This Day in American History

Jan. 8, 1815 – In the last major engagement of the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson repulsed the British in the Battle of New Orleans, losing only eight men killed and thirteen wounded versus more than 2,000 redcoats killed or wounded and hundreds more captured. As I learned from reading Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830, it was Jackson’s great good fortune to face off against the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham, one of those typically gallant British commanders (think Braddock in colonial Pennsylvania, “Chinese” Gordon, or polar explorer Robert Scott) who lead their men to disaster instead of glory. Pakenham’s men were sitting ducks as they marched a quarter of a mile of open ground in perfect formation – an inviting target for Jackson’s 4,000 men, many handy with a rifle.

With communications technology still in a primitive stage (the telegraph, the 19th-century’s counterpart to the Internet, was still 29 years away), neither side knew that the Treaty of Ghent, ending the three-year-long conflict, had been signed in Europe just weeks earlier.

More than 10 years ago, on a visit to New Orleans (remember New Orleans? That charming city wrecked by Mother Nature and a gaggle of politicians at every level, none of whom seems to have any idea, more than two years later, how to bring the metropolis back to life?), I was surprised to discover that though the major engagement took place on this date, it merely climaxed a two-week period of smaller skirmishes, frantic American ditch-digging, and tentative probes of the enemy by the British. More recently, I was saddened to learn that the site, Chalmette Battlefield and Cemetery, operated by the National Park Service, had been part of one of the areas the worst hit by said hurricane, and that it had to be closed for awhile for repairs before reopening.

The loss of life has led many to believe that the battle essentially accomplished nothing. But to my way of thinking, several major consequences followed:

It gave the British second thoughts about using its military to put an end to the upstart former colony to the south of its remaining North American possession, Canada. Though naval operations in the war had not gone as well as expected for the world’s greatest sea power, its fortunes had revived dramatically on land in the last year, courtesy of the massive incompetence of the American military and the Secretary of War, John Armstrong. A victory in New Orleans might have led the British government to wonder if hostilities might have been concluded a bit prematurely, and that, with its main opponent, Napoleon, out of the way, they could take care of any remaining business. Jackson’s victory put an end to that idea.

True, the British government would continue to chafe at this new continental power –and, early in the Civil War, practically salivate at the thought of recognizing the Confederacy as a means of peacefully dismembering the still-young republic. But never again would it seriously contemplate destroying the republic by force of arms.

The battle produced Andrew Jackson, America’s most acclaimed war hero since George Washington – not only an Indian fighter but a veteran of two wars against Britain (and he still had the scar to show from the first one, when, as a 13-year-old captured soldier, he had refused a British soldier’s order to clean his boots, and had been slashed across the forehead, leaving a scar). The hero became the most visible symbol of a group of newly enfranchised voters – white male voters (many, like Jackson himself, of southern Scotch-Irish extraction) less propertied and less deferential to the elites that elected the Virginia Dynasty and the Adamses, who would form an essential part of the coalition that produced the modern Democratic Party from the ashes of the Democratic-Republic Party after the election of 1824.

Jackson’s victory forced the federal government to thrash about how to deal with this unbelievably popular general with few means of restraint miles from Washington, but with a superabundance of initiative. Jackson had imposed martial law within a four-mile radius around his New Orleans encampment, and three years after the battle he would plunge the Monroe Administration into a major diplomatic crisis over his high-handed actions in Florida. In 1835, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokees could not be forcibly removed from their land by the state of Georgia, Jackson thundered, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." The result was the Trail of Tears.