The Greatest Fury by William C Davis

Author:William C Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

“The Finger of Heaven Was in This Thing”

ONCE AGAIN TO cover a failure, Cochrane dismissed the bombardment of Fort St. Philip as a mere diversion to mask Lambert’s withdrawal, but the mission’s origin days before the January 8 battle made a liar of him. He simply could not acknowledge a second defeat, this one exclusively the navy’s.1 It was never likely to succeed. Winds, a falling river—even rising tides—were likely to defeat him without the Yankees firing a gun.

Old Hickory got Overton’s good news late that night or early on January 19, and when just a few hours later the fog cleared at about eight a.m., he learned that Lambert was gone. Men on the line still saw redcoats behind their camp defenses, but on their works scouts found only fifty or sixty “paddys”: uniforms stuffed with cane and straw as decoys.2 Jackson immediately rode over to the abandoned camps and met a British surgeon with a message from Lambert asking for humane treatment for the eighty immovable wounded. Jackson so ordered. All but one missed arms or legs blasted off by artillery or amputated.3 More shocking were the ditches turned mass graves, some almost uncovered by the rain.4 A fortnight later legs, arms, and heads still protruded from the ground amid an effluvium of decaying flesh that was sickening.5 Lambert also left fourteen heavy cannons and a few stragglers quickly made prisoner.6

Jackson sent the welcome news to Monroe that same day, predicting that the enemy would not come again. With typical Jacksonian bluster, he claimed that, but for the delay of arms from Pittsburgh, he would have captured or destroyed the entire British land force.7 As it was, he had defeated “the choice of Wellington’s army” and crowed likewise to Winchester at Mobile that “I have defeated this Boasted army of Lord Wellingtons.”8 He can be forgiven for being unaware that more than half of Pakenham’s units never served under the duke.

The mail departing New Orleans the next day, January 20, carried exultations in its pouches. The turnout of volunteers and the courage they showed under fire were universally applauded.9 Victory put modesty in short supply. “Allow us to boast a little,” a friend wrote Congressman Robertson.10 The British had never taken such a beating anywhere in the world before, they said, and “those monsters” would never pollute Louisiana’s soil again.11 But that was too self-effacing. Major Reid, General Coffee, and others declared that no army anywhere in the world had ever achieved such a triumph.12 Tennessean Duke Sumner bested them all at hyperbole. Their victory was the greatest “since the invention of gunpowder.”13

Beyond their hubris, some took a longer view. They had saved New Orleans, “the great key and outlet” to all the immense and rich produce of half the infant nation, and the future commerce of a continent.14 One soldier calculated that a line of earthworks less than one mile long had saved a territory equal to the island of Great Britain—surely a victory that would force Europe to open its eyes to America’s growing strength.

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