Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom
The day was gloomy, yeasty, and gray, the ground was damp, and the air was chilly. It was Christmas Eve. The conditions the British found themselves in were appalling. Those digging holes to protect themselves from the fire of the Carolina found that after they’d dug two feet or so into the ground, water filled the holes up.
General Keane faced a dilemma, and he wasn’t at all happy about it. The ferocity of Jackson’s night attack had unnerved him. He knew the Americans had gone, but where? He had no powerful telescope like Jackson, nor a tall house to observe from, and because of a bend in the river he could not even see if Jackson had formed a line, which Keane fully expected the Americans to do. When he ordered scouts out for reconnaissance, they got only so far and then were sent flying by a large troop of Hinds’s Mississippi dragoons, who had been left by Jackson to watch for them. The night action had cost Keane nearly half a regiment, and the remainder of his army was still being rowed over on the dreadful trip from Pea Island. American warships were constantly shelling his men. By the time the army could assemble and take the field, it would be too late in the afternoon to mount an attack against the Americans. Worse, his troops seemed unsettled and grumbling, five thousand long miles from home on Christmas Eve.
About the only thing Keane seemed able to do at the moment was send for heavier artillery to try and drive the American ships from his flank. And yet he would have to wait for the guns to be rowed across the lake, like everything else, and then dragged and manhandled through the awful marshes and swamps before he could launch his attack. Still, he could not wait too long, for there was no ready supply of food in his present location, other than what his men had brought with them or what could be raided from the two or three local plantations, certainly not enough to feed 8,000. The original idea had been for the British army to be dining in New Orleans within a day or so, but clearly the scheme was not playing out as planned, or, as Lieutenant Gleig put it, “all things had turned out diametrically opposite to what had been anticipated.”
The only other thing Keane seemed to have found time to do was to complain of the ingratitude of the Louisiana Creoles who, he now realized, had just attacked him with the same ardor as had their American brethren. A few days earlier British spies or agents in New Orleans had hired slaves to nail up a new proclamation throughout the city and upon the fences of surrounding plantations; printed in French and Spanish by the official printing press aboard the fleet, it was signed by Keane and Admiral Cochrane: “Louisianians! [meaning Creoles or native French and Spanish] Remain quiet in your houses. Your slaves shall be preserved to you, and your property respected. We make war only against Americans.” But any notion that these people were going to defect and join him—or at least do nothing to hinder him—was now dashed to shards, another of Keane’s and Cochrane’s gross political miscalculations.
A number of slaves belonging to the plantations that the British were occupying did defect, however, though they probably had little choice. In any case, they were immediately set to work performing menial tasks such as hauling water and provisions and digging latrines. “These negroes,” recorded a British officer, “were all attired in a strange looking and rudely fashioned dress; it was composed of a coarse French blanket, or horse-cloth, with loose sleeves and a hood. Their shoes were made of bullock’s hide, undressed [raw] and with the hair on the outside.”
This same officer recorded that he was “accosted by a young negro, of great intelligence, [who] in excellent French implored me to order a collar of spikes with which his neck was encompassed to be taken off.” When the officer asked why he had been placed in such a diabolical device, the slave told him that as soon as he had heard the British were coming he tried to run away and join them, but his owner had caught him and this was his punishment. The collar, said the officer, “was contrived to prevent the wearer from using any other but an upright position,” so he had not been able to lie down for nearly a week.
“This ingenious symbol of the land of liberty I took immediate measures to have removed at our farrier’s forge, and no sooner was the poor devil released from it than he threw himself on the earth and placed one of my feet on his head, and said that he would very much like to serve me,” the officer wrote. “He said that he had been accustomed to the care of horses; could speak French, Spanish and a little English, would be faithful and honest, wishing no other reward but meat and drink.” He got the job.
Andrew Jackson, too, had to decide what to do next as he surveyed his situation from his observation post. The only way the British were going to get into New Orleans from where they presently sat was to march across the plantation fields. The part of the field on which they now were situated was about a mile wide, running from the river to the cypress swamp. But because of the bend in the river, the width of the plantations soon began to taper down funnel-like toward Jackson’s current position, so that an enemy formation in the attack soon would be compressed into just over half that front; thus, between the river and the swamp there would be little room for them to maneuver. Jackson, “an old Tennessee backwoodsman,” apparently had studied his military tactics books.
Right in front of Jackson’s position was the abandoned drainage ditch called the Rodriguez Canal. It was presently dry and grassy-bottomed, but Jackson saw the possibilities of a good defensive position. He was, however, inclined to launch another attack against the British—and had even ordered Carroll’s 2,600-man division down to participate—but his scouts told him the enemy had strongly reinforced throughout the night and more redcoats were pouring ashore, probably, by now, some 6,000 of them. Edward Livingston suggested that Jackson see Major Henri St. Geme, of the Louisiana dragoons, who a decade or so earlier—while Louisiana was still French—had ridden the fields around New Orleans with the famed French military tactician Jean Moreau, one of Napoleon’s marshals, during which they discussed how best to protect New Orleans. It was likely with a delicious sense of irony that the Frenchman St. Geme told Jackson that Moreau had pointed out this selfsame Rodriguez Canal as the best spot to defend against an attack from below the city on that side of the river.
