Patriotic Fire Read online

  There were no such things as military medals in the American army in those days—the little doodads that were scornfully thought to smack of the be-braided and be-decorated affectations of officers of the enemy, His Royal Britannic Majesty’s imperial army. The “common” Americans wanted nothing to do with any of that. What served instead for medals and decorations in the U.S. Army was to be “Mentioned in Dispatches” by the commanding officer in his reports to the War Department in Washington.* 2

  On January 8, 1815, the day on which the great battle culminated, General Andrew Jackson personally promoted Elijah to the rank of major on the spot, “for gallant conduct,” and mentioned him in dispatches thusly, in a letter dated January 25, 1815, to Secretary of War James Monroe. Jackson wrote: “Captain’s [sic] Montgomery, Vail and Allen, of the Seventh Regiment, acted well during the whole campaign. They are certainly good captains, and merit promotion.”

  Elijah remained in the U.S. Army for another seven years; then, on June 1, 1821, he received an honorable discharge at Blakely, Alabama, a small army outpost across Mobile Bay from the city (ironically, the site of the last major battle of the Civil War, some forty-four years later). Obviously he had found something attractive about the place. Mobile was flourishing then, as both a seaport and a river port city, and with the same French-Spanish cultural heritage and architecture as New Orleans, but on a smaller scale.

  Precisely when he met and married my great-great-great-grandmother Carolina Hollinger and when he began working his large plantation near the city is not known to me, though likely it can be found in Mobile’s marriage and property record books. Nor do we know much else about his personal life. Had he fallen in love earlier? Fought duels? Started a business and lost it in those turbulent times? Elijah would have been about four years old when the famous surrender by Cornwallis to George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, which ended the Revolutionary War, took place very near his family’s home. Might he have witnessed it? At New Orleans, he met General Jackson and surely must have met Jean Laffite and his band of “pirates” as well; after all, he fought alongside them on a daily basis for several desperate weeks.

  During his lifetime Elijah had crossed over from one century to the next, into an age of steamboats, railroads, and the telegraph, and saw his former commanding general elected president of the United States. From scraps of paper in the strongbox, it appears that Elijah in his later years was an esteemed citizen of Mobile, known universally as “Major Montgomery,” who lived out the remaining ten years of his life amassing a fair fortune and leaving behind the wonderful legacy of two young daughters, one of whom, Carolina Montgomery, is the namesake for my own seven-year-old daughter, Carolina Montgomery Groom.

  And what of all his property holdings, those 8,866 acres on the lovely Dog River? I know something about that, too. It was ever-divided among successive generations. Elijah’s daughter Carolina Montgomery married Sterling Thrower and one of their sons, Fremont Thrower, my great-grandfather—the one who went off to fight in the Civil War—inherited a small part of it, about 225 acres, which upon his return from the war he used as a hunting and fishing retreat. After his death in 1924, my grandparents built a home there on the banks of a creek off that lazy blackwater river, where I played as a little boy amid gardens of azaleas and camellias and mossy oaks and pines, and later as a young man hunted quail and fished the river’s fertile waters. About half the remaining property was sold off in the 1950s and ’60s, and the rest I myself inherited upon my father’s death. Over the years I’ve donated it all as charitable gifts—to my father’s college, to my old prep school, and to my own alma mater—all except for a few solitary acres, much of it marshland, which I keep for sentimental reasons. And upon which I still pay the taxes.

  One more thing. I may have Elijah’s sword from the Battle of New Orleans. It was the sword that always hung above my grandparents’ fireplace in my earliest memories, and which now hangs above the fireplace in my own office; it was my great-grandfather’s sword during his service in the Civil War cavalry—this much I know from my grandmother, who knew my great-grandfather Fremont well, since he lived until she herself was in her late thirties. When I inherited the sword in the 1990s, I took it to a dealer in antique arms to see what else could be learned about it.

  “It’s not from the Civil War period,” he said authoritatively. “This sword was manufactured in the era of the War of 1812.” Then he proceeded to explain why.

  That was always puzzling until just lately when I got to thinking and began going through all the family papers. My great-grandfather Fremont left Springhill College in 1862 at the age of eighteen to join the 56th Alabama Cavalry Regiment, which, like all Southern cavalry, was expected to arm, equip, and mount itself, not relying on the Confederate government at Richmond. Might it not be too far a stretch to assume that the sword probably had been handed down to him from his own grandfather Elijah Montgomery—the same sword that Elijah had worn at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814—and that Great-grandfather Fremont took it along himself into the Confederate army? After all, the South didn’t have many sword factories then, and a sword was just a sword in those days, wasn’t it? At least it’s interesting to think so.

  And by the way, this was a working sword, not a fancy dress-up ornament for parades and balls. There’s a dark, long-dried, brownish-red substance on the top crease of the sword that family tradition has long had it must have been the blood of some Yankee, hacked out in Civil War combat.

