From the beginning Andrew Jackson could not believe that a British general would be foolish enough to attempt an amphibious invasion of New Orleans. The city was essential to a British plain to remove the Americans from Louisiana and establish sovereignty “over all the territory fraudulently conveyed by Bonaparte to the United States,” but miles of thick swamps between New Orleans and the sea made it easy to defend from below. “A real military man, with full knowledge of the geography of this country,” wrote Jackson, would “cut off all supplies from above and make this country an easy conquest.”
Jackson had arrived in New Orleans in December to fortify the city’s already strong position against an anticipated attack by Adm. Alexander Cochrane, who was directing twenty-five hundred troops through Lake Borgne, directly to the east of the city. A miserable sixty-mile journey from the British fleet, during which the troops slept in rainy marshes filled with snakes and woke with their clothes frozen to their bodies, landed them on the Plain of Gentilly, nine miles from the city. Jackson descended with his entire force of two thousand men just as the exhausted British were settling in for their first comfortable night in two weeks. The British called for reinforcements to bring additional cannon from the distant fleet and for each new man to carry a cannonball in his knapsack.
Jackson’s men quickly erected log breastworks along a canal that bisected the field as it narrowed between a swamp and the Mississippi River, cutting off the only approach to New Orleans. Still, Cochrane blustered that his redcoats could dispose of any number of Jackson’s “dirty shirts.” Jackson disagreed. “I will smash them, so help me God!” Sir Edward Pakenham, the senior British general, took command of the army on Christmas Day. When the mist lifted on the morning of January 1, British artillery began throwing shells at Jackson’s fortifications. But their guns were inadequately mounted, supported in part with barrels of sugar that dissolved into a sticky muck. Twelve American guns, braced partially with cotton bales, took Pakenham’s erratic batteries apart, forcing a retreat.
A contingent of Kentucky troops arrived on January 3 to support the badly outnumbered American force, but to Jackson’s disbelief, they had no rifles. “I have never seen a Kentuckian without a gun and a pack of cards and a bottle of whiskey in my life,” he commented. Though his army was still outnumbered two to one, Jackson was ready for the advance when it came on January 8. British soldiers covered the plain before Jackson’s backwoods sharpshooters like an immense red carpet. The killing was ludicrously easy. The only Englishman who made it to the top of Jackson’s wall unscathed looked behind him and saw that his men “had vanished as if the earth had swallowed them up.” The British fell in whole columns under a steady barrage of American lead, and within twenty-five minutes they were in frenzied retreat. Onethird of the British force, about two thousand troops, lay in heaps before Jackson’s men. “The field,” wrote an American observer, “was so thickly strewn with the dead, that from the American ditch you could have walked a quarter of a mile to the front on the bodies of the killed and disabled.” That afternoon, as the survivors went out to the battlefield under a flag of truce to bury their dead, among them General Pakenham, they learned that the American line had lost only eight dead and thirteen wounded. Cochrane abandoned the Louisiana delta for good. By February 4, when news of December’s Treaty of Ghent reached American shores, Andrew Jackson was renowned as an American hero.
1890 One Hundred Years Ago
On January 25 a half-century of unsuccessful attempts to unionize the coal-mining industry ended when miners from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan founded the United Mine Workers of America. The union’s main objectives included an eight-hour day, better safety conditions, and the end of scrip payments and child labor. “Without coal there would not have been any such grand achievements, privileges, and blessings as those which characterize the twentieth-century civilization,” said the first UMWA constitution. “Those whose lot it is to daily toil in the recesses of the earth…are entitled to a fair and equitable share of the same.”
Introducing legislation to the House of Representatives, said Thomas Reed of Maine, was like trying “to run Niagara through a quill.” The Democratic majority of the House had resisted for years all attempts to reform the procedural rules that too often caused congressional business to grind to a halt, and when a new Republican majority elected Reed Speaker in December 1889, he vowed to reform the process.
On January 29 Reed had enough Republican votes to pass a routine confirmation vote, but he lacked a quorum because 165 Democrats in attendance had refused to vote. Under the House tradition of the time, Reed’s only choices were to vote again or give up. Reed chose to defy “this system of metaphysics whereby a man could be present and absent at the same moment” and directed the House clerk to register the names of forty Democrats as present but not voting. Furious cries of “czar” and “tyrant” arose from the Democratic side of the chamber, but Reed was implacable. When Rep. James McCreary rose to deny the Speaker’s right to count him in attendance, Reed observed that he had made “a statement of the fact that the gentleman from Kentucky is present. Does he deny it?” Public sentiment supported Reed’s campaign to end “delay and obstruction” in the House. “The country wants results,” wrote the New York Tribune, “and doesn’t care much in what way they are obtained.”
“Reed’s Rules” took effect in February. Under his direction the Fifty-first Congress passed the longest legislative program since the Civil War, raising expenditures until it earned the title of Billion Dollar Congress. The Democrats attempted to reenact the silent quorum following their sweep of the 1892 election, but Reed, as the leader of the House Republicans, gleefully used the rule to hold up congressional business until the Democrats were forced to relent for good.
On February 18 two major American women’s-suffrage organizations united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association at a convention in Washington, D.C. For two decades the suffrage movement had been divided between Susan B. Anthony’s politically aggressive organization and a more conservative New England group that disapproved of Anthony’s activist social program. By 1890, though, the suffrage movement was no longer regarded as a radical fringe issue, and a new generation of feminists was determined to work together to gain the vote. “Every right achieved by the oppressed has been wrung from tyrants by force,” declared Elizabeth Cady Stanton, NAWSA’s first president. “While the darkest page of human history is the outrages on women—shall men still tell us to be patient, persuasive, womanly?”
