From Subjects to Citizens:  the Acadians and the Americans

Less than six months after the prefect representing Bonapartist France handed control of the purchased part of Louisiana to representatives of the United States, the colony's Acadians, virtually all of them from the sidelines, witnessed a new holiday to celebrate.  On 5 July 1804, one of those American representatives, William Charles Cole Claiborne, former governor of Mississippi Territory and now governor of Orleans Territory, the lower part of Jefferson's Purchase, wrote U.S. Secretary of State James Madison from New Orleans:  "Sir:  The birthday of our Country [the day before] was passed here, in great harmony and hilarity.  High-mass was celebrated at the Cathedral Church, at seven in the morning and a prayer offered for the Continuance of the happiness and prosperity of the United States.  Two appropriate orations the one in the American, the other in the French language were delivered at the Hotel de Ville to a very crowded audience, and the orators (Doctor [John] Watkins and M. [Pierre] Derbigny) received great and general plaudits: the regular army and the (New) Orleans volunteers paraded, and performed various military evolutions very much to the gratification of a numerous assemblage of citizens.  Between eleven and two o'clock, the Governor received congratulatory visits from the Magistrates of the City, the Marquis of Casa Calvo and his Suit, the officers of the Regular Troops and of the Militia, the Revd Clergy and a number of private Citizens.  Throughout the day," Claiborne continued, "every thing wore the appearance of patriotism and Contentment."  One of the day's most moving ceremonies, as far as the city Creoles were concerned, was the blessing and presentation of the new flag of the Orleans Volunteers, overseen, with Claiborne's permission, by the unit's commander, Colonel Joseph de Goutin, fils dit Bellechasse, a younger son of the first native of French Acadia to settle in Louisiana.  "I trust that in this proceeding there has been nothing improper," Claiborne wrote Madison.  "I thought it was prudent on my part to conform to the religious customs of the people, or in other words to present the Standard in the Church, in order that Colonel Bellechasse into whose hands it was placed, might conveniently obtain the blessing."30

Here was a hint that becoming American might not change Louisiana Acadians fundamentally.  Despite American officials insisting that English was now the "official" language of the province, the great majority of Acadians still clung to their cultural verities and spoke their distinctive French patois, though some of them, especially the hand full of merchants and planters, learned English to communicate with les Américains.  Some of them welcomed the rough-and-tumble game of representative democracy the new Jeffersonian republic brought to them, while most watched the play unfold, so strange and discordant, from the safety of the political sidelines.  It was just as well.  According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, "Eastern politicians fretted about the newly annexed land's inhabitants:  Anglo settlers, Catholics, free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race folk."  Acadians and French Creoles, of course, were an important part of the new territory's "Catholic" element.   A New Englander, whose ancestors may have benefitted from the removal of the Acadians from Nova Scotia half a century earlier, lamented about Jefferson's purchase:  "'This Constitution never was, and never can be strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West,' warned Representative Josiah Quincy [III], the future president of Harvard.  Jefferson understood the sentiment.  The people of Louisiana were as 'incapable of self-government as children,' he judged, adding that the 'principles of popular Government are utterly beyond their comprehension.'  Rather than putting Louisiana through the normal Northwest Ordinance procedures," Daniel Immerwahr notes, "Jefferson added a new initial phase, military government, and sent the U.S. army to keep the peace" under the new governor of Orleans Territory, William C. C. Claiborne, who, like Jefferson, was a native of Virginia.  By 1806, the two territories carved from Jefferson's purchase "hosted the largest contingent of the army in the country."09  

This, among other factors, soured Louisiana Acadians on American-style governance.  Louisiana historian Carl A. Brasseaux explains:  "Acadians were slow to participate in" territorial and "state politics .... not because they were unfamiliar with democratic processes.  In the eighteenth century, Acadians had elected delegates to deal with English, French, and Spanish administrators.  In addition, under the Spanish regime they had periodically elected sindics (eighteenth-century counterparts of modern police jurors) to supervise local public works projects and Acadians sporatically served as sindics throughout the south Louisiana districts in the late eighteenth century.  But the commandants, gubernatorial appointees who were the real political power brokers on the local level, routinely opposed Acadians interests when they conflicted with those of the Creole elite.  The resulting political alienation of the Acadian population was reinforced by both the poor relationship between Louisiana's short-lived French regime and the Acadians and by the sense of uncertainty spawned by the colony's chronic political instability at the dawn of the nineteenth century.  The Acadians were thus careful to maintain their distance from any government regime, maintaining a low profile as the colony passed from Spanish to French and ultimately to American hands in late 1803.  American rule," Brasseaux insists, "quickly proved as unacceptable as French domination, and Acadians shunned politics until the 1840s, when popular parties and issues first emerged in rural south Louisiana."

However, in the first days of American control in Louisiana there was a moment when some Acadians felt that they had found a true political home.  Instructed by President Jefferson "to draw French-speaking Louisianians into the embryonic American territorial government so as to broaden its base of support," Governor Claiborne appointed prominent Acadian Joseph dit Belhomme Landry commandant of the Ascension District, formerly Lafourche des Chitimachas, "on the basis of his government experience, bilingualism, and 'profound attachment to the United States.'"  Joseph Landry was a native of Grand-Pré who, at age 3, was deported with his family and dozens of other Acadians from the Minas Basin to Maryland.  He came to Louisiana with his widowed mother and three sisters in 1766 and followed them to Cabahannocer on the river above New Orleans.  After moving upriver to Ascension, he married his first wife, a LeBlanc, in 1775.  By 1777, he owned 30 head of cattle, 20 hogs, and four slaves, which made him one of the wealthiest Acadians in the river district.  After serving as a fusileer in Galvez's river campaign against the British in 1779, Belhomme, as he now was called, remarried to a Bujole, who gave him most of his children.  He was promoted to lieutenant of the Ascension militia in 1794 and served as ad interim of the Ascension District from 1799 to 1803.  Meanwhile, he created New Hope Plantation at Ascension, where he grew corn and sugar.  He was promoted to major of militia in 1804, the same year Governor Claiborne named him commandant of the Ascension District.  The following year, the governor named him justice of the peace in Ascension, essentially the same role as district commander.  That September, Belhomme, Félix Bernard, and Isaac Hébert were elected to the territory's first legislative council.  (Bernard was not an Acadian; his full name--Félix-Gilles-Louis Bernard du Montier--reveals his actual roots; he was a scion of a French noble family from Brittany.  He came to Louisiana with his Acadian wife in 1785 and settled at Baton Rouge.  Hébert, like Belhomme, was an Acadian exile, a native of Cobeguit who came to Louisiana from France in 1785 and settled on upper Bayou Lafourche.)  In spite of these political advancements, "Hopes for an Acadian-Amerian political alliance were shattered in May 1806, when the Acadian representatives joined seven Creole legislators in condemning Claiborne's efforts to introduce English common law into Louisiana, as well as his excessive use of the executive veto.  Acadian displeasure with the Claiborne administration became so intense that in 1806 Joseph Landry resigned from the legislative council in disgust.  Landry's resignation apparently triggered a wave of popular rejection of American politics in the river parishes," Brasseaux goes on, "and only one Acadian representative was elected to the first state constitutional convention in 1812." 

Belhomme Landry, having recovered his political legs, was elected to Louisiana's first state senate in 1812.  But it was too late.  The damage had been done.  Louisiana's first state constitution reflected the form of democracy the rest of the United States favored in that day:  rule by the white-male propertied elite.  Again, Carl Brasseaux says it best:  "Louisiana's largest poor white element lacked a strong voice in the assembly, and its interests were ignored.  The planter-dominated convention drafted a very undemocratic document reflecting the concerns of the state's emerging economic elite.  Indeed, the state's first charter reserved the franchise for property holders, and state officeholding was effectively restricted to planters by high property qualifications..."  Election to the state house of representatives required $500 in property holdings.  To become a state senator, one needed $1,000 worth of property.  A governor needed $5,000!  (There was no lieutenant governor at the time.)  "Property qualifications for governor were especially significant," Brasseaux points out, "for the state's chief executive enjoyed extensive appointive powers and this unfluence."  Brasseaux goes on:  "The 1812 constitution profoundly affected politics in the Acadian parishes, for although propertied Acadian males along the Mississippi, Lafourche, and Teche were generally unaffected, landless settlers in the southwestern prairies, the lower Lafourche valley, and the Terrebonne Parish area were disfranchised."  Only with the presidential aspirations of "Old Hickory" Jackson and the creation of the Democratic Party in the early 1830s, would large numbers of Acadians, especially on the prairies, give a royal damn about Louisiana politics.08

Despite their disdain for governing American-style, Acadians were grateful to see at least some hopeful signs that being part of the American Union would not be all that bad.  Unlike the British of Nova Scotia, the Americans, as Governor Claiborne demonstrated in his conformity to the American Constitution's First Amendment, tolerated their Roman Catholic faith.  The new rulers left Louisiana's ecclesiastical parishes intact, and the Bishop of Louisiana, when the Church appointed a new one, could continue his business, though he would have to answer to a distant prelate in Baltimore, not to the Bishop of Havana in nearby Spanish Cuba.  Only the priests and the hand full of more fanatical Catholics complained when Protestant congregations inevitably appeared in their South Louisiana communities.  Even the burning question of the nature of Louisiana's civil law was solved by compromise.  "In the beginning," notes Louisiana historian Joe Gray Taylor, "Claiborne kept in force all Spanish law that did not conflict with the United States Constitution, but common law was soon substituted for Spanish law in criminal cases."  In 1808, likely from pressure by the Creole elite, "a new civil law, based on the Napoleonic Code of France, was put into effect.  Later, in 1825, a new adaptation of the Napoleonic Code was instituted, and it has remained as the basis of Louisiana's civil law to this day."  Louisiana's system of laws, then, changed gradually, probably a pleasant surprise for most Acadians.  Meanwhile, the economy of the region also changed slowly but inexorably as the plantation system took hold; none, even those who lived on modest holdings, could escape the play of that peculiar game.  For those Acadians who held others in bondage, or sought to do so, after it became clear that their new rulers had no intention of abolishing slavery in Louisiana, the American system of slavery held some appeal, except for one thing--the importation of "foreign" slaves into the new American territory.  Although the United States Constitution, ratified in 1788, provided for the abolishment of the international slave trade in all of the states by Congressional statue in 1808, "One of the first acts of the United States in administering the territory acquired from France by the Louisiana Purchase," notes Joe Gray Taylor, "was a prohibition of the foreign slave trade."  This, many Louisianians believed, "meant economic disaster" for planters in the new territory, including the hand full of Acadians in the sugar and cotton parishes.  It also invited widespread smuggling of slaves from the West Indies and West Africa into Louisiana territory years before the prohibition applied to the rest of the American South, a nefarious activity in which Acadians in the western parishes likely took part.  The territory's slave code was a less troublesome matter.  "A new slave code was largely a repetition of the French and Spanish Code Noir, though slightly more severe," Joe Gray Taylor explains.  Universally concerned about the integrity of their Spanish land grants, Acadian farmers and ranchers mastered the transformation of Spanish arpents into American acres, sections, and townships.  But, as shown by the slave importation brouhaha and the fight over the nature of Louisiana law, the transition from Spanish subject to American citizen was by no means trouble free.03

Meanwhile, momentous political changes came to lower Louisiana that affected everyone there, even the most insousiant of Acadians.  In March 1804, only four months after the transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States at New Orleans, the American Congress created the Territory of Orleans out of the southern part of Jefferson's Purchase, that is, all of the Louisiana Purchase south of the 33rd parallel, today's boundary between the states of Arkansas and Louisiana.  The new territory, unorganized at first, was created on 1 October 1804 and existed until lower Louisiana became the eighteenth state of the Union on 30 April 1812--seven and a half years which, according to historan Jon Kukla, were marred by "[c]ontroversies over race, religion, law, language, and culture" among the territory's polyglot inhabitants.  The new territory was authorized a legislature, elected by the qualified voters, which met at New Orleans, the territorial seat, in early 1805, soon after the territory was "organized."  The elected house of representatives consisted of 25 members who had to have been a United States citizen for three years and own at least 200 acres of land.  The first legislature, however, "reduced voter requirements to three months' citizenship and fifty acres of land"--"still a stringently restricted electorate," according to historian Joe Gray Taylor.  Governor Claiborne "remained governor by presendential appointment," typical of American territories, and was given "a five-man legislative council," which "was also appointed, but from a list of ten names drawn up by [the] elected house of representatives."  In April 1805, the legislative council, "attempting to give Louisiana a government like that of the southern states," created 12 counties, "which served as electoral districts," five of which--Lafourche, Acadia, Iberville, Attakapas, and Opelousas--contained substantial numbers of Acadians.  In 1807, the counties, which were still allowed to exist, were replaced by the territorial legislature with 19 civil parishes, eight of which--Ascension, Assumption, Baton Rouge, Iberville, Interior, St. James, St. Landry, and St. Martin--were largely Acadian.  Between 1807 and 1812, the territorial legislature created two more civil parishes--East Baton Rouge from an annexed portion of Spanish West Florida in 1810, and St. Mary from part of St. Martin in 1811, both where Acadians had settled.  When statehood came in April 1812, two of the civil parishes created in 1807 were renamed:  Baton Rouge Parish became West Baton Rouge Parish, and Interior Parish became Lafourche Interior Parish.  Both contained many Acadians. 

In 1845, a new Louisiana state constitution finally abolished the counties, leaving only the civil parishes to serve as "units of local government."  As Joe Gray Taylor explains:  "The same legislaure that created the parishes provided that the parish judge, justices of the peace, and a jury of twelve citizens should meet together once a year to deal with roads, bridges, levees, and police matters, or keeping order within the parish.  With the passage of time, the office of parish judge ceased to exist, the justices of the peace became purely judicial officers, and the jury, gradually becoming known as the police jury, became the administrative and legislative body of the parish."  Meanwhile, the administration of justice in the territory and then in the state rested "in the hands of justices of the peace, three so-called superior-court judges, and one United States district judge.".24

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In 1804, Lieutenant Henry Hopkins of the United States army "arrived in the Attakapas region to formally raise the U.S. flag over the Teche."  A similar ceremony was held most likely in the Opelousas District.  Late that year, "Spanish officials in Nacogdoches ... spread news of a royal decree that offered asylum to any slave escaping from American-held Louisiana into the province of Texas.  Officials in New Orleans," including Spanish "commissioner of limits" and former interim governor the Marqués de Casa Calvo, "confirmed its existence.  Within weeks rumors of insurrection spread through the lower part of the Louisiana district, and slaves began fleeing American territory for Texas," some of them likely from Attakapas and Opelousas vacharies, farms, and plantations.  Governor Claiborne beseeched the marqués to rescind the decree.  The Spaniard ignored him, and slaves continued to flee to Nacogdoches. 

The western Louisiana borderland, again, was a potential scene of conflict.  As though on cue, in 1805 "former Vice-President Aaron Burr arrived in New Orleans and conferred with General Wilkinson and a number of leading citizens."  According to Joe Gray Taylor and other students of Louisiana history, "Historians are still uncertain as to what Burr was planning."  Burr later insisted that he came to Louisiana to settle on "a Spanish land grant"--40,000 acres along the Ouachita River near present-day Bastrop, Louisiana.  The year before, in July 1804, while still serving as Jefferson's estranged vice president, Burr ended his long political rivalry with fellow New Yorker Alexander Hamilton by mortally wounding Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey.  Though indicted, Burr was neither tried nor convicted of murder despite the death of his opponent.  However, the notoriety of the incident ended his political career and whatever favor he may still have enjoyed with Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party.  After spending time in South Carolina, where his daughter lived, and returning to Philadelphia and Washington, D. C., to finish out his term as vice president, Burr chose to settle in Louisiana, and there he evidently turned into a conspirator.  His mistake was trusting the ultimate conspirator, General James Wilkinson, commander of the American army at New Orleans and former agent for Spain.  In 1806, when their schemes--whatever they may have been--began to unravel, Wilkinson denounced Burr to the re-elected president, and Jefferson, believing Wilkinson's take on the matter, ordered Burr's arrest for treason.  In February 1807, after being released by a local judge at Natchez, Mississippi, Burr was captured by federal agents in Mississippi Territory north of present-day Mobile, Alabama, and taken to Richmond, Virginia, for trial.  Chief Justice John Marshall, a cousin and political rival of Jefferson, presided at Burr's treason trial in the summer of 1807.  To Jefferson's chagrin, the former war hero, U.S. Senator, vice president, and duelist was acquitted of all charges and spent the next few years in self-imposed exile in Europe.  Back in Louisiana, all remained calm despite the nation-wide turmoil following the collapse of Burr's and Wilkinson's schemes. 