  Might it not instead be the “blood of an Englishman” from fifty years earlier—“Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum”? It’s sometimes said there were giants of men at that time, too. Which brings me back to the subject at hand.

  Point Clear, Alabama

  MARCH 11, 2005

  Prologue

  History is strewn with stern and peculiar endings, and were it not for the tenacity of Andrew Jackson and his makeshift army, the whole American experience might have been different. The Battle of New Orleans was fought in a thunder of electric-like flashes, of swords, cannon blasts, and rifle fire that became almost Shakesperean in its final, epic crescendo. When the battle ended, the American civilian-soldiers from the Southland had held the field against a trained and experienced British army, a force conceded by everyone to be the best in the world: men who had arrived riding the crest of recent victories over Napoleon’s fabled legions, men who had run over the feeble American militia and burned down the American capital at Washington—an enemy that had crossed the Atlantic with all the accumulated knowledge of its civilization to crush the upstart Americans.

  This great force was defeated by men wearing rags, derided as “dirty-shirts,” men without proper military training and weapons, scorned as scum of the earth, men who had no mirror to hold up against a future as they faced the Duke of Wellington’s smartly attired red-coated veterans, who marched against them with the attitude of soldiers who owned the very ground they trod upon.

  The American Founding Fathers, nearly forty years earlier, were never quite sure that democracy would work, especially during wartime, and the British were absolutely convinced that it wouldn’t. In their country, the king still more or less called the tune and his subjects danced the dance (and paid the piper, too). Their very Englishness had instilled in them a heightened sense of the rightness and superiority of their own way, and had provoked their fear and hatred of outlandish notions such as “democracy” and “republics.”

  Into this mix entered Andrew Jackson, a backwoods country lawyer and politician who commanded the American forces. He was a man ripe for the task, despising the British with a hate that was almost ignoble, having been brutalized by them during the Revolutionary War and with most of his family having been killed by them in one way or another. If history ever beckoned a man into a crisis, it was during this confrontation.

  That same moment propelled another man onto the stage, one reviled by some as a pirate, the Frenchman Jean Laffite, who had had his run-ins with the law. But
in this case the “pirate” turned patriot and sent his fierce crews into the fray at precisely the right time, and with the very real danger of finding himself swinging from a British hangman’s rope.

  The outcome reverberated across the globe, and in the process rekindled the spirit of America for generations to come.

  One

  By late autumn 1814, the United States of America, a nation barely thirty years old, was shaky, divided, and on the verge of dissolving. The treasury was empty, most public buildings in Washington, including the Capitol, the White House, and the Library of Congress, had been burned to ashes by a victorious and vengeful British army. New England, the wealthiest and most populous section of the new country, was threatening to secede from the still fragile Union. After two years of war with Great Britain, it appeared to many Americans that their experiment in democracy—the likes of which the world had never seen—might only have been some strange, nonsustainable political trial and, worse, that a return to the unwelcome fraternal embrace of the English kings seemed inevitable.

  American seaports from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico were blockaded by the British navy and the economy was in ruins because of it, with goods and crops piled up and rotting on the wharves. The U.S. Army was stymied and stalemated; the navy, such as it was, had fared little better, except on the Great Lakes. There was finger-pointing, recrimination, and torment everywhere, from the Congress to the press to ordinary citizens; no one was spared.

  Then, as autumn leaves began to fall, a mighty British armada appeared off the Louisiana coast with the stated purpose of capturing New Orleans, America’s crown jewel of the West and gateway to all commerce in the great Mississippi River Basin, a misfortune that would have split the United States in two. New Orleans was as nearly defenseless as a city could be in those days, with only two understrength regular army regiments totaling about 1,100 soldiers and a handful of untrained milita to throw against the nearly 20,0 seasoned veterans of the British army and navy who were descending upon it as swiftly and surely as a tropical cyclone.

  As word of the impending invasion reached decimated and burned-out Washington, President James Madison and Secretary of War James Monroe sent urgent pleas for the Western states to come to the aid of their stricken countrymen west of the Mississippi. Backwoodsmen from Tennessee and Kentucky were thus recruited into makeshift army units, but they were far off—as much as seven hundred miles by land and two thousand miles by water—and river transportation was mostly by slow river rafts and flatboats. It was doubtful they could get there in time. Orders from the secretary of war also went out to the legendary Indian fighter Andrew Jackson, then in nearby Mobile, Alabama, after having defeated the large tribe of Creeks who had just perpetrated the bloodiest massacre in American history. Would he go immediately to New Orleans and take charge?

  Yes, of course—but of what? Jackson must have wondered. The British fleet contained more than a thousand heavy guns against the perhaps three dozen cannons New Orleans could muster, and what of powder and shot, or flints for muskets and rifles? Assuming that the British didn’t overrun them outright, to Jackson’s knowledge there was little or nothing in the way of equipment, munitions, or manpower in New Orleans for a sustained siege. There were more than 10,000 trained, first-rate British redcoats bearing down, plus the larger roster of the British navy’s marines and sailors to support them—all this against fewer than a third that number of untrained and poorly armed Americans, even assuming the rubes from Tennessee and Kentucky did somehow arrive in time for the show. Jackson’s task was daunting, to say the least.

