1815: The Battle Of New Orleans

This channel is part of the History Hit Network. 1815 threatened to be a fateful year in a world that had been ravaged by conflict for nearly 20 years. In Europe, the great powers were poised dramatically for the final cataclysmic showdown of the Napoleonic War, Waterloo. In the United States of America, another war was about to reach its climax. As British troops assaulted Baltimore, an American named Francis Scott Key claimed that through the rocket's red glare, he could still see the American flag waving. In doing so, he created an American legend that would one day be incorporated into his country's national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner. But now, as the iron round shot whistled through the air, a new sound rose above the thunder of the guns, the rhythmic rattle of drums, and the wild skirl of the Highland bagpipes as the British regiments advanced. The Battle of New Orleans had begun. The Battle of New Orleans was the culminating struggle in the Anglo-American War of 1812, a war which need never have started, and one which had been concluded by a peace treaty before the battle was fought, though its participants had no way of knowing this. Its origins lay in the War of Revolution over 30 years before. That war effectively ended with the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in Virginia, although it took two more years to settle the peace treaty. Under the terms of the Peace of Paris, Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States of America. At that time, the states were still a fairly loose confederation of the former 13 colonies who had revolted against British rule in 1775. Conspicuously absent from the roll call of the new states were those making up the larger part of British North America, and especially upper and lower Canada. Canada was sparsely populated and economically backward in comparison with the prosperous English colonies to the south, but it also formed a dangerous strategic backdoor to those colonies. For that reason, British and American troops had wrested control of Canada from France during the long French and Indian War in the 1750s and 60s. But the threat was revived during the Revolutionary War when the British themselves used Canada as a springboard for the invasion of America's northern regions. General Burgoyne's ill-fated invasion of upper New York State and the Hudson Valley amply confirmed the danger, demonstrating the ease by which an invasion could be launched from Canada, even though he was eventually defeated by the Americans at Saratoga. The War of 1812 was a war fought to keep America in the ring, as it were. See, to score one victory over a European power, as America had done in the Revolutionary War, wasn't enough. There is a myth that America after the Revolutionary War became an isolated power, a large power but one removed from Europe. That was not true for two reasons. First of all, America depended upon its economic lifeline through trade with Europe. It had to take exports such as rum and sugar and re-export it to the European market. If Britain wanted to, through the use of the Royal Navy and through other sanctions, it could try to choke off that American trade with powers such as France. History Hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans. Our goal is to bring you award-winning documentaries that cover the events and figures that have shaped our world all in one place. Travel with us to the fascinating world of prehistoric Scotland, or uncover the lives of the people who called Pompeii home. We also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast network. Sign up now for a free trial and Timeline fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code TIMELINE at checkout. Secondly, America could not be isolated from Europe because Canada was to its north. Britain still maintained quite a formidable presence. So the War of 1812 was fought, in American eyes at least, to prove that they were a power that was there to stay. That even if they weren't quite as powerful militarily, economically or politically as Britain, that on the other hand they weren't going to be subordinates economically to be pulled to and fro by the whims of London. The Canadian question therefore loomed large in American politics. There was still the emotive question of incorporating the lost colony into the United States. There was the continuing threat that one day a British army would again attack by way of the St. Lawrence and Hudson Valleys. The direct causes of the War of 1812 were, however, to be In Europe, the Napoleonic Wars were raging and as a matter of course, the Royal Navy mounted a blockade of French ports. Napoleon retaliated by imposing his continental system on his conquered territories and allies. Under this system, the maritime nations of Europe were forbidden to trade with Britain. In the end, a number of countries revolted against the system and thus paved the way for the Corsican Emperor's downfall. In the meantime, it also provided great opportunities for neutral American shipping. This in turn led to the Royal Navy becoming increasingly more aggressive towards American vessels. Diplomatic incidents were therefore inevitable and made all the worse by the Royal Navy's attempts to recover any deserters from their own ranks found on American ships. Eventually, realizing the strength of American feeling on the issue, the British government revoked the orders in council, empowering the Navy to stop and search neutral vessels flying the Stars and Stripes. But it was too late. Before the