Patriotic Fire
Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans
Winston Groom
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Map: The Louisiana and Mobile Campaigns
Map: The New Orleans Battlefield and Vicinity
Map: The Attack and Defense of the American Lines Below New Orleans
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Photo Insert
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Footnotes
Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Winston Groom
Copyright
To Carolina Montgomery Groom—age seven
When you would come into my office and ask what I was writing, I told you it was a story about pirates and Indians and generals and heroes, and one of your own ancestors from long ago—all in your favorite city (the one with the big zoo). Well, here it is.
Your loving papa
Author’s Note
At the same time this book was going to press, the destructive hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area. Among the most devastated parts of the city was St. Bernard Parish, where the Battle of New Orleans was fought. The battlefield itself, now a national historical site maintained and operated by the National Park Service, was, at the end of September 2005, under several feet of water. The historical papers, paintings, maps, and other original documents are apparently saved, having been moved before the storm to other parts of the state from the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Williams Research Center, the Louisiana State Museum, and other archival entities.
Introduction
Most gratifying for any writer of histories is being able somehow to connect yourself to the events you’re describing; it adds an extra impetus—the almost bone-shivering feeling that you might actually be a small part of it, a slender thread that binds. I remember how whenever the historian Steve Ambrose, a friend who lived not far from here, began a new project he would first of all collect every relic he could find from the era he was writing about and clutter his office with them, just to keep himself in the spirit. And when that book was finished he’d then clear them out and start all over again, getting up a new collection to suit his next topic.
The last time I saw him do this was when he was writing Nothing Like It in the World, about the construction of the American transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869. Steve had somehow acquired an old topographical tableau under glass, about six or eight feet long and taking up the whole center of his office, that laid out in bas-relief the entire Western United States from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, with mountains, rivers, plains, deserts, and so forth, and model tracks and trains with little tin men working on them, like those collections of toy soldiers children used to play with after World War I.
I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced this sensation myself, mostly through direct ancestral involvement, although my people have not by and large been professional soldiers. In Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War (1995), it was through my great-grandfather Fremont Sterling Thrower, who left college in 1862 to serve with the cavalry of the Confederate general Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler.
In A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914–1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front (2002), inspiration was drawn through my grandfather, who fought in France with an American infantry division, and who, after a few years and another visit to France, brought back a Michelin Company illustrated guidebook of those terrible battlefields, a book that impressed itself into my memory when I was a teenager.
In 1942: The Year That Tried Men’s Souls (2005), my father’s service as a U.S. Army officer during World War II led to an even closer connection. I’d heard for much of my life his stories, and those of his friends, around the dinner table, stories of “Before the war . . . ,” “During the war . . . ,” and “After the war . . .”
Now here, to my surprise and delight, in this book on the dramatic and decisive end of the War of 1812, yet another ancestor has given me stimulus to recount the heroic events that occurred so long ago and far away. His name was Major Elijah Montgomery, of General Andrew Jackson’s army at the critical Battle of New Orleans in late 1814 and early 1815, which forever crushed England’s notion of reclaiming her dominant presence on American soil.
The source for these ancestral characters has been gleaned primarily from sheaves of old papers, letters, and other documents recovered nearly a quarter century ago in the attic of my parents’ home. My family, all of them, were inveterate collectors, pack rats if you will, and over the generations a wealth of such information had been handed down. None of them, I imagine, had any real idea of what to do with it all, just that it oughtn’t to be thrown away. Thus it was meticulously kept and stored in small packets tied with pink or blue ribbons, a quaint custom of the day, it seems, and saved in small metal strongboxes or wooden boxes. All of it at some point finally wound up in my parents’ attic and, after their deaths, made its way into my own cabinets.
Major Elijah Montgomery was my great-great-great-grandfather, on my father’s side of the family. He was born on the Northern Neck of Virginia (near Yorktown) in 1777 and died on his plantation near Mobile, Alabama, in 1831, at the age of fifty-four. I had heard my grandmother speak of him, although he had died well before she was born in the 1880s, but she’d listened as a young woman when her own grandmother—Elijah’s daughter—told her stories about him. As a young boy I heard some of my grandmother’s tales repeated: that Elijah was an officer in the War of 1812; that he had accumulated substantial holdings; that he died leaving two young daughters who were swindled out of their fortune by an unconscionable guardian appointed by the courts; and so on. It’s a shame, though, in retrospect, that I didn’t listen more closely as a youngster.
After I decided to write this book, I returned to the old papers to see just who and what Elijah Montgomery had been and what he had done, on an outside hunch that he might have had some role in the Battle of New Orleans. Little did I know! Many of the documents are crumbling; those particular papers are now nearly two hundred years old and a few will break up in your fingers—living history half vanished in an instant. But as I carefully untied the bits of ribbon and string around the packets and laid out their contents on a table in my office, a life began to reassemble itself—the life of a soldier, a war hero, a Southern planter and father—a man born during the American Revolution who lived in the strange and distant times of ferocious Indians, of slavery and duels, of wars with Englishmen and the birth of a new nation among deep forests reminiscent of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.
