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N EW O RLEANS ASSAULTED the senses with friendly weapons. Bitter aromas from its coffeehouses mingled with smells from European, African, and Caribbean kitchens, spilling into streets redolent of rose and citrus gardens, warehouses of pungent sugar and tobacco, the acrid droppings of cart horses, and the fishy tang of the great river. Street mongers’ cries hawked everything from bread to silks, vying with shouting auctioneers selling cattle and slaves, the rhythms of shod hooves and ironbound carriage wheels, the boasts of carousing riverboatmen, and the puffing stacks and belching boilers when a steamboat made landing.
Most of all, there were the sights of the city: the many-colored wooden buildings lining most of its seventy blocks, broadclothed and beaver-hatted gentlemen in their countinghouses, aproned merchants at shop doors, buckskinned upriver backwoodsmen on the streets, ladies in Parisian fashion strutting the banquettes , and Choctaw women in deerskin and gingham. Everywhere were the dusky faces of slaves and the formerly enslaved, and the coffeed complexions of mulattoes and quadroons inhabiting the city’s almost unique terra incognita between white and black. A sightseer might roam the known world or simply come to the crescent bend of the Mississippi and see it all in New Orleans. No wonder a late war visitor declared, “I could scarcely imagine myself in an American place.” 1
Some 25,000 people inhabited the place by late 1814, forty percent of them slaves or freedmen, making it the infant nation’s sixth largest city. Americans were but a quarter of the white population. 2 The rest bled French or Spanish blood, most of them creoles born there or in the Caribbean, and most resenting the American arrivées since the 1803 Purchase. The creoles clung to Catholicism, spurned English, and practiced an indolence that affronted the ambitious Yankees. Everything was an excuse for a party, even saints’ days, when sexes and races mixed inappropriately, the men got drunk, and everyone feasted. 3
Language defined politics and loyalties. Few Federalists or Republicans here; they were French or American. Even the Francophile Jefferson feared the creoles were so immured in French and Bourbon ideology that New Orleans might drift back to France or Spain. 4 Whoever governed it controlled the commerce and security of the entire American interior from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. 5 More than a third of the nation’s produce now passed through its wharves and warehouses. Attorney Abraham Ellery was not overly hyperbolic in calling the city “the deposit and Key of the Western World . ” 6 Nor is it any wonder that, before he bought Louisiana, Jefferson foretold that “there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.” It was New Orleans. 7
English eyes had long looked in that direction. Leaders in London considered a plan to overwhelm the Spaniards there in 1770 to seize its trade in indigo and furs. 8 Two years later the British commander in North America proposed to anchor transports in Lake Borgne, northeast of the city, and send boats rowing eighteen miles from the lake up its sluggish tributary Bayou Bienvenue to land just seven miles from the city, and in 1781 another plan emerged that proposed to do the same. 9 Now, more than three decades later, a new war raged, yet the creoles outside the city took so little interest in it that the American deputy attorney general feared only a British invasion could rouse them. 10
An invasion is exactly what they got. Shortly before dawn on December 13, 1814, an American commodore commanding a miniature squadron of seven sailing sloops and schooners, with just 25 cannon and 204 men, had his flotilla off Malheureaux Island, 75 miles northeast of New Orleans and 30 miles from the entrance to Lake Borgne. As the first glimmers of light penetrated mists blanketing the water, a nightmare emerged from the gloom to crawl toward him. The British had not forgotten those earlier plans. Forty-five boats mounting 42 guns were rowing 1,200 redcoats toward him to board his squadron. The commodore knew very well that at that moment he was all that stood between the enemy and New Orleans.
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T HE W AR O FFICE in London meant to change the dynamic in North America. In 1812–1813, Kentucky and Tennessee sent thousands of militia north to threaten Canada. Divert that supply of volunteers elsewhere, and His Majesty’s hold in Canada would be more secure. The raid on Washington and Maryland was one such diversion. A similar strike somewhere below Tennessee held promise of diverting even more. The ideal place was the Gulf Coast and particularly New Orleans.
