Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle That Shaped America's Destiny

by Brian Kilmeade

In Jackson’s view, the enemy’s ultimate objective was clear enough: the British wanted New Orleans. Anyone who could read a map knew that by capturing the city, His Majesty’s forces would consolidate control of the North American continent from the Gulf Coast to Canada—and that could end the United States’ westward expansion.

Two days after the Creek treaty was signed, Jackson and his little army set off toward the Gulf of Mexico, marching as quickly as they could. The new reality of a British threat fed an existing fear: those who read the papers already knew the British could be ruthless. The previous summer the Crown’s men, rampaging through the Virginia countryside, committed terrible atrocities. One woman seeking to escape was said to have been “pursued up to her waist in the water, and dragged on shore by ten or twelve of these ruffians, who satiated their desires upon her, after pulling off her clothes, stockings, shoes, etc.”21

Yet even for the most powerful military in the world, an attack on New Orleans would be no simple matter. The Royal Navy might lead the siege, but to get to New Orleans its ships would have to sail a hundred miles up the Mississippi. Along the way, they would face American guns, changing tides, and several sharp turns in the river, making for a slow and dangerous approach to their objective. Though he had no naval experience, Jackson understood these obstacles and guessed that the British would avoid a river assault. Assuming the British would launch an overland attack against the city, Jackson considered his possibilities. The Mississippi delta south of New Orleans, a swampy morass of bayous, would be practically impossible to march across. And the British had no easy land access from the north. Thus, Jackson and his advisers concluded that their enemy would come from the east.

If the British were to send a land force from the east, where would they land? Jackson believed that the most likely site was Mobile, a city 150 miles to the east, with its own protected bay. When, on August 22, he rode into Mobile with his army, he was already thinking one move ahead. Although he had never visited New Orleans, he would, somehow, find a way to protect this city unlike any other.

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.

Though isolated amid low-lying mudflats, in a climate where withering tropical heat and violent hurricanes were normal, 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.

When war was declared in 1812, Louisiana had no long-term allegiance to the United States, but the British increasingly interfered with trade, and goods quickly accumulated at the city’s docks, generating profits for no one. Louisiana’s governor, William Charles Cole Claiborne, had been dispatched from Washington—first appointed to the post by President Jefferson and then elected after statehood—but the city’s powerful Creoles, as white New Orleanians of Spanish or French heritage were called, had little respect for him.

This was amply demonstrated by the fact that a brash band of privateers—some called them pirates—sold their contraband openly in New Orleans, flouting the law. They paid no customs duties on the coffee, linens, silks, iron, mahogany, spices, and wine they smuggled into the city using hollowed-out cypress canoes and other flat-bottomed boats adapted to the marshy waterscape of the delta.

The London Times stated in its pages the position that many Britons held: “Mr. Madison’s dirty swindling maneuvers in respect to Louisiana and the Floridas remain to be punished.”2 A few members of Parliament even called for New Orleans to be handed over to Great Britain. The dutiful Gallatin took notes of the chatter and wrote home, relaying it to Secretary of State James Monroe. “To use their own language,” he warned, “[the British] mean to inflict on America a chastisement that will teach her that war is not to be declared against Great Britain with impunity.”3 Gallatin added ominously that he had heard whispers that a force of between fifteen and twenty thousand men was on its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Their aim was clearly to deliver punishment, not peace, to the colonies they’d lost thirty-one years before.

Why are there so many delays in sending a team to talk peace? Tall and congenial, Henry Clay was a hail-fellow-well-met sort of man who liked his liquor. He could walk into a roomful of strangers and depart with new friends, even if, as a demon cardplayer, he had managed to take some of their money. Now, in Ghent, those same gambling instincts put Minister Clay on edge. He could smell risk when he encountered it, and he had come to think the British were slow to open the treaty talks for a reason: With a large force from Great Britain attacking the United States, mustn’t the odds favor the superior British troops?

When, at last, the Britons did sit down to present their terms of peace on the afternoon of August 8, 1814, at one o’clock, the aura of doom darkened for Madison’s diplomats.

In the days that followed, the British and American negotiators continued to meet and exchange notes about possible treaty terms. But they made little progress. As Clay wrote home to Secretary of State Monroe ten days into the talks, “I am inclined to think . . . that their policy is to consume as much time as possible . . . [in] the hope that they will strike some signal blow, during the present campaign.”

