y-looking
missiles would strike terror to the ranks of our troops. These soon
learned that they were not so dangerous as they appeared. The infantry
this day did not engage in more than heavy picket skirmishing, and in
checking the demonstrations of the enemy on our lines. This movement all
along the line was evidently a feint in force, to draw from Jackson's
army information as to the powers of resistance it might offer and to
ascertain its most vulnerable point of attack. The loss of the British
this day was estimated at two hundred; that of the Americans much less,
as they were mainly sheltered from the enemy's fire. There were nine
killed and eight wounded.

DEFENSES ON THE WEST BANK OF THE RIVER.

Realizing that the enemy might suddenly throw a force across the river,
and by a flank movement up the right bank gain a position opposite the
city, from which, by shot and shell, he might compel a surrender,
Jackson sent Major Latour, chief of his engineer corps, to the west
side, with orders to select a position most suitable for a fortified
line in the rear of General Morgan's camp. Bois-Gervais Canal, three
miles below New Orleans, was fixed upon, and one hundred and fifty
negroes from the plantations near at once set to work. In six days they
completed the parapet, with a glacis on the opposite side.

Commodore Patterson removed from the Louisiana a number of her guns,
which he placed in battery in front of Jordon's plantation, on the right
bank, with which he did important service to the end of the campaign.
This formidable battery was formed to give a deadly flanking fire on the
enemy's ranks from the opposite bank of the river. It was manned and
served by sailors, mostly landed from the Carolina when she was burned.
They had been enlisted about the city after the gunboats were destroyed;
men of all nations, not a third of them speaking the English language.
The constant daily fire of this battery caused the British to fall back
from Chalmette's and Bienvenue's houses and to seek safer quarters in
the rear, after the artillery duels of the twenty-eighth.

Captain Henly, of the late ship Carolina, was placed in command of a
strong redoubt on the bank of the river, opposite New Orleans, around
which was a fosse twenty-five feet in width, the earth from which was
thrown up to form a steep glacis, from the summit of the wall serving as
a parapet to the brink of the fosse. Here a battery of two twenty-four
pounder