New Orleans (Chalmette)

Prelude

By December 14, 1814, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane had positioned a British fleet in the Gulf of Mexico just east of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne. Standing between these ships and the lakes was a small American flotilla, five gunboats under Lieutenant Thomas ap Catesby Jones. That same day, Captain Nicholas Lockyer led roughly 980 sailors and Royal Marines against Jones's boats, ferrying his force across the water in 42 rowboats, nearly all carrying a small carronade apiece. The fight was short, and Lockyer came away with Jones's vessels in hand. On the British side, 17 sailors died and 77 were injured; the Americans lost 6 killed and 35 wounded, with the survivors taken prisoner. Both commanding officers, Jones and Lockyer, numbered among the wounded.

An odd byproduct of this capture was the chance it gave the imprisoned gunboat crews to feed the British false impressions about how many men Jackson actually commanded. A well known anecdote involves Purser Thomas Shields and Surgeon Robert Morrell, dispatched under a truce flag to arrange the prisoners' parole. Placed in a cabin where their words could be overheard, Shields, who was hard of hearing, spoke loudly enough to declare that Jackson had 20,000 troops at his disposal. Yet nothing in how the British commanders subsequently acted suggested they truly believed they faced such overwhelming numbers.

General John Keane then oversaw the transport of sixteen hundred British soldiers by boat, a journey of 60 miles westward from Cat Island to Pea Island, possibly today's Pearl Island, roughly 30 miles (48 km) east of New Orleans. Moving the troops this way demanded six days and nights, with each individual crossing lasting about ten hours.

Beyond simply sailing up the Mississippi, the British had three other possible paths toward the city from the east. They opted against the sluggish river approach in favor of moving overland. One route ran through the Rigolets passage into Lake Pontchartrain, allowing troops to land two miles north of New Orleans, though the fort at Petit Coquilles guarding the Rigolets stood in the way. A second option involved rowing to the Plain of Gentilly by way of Bayou Chef Menteur and then following the Chef Menteur Road connecting the Rigolets to the city. This road was narrow and vulnerable to blockade, a fact Jackson understood well enough to keep it heavily guarded. The third path led through Bayou Bienvenue, on to Bayou Mazant, and finally the Villeré Canal, ending at a landing point a mile from the Mississippi and seven miles below New Orleans. Keane chose this final route.

Historian Andrew Lambert argues that Keane threw away a real chance at victory by rejecting the open road running from the Rigolets to New Orleans along Bayou Chef Menteur. Reilly, for his part, points out that although many have assumed Cochrane pressured Keane into launching a hasty, unwise assault, no real evidence backs this claim. Correspondence from Codrington suggests instead that Cochrane originally meant to pursue the first route, relying on flawed maps documented in his own papers. Complicating matters further, the narrow and shallow waters of the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes could not accommodate any vessel drawing eight feet of water or more.

Compounding these difficulties was a shortage of shallow draft boats. Cochrane had asked the Admiralty for such vessels but had been turned down. Because of this, even using every available shallow craft, the British could never move more than 2,000 men in a single crossing.

On the morning of December 23, Keane's vanguard of 1,800 British troops arrived at the Mississippi's east bank, some 9 miles (14 km) south of New Orleans. Had he pushed forward along the open, undefended river road, he might have reached the city within hours. Instead, Keane chose to set up camp at Lacoste's Plantation and await further reinforcements. During this pause, British troops entered the home of Major Gabriel Villeré, who managed to escape through a window and rushed off to alert General Jackson about the advancing army and where it had made camp.

Battle

South of the city, American engineers had laid out three successive defensive lines, the foremost sitting four miles from New Orleans along the Rodriguez Canal. This position ran from a swamp to the riverbank, fortified with a timber breastwork pierced for muskets and earthen platforms for cannon. Jackson counted 4,698 men on the Left Bank and another 546 stationed across the river.

On January 5, General Lambert came ashore with two infantry battalions numbering 1,700 men, swelling British ranks to roughly 8,000 landed troops.

British strategy called for seizing the twenty-gun battery on the right bank first, then turning its guns against the American line to support the main assault. Colonel William Thornton would ferry his men across the Mississippi under cover of darkness, push quickly upstream, capture Commodore Daniel Patterson's battery on the flank of the principal American works, and then rake Jackson's line with the captured guns, directly opposite the earthworks where most American troops stood.

Across the river, Major General Samuel Gibbs would direct the central assault with his second brigade. A diversionary column of light companies drawn from the 4th and 21st Foot, under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rennie, would advance along the riverbank as a feint, nominally attached to Keane's first brigade. Keane's remaining men would either capitalize on success near the river or shift toward the center to bolster Gibbs. Light infantry detachments pulled from the 7th, 43rd, and 93rd Foot, led by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Jones of the 4th Foot, guarded the right flank near the swamp. Major General John Lambert's third brigade waited in reserve.

According to Reilly, the leading elements of Keane's and Gibbs's brigades would sit roughly 650 yards from the American works, well within artillery range, making a first-light assault across the ditch essential.

A signal rocket fired at 6:20 in the morning opened the engagement, followed shortly by British guns opening up on Jackson's headquarters at the McCarty house.

British movements had not escaped detection. Colonel Davis brought 200 Kentucky militiamen to reinforce the Louisiana militia brigade, arriving at four in the morning after a muddy five-mile trek. They had gone without food since noon the day before and were thoroughly worn out. Morgan split them between two positions set a mile apart.

British engineers had cut a canal to float 42 small boats toward the river, but the scheme unraveled on the morning of January 8 when the canal walls collapsed and the dam gave way, forcing sailors to haul boats through mud alongside Thornton's assault force. The launch, meant for before dawn, ended up eight hours behind schedule by Thornton's own account, though a 2008 assessment puts the delay closer to twelve hours. Pakenham issued his final orders for the two-pronged assault that same morning. Despite the setback, he refused to delay the frontal attack, gambling that the right-bank force would draw attention away even without achieving full success.

Because the collapsing canal walls choked the passage overnight, only enough boats made it through to carry 560 men, a third of the planned force. Captain Rowland Money commanded the naval detachment as captain of HMS Trave, while Brevet Major Thomas Adair led the Marines from HMS Vengeur. Thornton failed to account for the river current, which swept his landing about a thousand yards past the intended spot.

The lone British triumph that day came from this delayed right-bank operation, where Thornton's brigade of the 85th Foot, joined by Royal Navy and Marine detachments, broke through and scattered the American line. Seven hundred militiamen fled the field. Reilly places the blame on Morgan, who scattered his forces rather than massing them around his primary defenses while using a picket merely to warn of the British approach. Splitting his troops between two indefensible positions a mile apart played directly into British hands, and his mishandling of the Kentucky and Louisiana militia practically guaranteed defeat. Yet the militia's retreat, though criticized, amounted to nothing more than sound judgment under the circumstances. Major General William Carroll of the Tennessee Militia oversaw an inquiry that concluded the conduct was "not reprehensible." Major Paul Arnaud, who commanded the 2nd Louisiana militia brigade, became a scapegoat for the withdrawal on the Right Bank, while fellow Louisiana officers Dejean, Cavallier, and Declouet faced reprimand