27 The Way of Andrew Jackson
We arrived at the levee in New Orleans on a cool day in the middle of December after more than a month upon the rivers, and I looked with the keenest interest at this old French-Spanish city, but a few years ours and still foreign, for now I had made the semicircle of our great towns from Boston in the Northeast to New Orleans in the Southwest, and all had been much alike, except this, which was different and new to me in everything. I saw before me a broad levee shaded with trees, with the great cross of the cathedral showing beyond, while along the river front rose handsome houses, homes of brick, some several stories high and standing in gardens surrounded by high stone or concrete walls with iron lattice gates. It was green and fresh with the roses blooming in winter, and the houses and the foliage and the perfumes were very welcome to us who had spent many weeks upon swollen and muddy rivers.
There came to meet us a great crowd, dark in complexion, clothed in bright colours, and talking much in foreign languages, and though their speech was strange, the accents were warm and friendly, and we knew that we were welcome. It was the Creole population, the descendants of the French and Spanish, with their many mixtures, who bore themselves in the defence in a manner worthy of the French of Henry of Navarre and the Spanish of Gonsalvo de Cordova. We were not a pretty lot, brown as Indians, in wild attire and plastered with the mud of the Mississippi, but they received us as if we had come in brand new uniforms covered with gold lace and with bands playing, and our hearts grew warm.
When we disembarked from the boats we fell into line and marched away to our quarters, glad to feel our feet upon earth again, though it is none too solid at New Orleans. Some of the handsome Creole ladies waved fans and bouquets of flowers at us from their little balconies, and more than one lank six-foot Tennesseean tried to smile back, but grinned. The Lord knows we were not beautiful, but we did the best we could, and surely woman can ask no more. One of our men had his eyes on a black-haired girl just peeping over the top of her fan when some one on the sidewalk called out to him:
“Keep in your place, you there! Attend to your duty! You’ve come for fighting, not courting!”
I saw well the officer who called out, for he was not six feet from me, a tall, thin old man, with a long, sharp face, over which was spread a network of seams and wrinkles, with a deep cut, as if from a sword, nestling on one side. His chin projected, his complexion was sallow, and a little leather cap did not conceal the mop of iron-gray hair which rose up straight and threatening on his head and seemed to match the fierce bright eyes shaded by heavy brows. His clothing was mean and faded—a short, blue Spanish cloak, tight trousers of which I would have been ashamed, they were so frayed and worn, and high-top boots, rusty and covered with mud.
The Tennesseean who had been rebuked was angry. Every Western man is as good as the President and does not like to be abused, and he was about to reply in a manner that would not have been polite, when Courtenay jerked him by the arm and whispered:
“Hush! Not a word! That’s General Jackson!”
When the general came the next day to see his “boy heroes of the Creek war,” as he called Mercer and Courtenay and the others who had been with him in those campaigns, I was presented to him and at once submitted to the charm and courtliness of his manner, which were so marked, despite his backwoods appearance, as every one who knew him will testify. I am not an unqualified admirer of General Jackson, and I was always for Clay instead of Jackson for the presidency, as I do not believe in electing soldiers to a civilian office, but I think that he represented some of the strongest, sanest, and most moral elements in our population, and at New Orleans he was the right man in the right place—alert, far-seeing, and with the will of the great Napoleon himself. He treated me with much consideration, and asked me some questions.
“You were at Washington, Lieutenant Courtenay tells me,” he said.
“Yes, I fought there.”
“You fought there! I understand there was no fighting at Washington; all running.”
“I stayed with Barney’s marines.”
“They did their duty. I hope that all of us here may do as well.”