In 1806, before Burr's arrest, Spanish and American agents met on the Sabine River to work out a compromise.  The result was the Neutral Ground Agreement in which the disputants "agreed to a sort of 'demilitarized' zone between Texas and the United States, which they hoped would prevent war."  The Americans nevertheless insisted that the boundary resulting from Jefferson's Purchase and the creation of the State of Louisiana nine years later should lay along the Sabine, while the Spanish placed the boundary there at Rio Hondo near their long-abandoned presidio at Los Adaes.  After years of delay due to war in Europe and extended negotiations between Spanish envoy Luis de Onís y González and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, finally, on 22 February 1819, the Adams-Onís Treaty set the boundary between Louisiana and Spanish Texas along the Sabine, thus relinquishing Texas to the Spanish, and Spain ceded the Floridas to the United States while recognizing a western boundry line that ran all the way to the Pacific.  Despite complaints from southerners and westerners, including Andrew Jackson, that the new boundary line at the Sabine "was simply too close to 'our great western mart,' New Orleans," the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty quickly and unanimously.  However, not until Spain's ratification in February 1821 did the spectre of war between the two powers evaporate along the western frontier.  It did not last.  Mexico's war for independence from Spain, which erupted the year the Adams-Onís Treaty was signed, promised to unsettle the area once again.  Mexico gained its independence in August 1821 and forbade the enslavement of Indians and Africans.  Seven years later, Mexico signed a "Treaty of Limits" with the United States that recognized the boundaries set in 1819, but the treaty did not go into force until April 1832.  Meanwhile, the continued movement of escaped slaves from South Louisiana into Texas and the uproar it caused on both sides of the border, as well as depradations by outlaws taking advantage of slack law enforcement in the isolated region, made the 30- to 40-mile wide Neutral Ground a precarious place for common folk to live, but they lived there nonetheless.  According to Joe Gray Taylor:  "From time to time, either American or Spanish troops, each side always with the consent of the other, would sweep the strip to recover stolen property and fugitive slaves and occasionally to arrest men wanted for crimes by one nation of the other."  Then, in 1835-36, all hell broke loose west of the Sabine when Anglo and Hispanic Texians fought for, and won, their own independence from Mexico.  The preponderance of southern Anglo-Americans in the former Mexican colony, exacerbated in the 1820s by the efforts of land "impresario" Stephen F. Austin, led Texas to become a slave republic.  Escaped slaves from Louisiana and other southern states now would have to avoid capture in the Texas Republic before finding freedom beyond the distant Rio Grande in slave-free Mexico.  When in December 1845 Texas became the American Union's twenty-eighth state, its citizens chose to retain their enslaved property along with devotion to the idea of state rights.04 

Meanwhile, Acadians left their homesteads in the old Neutral Ground, St. Landry, and other southwestern parishes and crossed the Sabine into the prairie region of coastal East Texas.  Among the west-bound emigrants were Acadians named Guidry (early 1830s), Chiasson (by 1840), Trahan (1840s), Broussard (by 1850), Hébert (before 1853), Dugas (late 1850s), and Labauve (1850s).  Choosing to become part of a thriving cattle industry, members of these families participated in cattle drives from their new homes in Texas across South Louisiana to the major cattle market at New Orleans.  The route they and their East Texas neighbors followed most of the way was called the Opelousas Trail, named after the old Louisiana district through which it ran.  It also was called the Old Beef Trail and followed closely what was later dubbed the Old Spanish Trail--a 130-mile venture from Niblett's Bluff on the Sabine to the western edge of the Atchafalaya Basin at Butte La Rose. 

The most troublesome geographical features of the Opelousas Trail were the many coulées, marais, bayous, and rivers the drovers and their beeves had to cross until they reached the western edge of the Atchafalaya Basin, which, if they chose the most direct route to the Mississippi, could be crossed only via a stream-driven cattle barge.  In Texas, the trail "began at Goliad," the site of the Spanish presidio where a shipload of Acadians and Germans from Maryland were held captive during their attempt to reach New Orleans in 1769.  From Goliad, it "moved across the upper edges of the coast plains crossing the Brazos near [present-day] Navasota, the Trinity at Liberty, the Neches at Beaumont, and the Sabine River north of Orange at a place called the 'narrows' or Ballew's Ferry," south of the east-bank river settlement of Niblett's Bluff.  The trail then crossed South Louisiana beside the path of three future byways:  the Southern Pacific Railway of the 1880s, U.S. Highway 90 of the early twentieth century, and Interstate Highway 10, built in the 1960s.  At each major crossing, it was customary for the drovers to hire local men to help with the most dangerous part of the trail, including the employment of specially trained cattle who would swim ahead of the herd and lead them to the best location on the river's opposite bank.  The first major obstacle for the drovers while crossing the southwest Louisiana prairies was the largest river between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande.  The Calcasieu River, which flows from the piney-woods of western Louisiana south of Red River all the way down to the Gulf, not only is wider but also runs faster than other streams of the region.  The famous landscape architect and journalist Frederick Law Olmstead, during a trip from Texas across the American South in the late 1850s, admitted that he was not "prepared to find the Calcasieu a superb and solemn river, two hundred and thirty yards across and forty five feet deep."  A favorite crossing of the mighty Calcasieu was at Bagdad Ferry, above present-day Lake Charles.  The next crossing was at Bayou Lacassine, a tributary of the lower Mermentau River, the upper reaches of which could easily be crossed at the western edge of today's Welsh.  Also there was the home of Miles Welsh, for whom the town is named.  Here the drovers, having "rode twenty miles over poor prairie land," could corral their steers and enjoy rough hospitality in the Welsh's cabin of a single room "which was a kitchen, chamber, parlor and hall, and let the rain in through every part" but was better than sleeping on the open prairie.  Next came the Grand Marais at the western edge of today's Jennings--another easy crossing if the rain did not fall too heavily.  Five miles east of the Grand Marais lay a potentially hazardous crossing, that of the Mermentau River.  Here, like the mighty Calcasieu, was a substantial stream that drained much of this part of the southwest prairies.  The Mermentau is formed by three southward-flowing bayous:  the Nezpique on the west, which flows directly south through several prairies of the old Opelousas District and falls into the Mermentau just south of the confluence of the two bayous to the east, des Cannes and Plaquemine Brûlé.  These bayous and their many tributaries drain the prairies west and south of today's Opelousas.  The cattlemen crossed the Mermentau just below its confluence with the Nezpique, at the present-day village of Mermentau.  After allowing their beeves to rest, the drovers continued eastward across open prairie, past today's Crowley and Rayne, to a crossing of upper Bayou Queue de Tortue, which flows southwestward into the Mermentau just above where the big river widens into today's Lake Arthur.  Here, along the Tail of the Turtle, all the way up to where it approaches the upper waters of Bayou Carencro, was the old boundary between the Attakapas and Opelousas districts, which continued northeastward across the upper Teche to Bayou Courtableu in the upper Atchafalaya Basin.  After crossing Bayou Queue de Tortue, the cattlemen drove their beeves northeastward across more open prairie to Vermilionville, today's Lafayette.  Crossing upper Bayou Vermilion, most likely at today's Pin Hook Bridge, would have been a fairly easy effort unless the rains had been unusually heavy.  It would then have been wise to hire locals to help with the crossing.  From Vermilionville, the herd crossed a narrow stretch of prairie south of upper Bayou Vermilion before reaching La Pointe on the upper Teche, today's Breaux Bridge.  After crossing the famous bayou and resting their beeves again, they would have found themselves on the final stretch, across the wide Prairie Grand Chevreuil, to the Atchafalaya Basin and the Mississippi beyond. 

Having reached the Teche, the drovers often corraled their herds with local ranchers and farmers while waiting for the cattle barge to reach nearby Butte La Rose on the upper Atchafalaya.  "Once there," Texas cattleman/historian Jim Bob Jackson relates, the drover's "hands were tied.  He became dependent on the cow boat and its timetable to cross the swamp.  On some trips," a drover "had to wait one to two weeks for an available boat in order to safely cross the swamp.  To try to drive a herd across the Atchafalaya Swamp was a fool hardy and dangerous endeavor because one could lose beeves, horses, and even men."  The only alternative to the cattle barge from Butte La Rose to Plaquemine on the Mississippi was to drive the herd south from Breaux Bridge or St. Martinville along the natural levee of Bayou Teche, past New Iberia, Jeanerette, Charenton, and Franklin, all the way down to Berwick on the lower Atchafalaya.  The crossing here to Brashear, now Morgan, City, was as treacherous as the crossing of the Calcasieu and was best accomplished by ferry.  From Brashear, the herds followed the natural levees eastward past Chacahoula to Thibodaux on the Lafourche, across that bayou and Bayou Boeuf, and then round the western edge of Lac des Allemands to the German settlements on the river above New Orleans--the original cattle trail from the Attakapas prairies to New Orleans used by Creole and Acadian cowboys since the 1750s.  However, the great distance and the dangers of this southern route made even a long wait for the cattle boat at Butte La Rose more sense to the cattlemen in time and money.  Even when, in the 1850s, the railroad from Algiers across from New Orleans reached Brashear City, the cattle barge trip across the Basin was faster and cheaper than the old southern route. 

The same was true of another alternative to crossing the middle of the Atchafalaya Basin on a steam-powered cattle barge--a "northern" trail followed by prairie cattleman Andrew Herron Mouton, "called Uncle Major," of St. Landry Parish, on the prairie north of the Old Spanish Trail.  In the late 1800s, from his vacharie near present-day Eunice, Uncle Major "would move 150 or 200 head of steers, weighing 400 to 500 pounds each, "northeastward across the open prairie "to Plaisance," near Washington, where they crossed Bayou Courtableu.  Mouton and his herd would continue northeasternward across more open prairies in St. Landry and Avoylles parishes to Simmesport on the upper Atachafalaya River, just south of the Red River's confluence with the Mississippi.  At Simmesport, "Expert swimmers would guide the lead steers across the river.  They would move down the west bank of the Mississippi to the New Texas Landing, West Baton Rouge, Plaquemine, Donaldsonville, St. James, and finally to Vacharie, where the steers were loaded and transported by steamboat to New Orleans."  Again, here was a roundabout trail that was in no way a short cut across the Atchafalaya Basin to New Orleans for anyone following the Old Spanish Trail. 

From Butte La Rose, the cattle boat transported the beeves into the heart of the Basin down the upper Atchafalaya to Grand River, which flowed eastward into Bayou Plaquemine.  This small but difficult bayou led directly to the Mississippi--a short cut of only a few days' time with the help of a small steamboat or two.  At Plaquemine on the river, the beeves would remain in pasture until they were loaded aboard a Mississippi River paddlewheel for the single-day's trip down to New Orleans.  Here the beeves would be sold at market price, and then the drovers would head home the way they had come.

According to Texas historian Jim Bob Jackson, it was customary for cattle drivers to corall their herds with local farmers and ranchers after making an especially troublesome crossing or while waiting for a river to subside or for the weather to turn.  Jackson's research on the antebellum cattle drives across the southwest Louisiana prairies revealed the names of some of these hospitable locals, some of them Acadians, or Cajuns, as others were calling them.  Charles Dugat, who would have been a Dugas in South Louisiana, lived in Liberty County, Texas, in the 1850s and tended his neighbors' herds when they were driving cattle to New Orleans.  Across the Sabine at Niblett's Bluff, Jean Baptiste Granger, Ursin Guidry, and a family named Guilbeau provided "lodging and food," helpers at the crossing, and the use of their coralls.  At the Teche, wealthy Acadian plantation owner Valery Martin, who lived a few miles south of Breaux Bridge on the bayou, along with neighbor Charles André Gauthier, a French Creole married to an Acadian Cormier, also accommodated drovers using the Old Spanish Trail.12

These local cattlemen and planters, in fact, were part of a growing economic phenomenon in the prairie parishes--the Acadian cattle baron.  In an overview of Acadian husbandry on the southwestern prairies during the antebellum period, historian Carl Brasseaux explains:  "On the prairies west of Lafayette Parish, 'providence rice' was sown haphazardly in low areas and watered only by rainfall.  The benign neglect exhibited by rice growers there pervaded all aspects of agiculture in the Acadian parishes.  Commercial agriculture and the slaveholdings it necessitated consequently were practically unknown on the southwestern prairies."  Mother Nature was partly responsible for this.  "Unlike the fertile Lafayette, St. Martin, and southern St. Landry Parish water bottoms," Brasseaux notes, "the prairies possessed thick sod and a very shallow clay pan, which militated against agriculture, particularly with the wooden implements traditionally used by the prairie Acadians.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the overwhelming majority of these people depended on cattle production for their livelihood," a tradition among Acadienne exiles that dated back to the Broussards' arrival on the lower Teche in 1765.  "The ease with which cattle could be raised on the open prairies as well as the availability of unclaimed land had drawn Acadians away from the region's principal watercourses since the 1770s.  The number of Acadians in the remote areas west of Bayou Vermilion and north of Bayou Queue [de] Tortue, however, remained small until the late antebellum period, when hundreds of non-slaveholders migrated to western Vermilion, St. Landry, and Calcasieu parishes."  There were other factors that contributed to this movement, Brasseaux explains:  "As in the river parishes, the exodus of small farmers was apparently prompted by the emergence of the plantation system, the steady reduction of family landholdings through forced heirship, and the availability of cheap government lands in the southwestern prairie area."  This westward migration among prairie Acadians could be detected as early as the 1830s.  A result was the development among prairie Cadiens of "a life-style far different from that of their eastern neighbors" along the lower Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche, as well as along the Teche--a life-style, Brasseaux insists, that was "much more compatible with their ancestors' nonmaterialistic values...," that "perpetuated the self-reliant spirit of their forebears, engaging in subsistence agriculture and ranching without the assistance of slaves." 

But this primitive prairie capitalism among latter-day Cadiens did not preclude the rise among them of a socio-economic elite.  "Although subsistence agriculture predominated among the prairie dwellers," Brasseaux goes on, "many western Acadians produced livestock commercially during the antebellum period, apparently for the money to acquire land.  The growth of livestock production was prompted by the rapid proliferation of herds requiring minimal management on the verdant prairies as well as consistently high beef prices....  Attracted by such favorble market conditions, some Acadian cattlemen regularly drove their herds to Crescent City markets, using the trails blazed by their ancestors," not only the eastern half of the Opelousas Trail, but also the old southern route down the Teche ridge to Berwick, over to Thibodaux, and around to the German settlements.  "Proceeds of these sales were invested in cheap government lands, and, over the years, these acquisitions were consolidated into large vacharies....  By 1850, St. Landry, Vermilion, and Calcasieu parishes boasted twenty 500-acre ranches and one vacherie containing 5,000 acres."07

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While losing a few emigrants to Texas and other parts of the United States, South Louisiana also welcomed large numbers of immigrants during the state's early American period.  Between May 1809 and January 1810, while Napoléon's army menanced Spain, thousands of refugees from the turmoil in Haiti who had escaped to Spanish Cuba in the early 1800s poured into New Orleans from Havana, most of them French Creoles but some of them Acadians.  Most of the new arrivals remained in New Orleans, but a hand full settled in the prairie parishes and others on the Acadian Coast above New Orleans.  They included Acadians named Cormier who settled at New Orleans and in St. Landry Parish, Prejean and Villejoin in St. Martin Parish, and Babin and Poirier on the river in St James.  After the British-American War of 1812 ended with American victory at New Orleans in January 1815, the sea lanes opened again, and immigrants poured into the Crescent City, though few, if any, were of Acadian heritage. 

There was at least one exception, a young Frenchman with Acadian roots who came to South Louisiana before the war with Britain reached the American Gulf coast.  Louis André Talbot did not come to Spanish Louisiana with any of the extended Acadian families in the 1760s.  And although his mother's family was deported from Île St.-Jean to St.-Malo, France, in 1758-59, he did not come to Louisiana on any of the Seven Ships from France in 1785.  He was born probably at Bordeaux in c1791, six years after the Seven Ships sailed from Paimboeuf, Nantes, and St.-Malo.  His father was a Lafitte, but Louis André, perhaps a "natural" son, assumed his mother's family name.  Louis André came to Louisiana probably in the early 1810s, before the second war with Britain made trans-Atlantic travel more difficult than usual.  He did not remain in Creole New Orleans but chose to go to the Acadian bastion of Bayou Lafourche, settling in Assumption Parish, where he married.  He and his wife, an Acadian Dugas, raised a large family there, including 10 sons.  His oldest son settled on the southwest prairies either on the eve of, or soon after, the War of 1861-65, establishing a western branch of the family.  Louis André's other sons remained on the upper Lafourche.13

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Although only a small portion of the Acadian presence in South Louisiana was affected by it, the so-called Bonnie Blue Flag Revolt of 1810 shook up the Baton Rouge area, where river Acadians had settled as early as the 1780s following British defeat in the American War for Independence.  Acadians who had come to the colony from Maryland in 1767 and settled at San Gabriel in the Spanish District of Manchac crossed the bayou into the Baton Rouge District after 1783 to occupy abandoned British lands.  In 1785, more Acadians arrived, this time from France, and chose to settle at Baton Rouge, where they remained, and in the New Feliciana District along Bayou des Écores, today's Thompson Creek, north of Baton Rouge, which most of them abandoned by the mid-1790s.  According to the Spanish, even after Jefferson's Purchase the area remained part of their province of West Florida, headquartered at Pensacola, with its eastern boundary on the Apalachicola River and its western boundary on the Mississippi.  The Americans thought otherwise.  Despite its lack of legitimacy, Jefferson pressed the American claim to Spanish West Florida, from the Mississippi east to the Perdido River, as part of his Purchase in 1803.  This policy continued, also passively, under Jefferson's successor, James Madison, who became the fourth President of the United States in March 1809.  Meanwhile, Anglo-American settlers in substantial numbers drifted into the disputed territory, including the present-day Florida parishes of southeast Louisiana and the southern halves of the present-day states of Mississippi and Alabama.  They established farms and plantations on the rich lands there and engaged in a thriving commerce not only out of the Gulf coast ports, but also along the Mississippi.  Acadians also continued to infiltrate into the disputed territory but in much smaller numbers, mostly around Baton Rouge.  Few of them held slaves on their new farms along the river, but slaves were a prominent feature of the cotton plantations established by Anglo-Americans and planters of other nationalities, including French and Spanish, throughout West Florida.17 

Unsatisfied with Spanish rule, in 1804 West Floridians staged a revolt against the Spanish, still headquartered at Pensacola, but also garrisoned at Mobile and Baton Rouge.  Despite the small size of the Spanish garrisons, the revolt was quickly put down.  In 1808, the province suffered an unexpected political upheaval, as did the rest of Spanish America.  Napoléon Bonaparte, the western world's most dangerous imperialist, overthrew the Bourbon monarcy in Spain and installed his brother Joseph as the Spanish king.  The Peninsular War that erupted affected not only the mother country, but also Spain's far flung colonies.  According to historian Andrew McMichael, "This would have important consequences for West Floridians, for whom" the Bourbon kings "represented the center of their monarchy-based political loyalty.  For West Floridians, as for other Latin Americans, the loss of their sovereign and the seeming demise of their mother country was more a psychologial and political blow than an economic and social problem.  West Florida had always been a mixture of many different cultures and remained tied economically to several other places, Spain being one of many.  But the sovereign king had always been a tangible object of their loyalty and one to whom they swore their fealty in document after document."  Now the province was rocked by an instability it had never felt, which made it more vulnerable than ever to the imperialist desires of its closest neighbor--The United States of America.18

