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October 23 - October 29, 2018
Elizabeth Jackson, had already lost too much. Her husband, Andrew Jackson Sr., had worked himself to death shortly before Andrew was born, leaving the pregnant Elizabeth with two, soon to be three, young sons in the rugged wilderness of upland South Carolina.
As Andrew recovered from a fever, she set off for Charleston, where two of the nephews she helped raise were prisoners. She would never return. After completing a 160-mile journey, much of it through enemy territory, she became ill with cholera and died. Andrew would learn he was an orphan when a small bundle of her clothes was returned to his home.
Andrew Jackson would never forget the pain and humiliation of that summer. His father, mother, and brothers were dead. He himself bore the memory of British brutality, his forehead and hand forever marked by the British officer’s sword, a reminder of the callous cruelty that had destroyed his family.
“Make friends by being honest and keep them by being steadfast. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue for slander—settle them cases yourself!”
On June 1, 1812, America declared war. After a hot debate, James Madison’s war resolution was passed by a vote of 19–13 in the Senate and 79–49 in the House of Representatives, and, once again, the new nation would be taking on the world’s premier military and economic power: Great Britain.
Though reluctant to risk the new nation’s liberty, Madison was now ready to send a message to England and the world that America would stand up to the bully that chose to do her harm. The unanswered question was: Could America win? Less than thirty years removed from the last war, and with virtually no national army, were Americans prepared to take on Britain and defend themselves, this time without the help of France? The world was about to find out.
when a British ship attacked the U.S. Navy’s Chesapeake, killing three sailors and taking four others from the ship to impress them into service to the Crown, then-president Thomas Jefferson had attempted to retaliate. To protest this blatant hostility, Congress passed the Embargo Act, prohibiting overseas trade with Great Britain. Unfortunately, the act hurt Americans more than the British. In just fifteen months, the embargo produced a depression that cruelly punished merchants and farmers while doing little to deter the Royal Navy’s interference and hardening New England’s resistance to
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By the time of the war declaration in June 1812, the number of sailors seized off the decks of American ships had risen to more than five thousand men.
As a lawyer, a trader, and a merchant, Jackson bought and sold land. By the time Tennessee joined the Union, in 1796, he had won the respect of his neighbors, who chose him as their delegate to the state’s constitutional convention.
Jackson then served as Tennessee’s first congressman for one session before becoming a U.S. senator.
Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian czar? No—we are the free-born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world.”4
The Louisiana Purchase had been completed in 1803 and, at a purchase price of $15 million for more than eight hundred thousand square miles of territory, the land had been a staggering bargain (the cost to America’s treasury worked out to less than three cents an acre).
The Louisiana city of New Orleans was the great gateway to and from the heart of the country. America’s inland waterways—the Ohio, the Missouri, and the numerous other rivers that emptied into the Mississippi—amounted to an economic lifeline for farmers, trappers, and lumbermen upstream. On these waters flatboats and keelboats were a common sight, carrying manufactured goods from Pennsylvania, as well as crops, pelts, and logs from the burgeoning farms and lush forests across the Ohio Valley, Cumberland Gap, and Great Smoky Mountains. On reaching the wharves, warehouses, and quays of New
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The Boston Evening Post soon dubbed the conflict “Mr. Madison’s War.” With no template to follow—he was the first American president ever to sign a formal declaration of war—James Madison was largely on his own.
There was nothing battle-hardened about Madison. Soft-spoken as well as short, he weighed perhaps 120 pounds. Genteel in manner, he was sickly and bookish, with a face that bore the age lines of a man of sixty-one years. He was a far cry from the strategist George Washington had been and had little choice when it came to military matters but to rely on the advice of his counselors. Many of them also lacked war experience.
Jackson issued a call to arms, and a flood of farmers, planters, and businessmen, many of them descendants of Revolutionary War veterans, poured into Nashville. These Volunteers, as their ranks would be called, were eager to fight for their country, to protect their homes, and to serve General Jackson.