With that he dismissed us, and we used a little leisure to wander over the strange, mossy, and beflowered city, with its high-walled and window-barred houses, and to make friends with the lively Creoles and San Domingans who were to fight by our side. But this had to be done quickly, for the British threat was growing more ominous. Their fleet lay at the entrance to Lake Borgne, which is northeast of New Orleans, and a powerful force of barges and launches crossing the lake had already destroyed our six little gunboats in a desperate fight, in which our men, though defeated by overwhelming numbers, behaved with a courage and tenacity which had shown the British that though it was but a few miles to New Orleans it was a long road to travel. But we in the city, who knew the slenderness of the defences and how few were the soldiers, scarcely dared to hope. Coffee’s men were there, the eight hundred Tennessee Indian fighters whom Jackson had summoned at the first alarm from the Indian country, coming eight hundred miles without a stop, the last hundred and fifty, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, in two days, a record which, I think, has not been equalled even on the open fields and hard roads of Europe; but even these and Carroll’s Tennesseeans and the Creoles and the San Domingans and the French refugees and the free blacks made but a few thousand badly armed men against the magnificently equipped fleet, with its twenty thousand soldiers and sailors, which the British had at the entrance to the lake or on it. So I prayed now in my heart for the Kentuckians who were afloat somewhere on the Mississippi, and the general swore at their tardiness with violence and profusion, for he was a very proficient man with oaths, which, I have heard from many authorities, are quite as effective in war as prayer. But neither oaths nor prayers brought the laggard Kentuckians; the muddy river flowed past, but no soldiers came on its current, and there was abuse of my Kentucky brethren, to which I listened not always in silence, for I knew that if they were slow it was not their fault, and I reminded those around me that in all the war Kentucky had given her blood more freely than any other State.
Whether help came or not there were no sluggards in New Orleans, and the work of defence went on by day and by night. At Washington there had been chaos; here were order, discipline, purpose, and I saw that to fight one must have soldiers, and to lead them one must have generals. There was no marching to and fro here, no waste of energy, but each man knew what to do and did it, for infused into all were the spirit and iron will of Jackson, one man dominating an army and a city, filling both with his own courage and energy.
“You should have seen him in the Indian country,” said Courtenay to me. “He was sick near to death there, bent double with terrible internal pains, but he was the general just the same. By day we carried him in an old chair, on which he sat astride with his stomach pressed over the back, for only in that way could he endure his suffering, and at night we bent down a sapling and he hung himself across it and slept by snatches; but whether by day or night he commanded everything and forgot nothing. That is the man who leads us; and we have two armies—ourselves the one, and Jackson the other.”
So we drilled on from day to day, preparing defences, ransacking the town for arms and ammunition, and trying to divine the British plans. It was now that the situation of New Orleans, amid a network of river and swamp and lake and bayou, was its greatest advantage, for the British, despite overwhelming force, were compelled to move slowly, and their fleet, though it had brought the army to Louisiana, could not reach New Orleans. All these things made for time, and time was what we needed most of all things.
On the third day after my arrival I was sent with a small detachment through the woods and swamps and around the great curve of Lake Borgne to see what the British fleet was about. It was a long journey through quaking and malarious swamps and dark wet woods and across creeks and sluggish bayous, but we remembered Coffee’s Indian fighters who had marched from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, one hundred and fifty miles, in two days, and at last, well coated with slime and mud, we came out at the southeastern corner of Louisiana and looked at the great British fleet as it lay anchored at the mouth of the lake, which was too shallow for the navigation of the frigates and ships of the line.
We were only six in number, and, having made our way through a marshy stretch of ground to the shore, we lay hidden there in the mud and swamp grass, where we could easily see the fleet of our enemies.
It was the most formidable armament that my eyes had ever rested upon, and as far as the spy-glass I had brought with me would carry I saw British sails and British sails. There lay the ships in the harbour of Ship Island, in the pass between Ship Island and Cat Island, and on to Chandeleur Island; ships of the line, frigates, sloops, brigs and transports, the Union Jack floating over all—an assembled power which made me sick at heart, remembering the ragged and half-armed little army of a few thousand men which I had left behind.
I put my little telescope to my eyes again and the ships came nearer, I could read their names. There in the centre was the Tonnant, a ship of the line of eighty guns, taken from the French by Nelson at the Nile, and over her flew the flag of the commander of the fleet, Vice-Admiral Cochrane, the man who had given the order to lay waste the American coast and destroy every town that could be reached, and had seen it carried out; with him was Admiral Codrington, destined to win fame years after in Navarino Bay. Beside the Tonnant lay the Royal Oak of seventy-four guns, with another admiral on board; and still farther on the Ramillies, a seventy-four, commanded by Sir Thomas Hardy, who received the dying Nelson in his arms at Trafalgar; and then the Asia and the Armide and the Sea Horse of the same size, and more frigates and sloops and transports than I could count. They carried the British, fresh from triumphs in Spain and France, and that army, too, which had made its victorious raid on Washington, expecting to repeat its exploit here.