A year before Napoléon's conquest of Spain, that closest neighbor, in one fell swoop, virtually destroyed West Florida's economy.  Reacting to the "near destruction" of the frigate Chesapeake by the British frigate Leopard in June of 1807, President Jefferson, in order to counter the clamor for war against Britain, pushed through Congress the Embargo Act, which ended all trade between the United States and other nations, including those nations' colonies.  The embargo "officially closed West Florida and Baton Rouge to American trade" via the American port of New Orleans and essentially cut off the Mississippi side of the province and its trade with the rest of the world.  Acadian farmers and merchants in the Baton Rouge area had no choice but to ship their goods directly to the Gulf Coast ports at considerable expense or to smuggle goods down to New Orleans, hoping American officials would not catch them.  When the Spanish government "inquired about an exception to the embargo," U.S. Secretary of State James Madison not only denied the request, but the Jefferson administration stationed naval vessels on Lake Pontchartrain and along the Mississippi, "essentially blockading West Florida."  And then came the conquest of Spain by Napoléon in 1808 and the outbreak of general war in Europe... again ... in 1809.19

For many reasons, Jefferson's embargo was an utter failure and was modified by "a nonintercourse law" passed by Congress in December 1808, a month after Madison's election.  After his inauguration on 4 March 1809, the economic struggle against Britain and Napoléon was the new American president's problem, as was American relations with its southeastern neighbors, the Spanish Floridas.  It did not take long for that relationship to become even more complicated for the new president.  In April 1809, Charles Louis Boucher de Grand-Pré, former governor of the Baton Rouge district, died.  Carlos de Grand-Pré, as he was known to his fellow Floridians, like no one else, had been a shaker and mover in the province.  According to Andrew McMichael, "In the long term, Grand-Pré's death removed one of the final pieces of the support structure in Spanish West Florida society.  Without Grand-Pré the government apparatus and, perhaps more importantly, the people's relationship to it began to collapse.  His death added immediacy to the weight of the local failure of the Spanish government, compounded the differences regarding the policial economy of the United States and Spain, and left the ongoing disputes over land policies without a trusted mediator.  In short, after having lost their metropolis," Bourbon Spain, "and at a time when the rest of the world was crumbling around them, residents of Spanish West Florida then lost the personification of their loyalty to the Spanish Crown."  The residents of the Baton Rouge district despised Grand-Pré's successor, Carlos Dehault De Lassus, who they insisted was corrupt and merely a "placeman."  Moreover, Governor David Holmes of nearby Mississippi Territory, and even exiled participants in former vice president Aaron Burr's abortive conspiracy of 1806 to separate the Louisiana Territory from the United States, tried to convince U.S. Secretary of State Robert Smith, and President Madison himself, that West Floridians, especially in the Anglo-American community of the Baton Rouge area, feared foreign intervention and would welcome American annexation of the province.20

In the summer of 1810, Anglo-American conspirators, from their base at Bayou Sara in the Feliciana district north of Baton Rouge, tried again to overthrow Spanish government in West Florida.  This time, with the inadvertent "help" of Governor De Lassus, they succeeded.  With De Lassus's approbation and cooperation, a convention of delegates, essentially an unauthorized district assembly, met at Baton Rouge in July and August to discuss and implement reforms in the governing of the local districts under De Lassus's jurisdiction.  Evidently there were as many delegates at the convention in favor of the province remaining under Spanish control as there were those who favored independence.  Unfortunately, in early September, rumors spread that the provincial governor, Juan Vicente Folch, who distrusted the convention as well as De Lassus, had appeared in the western part of the province and was sending troops from Pensacola to Baton Rouge to quell what he believed was an incipient rebellion.  Rumor followed rumor for the next several weeks, including the gathering of a pro-independence militia at Bayou Sara intent on attacking the fort at Baton Rouge.21 

On 22 September 1810, pro-independence delegates, after the mass resignation of delegates who opposed independence, issued a "preliminary Declaration of Independence," what Andrew McMichael calls "the final step toward separation from the mother country."  The following morning, 80 or so armed militia cavalrymen from Bayou Sara, led by a Frenchman named George of Passau and Anglo-American Philemon Thomas, attacked the ramshackle, undermanned Fort San Carlos at Baton Rouge.  The fort fell within minutes, and the rebels, issuing orders in French and English, not in Spanish, promptly arrested Governor De Lassus, who lived nearby.  The rebels also seized the provincial archives, housed at the fort, symbolically seizing the provincial government itself.  Two defenders died and three were wounded in the melee at Baton Rouge.  One of the dead was Louis de Grand Pré, 23-year-old son of the former governor, who was mourned by many of his fellow West Floridians.  The rebels raised their new flag, later called the Bonnie Blue Flag, with a five-pointed white star on a blue field, above the fort.  Three days later, the West Florida convention declared independence from Spanish rule.  The delegates promptly urged Mississippi Territory Governor David Holmes or Orleans Territory Governor William C. C. Claiborne to take possession of the province for the United States, but the two American governors hesitated, seeking advise from President Madison in Washington, D.C.  Assuming that they had been rebuffed, convention delegates, led by John Rhea and Fulwar Skipwith, declared West Florida an independent republic and created a government to be seated at St. Francisville, in the Feliciana district above Bayou Sara.  The delegates adopted a constitution, similar to that of the United States, on October 24 and chose Fulwar Skipwith, native of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, graduate of William and Mary College, veteran of the American War for Independence, diplomat to Martinique and France during the Washington administration, negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase, and founder of the Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, as president of the new republic.  He proved to be its only president.22 

When Madison learned of the revolt in West Florida, he acted decisively.  On 17 October 1810, only three days after the West Floridians formed their national government at St. Francisville, without the consent of Congress and without negotiation with the Spanish government or leaders of the new republic, and fulfulling Jefferson's claim that West Florida had been part of his Louisiana Purchase, Madison proclaimed that the former Spanish province now belonged to the United States.  He ordered Governor Claiborne at New Orleans, with assistance from Governor Holmes in Mississippi, to send U.S. troops to Feliciana to occupy Bayou Sara and St. Francisville, which they did on December 6 and 7.  Three days later, American troops lowered the flag of the new republic, with its single white star, and raised the Stars and Stripes over the fort at Baton Rouge.  The Republic of West Florida faded into history.  Not until 1813, however, during the next American war with Britain, did the Spanish garrison at Mobile surrender to American forces under General James Wilkinson.  Meanwhile, the Acadians in the Baton Rouge district and the few who may have remained in Feliciana, like the rest of their Acadian confreres on the lower river, along the Lafourche, and on the western prairies, were citizens of the United States of America, whether they liked it or not.23

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The first United States census in which Louisiana Acadians participated--that of 1810, the third of its kind--revealed that, of the 20 civil parishes in which 76,556 Louisianians lived, four parishes with substantial numbers of Acadians were among the top 10 most populous parishes of Orleans Territory:  St. Martin, second, with 7,369 people; St. Landry, third, with 5,048; St. James, fifth, with 3,955; and Iberville, tenth, with 2,679.  Other predominantly Acadian parishes in Orleans Territory that year held the following populations:  Assumption, eleventh, with 2,474; Ascension, twelfth, with 2,219; Lafourche (then called Interior), fourteenth, with 1,995; and West Baton Rouge (then called Baton Rouge), sixteenth, with 1,463--27,202 in the eight "Acadian" parishes.  Here was a territory with a population of over 60,000, large enough, according to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, to form a new state.25 

In early 1811, the United States Congress, taking note of the previous year's census, authorized for the Territory of Orleans a constitutional convention.  Louisiana historian Joe Gray Taylor tells the story:  "The convention met in a New Orleans coffeehouse affording ample room for the thirty-seven delegates.  Julien Poydras was elected chairman of the convention, which, if one can judge by the names, had more than twice as many delegates of French ancestry," including Acadian Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, "as there were Anglo-Americans.  Even so, the convention adopted a constitution that was the same as that of Kentucky, with only slight variations.  The new constitution limited suffrage to adult males who owned property and/or paid taxes, provided a two-year term for a twenty-five-man house of representatives, and called for a senate of fourteen men elected to four-year terms.  The governor served a four-year term, but could not succeed himself.  An interesting feature of the constitution was that the people voted for candidates for governor, but that the final choice was to be made by the legislature between the two candidates with the highest number of votes.  It should be added," Taylor continues, "that the legislature under the Constitution of 1812 always elected the candidate with the hightest number of popular votes.  The governor was far stronger than most governors in the Union, having the power, with senate approval, to appoint all judges and local officials"--a tightly-restricted democracy typical of the times.  In spite of the West Florida Revolt of 1810 and its result, the new state constitution "as drawn up," Taylor explains, "did not include the Florida Parishes within the boundaries of the proposed new state of Louisiana, but the convention adopted a resolution requesting that that territory be added to the new state."  And so it was done when Congress approved the new constitution on 30 April 1812, making Louisiana the eighteenth state of the Union.  In the  gubernatorial election that followed, territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne was overwelmingly chosen by the new legisture as the first governor of the State of Louisiana.33

Acadians and the Battle of New Orleans

And then another Amercan war disrupted the lives of Louisiana's Acadians.  Thirty-three years after Acadian militia fought under Spanish Governor Gálvez against the British during the American War for Independence, and only a month and a half after Louisiana became a sovereign state, the United States Congress declared war against Britain.  The contending issues of the War of 1812, also called "Mr. Madison's War," were unchecked American expansion into the Old Northwest, resulting in British support of Indian resistance there, especially by the Tecumseh Confederacy; British restrictions on American maritime trade despite U.S. neutrality in the conflict between Britain and Napoléonic France; and impressment into the Royal Navy of "British" sailors seized on American ships.  The British promptly blockaded American ports, including New Orleans.  Land warfare did not commence until later in the year, on the Canadian frontier, far from South Louisiana.  One wonders if the Cadiens there were aware of the large numbers of their fellow former exiles living in Lower Canada, much closer to the scene of conflict.  Not until the second and third years of the war did fighting come anywhere near Louisiana.  In 1813 and 1814, British forces from Upper Canada and their Indian allies captured American forts and defeated American forces in the Old Northwest and as far down the Mississippi as St. Louis, the capital of Missouri Territory.  After the British and their allies failed to capture St. Louis, they chose not to attack farther down the great river, leaving Louisiana untouched ... for now.  Meanwhile, on 30 August 1813, "Red Stick" Creeks, in retaliation for an American raid on their trade goods, attacked Fort Mims, an American-held post on the Alabama River north of Mobile, and massacred the entire garrison and hundreds of civilian refugees.  Fightin broke out in the region between the Red Sticks and American forces from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi Territory.  Cherokee and Lower Creek bands fought beside the Americans.  The British, of course, supported the Red Sticks though none of their land troops participated in the so-called Creek War.  By early spring 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson, in command of the Tennessee militia as well as the U.S. southern army, had cobbled together a large force of militia, U. S. regulars, and Native allies and moved south against the Red Sticks.  At Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in Mississippi Territory, today's northern Alabama, Jackson decisively defeated the main Red Stick army on 27 March 1814, ending the Creek faction's military power. 

Flush with victory, Jackson moved his force to the Alabama River north of today's Montgomery and sited his base there.  In the treaty of Fort Jackson, he forced the Creeks, both friend and foe, to cede their lands in western Georgia and part of today's Alabama and to trade only with the Americans, not the Spanish or the British.  Meanwhile, in April, a British naval force established a base on the lower Apalachicola River in Spanish East Florida to assist their Native allies in the region.  In July, Jackson warned the governor of Spanish West Florida at Pensacola not to get involved in his war with the British and their Indians allies.  The governor beseeched his British allies for assistance, and in August a British naval force landed at Pensacola.  The British were the first to attack; in September, they moved against American Fort Bowyer at the entrance to Mobile Bay, hoping to use Mobile city as a base of operations against the lower Mississippi.  The British failed to subdue Fort Bowyer and promptly sent a force of 200 Royal Marines to protect the small Spanish force at Pensacola.  It did no good.  In November, Jackson moved an overwhelming force against the Spanish citadel and easily captured it.  Learning that a large British amphibious force was gathering in Jamiaca, Jackson left a garrison at Mobile and hurried ahead of his army to the Crescent City to prevent the loss of the lower Mississippi.  The war had finally reached Acadian country. 

Mr. Madison's War had taken a crazy turn by December 1814.  The war on the Canadian front had more or less ended the previous September with the repulse of a British naval squadron on Lake Champlain in upstate New York.  Meanwhile, another front had opened on the Chesapeake the year before, but, until the defeat of Napoléon at Leipzig in eastern Germany in October 1813, followed by the emperor's abdication and exile to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean in April and May 1814, the British had been forced to focus their attention on Europe.  Now free of Napoléon's threat (at least for now), the British turned on the Americans and were determined to end the war in North America once and for all.  In August 1814, a large naval force carrying thousands of British troops that had been gathered at Bermuda under Admiral Sir George Cockburn and Major General Robert Ross entered the Chesapeake Bay and landed Ross's troops on the Patuxent River near Benedict, Maryland.  From there, they moved overland, brushed aside a weak American militia force at Bladensburg, and marched into Washington, D.C., where they burned the American capital, including the President's House and the U.S. Capitol building.  However, in September, the British attack on Baltimore via the Patapsco River ended in disaster when General Ross was killed by an American sharpshooter, his army was turned back my Maryland militia east of Baltimore, and the accompanying naval force under Admiral Cockburn failed to reduce Fort McHenry. 

By then, in August 1814, British and American diplomats, the Americans led by John Quincy Adams, met in the Belgian city of Ghent to negogiate the end of the two-year-long war.  After months of effort, the delegates agreed to end the war based on status quo ante bellum.  The treaty, signed on Christmas Eve, was quickly ratified by the British regent-prince, the future George IV, and sent on to the Americans. 

Meanwhile, General Jackson and his staff reached New Orleans at the end of November.  After a survey of the lower river all the way down to Fort St. Philip, which impressed him, he ordered the obstruction of the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, which, if small British warships ascended to its confluence with the Mississippi, could place them on the river above New Orleans.  East of New Orleans, he ordered the blocking of the Rigolets and the nearby inlet of Chef Menteur, both of which connected Lake Borgne to Lake Pontchartrain, to prevent shallow-draft British gunboats from entering the big lake and getting behind the city via Bayou St. John.  The road from Gentilly, behind New Orleans, east to Chef Menteur also was blocked.  Jackson ordered construction of defenses on the Mississippi below the city, on both banks, in case the British came up the river or approached it from the small bayous that flowed into Lake Borgne, which was not a lake at all but a large, shallow lagoon off the Gulf of Mexico.  He stationed a small flotilla of armed sloops and schooners in Lake Borgne to at least slow down British gunboats and transports who would attempt a landing there or on Lake Ponchartrain.  Meanwhile, he called for reinforcements from Mississippi Territory, Tennessee, and Kentucky to hurry down the river to him.  He also alerted, via Governor Claiborne, more of the state's militia companies, including predominantly-Acadian ones from upriver, the Lafourche, and the prairies, who would reach the city as best they could. 

A massive British fleet with thousands of redcoats aboard began arriving at the anchorage off Ship Island in the Mississippi Sound during the first week of December.  The fleet's commander, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane, after leaving the British rendezvous at Negril in western Jamaica and crossing the Gulf to Apalachicola, had moved on to Pensacola.  He was chagrined to find both that stronghold and Mobile denied to him by Jackson for an overland approach to New Orleans.  So he continued westward along the coast towards Ship Island.  After personally investigating the Lake Borgne approaches to the city west of the island, the admiral dismissed an attack from the mouth of the Mississippi, but was still open to an approach via Lake Pontchartrain, though it was almost as shallow as Lake Borgne.  For now, the best approach seemed to be via Bayou Bienvenue, also called Bayou des Pecheurs, the Bayou of the Fishermen, which flowed eastward from the outskirts of the city through cypress swamp and coastal marsh, reaching Lake Borgne just south of the entrance to Chef Menteur.  The beach there was firm enough for use as a staging area for troops, though its capacity was limited.  Most impressively, anyone ascending Bayou Bienvenue and its tributaries "had a mile or less to travel overland to the wagon and coach road running along the river levee nine miles northwest to New Orleans."  However, before he could land his redcoats there and move inland towards New Orleans, his gunboats had to destroy or at least drive away Jackson's gunboats on Lake Borgne. 

The Battle of Lake Borgne was fought on December 14 between American naval Lieutenant Thomas ap Catesby Jones's five gunboats, three sloops and two schooners, with 190 officers and men, and Royal Navy Captain Nicolas Lockyer's 45 armed launches or barges, each of which contained up to four Royal Marines--a total of 1,200 men and officers on the British boats, most propelled by oars as well as sail.  The only American advantage were the heavier caliber of some of their guns and a keener knowledge of the surrounding country.  Lockyer, who the previous September had failed to coax the "pirate" Jean Laffite to fight beside the British, divided his barges into three "divisions" and moved cautiously from Ship Island towards Lake Borgne on the 13th.  Catesby Jones, a Virginian, had been stationed at New Orleans since 1808 and was, unlike his British opponents, intimately familiar with the northern Gulf.  Seeing the size of Cochrane's fleet, the young Virginian alerted Jackson that the British would attack the city via the lakes, not via the mouth of the river.  Seeing also that he was grossly outnumbered by Lockyer's flotilla, he pulled back towards Bay St. Louis and then placed his gunboats north of the Malheureaux islands, "the narrowest point of the entrance to Lake Borgne."  Cochrane, behind Lockyer's advance, carefully moved his lighter-draft vessels westward from the "deep anchorage" at Ship Island, where his main fleet waited, to an "inner anchorage" at Cat Island, about 30 miles southeast of the Rigolets.  Here he waited for Lockyer to clear out Lake Borgne. 