news could cross the Atlantic, war had been declared and American troops were pouring across the Canadian border. There were two battles in the War of 1812. There was the battle on land, but there was the battle at sea. In fact, one can even argue that the War of 1812 was caused by that question of who controlled the oceans and who controlled the lakes on the North American continent. For example, one of the issues for which America supposedly fought the war was to prevent the impressment, the forced detention of sailors off American ships by the British who would then use them in the service of the Royal Navy. When the war actually started, many people in London thought that the Royal Navy would repel the American threat, much as it had repelled the Dutch and the French and other European powers in previous decades. In fact, the Americans fought at least a standoff, and they did it through two ways. First of all, they did it through raids, through ships which we call privateers, which were loosely attached to the main American military machine. By using such hit-and-run raids, the Americans could always threaten to cut off British supplies to the North American continent and, on the other hand, break the British blockade and ship their own goods to Europe. The second dimension of the naval battle, however, was much more organized. The Americans finally had to have a showdown with the British to prove that they were a naval power in their own right. They did that through two naval battles which were significant. The first took place on the Great Lakes, and Commodore Oliver Perry, who an American legend is known for the slogan, Don't Give Up the Ship, fought at least a standoff, if not the victory that he later claimed against British forces. More importantly, the Americans won the Battle of Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain, not well known to many people, but at that time on the American continent, it was vital for whoever controlled Lake Champlain controlled access to New York, to Vermont, and from there to New England. And the British hope of victory over the Americans turned upon convincing New England to join forces with the British against their former country. When the Americans repelled that threat on Lake Champlain, leading to charges of court-martial against British commanders for incompetence, they fought the decisive naval battle. They didn't vanquish the Royal Navy, but they at least put the Royal Navy in a position where it could no longer proceed with impunity against the Americans. On land, however, the war proceeded less smoothly for the United States, and in 1814, upon the defeat of the Emperor Napoleon, thousands of British troops suddenly became available for service in North America. Accordingly, six more regular battalions were allocated for amphibious operations, and on the 19th of August, 1814, a small British army led by Major General Robert Ross landed in Maryland and utterly defeated an American army at Bladensburg five days later. The victory would leave open the road to the American capital, Washington. Within the War of 1812, there were a number of commanders who fought on different fronts. See, the War of 1812, in fact, was more a series of skirmishes that took place. So you would have local commanders who fought in New England, in New York, and in Vermont. You had commanders who fought in the West, in Michigan, for example, and you had a series of British commanders who led their commands from Canada. There really wasn't one person who distinguished himself in the battle, in the command between 1812 and 1815, because there was really no large-scale battle which involved hundreds or thousands of casualties until the very end of the conflict. Serving on Ross's staff was an officer of the famous 95th Rifles named Harry Smith. His memoirs include a valuable record of the New Orleans campaign. Suffice it to say, we licked the Yankees and took all of their guns, with a loss of upwards of 300 men. We then entered Washington for the barbarous purpose of destroying the city. The Admiral would have burnt the whole place, but Ross would only consent to the burning of the public buildings. One of them was the White House, and afterwards, Harry Smith was sent home with dispatches announcing the triumph. There were two key military moments when the war took on its mythic importance. The first was in 1814. In the summer of 1814, the British succeeded in landing on the Atlantic seaboard and driving up the Potomac River to take Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. So there's the famous story about how it wasn't a military leader, but a political leader who saved us. Not the president, James Madison, but his wife, Dolly Madison, who went into the White House and took silver and curtains and all the other valuables that she could escape with before the British ransacked the place. Three weeks later, however, General Ross was killed in an unsuccessful attempt to capture Baltimore. The British had taken Washington and had won their first victory, but even that wasn't enough to break the will of the Americans. They then proceeded to try to move on Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, one of the largest cities outside of New York and Philadelphia. Here they tried to take the city by defeating Fort McHenry through a naval assault. And it was that assault observed by an American prisoner of war, Francis Scott Key, which led to the writing of the national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. I won't bother to repeat the lines here. I've heard them far too