As I looked my heart swelled with a sense of anger, indignation, and injustice—injustice because everything had been made so easy for them, so hard for us. They had come in overwhelming numbers in their great ships as comfortably as travellers on a pleasure voyage. They were accounted the best troops in Europe, they had served in many campaigns, knew all the tricks and ways of war, and were led by skilled and able generals. We were but a few, none well armed, some not armed at all, clad, many of us, in our homespun and tanned deerskin, led by generals who had fought only against the Indians and knew no civilized foe, and we had come a vast distance on a journey longer and far harder than theirs to defend the country that was ours.
But there was a sense of anger even greater and beyond that, for in advance they had detached the Southwest from us and made Louisiana a dependency of the British crown. On those ships came a complete staff of civil officials, appointed and classified for the government of Louisiana—so sure were they of its conquest—revenue collectors, clerks, printers, printing presses, stationery marked and stamped, all the paraphernalia of office. A new government, measured, cut to order, ticketed, and pigeonholed had been packed aboard the ships, and there was nothing more to do but to land and set it to working. Castlereagh, the British representative with the allied armies, had said days before in Paris, occupied by the victorious allies: “I expect at this moment that most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans, and have command of all the rivers of the Mississippi Valley, and that the Americans are now little better than prisoners in their own country.” Bonaparte had just been sent to Elba, and the British had been the chief cause of his going there. Flushed with such a triumph, they thought little of the Americans, who were without military resources and had sought to found a peaceful nation. It was the knowledge of such things that made my feelings bitter as I looked at their powerful fleet.
Though December, the sunshine was warm and bright. The water rippled gently away before a light wind from the west in streaks of silver and blue and gold; the white sails of the ships gleamed like snow, rays of sunshine flashed across the red uniforms and gold lace of the officers who walked the decks, and the murmur which many thousand men always make, even at their quietest, came over the waters to us. Three or four bands were playing too, and theirs were conquering airs.
For over an hour we lay there and watched them, and then we saw many men embarking in boats and launches and passing up the lake, of which they had already obtained command. Boat after boat was filled, and I guessed that it was a movement of importance. One could obtain little information by lying there in the mud, and we rose to retreat, hoping to find some wandering fisherman or hunter who could give us facts worth our knowing.
I suggested to the men that we divide and meet again at a certain spot that we had noticed as we came, about three miles back, as in this manner we would have six chances to one before of finding information, and we soon lost sight of one another among the banks and swamp grass. I turned northward. I was tired of wading in mud and stepping on moss through which my feet went as if it had been thin ice, and the ground seemed to grow firmer as I advanced. I passed out of the swamp and into a belt of thick woods, which I crossed in a few minutes and saw beyond a small clearing with a hut in the centre. This was was the place for my fisherman or hunter; this was sure to be his house, and I might find him at home. I hurried forward, and as I stepped from the trees some one hurled himself upon me. I saw the red of an English uniform, and having no time to draw a weapon, I grasped him by the shoulders, as his body struck me, and threw him into the air with a violent effort of my strength. It was lucky for him that an arm of the marsh protruded into that clearing, for he struck in the soft and oozing mud, squawking like a goose, and stuck there. But when I turned to see if any one else was near I found myself covered by the muskets of four English soldiers.
“You’d better surrender,” said one, “or we’ll blow your head off..”
Certainly they held the advantage, all the advantages in fact; if I had only been a little closer I might have made a fight even against them all, but any hostile movement now was sure death. It was a moment of the bitterest disappointment to me to be caught so in a swamp on a petty scouting expedition, when I had been building great hopes of achievement, but there was nothing to do except to yield.
“Very well, I give up,” I said, and I knew I said it sullenly.
“Who are you?” asked the man who had spoken. He seemed to be a sergeant or corporal.
“An American soldier,” I replied. I said it with as much dignity as I could muster, though I am afraid my muddy and bedraggled appearance was against me.
“Indeed! You are frank,” he said, looking at me in a curious way that I did not understand. “Come into the cabin, the major may want to talk to you.”