Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom
At ten-fifteen a.m. five British warships were sighted. They anchored two and a quarter miles downriver and sent out a pair of barges to within a mile of the fort, apparently to take soundings. Overton ordered the thirty-two-pounders and a few of the twenty-fours to open up on them, which they did, causing the two boats to retire. But now the British fleet had learned the range of the American guns—which was about a mile and a half—and maneuvered their own ships until they were just outside of it. Then two bomb vessels—large barges—moved forward and anchored, just out of American range, and opened fire on Fort St. Philip with their huge mortars. According to Latour, “The first shell from the enemy fell short, but the next burst over the interior of the fort.” All that day and night the shelling continued, with only short intervals, generally a shell every two minutes. The next morning the firing continued, “with the same vivacity as on the former day, except that there was a cessation for lunch and suppertimes.”
It was maddening for the Americans, because there was little else to do but sit there and take it. They had no gun that could reply in kind except their own thirteen-inch mortar, which had a range of two miles, but fuses for its ammunition proved to be defective and they had no tools to make others. The bombardment went on day after day, except for the noted lulls for lunch and dinner. Every day a few men would be killed or maimed, but not much structural damage was done. On January 11 a British shot hit the flagstaff and knocked down the American flag, causing a sailor “who was brave enough to stand on the cross-trees, exposed as a mark,” to set the big star-spangled banner waving again. In frustration, Overton decided one day to let loose a huge blast from all his guns just to let the British know the Americans were still there. It didn’t do any damage, but at least it made everybody feel better.
In the several days after the battle, the Americans had time to collect themselves, tidy up, and get about their chores, which also included continuing to strengthen Jackson’s rampart. Many began setting down their impressions in letters to family and loved ones. On January 10, physician Avery, whose regiment had been sent to fight on the right side of the river under Morgan’s command, wrote, still rather breathlessly, to his wife, Mary Ann, at Baton Rouge:
I have just returned from the Camp, where I have been for several days—on Sunday the 8th, we had a most tremendous battle with the enemy, their loss in killed and wounded and prisoners according to the best information, is 14 to 15 hundred, the ground in front of our lines may be said to [be] litteraly covered with their dead, while our loss is only 4 men killed and about 30 wounded and those very slightly, the action commenced a little after daylight and continued violent for about three hours, there was a continual and most dreadful roar of musketry, without one single moments intermission.
Same morning between daylight and sunrise a part of the British army crossed over the river and commenced an attack on that side of the river and drove our men from our batteries, in great confusion, but they withdrew the same day about 4 o’clock, as [it] is since learned; the day was thick and rainey, in the afternoon, they crossed the river in consequence of the great and unexpected loss they sustained on the Orleans [Jackson’s] side; the order of attack was that three thousand should cross and attack on this side at the same time of the attack on the Orleans side, but in consequence of their defeat, which actually happened, to their great loss, they withdrew their troops from this side, the next morning after the action they sent in a flag, with a request, that hostilities cease for three days. General Jackson answered that he would give them until half past one o’clock to bury their dead and no longer, and they accordingly sent a great number of men for that purpose, nothing of importance has happened since, the enemy have five vessels in the river below fort Placquemine [Fort St. Philip], we have heard a heavy cannonade today in that direction, if they should pass that fort, all our efforts here I am afraid will be unavailing, there would be but little to prevent them after from coming to Orleans, the place is very strong, and they will meet with great difficult—their first Genl and commander in Chief Pickingham and Genl Gibbs second are both killed, and Kean 3rd in command is wounded and said to be mortal—Cochran is now Commander in Chief.
Please give my respects to all my friends and believe me,
Dudley Avery.
While some of his facts may be incorrect, from the tone of his letter it is clear that two days after the battle Avery, like many others, remained astonished at all the things he had seen and heard.
The bombardment continued on the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth “with the usual intervals.” The enemy had finally decided that the best method of harming the Americans was to rig their shells for air bursts. One American was killed and another lost his leg, but this merely caused Overton’s men to collect all the timber they had removed from the fort previously and return it in the form of heavy-timbered overhead shelters. For a solid week they had been receiving about two hundred shell blasts every day.
On the evening of the fifteenth supplies arrived by boat from New Orleans, including new fuses for the thirteen-inch mortar, which was finally able “to return fire with considerable effect.” After several days of this back and forth, on the morning of January 18 the Americans woke up expecting more of the same, but, when they looked over the parapet, the British had lifted anchor and sailed away in the night, defeated yet again.
Latour calculated that during the nine days of bombardment the fort had been hit by no less than a thousand shells (seventy tons’ worth, so he said) and that the British had “expended more than twenty thousand pounds of gunpowder.” Much of the fort was in ruins, and “the ground outside was torn up in every direction,” he said, but the British had finally concluded that they couldn’t drive the Americans out of their positions. Especially after Major Overton’s frustrating display of barrage power, the British command realized that going upriver and against the current there was simply no way their ships could get past the fire from this determined little bastion. So Overton and the Americans had prevailed after all.