Ironically, even Americans had mused on plots to take the city. In 1804 the embittered vice president Aaron Burr, his presidential ambitions dashed, proposed to seize newly purchased Louisiana and hand it to Britain in return for half a million dollars. London ignored Burr’s offer, but by 1806 he planned to use Louisiana as his base for the conquest of Spain’s Mexico and Texas provinces, implying that he would create a new southwest empire with himself as ruler.
Many in New Orleans supported him, not least the Irish-born lawyer Lewis Kerr. 11 An early champion of Jefferson’s Republicans, he had a magnetic attraction for controversy. In 1802, on the advice of his friend Colonel Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia, Kerr moved to Natchez, where he made a fast friend in the governor of Mississippi Territory, William C. C. Claiborne, who appointed him attorney general. 12 Aged just twenty-seven, that precocious Virginian had already been a supreme court judge in Tennessee, the youngest congressman in history, governor of Mississippi, and then, in 1803, governor of the Orleans Territory of Louisiana, a position the jealous Jackson had coveted. 13 Claiborne actually sent Kerr to New Orleans ahead of himself to survey the local militia, and on taking office made the Irishman its chief of staff. 14
The authoritarian Kerr was unpopular, thanks not least to his claims of kinship to Robert Dundas, soon to be Viscount Melville and Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lieutenant General John Hely-Hutchinson (Baron Hutchinson). Some suspected Kerr’s loyalty, but Claiborne steadily advanced him and even had him codify the territory’s criminal law. 15 Then Kerr fell under Burr’s spell. He began recruiting men for an “army” that he would lead to conquer Spain’s provinces in North and South America and promised British assistance, thanks to his influential “relations.” 16
Kerr courted officers of the United States Army and tried to enlist the already legendary Reuben Kemper. Six feet tall, powerfully built, hazel eyes glowing from a face deeply scarred by Spaniard foes, Kemper and his brothers had led resistance to Spanish rule in the West Florida parishes above New Orleans that both Spain and the United States claimed. The nation watched via newspaper coverage in 1805 when the Spaniards beat and kidnapped the Kempers from their Mississippi homes, only for them to be saved from prison or death by the United States military. Reuben later confronted his kidnappers one by one, exacting revenge with bullwhip and knife, and carved notches in the ears of one as a warning to all. 17
This was the kind of man Kerr wanted. He met with Reuben and his brother Samuel, boasted of the important backing he enjoyed, asked them to raise men in Kentucky and Tennessee, and promised money in abundance, even if banks must be robbed. Then another Irishman stepped into the picture, Judge James Workman. He had earlier called on Britain to forcibly seize Louisiana. When he was ignored, he approached Jefferson, who showed no more interest than the British. 18 After the 1803 purchase, Workman moved to New Orleans and soon fell into Kerr’s orbit. 19 In January 1805 they joined lawyer Edward Livingston, merchant Beverly Chew, Orleans Gazette, for the Country editor John Bradford, and several others to form the Mexican Association of New Orleans, with Workman as president and its goal to seize Mexico. 20 The connection with Burr was transparent. The Kempers wanted nothing to do with the scheme, and Reuben went to Washington to alert Jefferson, but the president was already aware of Burr’s plans. 21
Governor Claiborne also refused to cooperate and fell out with both Irishmen, Workman dismissing him thereafter as “a mauled bitch.” By temperament affable, Claiborne quickly adapted to dealing with the prickly creole population, married the daughter of a prominent family, and confronted the daunting task of merging a population of Catholic Frenchmen and Spaniards with the predominantly Protestant American émigrés and their new democratic institutions. “There was a strange fascination in his manners,” recalled one of those Americans, but there was also a crafty politician. “He never refused, but always promised.” 22
His diplomacy did not work with General James Wilkinson, sent by Jefferson in 1806 to secure the city against further plots. Greedy, autocratic, and treasonous, Wilkinson was a paid Spanish spy as well as an American general. He simply ignored the governor and began arresting anyone suspected of complicity with Burr, with whom he was himself in league until he betrayed Burr, too. Wilkinson censored mail and instituted virtual martial law, one observer declaring that “his visit to New-Orleans was like that of a pestilence.” 23 Wilkinson arrested Kerr and Workman, accusing them of sedition, but juries twice failed to convict. 24 Both just disappeared in early 1809. 25 Workman settled in Havana for several years. 26 Kerr moved to the Bahamas to practice law. 27 “I was one of those every day kind of characters that, in absence, are seldom remembered long,” he told a friend, but neither he nor Workman were forgotten. Neither were they forgiving. 28 Both nurtured grudges and they were not yet done with New Orleans.
