, they finally silenced every piece of British
artillery. The Americans had used cotton bales in the embrasures, and
the British hogsheads of sugar, but neither worked well, for the cotton
caught fire, and the sugar hogsheads were ripped and splintered by the
round shot, so that both were abandoned. By the use of red-hot shot the
British succeeded in setting fire to the American schooner which had
caused them such annoyance on the evening of the night attack; but she
had served her purpose, and her destruction caused little anxiety to
Jackson.

Having failed in his effort to batter down the American breastworks, and
the British artillery having been fairly worsted by the American,
Pakenham decided to try an open assault. He had ten thousand regular
troops, while Jackson had under him but little over five thousand men,
who were trained only as he had himself trained them in his Indian
campaigns. Not a fourth of them carried bayonets. Both Pakenham and the
troops under him were fresh from victories won over the most renowned
marshals of Napoleon, and over troops that had proved themselves on a
hundred stricken fields the masters of all others in continental Europe.
At Toulouse they had driven Marshal Soult from a position infinitely
stronger than that held by Jackson, and yet Soult had under him a
veteran army. At Badajos, Ciudad Rodrigo, and San Sebastian they had
carried by open assault walled towns whose strength made the
entrenchments of the Americans seem like mud walls built by children,
though these towns were held by the best troops of France. With such
troops to follow him, and with such victories behind him in the past, it
did not seem to Pakenham possible that the assault of the terrible
British infantry could be successfully met by rough backwoods riflemen
fighting under a General as wild and untrained as themselves.

He decreed that the assault should take place on the morning of the 8th.
Throughout the previous night the American officers were on the alert,
for they could hear the rumbling of artillery in the British camp, the
muffled tread of the battalions as they were marched to their points in
the line, and all the smothered din of the preparation for assault. Long
before dawn the riflemen were awake, and drawn up behind the mud walls,
where they lolled at ease, or, leaning on their long rifles, peered out
through the fog toward the camp of their foes.

At last the sun rose and the fog slowly lifted, s