many times. But by arguing that through the rocket's red glare he could see the American flag still waving, he gave America a moral victory at a time when Britain arguably was close to winning the war. That was the first major incident. By this time, however, plans were already afoot to seize yet another important and perhaps even richer port, New Orleans. The second one did involve a military leader, a man named Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee backwoodsman who by educating himself at night, much as Abraham Lincoln would later do, and by leading fights against the American Indians, built up the legend of the intelligent, if ill-educated, backwoodsman who was about to teach the British a lesson. He did that in January 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans in Louisiana. The British had moved the focus of their attacks from the eastern seaboard to trying to drive up the Mississippi River, breaking off, cutting off the Americans from any access to the lands west of that territory. Thanks to the British naval blockade, the warehouses of New Orleans were known to be packed with the two-year accumulation of sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Taken together with the ships idly tied up on its quays, the whole lot was confidently assessed to be worth no less than 20 million pounds. New Orleans was the state capital of Louisiana. As its name suggests, it was originally a part of New France and was retained even after the fall of Canada. However, at the end of the French and Indian War, the colony was handed over by France to Spain in compensation for her losses as France's ally. This was bitterly resented by the inhabitants, but in 1802, Louisiana briefly reverted to French rule before being sold on by Napoleon to the United States in the following year. It had become a state in its own right as recently as 1812, and notwithstanding the long years of Spanish rule, it still had a largely French population under Governor William Claiborne, numbering more than 20,000 people. Not surprisingly, their moral allegiance to the United States was more than a little dubious, and to make matters worse, the Spanish colonies of Florida and Texas lay on either side. This presented the Americans with a dual problem. One, they didn't trust the Spaniards, and two, they needed to deal with these Indians. The result was that Andrew Jackson, the American commander in the area, was far more preoccupied with the supposed threat from Spanish Florida than he was from a British seaborne attack. The result was that when the British attack did come in, most of the American regulars were actually on the Florida frontier, far away from Louisiana, and more particularly New Orleans, which was the primary mission to defend. Major General Robert Ross was originally designated to command the impending British assault, and a fresh brigade consisting of the 93rd Highlanders and two West India regiments was to be added to his command. Although prize money and economic goods were alluring to the British treasury, the instructions prepared for Ross stressed that his primary objective was to seize and hold the port initially only as a bargaining counter for peace negotiations with America. Nevertheless, if the French and Spanish inhabitants then shown any sign of revolting against American rule, he was to arm them and provide every assistance. Someone in London had evidently done his homework, but the control of the Mississippi was the key to the North American continent. If Louisiana could be detached from the United States, the westward expansion of those states might be blocked along the line of the Great River. With hopes riding so high on the New Orleans expedition, the news that Ross had been killed outside Baltimore came as a considerable blow. A replacement had to be found quickly. The man selected was the Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, but it took time for him to be transported across the Atlantic, and in the meantime Admiral Cochrane had already sailed for New Orleans with most of the British assault force. Pakenham had the advantage of being Wellington's brother-in-law, which didn't hurt when it came to be given staff appointments, and indeed the command of the British forces in North America after the unfortunate death of General Ross at the Battle of Bladensburg. Wellington said he may not be the brightest genius, but he is one of the best we have, and certainly his service record bears out the fact that he was a talented general. When General Picton had fallen ill in the Peninsular War, Pakenham had been chosen to take command of the 3rd Division, and had taken a decisive role in Wellington's great victory in 1812 at the Battle of Salamanca. In 1815 he became commander of the British forces in North America, and arrived in New Orleans with his forces having already arrived before him, to find himself up against a very dangerous opponent, Andrew Jackson. Edward Pakenham was a good, solid Peninsular War commander, one of Wellington's generals with a lot of experience. The problem was at New Orleans that him and his Peninsular veterans, which had embarked from Jamaica to land at New Orleans, were massively overconfident. There were at first sight three possible approaches to the city. The first was to enter the main channel of the river and sail nearly a hundred miles upstream. In peacetime this was practical enough with a good river pilot, but any attempt to force a passage in wartime would face man-made as well as natural dangers. Any British attack up the river was bound to fail. The second