The widely publicized plots of Workman, Kerr, and Burr, and the kinetic efforts of the Kempers and others, kept the Spanish constantly on the alert, and the Americans in Louisiana ever aroused. Wilkinson’s departure in May 1807 brought relief, but there remained the specter of Spain and mistrust of the Spaniards in the city. They still believed that Louisiana rightfully owed allegiance to the Bourbon crown. The French remained interested as well, despite Bonaparte’s sale. General Jean-Victor-Marie Moreau visited the city in January 1808. Once one of Napoleon’s leading captains, he had been banished in 1804 for suspected disloyalty, becoming an exile in the United States. His visit may have had a motive other than sightseeing, and some suspected he was involved with Burr in yet another plot. 29
Real hazards hovered on the southern and western horizon. In January 1809, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander F. I. Cochrane landed a 10,000-man army on Martinique to operate against French possessions in the Indies, but rumor said he already had a taste in his mouth for New Orleans and meant to enforce free navigation for British shipping on the Mississippi. 30 At the same time, Spanish border provocations west of the river fed speculation that the Diegos—a British nickname for Spaniards that soon eroded into the derogatory “dagoes”—meant to reclaim what Bonaparte sold. A month after succeeding Jefferson in the presidency, James Madison responded with a military and naval buildup at New Orleans that included the return of Wilkinson. 31
A year later the Kempers’ dream came to realization when a two-minute revolt pushed the Spaniards out of Baton Rouge and the West Florida parishes. The rebels proclaimed a new commonwealth and sent now-colonel Reuben Kemper to seize Mobile. He just got in sight of his goal when the infant republic winked out on December 10 as Claiborne, representing Madison, took possession of West Florida in fulfillment of Jefferson and Madison’s claim that the Louisiana Purchase always included those parishes. 32 West Florida’s “president,” Fulwar Skipwith, was powerless to resist. Neither Spain nor England recognized the legitimacy of the momentary republic, nor of Madison’s opportunistic occupation. A year later Jefferson advised the seizure of the rest of Spanish Florida before England did so.
Despite mounting provocations, Britons commonly agreed that there was little to gain from war with America, though little to fear, either, from a nation with scarcely a dozen warships, virtually no standing army, and a reliance on disorderly militia. Louisiana and New Orleans might make an easy harvest. 33 An army landing in, say, Spanish Pensacola or Mobile, could march westward on a decent road, live off the land with aid from Creek allies, and take the city virtually unopposed, a prospect not lost on Orleanians, who as early as 1810 heeded Jefferson’s call to seize Pensacola before the British. 34
There was even a threat from within. On the night of January 8, 1811, two dozen slaves on an upriver plantation attacked their sleeping masters with machetes and cane knives. Soon they numbered in the hundreds, killing and attracting more adherents as they moved south toward a city that soon fell into panic. Federal soldiers, local militia, and a posse of planters congealed the next day to attack and disperse the rebels, killing more than fifty on the spot and capturing and executing at least fifty more in the following days, displaying their heads and mangled bodies along the river as a reminder of the price of rebellion. 35 It was the largest slave rebellion in the nation’s history, and after it Orleanians never again slept entirely at ease. Every new rumor awakened fear of a repeat or worse, and persuaded the British that with the right encouragement the slaves would rise in their thousands. 36
Among the volunteers who brutally quelled that revolt were two companies of free black militia that had existed since before the Purchase. New Orleans’s 7,500-strong free black community was the largest in the nation, and the rest of the population did not know quite how to deal with them. Led by white officers, they had helped put down an earlier slave rebellion as well, making Claiborne hope that they might be a bond between the races, but they also posed a challenge. Few were comfortable with black men being armed. The planter Major Pierre Lacoste commanded them, and some were property and slave owners themselves who had a stake in defending their city; but the governor feared that if Americans withheld their confidence from the black militia, the British might woo them to alliance. 37
All New Orleans needed was yet another source of danger, but then the Creeks took advantage of the United States’ distraction with its war to begin sporadic attacks on families as far north as Tennessee, a precursor of the Creek War to come. With slaves killing their masters and Indians killing whites, some laid the chaos to British agents stirring both to “carry fire and sword” across the frontier. 38 Then came the comet and the earthquakes. In a time of millennial fervor, it seemed that the world was coming to the end of days. A few panicked Orleanians even sought to hide from the cataclysm aboard the American gunboats on Lake Borgne. 39 Then, on June 18, 1812, Madison declared war.
