The Battle of New Orleans: including the Previous Engagements between the Americans; and the British, the Indians and the Spanish which led to; the Final Conflict on the 8th of January, 1815Smith, Z. F. (Zachariah Frederick)
History
The Battle of New Orleans: including the Previous Engagements between the Americans; and the British, the Indians and the Spanish which led to; the Final Conflict on the 8th of January, 1815
Smith, Z. F. (Zachariah Frederick)
New Orleans, Battle of, New Orleans, La., 1815
Commodore Patterson removed from the Louisiana a number of her guns,
which he placed in battery in front of Jordon's plantation, on the right
bank, with which he did important service to the end of the campaign.
This formidable battery was formed to give a deadly flanking fire on the
enemy's ranks from the opposite bank of the river. It was manned and
served by sailors, mostly landed from the Carolina when she was burned.
They had been enlisted about the city after the gunboats were destroyed;
men of all nations, not a third of them speaking the English language.
The constant daily fire of this battery caused the British to fall back
from Chalmette's and Bienvenue's houses and to seek safer quarters in
the rear, after the artillery duels of the twenty-eighth.
Captain Henly, of the late ship Carolina, was placed in command of a
strong redoubt on the bank of the river, opposite New Orleans, around
which was a fosse twenty-five feet in width, the earth from which was
thrown up to form a steep glacis, from the summit of the wall serving as
a parapet to the brink of the fosse. Here a battery of two twenty-four
pounders commanded at once the road and the river back to the swamp.
The Tennesseans, placed on the left, and operating in the undergrowth of
the woods of the swamp, were a continual terror to the British sentinels
and outposts. Clad in their brown hunting-dress, they were
indistinguishable in the bush, while with their long rifles they picked
off some of the British daily. The entrenchment line was being daily
strengthened.
A SECOND ATTEMPT TO BREACH THE AMERICAN WORKS, ON THE FIRST OF
JANUARY--GREAT ARTILLERY DUEL.
On the evening of the twenty-fifth, Sir Edward Pakenham arrived at the
British headquarters, and at once assumed chief command of the army in
person. He was a favorite of Lord Wellington in the Peninsular
campaigns, and held in high esteem by the English Government and people.
His presence imparted great enthusiasm to the officers and men of the
army, a majority of whom had served under him in other wars. The
invading British forces were now swelled to over ten thousand men for
present service. On the thirtieth and thirty-first, the enemy was
ominously busy in throwing up redoubts and in pushing his offensive
works in threatening nearness to our lines. In front of Bienvenue's
house he constructed a battery, of hogsheads of sugar taken from the
near plantations, the season for grinding the cane and converting the
product into sugar having just closed. A redoubt was also begun at a
point nearer the wood, fronting the American left, and some guns mounted
by the thirty-first. A heavy cannonading was opened on this day, from
this and other batteries along the British front, to which our own guns
responded, including those of the marine battery across the river, until
two in the afternoon.
[Illustration: BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS, JANUARY 8, 1815.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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