option was to go west and penetrate the maze of islands and shoals making up Lake Barataria, but even then the British army would still be on the wrong side of the mighty Mississippi. The third option was the most promising, and that was to hug the coast and approach the city first from the east by way of Lake Bourne, and then pass into Lake Pontchartrain, and so land just behind the city. It was the easiest and most direct route, and therefore the most obvious. General Andrew Jackson, the American officer sent to defend New Orleans, guessed the British plans and made his preparations accordingly. Unlike Pakenham, Jackson was not a professional soldier, although he had been a commander of militia troops since 1801, and only had transferred into the US regular army after his success against the Creek Indians in 1813. So Jackson was basically a talented amateur, yet unlike many militia generals he was very good at his job. He had tremendous leadership skills, he was able to get his men to follow him, wherever he wanted them to go, and they showed a tremendous loyalty to him throughout the New Orleans campaign. Andrew Jackson was probably the only American general of the entire American forces of the War of 1812 who emerged with any credit whatsoever. His force at New Orleans was a hodgepodge of a few regular units, lots of local militia units which he kept well to the rear, and a great deal of artillery which was manned primarily by pirates. However, while Jackson was busily fortifying the lake shore to the north of the city, the British Admiral Cochrane had a completely different plan in mind. The British agents had made contact with some Spanish fishermen in Lake Bourne, who knew of a shortcut, a narrow canal which led inland from their village to the plantation on the east bank of the Mississippi. On the night of the 22nd of December, a British force led by Major General John Keane passed through the canal, and just before dawn, found the American militia guarding the plantation sound asleep. In a matter of minutes, the militia were overcome, and the British landed on the banks of the Mississippi, just eight miles from their objective, New Orleans. Colonel Thornton of the 85th Foot urged Keane to attack the city at once before the Americans realized what was happening, but Keane decided to stay where he was. He had no artillery and no information about what might be waiting for him, but he did know that a second brigade was due to join him before midnight. Therefore, he decided to stay put and wait for them. Instead, it was the Americans who came looking for him. Andrew Jackson was an experienced Indian fighter who knew the importance of mounting a swift counter-attack. That night, he moved downriver with two regiments of regulars, a rifle company, a battalion of French-speaking volunteer militia, some Tennessee riflemen, and a small band of Choctaw Indians. Completing this cosmopolitan force were Major Louis d'Arquin's free men of color, another French-speaking battalion made up of mulattoes who had fled from the slave revolt on San Domingo. Jackson's plan was simple. Under cover of darkness, the USS Carolina would drop down the river and open fire on the British camp. At that signal, the rest of the Americans would move forward and attack anything that got in their way. Such an attack might have worked well enough in broad daylight, but in the darkness, it was asking for trouble. Nevertheless, at first things seemed to go well. The guns of the USS Carolina took General Keane and his men completely by surprise, and Jackson's regulars pushed back the British advanced pickets. Keane was stunned by the ferocity of the attack and seemed incapable of issuing effective orders, but Colonel Thornton formed his own 85th foot into line and, with the aid of the 95th rifles, mounted a counter-attack. This, in turn, came to a halt when the rifles blundered into d'Arquin's free men of color. In the darkness and at close range, the famous Baker rifle was actually at a disadvantage against the faster-firing smoothbore muskets. The rifle's commander, Major Mitchell, was taken prisoner and his men driven back. By now, the battle had ground to a complete halt, with both sides simply trading volleys with each other. Only Jackson had any artillery, and when a detachment of the 95th rifles began working along the riverbank towards his guns, he decided to withdraw while he was still ahead on points. Meanwhile, unbeknown to Jackson, on the left flank, units of Tennessee riflemen under Brigadier General Coffey and Major General Carroll had found no British troops facing them. Pushing blindly forward, they soon became scattered and lost. Eventually, most found themselves in the British camp, behind Thornton and his men. General Keene was at first unaware of the danger, though he acted decisively as soon as the alarm was raised. Headed by the 93rd Highlanders, a counter-attack tore into the disorganized Tennesseans and routed them. Uncertain where to commit them, Keene still had the fourth foot standing in reserve. Colonel Thornton now urged him to take advantage of the reinforcements and go on to the offensive, but he refused. The initial American attack had been so ferocious that he was convinced he was facing about 5,000 of them. He had no intention of mounting a head-on attack against such odds. The British Army, which fought the Battle of New Orleans, indeed throughout the Napoleonic Wars, sometimes has a rather odd impression of it. People seem to think it was led by aristocrats and composed of Wellington's famous phrase of scum of the earth. For most British officers, they were the sons of prosperous middle-class traders. In fact, the only real qualification to become an officer in the British Army was an ability to read and write. Basically, if you weren't fussy about which regiment you ended up in, it was very easy to get a commission in the British Army. As far as the rank and file were concerned, at the start of the Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars in the 1790s, the British Army was very largely recruited by volunteers. The old traditional method was sending out a party, drummer, officer, sergeant, and basically inviting people to volunteer for the army with exaggerated tales of how much money you were likely to get, glory, etc, etc, etc. Now this continued all the way through, but by 1814 it had very largely been superseded by volunteering from the militia. This had a lot of advantages, not least of which was that volunteers from the militia came ready-trained. Generally speaking, the quality was very high. The problem which they had in America, they needed time to adjust. Apart from anything else, three or four weeks at sea is not the best preparation for a campaign on land. But the biggest problem which the army faced in the New Orleans campaign, that's the thing from further north, was quite simply a lack of direction. The British commander in North America, General Ross, had been killed, and it was very largely down to individual regimental commanders and admiral to run the army until Pakenham turned up from Spain. So there was a lot of wasted effort and not a lot was going on. The troops got messed about. Quite honestly, by the time the battle was fought the British army was quite demoralized. Keane's decision to stay put was fined by Andrew Jackson. He knew that he would eventually have to meet a full-scale British attack, but right now he needed a breathing space to prepare for such an onslaught. His first requirement was a good defensive position, and he found it at Chalmette, just five miles outside New Orleans. It was a flat open stretch of plantation land about 1,200 to 1,500 meters broad, which had just been cleared of sugar cane. It was bounded on one side by the Mississippi River, and on the other by a thickly wooded cypress swamp. The British would be unable to outflank it, and instead would be forced to attack it head-on. To meet that assault, he decided to dig in along the line of a bramble-choked ditch called the Rodriguez Canal. Soldiers, civilians, and black slaves were all put to the task of deepening the old canal and throwing up an earthwork embankment on the American side. Finding the ground to be too soft to support his heavy artillery, Jackson requisitioned 150 bales of cotton from the city's warehouses and dug them into the ground to make firm gun platforms, not as barricades as is suggested by this 1840s print. Finally, some naval guns were positioned on the opposite bank of the river to enfilade any British attack on what was now being called Line Jackson. Meanwhile, back at the Villere Plantation, General Pakenham had finally caught up with his new command. Although he conceded there was little choice but to mount a frontal attack on the Americans, he was far from happy about the idea. Nevertheless, those officers who had fought at Bladensburg assured him that the Americans were unlikely to stand and fight. The American army, on the other hand, was quite different. It had a regular core to it, but as in Britain, the army was never popular. The army was something which was tolerated in peacetime and barely tolerated in wartime. Although there were regular regiments in the American army, the procedure when the war was declared, all the way through right up until the First World War, was rather than expand the regular army, it was to raise volunteer regiments and state regiments. These were altogether different from the regulars in as much as political influence tended to depend on the actual promotion of officers. Whereas in the British army, merit did count for quite a lot along with seniority, in the American army it was very largely a case of who you knew at a political level. Now in the British army this didn't matter too much because although influence counted, there's a certain matter of, well I know so and so, I knew his father, he did well at such and such a battle, he's done well in Spain, he'll do well in America. In America, in the American army, it was very much a matter of, well I need his vote, and he's done me a favour, and that was a very poor leadership in the American army. So when you get generals like Jackson, who as military commanders are not very good, but is a very good leader, he tends to shine because he's a good leader, even though in absolute terms is not so great, quite even mediocre in a way. On the 28th of December, Pakenham reluctantly set off on what was termed a reconnaissance in force. Essentially, this meant that the army would advance to contact and then see what happened. If it appeared possible to break through the unfinished American fortifications, they would do just that. If not, they would fall back and think again. In the event, he simply ended up dithering as much as Keane had done during the night battle. His engineers did not like the look of the American fortifications, but he decided to attack anyway. First, however, he needed artillery support, and when that failed to materialise, he changed his mind and withdrew after all. The decision may have been a sensible one, but it succeeded in raising American morale and disheartening his own men. Nor did the weather help. It was cold and wet, adding to the misery of the troops and making it difficult to bring up the big guns which Pakenham needed to breach the American defences. A deliberate assault was planned for the 1st of January, 1815. By dawn, two British assault columns were in place, facing opposite ends of Line Jackson. At first light, the British guns opened fire and initially caused considerable damage. Three of the biggest American guns were put out of action, but within minutes, the effectiveness of the British bombardment fell off. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep them supplied with ammunition. All of the reserve ammunition had to be carried by hand across the muddy fields, and to make matters worse, the guns themselves were sinking into the mud. One by one, they fell silent. Pakenham still had no intention of launching a frontal assault without proper artillery support, and so called off the attack before it had even begun. Needless to say, by the time his men returned to their waterlogged camp, they were thoroughly demoralised, as Harry Smith remembered. Poor Sir Edward was much mortified at being obliged to retire the army from a second demonstration and disposition to attack, but there was nothing for it. It came on to rain in the evening and was both wet and cold. After that, things could only get better, and on the 4th of January, two more battalions arrived, commanded by Major General John Lambert, and Pakenham at last had enough men to launch an attack on the left bank in support of the main one. After two failures, this assault had to succeed. He set it for dawn on the 8th of January, and once again, there would be two assault columns. This time, however, the balance would be slightly different. The Americans were defending the line with about 4,000 men. Most of them were militia, but from past experience, they would probably do well enough fighting from cover. As Pakenham would only be able to bring less than 7,000 men against them, the odds were too great to simply batter forward. The assault had to be concentrated at one, or at most, two points. The 1st Brigade, made up of Lambert's newly arrived 7th and 43rd Foot, and the dismounted 14th Light Dragoons, formed the reserve. On the right, the 2nd Brigade, commanded by Major General Samuel Gibbs, comprised the 4th, 21st, and 44th Regiments of Foot, and a detachment of the 95th Rifle. As Gibbs would be marching along the edge of the Cypress Swamp, he was also given Colonel Jones' Light Infantry Battalion. Their job would be to skirmish through the swamp and protect his flank. Over on the left was Major General Keane's 3rd Brigade, which consisted of another Light Infantry Battalion, led by Colonel Rennie, the 93rd Highlanders, the 1st West India Regiment, and the usual detachment of the 95th Rifles. Finally, the force tasked with clearing the left bank consisted of Colonel Thornton and his 85th Foot, the 5th West India Regiment, and some sailors and Royal Marines. The main effort was to be made by General Gibbs. The 44th Foot were charged with marching at the head of the assault column with facines to fill the ditch and ladders to get over the earth rampart. Lambert's Reserve Brigade was positioned so as to support the attack and exploit any breakthrough. Keane's Brigade, on the other hand, was simply to advance along the riverbank and wait for Colonel Thornton's men to clear the left bank and turn the guns there on Line Jackson. Among the hodgepodge of different units manning the American defences were a small number of known pirates, serving mainly as artillerymen on the very guns Colonel Thornton was tasked with capturing. The pirates in the Battle of New Orleans were led by a well-known Gulf Coast pirate called Jean Lafitte, who had previously been courted by the British to act as a privateer against American shipping, which was being fairly successful against the British. Andrew Jackson succeeded in effectively bribing Jean Lafitte to fight with him at the Battle of New Orleans, and he and his men fought alongside the regulars in the trenches at New Orleans and were most effective probably in actually manning the artillery at the battle. Unfortunately, bad luck struck once again. The operation to load Thornton's men onto boats for the assault crossing fell badly behind schedule, and then when the first wave finally got underway, the swift current carried them downstream. In the end, they got ashore a thousand meters below their planned landing place. Realizing that there would be no time to launch the second wave, Pakenham ordered the 5th West India Regiment to join the reserve instead. Thornton would have to do the job with just the 85th Regiment. Pakenham was determined that the attack should begin immediately, despite the ever-present Harry Smith urging him to wait. While we were talking, the streaks of daylight began to appear, and he said, Smith, order the rocket to be fired. I again ventured to plead the cause of delay, but he replied, it is now too late. The columns would be visible to the enemy before they could move out of fire and would lose more men than if they attacked. Fire the rocket, I say, and go to Lambert. This was done. I had reached Lambert just as the stillness of death and anticipation was broken by the firing of the rocket. It was hardly in the air before a rush of our troops was met by the most murderous and destructive fire of all arms ever poured upon a column. All now depended on General Gibbs, but his attack also stalled before it could get underway. Colonel Mullins of the 44th had neglected to check on the whereabouts of the