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W HITEHALL PAID LITTLE overt attention to the Gulf Coast at the outset, but Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, did not escape notice. Two months before the war began, Cochrane already had his eye on Louisiana. “The places where the Americans are most vulnerable is [ sic ] New Orleans and Virginia,” he told Kerr’s presumed cousin Viscount Melville. Take New Orleans and Britain controlled the Mississippi Valley’s trade. “Self interest being the ruling principle with the Americans,” said Cochrane, the interior states, like Tennessee, Kentucky, even Ohio, would withdraw from the Union to “join the party that pays for their produce.” 40
By September 1812, speculation in London predicted the seizure of Louisiana, and one plan after another to accomplish that object came forth, all from the Navy. 41 In November, Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren proposed taking the city and stationing black West Indies units there as garrison, thinking fear of their fomenting slave revolt would induce the southern states to surrender first. He suggested much the same thing again the following February. 42 At the same time, Captain Sir James Lucas Yeo reported New Orleans unequipped to defend itself and suggested that a single frigate light enough to get over the sandbar at the river channel’s mouth could sail up to take the city, where every faction was arrayed against the others, the local Indians hated them all, and a black regiment or two would spread panic and discontent with the war along the coast. 43 Another report from Captain James Stirling of the ship Brazen suggested that Britain should enlist the Creeks as allies while a small squadron took New Orleans to exact from it a ransom under penalty of being sacked, a measure that would surely add to the Americans calling for peace. 44
With all these reports in hand, and those earlier proposals dating back to the 1770s in his office files, Melville ordered further study by Stirling. In March he submitted a comprehensive statement of Louisiana and New Orleans’s vital strategic import to the Americans’ economy and security and the ever-present threat it posed to the security of Spain’s provinces while it remained in Yankee hands. Its population was divided, and he believed many would welcome being removed from the United States. “A small body of troops from this country might effectually wrest this invaluable Territory from the hands of the American Government,” he added, “and place the interior states of Kentucky, Ohio, Tenesee and part of Virginia at the mercy of Great Britain.” Noting that blacks outnumbered whites, he thought they could be employed to do “much mischief.” As for General Wilkinson, he could be bought, and even then the London press reported that American troops at New Orleans refused to serve under him. The Creeks were now at war with the Americans, and the Spaniards at Pensacola hated the Yankees more than they distrusted the British. 45
Despite all this, Melville concluded for the moment that New Orleans would require too many resources needed elsewhere to take and hold for the present, although he did not entirely dismiss it, either. 46 Public opinion showed rather more interest. Take New Orleans, and Britain would close the outlet for all industry and produce of the West and thereby divide the states, ran the argument. Take the city and it could provision Britain’s islands in the West Indies at half the cost of goods from England. Take it, and Spain’s possessions in America could be preserved from greedy adventuring. 47 Everyone knew it could be done so easily. That was one point of agreement, at least, with some Americans. Britain could take the city in sixty days, Senator Obadiah German of New York had warned on the floor of Congress. “Should she get possession of New Orleans,” he cautioned, “it will cost much blood and treasure to dislodge her.” 48 And yet Madison’s administration seemed to be “under an infatuation,” accused one critic, that kept it from providing for its defense. 49 Louisiana senators James Brown and Eligius Fromentin, and its sole congressman Thomas B. Robertson, struggled into the fall of 1814 to get the administration to take notice until the capture of Washington got Madison’s attention at last. 50
