I’m not sure how widely it will be observed beyond New Orleans and its environs, but January 8, 2015 will mark the bicentennial of the most important battle fought on American soil between Yorktown and the Civil War – a battle which virtually defined us as Americans, and which finally ended England’s dream of recapturing its lost colonies.
It was, of course, the Battle of New Orleans, waged by a ragtag, polyglot force of perhaps 4,000 Tennesseans and Creoles, Cajuns and Kentuckians, blacks and whites, slaves and freemen, backwoodsmen and pirates, against 8,000 of the most perfectly disciplined, well-armed, battle-hardened British regulars – men who had fought brilliantly in Wellington’s Peninsula campaign against Napoleon.
We were all taught, in grade school American History class, that the irony of this battle was that it need never have been fought, the Treaty of Ghent having been concluded on Christmas Eve of 1814. Like so much of what we learned in school, this is manifestly untrue, as the National Book Award-winning scholar Robert Remini makes clear in his perfectly formed and beautifully written little (199 pages) history, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory.
As Professor Remini recounts it, the battle very much needed to be fought. The Treaty of Ghent, after all, had simply restored England and America to the status quo ante bellum: nobody won, nobody lost. And the British could look forward to fighting another day to re-establish hegemony over a rebel people to whom they still believed they had only temporarily lost at Yorktown (itself, like Saratoga, a sprung trap rather than a genuine battlefield defeat).
They would never have conceded permanent defeat; they would have just kept coming back – had Andrew Jackson’s irregular forces not utterly massacred Wellington’s heroes, and sent their commanding general back to England pickled in brine. Jackson reported to President Monroe that the British had lost 400 killed, 1,400 wounded and 500 taken prisoner on the morning of January 8; he claimed his casualties as seven killed and six wounded. Even if there was a little hyperbole in the body count, there was none whatever in the outcome.
America had its first great battlefield victory, one which brought its disparate people together as nothing had since independence itself, on a day which would be celebrated almost as joyously as the Fourth of July right up until the Civil War.
And, once and for all, the British had learned their lesson; they would never again try America by force of arms. Small wonder that when, three decades later, President Polk set out to fix our country’s borders with Mexico and Canada all the way to the Pacific, the former necessitated a bloody war, but the latter only a very diplomatic negotiation.
Professor Remini’s economical account is both riveting and great fun, his Jackson a figure from “a time when the United States had heroes and reveled in them.” To be reading it this January 8th would be a fine American thing.
© 2015 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick highlights new books, articles and research findings in the “Resources” feature of his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. To download a sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com, and click on “Newsletter.”