Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was already a hard man from the Waxhaws when the second British war reached the Gulf. He held the Creek campaign and then New Orleans. On January 8, 1815 — after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, and before the gatekeepers of news could say so — he met Packenham's regulars behind earthworks and cotton bales and broke them.

The battle did not change the treaty. It changed the country's idea of itself. A western general with militia, free men of color, Jean Lafitte's gunners, and a few regulars had stopped a professional army at the mouth of the Mississippi.

This page is the soldier of 1814–15, not the later president and not the long argument about Indian removal. Those belong to other records. The war page owes him the morning at Chalmette and the fact that New Orleans stayed American.

He died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845. The city still keeps the field.