Preparations had come slowly. By the end of 1811, Captain John Shaw commanded just two brigs at New Orleans, with nineteen seaworthy gunboats and an unfinished blockship, so called for the immense weight of its broadside, that could be anchored to close passes into Lake Borgne with its massive armament. Wilkinson’s reinstatement did not build confidence. “I hope to God, our country shall never have to blush for placing confidence in such a man,” Fromentin told Livingston. 51 The general demanded supreme power, subject to no superior authority, and returned to his dictatorial ways. Still, he began surveys for new fortifications and commenced repairs to older defenses, even making the novel suggestion of mounting cannon on the decks of six of the new steamboats plying the Mississippi. Freed from dependence on fickle winds, they could go wherever needed. 52 He also ordered some waterways obstructed, giving careful consideration to avenues by which the enemy might approach on land and sea. One that he dismissed, however, was Lake Borgne. 53
Meanwhile Claiborne struggled with a balky legislature to raise militia. 54 He had no doubt his city would be attacked, even complaining of Washington’s lethargy to newly commissioned major general Andrew Jackson. 55 It did not help that some Federalists regarded New Orleans as already all but lost. 56 Finally, in January 1813, Washington haltingly began to address the danger. A study considered possible enemy lines of approach, including an admittedly unlikely landing on the southern shore of Lake Borgne, whence small boats could use Bayou Bienvenue to disembark troops on dry land a dozen miles below the city. 57 Meanwhile, Congress passed a secret act authorizing the seizure of Mobile, claiming that it was originally a part of the Louisiana Purchase. Wilkinson took Mobile on April 15, giving the Americans control of the Gulf Coast east to the Perdido River, but by this time he had so alienated everyone that Madison relieved him and sent Brigadier General Thomas Flournoy in his place. 58
Washington gave, and Washington took away. In June it ordered the 3rd United States Infantry elsewhere, leaving Louisiana seriously exposed, even as the legislature still resisted summoning militia. Flournoy arrived to find just 1,500 regulars and the same number of volunteers, undermanned, untrained, and short thousands of muskets. 59 “With this force,” he frankly told the governor on June 14, “it is impossible that the District Can be defended.” 60 Claiborne lamented to one of his militia commanders that “we are surrounded by dangers and we must unite our best efforts.” 61
Flournoy was scant improvement on Wilkinson, antagonizing almost everyone when he took command of the 7th Military District, but he faced tough questions. Could he stop the coastal trade between New Orleans and Pensacola, where supposedly neutral Spanish authorities allowed British warships to revictual on American provisions and enemy commanders gave arms to the hostile Creek Indians? Would Shaw’s flotilla at New Orleans act under his orders? Since the Choctaw seemed friendly, could he pay them to follow his banner? 62 Could anyone get cooperation on manpower from the legislature?
