The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory

In 1815 Britain’s crack troops, fresh from the victories against Napoleon, were stunningly defeated near New Orleans by a ragtag army of citizen-soldiers under the commander they dubbed ‘Old Hickory’, Andrew Jackson. It was this battle that defined the United States as a military power to be reckoned with and an independent democracy here to stay.A happenstance coalition of militiamen, regulars, untrained frontiersmen, free blacks, pirates, Indians and townspeople - marching to ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘La Marseillaise’ - inhabit The Battle of New Orleans in a rich array of colourful scenes. Swashbuckling Jean Lafitte and his privateers. The proud, reckless British General Pakenham and his miserable men ferried across a Louisiana lake in a Gulf storm. The agile Choctaw and Tennessee ‘dirty shirt’ sharpshooters who made a sport of picking off redcoat sentries by night. And Jackson himself - tall, gaunt, shrewd, by turns gentle and furious, declaring ‘I will smash them, so help me God!’ His improbable victory, uniting a rainbow of dissident groups finally proved the United States’ sovereignty to the world. It was the battle that thundered a once-poor, uneducated, orphan boy into the White House and forged a collection of ex-colonies into a nation.