Major Daquin was a white man as Gayarre tells us, or a quadroon as
other writers assert, is a disputed question.[71]

But not only was this regiment of free men of color to have all the
honor of the struggle. The colored men were enlisted in more ways than
one. Slaves were used in throwing up the famous entrenchments. The
idea of a fortification of cotton bales, which we are told practically
saved the city, was that of a colored man, a slave from Africa, who
had seen the same thing done in his native country. It was the cotton
breastworks that nonplussed the British. Colored men, free and slave,
were used to reconnoitre, and the pirate Lafitte, true to his word, to
come to the aid of Louisiana should she ever need assistance, brought
in with his Baratarians a mixed horde of desperate fighters, white and
black.

On the British side was a company composed of colored men, and
historians like to tell of their cowardice compared with the colored
men of the American side.[72] Evidently a scarlet coat does not well
fit a colored skin. To the eternal credit of the State troops composed
of the men of color, not one act of desertion or cowardice is recorded
against them. There was a most lamentable exhibition of panic on the
right bank of the river by the American troops, but the battalion of
the men of color was not there. They were always in the front of the
attack.[73]

In the celebration of the victory which followed in the great public
square, the Place d'Armes, now Jackson Square, where a statue of the
commander rears itself in the center, the colored troops came in for
their share of glory.[74] The train which brought in the four hundred
wounded prisoners was met by the colored women, the famous nurses of
New Orleans, who have in every war from the Revolutionary until the
Spanish-American held the reputation of being some of the best nurses
in the world.

The men of color were apparently not content with winning the victory;
they must furnish material for dissension for many days afterwards.
When the British army withdrew from Louisiana on January 27, 1815,
they carried away with them 199 slaves, whom they had acquired by the
very easy method of taking them willy-nilly. The matter of having
these bondmen restored to their original owners, of convincing the
British that the Americans did not see the joke of the abduction
caused one of the most acrimonious discussions in the history of the
State. The treaty between th