The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (17 page)

Jackson told the crowd gathered at the square that would one day bear his name that he would save the city. Rumors held that tens of thousands of British veterans were coming, and Lord Wellington, who
had defeated Napoleon, was commanding them. The whites of New Orleans feared not only the massive British invasion army bearing down upon them from the sea, but also the disruptions and slave revolts that might come with becoming the seat of war. And they feared that the divisions between French, Spanish, and English speakers, sutured by business deals that brought in more slaves, and then by mutually
suppressing slave rebels, might open like old wounds under the stress of invasion. But Jackson told them he would throw the enemy into the sea or die trying.
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A cheer went up. It was not only Jackson’s unyielding assurance, nor his patriotic rhetoric, that calmed his anxious audience. Since the War of 1812 had begun, victories had been unexpectedly few and far between. In 1812, after trying various strategies to push Britain into allowing American trade more freedom on the high seas, President James Madison had caved to pressure exerted by Republican
congressmen and asked for a declaration of war. The most vehement congressmen were the so-called War Hawks, mostly young representatives from western states. They believed that now, while Britain’s fleets and armies were tied up in the struggle with Napoleon, was
the time to finish dismembering the British Empire in North America by annexing Canada. (As it turned out, Canadians did not want that.)
Southern congressmen also imagined that war with Britain would permit them to seize additional territories from Spain. They had just annexed “West Florida,” the strip of land from Mobile to the “Florida Parishes” of Louisiana. Now the rest of Florida was in their sights.

By 1814, American nationalists had suffered many disappointments. The huge Royal Navy had bottled up the tiny American fleet
in its ports. Canadians and British troops inflicted a series of stinging defeats on US forces on the northern border. An attempted coup (later shined up with the name “Patriots’ War”), led by English-speaking planters living on Spanish-ruled Florida’s Atlantic coast, failed. Irritation at westerners’ dominance in the decision for war turned the northeastern states toward open undermining of war
efforts. And in 1813, dozens of Creek villages in Georgia and Alabama rose against white settlers in a war called the “Red Stick,” after the emblem of war that militants carried from town to town. On August 20, 1,000 warriors broke into a huge frontier stockade called Fort Mims, where 700 white settlers and enslaved African Americans sheltered. In less than an hour they slaughtered 250 men, women,
and children. Only a few whites escaped, though the Creeks—the most powerful of whom owned African-descended slaves and cotton plantations—kept black prisoners alive.
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In Tennessee, Andrew Jackson reacted to the news of Fort Mims by gathering the state militia and marching them south into Alabama. The brutal campaign that followed displayed both Jackson’s domineering personality and southwestern
whites’ determination to do anything necessary to secure fertile soil for slavery’s expansion. Jackson maneuvered to keep his command out of the control of political rivals back in Tennessee, shot deserters, and eventually pinned 2,000 Creeks into a loop of the Tallapoosa River called Horseshoe Bend. On March 27, 1814, his troops breached the enemy’s log walls and ran amok, killing 900 Creek
warriors at a cost of only 70 of the attackers. Then, Jackson called all Creek leaders—including the ones who had opposed the Red Sticks—to a meeting at Fort Jackson. There he bullied them into signing a treaty that conceded 23 million acres (36,000 square miles), an area as large as Indiana. The friendly Creeks protested, but he had the army, the victory, and the power. They signed away over half
of their lands in Alabama, much of it on the rich black soil of the central part of the territory. The land, already speculated upon several times as part of the vast Yazoo claim, could be surveyed and sold again—this time to actual white settlers.
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Jackson’s victory at Horseshoe Bend was one of the two real American triumphs of the War of 1812, even though the fact that it was fought against
Indians and deep in the southwestern interior means that many forget to think of it as part of that war. Measured by numbers killed—almost 1,000 between the two sides combined—it was the deadliest battle fought in the war. Horseshoe Bend’s casualties do not compare, of course, to those generated by the massive armies that had for a quarter century fought in Europe, though it was among the 100 deadliest
battles of the Napoleonic Wars. And considered by its outcome, it ranks among the most significant. The Treaty of Fort Jackson permanently handed far more land, and more valuable land, to the enslavers of the United States than all the blood and treasure poured out by France had won for her. The strong-arm robbery of the Creeks set the stage for millions of other profitable transactions that
would ensue over the next half-century. White slave-owning settlers’ military dominance over the southwestern Indians rendered inevitable the eventual loss of all their remaining land in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.

What Jackson was in the process of doing now would be just as significant. Haiti’s defeat of the invincible French army had opened the entire Mississippi Valley to an American
expansion driven by the productive force of slavery. In the suppression of the 1811 revolt, slaveholders and the US government had shown themselves willing to defend that opportunity ruthlessly. In the new environment of the now-open southwestern regions, slavery was changing, becoming something different from what it had been in the old states or the old Caribbean. But from the perspective of
Britain, the Treaty of San Ildefonso was illegitimate, and therefore so was the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon had no right to sell a territory to which he had no title. Now—having raided the Chesapeake coast and burned Washington to the ground, British Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane was on his way to the Gulf to seize New Orleans, return greater Louisiana to Spain, and leave the United States caged
behind the Mississippi.

