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

by Brian Kilmeade

When he discovered that promised shipments of ammunition had not arrived from the city, he summoned Governor Claiborne, the man charged with providing munitions. Jackson warned the intimidated Claiborne, “By the Almighty God, if you do not send me balls and powder instantly, I shall chop off your head, and have it rammed into one of those fieldpieces.”35

The total came to almost 5,000 men.

The new waterway at the Villeré plantation had broken through to the river two days before, making possible the planned launch of Thornton and his men the previous night.

Thanks to the failure of Admiral Cochrane’s design for a temporary lock between the river and the bayou, most of the British ships had grounded in the canal.

less than two-thirds of the boats, many of them small, had made it through.

After almost a fortnight of delays and setbacks, Pakenham rejected the idea.

It will cost more men, [but] the assault must be made.”

three hundred bundles of sugarcane and sixteen ladders from an earthen redoubt partway to the American line. On

Barely a half hour before dawn, a dismayed General Gibbs discovered the blunder. Without the ladders, Gibbs’s men had no way to scale Jackson’s wall.

One man in front fired, then fell back to reload, making way for the next soldier to empty his gun into the mass of oncoming humanity.

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, before joining Pakenham in death.25

The attack across the river—Pakenham’s best hope, his only hope—occurred altogether too late.

boatmen’s complete failure to anticipate the strong Mississippi currents.

the redcoats had a four-mile march north toward their objective—and

Patterson, watching from his redoubt a few hundred yards away, recognized that the tide ran against him. Before the British force could reach him, he ordered his men to spike the guns.

seventeen hundred and eighty-one officers and soldiers, had fallen in a few minutes.”

The American losses on the Chalmette Plain on January 8 amounted to no more than a dozen dead.

General Jackson and his multiethnic, multigenerational army made up of people from every American social class and occupation had come together to do what Napoleon had failed to do: destroy the finest fighting force in the world. Thanks to Jackson’s military instincts, his impeccable planning, and his ferocious leadership, America had prevailed in the most important fight of its young life.

after nine days of indecisive artillery exchanges (the British fired more than a thousand rounds, killing just one American and wounding seven) Cochrane’s ships sailed away on the night of January 17. Fort St. Philip was pockmarked but intact.2

Although the American commander, Colonel William Lawrence, ordered his guns to fire on the British, they would not be deterred: by Saturday, the muzzles of four eighteen-pounders, two six-pounders, a pair of howitzers, and eight mortars were pointed at the fort. The British were ready. Before opening fire, however, Captain Harry Smith, under a flag of truce, carried a demand from his commanding officer, General Lambert, to Colonel Lawrence. His message in short: Surrender your fort.

Lawrence saw no alternative but to surrender.

In a matter of hours, however, the momentum shifted for good when, the next day, the British frigate HMS Brazen sailed into view. Fresh from an Atlantic crossing, she brought word of the Treaty of Ghent. Cochrane and his generals were ordered to end hostilities and prepare to sail home.

all-important Treaty of Ghent,

“There shall be a firm and universal Peace between His Britannic Majesty and the United States.”

Mr. Madison submitted the document to the Senate without delay. It was read aloud three times to the assembled body, and some senators wondered at the absence of any reference to impressment and the harassment of neutral trade, two of the main reasons for declaring war two and a half years earlier. Nor was there mention of navigation of the Mississippi. Nevertheless, when the key question was asked in proper parliamentary fashion—“Will the Senate advise and consent to the ratification of this treaty?”—the resulting vote was for ratification, thirty-five

five yeas, no one...

At last, on March 8, 1815, having received “persuasive evidence” of ratification of the treaty, Jackson released the reins. He dismissed the Louisiana militia and, after official word arrived, on March 13, he issued orders for Generals Carroll and Coffee to march their commands without delay back home. He expressed his thanks and admiration.

The brilliance of the victory in New Orleans overshadowed the dark humiliation of the burning of the public buildings in Washington; in time, with the blurring of memory, the nation’s recollections of the war would center on Andrew Jackson. Mr. Madison’s War would become General Jackson’s War. He was remembered as having restored America’s honor.

General Andrew Jackson had melded a largely amateur force into an army, one that had vanquished a sophisticated force perhaps twice its size. His attack on December 23 had been a masterstroke, one that stunned the British and bought Jackson and the defenders of New Orleans essential time.

serve two terms as the nation’s seventh chief executive (1829–37)

Jackson continued to do his bit—and then some—after the war. His defeat of the Creeks had already cleared a great swath of territory for settlement, but in 1818, pursuing the Seminoles at President Monroe’s orders, he wrested Florida from Spain, and then served as its territorial governor.

1823, as a U.S. senator from Tennessee, he had been positioned to run for the presidency. Though he won the most electoral votes in the four-man race of 1824, his lack of a plurality meant the contest was decided in the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams prevailed. The vote left a sour taste in Jackson’s mouth: another of the candidates, the former Ghent negotiator Henry Clay, had thrown his support to Adams and soon thereafter been named secretary of state.

The 1828 election ended differently when changes in voter eligibility (property requirements for suffrage were eliminated in most states, quadrupling the electorate) helped Jackson prevail.

On the other side of the line, Sir John Lambert and John Keane—unlike the deceased generals Pakenham and Gibbs—made it back to Europe alive. Both joined the Duke of Wellington in defeating Napoleon once more, this time at the Battle of Waterloo, on June 18, 1815.