As dawn approached, only about twenty of the forty-two boats that had been brought from the fleet could be hauled down the canal and launched into the Mississippi River, but it was finally decided to go ahead with these and hope for the best. With muffled oars, Thornton’s party at last shoved off just before dawn but was soon caught in the swift main current and carried several miles below the place they had planned to make shore, thus setting them back even farther. Lieutenant Gleig explains, “Day had already broke, while they were yet four miles from the [American] batteries, which ought to have been taken hours ago.”
A signal had been prearranged for the start of the main attack at first light: a rocket was to be fired from the British positions in front of Jackson on both the left and the right. At this, Thornton’s people across the river would begin firing at Jackson’s line with the captured American guns and, at the same time, the British columns would immediately march forward. But as dawn approached there had been none of the telltale sounds of battle echoing from the west bank, and Pakenham had to assume that, at best, Thornton’s attack would yet be forthcoming, only probably not in time to coincide with his own—certainly an ominous development.
Pakenham rode to the levee and listened anxiously for the sounds of Thornton’s battle across the river. He then turned to an aide and declared, “I will await my plans no longer,” and spurred his horse forward toward Jackson’s line, where his army waited silently for its orders. First he went to Keane, who was posted nearer the levee. Now he made a fatal decision.
Realizing that Thornton’s force was now unlikely to silence Patterson’s nine heavy guns on the west bank, and wishing to spare Keane’s brigade from the worst of Patterson’s enfilading fire, Pakenham told Keane that when the attack began he was to march his men in a right oblique, a diagonal move, toward General Gibbs, which would carry them nearer to the center, toward the cypress swamp and farther away from Patterson’s guns. And then he rode off to Gibbs’s column, the main one.
Here fate’s sleight of hand, which can deal out ironies in spades, dealt a big one that day. When Pakenham found Gibbs, who was to lead the main assault, he received startling news—Colonel Mullins’s 44th Regiment, which was supposed to bring forward the scaling ladders and fascines, had failed to do so. This “extraordinary blunder” was most alarming. Gibbs had ordered the regiment and Mullins back for the equipment, but with the approach of daybreak every second must count if they were to achieve any surprise at all, and that counted for everything.
Pakenham ordered one of his own aides, Major Sir John Tylden, to rush forward and discern the situation with the ladders and fascines. Other commanding officers were staring at their timepieces and, at the first faint rosy glows of dawn, wondering what the holdup was. Over in the 93rd Highland Regiment, its commander, Colonel Robert Dale, seemed “grave and depressed” when he was informed by the regimental physician that there had been trouble getting Thornton’s men across the river. Instead of answering the doctor, Dale, with the detached air of a condemned man, handed him his watch and a letter, saying, “Give these to my wife; I shall die at the head of my regiment.”
While awaiting news of the scaling equipment, Pakenham’s aide Major Sir Harry Smith suggested to him that, given the situation with the boats and now this misfortune with the scaling ladders, the attack might best be postponed. Pakenham was having none of it. “I have twice deferred the attack. We are strong in numbers comparatively. It will cost more men, and the assault must be made.” Smith, however, again cautioned delay. “While we were talking,” Smith said, “the streaks of daylight began to appear, although the morning was dull, close and heavy, the clouds almost touching the ground: Pakenham shook his head. ‘It is now too late,’ he said.”
Tylden returned shortly and reported that Mullins’s Irishmen had finally found the heavy gear and were moving in a “most irregular and unsoldier-like manner, with the fascines and ladders,” but he concluded that by now they “must have arrived at their situation in column.” In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth; the Irishmen were still struggling with the scaling equipment when Pakenham turned to Smith and said, “Smith, order the rocket to be fired.” Captain Cooke of the 43rd Light Infantry, which was in reserve that morning, later deemed it “the Fatal, the ever-fatal rocket,” and, as it turned out, he was certainly right.