Along the way, one soldier remarked upon Jackson’s toughness. Then another observed that he was as “tough as hickory.” Said aloud, the comparison rang true and, soon enough, his men took to calling their commander “Hickory” and eventually “Old Hickory.”
The nickname would last a lifetime,
And then the president fell ill with “bilious fever.” At Montpelier, their home in central Virginia, with Mr. Madison in a delirium, Mrs. Madison worried he might die.
In Tennessee, however, the summer passed peacefully until, with August giving way to September, life in Andrew Jackson’s West took a sudden turn. In a matter of days, two events would alter the course of Jackson’s life. One almost killed him, and the other accelerated his rise to the status of genuine American hero.
The fight began with a roar of Indian guns as Weatherford’s Red Sticks, naked but for their red war paint, burst from a dense thicket. They were “like a cloud of Egyptian locusts,” Davy Crockett wrote, “screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head.”15
His Volunteers had little food and no feed for their horses. With expected supply shipments delayed, Jackson saw that his starving troops were growing more restless by the day. He realized that, despite the victory at Talladega less than a month before, his army was about to come apart at the seams—and if his Volunteers deserted, he would be able to fight neither Indians nor the British.
Would New Orleans welcome America’s protection? The answer to that question was far from certain. The most important city in Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was in transition. An American possession since 1803, Louisiana had been a state for only two years, and its loyalty to the Union was not yet proven.
New Orleans had nevertheless become a center of European refinement and culture. An outpost of law and order in the wilderness, it was still home to more than a few outlaws. The most important city in the newest American state, it was French in spirit, but had also been a possession of both the British and the Spanish; many of its inhabitants didn’t even speak the language of their new government. In the event of invasion,
Jackson would have to shape an unprecedented unity among a motley population of French colonials, Native Americans, freed slaves, American woodsmen, and even pirates.
New Orleans had been a place of constant change simply because of its geography. A natural bank, or levee, had risen along a crescent-shaped turn in the meandering Mississippi and, over the centuries, Native Americans had found the spot, located about a hundred miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico, a convenient place to travel farther inland.
Nevertheless, by the time of Mr. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans had become a European-style city with an aura such that a contemporary visitor described the place as a “French Ville de Province.”1 The oldest quarter was a central checkerboard of streets, the Vieux Carré, which retained a grid planned long before by French royal engineers. In the next decade, the population more than doubled to eighteen thousand inhabitants.
I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me. —Andrew Jackson
Five miles downstream from the port of Baltimore and in British custody, Francis Scott Key had watched the great fight unfold. Commissioned by President Madison to negotiate the freedom of a Maryland doctor detained by the British after the burning of Washington, Key was aboard a British ship awaiting the outcome of the battle. From the ship’s deck he watched the fireworks of the bombardment, then waited in the darkness, watching and wondering. He did not know what the silence meant, but he worried: Had Baltimore fallen? He paced the deck of the ship, periodically peering through a spyglass at
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He had a tune in his head—once before, he’d written a celebratory poem to fit the melody—and he jotted down his thoughts and sentiments, as well as a couplet that would ring familiar in the ears of his countrymen for generations to come.
Tis the star spangled banner, O! long may it wave / O’er the land of the free and...
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New Orleans was a city that loved a parade, and Jackson decided there was no better way to cheer and inspire the anxious townspeople. He announced there would be a procession into the city’s central downtown square, the Place d’Armes, on Sunday, December 18. On the day of the parade, the people
First, he complimented the people of New Orleans on their bravery even as he exhorted them to further heroism: “The American nation shall applaud your valour, as your general now praises your ardour.” Jackson’s promise, he told them, was of victory: “Continue with the energy you have began, and he promises you not only safety, but victory.”
