Recommend if you like historical battles.
Recommend if you have no clue about the War of 1812.
Recommend if you don't know much about President Andrew Jackson.
I picked up this book because I really couldn’t remember a damn thing about the War of 1812. I knew that we got the Star Spangled Banner national anthem from this war but didn’t remember why. I knew that I thought President Andrew Jackson was a racist son-of-bitch with his treatment of the American Indians and the Trail of Tears. I also knew that Col Andrew Jackson had a victory in New Orleans from Johnny Horton’s song, "The Battle Of New Orleans.” Lastly, I somehow knew that Davy Crocket served with Jackson in New Orleans before he died at the Alamo. But I didn’t know the details. So, I thought I would try to remedy all of that.
Here is the setup.
Just 20 years after George Washington defeated the British in the U.S. revolutionary war, the British had impressed some 10,000 American sailors to support the British war with Napoleon. Two years later, the British Navy set a blockade against American vessels delivering cargoes to France. In 1807, the British fired upon the American ship Chesapeake because she would not give up her cargo. The current President Thomas Jefferson enacted an embargo on Great Britain which resulted in a disaster for the American economy. After President James Madison took office (1809), the first battle of the the War of 1812 happened in 1811: the Battle of Tippecanoe. In June 1812, America declared war on Great Britain. The war goes back and forth with victories and defeats on both sides. In August 1814, both sides start negotiating the Peace Treaty of Ghent. That same month, the British captured Washington D.C. and burned it to the ground. Things were not looking good.
President Monroe began to worry about the defense of New Orleans. If the British captured the town before the Ghent treaty was signed, the U.S. would be bottled up in the west and would not be able to expand. He tasked Col Andrew Jackson to defend it.
Spoiler Alert: "General Jackson and his multiethnic, multigenerational army made up of people from every American social class and occupation had come together to do what Napoleon had failed to do: destroy the finest fighting force in the world.” [1]
Jackson crept up on the British bivouac site in the middle of the night to deliver a sneak attack that caught the British by complete surprise. It was a fierce battle and the British lost many soldiers. And then, just as sneakily, Jackson escaped back to his defensive positions before the sunrise. When the British finally regrouped to start their attack, they ran into a withering display of firepower and marksmanship. During the day, the Americans lost some 15 casualties. The British numbers are hard to pin down but some say as high as 2,000. The “Davey Crocket” types in Jackson's Army didn’t miss with their long rifles. Every shot fired resulted in a British casualty. At the end of the day, the British called for a truce to bury their dead comrades and slipped away from New Orleans on their British naval vessels.
I picked up this book because I really couldn’t remember a damn thing about the War of 1812. I knew that we got the Star Spangled Banner national anthem from this war but didn’t remember why. I knew that I thought President Andrew Jackson was a racist son-of-bitch with his treatment of the American Indians and the Trail of Tears. I also knew that Col Andrew Jackson had a victory in New Orleans from Johnny Horton’s song, "The Battle Of New Orleans.” Lastly, I somehow knew that Davy Crocket served with Jackson in New Orleans before he died at the Alamo. But I didn’t know the details. So, I thought I would try to remedy all of that.
Here is the setup.
Just 20 years after George Washington defeated the British in the U.S. revolutionary war, the British had impressed some 10,000 American sailors to support the British war with Napoleon. Two years later, the British Navy set a blockade against American vessels delivering cargoes to France. In 1807, the British fired upon the American ship Chesapeake because she would not give up her cargo. The current President Thomas Jefferson enacted an embargo on Great Britain which resulted in a disaster for the American economy. After President James Madison took office (1809), the first battle of the the War of 1812 happened in 1811: the Battle of Tippecanoe. In June 1812, America declared war on Great Britain. The war goes back and forth with victories and defeats on both sides. In August 1814, both sides start negotiating the Peace Treaty of Ghent. That same month, the British captured Washington D.C. and burned it to the ground. Things were not looking good.
