Patriotic Fire Andrew Jackson And Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans

Chapter One By late autumn 1814, the United States of America, a nation barely thirty years old, was shaky, divided, and on the verge of dissolving. The treasury was empty, most public buildings in Washington, including the Capitol, the White House, and the Library of Congress, had been burned to ashes by a victorious and vengeful British army. New England, the wealthiest and most populous section of the new country, was threatening to secede from the still fragile Union. After two years of war with Great Britain, it appeared to many Americans that their experiment in democracythe likes of which the world had never seenmight only have been some strange, nonsustainable political trial and, worse, that a return to the unwelcome fraternal embrace of the English kings seemed inevitable. American seaports from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico were blockaded by the British navy and the economy was in ruins because of it, with goods and crops piled up and rotting on the wharves. The U.S. Army was stymied and stalemated; the navy, such as it was, had fared little better, except on the Great Lakes. There was finger-pointing, recrimination, and torment everywhere, from the Congress to the press to ordinary citizens; no one was spared. Then, as autumn leaves began to fall, a mighty British armada appeared off the Louisiana coast with the stated purpose of capturing New Orleans, America's crown jewel of the West and gateway to all commerce in the great Mississippi River Basin, a misfortune that would have split the United States in two. New Orleans was as nearly defenseless as a city could be in those days, with only two understrength regular army regiments of about 1,100 soldiers and a handful of untrained milita to throw against the nearly 20,000 seasoned veterans of the British army and navy who were descending upon it as swiftly and surely as a tropical cyclone. As word of the impending invasion reached decimated and burned-out Washington, President James Madison and Secretary of War James Monroe sent urgent pleas for the Western states to come to the aid of their stricken countrymen west of the Mississippi. Backwoodsmen from Tennessee and Kentucky were thus recruited into makeshift army units, but they were far offas much as seven hundred miles by land and two thousand miles by waterand river transportation was mostly by slow river rafts and flatboats. It was doubtful they could get there in time. Orders from the secretary of war also went out to the legendary Indian fighter Andrew Jackson, then in nearby Mobile, Alabama, after having defeated the large tribe of Creeks who had just perpetrated the bloodiest massacre in American history. Would he go immediately to New Orleans and take charge? Yes, of coursebut of what? Jackson must have wondered. The British fleet contained more than a thousand heavy guns against the perhaps three dozen cannons New Orleans could muster, and what of powder and shot, or flints for muskets and rifles? Assuming that the British didn't overrun them outright, to Jackson's knowledge there was little or nothing in the way of equipment, munitions, or manpower in New Orleans for a sustained siege. There were more than 10,000 trained, first-rate British redcoats bearing down, plus the larger roster of the British navy's marines and sailors to support themall this against fewer than a third that number of untrained and poorly armed Americans, even assuming the rubes from Tennessee and Kentucky did somehow arrive in time for the show. Jackson's task was daunting, to say the least. This was arguably the gloomiest moment in American history before or since, it being almost universally believed that Britain, still smarting from defeat at the hands of thGroom, Winston is the author of 'Patriotic Fire Andrew Jackson And Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans' with ISBN 9781400044368 and ISBN 1400044367.