Loss of the Carolina wasn’t disastrous for the Americans, but it became an omen of vexatious things to come. Now that Pakenham had disposed of this floating artillery platform on his left flank, he was able to organize his assault on the American defensive position, which still wasn’t finished, since they were continuing to throw up dirt and bring up artillery pieces. By now the British had managed to send out enough scouts to get at least a rough notion of what lay in store for them—namely, Jackson’s line—although they were unable to get close enough to tell just how much artillery it brought to bear, or precisely what defensive safeguards it contained. Pakenham then decided not upon a full-scale assault but, instead, a “reconnaissance in force,” or the Great Reconnaissance, as it came to be known.
Pakenham’s plan was to send the army in its entirety against the American position with the notion of discovering just how much opposition he was facing, and with the secondary expectation of “scaring the Americans out of their wits.” In other words, the overall design was not to risk an all-or-nothing battle at this point, but to hope in the first place to find out what scheme of defense Jackson had devised and, at the same time, with the British redcoats marching smartly and deliberately toward the American positions, to frighten them into running away as they had at Washington and other places on the East Coast. If that happened, of course, they could simply march into New Orleans.
An added accommodation for Pakenham arrived as a present from Mother Nature. The Mississippi suddenly began to run lower than usual, so that the cuts Latour had made in the levee no longer inundated the sugar plantation fields, and the water that had covered the plain between the American and British positions quickly ran off via the canals and into the bayous. The ground conditions certainly weren’t ideal, since the soil had turned to muck, but at least the British wouldn’t have to slog through two miles of river water.
Meanwhile, as Pakenham organized his army for the assault, the Americans were doing some night work of a variety the British weren’t familiar with. After dark the Choctaws (now numbering sixty-two in all) with their tomahawk hatchets and the “dirty-shirt” Tennesseans with their long rifles and hunting knives would creep out of the lines and move stealthily toward the advance British pickets, killing as many as they could. The tactic was considered “unchivalrous” by the British, whose pickets usually enjoyed relative amity with their opposites during the European wars. Lieutenant Gleig condemned it as “an ungenerous return to barbarity,” though he and others conceded that the Americans were fighting for their own soil.
That night, soon after dark, while the blackened timbers from the blown-up Carolina were yet floating in the Mississippi, the British army moved forward en masse in two divisions, with ten pieces of artillery and several batteries of the new Congreve rockets. On the left, led by General Keane, were the 85th, 93rd, and 95th regiments and the 5th West Indians. On the right, commanded by Major General Sir Samuel Gibbs, who had arrived with Pakenham, were the 4th, 21st, and 44th regiments and the 1st West Indians. They drove in the American pickets on the Bienvenue and Chalmette plantations just six hundred yards in front of Jackson’s line and hunkered down—but not peacefully, as the Choctaws and dirty-shirts with their knives and hatchets kept up their fiendish nightly activity.
For a better understanding of why the British were angry, disturbed, and frightened by this unorthodox style of warfare, listen to Major Latour’s account of one such episode: “An old inhabitant of Tennessee obtained leave from his officers to go on what they called a hunting party. He stole through ditches and underwood, till he got near a British sentinel, whom he immediately killed; and having seized his arms and accouterments, he laid them at some distance from that place, and went to post himself in a different direction. When it was time to relieve the sentinel, the corporal of the guard finding him dead, posted another in the same place, where the guard had hardly left him, when the Tennessean shot him down, and having conveyed his arms and accouterments to the spot where he left those of the man he killed before, he again went to lie in wait in another place. The corporal, in his next round, had again to relieve a dead sentinel, and the man who took his place soon shared the fate of the two others; the Tennessean taking the same care to secure his arms and accouterments, and then posting himself in another place. At last the corporal, amazed to see that in one night three sentinels had been killed at one post, determined to expose no more men in so dangerous a spot. Our Tennessean, seeing this, returned to camp with the spoils of the slain, and received the felicitations of his comrades.”
Jackson understood that an attack was coming and decided to meet it head-on. This was no easy decision considering that his people were outnumbered by about three to two in infantry and two to one in artillery, and that his line wasn’t yet completed and presently contained only five artillery pieces. Although he did have the guns of the Louisiana to support him, a lesser man might have postponed the inevitable and retreated to a place closer to the city and hoped for the best. But not Jackson; it wasn’t in his nature. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, “Only two things are needed, the power of the man and the power of the moment,” and now, on a wintry morning in south Louisiana, apparently both had arrived.
Jackson was determined not to be bested by an army of usurping Englishmen invading American soil. He trusted implicitly his two Tennessee commanders, Coffee and Carroll, and had well-placed faith in the courage and loyalty of their men, with whom he had fought the Creek War. Likewise, despite persistent rumors of their unreliability, he had come to trust the Creole fighters of Louisiana under their somewhat gaudy and affected French-speaking officers.