President Monroe began to worry about the defense of New Orleans. If the British captured the town before the Ghent treaty was signed, the U.S. would be bottled up in the west and would not be able to expand. He tasked Col Andrew Jackson to defend it.
Spoiler Alert: "General Jackson and his multiethnic, multigenerational army made up of people from every American social class and occupation had come together to do what Napoleon had failed to do: destroy the finest fighting force in the world.” [1]
Jackson crept up on the British bivouac site in the middle of the night to deliver a sneak attack that caught the British by complete surprise. It was a fierce battle and the British lost many soldiers. And then, just as sneakily, Jackson escaped back to his defensive positions before the sunrise. When the British finally regrouped to start their attack, they ran into a withering display of firepower and marksmanship. During the day, the Americans lost some 15 casualties. The British numbers are hard to pin down but some say as high as 2,000. The “Davey Crocket” types in Jackson's Army didn’t miss with their long rifles. Every shot fired resulted in a British casualty. At the end of the day, the British called for a truce to bury their dead comrades and slipped away from New Orleans on their British naval vessels.
Timeline
1783 - The Revolutionary War ended
1803: British begin to impress American sailors and force them to work on British Ships. Nearly 10,000 American sailors were forcibly made by the British navy to work in their ships. This enforcement was made under the British Impressment that was authorized under the Orders-in-Council of the British Monarchy.
July 1805: British naval forces started to enforce blockade and the seizure of commercial shipments on American vessels delivering commercial cargoes to France. This measure was enforced by the British government due to their on-going war with the forces of Bonaparte.
October 1805: At sea, the British severely defeated the joint Franco-Spanish navy in the Battle of Trafalgar.
June 1807: The American ship Chesapeake is fired upon by the British ship Leopard causing an international incident.
December 1807: Thomas Jefferson imposes an embargo on Great Britain but it results in economic disaster for American merchants and is discontinued in 1809.
March 1809: James Madison is inaugurated President of the United States.
November 1811: The Battle of Tippecanoe (in present-day Indiana), considered the first battle of the War of 1812, takes place between Tecumseh's brother, The Prophet, and William Henry Harrison's army.
June 1812: America declares war on Great Britain.
July 1812: General William Hull enters Canada. This is the first of three failed attempts made by the U.S. to invade Canada. The British force the surrender of Fort Michilimackinac (in present-day Michigan).
August 1812: General William Hull surrenders to General Isaac Brock at Detroit.
January 1813: British and Indian allies repel American troops at the Battle of Frenchtown (present-day Michigan). American survivors are killed the following day in the Raisin River Massacre (present-day Michigan).
April 1813: U.S. troops capture and burn the city of York (present-day Toronto).
May 1813: The siege of Fort Meigs (present-day Ohio).
September 1813: Captain Perry defeats the British at the Battle of Lake Erie.
October 1813: The warrior Tecumseh is killed at the Battle of the Thames (Canada).
November 1813: The Battle of Crysler's Farm (Canada).
July 1814: The Battle of Chippawa (Canada). The Battle of Lundy's Lane (present-day Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada).
August 1814: Peace negotiations begin in Ghent.
August 24-25, 1814: The British burn Washington, DC in retaliation for the burning of York. President James Madison flees the Capital.
September 1814: The Battle of Plattsburg on Lake Champlain is a major American victory, securing its northern border. The Battle of Baltimore takes place at Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner.
December 1814: The Treaty of Ghent: Americans and British diplomats agree to the terms of a treaty and return to the status quo from before the war.
January 1815: Andrew Jackson defeats the British at the Battle of New Orleans.
February 1815: The Peace Treaty is ratified and President Madison declares the war over.
