\u2026remind them of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was recently reading \u201cAndrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans\u201d by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yeager. The War of 1812 was going badly for the Americans. The British had burned the White House, and a huge contingent of British troops was in Louisiana planning to march north in conquest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Against them stood future President and then Major General Andrew Jackson, and a ragtag assembly comprised largely of citizen militia. Jackson would later be called a racist, but he had assembled a motley crew of whites, African-Americans, Native Americans and Creoles, all of which he made sure were paid the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They mixed regular battlefield strategies with the guerrilla warfare tactics that had so well served the Colonials in the Revolutionary War. The Brits still marched forward in orderly lines\u2026but the Americans used tactical cover, skilled marksmanship, and their own rifles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At one point in the pivotal battle of New Orleans, the authors gave an example of deadly American marksmanship: \u201cJust minutes into the battle, according to one Kentucky rifleman, \u2018the smoke was so thick that everything seemed to be covered up in it.\u2019 But the woodsmen, armed with .38 caliber long rifles (the barrels were forty-two inches long) kept firing with deadly accuracy. Half-hidden in the dense cypress vegetation, their loaded their guns with balls and buckshot. Their fire was nearly constant and, according to one Louisiana merchant watching down the line \u2018the whole right of the British column was mowed down by these invisible riflemen.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, \u201cBack at the Rodriguez Canal, said one soldier, the scene was \u2018a sea of blood.\u2019 The illusion resulted from hundreds of red uniforms obscuring the stubble of last year\u2019s sugarcane crop. The letting of blood had indeed been great leaving an unfathomable number of dead and dying soldiers prostrate on the Chalmette Plain. In some places the bodies were so numerous that it seemed possible to walk without ever touching the ground for a distance of perhaps two hundred yards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The authors concluded, \u201cGeneral Jackson and his multiethnic, multigenerational army made up of people from every American social class and occupation had come together to do what Napoleon had failed to do: destroy the finest fighting force in the world.\u201d The American victory at the Battle of New Orleans, the turning point that saved the United States from defeat, was owed in great part to armed citizens and their skillfully-wielded personal weapons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2026remind them of this. I was recently reading \u201cAndrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans\u201d by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yeager. The War of 1812 was going badly for the Americans. The British had burned the White House, and a huge contingent of British troops was in Louisiana planning to march north in conquest. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8548,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8547\/revisions\/8548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}