CHAPTER VIIII
All morning the gunboat crews watched, resigned to their fate, while the line of barges rowed steadily toward them, stretched out closely abreast. Just before eleven a.m. on December 14 the battle began. Jones fired first because some of his guns were longer-ranged than the carronades in the bows of the barges. This did damage, but not enough, since he was outnumbered by more than five to one.
Still, the Americans cheered when two of the barges were blown to splinters and their occupants dumped or blown into the cold water. Fifteen barges soon detached themselves and began rowing directly toward Jone’s gunboat. Moments later the British opened fire, and Jones was among the first struck, with a musket ball in his shoulder. As he was being carried below he turned over command to his second officer, shouting, “Keep up the fight! Keep up the fight!” just as a blast of British grapeshot struck his second down.
A British boat plowed into Jone’s, and the British sailors and marines quickly chopped through the boarding nets. A hand-to-hand slaughter commenced. Superior numbers soon told on the Americans, and the boarding crews quickly turned Jones’s boat’s cannons on the other gunboats, which themselves were being overwhelmed. It took another bloody hour and a half, but in the end the predictable came to pass: 10 Americans were killed, 35 wounded, and most others captured. The British came away with 17 killed and 77 wounded, plus five American gunboats with all their armaments and several boatloads of prisoners. Andrew Jackson had not only lost his “eyes” on Lake Borgne, he had lost its defense as well, a circumstance that shortly would bring on near disaster.
After learning that the gunboats had been captured and the British were close by, Jackson put the state under martial law. This established a curvew, closed the city coming and going, and permitted impressments of sailors, as well as any other able-bodied males, who were sent into the militia. The martial law proclamation established Jackson as being in supreme command over everything, and-though he later himself conceded that it was probably unconstitutional- his authority became absolute, including the right to execute civilians as spies.
When the victorious barge force returned to the fleet anchorage after defeating the American gunboats, the navy began loading the army into them for the forty-mile row across the lake. The soldiers were crammed in so tightly that they had no room even to move their legs or adjust position during the grueling ten-hour trip.
As if that weren’t enough, the weather suddenly turned against them, as it often will in these climes. As the army began assembling at Pea Island, British intelligence officers were engrossed in reconnoitering actual landing spots for the invasion. Pea Island was very close to the Mississippi shore, from which it would been fairly simple to put the army on the easiest route into New Orleans-the Chef Menteur Road across the Plain of Gentilly, which Jackson himself had been surveying just a few days earlier when he learned of the capture of his gunboats.
If the British army arrived quickly and moved swiftly, it could take New Orleans in half a day, before the Americans knew what had happened to them. By the morning of December 23 the British invasion was well under way. The redcoats under Colonel Thornton had come slip-and-stumble through the muck of the marshes and the mire of the cypress swamp.
Complete surprise had been achieved beyond their wildest dreams. Back in New Orleans, neither Jackson nor anyone else was aware that a British army was gathering just below the city. If the British could get an advance force into the city before the Americans reacted, and with more coming all the time, they would be very hard to dislodge.
Then Jackson did what many reasonable men of the day would do under the circumstances. He poured everyone a glass of strong drink before declaring, ‘Gentlemen, the British are below, we must fight them to-night.
Within minutes the alarm guns had been fired in New Orleans and the cathedral bells rung, spreading the news with electric rapidity throughout the city. Jackson immediately began issuing marching orders, to Coffee, to Carroll, to the free men of color, to the battalions of New Orleans volunteers, the regulars, and the militia: everyone was to assemble in front of the British position on the Plain of Chalmette.
As the sun began to set and purple shadows fell over the stubble cane fields and orange groves on a short Southern winter day, Jackson’s army organized itself. Then they began to march out of the city about a mile south to the Montreuil plantation, which was fifteen plantations (about ten miles) above where the British had assembled.
The Americans had moved into position so quietly, however, that the British never suspected an attack in force that night. Jackson stealthily maneuvered the American army forward to the very edges of the De la Ronde plantation, just opposite the British camp.
Coffee’s dismounted infantrymen, burst into the British line at the far end of the field near the cypress swamp. Their object was to cut off the British line of reinforcement and supply that led from their landing site and then roll up the enemy’s right flank, pushing it toward the river.
With the entire field erupting in gunfire, these startled, hungry, weary troops who had just endured the grueling daylong row across the lake were herded by their commanders through the gummy marshes and the swamp and plunged straight into the cane-field fray.
At the same time, Jackson had ordered forward the two regiments of U.S. regulars as well as the lawyer and merchant volunteers, who pitched into the British in their sheltering position behind the levee. A particularly fierce fight was put up by a British captain named Hallen and his 80-man outpost several hundred yards in front of the main enemy line.
Try as the Americans might to evict the British from their position near the levee, they would not budge, and, since Hallen was continually reinforced, the Americans had no choice but to go around them. Scores of vicious little fights erupted in the darkness all over the field of several hundred acres, and it soon became a practical impossibility to keep order- it was a war of detachments and duels. To make matters worse, a heavy fog had risen up from the river and swamps and covered the battlefield, mingling with the smoke from the many muskets and guns.
Every available weapon was used: rifles, pistols, bayonets, gun butts, knives, hatchets, sabers, fence rails, and fists and strangling hands, accompanied by wild yelling, cursing, and the screaming of the wounded. The Choctaw Indians made good use of their tomahawks.
The night was black as pitch, illuminated only by the flashes of gunfire against low-hanging clouds and the fog. The butchery went on for a full six hours, and men on both sides were shot by their own in the darkness and fog. The Americans had two six-pounder cannon moved up, but before they could be put in firing position the British attacked them.
Jackson rode up and gave a demonstration of his legendary self-control, “indifferent to the shower of bullets which whistled around him.” He called out, “Save the guns, my boys, at every sacrifice!” Sometime around ten p.m. the 1,100-man regiment of 93rdHighlanders began to arrive on the field, and these strapping six-footers lent much needed weight to the British defense. Around midnight Jackson decided to call off the attack; his men were exhausted, ammunition was running low, and the constant stream of British reinforcements was tipping the balance against him. Between those considerations and the fog, darkness, and gunsmoke, which made command and control almost impossible, Jackson sent messengers to Coffee and Colonel Ross of the 7th Regiment of regulars to fall back, but small pockets of soldiers, unable to disengage, continued to fire at one another for several hours more.