The Battle of New Orleans

Andrew Jackson held the lower Mississippi against a veteran British army, and Smith takes his time getting to the morning that made it famous. Written for the Filson Club of Louisville and published in 1904, the book moves forward from Tippecanoe and the Creek war, through Jackson’s march on Spanish Pensacola, the British landings by the bayous below the city, and the December fighting at Villeré’s plantation that fixed the ground at Chalmette. Jean Lafitte and the Baratarians get their part. So does the quarrel that outlasted the victory: Jackson’s charge that the Kentuckians ingloriously fled on the west bank, and General John Adair’s long answer to it, which Smith sifts at length. Charts of the field and an appendix naming three Kentucky militia regiments, man by man, close the book.