Cooke’s regiment was posted on the left, near the river, and when the rocket went off with its great whoosh, no one knew what it meant. The projectile whizzed all around the sky, Cooke reported, “backwards and forwards in such a zig-zag way that we all looked up like so many philosophers, to see if it was coming down upon our heads.” As Latour remembered it, he was standing with Jackson near the center of the line when the rocket went up. “That is the signal for their advance, I believe,” the general said. The rocket finally landed in the Mississippi and, after a moment of silence, suddenly there came a huge cannonade from the British lines on Jackson’s left, near the cypress swamp.
The thick fog had begun to lift coincident with the rise of dawn, and Jackson’s artillery replied in kind. “The Americans opened upon us from right to left,” remembered Lieutenant Gleig, “a fire of musketry, grape, round-shot, and canister, which I have certainly never witnessed any more murderous.” Within seconds, according to Captain Cooke, “were the cannonballs tearing up the ground, criss-crossing each other [especially those from Patterson’s battery across the river] and bounding along like so many cricket-balls.”
When Gibbs’s column was still more than three hundred yards away, General Adair tapped one of his Kentucky marksmen from behind.
“See that officer on the gray horse?” he said, pointing to a British major who was riding alongside the leading column. “Snuff his candle!”
The Kentuckian took careful aim, squeezed the trigger, and Major Whitaker toppled from his horse, dead. A British quartermaster, E. N. Borroughs, had seen this from his perch on the balcony of the De la Ronde plantation house and marveled that “at a distance of nearly three hundred yards . . . the bullet passed through his head, out at the right temple and went on.” Historian Robert Remini notes: “The final great action in the Battle of New Orleans, which had been anticipated for over a month, had finally begun.”
The air was rabid with death and gun smoke, an inferno of cannon and rifle fire belching flame, lead, and red-hot iron; the great boom of the big guns and zing of musket balls; the strange, mournful music of the battlefield set against the most unearthly sounds of all, the whoosh of the British rockets and the shrieks and groans of the wounded and dying. It was Sunday morning, January 8, 1815, and all this noise began racketing back to New Orleans. The Sabbath church bells had already begun to toll, and the bewildered and apprehensive women with their children clutching at their skirts went inside to pray to God that their men could hold back the British.
When the mist had nearly cleared and the first rays of sun broke over the Chalmette plantation that morning, the dirty-shirt Americans beheld a sight that must have been breathtaking. Taking up most of the half-mile-long sugarcane fields before them was the red-coated British army, coming on in columns, each several hundred yards long, to the beat of drums and blare of bugles. With their higher-ranking officers prancing about on horses taken from local plantations, it must have been a stirring spectacle.
These were emotion-packed minutes: if the British broke the American line Jackson faced dismal consequences, since his two rearward lines were not nearly so strong and a retreating army never fights as fiercely as one that has not been beaten where it stands.
Despite the heavy fire from the Americans, the British came on relentlessly. Unlike the Americans—who were fighting together for the first time and, in most cases, were fighting at all for the first time—the British army was made up of trained professional soldiers, and was all tradition. History passes along many descriptions of men making a charge or ground assault against an enemy position. Contemporary accounts usually describe them
as marching with their heads down, as if they were moving into a strong wind or a rainstorm, or in some cases at a crouch, so as to expose as little of themselves as possible. But when the British marched, they marched, ramrod straight, in tight formation and drawn up tall, daring the enemy to do his damnedest.
The dramatic rattle of the British drums was aimed at establishing a marching cadence, but the drums also had another purpose: to unsettle and strike fear in the enemy, sounding that steady rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat as the red-coated columns drew nearer and nearer, defying shot and shell and rifle fire.
In the American lines the apprehension was powerful and electrifying. All the boasting and hallooing was now just alluring nonsense in the face of this majestic British juggernaut. Conscious of their own inferiority in dress, in training, in experience, the Americans by now must have become at least dimly aware that here, today, they were the keepers of the national destiny; that if they fled, they would let down their nation and their flag. For some it was more personal: the Creoles had families in New Orleans, and the British army’s desecrations against civilians were well publicized.