The battle's result was a foregone conclusion, but the Americans stood their ground.  Despite contrary winds, by 11 a.m., Jones had maneuvered his gunboats into position, single line abreast, in the channel north of Malheureaux, his command boat, Number 156, at the center.  Lockyer's launces attacked in divisions straight on, 15 of the launches, including Lockyer's, heading straight for Jones's boat, which, unfortunately for the attackers, carried the most guns and the largest crew.  Here occurred most of the fighting, not just cannon and musket fire, but also hand-to-hand combat with blade, pike, and pistol. Both commanders were severely wounded in the hour-long melee; both survived their wounds.  None of Jones's boats and their crews escaped capture, including a sixth American vessel, the dispatch sloop Alligator, which, along with the other American boats, now would serve the Royal Navy.  Lockyer's casualties, dead and wounded, numbered 77, including five dead or mortally wounded officers.  Jones lost 41 killed and wounded, half of them from his boat Number 156, and 141 captured.  As Lockyer's tars, carrying their many prizes, returned to the fleet off Cat Island, the way was now open for an unopposed landing at Bayou Bienvenue. 

Jackson now realized that the British would attack him just as likely via Lake Borgne as from behind him via Lake Pontchartrain and Bayou St. John, so there, at Chef Menteur and Fort Petites Coquilles, he massed his largest available force.  Soon after the disastrous battle on Lake Borgne, Jackson made a decision he had been contemplating since he arrived in the city two weeks earlier:  on December 16 he declared martial law, the first instance of its use in the nation's history.  Happily for him and the fate of the city, the citizens' response was overwhelmingly positive.  Days later, succumbing to pressure from state and federal officials, including Governor Claiborne, Jackson allowed Jean Laffite, Pierre Laffite, and their Barataria associates to become a part of the city's defense.  Those "pirates" and smugglers still in jail were released, and those still hiding in the swamps west of New Orleans were allowed to come into the city and enlist in the state's militia.  The Laffites and their Baratarians also brought to the coming fight additional field artillery and the expertise to use it, as well as 7,500 gun flints, essential for a stand-up battle against the finest army on the planet. 

Actual fighting at New Orleans did not begin until late December, while more of the state's miltiamen, responding to Jackson's and Claiborne's calls, along with more reinforcements from upriver, hurried to the city.  The delay sprang from Admiral Cochrane's reluctance to use the small beach at the mouth of Bayou Bienvenue to land a major force of infantry, much less cavalry and artillery.  He now preferred an approach via Lake Ponchartrain behind the city.  Anticipating this, on the 16th, two days after the gunboat fight at the entrance to Lake Borgne, the admiral began moving his redcoats from the transports at Cat Island to remote Pine Island, near the mouth of Pearl River and close to the Rigolets, where they suffered miserably from the cold and rain of a late autumn gale.  Again unsure of the Pontchartrain approach, on December 18 Cochrane sent two young officers, disguised as locals, to carefully reconnoiter the Bayou Bienvenue approach all the way up to the river below the city.  Back to report to the admiral late on the 19th, the scouts described in detail an almost ideal approach, even for a large army, via Bayou Bienvenue and its tributaries.  Hearing their report, Cochrane changed his mind one last time and ordered the troops at Pine Island, now organized in three brigades, to move to Bayou Bienvenue despite its limitations.  The autumn gale still blowing, the advance force, led by Colonel William Thornton of Bladensburg fame, did not get underway until December 22, rowing down the coast from an anchorage below Chef Mentaur first west and then south along the shallow beach to the mouth of the bayou, which they did not reach until dusk.  Thornton, with his lead element, including engineers to remove obstacles from the bayou as the boats full of redcoats plodded along, hoped to reach Villeré's plantation on the river road before morning.  A sleepy Yankee outpost on the bayou that the two scouts had not seen posed no obstacle to their timetable, but the narrowness of Bayou Bienvenue and its tributary Bayou Mazant, the weather, the darkness, and an ebbing tide slowed the redcoats considerably; the lead boat did not reach the head of Villeré's canal until just before daybreak.  Still, by mid-morning of the 23rd, when the lead troops from the green-coated 95th Rifles stepped on solid ground at Villeré's cane field, their arrival was still a complete surprise to the Louisiana militiamen posted nearby. 

By then, the first of Jackson's anxiously awaited reinforcements from Tennessee and Mississippi had reached the city, along with a polyglot reinforcement of Louisiana units, including a troop of volunteer horsemen from the Attakapas parishes, likely including Acadians.  Kentucky volunteers also were on their way.  With Jackson's sturdy westerners came more arms and ammunition in keelboats from as far away as Pittsburgh.  Jackson now could boast a force of perhaps 12,000 men--regulars, volunteers, militia, sailors, corsairs, even a contingent of Choctaw--stationed at positions above the city, on bayous below the city falling into Lake Borgne, farther downriver at English Turn, Fort St. Philip, even La Balise at the mouth of the river, at Barataria Bay and the bayous running from there to the West Bank across from New Orleans, and outposts at Fort St. Jean, Chef Menteur, and Petites Coquilles guarding the main approaches from lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain, from where he most suspected the British would come.  Meanwhile, across an ocean, an historian of the battle reminds us that "Louisianans could not know it, but by December 23, as Jackson prepared an army to defend America's most valuable port from British invasion, the nations were within hours of a treaty to end the war." 

Just not yet.  There were more battles to fight in this corner of America before the last great contest between Britain and its former colonies finally could be decided.  In command of the outpost at Jacques Villeré's riverside plantation was the general's older son, Gabriel, a major in the 3rd (de La Ronde's) Regiment Louisiana Militia.  Without warning, the young major and his men were surrounded and captured by a battalion of wily green-coated riflemen who suddenly emerged from the cypress swamp behind his father's long-lot plantation.  Despite being under guard, the major escaped via an open window onto a gallery and reached the tall cane before a British rifle ball could cut him down.  After bludeoning his favorite hunting dog, who dutifully followed him but whose barking threatened to give him away, the major hurried across ditches and fields to the second plantation farther upriver.  Here he warned his commanding officer, Colonel Denis de La Ronde, that the British had arrived.  To elude capture by any redcoats in pursuit, they rowed across the river to another plantation, where the colonel remained to gather up militia, and the major and the plantation owner rode as swifly as they could up to Algiers, across from New Oreans.  By noon, Villeré and the plantation owner had re-crossed the river, hurried to Jackson's headquarters, and the major told Old Hickory what he had seen.  Meanwhile, the British commander at Villeré's, Colonel Thornton, after securing his prisoners, moved a column of his riflemen to the river road and the levee beyond, formed them into line of battle, and moved upriver a mile or two, as far as Lacoste's plantion, in case the Americans had come down to meet him.  They had not.  Army commander Major General John Keane arrived, halted Thornton's progress, ordered pickets sent ahead and placed behind, and established bivouacs at Lacoste's and Villeré's, where hundreds of his redcoats collected themselves after their ordeal from the landing via bayou, marsh, and swamp. 

Stung by the surprise appearance of his redcoated foe at a place he had only lightly guarded, Jackson was determined to attack them as soon as he could muster a force to do it--"'By the Eternal!'" he thundered to his aides in the young Villeré's hearing. "'The British shall not sleep upon our territory!'"  Jackson then prepared for the most risky of military actions--a night attack.  He ordered a company of Louisiana dragoons from Feliciana, led by Captain Llewellyn Griffith, to hurry downriver to see if the redcoats had advanced closer to the city.  Next Old Hickory called his two regiments of U.S. regulars--the 7th and 44th--to form ranks in the Place d'Armes in front of the cathedral (today's Jackson Square).  After a brief fight with the British pickets around 3 p.m., Griffith withdrew and reported that the enemy had not moved beyond Lacoste's.  Meanwhile, Jackson ordered Brigadier General John Coffee's and Major General William Carroll's mounted Tennesseans to hurry from their bivouac north of the city to rally at the Place d'Armes.  He also ordered Claiborne to muster as many unassigned militiamen as he could.  The governor managed to gather 400 or so of them, arming some with pikes in lieu of muskets, and sent them cheering to the battlements of Fort St. Charles at the southeastern corner of the city.  Still determined to make his night attack, Jackson ordered Coffee to gather up other dragoon units--a thousand mounted men in all--and rally them at Fort St. Charles, where they would draw ammunition and "compose a left-wing brigade and reserve."  Jackson also called to the city center militia units, including a company of Choctaw and a battalion of free men of color, guarding Bayou St. John at its confluence with Lake Pontchartrain, where he was confident, now, the British would not strike.  After a quick meal and a short nap, Jackson left his headquarters at Fort St. Charles and, with his staff, rode to the Place d'Armes to review his regulars.  By late afternoon, his attacking force numbered 1,700 or 1,800.  Coffee's mounted Tenneseeans would move out first, followed by a hastily-thrown-together brigade of infantry under Colonel George T. Ross of the 44th U.S. Infantry.  Meanwhile, he sent orders to militia General Morgan at English Turn to gather enough boats to cross the river below the plantations to strike the British in the rear.  Orders also went out to the two gunboats, the sloop New Orleans and the schooner Carolina, under command of Commodore Daniel T. Patterson and manned by some of Laffite's men, to drop down river from their station at New Orleans to harass the British from the river flank.  But questions remained:  Was the appearance of a British force at Villeré's simply a diversion?  Were the British there and at Lacoste's still stationary, or were they already moving towards the city?  To address the first question, he sent Coffee's 2nd Tennessee Regiment back to the Gentilly road to warn of a British movement via Chef Menteur and directed Carroll to go there also.  Coffee's remaining cavalry would soon answer the second question. 

Ross's brigade was slow in passing to the main river road, with Claiborne and the militia following closely.  Three miles out of the city, however, Jackson, taking full advantage of his interior lines, ordered Claiborne and the militia to return to the city and follow the 2nd Tennessee down the Gentilly road, the approach he would have taken had he been the British commander.  Needless to say, the governor was not happy with the order, but he obeyed it anyway.  Meanwhile, Jackson sent another mounted reconnaissance ahead to check British numbers and ordered Colonel De La Ronde to return to his home to direct Coffee's cavalrymen along the edge of the cypress swamp behind his plantation if he chose to flank the British at Lacoste's.  Coffee's column, with Pierre Laffite as a guide, moved carefully down the river road, stopping to arrest an unarmed black fellow nailing copies of a British proclamation to every fence post he could find.  Around 6:30, as the twilight faded, the Tennesseeans could see hundreds of campfires in the gloom ahead "scarcely a mile away."  Keane and his redcoats had not moved.  Instead, they had pulled back to Villeré's and had gone into bivouac for the night.  Jackson came up with his staff and saw his opportunity.  Around 7 p.m, daylight two hours gone, he ordered Coffee to move his men leftward to the woods behind Lacoste's, dismount, move by foot to the woods behind Villeré's and, when he heard the guns of Patterson's boats, attack the British flank and rear.  Ross's brigade, with the regulars, would attack the British encampment head on and then wheel to the right to push the redcoats towards the levee, while Morgan's militia attacked them from the rear.  Carolina, the first of Patterson's boats to anchor opposite the British camp, opened a steady fire a little after 8 p.m.  What followed was the usual result of night time warfare--"fury and confusion."  Though Jackson was able to position his forces in the dark, and the gunboat attack did take the British completely by surprise, the resulting battle, exacerbated by fog, gun smoke, and Colonel Ross's inebriation, devolved quickly into a confused melee that lasted past midnight.  During the melee, General Keane received reinforcements, at least two more veteran regiments, from the Bayou Bienvenue pipeline.  By midnight, Jackson realized that he had to make a decision--either to continue the assault despite the chaos and confusion, or hold his position, reform his lines, and wait for daylight to resume the attack.  Certain now that this was the only line of approach the British would take against New Orleans, he ordered Claiborne and Carroll to join him below the city.  And what of Morgan and his militia at English Turn?  Had they crossed the river and attacked the British rear?  He would know it only by the sound of their firing, and he had heard--could not hear--anything from that direction.  "When there was a lull, however," in the fury and confusion "one thing he did not hear was firing downriver from Morgan." 

What happened there proved to be "the broken gear" of Jackson's fine-tuned attack machine.  Historian "Jack" Davis describes it best:  "The men at English Turn chafed to get into the fight when Jackson's instructions arrived, and Morgan soon had 320 men of Colonel Alexander DeClouet's 6th Louisiana Militia ready to march.  Then," inexplicably, despite superior orders, "he just kept them there."  Here was a unit from the old Attakapas district, filled with prairie Acadians.  Despite the wide, formidable Atchafalaya Basin lying between them and the capital city, DeClouet's was among the first of the outlying militia regiments to make it to New Orleans.  "Either Morgan did not receive Old Hickory's order to cross the river or he pretended not to understand his instructions," Davis continues.  "When DeClouet's officers protested that they must get moving, Morgan refused to budge until he got specific instructions.  The officers continued to beg to march, and it was with difficulty that they kept their men from leaving on their own initiative.  Only when Morgan heard Carolina's guns did he relent at last.  When the main fighting stopped, they were at Bayou Terre-aux-Boeufs, still six miles from the enemy as they marched through mud on the river road.  DeClouet begged Morgan to hasten to pitch into the enemy rear, but the general remained in the grip of crippling indecision, if not obtuseness.  It was well after midnight when his advance finally ran into British pickets, who fired on them.  The column also encountered a British artilleryman, apparently drunk and lost, who mistook them for fellow redcoats and exhorted them to 'come on, my lads, for the Yankees never got such a licking in their lives!'  After a half-hearted effort to push through the enemy picket, Morgan told his advance to run back to the main column, sparking a silly panic that had men jumping over fences and piling on top of each other in confusion before they finally redeployed in a line. Then he kept them standing in formation until two a.m. or later, when his officers suggested they might as well go back to English Turn.  Morgan refused to do that, too, until a council of officers agreed on retreat, not knowing how Jackson had fared.  Back they marched through the mud to their barracks, disgusted with a general whom a sergeant of the 6th Regiment dismissed as 'an old woman.'"  One can only imagine what the British would have done if a regiment full of Acadians had slammed into their rear, determined to kill as many of them as they could manage.  Meanwhile, Jackson, after contemplating another attack but learning of Coffee's precarious position on the left, decided he had best save his army for the counterattack that surely would come.  Slowly, carefully, before dawn, he pulled his entire line back to a plantation above De La Ronde's--McCarty's.  To Old Hickory's relief, the British did not pursue. 

His and his opponent's casualties reflected the intensity of the nocturnal combat.  The Americans suffered 24 killed, 115 wounded, and 74 missing, mostly captured--10 percent of their numbers.  The British reported 46 killed, 167 wounded, and 64 missing, also mostly captured--11 percent of their numbers.  The redcoats, having successfully stood their ground, could have claimed a tactical victory.  Not only did Keane's veterans rally quickly to the surprise attack, but they prevented Jackson's flank attack on their right from halting the arrival of reinforcements from the Bayou Bienvenue landing.  Jackson nevertheless disengaged in fairly good order and still held the interior line, with easy access to his strategic rear at bayous St. John and Chef Menteur.  He also expected more reinforcements from Claiborne's state militia.  Above all, he now had a place he could fortify that would give him a defensive advantage when the British, now in far greater numbers, finally came at him. 

Jackson ordered a line of emplacements for artillrey and small arms constructed behind an "old millrace"--the Rodriguez Canal--at the upper edge of Ignace Martin de Lino de Chalmette's plantation, five miles below the city's edge and two miles above the British camps at Villeré's and Lacoste's.  He chose the upper story of the nearby McCarty house for his new headquarters.  The carefully-constructed embankment at Chalmette's, dubbed Line Jackson, stretched 800 yards from the levee on the American right into a cypress swamp on the left.  After inspecting the line, Jackson ordered the construction of an oblique arm on the left, essentially a refusing of his line, inside the cypress swamp, to discourage a flank attack there.  The British, approaching from downriver, would be forced to attack on a narrow front across open cane fields swept by artillery and rifle fire.  Moreover, as they approached the line, their left would be vulnerable from fire in and across the river, their right to flank attacks from the cypress swamp that stood at the back of the fields.  The only advantage to the British, other than numbers and experience, were dozens of buildings and hundreds of trees standing on the four long-lot plantations--Chalmette's, Bienvenu's, De La Ronde's, and Lacoste's--between Line Jackson and the British bivouac at Villeré's.  Here, behind the trees and structures, attackers could find cover during an assault, but these trees and structures also could break up infantry formations trudging their way across the muddy fields. 

The line was essentially finished by evening of Christmas Day, though Jackson insisted that it be constantly strengthened with timber from slave cabins and other nearby structures, as well as lumber milled across the river.  Meanwhile, he ordered reinforcment of Morgan's force on the west bank of the river at Fort St. Leon and English Turn to prevent the British from reaching his vulnerable right flank.  Here would be stationed more newly-arrived militia.  He ordered Morgan to move some of his men to the east side of the river to cut the levee below the British, boxing them in, after which they would return to the west bank and then move upriver with most of his artillery there to a point opposite the British camps.  Patterson's two gunboats would continue to harass the British from across the river and add further protection to Jackson's right flank. 

Meanwhile, a major change occurred in the British field command.  Major General Sir Edward Michael Pakenham, brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, had been designated commander of the British army in North American after the death of Major General Robert Ross at Baltimore in September 1814.  Pakenham was home in Ireland at the time of his assignment.  He was not pleased, having hoped to avoid service in "America."  Nevertheless, he arrived at Portsmouth, England, by the end of October to take a Royal Navy convoy to his new command.  Before he left, Secretary of State for War Sir Henry Bathurst filled him in on British grand-strategy, including the diplomatic wrangling still playing at Ghent.  Bathurst told the 36-year-old general that "unless and until" he received word that President Madison and the U.S. Senate had ratified the treaty signed at Ghent, "he was to continue hostilities."  Pakenham and his staff, aboard HMS Statira, reached Cochrane's "deep anchorage" at Ship Island on Christmas Eve, the day after Jackson's night attack, but the admiral was not there.  Determined to learn what had happened at New Orleans thus far, Pakenham and his staff took a ship's gig to the "inner anchorage" at Cat Island, but the admiral was not there either, nor was he at Pine Island, where they ate and rested.  They did not reach the admiral's tent at Des Pêcheurs on Bayou Bienvenue until 8 a.m. on Christmas morning and could hear the firing from the U.S.S. Carolina as the admiral gave his report of the recent engagement.  Anxious to reach the front, Pakenham and his staff, in two ship's gigs, endured the trip through bayou, marsh, and swamp and reached Villeré's around 11 a.m.  Despite it being Christmas, Jackson's men were still at work on the fortified line behind Rodriguez's ditch. 