For months Claiborne politicked, cajoled, and threatened in order to get the state government to approve his calls for militia. The French creoles controlled the senate and the Americans the house, and neither would cooperate. Brigadier General David Bannister Morgan sat in the house, grumbling that few of the French felt any love for the United States. Rather, some openly looked to the day when Napoleon would come to reclaim them and Louisiana. “Our Politics here, are not Federalist & Republican,” Morgan explained on January 14, 1814. “They are clearly & distinctly understood to be French & Americans.” He feared the two factions might declare war on each other. 63 None of this made command easier for Flournoy, who complained to the secretary of war that “I do believe that there is not one person in twenty throughout this State, that is friendly to the United States, or who would take up arms in its defence.” 64
Claiborne still had faith in the patriotism of the people, and knew there were many faithful citizens in the city, but confessed to Jackson in August that, if attacked suddenly, the city would fall. The only salvation might be regulars and Kentucky and Tennessee militia. He begged General Jackson, who replaced Flournoy in June, to march to New Orleans, even though it lay outside his own military district. 65 Meanwhile, Captain John Shaw now had only the eighteen-gun brig Syren and the twelve-gun Viper , the newly purchased Louisiana still being fitted out with sixteen big guns, half a dozen gunboats, and a few sloops and schooners. Washington sent him few resources, complaining of the expenditure and waste on the New Orleans station, but still he amassed an abundance of artillery and ammunition. 66 Should the British invade, he expected them to come overland via Mobile, although he saw the possibilities of Lake Borgne. 67
By October 1813, Secretary of the Navy William Jones wearied of Shaw’s protests of unreadiness and replaced him with Master Commandant Daniel Todd Patterson. 68 Patterson was fifteen years in the Navy now, most of them spent on the New Orleans station, which had special advantages in that Edward Livingston was his cousin, and that attached him to the creole families of Livingston’s wife, Louise Davezac. Just the month before taking his new assignment at his new rank, he had enlisted Livingston’s aide in politicking for promotion. 69 Even among the Americans at New Orleans, family entanglements were omnipresent.
As Shaw left, three British warships anchored off the mouth of the Mississippi, sending parties ashore, and on April 24 several small boats from them raided upriver to within twenty miles of the city. 70 They were minor but telling incursions. New Orleans had come into British view at last. Meanwhile, Patterson found wood rot on the Louisiana that made her temporarily unfit for service. Then Secretary Jones halted work on the blockship when it was nearly complete, ordered Syren and Viper off after British ships blockading the river mouth, and further weakened the station by sending the armed schooner Carolina in chase of smugglers. 71 When Patterson warned Jones in July that the British would surely strike that winter, Jones all but ignored him. 72 General Jackson, then occupied subduing the Creeks in the Alabama country, paid more attention, and that same month advised Claiborne and Governor David Holmes of Mississippi Territory that Mobile and New Orleans were so important strategically that the enemy must want them, “and I have no doubt these will be their objects.” 73
He was right. By that spring, outcry in Parliament and the London press called for “ vigorous war with America! ” Britain wanted to halt the Americans’ territorial expansion in all directions, expel them from the fisheries north of Maine, and exclude them from all trade with the British East and West Indies. Some demanded the cession of New Orleans to secure British rights to Mississippi navigation, claiming that France had no right to sell it to the Yankees. 74 There was the added attraction of as much as $14 million in cotton trapped in New Orleans warehouses by the British blockade of the river, with 1814’s crop still on the plantations. More than $1 million worth of sugar was there, too, as well as untold Kentucky whiskey, flour, pork, tobacco, and more. A fortune awaited the taking. 75
It was an attractive prize, but Britain would have to seize virtually all of the Louisiana Territory to contain the Yankees. The Spaniards and Indians, though allies now, would be difficult neighbors, and how would Britain cope with the region’s 100,000 slaves? On reflection, taking and keeping New Orleans or Louisiana presented too many problems. Few who presented plans for seizing New Orleans considered what would come afterward, and no one in government seems to have advocated permanent possession. Admirals and generals did not speak for Whitehall and had no decisive voice in its policy. 76
In April the Admiralty gave command of the North American Station to the fifty-six-year-old son of the impoverished 8th earl of Dundonald, thirty-year veteran Cochrane. Financial straits dogged the family—his older brother once pawned his clothes to eat—and Cochrane himself, though comfortable, was never far from debt. 77 He had fought the French in 1795 and captained a line ship in 1799. Some accused him of inventing intelligence of Spain preparing a hostile expedition, which precipitated a British attack on a treasure fleet at Cape Santa Maria that yielded considerable prize money and led to war, but he realized not a ha’penny himself. He got in Admiral Nelson’s bad books somehow and was sent away to the West Indies, where he performed creditably, winning knighthood in 1806 and promotion to rear admiral the following year. Now he was Vice Admiral of the Red. 78
Thanks to political differences, the Duke of Wellington had no use for Cochrane. Early in the planning for New Orleans, he snidely sneered that “spoils lay somewhere at its root,” and a year later felt even more convinced that Cochrane’s aim was plunder. 79 Admirals and generals shared one-eighth of the realized proceeds of the sale of captured enemy ships and property, while the overall commander in chief received an eighth for himself. 80 The prospect of such prize money as a useful incentive was ever on naval officers’ horizons and contemptuously exaggerated in army circles. 81 Cochrane could certainly use it, but restoring reputation after failures on the Atlantic coast was the currency he coveted, and taking New Orleans would make a fine close to his war.