  This was arguably the gloomiest moment in American history before or since, it being almost universally believed that Britain, still smarting from defeat at the hands of the upstart colonies three decades earlier, now seemed determined to crush, humiliate, and retake her lost possession. And as Britain at that time was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, there was little doubt among many Americans that the British could do it—considering what they had done so far—and not a few United States citizens prepared, however grimly, to return hat in hand to the iron fists of His Royal Britannic Majesty and life again under the British lion.

  “I expect at this moment,” declared Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, “that most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans, and have command of all the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and the lakes, and that the Americans are now little better than prisoners in their own country.”

  As it turned out, of course, this was not to be, but no one could have known or even expected it at the time. What they hoped for, but did not count on, was the courage and tenacity of a small band of American warriors, probably the most disparate and slapdash army ever assembled on earth. It consisted of Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Irishmen—and their descendants—infantry battalions of freed black men, a handful of gunboat sailors, some displanted Acadians (“Cajuns”) from Nova Scotia, a regiment of pirates and smugglers, a convent of Catholic nuns, companies of prominent New Orleans lawyers and merchants, stranded seamen of all nations, leftover adventurers and soldiers of fortune from the Revolutionary War era, numerous women of New Orleans from high society dames to prostitutes, the two small regiments of U.S. Army regulars, plus the aforesaid backwoodsmen from Tennessee and Kentucky—but what an army they became!

  All of this in due time, but first let us focus on the broader picture of just what the fledgling American nation had become by that time, how its people lived, and what they thought of themselves.

  By 1812 America had grown into a huge but unwieldy economic giant, shipping foodstuffs and raw materials throughout the world. In the more than two centuries since the first colonists settled at Jamestown, huts had been replaced by homes, some of them palatial, and roadways and riverways connected its great cities, which flourished at Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Boston, Charleston, and, of course, New Orleans—all of them busy harbor ports. A vast westward expansion had begun, carrying settlers into the fertile lands across the Alleghenies, in the process pushing the Indians out of western New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which were now becoming dotted with farms raising corn, grains, cotton, and other cash crops.

  The U.S. population had doubled in the three decades since the end of the Revolutionary War, so that by 1812 there were some eight million Americans, many of them recent immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany, with a smattering of French and Spanish, many of these last settling in New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston—all adding to the simmering melting pot that was coming to define the United States.

  By the standards of today, transportation and communications were rudimentary, and the sailing vessel remained the most efficient mode of travel. Railroads and steamboats had recently been invented but were not yet in any significant use in the United States. Thus, for instance, it took about a month to send a message by sea or on horseback from New Orleans to Washington City, as the nation’s capital was then called, and another month to receive a reply. The telegraph was still two decades into the future, as were the reaping and threshing machines that took so much of the backbreaking work out of farming. However, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had opened up the Southern states to abundant cultivation of that fabulous crop, and with it the widespread introduction of slavery into the region.

  In the large cities, gas lighting for homes and streets was just being introduced. Among the wealthier classes, most furnishings, fancy dress, and other high-end items were still imported from Europe and England; the less affluent used cheap local goods or made their own. Newspapers and broadsheets thrived as the principal means of information, and a number of magazines of opinion such as the Niles Weekly Register and Debow’s Review were also widely circulated.

  The cities had immediately become hotbeds of political activity, much to the disappointment (and even disgust) of George Washington, who had consistently warned against it.
After the Revolution ended, Americans had quickly divided up into two “factions,” or political parties, as they are now called, which reflected—as they do today—the same two natural divisions of liberal and conservative human philosophy that have dominated political thought ever since the days of ancient Greece and Rome.

  The Federalist party, exemplified by the first U.S. treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, a transplanted New Yorker, arguably more closely resembled today’s Democrats, advocating big government and federal involvement in regulating the economy, including government sponsorship of manufacturing, industry, and public works, as well as a national monetary system and a standing army—in short, more federal control—and, of course, higher taxes to support it all.

  On the other hand, the Democratic Republican party, as it was known and defined by Thomas Jefferson and the other Southern presidents, wanted as little government as possible from Washington and, instead, preferred that the various states assume the brunt of governmental activities, including national defense, banking, and, of course, little or no taxation from authorities in Washington. (Plus, there was the ever vexing question of slavery, which Southern states were beginning to suspect was becoming target zero of the small but growing abolitionist movement in the North.)

  To that end, members of both factions had conducted for years a relentless discourse in the nation’s newspapers, treating the reading public to snide, confrontational, and often libelous “letters” published anonymously and signed with pen names usually taken from Greek and Roman classics. This practice sometimes led to duels in which either the offender or the offended was often dispatched to his reward.* 3 In truth, Americans have always been such a fractious people that it remains something of a wonder democracy has survived at all.