Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom
Marigny’s main point was that manpower was still the critical factor, and that while all these fierce and battle-experienced Baratarians were presently in jail or on the run, it only made good sense to enlist their valuable services. Jackson was still having none of it. “The General was unrelenting,” Marigny wrote. “He told us these men were being pursued by the United States Civil Officers, that many were in prison . . . that he could do nothing about the matter.”
One factor in all of this might have been that Jackson appears to have taken a dislike to Marigny, who was young, handsome, somewhat of a sophisticated playboy about town, and generally acknowledged as the leader of French Creole society in New Orleans. He was also the son-in-law of the old Spanish comandante at Pensacola who, a few days after Jackson accepted his surrender, had produced a letter, which Marigny showed to Jackson. In it, the comandante showered Jackson with fulsome praise (“I kiss your feet . . .” and so on) and asked his son-in-law to open the doors of his elegant New Orleans home as headquarters for Jackson when he arrived there.
At first Jackson accepted the offer, but apparently he thought better of it afterward. When he got to New Orleans, he curtly declined Marigny’s offer of hospitality and instead established his headquarters on Royal Street. Perhaps Jackson was suspicious of the in-law connection between Marigny and the Spanish comandante and fingered Marigny as possibily disloyal—maybe even a spy. Who knows? History is silent on the matter, but the relationship between the American general and the patriotic and influential young New Orleans Creole remained chilly throughout the campaign.
Soon events began to overtake the citizens of New Orleans, for on December 12 the British invasion force arrived offshore. Fears that had drifted obscurely regarding His Imperial Majesty’s intentions suddenly began to clarify themselves with alarming rapidity.
Laffite, for his part, was still persona non grata in the city and, with an arrest warrant hanging over him, was more or less hiding out at the homes of plantation owners whom he knew and had had dealings with in the smuggling business. According to one story, among them was Elmwood in Tchoupitoulas, above New Orleans, where Laffite had no sooner arrived than “a servant announced the approach of the carriage of another guest.” The guest, it turned out, was none other than the beautiful wife of Governor Claiborne.
The horrified mistress of the manor sent away all of her servants “except a trusted one named Henrietta, whom she warned to address Monsieur Laffite as Monsieur Clement.” Laffite was much amused by this ruse and entered into it “with all his ease and natural grace.” Throughout the afternoon and evening Mrs. Claiborne was charmed and coquettish, never realizing that the man she was flirting with and her husband each had a price on the other’s head. When she returned to New Orleans, she “was extravagant in her praise of the most remarkable man she had ever met.”
Eight
It was certainly not as if an invasion was unexpected; warnings had been abundant, the most recent arriving on December 8 in an unsigned letter from Pensacola delivered by a friendly Choctaw Indian to Commodore Patterson, the New Orleans naval commander, when he returned to the city from his inspection tour with Jackson. The anonymous writer began, “Dear Sir . . . a very large force of the enemy is off this port, and it is generally understood New Orleans is the object of attack. I am not able to learn how, when or where the attack will be made, but I heard they have vessels of all descriptions, and a large body of troops.”
Not only was the source of this communication mysterious, it also seems odd that it was conveyed in such fashion, since Jackson had stationed a U.S. garrison at Pensacola, and surely if there had been a large British fleet offshore someone among them would have seen it and sent the information along in a less surreptitious fashion.
When Patterson showed Jackson the letter, the general was skeptical, wondering if it might not be a ruse to steer him in the wrong direction. Patterson, however, took more stock in it and ordered his squadron of five sloop-rigged gunboats, a dispatch boat, and a tender to redouble their already sharp lookout on the approaches to Lake Borgne, which he had always considered the most likely approach for an amphibious invasion of the city.
This tough and valiant little flotilla represented just about all of Patterson’s command. He also had the 85-foot, 230-ton sloop of war Carolina mounting fourteen guns and partially manned by sailors from New England. The much larger ship Louisiana, a corvette, mounting sixteen guns, was also under his command, but she remained tied up at the city wharves because Patterson could find no sailors to man her—for the unforgivable reason that the navy offered no bounty for signing on and that pay on merchant vessels was much higher. The gunboats, on the other hand, were fully manned, but no match for any of the large ships of the British navy. The sailors derisively called them “Jeffs,” after Thomas Jefferson, who had ordered scores of them built on the theory that they could substitute for a proper world-class navy. They were strictly coastal craft, sloop-rigged, shallow-draft, black-hulled, about 45 feet long and 80 tons, armed with four or five small cannon each, and sailed by a crew of twenty.* 58 The gulf flotilla was commanded by a naval lieutenant with the interesting name of Thomas Ap Catesby Jones, whose assignment was to be Jackson’s eyes for the expected invasion.