Lastly, Jackson had come to look upon the once distasteful Baratarians of Jean Laffite as a godsend; their gunnery on the Carolina and Louisiana had been impeccable in “annoying” the British and thus far forestalling an attack. He now relied upon them enough that he sent a courier to Fort St. John ordering Dominique You and his cutthroat artillerists to come at once to the barricade. That the British would attack at Fort St. John was now logically incompatible with what Jackson was seeing. The Baratarians responded resolutely, promptly, and on the run, with Dominique You leading the way, squat, smiling his perpetual grin, his neck thick as a tortoise, and smoking a cigar. They arrived ready for a fight about dawn on December 28, and just in time for the show.
Eleven
Lieutenant General Sir Edward Pakenham’s attack began shortly after sunrise on December 28. His advance troops ran the American pickets out of the buildings they were occupying on the Chalmette and Bienvenue plantations, right in front of Jackson’s line, which had been filled with combustibles that were then fired upon and destroyed by American artillery to keep them from being used as shelter by the British. But that was not before at least one British officer got inside the elegant Bienvenue mansion; he later described in salacious detail the boudoir of the mistress of the manor, down to and including the books she read and the items of clothing she wore.
Pakenham had brought forward most of the artillery pieces he had used to destroy the Carolina with the intention of using them on, first, the Louisiana and, next, Jackson’s infantry line, but this did not work out. Gunfire from the Louisiana not only raked the flank of the British advance but, along with cannon fire from the five guns now in Jackson’s batteries along the Rodriguez Canal (which had become his formidable moat), ultimately silenced the British guns, which were then abandoned by Cochrane’s naval artillerymen. The interesting thing is that the renowned skills of the British artillery service were so quickly and thoroughly defeated by the dirty-shirts, Baratarian privateers, Louisiana militia, and a handful of U.S. Army regulars who had been denounced by the British army as nothing more than a “rabble.”
It had turned out to be one of those lovely Deep South winter mornings; the temperature was mild, almost balmy, and the skies sunny in contrast to the damp fogs, frost, and freezing rains that had characterized the past several weeks. It was recorded that as dawn broke, the
racket of thousands of ricebirds roosting in the cypress trees filled the air with a cacophonous screech of bird music.
It took the better part of an hour to get the entire British army assembled, but when it came into view it must have been both a magnificent and a disturbing sight to the American dirty-shirts. With drummer boys beating out an unnerving cadence, there soon appeared thousands of redcoats in two columns, eighty men abreast, filling up most of the front, one column marching along the levee road toward Jackson’s right and the other marching across the fields toward Jackson’s left. Pakenham’s plan was not an all-out, do-or-die assault, but to discover if there was any weakness in the American position and, if so, to proceed to attack and exploit it. It was, of course, floated in some quarters that the very sight of a British army marching against them would frighten the Americans out of their lines and send them flying back toward the city.
“They thought, no doubt to intimidate us by their boldness,” wrote Latour, “hoping that the sight of a heavy column marching against our lines, would strike such terror as to make us abandon them. They did not know with what adversaries they would have to contend, nor that they were destined to atone for their arrogance with streams of blood.”
As the British formation neared Jackson’s line, several redcoat batteries opened fire and showered the Americans with their new secret weapon, the Congreve rocket, to which Key had alluded in his “Star-Spangled Banner.” The rockets hissed and weaved and sputtered and threw out showers of sparks and flame like giant bottle rockets and then exploded with a bang of shrapnel, but they were wildly inaccurate. Jackson went riding down the lines, dismissing the rockets as “children’s toys,” although they wounded several men, including a marine major who also had his horse killed by one.
“The British had great expectation from the effect of this weapon, against an enemy who had never seen it before,” Latour noted. “They hoped that its very noise would strike terror into us; but we soon grew accustomed to it.”
Latour’s appraisal was on the money. The psychology of battle is very fragile, as the British were well aware, and surprise plays a great part in it. Men trained to know what to expect from an enemy are far less likely to give up the field than those who are confronted by strange new weapons or sudden, unexpected attacks.
This was Pakenham’s first view of the American position, and he wanted to have a good look at it; accordingly, he ordered both Gibbs’s and Keane’s columns halted and sent one of his engineer lieutenants up into a tree with a spyglass. The engineer informed Pakenham that the entire American fortification was fronted by a ditch that was filled with water to a depth unknown, and that it extended from the river all the way back to the seemingly impassable cypress swamp. In other words, Jackson was athwart the only path the British could use to get into New Orleans from their present position, and they would have to either destroy him or retreat and find some other way. It was a disagreeable situation for a commander to be in because it left no options—either you played the hand you were dealt or you folded.
Pakenham told his chief of artillery, Colonel Alexander Dickson, to bring up his guns to see what good that would do, but when Dickson went back to the river levee where he’d left them, he found that they had been destroyed by fire from the Louisiana. Meantime, Pakenham ordered Gibbs and Keane to resume their march against the American positions.
Right in the middle of all this an aide arrived from New Orleans, six miles distant, with information he thought Andrew Jackson should have. News of the British arrival had set in motion the work of busybody theorists bent on raising disturbing issues that best not be thought of at all.
