This noted city is about one hundred and seven miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and the older portion was built around the outer curve of a grand crescent-shaped river bend, which gave it the popular designation of the "Crescent City." It afterwards grew far up stream, and stretched around another reverse bend, so that now the river passes through in form much like the letter S. The surface descends from the river by gentle slope towards a marshy region in the rear, and is several feet below the level of high water, the levee being a strong embankment about fourteen feet high and fifteen feet wide on the surface, effectually protecting from overflow. Its magnificent position near the mouth of the river, where an enormous interior commerce, coming by railroad and steamboat, has to be transhipped to ocean-going vessels, has made the prosperity of the city. Its event of chief memory is the battle of January 8, 1815, when General Andrew Jackson defeated the British under General Pakenham. The battlefield was at Chalmette in the southern suburbs, on ground stretching from the Mississippi River bank back about a mile to the cypress swamps. The war with England had already been ended by a peace concluded at Ghent December 24, 1814, but neither side then knew of it. The British advanced from the eastward to attack the city, and a hastily constructed line of breastworks formed of cotton bales was thrown up, behind which Jackson's men were stationed to receive the attack. The result was a most disastrous defeat, Pakenham, his second in command and twenty-six hundred men falling, while the American loss was only one hundred. A marble monument on the field commemorates the victory, and a National Cemetery, with many graves of soldiers fallen in the Civil War, now occupies a portion of the ground. In the Civil War, in April, 1862, Admiral Farragut ran his fleet past the forts commanding the river at the head of the Passes, and appearing before the city compelled its surrender, when it was occupied by the accompanying land forces under General Butler.