifty pieces of cannon,*
 
⁶⁵
of large caliber, each discharged from once to thrice a minute, often a simultaneous discharge of half a dozen pieces, an average of two discharges every second; while plain and river were so densely covered with smoke that the gunners aimed their guns from recollection chiefly and knew scarcely any thing of the effect of the fire.”

According to the German merchant Vincent Nolte, the main British battery, which was situated just to the right of a road that ran through the center of sugarcane fields, “directed its fire against the battery of the pirates Dominique You and Beluche.” Once, as Dominique was examining the enemy through a glass, “a cannon shot wounded his arm; he caused it to be bound up, saying, ‘I will pay them for that!’ and resumed his glass. He then directed a twenty-four-pounder, gave the order to fire, and the ball knocked an English gun carriage to pieces and killed six or seven men.”

Not long afterward a British shot hit one of Dominique’s guns and knocked it off its carriage. While it was being repaired, someone asked him about his wound. “Only some scratch, by gar,” he growled, as he ordered his other cannon loaded with chain shot that “crippled the largest British gun and killed or wounded six men.” Surtees, the British quartermaster, remembered that the Baratarians had delivered the most deadly fire of all. Referring to the big thirty-two-pound gun of Beluche, he said, “It always struck the battery at first bound. Any of the other guns seemed like child’s play to the unceasing and destructive fire from this heavy piece of ordnance. I could distinctly see that they were sailors that worked it—one of whom, a large mulatto with a red shirt, always sponged her out after firing.”

P
articularly disturbing for Surtees was the actual appearance of the object of his destruction. “I could distinctly perceive the ball from this gun every time it was fired,” he wrote, “it appearing like a small black spot in the midst of the column of white smoke, which gradually grew larger in appearance as it approached us. Seeing which way the ball was coming, I told the men when to lie down; and on one occasion was the shave so close, that it actually carried away one of the men’s pack as he lay on the ground.”

Captain Benson Hill, near the British center, came upon a number of West Indians cringing in a transverse drainage ditch within gunshot range. He told them to go back to their lines.

“No sir, Boss,” one of them replied. “No more Jamaica. No more white man’s orders. We die here.”

The terror of war, of course, was not limited to the British soldiers. Vincent Nolte watched as one of the American militiamen bent over to light a cigar at the same time a ball passed over his head and decapitated the man standing next to him.

The British artillery had struck several of Jackson’s guns, but they were repaired while the others laid down a devastating fire that, within less than an hour, dismounted five British guns and so damaged eight others that they could not be aimed properly. The sugar hogsheads proved a disaster as embrasures. They blew totally apart when hit by a cannon shot and sent sugar flying everywhere, clogging guns and extinguishing firing matches.

Once more a party of British, again led by the intrepid Colonel Robert Rennie, tried to flank Jackson’s left by going through the cypress swamp, but they were met and repulsed by Jugat’s Choctaws and Coffee’s Tennesseans. Latour later wrote that “Wellington’s heroes discovered that they were ill-qualified to contend with us in woods where they must fight knee-deep in water.”

By noon the British fire had noticeably slackened; two-thirds of their guns had been put out of action, and Pakenham ordered a withdrawal. This could not be accomplished, however, because Jackson’s guns were still firing, and so the redcoats had to lie miserably in their damp ditches until nightfall, while what was left of their artillery tried to dispute the Americans’ decided superiority. “We retired not only baffled and disappointed, but in some degree disheartened and discontented,” remembered Lieutenant Gleig. “We knew that with small arms the Americans were foemen worthy of our steel, but we did not expect them—mostly militia as they were—to get the best of an artillery combat, pure and simple.”

J
ust as the sugar barrels had proved unsuitable to the British for combat protection, so the cotton bales turned out to be worthless to the Americans. British gunfire knocked them all over the place and even set them afire, obscuring the battlefield. Jackson ordered them removed. It was found that much of the British fire had gone high and landed behind the line, while shot and shell that actually hit the rampart simply sank into its mud. The Americans had lost 11 men killed and 23 wounded. Jackson issued everybody two ounces of whisky and posted an order of congratulations.

