“Yet, although a mighty and cruel foe was at their very gates, nothing save fierce defiance reigned in the fiery Creole hearts of the Crescent City. For a master spirit was in their midst. Andrew Jackson, having utterly broken and destroyed the most powerful Indian confederacy that had ever menaced the Southwest, and having driven the haughty Spaniard from Pensacola, was now bending all the energies of his rugged intellect and indomitable will to the one object of defending New Orleans. No man could have been better fitted for the task. He had hereditary wrongs to avenge on the British, and he hated them with an implacable fury that was absolutely devoid of fear. Born and brought up among the lawless characters of the frontier, and knowing well how to deal with them, he was able to establish and preserve the strictest martial law in the city without in the least quelling the spirit of the citizens. To a restless and untiring energy he united sleepless vigilance and genuine military genius. Prompt to attack whenever the chance offered itself, seizing with ready grasp the slightest vantage point, and never giving up a foot of earth that he could keep, he yet had the patience to play a defender’s game when it suited him, and with consummate skill he always followed out the scheme of warfare that was best adapted to his wild soldiery.” It was two o’clock, December 23, before Jackson learned that Keane, with 2,300 men, had landed and marched to the river’s bank, in six miles of New Orleans. Without a moment’s hesitation he drew up his thin, sallow form, struck his clenched fist on a table and said: “By the eternal, they shall not sleep on our soil!” Very quietly, later, he ate a little rice and dozed on a sofa—the only sleep he had, say several reputable historians, for four days and nights thereafter, and he started to meet the enemy with a little over two thousand men. I am willing to stake my claim, previously made, that this man was one of the greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic on this one act alone. Here were the British, more than a match for him in numbers, equipment and confidence. So sure were they of taking the city that they had loafed along all afternoon and now had gone in a jolly camp at sunset, on the banks of the great river, preferring to march into the city in the morning, and not at night. They were disciplined and bayonetted, jolly as a lot of schoolboys, and brave as men get to be, full of fun and fight. I cannot think of another general, from Washington to Lee, from Gates to Grant, who would not have said: “I will fight them in the morning; this evening I will prepare. I will barricade, I will entrench, I will throw up my wall between them and the city.”