Reconnoitering off the coast of Mississippi on December 10, two of Jones’s gunboats came upon what must have been a breathtaking sight. There in the deep blue waters to the east they beheld in the distance a line of tall white sails, stretching as far as the eye could see. These could only be the British warships, an assumption further investigation soon confirmed. The gunboats shadowed them at a respectful distance for the two full days it took to get the enemy armada assembled and anchored off the north end of the Chandeleur Islands, near the mouth of Lake Borgne. For the larger ships this was as far as they could go, because of the shallowness of the lake, but there were also a number of smaller sloops of war and other armed vessels attached to the fleet, which took station at Ship and Cat islands, closer to the lake, so about all Jones could do was watch and report their movements to Patterson in New Orleans.
Aboard the huge flagship Tonnant Admiral Cochrane was growing impatient to start the invasion. He had sighted the shadowing gunboats and realized the Americans had become aware of his presence, but they would not know precisely where and when his army would strike. In order to keep them in the dark as long as possible, Cochrane knew he would have to dispose of the pesky gunboats that were keeping an eye on him and gave the order, “Clear the lakes,” setting into motion a fierce little battle that opened the campaign.
Jones’s orders from Patterson had been to defend New Orleans from the Rigolets, the narrow channel from Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchartrain, only a few miles from the city. A small fortification, Fort Petites Coquilles, was still under construction there, but it presently contained a number of artillery pieces. Patterson’s idea was that between the fort and the gunboats enough U.S. firepower should be available to drive off a British attempt to enter Lake Pontchartrain.
Patterson never got to find out whether or not that was so. As soon as Cochrane arrived he sicced his small, heavily armed sloops and corvettes on Jones’s gunboat flotilla, and no sooner had these medium-draft war craft entered the lake than they promptly ran aground. Jones had by now moved farther up the lake, anchoring off what was little more than a glorified marsh appropriately called Malheureux Island. From there he watched and awaited developments, which proceeded apace. On the afternoon of December 13, the Americans could see through their spyglasses a number of small barges being lowered into the water by the larger ships. At sunrise the next morning they noted that the barges were entering Lake Borgne and rowing toward them in a long line, half a mile wide. There were forty-five in all, occupied by no fewer than 1,500 British sailors and marines, armed with sabers, hatchets, pistols, and muskets. In addition, the bow of each barge mounted a carronade, a small cannon extremely lethal at close range.
Jones took cognizance of his orde
All morning the gunboat crews watched, resigned to their fate, while the line of barges rowed steadily toward them, stretched out closely abreast. At one point midmorning the American sailors became puzzled, and possibly a little relieved, when the line of barges stopped, oars were pulled in, and they dropped anchor. But soon the anchors were weighed and the rowing began again in earnest. It turned out the commander of the barge army had decided to stop and feed his men lunch before the battle began.
As has been aptly pointed out by the historian Wilburt S. Brown, the best move for Jones at that point would probably have been to burn or blow up the gunboats to keep them from falling into British hands, then make for shore in their dinghies—even swim for it, if need be—to fight another day. But Jones figured his orders called for him to stand and fight the enemy, and that if he did not, his name would go down in disgrace. So he ordered his crews to double-shot their guns and prepare to fight to the last extremity. Then he ran up the (anti-)boarding nets, which, as one witness recorded, “left the gunboats looking as if they were draped in giant spider webs.”
Just before eleven a.m. on December 14 the battle began. Jones fired first because some of his guns were longer-ranged than the carronades in the bows of the barges. This did damage, but not enough, since he was outnumbered by more than five to one. Still, the Americans cheered when two of the barges were blown to splinters and their occupants dumped or blown into the cold water. Fifteen barges soon detached themselves and began rowing directly toward Jones’s gunboat. Moments later the British opened fire, and Jones was among the first struck, with a musket ball in his shoulder. As he was being carried below he turned over command to his second officer, shouting, “Keep up the fight! Keep up the fight!” just as a blast of British grapeshot struck his second down.
The lead barge was occupied by the expedition commander, Captain Nicholas Lockyer—the same Lockyer who several months back had approached Jean Laffite at Grand Terre on behalf of the British. His boat plowed into Jones’s, and the British sailors and marines quickly chopped through the boarding nets. A hand-to-hand slaughter commenced. Superior numbers soon told on the Americans, and the boarding crews quickly turned Jones’s boat’s cannons on the other gunboats, which themselves were being overwhelmed. It took another bloody hour and a half, but in the end the predictable came to pass: 10 Americans were killed, 35 wounded, and most others captured. The British came away with 17 killed and 77 wounded, including Lockyer, plus five American gunboats with all their armaments and several boatloads of prisoners. Andrew Jackson had not only lost his “eyes” on Lake Borgne, he had lost its defense as well, a circumstance that shortly would bring on near disaster.