British casualties were more than 100, with nearly half that number killed. Pakenham was in a quandary. He had now failed twice to dislodge the Americans from their line, and there was seemingly no way around it. The only other option was to withdraw back to Lake Borgne or to the fleet and try to find some other place to resume the attack, but this was unacceptable as too much had gone into the enterprise to abandon it now. Besides, the British army was a proud army, an arrogant army perhaps, especially in the wake of their conquests of Napoleon’s forces in Europe. They were considered by many—and considered themselves—the most polished killing machine on the face of the earth, and perhaps that was true. In any event, they intended to stay and find out.

It was reported that Admiral Cochrane attempted to shame Pakenham into assaulting the Americans by telling him that, if he and his army had no taste for it, his own sailors would attack and rout Jackson and that Pakenham’s soldiers could bring the sailors’ baggage up afterward. This story has been repeated by many historians, but, as General Brown points out, it probably has no basis in fact, not only because there is no mention of it in any British document or by a diarist but also because it would have been very out of character for Cochrane to say such an impertinent thing to a lieutenant general of the army who was also the brother-in-law of the legendary Duke of Wellington.

In any case, Pakenham made a fateful decision. He had just learned that a strong 2,000-man brigade of reinforcements under Major General John Lambert had arrived in the Mississippi Sound and had joined the fleet. It would take a few days to transfer them to his army, but after that had been done, Pakenham determined to go at the Americans all out. It would require about a week to prepare.

First, the British would need scaling ladders to climb up Jackson’s rampart, which by now was eight feet high and growing. They would also need fascines—tightly wrapped bundles of sticks (in this case, sugarcane stalks)—which they would throw into the ditch in front of the fortification so that the soldiers could use them to cross over.

Pakenham next conceived as part of the plan a landing on the west, or right, bank in order to silence the American artillery batteries there and to either bring over artillery of his own or use captured American guns to enfilade Jackson’s line—as Jackson had done to him—and drive him from his position. This force would be commanded by Colonel William Thornton and would consist of about 1,400 men. To accomplish this, Cochrane proposed what soon developed into a herculean enterprise: since approximately fifty large pulling boats (each boat holding twenty-eight soldiers, plus rowing crew) would have to be brought from the fleet to Lake Borgne and then up Bayou Bienvenue, why not lengthen and deepen the Villeré Canal and simply float them all the way across the fields to the river?

This was easier said than done. Like the Rodriguez Canal along Jackson’s line, the Villeré Canal was just above the water table, and as soon as the redcoats and sailors began digging it out they were consumed by muck. They worked in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, and it was said that the two Jamaican regiments “were almost worked to death on the project.” Pakenham was skeptical of the plan and wanted to use rollers to ferry the boats across the cane fields, but the navy was afraid that rollers would stove in their bottoms, and so work on the canal continued apace.

For the British, things were becoming desperate, especially in the matter of rations. To feed an army in the field of from 8,000 to 10,000 men requires a tremendous supply effort. This large British army had been on the Mississippi for nine days and had by now eaten up all the stored provisions on the several plantation lands they occupied, as well as having killed and eaten all the cattle, swine, goats, and poultry. Food from the fleet had to be rowed in daily across nearly eighty miles of often rough water, and, to make matters worse, the fleet ration stores themselves were running out. It had been planned that by now the British army would have taken New Orleans and be dining off the largesse of the considerable food cellars of that city. Americans who killed or captured British soldiers reported that in their knapsacks they were carrying cooked horseflesh—it had gotten that bad.

B
ritish accounts recall that the soldiers picked all the ripe oranges from the groves (December is picking time for citrus in the South) and boiled them in large cauldrons found on the plantations, into which much sugar—also found in profusion on these plantations—was poured, resulting in tart sugar-coated orange peels, a delectable kind of sweet-and-sour candy that at least helped ease the men through their various travails.

Likewise, there was an ammunition problem, since every cannonball and shell as well as powder and cartridges had to be transported with the by now worn-out sailors who rowed day and night to keep the supply going. Part of the reason the artillery attack had failed was lack of ammunition, and now every reinforcement soldier or sailor who left the fleet for the battleground was required to carry on his person at least one heavy cannonball or shell. In today’s military this would be called an “offensive load,” with the meaning leaning toward the vulgar.