Before assuming his new command, Cochrane had already sent Captain Hugh Pigot to the Gulf Coast to reconnoiter New Orleans’s defenses and sound for interest among the Creeks in an alliance. The Indians, and runaway slaves from Georgia, could significantly reinforce an invasion force. Cochrane had also heard rumors of disaffection and dissent among the white population of Louisiana and wanted to know if they might also act as auxiliaries. Then he ordered Pigot to look into “a set of Pirates or Free Booters” operating from “a place called Baritaria.” Could they be lured or hired to support an expedition against New Orleans? Not unmindful of the city’s riches, he instructed Pigot to assay the market value of the goods stored in the city. 82
Pigot reached Apalachicola, 140 miles east of Pensacola, on May 10, and four weeks later reported to Cochrane in the Bahamas. In March Jackson had ended the Creek War in victory, but surviving chiefs promised 3,000 warriors to the British, boasting that with another 3,000 redcoats they could together expel the Yankees from Louisiana and the Floridas. Pigot thought they could be made ready to move in early August. 83
Armed with Pigot’s report, Cochrane drafted a proposal on June 20. 84 He would land 3,000 redcoats at Mobile to move overland with 1,000 Creeks to take Baton Rouge upriver from New Orleans. At the same time he would disembark more using light draft boats to convey them into Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain to approach New Orleans while sending a flotilla of gunboats up the Mississippi. New Orleans would be cut off and forced to surrender without resistance. 85 By March 1815 he promised to see “the Keys of the Mississippi placed in the custody of Gt. Britain.” 86
The admiral got started without waiting for approval. He turned now to one of his favorites, marine major Edward Nicolls, to manage the Indian part of the equation. One of the most remarkable soldiers ever to serve Britain, the thirty-five-year-old Irishman had a fighting reputation second to none, and the scars to earn it. By 1814 he had suffered a broken left leg and a wounded right, bullets through his body and right arm, a saber cut on his head, and a bayonet thrust in his chest, which combined gave him what a fellow officer described as “a fantastical deportment.” 87 He established a camp at Apalachicola in July to arm and train Creek warriors and runaway slaves and persuade them to join in an attack on New Orleans when the time came. 88 Nicolls issued Cochrane’s July 1 proclamation promising to arm all the warriors who came and calling on slaves in Georgia and the Carolinas to rally to his standard. 89 Encouraged by Nicolls’s initial reports, Cochrane revised his estimate of regular soldiers needed from 3,000 down to 2,000 and boasted to the secretary of state for war, Lord Henry Bathurst, that he would give the Americans “a complete drubbing before peace is made,” adding that he would see “command of the Mississippi wrested from them.” 90
Thanks to communications taking fifty days or more to pass between London and the fleet, Cochrane had no way of knowing that an army of 7,000 had already been designated to be sent to Point Negril at the western tip of Jamaica by November 20, where he was to meet them with Ross’s army from the Chesapeake. 91 When Cochrane’s reduced estimate of necessary manpower reached him, Lord Melville revised plans to put Cochrane in overall command of the expedition. 92 Even though Wellington was skeptical of the operation, he gave it his blessing, and on August 10, Melville informed Cochrane that his plan was adopted. 93 In addition to 2,900 of all ranks from the Chesapeake, London would send 2,130 more, including the black 5th West India Regiment from Jamaica, which numbered among its privates a soldier aptly known simply as “Affricanus.” 94 At Jamaica, Cochrane would also take on small craft for transporting soldiers from their ships into the lakes and bayous, and more would be sent from England. 95
Cochrane received Melville’s July 29 authorization on September 17. He departed for Barbados about October 5, fully confident of success, leaving Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm in command of the Chesapeake fleet to bring that army to the rendezvous. Once he took New Orleans, he would move the army into Georgia and South Carolina to pound the enemy without respite as long as the war lasted. 96 He might have preferred Bermuda or Barbados as a rendezvous point rather than Point Negril, since it stood at the threshold of the Gulf. Any sighting of a major fleet there would suggest New Orleans as an objective. 97 Still, Cochrane felt assured that the Americans had no inkling of the invasion. 98 That was not to last for long.