New Orleans was now just seven miles away, an easy two-hour march along what General Keane regarded as a “tolerably good” road.20 Despite Colonel Thornton’s argument that they should take the fight immediately to the Americans, the British made camp. After long nights on the barges, they hoped for a full night’s rest. The invasion, months in the making, could wait until tomorrow. This would be their first critical mistake.
After ten minutes the bombardment from the Carolina slackened—but Andrew Jackson’s second surprise was about to be delivered.
Thus, the future of the city of New Orleans and the territory of Louisiana—as well as the lives of many men—hung in the balance. The pressure stayed on General Jackson. Now that he knew the route the British assault would take, his job would be to establish a solid defensive line.
Miraculously, no one was hurt, and Jackson, as was his habit, had quickly departed—not to flee, but to fight. According to his adjutant Major Reid, it was Jackson’s practice, “on the first appearance of danger . . . instantly to proceed to the line.”
These d—d Yankee riflemen can pick a squirrel’s eye out as far as they can see it. —Anonymous British prisoner of war
Standing high on the parapet with a panoramic view of the field, Jackson surveyed the battle unfolding beneath him. He offered repeated exhortations. “Stand to your guns, don’t waste your ammunition,” he cried. “See that every shot tells!” “Give it to them, boys; let us finish the business today!”13 He was the backbone.
He, too, was carried to the rear, and the bearers laid their commanding general down beneath a great live oak tree in the center of the field, just out of firing range. The surgeon summoned to his side could do nothing, but the dying Pakenham was able to utter one last command. For the ear of John Lambert, the only British major general left standing, Pakenham whispered, “Tell him . . . to send forward the reserves.” Pakenham had fallen, well short of New Orleans, and would die quietly on the battlefield within the hour. General Gibbs, though in evident agony, survived into the next day,
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Jackson initially gave Monroe an estimate of 1,500, a number he later revised to 2,600. The American losses on the Chalmette Plain on January 8 amounted to no more than a dozen dead. More would be killed on the west bank and in skirmishes in the days following, but the battle, indisputably, was a far greater disaster for the British. General Jackson’s earthworks and his unlikely melding of men had held. The city of New Orleans no longer feared a British invasion. For the nation, the meaning was larger, too. Against all odds, General Jackson had preserved the mouth of the Mississippi for
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“The sons of America,” he went on, “have given a new proof how impossible it is to conquer freemen fighting in defense of all that is dear to them. Henceforward we shall be respected by nations who, mistaking our character, had treated us with the utmost contumely and outrage. Years will continue to develop our inherent qualities, until, from being the youngest and the weakest, we shall become the most powerful nation in the universe.”
become a force to be reckoned with. General Andrew Jackson had melded a largely amateur force into an army, one that had vanquished a sophisticated force perhaps twice its size.
Jackson’s unyielding belief in the Republic and his instinct for democratic values help explain why later historians would refer to his time as the Age of Jackson.
As the year 1839 drew to a close, Andrew Jackson faced a decision. He held an invitation in his hand: with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the big battle just weeks away—the “silver jubilee” the organizers called it—the city he had saved invited him to return to celebrate his greatest military triumph.
having gone on to serve two terms as the nation’s seventh chief executive (1829–37) and to dominate his era, a common man, as Jackson saw himself, captaining the ship of state through enormous changes.
For one thing, his health was poor. He had spent the last five months of his presidency confined to his bed after almost dying following another of the periodic lung hemorrhages that plagued him (the lead ball from his 1806 duel remained embedded in his lung). In contemplating a long trip, he feared the physical challenges of a jarring ride in winter weather.
Davy Crockett became a U.S. congressman and later died at the Alamo, but not before writing his colorful, if rather folkloric, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834).
In the end, though, everyone understood—then and now—that Jackson was the man of the hour, the man who met his moment standing atop his earthworks. He was ready to fight to the last man, to give his own life, and to burn the city of New Orleans before surrendering it to the British.
But General Jackson knew better: he had saved New Orleans; if he had not, the postwar history of his nation would have been different indeed.
