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The Battle of New Orleans was a slaughter. British casualties that day numbered more than 2,000, while the Americans lost just 70 men, 13 of who were killed. Burial details from both sides worked together for days to dispose of the dead. The wounded were carried to nearby homes that had been turned into makeshift hospitals. The level of ghastliness and suffering was reportedly beyond imagination. One British captain recalled hearing the piteous cries of his wounded soldiers and seeing “a basket nearly full of legs severed from these fine fellows.” The British army retreated from the field, boarded ships and left. Ironically, this climactic battle was fought after American and British negotiators had concluded a peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium, on Christmas Eve 1814.

But on that fateful day in early January 1815, no one in New Orleans knew anything about a treaty. The Americans knew only that their country had been invaded, and they must fight. They proved they could defeat some of the world’s best troops fighting on behalf of the world’s strongest nation. They also proved the lethal efficacy of applied and concentrated firepower, a blend of technology, policy and tactics that would eventually prove the cornerstone of the American way of war.

For further reading, John McManus recommends: The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory, by Robert V. Remini, and Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans, 1812–1815, by Frank Owsley, Jr.

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