With most of Keane's forces there and two fresh infantry regiments from the recently arrived convoy soon to appear, Pakenham reorganzied the field force into three brigades, one of them under Keane.  Along with the construction of field defenses for his lighter guns, he followed up on Keane's efforts to cut embrasures into the levee during the night to protect his heaviest guns against the two American gunboats anchored on the opposite shore.  He was not happy with the range of his artillery, but he was impressed with the men who would handle what he had, including a recently-installed hot-shot oven hidden behind the levee.  And then, like his opponent, he waited.  Two days later, on the morning of December 27, Pakenham's head of artillery, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Dickson, "arguably the army's ablest artillerist," who had come with him aboard the Statira, gave the Americans an unhappy surprise of their own.  Several of Dickson's field guns firing red-hot cannon balls from the newly-installed hot-shot oven, along with a field mortar, opened fire on the Carolina from behind freshly-cut embrasures, with devastating effect.  Ravaged by fires fore and aft and by a mortar shot that pierced its bottom, the schooner began to sink.  Just as its officers and crew were abandoning ship, its aft magazine exploded, and the Carolina was no more.  The officers and crew who could walk--only one of them had died in the fight--made their way upriver along the west bank road towards where their sister stip was anchored.  Meanwhile, the sloop New Orleans hauled up its anchor, and, with a friendly tail wind, managed to move farther upriver, out of harm's way.  With the river menace removed for now, Pakenham ordered his men to cook two day's rations and be ready to advance that afternoon.  Then his plans unraveled.  Not only did the destruction of the Carolina severely deplete his remaing artillery ammunution, but, worse, his quartermaster could not move up enough meat rations on such short notice to feed the men before they marched.  Pakenham called off the movement until the following morning, leaving his officers to wonder why. 

Pakenham used the extra time to improve his plan of attack, including organizing and replenishing his field artillery; they needed horses as well as more ammunition.  Jackson had observed the destruction of the Carolina through a telescope on the upper story of his McCarty house headquarters and came downstairs more determined than alarmed.  "American confidence remained high, especially as rumors said the Kentuckians might arrive the next day, which would swell Jackson's numbers to over 10,000 or more."  Work on Line Jackson continued day and night; that night, despite the rain, more heavy guns were placed in the line's strengthened embrasures, and soon experienced gunners, including some of Laffite's Baratarians, arrived to man them.  Meanwhile, Jackson ordered "virtually all militia outside of the city to march to New Orleans" and the blocking force stationed at Barataria, including Jean Laffite, to fall back to the city.  Despite his delicate health and chronic lack of sleep, on the 27th Jackson personally inspected his line three times and kept half of his force under arms that night in case the new British commander tried a night attack of his own. 

Pakenham waited until daylight before taking action--a reconnaissance in force.  Two of his brigades, under Keane and another major general, Sir Samuel Gibbs, had been in place since before dawn, Keane on the left along the main road, Gibbs in the center.  Gibbs, like Dickson, had come to Louisiana with Pakenham aboard the Statira.  Pakenham's third brigade, under yet another major general, John Lambert, who also had come with Pakenham, had not reached Villeré's.  To cover his right along the cypress swamp and to strike Jackson's left if the opportunity arose, Pakenham cobbled together a light infantry force under Major Robert Rennie of the 21st Fusiliers, noted for his skilled use of such troops.  As they crossed Lacoste's and De La Ronde's plantations, the British commanders acquired only glimpses of the Amercian earthworks over a mile away.  Reaching a curve in the main road, Keane's column could see even less of it.  A company of Mississppi dragoons under Major Thomas Hinds, already a week at New Orleans and veterans of the night attack on the 23rd, had been serving as Jackson's forward pickets for five straight days and nights.  They notified Old Hickory of the approach of the British columns as soon as they saw them and held their positions until Congreves rockets, fired from between the approaching redcoat columns, began screaming through the cane stubble where they lay.  The Mississippians swiftly mounted and hurried back to Jackson, who sent them to the rear.  Around 7:30 a.m., the Louisiana, under Patterson, maneuvered into position opposite Jackson's right, no longer in range of redcoat hot-shot fire, and presented its starboard broadside guns to the oncoming enemy.  Jackson, back at McCarty's, used his old telescope, a gift from one of the Creole planters, to catch a view of the redcoats through one of McCarty's second-floor dormers.  Meanwhile, for the first time, his gunners on Line Jackson prepared to fire at an oncoming enemy.  When the redcoat columns reached Bienvenu's plantation, a mile and a half away, Jackson's heavier guns opened up on them, followed by the guns on Louisiana.  Only then did the British commanders realize what they were up against in the face of this thrown-together, rag-tag American army.  Round shot and grape tore through redcoat ranks as they staggered forward into the enemy fire, which worsened when they came into rifle range.  None of the redcoat units in the two brigades on their left and center got closer than 400 yards from the American line.  Some units took refuge in plantation ditches, most of them filled with water and mud.  Veterans of Bladensburg, Baltimore, and Salamanca panicked in the smoke and noise and fire until their commanders reformed them and led them to cover behind plantation structures.  Rennie on the right, despite the cover of the trees, failed to turn the American left, his forward movement stymied by the oblique emplacement built there by Coffee's men.  The attempt by some of Carroll's units to drive Rennie back with a counter attack failed miserably, but Rennie's light infantry could not withstand the sustained fire from Jackson's main line and fell back to a safer position.  Meanwhile, the British field guns returned fire as best they could, but even Dickson was surprised to see such "intimidating weight of enemy guns" all along his front. 

The exchange of fire lasted throughout the morning and into the afternoon of the 28th.  By 3 p.m., Jackson's artillery had silenced the British guns.  Pakenham had remained with Gibbs's brigade in the center most of the day.  He could see now that his reconnaissance in force had no chance in becoming a full-on assault.  He needed Lambert's brigade and heavier guns to have any hope of punching through Jackson's line to New Orleans.  He ordered his troops to begin a gradual withdrawal from their forward positions when darkness fell.  Slowly, carefully, the redcoat regiments and batteries pulled back to De La Ronde's, out of range but still in view of Jackson's gunners when the light of morning returned.  Pakenham moved his headquarters to a house at Bienvenu's behind Gibbs's bivouac in the woods on the right of that plantation.  Despite the intense artillery fire, British casualties were light--16 killed and 38 wounded, many of the wounded with severed limbs.  Jackson's casualties were much lighter--seven killed and five wounded, with no one missing.  The Louisiana and Jackson's big guns continued their fire through the evening and into the night, causing no more casualties but annoying the redcoats during their supper and sleep.  That night, a disturbing new trend, at least for Pakenham, commenced in earnest--more redcoats deserted to the Americans, though coming into their lines in the darkness had terrors of its own. 

The next few days saw both sides strengthening their positions.  The British brought up more 18-pounders from the ships on the island anchorages, hustled mostly by "webfoot" blue jackets provided by Admiral Cochrane; two of the big guns were placed in a new levee-side battery opposite the Louisiana.  More men died, day and night, in the counterfire between guns and musketry.  More redcoats deserted through the cypress swamps to a picket station on Widow Piernas's plantation a mile behind Line Jackson.  Disappointed by the scarcity of men who reported for militia duty in the Bayou Lafourche valley, "General Philemon Thomas had them arrested and brought to Baton Rouge"; many of them likely were Acadians.  Determined to send more reinforcements to Jackson, state officers at Rapides, Natchitoches, and Opelousas summoned men to join a new militia unit, the Consolidated 17th, 18th, and 19th Regiment, which would be mustered at Opelousas during the first week of January and then hurried to New Orleans; it, too, would contain Acadians as well as French Creoles.  Continuing his defense in depth, at the end of December Jackson ordered the construction of a second line east of the river--Line Dupré, on the plantation of that name--two miles above Line Jackson, back towards the outskirts of the city.  Here, on the closer line, Jackson ordered the commander of the state militia, Major General Jacques Villeré, to station companies from DeClouet's Regiment, filled with prairie Acadians, who doubtlessly were overjoyed to be free of "old woman" Morgan, still commanding on the west bank of the river.

On the last day of the year, three days after his reconnassiance in force, Pakenham concluded that he could not wait for Lambert's units, still days away, but must strike now with the men and guns he possessed.  This would not be a reconnaissance in force but a full-scale assault, with his artillery taking the lead.  Dickson insisted that there was not enough ammunition for the guns at hand, but Pakenham refused to give him another day.  On New Year's Eve, as darkness fell, Rennie took a force of light infantry around the right flank and hid in the swamp to await the main attack the following morning.  After dark, Dickson's new batteries, some of the guns having arrived that day, moved forward in the darkness and positioned themselves as close to Jackson's line as they could.  From there, at sunrise, Dickson's guns would silence the Yankee guns with overwhelming fire as they blasted holes in their line.  Gibbs's heavy infantry, most carrying fascines--bundles of reeds and sugarcane stalks--would then rush the Yankee line, using the facines to cross the ditch, and overawe the remaining Americans with the bayonet.  Meanwhile, Keane on the left would make a strong demonstration against the American regulars and militia facing him and join Gibbs's main assault only if opportunity presented.  Rennie on the far right would occupy the Americans there and look for an opportunity to turn their rear, while some of Gibbs's units moved to the right and forced their way into the American line at the edge of the woods, where the Tennesseans fire would be less effective.  Only one of Pakenham's units, Gibbs's 44th Foot, would carry scaling ladders to Jackson's line.  The rest would have to breach the line as best they could. 

New Years's Day opened with heavy fog and intermittent rain, slowing Pakenham's infantry advance to their attack positions, which began at 4 a.m.  The fog also silenced his artillery until the fog cleared.  At 9 a.m., the redcoat artillery could see clearly enough to commence their bombardment.  The first target was Macarty's house, which Pakenham knew was Jackson's field headquarters.  The first blast caught Jackson and his staff at breakfast and gave Old Hickory confirmation that there were spies in the city.  He and the others emerged from the battered house unscatched and made their way to the scene of battle.  The artillery duel lasted all day.  To Pakenham's disappointment, Dickson's guns failed to blast the Americans from their positions.  Jackson's wall, in fact, sustained no serious damage all along the line.  By 3 p.m. the  British guns began to fall silent, their ammunition all but spent and the rain returning.  Meanwhile, the American guns paused briefly to move their caissons out of harm's way and resumed a steady fire that the British could not match.  The redcoat infantry, meanwhile, remained in their covered and concealed positions, unable to withstand the Yankee fire out in the open.  The only infantry action was a brief sortie by Rennie's unit in the trees on the right, soon checked by Coffee's riflemen.  At day's end, Pakenham's bombardment "had failed completely."  The best he and Dickson could do was to withdraw the guns under cover of darkness.  The infantry would have to remain in their positions to protect the artillery, which took all night to move.  The work was so arduous in the mud and rain that infantry units were taken from the line in shifts for a turn at hustling the big guns to safety. 

During the following days, both general and admiral on the British side discussed new tactics, Pakenham agreeing to Cochrane's demands that the Royal Navy play a more important role in the fight against Jackson.  This included a run past the forts on the lower Mississippi and then blasting a way past Jackson's right flank, forcing his retreat and perhaps the fall of the city.  Pakenham would simultaneously launch another frontal assault against Line Jackson, this time with even more supporting artillery as well as Lambert's brigade, soon to arrive, to supplement the troops of Keane, Gibbs, and Rennie.  Cochrane also suggested that Villeré's canal from Bayou Bienvenue be widened and extended to the levee, allowing troops in boats to pass safely behind Pakenham's line, cross the river via a cut in the levee under cover of darkness, and strike the Americans on the west bank of the river while Pakenham assaulted Line Jackson.  Pakenham agreed, and the project was begun.  Meanwhile, Jackson ordered his main line to be hightened and strengthened while his pickets, sharpshooters, dragoons, and artillery harrassed the enemy day and night.  Maintaining morale was difficult for Pakenham and his officers, not so for Jackson and his subordinates.  After seven weeks of floating and marching down the Ohio and Mississippi, all the way from Louisville, the Kentuckians finally arrived on January 2 to take their place as a heavy reserve between lines Dupré and Jackson.  Only a third of them were armed when they reached the city, so Jackson and Claiborne scrounged what they could from civilians in New Orleans. 

Lambert's redcoats began to arrive on January 3.  British morale quickly improved.  The appearance of a another brigade of Wellington's veterans guaranteed a general assault against the entrenched Americans, and many redcoats, officers and enlisted alike, were certain this one would be decisive.  Both sides brought up more guns of varying caliber, some of them going into new redoubts built by both sides near the east-bank levee.  They also stockpiled more ammunition for the work ahead.  Aware of British plans to attack him via the lower river, Jackson ordered the strengthening of forts St. Philip and St. Leon.  He also ordered the creation of a 78-mile-long messenger line between the forts to give him warning of the enemy's approach.  Meanwhile, he ordered Morgan to build earthworks on the west bank opposite the British camps to be built or strengthened and more militia stationed there and at Fort St. Leon, where companies of DeClouet's Regiment of Militia still comprised the garrison.  Across the river, Pakenham was determined not only to punch his regiments through Jackson's main line but to flank him out of that line via the British right and force the Americans to fall back on the city.  On January 4, Pakenham sent a company of the 4th Foot into the swamp past the left of Jackson's refused line to find a way around it, "but they got lost in the wilderness and gave up," which was great good luck for Jackson.  "Had they but known," a historian of the campaign relates, "there was a route, if not a good one, and not just to Jackson's immediate left rear, for Bayou Bienvenue went all the way back to Madame Piernas's plantation a mile behind the main earthwork, putting both his own line and Claiborne's position on the Gentilly road in jeapardy." 

Pakenham did not find this flanking route, but Jackson did.  Alerted by what turned out to be a false report on the night of the 3rd, Jackson ordered Reuben Kemper, a local character of some repute, to take a dozen men in dugouts up the Piernas canal to reconnoiter bayous Bienvenue and Mazant.  On the 4th, they observed the British redoubt at the confluence of the bayous and detected no flanking movement up Bayou Bienvenue.  Kemper and his party were then spotted near the redoubt by alert British sailors, who drove them into the surrounding marshes, which they set ablaze.  Kemper had seen all he needed to see.  He and all but one of his party made it back to Jackson's line by January 7.  Jackson now knew that upper Bayou Bienvenue, despite the danger of its approach, was too narrow and too shallow to support a large British movement there.  Another incident occurred in that quarter that confounded the British.  On the night of the 5th, as Kemper and his men were eluding the British and making their way back to their lines, American sailing master William Johnson "took four boats and thirty-five sailors and soldiers through Chef Menteur to reconnoiter the British transport anchorage on Lake Borgne."  As a gale was about to strike, they observed the last of Lambert's reinforcements disembark from a nearby transport and row towards the entrance of Bayou Bienvenue.  After waiting patiently for the boats full of redcoats to pass on, around 4 a.m. Johnson and some of his men boarded the transport and overwhelmed its small crew.  "With dawn approaching, he loaded his captives aboard his own boats and set fire to the transport, which exploded just as dawn approached on January 6."  An armed British barge approached, but Johnson's men drove it off with musket fire.  With more enemy boats approaching, Johnson's little flotilla "sailed safely back through Chef Menteur to Fort St. John."  His prisoners told him that the loss of the bread and rum aboard their transport "would be a serious blow" to the hungry redcoats in Pakenham's army.  They also confirmed that Lambert had arrived with 2,000 more redcoats and that there would soon be "'a desperate effort' on Line Jackson that might come as soon as January 7." 

The captured bluejackets were not far off in their estimation of Pakenham's next move.  The extension of Villeré's canal to the levee was completed by the evening of January 6.  Pakenham gave some thought of ordering the levee cut and sending a force across to the west bank that night, but he would not be ready for a massive assault against Line Jackson the following day.  On the morning of the 7th, the troops were informed that the grand offensive would begin the following day.  The engineers cut the levee that afternoon for a crossing that night, but the river refused to cooperate; it had fallen too low to flood the canal and allow the boats to flow effortlessly through the cut and into the river.  The cross-river movement could not be abandoned; Pakenham's plans for the morrow depended too much on it.  So the boats had to be manhandled through the nearly empty canal and then through the cut, each boat requiring 50 to 100 men to move it to the riverside.  Meanwhile, Jackson's daily bombardment began promptly at 7 a.m. and lasted all day, his men strengthening the line amid the concussion and din which they now ignored.  Jackson, through his glass in what was left of Macarty's top floor windows, as well as the men laboring on his line below, could see through the smoke hundreds of redcoats manhandling boats through Villeré's canal towards the levee--a sure sign of what was coming.  Across the river, U.S. Navy Commodore Daniel T. Patterson, former commander of the Carolina, now commanding the Louisiana, and his aide rode downriver to check out a report that the British were preparing to cross the river.  Opposite Villeré's, they observed hundreds of redcoats manhandling boats through the canal and the notch in the levee and several boats already moored to the riverbank.  Recognizing the import of what he saw, Patterson sent his aide to Morgan's headquarters to warn him of an impending attack on his side of the river.  Patterson also sent a warning to Jackson describing what he had seen.  Typically, Morgan's earthwork on the west bank, which Jackson had ordered built days before to fire upon British ships coming upriver, was unfinished.  Jackson ordered more militia companies and a detachment of Kentuckians to hurry across the river to reinforce Morgan, who assigned DeClouet's Regiment of French Creoles and Acadians to the unfinished part of his new line, facing downriver.  Oddly, Morgan did not place his men in the works but "kept them in their bivoucs, with orders to practice marching up to the works."  Only then did Morgan give orders "to extend his defenses toward the swamp on his right." 