In the days leading up to the Battle of Lake Borgne Jackson had shown calm immediacy and determined leadership, but never an outright sense of urgency. He had even wanted Rachel to join him in New Orleans and wrote her saying so on the morning of December 15, before going out with staff to reconnoiter the Plain of Gentilly, which he considered a possible invasion route. It was there that a courier found him with word of the defeat and capture of the gunboats the previous day, and this bad news seems to have energized him as never before.
Considering that he was yet so ill from dysentery he could barely stand up, it is remarkable that Jackson became such a whirlwind of activity in the days that followed. His companions noticed that he was becoming thin as a scarecrow, his menu consisting only of a bowl of grits and some toast in the morning and a little rice for dinner and supper. Unless pressed with something else, he would often lie on a couch in his headquarters to save energy, perhaps taking a sip or two of brandy. But with the news of the gunboat calamity and the British invasion now plainly imminent, Jackson sprang into action. He published another proclamation (written by Livingston) in which he told the diverse population to put aside any remaining animosities, and for anyone who didn’t harsh measures were in store. He issued a flurry of orders calling up the militia and sending them to man the various forts protecting the city. He sent a battalion of the free men of color and some militia to the Chef Menteur Road with orders to block and defend it. Orders went out to General Coffee at Baton Rouge and General Carroll, by then at Natchez, to hurry their forces to New Orleans—which they did, arriving on December 20—and he dispatched scouts far upriver to see if they could locate the missing 2,300 Kentuckians.
He also sent a dispatch telling Rachel to postpone her trip.
Earlier Jackson had asked the Louisiana legislature to suspend the writ of habeas corpus so that Patterson could impress a number of the unemployed sailors hanging around the waterfront to man the idle Louisiana, but this was refused. Now, after learning that the gunboats had been captured and that the British were close by, the legislature went into an absolute panic that one can only envision—what with all their customary gesturing and shouting in various languages. That was enough for Jackson, and he promptly took the ultimate step, on December 16, 1814, of putting the state under martial law. This established a curfew, closed the city coming and going, and permitted impressment of sailors, as well as any other able-bodied males, who were sent into the militia.
The martial law proclamation established Jackson as being in supreme command over everything, and—though he later himself conceded that it was probably unconstitutional—his authority became absolute, including the right to execute civilians as spies. As one writer observed, “The man had met the hour,” and it was a good thing, too, because there wasn’t a moment to lose; it was understood that the invasion could start at any time, in any place.
As soon as Lake Borgne had been cleared, Cochrane began launching the British army toward an assembly point at the mouth of the Pearl River, near what is today Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. Probably at Pensacola, Cochrane took on “certain Spaniards,” former officials who once lived in New Orleans when it was a Spanish colony, and who were more than willing to give the British the lay of the land. Also at some point Cochrane’s people made contact with a group of Spanish fishermen who worked Lake Borgne, and doubtless plied them with money for information on possible invasion routes. The assembly-point destination for the army was Ile aux Poix, or Pea Island, a boggy piece of marsh ground so desolate and remote it was hoped the landing would go undiscovered. It did, but it put an awful strain on the men.
When the victorious barge force returned to the fleet anchorage after defeating the American gunboats, the navy began loading the army into them for the forty-mile row across the lake. The soldiers were crammed in so tightly (about thirty men, with all their equipment, on a twenty-foot boat, plus rowing crews) that they had no room even to move their legs or adjust position during the grueling ten-hour trip. As if that weren’t enough, the weather suddenly turned against them, as it often will in these climes. Contrary to popular opinion, New Orleans at times can be seemingly one of the coldest places on earth—if not by actual thermometer readings, then at least by what modern-day meteorologists adjust for, such as wind-chill factor. Being as it is between a giant swamp and a giant river, there is always much humidity in the air, making even a moderate cold chilling to the bone. When a winter wet front comes in from the west and collides with arctic air pushing down from the north, the weather in New Orleans can become disagreeably cold. If a rare series of these frontal events occurs, it can be brutal, especially to people exposed to the elements, and app
In the daytime there would be drenching rains that soaked the men; then at night the temperature would dip below freezing and their clothing would actually freeze to their skin. Here is Lieutenant Gleig’s recollection of Pea Island: “It is scarcely possible to imagine any place more wretched. It was a swamp containing a small space of ground at one end and almost wholly unadorned with trees of any description. The interior was the resort of wild ducks and other water-fowl; and the pools and creeks abounded in dormant alligators.”
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.”