On that same day General Lambert, who by then had concluded that further prosecution of the battle was incompatible with reality, began his evacuation of the British army from Louisiana. “Failure, failure everywhere to this imposing expedition,” crowed James Parton, Jackson’s early biographer.
Sixteen
Retreat in the face of an enemy is generally considered one of the two most dangerous military maneuvers (the other is an opposed amphibious landing).
Lambert had not put much faith in Cochrane’s attack on Fort St. Philip and had been planning a retirement ever since the results of January 8 became so painfully apparent. Since the fleet still did not have enough boats to load up the army all at once, his staff worked out a scheme that they hoped could succeed.
It was more than nine miles from their present position at the Villeré plantation to the mouth of Bayou St. John. During the invasion the British had been able to ferry the troops to within two miles of the sugar plantations, but that was before the Americans discovered them. Now, however, they were being watched most carefully, and speed and stealth would be necessary to avoid being attacked and destroyed in detail during the process of their withdrawal.
Accordingly, British engineering parties, along with battalions of infantry, were sent out to build bridges over all the multitudinous streams, creeks, and bayous that emptied into Bayou St. John; sometimes using timbers, sometimes strung-together boats, but mostly using bound-together cane reeds from the swamps to form what they hoped would be a kind of dry footing, they fashioned a seven-mile-long path along the right bank of the bayou down to the Spanish Fishermen’s Village.
At intervals in this gross morass they also fashioned redoubts, or forts, from which a pursuing enemy, confined by necessity to the narrow path, could be held off by concentrated cannon and rifle fire. The troops could then wait on the shores of Lake Borgne for the boats to come and pick them up, or so the operation was conceived. It took a full nine days
Meantime, Lambert had ordered a Major Wylly, his military aide, to accompany the remains of General Pakenham (grotesquely preserved in a barrel of rum) back to England for a proper burial, taking along with him “dispatches of the lamentable disaster” that would inform Whitehall and the Admiralty of what had happened.
During the week prior to the British evacuation, negotiations for a prisoner exchange had been taking place. Harry Smith again spoke for the British, but this time the jovial Edward Livingston represented Jackson, instead of Colonel Butler, whom Smith had found distasteful. Smith enjoyed Livingston immensely and praised him as “a gentleman and a very able man.” Jackson initially had resisted a prisoner exchange because, he told Lambert in a note, the British had not been forthcoming in sending a list of the names of those American prisoners they had captured. When this was finally produced, Jackson agreed, and it was decided that the exchange would take place on the afternoon of January 18.
It became a notable event in itself, with the fashionable New Orleans Rifles marching out to the dividing line near where the British mass grave was located to escort some sixty of its members back into the ranks. As we know, these people represented the cream of influential and wealthy men of the city, and there was great cheering and boisterousness on the occasion of their return, associated, one suspects, with not a little drinking.
As soon as it got dark that night, Major Smith recalled, “our troops began to move off and [by] midnight we were well off and the pickets were retired.” Lieutenant Gleig said that the British army stole away in the most surreptitious manner, “tending their cooking fires until the last moment, arranging things in the same order as if no change were to take place. The most profound silence was maintained; not a cough nor any other noise was to be heard from the head to the rear of the column.” Apparently rumors of the British withdrawal had reached the Americans anyway, or so Gleig believed, “for we found them of late watchful and prying, whereas they had been formerly content to look only to themselves.”
The wounded were the first to be moved, a few days earlier, with some of the black units, and it must have been a terrible strain on them, since the path was slip-and-stumble over its entire seven-mile length. The trail was bad enough for the leading elements, but as more and more men entered the swamp, it became a mire again, difficult enough to traverse in daytime, let alone in the freezing night with no moon and only stars to light the way. Lieutenant Gleig claims he fell up to his waist in mud and that he saw a man actually disappear beneath some sort of muddy quicksand.
Captain Cooke said he was terrified when he watched an alligator, “with a mouth large enough to swallow an elephant’s leg,” emerge from the water and penetrate into the swamp of reeds. “The very idea of the monster prowling about in the stagnant swamp took possession of my mind in a most forcible manner,” Cooke remembered.
As they floundered on, Gleig, in the rear of the column, said that “all trace of a way had entirely disappeared” and everything was “trodden into the consistency of mud. Every step sank us to the knees, and frequently higher.” This went on all night and into the next morning, as thousands of British soldiers slogged along and made their way in gloomy and disappointed silence away from the land of “beauty and booty.”