Pakenham and his army spent all day of the 7th and well into the night preparing for the attack to come on the morning of the 8th.  The new attack plan was somewhat similar to the one on the 1st but included an important element--the assault on the west bank--that had not been tried the week before.  Gibbs, the senior brigade commander, would attack at the center but also on the right.  However, there would be no attempt to flank Jackson's refused line via the swamp; a force of light infantry from Gibbs's command would protect his right flank at the edge of the swamp.  Keane's brigade would attack on the left, as before, but this time Rennie and his select command of light infantry would attack on Keane's extreme left, not on the right, first to neutralize Jackson's new redoubt at the levee, then to flank Jackson's line there and get into his rear, where they could attack any reinforcements that tried to succor the Americans.  Colonel Thomas Mullins's 44th Foot of Gibbs's command would carry the fascines and scaling ladders needed to cross the Rodriguez Canal and breach Line Jackson.  Once over the canal atop the fascines laid down by Mullins's infantry, his company of grenadiers would use the ladders to scale the wall at several points and subdue what was behind it at the point of the bayonet, making way for Gibbs's and Keane's companies to follow through the breaches and send the Americans scurrying back toward the city.  Across the river, Colonel William Thornton's command, having crossed before first light, would overwhelm Morgan's command and turn Morgan's and his own guns on Jackson's right, assisting Rennie's flanking movement.  Pakenham's artillery, still under Dickson, would do their best to silence Jackson's eight batteries along his line as well as the new one at the levee.  Lambert's brigade would stand in reserve and assist wherever needed.  Pakenham's attacking force, including Lambert's units, numbered close to 8,500.  The marines, artillery, "and other ranks" brougt the number of Pakenham's army on the field to "perhaps 10,000."  Jackson's numbers along his east-bank line did not exceed 4,800.  They included 154 gunners at the eight batteries, 1,562 Tennesseans under Carroll at the center, 813 more Tennesseans under Coffee to their left, 526 Kentuckians under Colonel Gabriel Slaughter behind the Tennesseans, and on the right 735 regulars under Colonel George T. Ross, 365 militiamen under Major Jean Baptiste Plauché, 40 New Orleans Riflemen under register-of-wills-turned-Captain Thomas Beale, 175 in the New Orleans battalion of free men of color under Major Pierre Lacoste, 85 marines, and several companies of dismounted dragoons, including a 50-man company from Attakapas.  Jackson, always worried about flank attacks, placed Louisiana militia on his far left, beyond Coffee's Tennesseans, all the way around to Piernas's plantation.  Line Jackson now stretched 1,539 yards, almost twice as long as its original 800. 

January 8, 1815--one of the most significant days in world history--began poorly for the British.  Gibbs's, Keane's, and Rennie's men stirred as early as 4 a.m. to eat their breakfasts, do their business, gather their gear, and get into their attacking positions.  However, Thornton's efforts at crossing the river had fallen hours behind schedule.  Pakenham did not awake until 5 a.m.  By then, he believed, Gibbs's, Keane's, and Rennie's units were already in position and waiting for sunrise to begin the attack, probably unaware that Thornton would not have time to overwhelm the Americans across the river and support them in their movement against Jackson's line.  Pakenham briefly thought of postponing Thornton's operation but changed his mind, hoping that the colonel would at least stage a successful diversion.  Meanwhile, a greater disaster was in the making when the irrascible Colonel Mullins botched his orders to issue fascines and scaling ladders to the 44th Foot and get them in position before the attack.  Though Pakenham and Gibbs had given him detailed instructions, even a map of the battle area showing where the important implements were stored, Mullins confused redoubts, a mile apart, and his subordinates, who were not confused, were too timid to correct him.  As a result, most of his men were unable to get into position ahead of the main attack, the signal for which--a Congreve rocket--was fired at 6:20 a.m.  A strange silence fell upon the battlefield as the rocket flew up and then away, landing in the river.  Then all hell broke loose.  Dickson's guns opened up all across the front, soon answered by Jackson's batteries and riflemen.  Mullins finally realized his mistake and ordered his men back to the correct redoubt.  They did their best to lug the facines and ladders ahead of Gibbs's attacking units through the growing American fire, with little success.  Fog still clung to the ground, and smoke from the guns obscured much of the field, ruining any chance that Gibbs's forward units would have the proper implements to scale the wall before the Americans were aware of it.  In the confusion, some of Mullins's men dropped their fascines and ladders and fired at the unseen enemy.  Others ran for the rear, still carrying their burdens.  Pakenham and his aide crossed their path.  The general scolded his infantrymen as they hurried past.  More light brought more casualties as Jackson's men fired into the mass of redcoats gradualy appearing in the mist before them.  Meanwhile, Patterson's batteries across the river, including the guns of the Louisiana, despite limited visibility, opened a flanking fire into Rennie's units as they hurried through the smoke and mist to reach Jackson's right.  As Keane's columns veered to the right, away from Rennie's advance, they also came under fire from Patterson's guns--the consequence of Thornton's tardiness in getting his men across the river.  Rennie and his fleet-footed light infantry were the first of the redcoats to reach any part of Jackson's line.  After capturing the new bastion by swiftness and force of arms, Rennie and a hand full of others, including several officers, bolted across the bridge atop the moat and attacked the far end of the line itself.  Jackson himself was standing nearby and personally hurried reinforcements to the threatened flank.  There, under the fire of Jackson's riflemen, the gallant Rennie and most of his officers met their end.  By then, Keane's columns had veered to the center to bolster Gibbs's attack, so the remnants of Rennie's small command would receive no reinforcements. 

The battle, in fact, had only begun.  Mullins's failure to perform his mission of providing fascines and scaling ladders for Gibbs's assault troops doomed the British effort at the center.  When Gibbs's grenadiers reached their designated positions before Jackson's wall, they could only wade the wide, deep ditch in front of them and scale the thick earthen wall, eight to twelve feet high in most places, as best they could.  As a result, only a few of the redcoats reached the wall and fewer still managed to scale it, only to be shot or captured by the Tennesseans on the other side.  Most of Gibbs's units, in fact, lost their cohesion from the massed artillery and musketry fire that poured into their ranks from ahead and on their flanks.  Men who could not reach the wall fell to the ground or sought refuge in ditches or behind the remnants of plantation structures, whatever gave them cover.  Heavy gunfire also blasted apart Keane's columns, moving diagonally across the field to the left of Gibbs's assault, suffering as much from Patterson's fire from across the river as from the massed artillery and musketry to their front.  Officers did their best to push their men forward, and many of them went down in the galling fire.  Three of the felled officers were major generals--Keane, then Pakenham and Gibbs, who were hit at the head of their commands.  Keane survived his wounds, but Pakenham and Gibbs did not.  As members of his staff hustled Pakenham's remains back to the rear, command of the army fell to Lambert, who did what he could to organize a steady defense.  The worst of it was over in a remarkably short time, the morning fog still mingling with the heavy battle smoke, the sun barely up in the winter sky. 

But the battle was not over.  Thornton's cross-river assault did not cross the Mississippi until just before dawn--only nine boats filled with Royal Marines and redcoats from Thornton's own 85th Bucks Volunteer Light Infantry, of Bladensburg fame, and four gun barges to keep pace with the advancing column to protect its right.  Once the boat captains unloaded the men on the west bank at Andry's plantation they recrossed the river to take on more.  As soon as they were formed, Thornton led the troops he did have up the levee road in the direction of Morgan's line.  He had just begun his advance when he heard the signal rocket across the river, a short pause, and then the booming of Dickson's guns.  Meanwhile, Morgan had sent Major Charles Tessier and a company from DeClouet's milita down the same road "to resist a landing and delay enemy advance."  Around 5 a.m., in the morning gloom, militiamen sighted boats in the river filled with redcoats and heading to a landing a couple of miles below Morgan's line.  The current, Tessier could see, was moving the redcoats farther down river, giving him an opportunity to confront them even farther from the line behind them.  Then Tessier lost his nerve.  Instead of deploying his prairie militia across the road the redcoats had to take to get to Morgan's still-unfinished line, he turned his men into the refuge of the swamp that flanked the levee road, allowing the redcoats, after they landed, a clear path up the west bank of the river.  Back at Morgan's line, a regiment of Kentuckians under Colonel John Davis hurried up, "hungry and exhausted from want of sleep," having been sent into the city the night before to scrounge for civilian weapons before crossing the river to reinforce Morgan.  The general sent Davis's Kentuckians ahead to reinforce DeClouet, and then sent Major Paul Arnaud with more militia to support Davis.  Davis had gone three-quarter of a mile down the road, to Mayhew's plantation, when he heard the signal rocket and the artillery open up across the river.  Davis halted his column and formed a battle line in the fields on either side of the levee road, his men to the left, Arnaud's to the right, when the head of Thornton's column appeared on the road ahead.  Had Davis's column continued down the road in the gloom of morning they would have come upon a canal at the boundary of Duvergne's and Mayhew's plantation, crossed by a bridge that Morgan had not bothered to dismantle.  Thornton's infantry reached the bridge first, enabling the 85th Foot to keep their pace towards the enemy's line.  Davis's men detected the redcoats first and held their fire, but Royal Navy Captain Samuel Roberts,  aboard one of the gun barges, spotted the Americans soon after they formed their line.  His guns opened fire with grape shot from the middle of the river, provoking the Americans to return fire, revealing their position. 

Only minutes after the main battle eruptied on the east bank, the much smaller battle on the west bank was on.  Thornton sent a captain and 20 men from the 85th to drive off the Americans.  The redcoats fired a volume, and Davis's Kentuckians replied with several of their own, but Arnaud's militia broke and ran, and the Creole major was unable to stop them.  Davis had no choice but to withdraw his own men under fire, his pround westerners enduring the taunts of the pursuing redcoats.  Up the road, Morgan's 300-yard-long earthwork, running across Castenada's plantation, was held by 640 militiamen--Colonel Jean Baptiste Dejean's 1st Louisiana Militia on the left, near the levee, Colonel Zenon Cavelier's 2nd Louisiana Militia in the center, and the rest of DeClouet's regiment of "drafted" prairie militia on the right.  Amazingly, more than a hundred of these defenders were unarmed, and more than a dozen of them were armed with shotguns!  Morgan "had another 220 of all ranks, several of them unarmed as well."   Morgan's only artillery were two brass six-pounders, recently arrived, with only a dozen rounds per gun, which he assigned to a staff officer, who placed the battery on the levee road on the left.  Morgan's three militia units occupied only 200 yards of the line, with no one manning his far right near the edge of the swamp, where the earthwork was unfinished; only a "shallow dry canal" there would have barely slowed a flanking force.  Moreover, a deeper canal to the rear of Morgan's line could be crossed by a bridge, which Morgan also had neglected to destroy!  Meanwhile, Davis Kentuckians retreated to the rear of Morgan's line and reformed their companies to plug the vulnerable part of the line.  When Thornton came up with his 450 infantrymen, he spotted the glaring flaw in Morgan's line, quickly formed a three prong assault, fired off several Congreeve rockets, and sent his redcoats forward.  Morgan's two guns and one of Patterson's 12-pounder batteries on the levee behind Morgan, buttressed by infantry fire from the Louisiana militia, stopped the redcoats twice. The Americans yelled "Victory!" ... prematurely.  Supported by reinforcements coming up the road and fire from the gun barges out in the river, Thornton's light infantry rushed around Morgan's unprotected right and got into his rear.  The Kentuckians, who had just come up, "scarcely fired a shot" and broke to the rear.  Morgan's line quickly collapsed, Kentuckians and Louisianians running in every direction.  Some of Davis's men made it to the safety of the swamp and soon got lost.  Others headed north beneath the towering cypress and did not emerge until they reached Algiers, across from New Orleans.  Morgan did his best to stop the rout, but most of his officers had joined their men in flight.  Patterson, though under fire from British batteries across the river, ordered his guns to turn on the charging redcoats, but panicked Kentuckians ran into his field of fire.  The commodore had no choice but to dump his ammunition in the river, spike his guns, and join the retreat up the river road to get the Louisiana out of harm's way.  British casualties were light, but Thornton was among the wounded, shot in the same part of his body where he had been hit at Bladensburg.  He turned over field command to Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gubbins of the 85th, who had led the center thrust against Morgan's line, and suggested he continue the movement as far upriver as his redcoats could manage. Gubbins pushed the 85th and the accompanying Royal Marines as far up the road as Flood's plantation, which lay "immediately opposite Line Jackson across the river."  

Here perhaps for the British was a chance of victory, if only Pakenham and the rest of his army were not being slaughtered across the river, and if they were up against anyone but Andrew Jackson.  Old Hickory possessed no formal military training, but he had a natural instinct for war.  He not only was formidable in the offense--ask the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend--but also in defense, as he demonstrated here.  He followed the precept of defense in depth not only on the east bank but on the west bank as well.  Behind Morgan's Line, which protected Patterson's lower battery, was Line Bois Gervais, two miles to the rear, above Patterson's works, and well to the rear of Line Jackson.  It had been laid out by Arsène Carriere Latour, a French engineer who had been working on Fort St. Leon when Jackson came to New Orleans and who was immediately promoted to major and chief engineer.  Latour's line was still unfinished, but even Morgan could see that this was the proper place to halt the mad rush of his militia and Kentuckians, which he managed to do with the help of Captain James C. Wilkins of Natchez and his company of volunteer infantrymen, who had reached New Orleans "only that morning."  Wilkins, "a brusque, decisive businessman who controlled much of Natchez's river commerce and most of its cotton," commandeered two ferry boats to cross to Algiers, and hustled his men to Latour's work, where they waited for their onrushing compatriots.  There, at Line Bois Gervais, the pell-mell retreat finally ended, and Morgan managed to reform the pitiful remainder of his thousand-man brigade.  Just then, Pierre Laffite arrived with an order from Jackson for Morgan to stand his ground.  "Paralyzed by indecision, Morgan asked Jackson to send Laffite back with instructions."  

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Coloned Gubbins informed Colonel Thornton that Patterson had not thrown all of his powder and shot into the river.  Thornton urged Gubbins to remove the spikes from Patterson's guns and turn them on the right flank of Line Jackson.  He then hurried a note to Pakenham informing him of what was happening on the west bank.  By then Pakenham was beyond caring and the command of the army had passed to Lambert, who was caring more about an American counterattack than resuming the attack on Jackson's line.  Thornton's message to Pakenham reached Lambert "about ten a.m."  By then, many of the British survivors were covering in the cypress trees out of the line of fire and Lambert's reserve brigade and remnants of the other three commands stood firm against a possible counter blow.  But on the west bank, perhaps, there was one last opportunity to turn Jackson away from his formidable line.  Lambert sent an aide to inquire of artillery chief Colonel Alexander Dickson, still very much alive, if the guns in Thornton's possession could turn the tide of battle.  Dickson, typically, went to see for himself.  However, ahead of him was Lieutenant Colonel John Burgoyne of Pakenham's, now Lambert's, staff, who reached Thornton and his command "with staggering news.  They were ordered to withdraw."  Then Dickson appeared.  He, too, saw the opportunity offered by the captured guns, but Burgoyne's message, which did not mention Pakenham's death, though Thornton's men wondered why it had come from the third ranking major general, not Pakenham himself, had thrown Thornton's men into confusion--only his own 85th Foot seemed ready to keep up the fight.  Dickson and Burgoyne were fully aware of the destruction of the British high command and a substantial part of Pakenham's army in less than two hours.  Still, the sight of the rear of Jackson's right flank stirred these officers to action.  They hurried back across the river to inform Lambert that, with 2,000 more men, there might be a chance "to retrieve the battle, and honor" via the guns on the west bank.  Lambert consulted with Admiral Cochrane, who was still with the army.  Evidently the man who had concocted the New Orleans campaign was no longer certain of its chances for victory.  The general agreed.  Lambert emerged from the lengthy conference, having "definitively decided to pull Thornton over from the right bank." 

As Thornton organized his withdrawal, confusion continued behind the unfinished walls of Line Bois Gervais.  First to appear after Laffite left was Captain Bartholomew Shaumberg of Governor Claiborne's staff, who showed Morgan an order from Jackson that Thornton must be destroyed.  Morgan "candidly said he could not do it."  Next appeared "the colorful General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert," a famous poser, who claimed that Jackson had sent him to take 400 of Morgan's men and destroy Thornton.  Morgan demanded to see the order in writing.  Humbert insisted that the order was verbal.  Morgan retorted that "even if he had four hundred men he could depend on, he would not let Humbert have them" without written orders from Jackson.  Humbert stormed off, his confrontation with Morgan having given Thornton and his men time to withdraw to the safety of their boats.  Then Governor Claiborne appeared.  Behind him came reinforcements from the city under militia General Jean Baptiste Labatut.  Morgan and Claiborne discussed a counterattack, but it was too late.  They resolved, instead, to consolidate their collective forces at Bois Gervais and report back to Old Hickory. 

Across the river, Lambert kept his regiments hidden until darkness allowed them to quietly fall back to the British bivouack at Vallieré's.  At nightfall, Dickson brought his guns in from the field and spiked the ones he could not.  After conferring with his officers, Jackson chose not counterattack--he was "protecting his victory," an aide later noted--but Old Hickory remained alert to any British movement while there was daylight.  "Shortly after the fighting stopped," Lambert sent a staff officer "under a white flag to seek a cease-fire to collect the wounded and bury the dead."  Jackson agreed to "a suspension of hostilities" until noon the following day, "but only on his side of the river."  Thornton was still on the west bank, near his boats, facing Morgan.  Despite the truce, Jackson still refused to trust the British.  He insisted that no more reinforcements could be sent to the west bank by either side before midnight.  Lambert waited until 10 a.m. the following morning to agree to the proposal; by then he had pulled Thornton's men back over the river.  To prevent British officers from seeing more of his main emplacements, Jackson stipulated that the truce line lay at a ditch 300 yards in front of his wall.  His Americans would collect the British dead in front of their works and bring the bodies to the truce line, while the British collected their dead behind the line and buried them where they chose.  The immobile British wounded on the American side of the truce line would be taken back into the city for treatment and exchanged for American prisoners at the Balise. 