As the peace negotiators talked across the Atlantic, an express messenger arrived in Mobile, bringing Jackson bad news. His hunch had been correct: the British were indeed planning to land along the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans. The dispatch Jackson received at five o’clock on the evening of August 27, 1814, reported that three warships, the HMS Hermes, Carron, and Sophie from the Royal Navy station at Bermuda, had already landed a small force of men and armaments at Pensacola in Spanish Florida.

A large invasion seemed likely; another source, this one writing from Havana, reported that a loose-lipped British officer had bragged about a plan to capture Pensacola, to move on to Mobile, then to march overland to New Orleans.

That night Jackson put pen to paper, writing home to Tennessee, asking to be reinforced with the entire state militia. In particular, he wanted General Coffee and his cavalry. He wanted Cherokees and artillerymen, and he needed transport and supplies.

But Jackson couldn’t afford to sit around waiting for reinforcements: his first task would be to get Fort Bowyer into fighting shape. Because of its location thirty miles south, at the opening of Mobile Bay, Fort Bowyer would be the first line of defense if British ships moved on Mobile.

On August 24, the British played their hand: At the little town of Bladensburg, eight miles from Washington, the British attacked. The town’s American defenders—a mix of militiamen from Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis, almost none of whom were in uniform—were no match for the men in bright red coats.

Led by the British general Robert Ross and Sir George Cockburn, a hot-tempered admiral in the Royal Navy, the enemy sliced through the line of intimidated militiamen, captured Bladensburg, and headed straight for Washington.

Before fleeing, the First Lady and others had sought to save a few precious relics—a portrait of Washington, a copy of the Declaration of Independence in the Library of Congress—but a few hours later, after stopping for an afternoon dinner, the British marched into a nearly empty Washington. Then shots rang out, as hidden snipers fired into the ranks of the 150-man British force.

When the British arrived there, they found Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s dinner table still set, the aroma of cooking food still wafting up from the recently abandoned kitchen. They drank the president’s wine and ate a generous meal before building bonfires in the rooms and retreating to the street to watch the mansion burn. By

The British made a point of sacking the offices of the Washington newspaper the National Intelligencer, building a bonfire to burn its type and presses. The Intelligencer was known for printing stories critical of Cockburn, and he was determined to teach its editor and readers a lesson. “Be sure all the c’s are destroyed,” he is said to have told his men, “so that they can’t abuse my name anymore.”

In the end, it wasn’t the brave efforts of the American people that put out the fires or stopped the destruction. Only the arrival, with miraculous timing, of a powerful storm prevented more of the city from being damaged by the flames.

Although the British returned to their ships several days later, President James Madison and the U.S. Congress were left homeless. The attack tore the fabric of the nation, too, with hopes of a peace deal growing dim. Many of the northern states had refused to go to war; the Eastern Seaboard was ill equipped to fight off its attackers, and when it came to protecting the new nation’s capital, no one had fought.

The events of August 24 also meant that when Jackson’s dispatch arrived in Washington, it didn’t land on John Armstrong’s desk. That desk was gone—the building the War and Treasury Departments shared had also been torched—and John Armstrong had been dismissed.

the national government was struggling to survive and reestablish itself.

Meanwhile, one of the first British ships to arrive in the Gulf of Mexico was about to make its presence felt.

On the morning of September 2, 1814, the British Sophie sailed into view, sailing directly for the shallow channel that led to Barataria Bay, south of the city of New Orleans.

Since 1805, the island of Grand Terre had been home to the men who thought of themselves as coastal privateers. They had fled the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo following the slave rebellion that led to the founding of the independent nation of Haiti.

The British had arrived in Barataria Bay to seek a parley. Like Jackson, the British understood that they would need local knowledge of the New Orleans landscape in order to take the city.

Who better to provide it? With their fleet of perhaps thirty vessels, the pirates routinely attacked shipping in the Gulf, taking as prizes passing merchant ships flying the British and especially the Spanish flag. After capturing their prey—their artillery was considerable, their daring greater—the pirates would disappear into the sanctuary of the bayous, beneath the canopy of live oaks laden with Spanish moss.

the pirates in their brightly colored pantaloons and blouses stood in contrast to the uniformed men of the Royal Navy. Knives, cutlasses, and pistols hung from their belts, and bandannas covered their heads. These men deserved the name that Andrew Jackson soon coined for them: they were “piratical banditti.”