That settled it for Jackson, but there remained herculean work to be done. The canal line had to be heavily fortified immediately if the Americans, with their smaller army and mostly untried soldiers, were to stand a full-scale infantry assault by the superior and professional forces of the British. They certainly couldn’t withstand it in the open fields.
Accordingly, men were rushed back to New Orleans and to surrounding plantations to gather up as many shovels, spades, hoes, axes, sledges, nails and hammers, horses, oxen, and wagons as could be found. Hundreds of slaves were brought in to help with the work, but a silly disagreement soon arose among some as to whether the Americans and Creoles should work alongside the slaves, since digging was considered “Negro work.”
Jackson quickly settled the question and, with one rank sleeping on their arms while another dug and filled, all participated under direct orders, working like dervishes under the general’s iron-fisted supervision.
At the same time, Jackson told Latour to get a detachment and break the levee both in front of the British position and behind it. Whosoever’s idea this was, it was a canny and wicked one. At that time of year the river ran low, but it was still presently a foot or so above the level of the land and would inundate the entire plain between with the same amount of water; whoever attacked would have to wade through it.
Jackson’s design was to widen the canal to at least ten feet, piling up the spoil dirt on the far side to create a fortification. Boards and planks from fences, barns, and houses were ripped out and pounded vertically to create a berm; thus the half-mile-long breastwork started to take shape beginning at the levee on the river and running to the cypress swamp. At a foot and a half the diggers struck water in the ditch but kept on digging until there was at least two feet of water in the canal. It was soon discovered that the thrown-up mud was sliding back into the canal, and, since
Vincent Nolte, a German merchant in New Orleans, was now in the line as a volunteer rifleman. He recalled years later that at the time cotton could be acquired in the city for seven to eight cents a pound. Jackson had learned that only a mile or so behind their position was a merchant ship tied up to the levee containing a large number of cotton bales, and he immediately dispatched men to go and get them. When the wagons began to return, Nolte immediately recognized from the revenue stamps that it was his own cotton, which he had contracted to ship to Havana just before the emergency.
The rub came because Nolte’s crop was the rare “long-staple” cotton, with nearly twice the value of the regular seedy variety that most planters produced, and his 245 bales now being manhandled into the muddy fortification were worth, in today’s dollars, nearly $100,000. This caused Nolte, ever the businessman, to become “vexed at the idea of their taking cotton of the best sort,” and he took his complaint directly to Livingston, Jackson’s military secretary. “Well, Mr. Nolte,” Livingston replied curtly, “if this is your cotton, you, at least, will not think it a hardship to defend it.”
At one point while walking the lines of the fortification with Livingston, Jean Laffite saw something that might have caused a shiver of fear to flow over him. At the far end of the line, where it entered the cypress swamp, the rampart abruptly ended. Laffite remarked to Livingston that in his opinion this was dangerous. Everywhere else, he said, the army could fight from behind a rampart, but here the British were afforded an opportunity to get behind the American position. Then there would be an open-field, broad-daylight fight of just the sort Jackson was seeking to avoid.* 62
Whether they both went to Jackson with this notion or whether it was Livingston alone who carried back Laffite’s assessment is a matter of dispute, but in any case Jackson immediately agreed with it and ordered that the rampart be extended and manned so far back into the swamp that no one could get around it. This was done in spite of the immense discomfort of the Tennesseans of Coffee and Carroll, who, to defend the position, often had to stand knee-deep and even waist-deep in winter swamp water.
Laffite’s advice might have been the best suggestion Jackson received during the entire battle, because breaching the American position at just this spot was exactly what the British had had in mind.
All Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the men labored to build and strengthen Jackson’s soon-to-be-famous parapet. It was an incredible effort, and when it was at last finished two weeks later it would consist of a fortification more than half a mile long, fronted by planks, behind which would lay a berm seven or eight feet high and about the same width thick, bristling with eight batteries of artillery placed at intervals, firing from defilade (i.e., from above), and in between them would be placed all of the infantry that could be crammed into the line. Not only that, but in front of it, in the canal, they had dug out a ten-foot-wide moat with two feet of water in it. If the British planned to drive them from this position, they had best be bringing their lunch, since they would first have to slog through nearly two miles of knee-deep December-icy water, fetch themselves across a ten-foot moat, then scale an eight-foot embankment, all in the face of murderous cannon and rifle fire. Jackson also ordered a tall flagstaff to be planted near the center of the line and the biggest star-spangled banner they could find hoisted upon it, so that—for better or worse, if nothing else—those Englishmen would see the American flag flying during most of their slog toward them. But that was all in the future; for now the fortification was only beginning to take shape, and Jackson pushed the men relentlessly.