Already humiliated by his scampering retreat from the White House, President Madison desperately needed help if he was to prevent British forces from overturning his mentor’s most significant achievement. Jackson was the man for the job. After imposing his treaty on the Creeks in August, he had pursued remaining Red Sticks into ostensibly neutral Spanish-held Florida.
He seized Pensacola, sending British marines and a flotilla of warships reeling backward. He also fortified Mobile, another target of British invasion plans. The British, meanwhile, shifted troops to a staging base at Jamaica. They believed Louisiana was low-hanging fruit: divided by ethnic conflicts
and filled with slave owners who would surrender before risking a fight that could disrupt their
“property arrangements.” When Jackson heard in late November that a massive invasion force was about to leave Jamaica, he sent word to units from Tennessee and Kentucky to descend down the Mississippi to New Orleans as quickly as possible. He had left Mobile on the 22nd. Now, he was here. Over the next weeks he would gather more troops, fortify the approaches to the city, and continue to stiffen
the sometimes-flagging resolve of the wealthier residents. But the British were coming.

IF YOU DRIVE OUT
from New Orleans’s Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, Rampart Street turns into St. Claude Avenue as you enter “the Marigny”—the old Faubourg that was literally outside of the city in Jackson’s day. Once St. Claude passes over the canal, the neighborhood changes from white to black. You cross
Andry and Deslonde, streets that, a few blocks north of here, run through a landscape once blown bare of houses by the explosive force of water. Keep going, though. There was already enough encoded in the street names of the Lower Ninth Ward to make you weep without thinking, too, of bare concrete pads and naked sidewalks. Soon the road becomes St. Bernard Highway, and in a single minute you are
at the battlefield. And yet you are only five miles from the Quarter.

Today the swamps are filled in, but in the first days of 1815, the Chalmette property on which the Battle of New Orleans was fought was a narrow neck of 1,000 yards of sugarcane stubble that covered the gap between the almost impassable wetlands and the Mississippi. The invaders’ fleet had balked at the attempt to get their
troops up the winding and fortified river. Instead the British army landed almost in the rear of New Orleans on Lake Borgne, and passed by canal and path through the woods over the course of December 22 and 23. Some 5,500 regulars under Edward Pakenham, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Napoleonic wars, now stood almost within sight of New Orleans, five miles from the destruction of American
empire west of the Appalachians.
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Although Jackson could deploy 4,000-odd men in the bottleneck of Pakenham’s path to New Orleans, American militia had historically performed poorly in pitched battle against trained European regulars. Yet those units had not been commanded by Andrew Jackson. He shamed backbone into the city fathers of New Orleans, who (when the British army arrived at their
gates) begged him to retreat upriver from the city and declare it open so they would not be burned and looted for resisting. The majority of his troops came from Tennessee and Kentucky. There were also two battalions of free
men of color from lower Louisiana, one of which was composed of refugees from Saint-Domingue. Jackson warned them all that the enemy, who supposedly promised freedom to the
hundreds of slaves who had escaped to their lines in the two weeks since they had arrived, “avows a war of vengeance and desolation, proclaimed and marked by cruelty, lust, and horrours [
sic
] unknown to civilized nations.” Only victory, he suggested, would prevent the unleashing of the fires of Saint-Domingue in the slave societies of the Mississippi Valley.
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Jackson had chosen his ground well,
anchoring his lines in as good a defensive position as one could find between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains. As January 7 turned into January 8, he and his troops lay entrenched behind the ten-foot-wide Rodriguez Canal that separated the lands of Chalmette from those of Benjamin Macarty. At one in the morning, Jackson woke his aides. He could smell the attack. Four years to the day after
the
commandeurs
had launched their attack on the most thickly planted center of enslavers’ power, Pakenham’s troops stirred and moved.

Dawn revealed 4,000 men drawn up in menacing formation across Chalmette’s long lot. Then, drums beating, cannon firing, the red line began to advance on Jackson’s lines in perfect step, ominous and beautiful. They embodied the discipline that had ruled European
battlefields for the past century. But as they came into range, splitting into two prongs to avoid a huge mire in the middle of Chalmette’s field, Jackson’s troops began to empty a carefully aimed storm of lead into the British ranks. Cannon fire ripped holes in the red formation. Pakenham himself, riding forward to see why his lines had shuddered and stalled, was hit multiple times. He bled to
death by the edge of the swamp.
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By 8 a.m. it was all over. Two thousand British soldiers lay as casualties on the Chalmette plain, of whom at least 300 were dead. The Americans lost a mere thirteen killed. Still, Jackson wisely refused his subordinates’ pleas for him to pursue the retreating British army, which still held 2,000 trained men in reserve. Instead, he let the enemy pack their bags.
On January 25, the invaders departed, taking with them almost 800 enslaved people who had, in effect, emancipated themselves.

Although mighty armies disrupted slaveholder power more effectively than the slaves’ revolt had, enslavers had won this round, too. The loss of 800—for whom Britain would after many years consent to reimburse Louisiana enslavers—was not even a dent in the solidity of slavery
at the mighty river’s head. Within hours of the American triumph, meanwhile, a rider with news of this most significant of American victories between the Revolution
and the Civil War whipped his horse into a gallop past Fort St. Charles, turned left just past where one last head had sat on a pike for so long, and headed up the Chef Menteur Road. Another went up the river road, past all the still-standing
posts. It took weeks—until February 4, in fact—for news on horseback to reach the national capital. But when it did, a mighty flood of joy poured out.