When dawn finally lit the sky, Gleig remembered, the men were surprised to find themselves on the edges of Lake Borgne, in a “perfect ocean of reeds” as far as the eye could see, with the thin beaches and ponds along the lakefront rimmed with winter ice. They had had nothing to eat along their trek other than what they had brought themselves, and there was nothing here, either, so Gleig shot some ducks, which were plentiful at that time of year in southern Louisiana. But the ducks fell into the water, and Gleig did not want to swim in after them, as there was no way to get dried off afterward. “The only fuel,” he said, was the reeds, “which blaze and flare up like straw,” after which all warmth is gone.* 71
The army stayed put for two days, cold and starving, until the boats of the fleet finally returned and fetched them off in another cramped and wretched sixty-mile row across the lake in rain and cold. One can only imagine the atmosphere aboard ship then, compared with the day the fleet had first sailed into the Mississippi Sound less than a month earlier. Lieutenant Gleig sums it up as well as any, and seems to have said it for all of them: “We had set out in the surest confidence of glory, and, I may add of emolument, and were brought back dispirited and dejected. Our ranks were woefully thinned, our chiefs slain, our clothing tattered and filthy and even our discipline in some degree injured.” It was enough, he said, “to prove the short-sightedness of human hope and human prudence.”
The next morning, bright and early, Jackson and some of his staff, including General Humbert, were up at the observation post on the top floor of the Macarty house. Jackson scanned the British position, and things looked fairly normal: sentinels seemed to be posted as usual and British flags were flying. Something seemed strange, however; they could see none of the busy activity that they had so often observed. There were no horseback riders, and it was odd that thousands of men could be so still; there was no smoke from cooking fires. Then the eagle-eyed Humbert stepped forward and took a turn at the telescope.
“They are gone,” he announced.
“How do you know?” Jackson asked.
Humbert motioned for Jackson to look through the glass, which he had trained on a crow hovering above one of the British “sentinels,” almost as if it intended to alight on him.
“The proximity of the crow showed that the sentinel was a ‘dummy,’ and so ill-made, that it was not even a good scarecrow.”
The British had gone, and were doubtless on their way back to the fleet by now, but what would they do next? Come back for another try from a more promising invasion route? Attack Mobile and return from there? The calculus was varied, and maddening. Jackson could not have known it then, except perhaps intuitively, but the British army had just been reinforced by two more regiments, which had arrived from Europe—1,500 more men, which made good many of the losses suffered on January 8—and there was every possibility that they would renew their campaign in some other venue.
Jackson ordered Major Hinds and his dragoons to organize a scouting party and investigate what had become of the enemy, and, if possible, do damage to them. This force had not even had time to form when a British medical officer appeared on the plain waving a white flag. He carried with him a letter from Lambert, “which announced his departure,” and asked Jackson in the name of humanity if the Americans would care for some eighty British soldiers whose wounds were such that they could not be taken along.
Jackson sent for his surgeon-general and along with him and his staff rode over into the British camp. “He saw that, indeed, they had departed and that his own triumph was complete and irreversible,” says James Parton. They had taken much with them, but also left much behind, including fourteen cannons, which they had spiked and whose carriages they had ruined. Three thousand cannonballs were gathered up by the men and taken to the American lines.
Jackson went to the hospital in the De la Ronde mansion and “assured the wounded officers and soldiers of his protection and care.” It did not take long for word to get back to New Orleans of the plight of the wounded redcoats, and soon many ladies rode down in their carriages “with such articles as were deemed necessary to the comfort of the unfortunates.” According to Judge Walker, a British surgeon who had been left behind met and fell in love with one of these ladies, “a bell of the city,” and not long afterward the two were married and settled in New Orleans to raise a large family.
The soldiers were removed from the rude plantation hospital and taken into town, but between them and the wounded, who had been captured on January 8, the New Orleans hospitals were full and accommodations few and far between. Many were taken in by
From January 8 to January 21 the American army remained in its positions, not knowing what the British would do next. It rained almost every day, and soon this nearly two weeks of inundation presented the American line with a hideous tableau: out of the shallow mass grave in which the hundreds of British had been buried, bloated arms, legs, heads, and sometimes whole bodies began to arise from the soft ground—and remained in this attitude, silent except for the buzz of a swarm of winter blackflies, which cast a disturbing pall over the entire plain, with an accompanying horrifying smell. With the prospect of diseases such as cholera always associated with putrefying dead, Jackson realized he ought not keep his thousands of men in the lines much longer.
The butcher’s bill for the Battle of New Orleans was among the most lopsided and outrageous in the history of organized warfare up until then, except perhaps for some of those biblical-style battles in which no prisoners were taken. The British suffered approximately 3,750 casualties: 850 killed or died of wounds (most of these on January 8); 1,200 wounded and disabled; 1,200 wounded and returned to duty; and 500 prisoners. The American casualty total was 333, with 55 killed, 185 wounded, and 93 prisoners.