For each of these Americans, privately and characteristically, their single overarching determination boiled down—as it has always boiled down, ever since men have organized to fight one another with rocks, clubs, or guns—to the understanding that they were not going to cut and run, for the simple, honest fear of not wanting to disgrace themselves in front of their comrades.
Fourteen
On the British right the skirmishers of the 95th Regiment waded across the ditch in front of Jackson’s line and, since no fascines or scaling ladders had yet arrived, began desperately trying to carve steps into the rampart with their bayonets. The leading companies of the 44th stopped, directly against their orders, which were to carry the American position at bayonet point, and began to shoot at the Americans, but when they were answered by a ruinous volley from Carroll’s Tennesseans and Adair’s Kentuckians, they ran away, setting into motion a chain of events that would soon shudder through the entire British army.
“Instantly the whole American line, from the swamp to a point near its center, was ablaze,” said British quartermaster Borroughs from his vantage point on De la Ronde’s balcony. “In less time than one can write it, the 44th Foot was literally swept from the face of the earth. In the wreck and confusion that ensued within five minutes the regiment seemed to vanish from sight—except the half of it that lay stricken on the ground. Every mounted officer was down at the first fire. No such execution by small arms has ever been seen or heard of.”
Following Pakenham’s revised orders, Keane had begun his diagonal march across the field toward the point where Jackson’s rampart intersected with the cypress swamp. Unfortunately, Pakenham had forgotten to tell Colonel Sir Alexander Dickson, his chief of artillery, of the change in plans, and thus, as Keane’s brigade started to march in front of Dickson’s guns, he had no choice but to cease firing for fear of hitting his own troops. Arriving first on the scene at the head of Keane’s brigade was the proud, tall 93rd Regiment of Scotsmen, wearing plaid tartan trousers and playing “Monymusk” on their bagpipes. They, too, were expecting to find the ditch filled with fascines and the scaling ladders against the rampart, but in this they, too, were disappointed. When the members of Mullins’s 44th, who were dragging up the scaling equipment, saw the regiment’s leading companies coming back toward them in flight, they dropped the ladders and fascines in the field and joined the others in a rush for the rear.
The commander of the 93rd, Colonel Dale, who had earlier given the regimental surgeon his watch and a letter to his wife, ordered his men to halt so he could appraise the situation. At that point he was fatally shot, just as he had predicted. General Gibbs came rushing through the smoke and noise and gloom hollering for Colonel Mullins and threatening to “hang him from the highest tree in that swamp” for forgetting the scaling gear. But Mullins was nowhere to be found.
Over on the left by the levee, three companies of infantry under Colonel Rennie stormed the redoubt in front of the rampart that Jackson had declared “will give us trouble.” The Americans who were manning it were outnumbered, but a good deal of hand-to-hand fighting occurred before those who remained managed to scramble across a plank laid over the ditch and find safety behind the rampart. In what turned out to be a tragic case of “leading by example,” right behind them came Rennie and two of his officers, who scaled the rampart. Looking back, Rennie shouted to his men, “Hurrah boys, the day is ours!” just as a volley from the New Orleans Rifles struck and killed all three men, who pitched headlong down into the ditch. Seeing this, the other redcoats fled in disorder, some along the levee, some along the road, and some along the riverbank. Captain Humphrey, with his eternal cigar, blasted them with his cannons, and so did Patterson’s marine battery from across the river, until the riverbank was littered with dozens of dead and wounded British.
Historian Walker tells us that “a discussion arose” as to who had the honor of bringing down Colonel Rennie. “Mr. Withers, a merchant of New Orleans, and the crack shot of the company, settled the controversy by remarking: ‘If he isn’t hit above the eyebrows, it wasn’t my shot.’ ”
Rennie’s body was dragged out of the ditch, and “it was found that the fatal wound was in the forehead.” Withers, therefore, was assigned the quaint custom of sending Rennie’s watch and other valuables to his widow, who was among the wives aboard ship with the fleet off Lake Borgne.