The truce became permanent.  The Battle of New Orleans was over. 

Lambert's adjustant collected reports from the field commanders and informed the general that the battle had cost the British 291 killed, 1,262 wounded, 484 missing.  The dead and wounded included at least a hundred officers.  Overall casualties since December 23 numbered 371 killed, 1,511 wounded, and 532 missing, including 129 officers!  Jackson's casualties for the January 8 battle were miniscule in comparison:  13 killed, 39 wounded, 19 missing.  His losses since December 23 were 55 killed, 185 wounded, and 93 missing.  Not until he saw Lambert's signature on the truce messages did Jackson realize the redcoat high command had been decimated.  His victory was complete. 

But the campaign for New Orleans was not yet over.  By January 8, half a dozen of Cochrane's warships came within site of Fort St. Philip on the lower river, where Major William Overton still commanded.  The next day, at 3:30 p.m., as Lambert's men were still hurriedly burying hundreds of their comrades in the field on which they had fallen, the British bomb ships opened fire on the fort, out of range of Overton's guns; his most powerful ordnance, his big mortars, which could have reached the British vessels, had defective fuses.  The Americans simply waited out the bombardment while the major sent word upstream of the attack; Overton reported no damage.  Jackson reacted immediately.  He sent more heavy guns, plus a hot-shot furnace, from Fort St. John to Morgan and reminded the general how important it was for him to stand firm.  Commodore Patterson meanwhile repaired his riverside batteries and dropped the Louisiana down to Jackson's line to stop anything afloat that approached it.  When the truce expired on the afternoon of the 9th, Jackson resumed his bombardment of the British lines and kept it up, day and night, for several days longer.  On the 10th, the rain returned, bringing even more misery to the redcoats at Villeré's.  Fresh supplies and rumors of peace cheered them up, but the American bombardment seemed never-ending.  After ordering the remnant of the 44th Foot to further improve the canal road at Villeré's, Lambert began a slow withdrawal on the 11th, sending Thornton and other walking wounded down the canal and the bayou to the landing on Lake Borgne, from which they were rowed out to gunboats serving as ersatz hospital ships.  Downriver at Fort St. Philip, the British bombardment continued with little effect.  On the 14th, admirals Cochrane and Codrington headed back to the fleet, leaving Admiral Pulteney Malcolm to handle the Royal Navy's part in the withdrawal on site.  Lambert informed Malcolm on the 16th that he would withdraw his infantry and artillery beginning at nightfall of the 18th.  Meanwhile, Jackson got wind of the movement and concocted a bold plan that would bag much of the rest of Lambert's army.  On the 17th, he sent Reuben Kemper to scout out Bayou Bienvenue and ordered Morgan to send 600 men on keelboats downriver, prepared to cross them to the east bank to strike Lambert's withdrawal on the Villeré canal if Kemper reported a movement.  Again, Morgan proved to be worthless as a commander.  When the British began their withdrawal, Morgan "barely got moving before it was too late," and the British got clean away. 

On the 17th, the British took advantage of an all-day exchange of prisoners and ambulatory wounded at the truce line to cover Lambert's retreat that night.  The withdrawal went as planned, despite the marshy terrain, a sudden nighttime torrential rain that soon gave way to clear skies, and high tide in Lake Borgne in the middle of the night that flooded the bayou.  Fires left burning at Villeré's, stoked by some of Dickson's gunners before they joined the retreat, also fooled the Americans, who resumed their bombardment of the camp at 1 a.m., a sure sign that they had been deceived.  "At 3 a.m.," Lieutenant Colonel Gubbins, head of the picket detail at the bivouack, "walked into the woods, the last man to turn his back on the scene of their defeats.  All that remained of them now were Pakenham's and Gibbs's entrails, buried beneath a pecan tree at Villeré's.  It was the only American soil they occupied successfully."  (The bodies of the two generals, sans entrails, were taken out to the fleet and returned to Britain in what historian W. C. Davis calls "spirit casks"--barrels of rum.)  Meanwhile, on the lower river, proper fuses for Overton's big mortars finally reached Fort St. Philip from upriver.  The first discharges of the big American guns "so unsettled the British that the next morning," the 18th, "they weighed anchor and dropped out of sight."  Before long, Cochrane's order to abandon the river reached the flotilla, and they returned to the fleet.

New Orleans was saved. 

Jackson learned of Overton's victory on the morning of the 19th, about the same time he discovered Lambert's departure when the fog lifted from the battlefield.  He wasted no time riding to Villeré's, where a British surgeon greeted him and asked for assistance with the legless, armless redcoat wounded he had remained behind to watch after.  Jackson of course complied.  Later that day, he informed Secretary of War James Monroe of his victory, and the following day, the 20th, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of missives left the city in mail pouches proclaiming the triumph over the British.  It was another week, however, on the 27th, before the last of Lambert's redcoats boarded boats at the bayou landing that would take them across Lake Borgne to the fleet.  Meanwhile, Jackson congratulated his army in a grand revue and then dispersed them to strategic points around the city in case the redcoats decided to return.  He re-established his headquarters at Fort St. Charles, endured a grand celebration in his honor at St. Louis Cathedral on the 24th, supervised the final exchange of prisoners at the Balise, kept his army on the alert for returning redcoats, and waited for his wife Rachel, who did not reach New Orleans until February 19.34 

During the hectic gathering of militia units for the sprint to the Crescent City, an interesting note can be found in five marriages recorded between 27 December 1814 and 5 January 1815 in St. Landry Parish.   Father Michel Bernard Barrière had served as pastor of St. Martin de Tours church at St. Martinsville in the 1790s, retired for a time, and was transferred to St. Landry church at Opelousas in the early 1800s.  Father Barrière recorded the marriages in the parish's marriage register--those of German Creole Michel Bihm and Acadian Eugénie Lejeune on December 27, French Creoles Donatien Guillory and his cousin Selesie Fontenot on January 1, Spaniard Thomas De Los Santos Cortines and mulatresse libre Maria dite Pene Estaphania on January 1, French Creole Louis Carrière and Acadian Célestine Doucet on January 2, and French Creole Lucien Bergeron and German Creole Madeleine Guillaume Spargenberg on January 5--and included the notation: "The above five marriages ... were celebrated during Advent due to the war and the immediate departure of the militia leaving from here [Opelousas] on the 4th January 1815."  The culminating battle at New Orleans was fought four days later, so the Opelousas militia likely did not reach the city until after the battle was fought.10

The Opelousas militia and others of the state's units who arrived after the January 8 battle did reach the city before the war officially ended.  President Madison and his cabinet did not receive the Treaty of Ghent until February 17, more than a month after Jackson's victory at New Orleans and weeks after the last of the British army departed the area in late January.  The U.S. Senate quickly ratified the document, and the war was officially over.  In March, after General Jackson, still at New Orleans, released the militia, the Opelousas newlyweds could return to their homes and begin their new families in earnest.  Their fellow Creoles and Acadians also had something to celebrate, especially the South Louisiana militiamen who fought in and survived the great battle at New Orleans.  They could not know it, but it would be decades before Louisianians would be called again to fight for their country, this time in Texas and Mexico. 35

.

DeClouet's Regiment, which fought at New Orleans on both sides of the river, was only one of Louisiana's militia units in which Acadians could be found.  Men with Acadian surnames, and their units, who served during the War of 1812, but not necessarily at New Orleans, included: 

DeClouet's Regiment Louisiana Militia, Captains Marin Martin, Valery Martin, First Lieutenants Joseph Dugat, Antoine Guidry, Andre Martin, Henry S. Thibodaux(future governor), Second Lieutenants Andrew LaBlanc, Julian Robichaut, sergeants Christopher Bertrand, Jean Boudreau, Julien Comau, Narcisse Cormier, Paul Dugar, Pierre Guedry, Jean Gilbeaud, Raphael Legendre, John Q. Talbot, Leandre Thibodeaux, Francis Trahan, corporal/sergeants Celestin Aucoin, Wyatt Martin, Charles Mouton, corporals Augustin Benoit, Alexandre Daigle, Fabian Dantin, C. Doiron, Augustin Dugat, Obin or Ohm B. Thibodeaux, private/corporals Eloi Broussard, John Broussard, Ursin Broussard, Peter Granger, Celestin Prejean, privates Cyprien Arcenaux, Surville Arcenaux, Francois Arcenaux, Joicin Arcenaux, Alexandre Babin, Auguste Babin, Alexandre Babineaux, David Babineaux, Francois Babineaux, Joseph Babineaux, Charles Benoit, Joseph Benoit, Olivier Benoist, Xavier Benoit, Baptiste Bergeron, Guillaume Bergeron, Pierre Bergeron, Francois Bernard, John L. Bernard, Joseph Bernard, Simon Bernard, Ursin Bernard, Alexandre Bertrand, Jacques Bertrand, Jean Bertrand, Joseph Bertrand, Fred Blanchard, Joseph Bodreau, Hippolyte Boudreau, Joseph Boudreau, Lufroy Boudreau, Olivier Boudreau, Philemon Boudreau, Simon/Simeon Boudrow, Jean Baptiste Bourg, Charles Bourke, Francois Bourke, John Bourke, Benjamin Burke, Etienne Bourgois, Jean Pierre Burgois, Louis Burgois, Aurelien Braud, I. Edward Broussard, E. or Joseph Breau, Francois Broussard, Isidore Broussard, Jean Olidon/J. Olivier Broussard, Joseph Broussard, Louis Broussard, Pierro Broussard, Vallery Broussard, Louis Chiasson, Louis Clement, Cadet Comau, Hypolite Comau, Pierre Cormier [author's ancestor], Raphael Cormier, John Pierre Daigle, Joseph Daigle, Baptiste Dantin, Charles Dantin, Michel David, Patrick David, Peter David, Ursin Doucett, Charlitte Duga, Maximilian Dugat, Oliver Dugat, Charles Duhon, Joseph Duhon, Phirmin Duhon, Placide Duhon, Edmond Dupuy, Hypolite Dupuis, Michel Dupuis, Etienne Gautreau, Joseph Godreau,  Joseph Granger, Louis Granger, Pierre Granger, Simon Granger, Baptiste Guidry, Hypolite Guidry, Jean Guidry fils, Jean Charles Guidry, Joseph Guidry, Julien Guidry, Oliver Guidry, Philemon Guidry, Pierre Guidry, another Pierre Guidry, yet another Pierre Guidry, Alexandre Guilbeau, Jean Charles Guilbaud, Julien Guilbaud, Orsaime Guilbaud, Placide Gilbeau, Chrystien Hebbrent, Auguste Hebert Jr., Charles Hebert, another Charles Hebert, Francis Hebert, another Francis Hebert, Placide Hebert, Valmond Hebert, Ciery Henry, Henry Henry, Jean Baptiste Henry, Antoine Labawve, Francois Labauve, Placide Labauve, Agricola Landry, Alexander Landry, Athanas Landry, Aurora Landres, Celestin Landry, Cyrill Landry, Eloi Landry, Florentine Landry, Francis Landry, Jean Landry, Joseph Landry, Maximilien Landry, Raphael Landry, Rosamond Landry, Victor Landry, ____ Landry fils, Chevallier LeBlanc, Jean LeBlanc, Jean Baptiste LeBlanc, Joseph LeBlanc, Joseph LeBlanc Jr., Julien LeBlanc, Louis LeBlanc, Pierre LeBlanc, another Pierre LeBlanc, Zeno LeBlanc, servant Lewis LeBlanc, Celestin Legendre, Andre Lege, Augustin Leger, Pital/Vital Lejeune, Julien Louviere, James Martin, Louis Martin, Samuel Martin, Alexandre Melancon, Amelien Melancon, Anaclette Melenson, Baptiste Melancon, Charles Melancon, Jean Melancon, Joseph Melancon, Marcelin Melancon, Benjamin Mire, Joseph Mire fils, Placide Mire, Francois Mouton, Sylvester Mouton, Louis Part, Julien Poirier, Alexandre Potier, Francois Potier, Joseph Prejean, Maximilian Prejean, Auguste Richard, F. Richard, Louis Richard, Rosimond Richard, Auguste Roger, Alexandre Roy, Joseph Roy, Hypolite Savois, John Savoy, Josepy Savoy, Baptiste Saunier, Lufroy Sonier, Pierre Sonier, Placide Sonnier, Syrile Sonnier, Auguste Template, Charles Template, Jean Tomplet, Charles Theriot, Joseph Terrio, Julien Theriot, Baptiste Thibodeaux, Isaac Thibodeaux, Jean Thibodeaux, Martin Thibodeaux, Narcisse Thibodeaux, Placide Thibodeaux, Alexandre Trahan, Baptiste Trahan, Charles Trahan, Denis Trahan, Jean Trahan, Joseph Trahan, another Joseph Trahan, Julian Trahan, Pierre Trahan, Gregoire Velljoin, Charles Vincent, Joseph Vincent, another Joseph Vincent, and yet another Joseph Vincent. 

6th (Landry's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, Colonel Louis Landry, Majors I. Blanchard, Aubry Dupuy, Captains Abraham Arcenaux, Joseph Gaudet, Pierre Lalande, Ferdinand Landry, Narcisse Landry, Lieutenant Adjutant B. Dupuy, First Lieutenants Desire LeBlanc, F. Martin, Benjamin Mire, Pierre Theriot, Second Lieutenants Simon Arcenaux, Eugene Gaudet, Edouard Gaudin, Julien Landry, Valerie Landry, sergeants I. Arcenaux, Edward Bourgeuos, Luc Gaudin, Leger Landry, Silvain LeBlanc, Alexandre Melancon, Joseph Melancon, another Joseph Melancon, Paul Melancon, Joseph Michelle, Pierre Michel, ____ Michell fils, Louis Richard, corporals Francois Arceneau, Zenon Arcenaux, Pierre Bourgeous, Nabord Braud, R. Braud, Joseph Dupuis, Allain Gautro, Francois Guidrit, Edward Landry, Valery Landry, B. LeBlanc, Dermont LeBlanc, M. LeBlanc, Paul LeBlanc, Joseph Melancon, Simon Melancon, Joseph Michel, A. Richard, Paul Thibodeaux, privates Joseph Achi perhaps Aché, Alexis Arcenau, Auguste Arcenaux, Gabriel Arcenaux, Jn. Arceneaux, Louis Arceneaux, Dartoise Babin, Eugene Babin, Joseph Babin, Lessier Babin, Lifrin Babin, Narcisse Babin, R. Babin, S. Babin, Simon Babin, V. Babin, J. Ls Baurgeais, St. Arnand Baurgeois, Jean Bergeron, Pierre Bergeran, Joseph Bertrand, Joseph Blanchard, another Joseph Blanchard, Pierre Blanchard, Madé Bourg, Jean Baptiste Bourgeous, Joseph Bourgeous, Jean Restival Bourgeous, L. Bourgeous, M. Bourgeous, Olivier Bourgeuos, Paul Bourgeous, Paul A. Bourgeous, S. A. Bourgeous, Timon Bourgeous, Maurice Bourque, Casimire Braud, Edouard Braud, Etienne Braud, Raymond Braud, Road Braud, Urbain Braud, Jean Baptiste Chaison, Michel Clauatre, Cellestin Commo, Charles Commo, Joseph Daigle, Jean Davide, Gregoire Dugas, Isidore Dugas, Jerome Dugat, another Jerome Dugat, Francois Duhon pere, Francois Duhon fils, Joseph Duhon, Alexandre Dupuis, Noel Dupuis, Simon Dupuis, August Gaudet, Pierre Gaudet, Valery Gaudet, Michael Gaudin, Valantin Gaudin, Charles Gautreau, Harbin Gautrau, Simon Gautrau, Michel Gautrat, Jean Baptiste Gautreau, Jean Louis Gautrot, Joseph Gautreau, Simon Gautreau, JSeraphim Godin, John Gravois, Valery Gravois, Alexandre Guiedrit, Emon Guidrit, Jean Baptiste Guidrit, Narcisse Geudry, Paul Hebert, Joseph Lalande, another Joseph Lalande, ___ Lallans fils, Helie Lanaux, Simon Lanaus, Auguste Landry, another Auguste Landry, Belonie Landry, Benjamin Landry, Desire Landry, Donat Landry, Elias Landry, I. V. Landry, Joseph Landry, Joseph S. Landry, Nicolas Landry, Pierre Landry, Raphael Landry, S. Landry, Torissin Landry, Ursin Landry, Victor Landry, Helie Lanaux, Michael Laneaux, Albert Lanoux, Armogene LeBlanc, B. LeBlanc, Bn. LeBlanc, C. LeBlanc, Colin LeBlanc, Corantin LeBlanc, D. LeBlanc, Danat LeBlanc, Desire LeBlanc, Dominique LeBlanc, Edouard LeBlanc, Etienne LeBlanc, Hypolite LeBlanc, another Hypolite LeBlanc, J. LeBlanc, Jacques LeBlanc, Joseph LeBlanc, Jean Baptiste LeBlanc, John LeBlanc, Joseph LeBlanc, L. or S. LeBlanc, Olivier LeBlanc, P. LeBlanc, Paul LeBlanc, Rosemond LeBlanc, S. LeBlanc, Silvain LeBlanc, Stanislaus LeBlanc, Valery LeBlanc, Baptiste Louvier, I. Martin, David Melancon, Eugene Melancon, Henry Melancon, Louis Melancon, Olivier Melancon, another Olivier Melancon, P. Melancon, Rosemond Melancon, Cadet Michelle, Eugene Michelle, Flourentin Michel, Francois Michel, Marcellin Michelle, Benjamin Mirre, Jean Bapiste Mire, Joseph Mirre, Paul Mirre, Pierre Mirre, Etienne Part, Joseph Part, another Joseph Part, Joseph Poirrier, Etienne Richard, M. Richard, Pierre Richard, another Pierre Richard, St. Ville Richard, Simon Savoy, Eloi Theriot, Jean Theriot, Olivier Theriot, Valentine Theriot, Charles Thibodeaux, and Felix Vincent.

