Battle of New Orleans

The last major land battle of the War of 1812 was fought on 8 January 1815 at Chalmette, a few miles downriver from New Orleans. A British army under Sir Edward Pakenham attacked an entrenched American force led by Andrew Jackson and was cut to pieces in little more than half an hour. The peace treaty had already been signed in Europe, so the battle did not change the war's outcome, but it made Jackson a national hero and shaped how Americans remembered the conflict.

Peace talks between Britain and the United States opened at Ghent in August 1814. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy under Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane pressed for an expedition against New Orleans, the gateway to the Mississippi and the vast lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Pakenham was told to keep fighting even if he heard rumours of peace. Whether Britain meant to hold Louisiana permanently remains debated; many historians reject the idea.

On 14 December 1814 British sailors and marines in rowing boats captured the small American gunboat flotilla on Lake Borgne. Troops were then ferried across the shallow lakes and bayous, and on 23 December an advance guard of about 1,800 men reached the Mississippi only nine miles below the city. Instead of pushing on, they made camp.

Warned by a local militia officer who escaped capture, Jackson struck the British camp that night with just over 2,000 men before falling back to the Rodriguez Canal. There a long earthen rampart, studded with artillery and built partly by enslaved labourers, was raised from the river to a swamp. Pakenham arrived on Christmas Day. A reconnaissance in force on 28 December came close to breaking through near the swamp but was called off, and an artillery duel on 1 January 1815 ended when the British guns ran short of ammunition.

With reinforcements, Pakenham had about 8,000 men; Jackson's defenders numbered roughly 5,000 to 5,700, a mix of regulars, sailors, militia from Tennessee, Kentucky and Louisiana, and Barataria privateers including the Lafitte brothers. The British plan relied on a night crossing to seize the American guns on the west bank, but the canal dug to move the boats collapsed, and only about a third of the force got across, hours late.

The main attack went ahead at dawn regardless. The 44th Regiment, which was supposed to carry ladders and bundles of sticks for crossing the ditch, had left them behind. As the morning fog lifted, the advancing columns were exposed to massed artillery and musket fire. Pakenham and his second-in-command, Major General Samuel Gibbs, both lost their lives, and the attack collapsed. On the west bank the British did overrun the American militia, but General John Lambert, now in command, judged the position untenable and withdrew.

British casualties exceeded 2,000 killed, wounded, missing or captured, while the Americans reported 71. The British broke camp by 19 January and re-embarked. In February they took Fort Bowyer at Mobile Bay, but news of the Treaty of Ghent, signed on 24 December 1814 and ratified by the United States on 16 February 1815, ended the fighting. Napoleon's escape from Elba soon pulled British attention back to Europe, and Lambert fought at Waterloo.

Americans celebrated the victory as proof that the young republic had held its own against a great power, and 8 January was a national holiday from 1828 to 1861. The news arrived just as New England Federalists brought their grievances from the Hartford Convention to Washington, and the party never recovered from the charge of disloyalty. Jackson rode his fame to the presidency, serving from 1829 to 1837. Some historians argue that the battle mattered less to the war than to the myth of an American triumph that grew around it.

Our 1815 map shows New Orleans within the United States, which had acquired Louisiana in 1803; the 1800 map shows the region as Spanish Louisiana.