THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS

By Major Arsene Lacarriere Latour, Jackson's chief engineer.

MAJOR LATOUR is regarded as the most, if not only, trustworthy contemporary historian of the Louisiana campaign conducted by General Jackson. His position made him Well qualified for his task, and he has treated the subject without bias. The battle took place January 8, 1815, fifteen days after the Treaty of Ghent was signed. Of the 7,000 veterans of the Napoleonic wars who fought at New Orleans under General Pakenham, one of Wellington's commanders, 2,500 were shot down, including Pakenham himself and Generals Gibbs and Keane. The American loss was 8 killed and 13 wounded. The attention the Battle of New Orleans attracted in Europe added enormously to American prestige.

Gleig, who gives the British side, was an Oxford man who had served as volunteer under Wellington before embarking for America. His account of the engagement in which he took part is considered the most trustworthy written from the English side.

A LITTLE before day break, our outpost came in without noise having perceived the enemy moving forward in great force. At last dawn discovered to us the enemy occupying two-thirds of the space between the wood and the Mississippi. Immediately a Congreve rocket went off from the skirt of the wood, in the direction of the river. This was the signal for the attack. At the same instant, the twelve-pounder of battery No. 6, whose gunners had perceived the enemy's movement, discharged a shot. On this all his troops gave three cheers, formed in close column of about sixty men in front, in very good order, and advanced nearly in the direction of battery No. 7, the men shouldering their muskets, and all carrying fascines, and some with ladders. A cloud of rockets preceded them, and continued to fall in showers during the whole attack. Batteries Nos. 6, 7 and 8, now opened an incessant fire on the column, which continued to advance in pretty good order, until, in a few minutes, the musketry of the troops of Tennessee and Kentucky, joining their fire with that of the artillery, began to make an impression on it, which soon threw it into confusion.

It was at that moment that was heard that constant rolling fire, whose tremendous noise resembled rattling peals of thunder. For some time the British officers succeeded in animating the courage of their troops, and making them advance, obliquing to the left, to avoid the fire of battery No. 7, from which every discharge opened the column, and mowed down whole files, which were almost instantaneously replaced by new troops coming up close after the first: but these also shared the same fate, until at last, after twenty-five minutes continual firing, through which a few platoons advanced to the edge of the ditch, the column entirely broke, and part of the troops dispersed, and ran to take shelter among the bushes on the right. The rest retired to the ditch where they had been when first perceived, four hundred yards from our lines.

There the officers with some difficulty rallied their troops, and again drew them up for a second attack, the soldiers having laid down their knapsacks at the edge of the ditch, that they might be less encumbered. And now, for the second time, the column, recruited with the troops that formed the rear, advanced. Again it was received with the same rolling fire of musketry and artillery, till, having advanced without much order very near our lines, it at last broke again, and retired in the utmost confusion.

The attack on our lines had hardly begun, when the British commander-in-chief, the honorable Sir Edward Packenham, fell a victim to his own intrepidity, while endeavoring to animate his troops with ardor for the assault. Soon after his fall, two other generals, Keane and Gibbs, were carried off the field, dangerously wounded. A great number of officers of rank had fallen: the ground over which the column had marched, was strewed with the dead and the wounded. Such slaughter on their side, with no loss on ours, spread consternation through their ranks, as they were now convinced of the impossibility of carrying our lines, and saw that even to advance was certain death. In a word, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of some officers to make the troops form a third time, they would not advance, and all that could be obtained from them, was to draw them up in the ditch, where they passed the rest of the day.

I deem it my indispensable duty to do justice to the intrepid bravery displayed in that attack by the British troops, especially by the officers. . . . The British soldiers showed, on this occasion, that it is not without reason they are said to be deficient in agility. The enormous load they had to carry contributed indeed not a little to the difficulty of their movement. Besides their knapsacks, usually weighing nearly thirty pounds, and their musket, too heavy by at least one third, almost all of them had to carry a fascine from nine to ten inches in diameter, and four feet long, made of sugar-canes perfectly ripe, and consequently very heavy, or a ladder from ten to twelve feet long.

The duty of impartiality, incumbent on him who relates military events, obliges me to observe that the attack made on Jackson's lines, by the British, on the 8th of January, must have been determined on by their generals without any consideration of the ground, the weather or the difficulties to be surmounted, before they could storm lines defended by militia indeed, but by militia whose valor they had already witnessed, with soldiers bending under the weight of their load, when a man, unencumbered and unopposed, would that day have found it difficult to mount our breastwork at leisure and with circumspection, so extremely slippery was the soil.