aw of the Duke of Wellington, with a part of Wellington's victorious army, fifty ships, a thousand guns and twenty thousand men!"
Never had Great Britain lost sight of the Mississippi. This was a part of the fleet that burned Washington and had driven Dolly Madison and the President into ignominious flight.
Terrified, New Orleans, the beautiful Creole maiden, beset in her orange bower, flung out her arms appealing to the West! And that West answered, "Never, while the Mississippi rolls to the Gulf, will we leave you unprotected." And out of that West came Andrew Jackson and tall Tennesseeans, Kentuckians, Mississippians, in coonskin caps and leathern hunting shirts, to seal for ever our right to Louisiana.
The hottest part of the battle was fought at Chalmette, above the grave of the Fighting Parson. Immortal Eighth of January, 1815! Discontented Creoles of 1806 proved loyal Americans, vindicating their right to honour.
Napoleon laughed when he heard it at Elba,—"I told them I had given England a rival that one day would humble her pride."
Even the Ursuline nuns greeted their deliverers with joy, and the dim old cloistered halls were thrown open for a hospital.
"I expect at this moment," said Lord Castlereagh in Europe, "that most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans, and have command of all the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and the Lakes."
But he counted without our ships at sea. The War of 1812 was fought upon the ocean, "the golden age of naval fighting." Bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, under the "Gridiron Flag," tars of the American Revolution, sailor boys who under impressment had fought at Trafalgar, led in a splendid spectacular drama, the like of which England or the world had never seen. She had trained up her own child. A thousand sail had Britain—America a dozen sloops and frigates alto