It seems ironic that some of the papers most useful in reconstructing the life of Elijah Montgomery are court records concerning the disposition of his estate, following his death in 1831. You can learn a lot about a man by looking at these things, especially when the laws of probate were such as in bygone days. Anybody who feels a shudder over the so-called death tax today ought to go back and look at probate papers from the mid-1800s; that will really give you a fright—government people rummaging through your most private stuff. States had no income ta
xes then, and a principal way revenue was raised was to go after the property of the dead—every scrap of it—to collect the government’s share.
Elijah must have had a lengthy final illness as the nineteenth century entered its fourth decade, given the medical bills paid out by his estate after his death. Then, within a few weeks, courts in Alabama appointed assessors and masters who rushed in to pick through and inventory every item of value he owned in this world, as well as to list (and tax) any moneys yet owed him and record and pay any of his legitimate debts so as to get it all settled—including $45 to the man who built his casket ($965 in today’s dollars).
Samples of the property we know Elijah possessed, in no particular order, follow:
5 horses $925
1 old horse [presumably destined for the glue factory] $21
1 stew pan $1
10 satin sheets $20
4 btls mustard $1
9 feet rope [“at 14c per foot”] $1.26
1 buff evening vest $3
6 pair fine window curtains $30
2 5lb bags of nails $.75
16 saws [“three rust out”] $12
4 loafs sugar $1
13 qts. tea $4
So it goes on page after page, but you get the drift: tables, sofas and chairs, items in the pantry or the bedroom or the closet, needles and spools of thread, rifles and shotguns, rings and cuff links, lumber, stands of bricks, pots and pans; the tax assessors overlooked nothing.
Elijah also had more important things for the state, city, and county to evaluate, taxwise, such as “1 large silver spoon $35,” as well as china, silver flatware, crystal, vases, lace tablecloths and napkins, napkin rings, wagons, animal harnesses, several teams of oxen, blacksmith’s tools, plows, shovels, wheelbarrows, 1,985 sap buckets, a piano, a fishing skiff, and a sailboat (“sloop rig, about 20 feet”); official value was stamped upon it all. The probate file I went through is nearly half a foot thick.
From the look of it, Elijah was a drinking man, too, or at the very least he liked to throw parties. This taxable inventory included:
3 bbls Scotch Whisky $85
5 bottles Champagne $11
5 casks Monongahela Whisky [likely riverboat moonshine] $60
1 gallon whisky [local rot gut, no doubt] $1
Then there were his home and his lands, all assessed to the last penny. The property was vast, some 8,866 acres (about fifteen square miles, much of it on the Dog River), which had been the dowry of his first wife, Carolina Hollinger, under a land grant to her family by the British government in 1767, eight years before the Revolution and ten years before Elijah was born. It was here—near Mobile, where I grew up—that after his service during the War of 1812 Elijah settled and established his plantation, where he grew cotton and produced turpentine, sap, and tars (for paints, corkings, and related things) from the great stands of native longleaf pines on the property.
There were also debts to be paid and debts to be collected by the estate. According to court papers, Montgomery owed $231 to a Mobile tailor shop and $120 to a man who had sold him a racehorse. In turn, his estate was owed various debts, including $50 from a man named Middleton who had written him a poignant letter dated October 28, 1829, and addressed to “My dear Major,” saying, in part: “I am much in distress in making up a sum of money to pay [illegible] for fifty dollars [$1,000 in today’s money] and in having buried my little daughter yesterday & am but poorly fitted to make an effort to raise any amt. in town. Make an effort, my good friend to let me have the amt. It would add another of the many favors for which I shall always feel under obligations to you.”
Apparently Elijah sent Middleton the money he asked for, since the tax people were there to collect and tax it after he died. It’s all set down in court papers, written in an exquisitely flourished ink-pen cuneiform unknown in what passes for calligraphy today.
Elijah also owned slaves, thirty-six of them to be exact, according to the probate records. They are all listed: “William, Edwin, Indiana, Alaria, Graham, Lizzy . . . twelve men, eight women, nine boys, six girls, one infant,” collectively valued by the court at nearly $15,000 ($334,000 in today’s dollars). The able-bodied male slaves were valued at $500 each, women at $400, and children not yet in their teens at about $250. There was one, Molly, “age about 60,” who was valued at only $50, presumably because of her age and because the laws of the state obligated owners to provide care for their older charges.
