Patriotic Fire Read Free Page B

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
    B y 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