The battlefield remained relatively quiet for the rest of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Keane was still waiting for the artillery from the fleet with which to silence the Carolina (or, in Captain John Henry Cooke’s words, “to blow her out of the water”) as well as the last remnants of his army, which did not get into the field until Christmas morning. When it finally did arrive, it came with a surprise for Keane in the form of General Sir Edward Pakenham, who immediately relieved him of his duties and took charge. This change of command had a very good effect on the troops, who had not only been shaken by the American night attack but also were becoming demoralized by the devastating blasts from the Carolina and Keane’s failure to march them out of its range of fire and into New Orleans for their booty and beauty.
Sir Edward was an officer of some distinction; he had never held the command of a major army but had led regiments and a division. As a second son without hope of inheriting the family estate, he had joined the army at the age of sixteen and quickly rose through the ranks of the officer corps. In 1803, in a battle against Napoleon’s forces on the island of Saint Lucia, he was badly wounded in the neck, which caused his head to cock to one side, until, two years later, again fighting Napoleon’s army on the nearby island of Martinique, he received another bullet to the neck that, ironically, corrected the droop. Afterward he fought in the Peninsular campaign, in which he distinguished himself at the Battle of Salamanca.
As mentioned, his sister was married to the Duke of Wellington and, after Salamanca, he was put on Wellington’s staff, where the Iron Duke assessed him thusly: “Pakenham may not be the brightest genius, but my partiality for him does not lead me astray when I tell you he is one of the best we have.”
It has been pointed out that Pakenham’s arrival was delayed by as much as a week or more by the captain of his transport ship, who insisted on shortening sail every night—presumably to guard against some possible mid-ocean collision—and that if Pakenham had somehow joined the fleet before the landing, his forceful personality (as well as his close connection to the formidable Wellington) might have swayed the imperious Cochrane from attempting such a daring and dangerous scheme as was in place now. That may well have been so, but it did not happen, so Pakenham was left to take charge of the situation he inherited.
There is no dispute that when the thirty-six-year-old Pakenham arrived at the Villeré plantation on Christmas morning he was displeased; he was “furious,” in fact, and, as Cooke tells us, “at once gave vent to his feelings, declaring that troops were never found in so strange a position.” From a practical point of view, Cochrane’s plan was outlandish. Here Pakenham was with his army bottled up between a river and a swamp, and his train of supply (and route of escape, if necessary) possible only by small boats that had to row fourteen miles up a bayou and then sixty miles across a huge lake during all the vicissitudes of wintertime. Nevertheless, he came to agree with Keane that the Carolina must be dealt with before marching against the Americans, lest the troops be exposed to artillery bombardment in the open fields all the way to Jackson’s line. This might have been a proper military attitude to take except for one thing: every minute the British delayed in attacking the Americans gave Jackson exactly those same minutes to strengthen his line, and Jackson used them well.
Lieutenant Gleig records that the men cheered when it was announced that Pakenham would be taking over, but also that Christmas Day was definitely not up to standards. He and some fellow officers had decided to pool their provisions and give a little feast, but “so melancholy a Christmas dinner I do not recollect at any time to have been present.” They had few plates and utensils, and had to try to eat under the constant bombardment from the Carolina. “Whilst we were sitting at a table a loud shriek was heard after one of these explosions, and on running out we found that a shot had taken effect in the body of an unfortunate soldier. Though fairly cut in two at the lower part of the belly, the poor wretch lived for nearly an hour, gasping for breath and giving signs even of pain.”
In war, one must always assume the other side has a plan as well, and such was the case with the British on the day after Christmas 18
The second British salvo did the trick. It was a glowing hot shot shoveled into a cannon barrel from the field furnace that burst into Carolina’s innards at an inaccessible place beneath her steering cables, and the fire it started quickly became inextinguishable. With one man killed and six wounded, Carolina’s crew managed to get two of her cannon ashore before she blew up in a fantastic roar of smoke and flame from the powder magazines. James Parton, one of Jackson’s early biographers, tells us, “The explosion was terrific. It shook the earth for miles around; it threw a shower of burning fragments over the Louisiana a mile distant.” It sent a shock of terror through thousands of women up in New Orleans; it gave a momentary discouragement to the American troops. For the British it was a moment of grand exultation, “as if they had removed the only obstacle to their victorious advance.” One British diarist recorded that “among the crowd of spectators collected to witness the attack on the schooner were the Indian Chiefs, who appeared deeply interested in the proceedings.” With Laffite’s Baratarian gunners pulling at the oars of the ship’s boats, the Louisiana was able to avoid similar treatment by moving upriver. They anchored her right across from Jackson’s ditch, in perfect position to enfilade his front if the British attacked.