Right about this time Captain Cooke, who was nearby behind the redoubt from which Rennie’s men were retreating, observed that “at this momentous crisis a droll occurrence took place; a company of blacks emerged out of the mist carrying ladders, which were intended for the three light companies on the left of the attack.” But, Cooke continues, “they were so confounded by the multiplicity of noises that they dropped the ladders and fell flat on their faces”; then he launched into a long dissertation on the proper employment of scaling ladders by men under fire, concluding that “only the very elite of an army” should be used for such a critical and dangerous enterprise.
By this time the battle was at its most pitiless intensity. According to Cooke, “The echo of the cannonade and musketry was so tremendous that the vibration seemed as if the earth was cracking and tumbling to pieces [and] the heavens were rent asunder by the most terrific peals of thunder that ever rumbled and produced an intermingled roar surpassing strange.”
Cooke remembered seeing one of his friends, a Lieutenant Duncan Campbell, “running about in circles” and falling down only to get up again and run in more circles. It turned out that a grapeshot had torn open his forehead and rendered him blind. He was carried off to the rear, Cooke tells us, “and in a state of delirium and suffering he lived for a few days.”
Back over on the British right, where the main attack under Gibbs had been expected to fall, a terrible and dangerous situation had developed, and the thousand tartan-clad Scotsmen of the 93rd Highlanders were beginning to undergo an ordeal of horrifying proportions.
When Colonel Dale was shot, right after ordering the regiment to halt, nobody in the subordinate command appeared to know what to do next. So the men remained there, in perfect marching formation, “standing like statues” with their regimental flags fluttering in the thin breeze, right in front of Jackson’s rampart, while the American gunners and riflemen blasted away at them. They were not even told to fire back.
“The American batteries were playing upon them with awful effect, cutting great lanes through the column from front to rear, and huge gaps in their flanks.” Some 600 of the Scotsmen were killed or wounded.
Meantime, Gibbs’s other regiments were running up against a perfect firestorm from Carroll’s and Coffee’s Tennesseans and Kentuckians that no soldier on earth could long withstand. One of the Kentuckians, a man with the wonderful name of Ambrose Odd, was so short that he could not see over the rampart, and so he jumped atop it and began to fi
re at the British soldiers. When a colonel told him to get down, he replied, “Well, I’d like to know how I can shoot until I can see something!”
At one point Jackson ordered his artillery batteries to cease firing for a few minutes and let the clouds of smoke blow away, in order to fix the British troops clearly for more of the same. In Battery No. 3 he observed Captain Dominique You standing to his guns, his broad Gallic face beaming like a harvest moon. Though he was a short and squat man, he looked much larger now, his eyes burning and swelling from the powder smoke. Jackson declared, “If I were ordered to storm the gates of hell, with Captain Dominique as my lieutenant, I would have no misgivings of the result.” During this momentary lull a strange incongruity occurred: the band of Beale’s New Orleans Rifles resounded up and down the line playing “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail, Columbia”—in fact, throughout the entire engagement this band would play continuously every patriotic tune in its repertoire, though much of it could not be heard over the noise of the battle.
As the men in Jackson’s line looked over the rampart at the stunned British host before them, the Americans were astonished at the number of red-coated lumps lying on the field. The morning was so humid and still that the gunpowder smoke did not drift away in the wind as Jackson had hoped, but “simply pancaked lazily toward the ground, as if the very air itself was exhausted.”
Soon the order was received to recommence firing, and the “horrid concert” erupted once again.
“Stand to your guns!” Jackson roared. “Don’t waste your ammunition. See that every shot tells! Give it to them, boys; let us finish the business today!” he told them.
Pakenham had watched in mortification as the deflated soldiers of the 44th and 21st Regiments streamed back toward the rear and declared, “Lost from want of courage!” When he rode out in front and tried to get them turned around, General Gibbs clattered up in a towering rage: “I cannot control my men!” he claimed. “They won’t obey me!” Pakenham began rallying them “with reminders of the glory they had acquired in Egypt and elsewhere,” leading them himself into the gloom and roar of battle. Along the way they passed by hundreds of men in little bunches, cringing in depressions or drainage ditches from the American fire.