To the visitor’s surprise, the elegant man identified himself, speaking in his native French. “Monsieur,” he said, “I am Lafitte.” He beckoned them to follow.

Jean Lafitte’s comfortable house had a broad covered gallery, a deep porch in the Caribbean style, which looked out on the Gulf.

They contained the terms of a British proposal. “I call on you, with your brave followers, to enter into the service of Great Britain, in which you shall have the rank of a captain,” Lafitte read. “Your ships and vessels [will] be placed under the orders of the commanding officer on this station.”11 Lafitte and his men were being invited—or were they being forced?—into British service.

Lockyer assured Lafitte the offer was a generous one. For his cooperation in fighting the United States, Lafitte would be paid $30,000 in cash.

Next Lafitte gained confirmation of the rumor he had already heard: yes, New Orleans was to be attacked by the British.

The message was clear: Join us or we will destroy you.

He needed to consider the proposal before him, he said. His habit of closing one eye when he spoke suited his words; he could not, he explained, give an immediate answer.

Good to his word, Jean Lafitte saw his visitors off the following morning and, after their departure, he drafted a formal response. He opened his letter with an apology for being unable to give an immediate answer, but the pirate leader stood firm: He needed time to decide. After taking two weeks to put his affairs in order,

Lafitte wrote a second letter, this one addressed to a trusted friend in New Orleans. Writing as a “true American,” Lafitte confided that he wished to be of service to his adopted country. “I make you the depository of the secret on which perhaps depends the tranquillity of our country,”12 he wrote, before recounting the story of the arrival of the British ship at Grand Terre.

Lafitte had decided to play the double agent, offering the Americans fair warning of the British plan. His third letter of the morning was addressed to Governor William Claiborne. “I tender my services to defend [Louisiana],” he told Claiborne. “I am the stray sheep, wishing to return to the sheepfold.”13 Whether General Jackson wanted the help of the piratical banditti or not, Lafitte had just declared himself at his service in the fight to save New Orleans.

More than a week would pass before Andrew Jackson learned of the British visit to Barataria. He was 150 miles away in Mobile—and worrying about the security of that port. For him the stakes were clear: if he didn’t hold Mobile, the British would have a clear road to New Orleans.

It was too late for Jackson to inspect Mobile’s defenses. “A number of British armed ships . . . lay off the bar, and from their maneuvering and sounding, etc., showed a design of attacking that fort, or passing it for Mobile.”1

At this point, all he could do was pray that the little fort withstood the attack and prepare Mobile to face the British if it didn’t.

Unknown to Jackson, a small force of 72 Royal Marines and 130 Indian recruits had landed nine miles east of Fort Bowyer three days earlier. Armed with a cannon and a howitzer, they planned to attack the fort from behind, while four warships, mounted with seventy-eight guns, would attack from the sea. Even now, the Hermes, the Carron, and the sloops Sophie and Anaconda were sailing around Mobile Point, getting into position.

Map attached

At the center of the approaching British land force were Creeks and Choctaws the British had recruited as their allies.

The British veterans expected Fort Bowyer to fall as easily as Washington had three weeks earlier. But as the combined force marched boldly toward Fort Bowyer, Lawrence’s men dampened their hopes. A barrage of cannon shot pinned the British down, halting their advance. As the ground force took cover and attempted to regroup, Lawrence concentrated on the seaside battle.

with a lucky shot, an American cannonball tore through the anchor cable that was holding the Hermes in firing position. Suddenly cut loose, the ship drifted helplessly toward the fort, carried by the incoming current. While sailors frantically tried to get the sails to catch the falling wind and carry the Hermes out of range of American guns, shots thudded into her hull and shredded the ship’s sails and rigging.

The Hermes had run aground. Trapped just six hundred yards from Fort Bowyer’s guns, the ship was now an easy—and stationary—target.

Thirty miles away, the earth trembled. Feeling the ground shake in Mobile, Andrew Jackson looked south toward Fort Bowyer and there, at the horizon line, he saw the Hermes light the sky.