Notes from the book and other sources
The end of the war and its best moments—a handful of sea battles won by U.S. warships, the rocket’s red glare that illuminated a giant flag in Baltimore (memorialized by the barrister Francis Scott Key), and, most of all, the Battle of New Orleans—provided Americans with a new sense of nationhood. In Europe, particularly among the inhabitants of Great Britain, a new recognition emerged that their American cousins couldn’t be regarded merely as poor relations; one had to respect a people who stood up and defended themselves against the British Empire. Once dismissed by George Gleig as “an enemy unworthy of serious regard,”24 the American military—whether regular or militia, army or navy or marines—had become a force to be reckoned with.
General Andrew Jackson had melded a largely amateur force into an army, one that had vanquished a sophisticated force perhaps twice its size. His attack on December 23 had been a masterstroke, one that stunned the British and bought Jackson and the defenders of New Orleans essential time. The general had marshaled his limited naval resources to harry the British from the Mississippi. He had improvised a brilliant defensive strategy. He had exercised restraint and discipline. He deployed his men in a way that took advantage of their strengths as riflemen and minimized their weaknesses. His tactics forced General Pakenham’s well-drilled force to confront American strengths on U.S. terms.
His orientations were the essential verities: duty to country (at first that meant region but, with the life-changing events in Louisiana, it became nation); duty to God; and duty to family, not only, in the narrow sense, to his relations but also to his neighbors, whom he regarded as his brothers and his sisters, and to his men and those who voted for him, whom he regarded as children given unto his care.
But in 1818, pursuing the Seminoles at President Monroe’s orders, he wrested Florida from Spain, and then served as its territorial governor.
The 1828 election ended differently when changes in voter eligibility (property requirements for suffrage were eliminated in most states, quadrupling the electorate) helped Jackson prevail.
Davy Crockett became a U.S. congressman and later died at the Alamo, but not before writing his colorful, if rather folkloric, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834).
On the other side of the line, Sir John Lambert and John Keane—unlike the deceased generals Pakenham and Gibbs—made it back to Europe alive. Both joined the Duke of Wellington in defeating Napoleon once more, this time at the Battle of Waterloo, on June 18, 1815.
Jackson’s failure to properly defend the west bank raises another what-if. Many military historians believe that, given only slightly altered circumstances, the capture of Patterson’s position could have been catastrophic to the American cause.
He made a series of decisions that have come to be seen as wise, even profound, in the eyes of most commentators: his double-time march on Pensacola; his flexible approach to defending the city of New Orleans; his surprise attack on December 23; his choice to shift from offense to defense; his decision before the big day to make his stand at the Rodriguez Canal and then to remain safely behind his ramparts after January 8, 1815.
On reading the accounts in most textbooks, the student comes away with the sense that the War of 1812 ended in a draw.
Rachel, but the stresses of the 1828 election Just days after the close of the hard-fought electoral battle, Rachel Jackson was indeed summoned by her Lord, stricken with an intense pain in her left arm, shoulder, and chest. Suddenly, the president-elect was in mourning for the love of his life.
Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. As president, he continued this crusade. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the “Indian colonization zone” that the United States had acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase. (This “Indian territory” was located in present-day Oklahoma.) [2]
In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.
[Chorus:]
We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin' on
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
We looked down the river and we see'd the British come.
Lyrics to the Battle of New Orleans
In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.
[Chorus:]
We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin' on
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
And there must have been a hundred of'em beatin' on the drum.
They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring.
We stood by our cotton bales and didn't say a thing.
[Chorus]
Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our muskets 'til we looked 'em in the eye
We held our fire 'til we see'd their faces well.
Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave 'em ... well
[Chorus]
Yeah, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
We fired our cannon 'til the barrel melted down.
So we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round.
We filled his head with cannon balls, and powdered his behind
And when we touched the powder off, the gator lost his mind.
[Chorus]
Yeah, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn't catch 'em
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
Sources
[1] "Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle That Shaped America's Destiny,” by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaege, Sentinel, 24 October 2017, Last Visited 7 April 2019,
[2] "Trail of Tears,” by History, Last Visited 7 April 2019,
[3] "Johnny Horton - The Battle Of New Orleans Lyrics,” by MetroLyrics, Last Visited 7 April 2019,
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