ladders, and now they were nowhere to be found. For half an hour, he simply stayed right where he was, before eventually sending his men back to look for him. When they returned and Gibbs finally got moving, there was no sign of Mullins. Without him, the leaderless 44th began throwing down their ladders and running away. Uttering blood-curdling threats about exactly what he would do with Mullins once he caught up with him, General Gibbs pressed on regardless. Pushing their way through what was left of the 44th, the 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers finally managed to reach the ditch and started to scramble up the earthwork ramparts. Meanwhile, Hackenham had decided to send the 93rd Highlanders across the width of the battlefield to support the attack, but in quick succession, both General Gibbs and the Colonel of the 93rd were shot dead. Unable to advance further, the Highlanders halted under a storm of fire. Next, it was General Hackenham's own turn. No sooner had he taken personal charge of the assault than he was hit by a charge of grapeshot, which killed his horse and shattered his knee. He was struck again in the arm, and then as one of his staff tried to throw him onto a horse, he was hit a third time and fell dying. This left General Keane in command. Thanks to the fog and smoke which remained quite thick along the riverbank, his light infantry battalion had managed to storm a bastion on the very end of the line. Unfortunately, its commander, Colonel Rennie, was shot down as Keane tried to bring up the 1st West India Regiment in support. He was himself wounded and carried off the field. In a matter of minutes, two generals had been killed and another badly wounded. Only General Lambert remained. By this time, his three battalions were the only ones in any fit state to fight, but he recognized that it would be pointless to sacrifice them. The battle was already lost. Ironically, Colonel Thornton's delayed attack on the left bank was the only one to be successful. The American militia bolted as soon as his 760 men charged forward. Only one American was killed and three were wounded. Another 30 were captured, along with 16 guns, and by a curious coincidence, one of those guns had been captured from a Yorktown 30 years before. It was small consolation. All in all, out of 7,730 men who started out that morning, the British Army lost 291 killed, 1,262 wounded, and 484 missing or prisoners. The grim task of clearing the dead fell to Harry Smith. Late in the afternoon, I was sent to the enemy with a flag of truce and a letter to General Jackson with a request to be allowed to bury the dead and bring in the wounded lying between our respective positions. The Americans were not accustomed to the civility of war and fired on me with cannon and musketry. A round shot tore away the ground from under my right foot and it would have been a bore indeed to have lost it under such circumstances. However, they did receive me at last and afterwards I was sent out with a fatigue party with entrenching tools to bury the dead and some surgeons to bring off the wounded. There were some awful wounds from cannon shot and I dug an immense hole and threw nearly 200 bodies into it. A more appalling spectacle cannot well be conceived than this common grave and the bodies hurled in as fast as we could bring them. Victory cost Jackson just 13 Americans killed and 39 wounded. Thornton's successful attack opened the possibility of at least bombarding New Orleans from the left bank but General Lambert rightly judged that the army had been too badly mauled. There was no alternative but to retreat. In a frustrated attempt to regain the initiative or perhaps to restore his men's shattered morale, General Lambert subsequently besieged and captured Fort Boyer at the mouth of Mobile Bay. It was a hollow victory however. The Americans surrendered on the 12th of February 1815 and the very next day a Royal Navy dispatch boat arrived in the bay with the news that peace had been signed on Christmas Eve 1814, two weeks before the engagement at New Orleans. The great tragedy of the Battle of New Orleans of course was it was fought after the war had actually ended. Peace had been signed at Ghent and it was just a simple matter of geography. It took time for the news to come across the Atlantic and in that space of time the battle was fought. The British army withdrew from the Mississippi Delta. At the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 American forces under Jackson killed or wounded more than 2,000 British soldiers in 30 minutes including three major generals who were leading the campaign. The Americans casualties seven killed about 75 wounded. That battle gave us a second legend, a legend which in southern America is commemorated in a song the Battle of New Orleans about the mighty British thinking they could walk across and vanquish us on the Mississippi River and being sent scurrying back to their homeland with their tails between their legs. The irony about that battle though to talk about military leaders is that in fact as it was being fought the treaty ending the war had already been negotiated. Jackson didn't know about it and the British commanders didn't know about it because the copy of the treaty was being sent back across the Atlantic Ocean. No matter we had a military hero, a man who later became president for eight years and America had established itself as a young fully-fledged nation. The bloody Battle of New Orleans, the last fought between Britain and America, need never have taken place. Such are the fortunes of war.