Stranger than fiction was the contrast between the leaders and between the armies that fought this extraordinary battle of New Orleans when, after the declaration of peace, the United States won its one famous but belated victory on land. On the northern frontier such a man as Andrew Jackson might have changed the whole aspect of the war. He was a great general with the rare attribute of reading correctly the mind of an opponent and divining his course of action, endowed with an unyielding temper and an iron hand, a relentless purpose, and the faculty of inspiring troops to follow, obey, and trust him in the last extremity. He was one of them, typifying their passions and prejudices, their faults and their virtues, sharing their hardships as if he were a common private, never grudging them the credit in success. In the light of previous events it is probable that any other American general would have felt justified in abandoning New Orleans without a contest. In the city itself were only eight hundred regulars newly recruited and a thousand volunteers. But Jackson counted on the arrival of the hard-bitted, Indian-fighting regiments of Tennessee who were toiling through the swamps with their brigadiers, Coffee and Carroll. The foremost of them reached New Orleans on the very day that the British were landing on the river bank. Gaunt, unshorn, untamed were these rough-and-tumble warriors who feared neither God nor man but were glad to fight and die with Andrew Jackson. In coonskin caps, buckskin shirts, fringed leggings, they swaggered into New Orleans, defiant of discipline and impatient of restraint, hunting knives in their belts, long rifles upon their shoulders. There they drank with seamen as wild as themselves who served in the ships of Jackson's small naval force or had offered to lend a hand behind the stockades, and with lean, long-legged Yankees from down East, swarthy outlaws who sailed for Pierre Lafitte, Portuguese and Norwegian wanderers who had deserted their merchant vessels, and even Spanish adventurers from the West Indies. The British fleet disembarked its army late in December after the most laborious difficulties because of the many miles of shallow bayou and toilsome marsh which delayed the advance. A week was required to carry seven thousand men in small boats from the ships to the Isle aux Poix on Lake Borgne chosen as a landing base. Thence a brigade passed in boats up the bayou and on the 23d of December disembarked at a point some three miles from the Mississippi and then by land and canal pushed on to the river's edge. Here they were attacked at night by Jackson with about two thousand troops, while a war schooner shelled the British left from the river. It was a weird fight. Squads of Grenadiers, Highlanders, Creoles, and Tennessee backwoodsmen blindly fought each other in the fog with knives, fists, bayonets, and musket butts. Jackson then fell back while the British brigade waited for more troops and artillery.