Nicolls had gone to Nassau to collect more men and officers for his mission, and by July 26 was ready to return to the Gulf Coast. The night before he left, he wrote Cochrane of his complete confidence in success. “A most intelligent gentleman” there had convinced him that the creoles in New Orleans were anxious to be rid of the Americans, gave him a map of the area, a full account of its defenses, and a letter to another man somewhere on the coast who could help enlist men in the city to cooperate. His Nassau informant was Lewis Kerr, and the letter was to James Workman, who was not back in New Orleans but somewhere on the Gulf Coast. 99
Nicolls reached Havana on August 4 aboard Captain William Percy’s Hermes , accompanied by Captain Robert Spencer in Carron . Even before they landed in port, someone let slip that their ultimate goal was New Orleans. 100 When Nicolls learned there that their Spanish allies would not allow them to land at Pensacola, he angrily went to a tavern, where frustration or rum fueled declarations that he might land at Pensacola anyhow and that he could take the whole coast with little opposition from the Yankees once their slaves flocked to Nicolls’s banner. 101 The day after he left, a man in Havana wrote to London that Nicolls was headed for New Orleans. Attentive ears had heard Nicolls’s boasts and passed them to others, a second breach of security. 102
A pair of those ears belonged to Washington’s commercial vice consul, diplomat and slave dealer Vincent Gray. 103 The day before Nicolls’s arrival, a letter from Jamaica alerted Gray that an agent of Cochrane’s had let slip that Britain would invade Louisiana. When Hermes and Carron anchored in Havana’s harbor, Gray accompanied the port inspector aboard them and heard enough from Percy and Spencer to conclude that the British intended to strike New Orleans. He wrote to Jackson, Secretary of State James Monroe, Patterson, Claiborne, and others, and sent the letters through multiple portals, hoping one or more would get through. Calling Nicolls “an impatient blustering Irishman,” he urged them to arouse the people, for there was not a moment to lose. 104 Gray kept writing through early October as he learned more, even passing on word that Cochrane expected to take New Orleans in time to winter there, but never knowing if any of his letters made it to their addressees. Several were intercepted, but those to Claiborne, Monroe, and Jackson got through. 105 Slow communications blunted the import of some of what he wrote, but his flurry of letters was a dramatic intelligence coup for the Americans, another of the security lapses that compromised Cochrane’s hope for secrecy.
After landing at Apalachicola on August 10, Nicolls moved to Pensacola four days later to hear of Jackson massing men to march on the town. 106 Learning that the Spanish population and garrison did not intend to make a fight, he simply took over the town himself. 107 The Indians were slow in flocking to him, runaway slaves from Georgia even less forthcoming, but while he waited for General Jackson to appear at the gates of Pensacola, he set in motion a plan to enlist the third of his promised auxiliaries in the campaign to take New Orleans. He sent a mission to Barataria to see the man he called “Monsieur Lafette.”