7th (LeBeuf's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, Captain Jean Guillot, First Lieutenants Etienne Bodreau, Ianot Daigle, Second Lieutenants Baptiste Dugas, Simon Guillot, Simon Landry, Trasimond Landry, First Sergeant Alexis Hebert, sergeants Michel Ancoin, Paul Marie Boudreau, Etienne Daigle, Vicair Levron, Merrius Melancon, Louis Richard, Paul Savoix, corporals Elie Ancoin, Paul Ancoin, Valentin Baudro, Louis Blanchard, Charles Dupuis, Jean P. Guillot, Louis Hebert, Benjamin Landry, Alexey Lejeune, Joseph Levron, privates Antoine Ancoin, Francois Ancoin, Francois Ancoin, Iysaint Ancoin, Guillaume Arceneau, Pierre Arcenaux, Francois Bariaux, Baptiste Baudro, Charles M. Baudro, Felix Baudro, Guillaume Baudro, I. Baudro, I Bte Baudro, I. I. Baudro, Jean dit Meto Baudro, Jesse Baudro, Joseph Baudreau, Jye Baudreau, Laurent Baudro, Joseph Baurgeois, Bastien Benoit, Jean M. Benoit, Pierre Benoit, Germain Berjeron, Pierre Berjeron, Elie Blanchard, Elie D. Blanchard, Etienne Blanchard, Firmin Blanchard, I. C. Blanchard, Jean Blanchard, Jean C. Blanchard, Auguste Boudro, Charles Boudro, Felix Boudro, Guillaume Boudro, I. B. Boudro, Jean Boudrean, Jean Boudro, Laurent Boudro, Magloire Boudreau, Amant Bourg, Auguste Bourque, I. P. Bourg, Marin Bourg, Theodore Bourg, Joseph Bourgeois, Valery Bourgeois, V. B. P. Bourgeois, Hypolite Bourke, Louis Bourke, Charles Breau, Pierre Braux, Dominique Broussard, Auguste Coumeau, Joseph Coumeau, Amant Crochet, Francois Crochet, Joseph Daigle, another Joseph Daigle, yet another Joseph Daigle, Alexandre Delaune, I. B. or J. B. Delaune, Antoine Dubois, Joseph Dubois, Louis Dubois, Cadet Dupuis, Etienne Dupuis, Jean Dupuis, Joseph Dupuis, Pierre Dupuis, Jean Ebert, Louis Ebert, Maturin Ebert, Pierre Ebert, Siril Ebert, Pierre P. Forest, Joseph Gautro, Pierre Gautreau, Baptiste Guillot, Isidore Guillot, Jean C. Guillot, Jean Pierre Guillot, Joseph Guillot, Louis Guillot, Olivier Guillot, Vabien Guillot, Alexandre Hebert, Ambroise Hebert, Cromas Hebert, Jean Baptiste Hebert, Thimoli Hebert, Amiable LaBlanc, Alexandre Landry, August Landry, Henry Landry, another Henry Landry, Jean Landry, another Jean Landry, Joseph Landry, Magloire Landry, Charles LeBlanc, Jean M. LeBlanc, Simon LeBlanc, Ursin LeBlanc, Alexis Lejeune, Ambroise Lejeune, Jean Baptiste Lejeune, Lemon Lejeune, Saturnin Levron, Michel Martin, Joseph Mellason, Joseph Moise, I. Baptiste Pitre, Jn. M. Pitre, Olivier Potier, Valerie Prejean, Jean Raubishau, John B. Robichaux, Joseph Robichaux, another Joseph Robichaux, Joseph Savoix, Florentin Temple, Broise Terriot, Charles Terriot, Fouville Terriot, and Joseph N. Thibodeaux.

8th (Meriam's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, Major Aubry Dupuy, Captains Z. Allain, Denis Landry, Pierre Joseph Landry, Jean Alexis LeBlanc, Lieutenant Adjutant B. Dupuy, First Lieutenants Simon Babin, Isidore Labove, Achilles Landry, M. Landry, Simon Richard, Second Lieutenants Jh. Babin, Marcel Dupuis, Valerie Hebert, Emel Landry, Charles LeBlanc, Joseph Orillion, First Sergeants Hipolite Landry, Placide LeBlanc, sergeants Auguste Babin, A. Dupuis, Gideon Dupuis, Edward Landry, Firmin D. Landry, Joseph Landry, Jerome LeBlanc, F. Legeune, Pre. Theriot, Th. Theriot, corporals Hubert Babin, Isaac Babin, I. Braud, Tlle Braud, Allain Breau, Joseph Breau, Julian Comau, Eloi Dupuy, Sebastien Guidry, Eloi Hebert, Joseph Hebert, Narcisse LeBlanc, Z. Legeune, Isadon Rivette, Louis Rivette, privates Bernard Allain, John Bte Allain, L. Allain, Pierre Allain, another Pierre Allain, V. Allain, Auguste. Babin, Francois Babin, Henry Babin, John Babin, Joseph Babin, Ls. Babin, P. Babin, Paul Babin, Pet Babin, Senator Babin, Simon Babin, V. Berjeron, J. Blanchard pere, Jacques Blanchard, Jerome Blanchard, Joseph Blanchard, M. Blanchard, P. Blanchard, Peter Blanchard pere, Victor Blanchard, Z. Blanchard, Jerome Boudrau, I. Bourg, André Bourgeois fils, Arsene Breau, C. Braud, Felix Breau, Henry Breau, Joseph Breau, Laurent Breau, Louis Breau, Michel Breau, Olisernce Breau, Or Braud, P. Braud, Pierre Breau, Urban Breau, Vy. Braud, Eloi Joseph Broussard, Firmin Broussard, Louis Broussard, Pierre Broussard, Simon Broussard, Etienne Chiasson, Victor Chiasson, Joseph Clautre, P. Clement, Bernard Comau, Cs Commeau, Etienne Comau, Gilbert Comau, Henry Cumo, John Louis Comau, Simon Comeau, Alexandre Daigle, B. Daigle, Cadet Daigle, Daniel Daigle, Honore Daigle, John Daigle, Joseph Daigle, L. Dagle, Z. Daigle, B. Doiron, I. Doiron, Maurice Doucet, Charles Dupuis, Jean Baptiste Dupuis, Mag Dupuy, Paul Dupuis, Pierre Dupuis, Michael Ebert, Thomas Hebert fils, Zacharie Ebert, Mc Foret, Raphael Gautrot, Joseph Grange, P. Grange, Raphael Granger, Edward Guedry, A. Guillot, Ls Guillot, A. Hebert, another A. Hebert, Abraham Hebert, Alexandre Hebert, Charles Hebert, another Charles Hebert, Dominique Hebert, Elie Hebert, another Elie Hebert, Gabriel Hebert, Jacques Hebert, Jean Baptiste Hebert, another Jean Baptiste Hebert, Joseph Hebert, Michel Hebert, Narcisse Hebert, Paul Hebert, another Paul Hebert, yet another Paul Hebert, Thomas Hebert pere, Thomas Hebert fils, V. Hebert, another V. Hebert, Jacques Labauve, I. Labove, Jean Baptiste Labauve, August Landry, Azani Landry, Baptiste Landry, David Landry, Donat Landry, F. Landry, Hipolite Landry, Joseph Landry, Louis Landry, Mathurin Landry, N. Landry, Pierre Paul Landry, Raphael Landry, T. Landry, T. L. Landry, Ursin Landry, Xavier Landry, Auguste LeBlanc, Jean Alexis LeBlanc, Belonie LeBlanc, Dosia LeBlanc, Edward LeBlanc, another Edward LeBlanc, Hipolite LeBlanc, Jean Baptiste LeBlanc, John Baptiste LeBlanc, Joseph LeBlanc, another Joseph LeBlanc, yet another Joseph LeBlanc, Laurence LeBlanc, M. LeBlanc, Maxie LeBlanc, Maximilien LeBlanc, Moyse LeBlanc, N. LeBlanc, P. LeBlanc, Pierre LeBlanc, Simon LeBlanc, Treville LeBlanc, V. LeBlanc, Victor LeBlanc, A. Legeune, Baptiste Lejeune, Mathurin Lejeune, T. Legeune, Louis Longuepee, I. Malaison, A. Martin, James Martin, John Martin, Allain Melancon, Edward Melanson, Jerome Melancon, Joseph Meloncon, Thomas Melanson, Zenon Melancon, Joseph Orillion fils, Nicholas Orillion, S. Rabicheau, A. Richard, I. Richard, Pierre Richard, Auguste Rivette, Eli Rivett, Jerome Rivett, Joseph Rivet, Marcelle Rivett, Marcellin Rivett, Pierre Rivette fils, Theodore Rivet, Xavier Rivett, Bovier Robicheau, I. Bte Robicheau, A. Templet, F. Templet, I. M. Templet, Xavier Theriot, A. Thibodeaux, Pierre Charles Thibodeaux, Paul Trahan, and V. Trahan.

16th (Thompson's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, Captain Baptiste Jeansonne, First Lieutenant Onezime Guidry, Joisin Hebert, sergeants Christopher Bertrand, Baptiste David, Simon Richard, corporals Eloi Landre, Sylvester Mouton, Pierre Richard, Placide Savoye, privates Pierre Aucoin, Jean Baptiste Benoist, Joseph Bergeron, Lefroy Boudreau, Simonet Bodro, Olivier Bourg, Alexandre Brasseux, Pierre Breau, Collin Broussard, Eloi Broussard, Joseph Brussard, Charles Chiasson, Pierre Chiasson, Francois Clement, Etienne Daigle, John Daigle, Joseph D'aigle, Hebert Doucet, Pierre Doucet, Elohi Ducet, John Ducet, Ursin Ducet, Oliver Dugat, Firman Duon, Pierre Duon, Etienne Forest, Michel Forest, Stephen Forest, Pierre Godin, Louis Guidry, Treville Guidry, Francois Hebert, Joseph Hebert, Pierre Hebert, Augustine Jeansonne, Placide Labauvre, Charles Laland, Geon Laland, Guillaume Lallande fils, Athauase Landry, Julian Landre, Leander Landre, Ursin LeBlanc, Augustin Leger, Jean Leger, Hebert Lejeune, Jean Baptiste Lejeune, Osier Lejeune, Pierre Lejeune, Charles Melancon, Pierre Potier, Dominique Prejean, Maximilan Prejean, John Prince, Anaclet Richard, Cerile Richard, Dominique Richard, Francois Richard, John Baptiste Richard, Joseph L. Richard, Louis Richard, Philip Richard, another Philip Richard, Pierre Richard, Pierre L. Richard, Auguste Roye, John Baptiste Roy, Lefroy Roy, Valery Roy, Francois Savoice, Francis Savoice fils, John Savoice, Joseph Savoye, Louis Sonnier, Julien Theriot, Cyril Thibodeaux, F. Thibodeaux, Pierre Thibodeaux, Sylva Thibodeaux, Toussaint Thibodeaux, Zeno Thibodeaux, and Oliver Trahan.

Captain Hubbard's Mounted Company Louisiana Militia, corporal Edouard Therio, privates Alexandre Arseneau, Pierre Arseneau, Urbain Arseneau, Antoine Aucoin, Firmin Aucoin, Florentine Baudreau, Narcisse Baudreau, Pierre Baudreau, Auguste Bourg, Baptiste Fabien Bourg, Francois Bourg, Hippolyte Bourg, Joseph F. Bourg, Louis Bourg, Pierre Martin Bourg, Alexandre Comeau, Baptiste Daigle, Michel Duon, Charles Foret fils, Guilfry Gautreau, Joseph Gautreau, Marin Gautreau, Jean Baptiste Hebert, Apolinaire Landry, Armand Landry, Auguste Landry, Baptiste Landry, another Baptiste Landry, Etienne Landry, Maxille Landry, Lubin LeBlanc, Valerie LeBlanc, Maturin Oselet, servant Guillaume Pitre, John Robichaux, Jean B. Robichaux, Baptiste Templet, Florentine Templet, Jean Templet, Ambroise Theriot, Celestin Theriot, Charles Theriot, Francois Theriot, and Martin Thibodeaux.

Baker's Regiment Louisiana Militia, corporals Elroy Benoit, Eloy/Elroy Broussard, private/corporal Edward Broussard, privates Joseph Babin, Charles Bourk, Alexandre Broussard, Armand Broussard, Edward Broussard Jr., Elois Joseph Broussard, Louis Broussard, Pierre Broussard, Raphael Broussard, Cola Brussard, Valery Commo, Joseph Gedery, Joseph Gilbeau, Cyprien Granger, Lora Granger, Jean Guidry, Joseph Guidry, Francois Hebert, Olduphe Labauve, Joseph Lachausee, Dennis Landry, Hebert Landry, Valentine Landry, Alexi LeBlanc, Jacques LeBlanc, Louis LeBlanc, Peer LeBlanc, Silvester LeBlanc, Simonette LeBlanc, Theophile LeBlanc, Francois Louvier, Frederick Louvier, Louis Louvier, Antoine Martin, Paul Martin, Mar Prince, Cyprian Savoir, Nicholas Thibodeaux, and Pierre Paul Thibodeaux.

5th (LaBranche's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, fusilier-Sergeant Abraham Bourgeois, Daniel Lambert, Louis Lambert son, corporal Ante Son Dupuis, fusilier-private Cyprien Arceneau, Abraham Bourgeois (nephew), Jacques Broux, Joseph Broux, Francois Clement, Jacques Clement, Nicholas Clement, Louis Deroche, Pierre Deroche, In (Jn?) Bte Desroche, Pierre Dubois, Antoine Dupuis, Armand Gravois, Joseph Henry, Magloire Martin, ____ Michel, and ____ Richard.

Plauché's Battalion Louisiana Militia, sergeant Aine Lanaux, privates Jacques Alan perhaps Allain, Jn Alin perhaps Jean Allain, B. Blanchard, ____ Bourg, ____ Bourgeois, Joseph Bourgeois, ____ David, A. Douce, ____ Dubois, ____ Dupuy, Desire Henry, Charles Lanaux, P. Lanaux, ____ Michel, Constant Michel, ____ Mouton, and A. Richard.

1st (Fortier's) Battalion Louisiana Militia, sergeant Jh Martin, corporal Edmond Dupuis, privates Baptiste Benoit, Francois Bourgeois, Joseph Henry, and Charles Lalande.

2nd (Peire's) Battalion Louisiana Volunteers, First Lieutenant Noel Gaspard Dupuy, sergeant Charles Vincent, corporal/sergeant Ursin Bijos, privates Pierre Benoit, Aurora Landry,Joseph Landry, Louis Lanoix, Similien Michel, Francois Pothier, and musician Bon Hebert.

2nd (D'Aquin's) Battalion Louisiana Militia, Captain Marcellin Guillot, corporal Fontage Leger, fusilier-privates Marin Breau, Desire David, Guillaume Henry, Louis Henry, and Bazile Martin.

2nd (Cavelier's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, privates Francois Benoit, Nls Cormier, Francois Degre, Simon Gaudin, Baptiste Lambert, Augustin Martin, Bisente Martin, Jeremiha Martin, Joseph Martin, Louis Martin, ____ Michel, ____ Potier, and Roland Vincent.

3rd (De La Ronde's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, First Lieutenant Elvix/Eloi Arché/Aché, corporal Jean Bourg, privates Andre Benoit, Andre Hebert, Jean Baptiste Labeau, Francois Martin, Jh Martin, Jques Martin, Louis Martin, ____ Prince, and George Tradahon.

4th (Morgan's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, Surgeon's Mate ____ Bourgeois, privates ____ Bourgeois, _____ David, ____ Gaudin Jr., Gaudin, Sr., N. Henry, and Cesair LeBlanc.

Consolidated 10th and 20th Regiments Louisiana Militia, corporal Augustus Richard, privates Eli Aucoin, Pollite Commo, Bovier Daigre, David Daigre, Lawrence Daigre, Olivier Daigre, Peter Dupuy, Paulin LeBlanc, and Joseph Trahan.

11th (Hickey's) Regiment Louisiana Militia, corporal Jean Baptiste Legendre, privates Firmin Guidry, and Bernard Lalande.

Consolidated 17th, 18th, and 19th Regiments Louisiana Militia, privates [James Bowie], Baptiste Dubois fils, Olivier Dubois, Alexis Dupuis, Maxamillun Dupuis, Pierre Dupuis, Thomas Michel, Fr. Poirier, Francis Roy, Lufroy Roy, and Thomas Talbot.

Captain Halloway's Company Cavalry Louisiana Militia, private Pierre Bergeron.

Captain Songy's Company Louisiana Marines, sergeant En Mouton, and private Francois Breau.

Captain Cahuveau's Company Louisiana Cavalry Militia, sergeant P. A. Guillotte, and private F. Dupuy.

Captain Chaudurier's Company Louisiana Volunterers Artificers, Artillery, sergeants John Mouton, Jean Richard, and artificer Louis Roy.

Captain Dubuclet's Troop Louisiana Hussars Volunteers, artificer Solastille Roy, privates Alexandre Charles Landry, Derneville LeBlanc, and Rosemont LeBlanc.

Captain Lagan's Company Louisiana Volunteers, privates Antoine Leger, and Joseph Roger.

Captain Trudeau's Troop of Horse Louisiana Volunteers, private Albin Michel.

Undesignated unit, Colonel/Aide-de-camp of Gov. Claiborne Octave LeBlanc, privates Ambroise Dugas, and Olliver Dugas.

Due to the complexities of French settlement in South Louisiana, many of these men with "Acadian" surnames--such as the Allain's of the 8th Regiment Militia--likely were French Creoles or Canadiens, not Acadians.36

South Louisiana Geography and the Acadians