I’m not proud that my ancestors owned slaves, but neither do I subscribe to the historic fallacy of assigning present-day ethics or morals to such a widely accepted practice by people who lived nearly two hundred years ago. Virtually every family of means in the South had slaves then (and many in the North, too—let alone slaveholders in Britain, France, Portugal, and elsewhere), including twelve of the first fifteen U.S. presidents and most of the nation’s Founding Fathers, abominable as we consider it today. It has taken long years and countless deaths of men good and bad to arrive at our present state of morality about this matter.
From the papers of the probate, there’s fragmentary evidence that Elijah took pretty good care of his slaves; at least one hopes so. Among the items paid out were $188 for “11 barrels of pork and 405 rashers of bacon,” $64 “for medical services for negroes,” as well as maintenance of a sort of nursery: $20 “for provisions and supplies for negro woman Molly [she of the meager $50 value] who has charge of sundry children of the estate.” There is also a bill for “$7 for burying the negro Ned.”
One of the final and most heart-wrenching acts of the administrator of probate is recorded in these documents as well. This was the auctioning off of Elijah’s slaves to liquidate his estate and settle the remaining taxes. On March 25, 1834, some twenty-eight slaves were divided into four lots and sold on the steps of the Mobile County courthouse. They brought $9,900—minus commission. (From the names and ages given in the papers, it would appear that they were sold off as families.)
One supposes that Elijah’s widow, Adaline, did not feel up to running the plantation by herself and, with her two stepdaughters, wished to move into the city, some fifteen miles north. (Elijah’s first wife, Carolina Hollinger, before she died in 1826 had borne him two girls, Mary Montgomery, nine at the time of his death, and Carolina Montgomery, seven.) At least some of the remaining slaves probably went with them as house servants.
One might question why, if Elijah was a relatively wealthy and decent man, he didn’t simply free his slaves as George Washington had in his will upon his death in 1799. The answer is that by the 1830s, according to the “manumission laws” in Alabama, as in most other Deep South states, the state legislatures had made it illegal for an owner to free his slaves unless it could be proven in court that a particular slave had actually, and physically, saved the life of the owner or a member of his family, or had performed a similar service—and even then, the freed slave was required to leave the state within thirty days (but not with his or her family) under penalty of being sold off into slavery again.* 1
In any case, when all was said and done, the estate Elijah Montgomery left Adaline and his two young daughters—personal property, home, slaves, and acreage—was worth, in today’s dollars, about $2.7 million, minus taxes and lawyer’s fees, of course. Still, not a bad windup for a boy from Virginia who had had to join the army to make a living.
How Elijah came to be at the Battle of New Orleans, and a hero at that, may likewise be pieced together from fragments found in the old attic strongbox. In the America of the eighteenth century, particularly in Virginia, where Elijah was born when it was still under British rule of law, the oldest male heir inherited the bulk of his family’s estate. Of the others, it was anticipated that the girls would marry (and marry well) and that the younger boys would find themselves work suitable to their status. Often this entailed leaving their birthplace to seek opportunity and fortune across the Alleghenies in the rich and newly opened lands of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Illinois.
Elijah most likely ventured forth on this course sometime in his early twenties. I could find no record of his schooling, but from the elegance of his signature and other of his scant writings in my possession, it can be reasonably deduced that he had a semblance of a proper education. At some point he settled in Kentucky, at Lexington, where, in 1808, at the age of thirty-one, he was commissioned as an officer of the newly organized 7th Infantry, a regiment of the regular U.S. Army.
This, and much of the other information on Elijah’s military service, comes from a letter found in the strongbox from the adjutant general of the U.S. Army to my grandmother, dated July 8, 1931. Elijah’s age at the time of his commissioning was rather old for a second lieutenant, and one can probably assume that whatever it was he was doing in Kentucky had not turned out very well, since applying for service as a professional soldier at the age of thirty-one was equivalent to spending the rest of your life’s career in the military, starting out at the very bottom rung of the officer corps at that.
The 7th Infantry Regiment—about 400 to 600 men, depending on circumstances—remains to this day (according to its official Web site) the most decorated infantry regiment in the United States Army. In the early 1800s it was sent by the War Department to New Orleans, newly acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, as its permanent base, though the regiment was expected to operate up and down the Mississippi, on both sides of the river. By the time war with England broke out in 1812, Elijah had been promoted to first lieutenant, and the regiment was sent north to Ohio and Indiana, to fight hostile Indians who were being stirred up by the British from their bases in Canada.
By May of 1814 Elijah had been promoted to captain and the 7th Regiment was ordered back to New Orleans to defend it against a possible British invasion of Louisiana. There he remained six months later when Andrew Jackson rode into the city to take charge of all defenses. A month afterward, when the Battle of New Orleans broke out in earnest on December 23, 1814, Elijah rendered outstanding performance during the three bitter weeks of fighting.