When the messenger rode up to the general, who was sitting on his horse watching the British advance, he informed him that there was talk in the legislature at that very moment of surrendering the city. This was because Jackson had darkly hinted that if the British ever did get into position to seize New Orleans, he might first burn it to the ground, just to spite their “booty and beauty” aspirations. This was no idle threat, as Jackson was to recall later, and the memory of how the Russians a few years earlier had set fire to Moscow to keep Napoleon from profiting from it was fresh in everyone’s minds. Naturally, Jackson’s notion was alarming to many of the merchants and others with substantial holdings in the city (many of whom themselves were members of the legislature).
Jackson returned the messenger to find Governor Claiborne and instruct him that if there was any more such talk in the legislature he would “blow it up”—whatever that meant. When this startling order reached the governor, he immediately sent armed men to close down the legislature, which caused a lasting uproar all its own.
When the British columns came within artillery range, Jackson’s gunners let them have it. So did the Louisiana, a single shell from which, according to Latour, “killed fifteen men.” The American ship fired more than eight hundred rounds that day from the seven starboard-side cannons she could bring to bear, finally causing the British to disperse their column formation and spread out and take cover in ditches and indentations in the cane fields.
Seeing this, General Carroll, on the far left near the cypress swamp, sent one of his colonels with a 200-man battalion about a hundred yards out in front of the line to outflank the British. But the colonel became confused and went the wrong way; he was killed along with half a dozen of his men before the maneuver was called off. They fought until midafternoon, with American rifle fire—especially from the Tennesseans’ long rifles—and Jackson’s artillery taking their toll. Finally, Pakenham had seen enough; he called off the assault and took his army back out of range of the American guns.
“That the Americans are excellent marksmen, as well with artillery as with rifles, we have had frequent cause to acknowledge; but, perhaps on no occasion did they assert their claim to the title of good artillerymen more effectually than the present,” noted Lieutenant Gleig, who added that he felt lucky to have escaped with his life.
Much of what Gleig related probably was the work of Jean Laffite’s Baratarian gunners. Historian Jane Lucas De Grummond tells us that Laffite himself had installed them in the batteries containing two of the largest and most powerful guns in the line, the twenty-four-pounders, which Jackson had ordered dragged down from New Orleans a day or so earlier. If so, Laffite had thus deliberately placed himself in a perilous position, since if he was captured by the British he would surely have been hanged for his double-cross of Captain Lockyer, if not on simple piracy charges.
One gun was commanded by Dominique You and the other by the Laffites’ cousin Renato Beluche. This made perfect sense because, aside from the navy men, these seagoing artillerists and their crews were the most experienced gunners available. In his campaign against the Creeks (which also constituted his entire military experience), Jackson himself had commanded nothing larger than a single small six-pounder field gun that would compare as a peashooter to these big cannons, which could blast the British with heavy shot and shell at a distance of almost a mile.
As the British began to retire, the dirty-shirts hooted and jeered at them from atop their rampart. There is one story that Dominique You took particular note of a tall Scotsman from the 93rd striding defiantly to the rear. He set his gun crew on his cannon to action, and within half a minute the match was applied to the powder hole and the charge exploded; a twenty-four-pound ball flew out, tearing the head off the Highlander and sending it “spinning like a football down the field.”
Pakenham’s withdrawal at this stage may have appeared wise by military standards. He had reconnoitered the American position and established in his mind its strong and weak points. He also may have simply snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, because what he did not seem to comprehend was that Jackson’s men had been, and would be, working like beavers day and night to bolster their position. The arresting thing about it is not that they attacked but that they quit when victory might have been at hand, because the fortification Pakenham would event
ually face would be far stronger than the one he had seen that day.
It is useful here to say a word about the weapons used during the battle. The British infantry was mostly armed with muskets, manufactured in English foundries to strict government specifications. Much study had gone into the design, with considerations as to their weight, accuracy, durability, rate of fire, maintenance, and similar factors. Muskets were smoothbore weapons, with an effective range of about a hundred yards, and an experienced redcoat could fire about two or three aimed shots a minute. This was substantial if you consider that with Pakenham’s entire army firing all at once (which it would not be), shooting at that rate could send toward an enemy about twenty-five thousand balls per minute or, put another way, they could deliver four hundred aimed shots every second—certainly a “hail of lead” if ever there was one.
The two regiments of American regulars were armed with a similar weapon, while the volunteer Louisianans brought almost anything and everything, from bear rifles to fowling pieces, which could be deadly in their own ways, depending upon the skill of the user. Jackson’s Tennessee dirty-shirts, however, had mostly brought with them their own long rifles, which under most military circumstances would have been a thoroughly unsuitable weapon. But given the conditions at the New Orleans battle, they were just about perfect. These rifles—so called because the interior of the barrel, or bore, had been “rifled,” or grooved—could kill a man at three hundred yards, more than triple the range of the British musket.