The Battle of New Orleans including the Previous Engagements between the Americans and the British, the Indians and the Spanish which led to the Final Conflict on the 8th of January, 1815

8 January 1815

Battle of New Orleans

Battle of New Orleans

Besides general histories of the United States and of the individual States, and periodicals, newspapers, and manuscripts, which contain valuable information on the battle of New Orleans, his library contains numerous works more specifically devoted to this subject.

I have also been placed under obligations to Mr. William Beer, librarian of the Howard Library of New Orleans, which has become a depository of rare works touching the history of the South Mississippi Valley, and especially relating to the War of 1812 and the battle of New Orleans. A list of all the works in this library which Mr. Beer placed at my disposal would be too long for insertion here, but the following may be mentioned: Claiborne's Notes on the War in the South, Goodwin's Biography of Andrew Jackson, Reid and Easten's Life of General Jackson, Nolte's Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres, Report of Committee on Jackson's Warrant for Closing the Halls of the Legislature of Louisiana, The Madison Papers, Ingersoll's Historic Sketch of the Second War between Great Britain and the United States, Cooke's Seven Campaigns in the Peninsula, Hill's Recollections of an Artillery Officer, Coke's History of the Rifle Brigade, Diary of Private Timewell, and Cooke's Narrative of Events. No one would do justice to himself or his subject if he should write a history of the battle of New Orleans without availing himself of the treasures of the Howard Library.

In the French and Indian war which preceded the Revolution there was fighting for some time before a formal declaration of war. The English drove the French traders from the Ohio Valley, and the French forced out the English while the two nations were at peace. The French chassed from one of their forts to another with fiddles instead of drums, and the English with fowling-pieces instead of muskets rambled over the forest, but they sometimes met and introduced each other to acts of war while a state of hostility was acknowledged by neither. Something like a similar state of things preceded the War of 1812. Tecumseh was at work trying to unite all the tribes of Indians in one grand confederacy, ostensibly to prevent them from selling their lands to the Americans, but possibly for the purpose of war. While he was at this work his brother, the Prophet, had convinced the Indians that he had induced the Great Spirit to make them bullet-proof, and the English so encouraged them with food and clothing and arms that they believed they were able to conquer the Americans, and began to carry on hostilities against them without any formal declaration of war by either party. The battle of Tippecanoe, which came of this superstition among the Indians and this encouragement from England, may be considered the first clash of arms in the War of 1812. The English took no open or active part in this battle, but their arms and ammunition and rations were in it, and after it was lost the Indians went to the English and became their open allies when the War of 1812 really began. Whether the English were allies of the Indians or the Indians allies of the English, they fought and bled and died and were conquered together after the initial conflict at Tippecanoe, in 1811, to the final battle at New Orleans in 1815, which crowned the American arms with a glory never to fade.