NAWSA would concentrate its resources on individual states, although Anthony, who assumed the organization’s presidency in 1892, insisted that the ‘Very moment you change the purpose of this great body from National to State work you have defeated its object.” Indeed, hundreds of statewide campaigns over the next twenty years gained women the vote in only two states, Colorado and Idaho. Renewed focus on a national suffrage amendment after 1910 revitalized the issue and led to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment a decade later.
1940 Fifty Years Ago
John Ford’s film The Grapes of Wrath opened in January to immediate acclaim. Though Ford and the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson softened the political anger of John Steinbeck’s novel, their haunting film captured the bleakness and despair that accompanied fugitives from the Oklahoma dust bowl on their way to California.
James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s three-act comedy The Male Animal opened on January 9 at Broadway’s Cort Theater. Nugent, who also played the lead role in the production, and Thurber examined the issues of academic freedom and sexual jealousy “in the anti-heroic style of Mr. Thurber’s solemn drawings and crack-brained literary style,” as one reviewer wrote. Henry Fonda and Ronald Reagan would star in later motion-picture adaptations of the play.
Alarmed by Japanese military and economic expansion in the Pacific, the United States allowed its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan to expire on January 26. Secretary of State Cordell Hull informed Tokyo that the two countries would continue to trade on a day-today basis.
The first Social Security checks went into the mail on January 30. The initial check, totaling $22.54, went to a Vermont widow named Ida May Fuller, who received more than $20,000 in benefits before her death in 1975 at the age of one hundred.
1965 Twenty-five Years Ago
On January 2 the New York Jets signed the University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath to a $427,000 contract that made Namath the highestpaid first-year player in professional football history. “I realize that the football Giants are better established in New York than we are,” said the Jets’ president, Sonny Werblin. “But I remember that when I was growing up in New York, the baseball Yankees couldn’t get started in this town.…all that changed as soon as the Yankees got their Joe Namath, Babe Ruth.” Namath actually lived up to this comparison when he engineered a victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. That game elevated not only Namath and his victorious team but the entire American Football League in its struggle for respectability against the NFL, with which it was scheduled to merge in 1970.
“We are in the midst of the greatest upward surge of economic well-being in the history of any nation,” said President Lyndon Johnson in his January 4 State of the Union message to Congress. “We do not intend to live—in the midst of abundance—isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness of leisure.” In outlining his vision of the Great Society, Johnson promised something for everyone. Almost every paragraph of the fifty-minute speech called for a new government action or study. Even after his administration had fallen apart under the weight of its own ambitions, Johnson believed in the principle of the Great Society. “We’re the wealthiest nation in the world,” reflected the former President in 1970. “We need to appeal to everyone to restrain their appetite. We’re greedy but not short on the wherewithal to meet our problems.”
The Johnson administration had been considering an escalation of the war in Vietnam for several months when, on February 7, several dozen Vietcong guerrillas made a night attack on the Camp Holloway American air base at Pleiku. The commandos struck the airstrip and a nearby barracks with hand grenades and mortars, killing 8 Americans and injuring another 126. “I don’t believe it will ever be possible to protect our forces against sneak attacks of that kind,” commented Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.
In Washington President Johnson immediately held an emergency meeting with the National Security Council to plan the American response. “We have kept our gun over the mantel…for a long time now,” he said. “And what was the result? They are killing our men while they sleep in the night. I can’t ask our American soldiers out there to continue to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.” Johnson ordered U.S. Navy jets to bomb a guerrilla training camp at Dong Hoi in North Vietnam. At the time there was speculation that the Hanoi government had hoped to provoke such a retaliatory raid in order to convince the visiting Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin that its armies needed military aid.
On the tenth North Vietnamese commandos killed twenty-three more Americans in a strike on a barracks at Quinhon, seventy-five miles east of Pleiku. Johnson had seen enough. Disregarding protests from several liberal senators and threats from the Soviet and Chinese governments, the President decided on February 13 to initiate Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. “Even if it fails, the policy will be worth it,” wrote the presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy of the decision. “At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.”
The Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X had been convinced for several months that his life was in danger when, on February 21, three gunmen assassinated him as he spoke to an audience in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm X believed that his repudiation of the Black Muslim religion had made him a target and that powerful elements in the American government wanted him dead. Though two of the men later convicted of killing him were Black Muslims, their trial did not reveal evidence of a conspiracy.
Malcolm X had emerged from prison in 1952 as a self-educated member of the Nation of Islam. He preached a mesmerizing doctrine of black militancy and asked no concessions of white America: “An integrated cup of coffee doesn’t pay for 400 years of slave labor.” He rejected the principle of nonviolent protest advanced by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., as “asking the fox to protect you from the wolf.” He denied that he encouraged bloodshed: “I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice.” He said he was the angriest black man in America.
In 1964 Malcolm X was suspended by Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims, for drawing negative publicity. Growing disillusion led Malcolm X to denounce the religion and found his own church in New York City “to carry into practice what the Nation of Islam had only preached.” Malcolm X had begun to express faith that an end to America’s racial problem could be based on reconciliation rather than confrontation. He knew his break with the Muslims had made him a marked man, but he continued to speak. “To speculate about dying doesn’t disturb me as it might some people,” he explained in his autobiography. “I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped to change those societies.”
