CHAPTER VIII
Jackson and his staff rode over to the Place d’Armes to review his troops. Considering that the British army then descending on Louisiana was variously thought to number from 10,000 to 20,000 regulars, all veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Jackson didn’t seem to have much to work with.
New Orleans offered him the following: A battalion of local businessmen, lawyers, planters, and their sons, numbering 287 men, commanded by Major Jean Baptiste Plauche’. They were colorfully uniformed and high-spirited, but most of the companies had been organized for only about a month, and their fighting capabilities were untested.
Likewise there were “two regiments of Louisiana State Militia, badly equipped, some of them armed with fowling pieces, others with muskets, others with rifles, some without arms, all imperfectly disciplined. Then there was an understrength battalion of 210 free men of color. There were the Tennesse volunteers under General Coffee.
This motley-looking crew numbered about 1,800, most of whom had fought with Jackson in the Creek War and at Pensacola. They were rough, tough, unshaven, buckskin- or homespun-clad, and generally wild and murderous-looking backwoodsmen-many wearing coonskin caps- who, according to one participant in the battle, carried nothing but their rifles, cartridge boxes, hatchets, knives, and powder horns.
They had no idea of military organization and discipline; they paid attention only to the more important part of their calling, which, according to their notions, was quietly to pick out their man, fix him in their aim, and bring him down. Equally important, though also understrength, were the two regular U.S. Army regiments, the 7th and the 44th , numbering together 796 riflemen.
To round things out was a company of 107 mounted Mississippi dragons under Major Thomas Hinds, as well as a detachment of 62 friendly Choctaw Indians, commanded by Captain Pierre Jugat, who, for their part, would make things plenty disagreeable for the British, as they would soon find out. Jackson could thus muster just under 3,000 men, many of questionable ability.
With any luck, the promised 2,400-man force of Kentucky militia under Major General John Thomas, as well as General William Caroll’s 2,200 Tennesse volunteers, would arrive in time for the invasion. These upcountry reinforcements were coming by flatboat down the Mississippi, but so far no word had been received as to their where abouts. Likewise, to arm them, Secretary of War Monroe had scraped up the money to order a shipment of five thousand rifles from the munitions factories at Pittsburge, but nothing had been heard of this, either.
Having surveyed his army, Jackson now embarked on a weeklong survey of the city’s defenses. For a city so far removed from punctual help from the rest of the nation, New Orleans was practically defenseless in purely military terms- or so it seemed at the time- and any notion of defending it presented a problem of staggering difficulties.
Neither the federal nor the Louisiana legislature had seen fit to appropriate any funds necessary to build the proper fortifications to protect the city. This appeared to be inviting calamity, but in fact, except for an invasion force marching overland to descend on the city from the north or east as Jackson expected it to – New Orleans had fairly good natural defenses in the form of all those impassable bogs, marshes, and quagmires that make up the lower Mississippi River Delta.
With the engineer Major Latour as his guide, Jackson and his party visited what he considered the other most likely routes of an invading British army. The geometry of the problem was maddening; there were so many ways an enemy could come. First on his list were, of course, the eastern approaches to New Orleans from Mobile or points westward along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Chief among these was the Chef Menteur Road, running east-west along the coast, which had been built through impassable swamps. It could be fairly easily defended by a small force by blocking it with trees and other debris, Jackson concluded.
He ordered the requisite number of troops and artillery posted, issued them their orders, and moved on. Next was Bayou St. John, a water approach in which the British army would have to arrive in shallow-draft boats through Lake Borgne, a bay off the gulf that led through a narrow channel into Lake Pontchartrain, guarded by a half-finished fort called the Rigolets.
Once into Pontchartrain, however, Bayou St. John branched nearly into the city, guarded only by a decrepit installation from colonial days, Fort St. John. Jackson ordered it strengthened and garrisoned. The calculus of approaches to the city from the south proved difficult. First, there were any number of bayous, streams, and canals that, left unguarded and unobstructed, could have allowed the British through. Jackson ordered all of these blocked by felled trees, with guards from the state militia posted to watch them.
And of course there was the Mississippi River itself, which might have become a huge highway for the ships of the British navy. As we have seen, though, the trouble with the river route was that the passes out of the gulf to access it were too shallow to permit entry of the big three-decker sixty- to eighty-gun British ships of the line, and even if their smaller men-of-war were able to get over the bars, they’d face formidable obstacles, the first of which was Fort St. Philip, about sixty miles downriver from New Orleans.
The fort was not in bad condition, but Jackson wisely ordered it strengthened, its wood barracks pulled down to prevent fires in case of bombardment, and a reinforced garrison of trained artillerists stationed inside. Then, on the trip back upriver, he visited Detour d’Anglais- English Turn.
English Turn was an almost two-hundred-degree bend where the river practically doubled back on itself about twenty miles below New Orleans. For sailing ships it was a challenge and often a trial even in peaceful times. As was no doubt pointed out to Jackson by Commodore Patterson, to navigate the first part of the turn, whatever wind direction was available to get them there would be right in the ship’s face, making progress impossible until the wind changed direction, which could be hours, days, even weeks.
The French and Spanish colonists had thoughtfully built a small installation at English Turn, but Jackson ordered more batteries, then two additional batteries across the river, just in case. From these an unfriendly ship could be bombarded in an almost helpless state while waiting for the wind to change. Its not clear where Jackson got the extra artillery to brace up Fort St. Philip and English Turn, but a good bet might be that it came from those armed privateer ships and shore cannon that Patterson had captured in his raid on Laffite’s Baratarians.
All through the ages a defending commander’s worst dilemma has been lack of knowledge of where and when the enemy would strike. Even though Jackson enjoyed the advantage of shortened interior lines, he was by necessity forced to disperse many of his troops over every possible venue of attack- leaving himself vulnerable at all of them- until he could divine the true intentions of the British.
He went to the contentious Louisiana legislature and persuaded the state to pay for all the military improvements he’d requested. He made efforts to enlist more men from the city and state to defend against invasion. Women were already wrapping bandages as well as making clothes and blankets for the militia and troops not yet arrived. The Ursuline nuns in their convent were readying their hospital. The gunboats, on the other hand, were fully manned, but no match for any of the large ships of the British navy. They were strictly coastal craft, sloop-rigged, shallow-draft, black-hulled, about 45 feet long and 80 tons, armed with four or five small cannon each, and sailed by a crew of twenty.
The gulf flotilla was commanded by a naval lieutenant with the interesting name of Thomas Ap Catesby Jones, whose assignment was to be Jackson’s eyes for the expected invasion. Jone’s orders had been to defend New Orleans from the Rigolets, the narrow channel from Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchartrain, only a few miles from the city.
A small fortification, Fort Petites Coquilles, was still under construction there, but it presently contained a number of artillery pieces. The idea was that between the fort and the gunboats enough U.S. firepower should be available to drive off a British attempt to enter Lake Pontchartrain.
At sunrise the next morning they noted that the barges were entering Lake Borgne and rowing toward them in a long line, half a mile wide. There were forty-five in all, occupied by no fewer than 1,500 British sailors and marines, armed with sabers, hatchets, pistols, and muskets. In addition, the bow of each barge mounted a carronade, a small cannon extremely lethal at close range.