Jackson was both law and idea, and in twenty-four hours, by his own calm and intrepid bravery, his own self-assurance and fiery determination, he had the impulsive inhabitants ready to fight to the death. On December 8, 1814, just one month to a day before the great battle was fought, a splendid double-deck battleship, the Tornant, flying the British admiral’s flag, and the advance guard of the great host, anchored off Chandeleur’s Island. There were two ways to reach New Orleans—up the Mississippi, or in the open bay through Lake Borgne, thence a march across the level delta straight to the city. The English chose the latter. Five little American gunboats with 180 men lay in Lake Borgne, and these put up a gallant fight against the forty-five barges and one thousand men who finally grappled with them and took them with cutlass, pike and pistols. And there, at noon, December 23, 1814, on the banks of the Bayou Bienvenue, a lonely, marshy place, and the last place that Jackson thought they would land, the British, 1,900 strong, under General Keane, one of the ablest officers of the command, landed without opposition and even without the knowledge of Jackson, who was beyond the city, near Lake Pontchartrain, expecting them there. In two hours he had four hundred more troops, a force larger that day than Jackson’s entire available command, and in nine miles of New Orleans, on a dead level plain, bounded on one side by the river and the other by the marshes of the lake. It was a plain, easy march to New Orleans, and if he had marched at it that afternoon it would have been his before night. And why did he not? For only one reason—neither Pakenham nor Keane nor any general or soldier of all the British army supposed for an instant that there was anything before them but a lot of cowardly backwoodsmen whom they could brush away with their bayonets or stampede with a single charge. And who, indeed, were these men? Who was their commander, and what had they done on battlefield before? Speaking of Pakenham’s utter defeat of the French Field Marshal Soult, but a short time before, the English historian, Napier, says: “He was opposed to one of the greatest generals in the world, at the head of unconquerable troops. For what Alexander’s Macedonians were at Arbela, Hannibal’s Africans at Cannae, Caesar’s Romans at Pharsalia, Napoleon’s Guards at Austerlitz—such were Wellington’s British soldiers at this period.... Six years of uninterrupted success had engrafted in their natural strength and fierceness a confidence that made them invincible.” And here is the same author’s description of how Pakenham fell on Salamanca, routing the best soldiers of continental Europe: