uation. Coffee, with part of the Tennessee volunteers,
was up the river at Baton Rouge. A hurried summons brought him a
hundred and twenty miles in two days, and on the 19th he was in camp a
few miles above the city with eight hundred men. Two days later came
General Carroll and a brigade of Tennessee militia, two thousand strong;
with them came also a squadron of mounted Mississippi volunteers.
Louisiana furnished a thousand militia; the city of New Orleans five or
six hundred volunteers, of whom about a third were mulattoes. Jackson
had also two incomplete regiments of regulars numbering together about
eight hundred rank and file. A Kentucky brigade of twenty-five hundred
men was on the way, but without arms. Of Carroll's men, only one in ten
had a musket. To provide arms for these new troops was a difficult
matter, and many of the Kentuckians were still unarmed when the final
struggle came. The city became panic-stricken and disorderly, and
Jackson promptly placed it under martial law.

Such was the situation when, on the morning of December 23, the British
advance party, numbering about seventeen hundred, conveyed in small
boats over the shallow Lake Borgne and up the Bienvenu, landed six miles
below the city and seized the mansion of Major Villere, a Creole
gentleman of the neighborhood. Villere was captured, but escaped, and at
half past one o'clock Jackson knew in New Orleans that the enemy was at
hand. By good luck, Major Latour, a French engineer, and the best
historian of the campaign, was among the first to view the invaders, and
he gave the general a correct idea of their position and numbers. As in
all other crises, Jackson's resolve was taken at once. "By the Eternal,"
he exclaimed, "they shall not sleep on our soil!" He set his troops in
motion for a night attack.

Had the British marched on to New Orleans without stopping, it seems
probable that they would have taken it that evening. But at nightfall
upwards of two thousand Americans were between them and the city.
Jackson was on the American right, near the river, with the regulars and
the Louisiana contingent. Coffee, with his Tennesseans and the
Mississippi horsemen, was on the left, next the cypress swamp. Carroll's
brigade and the city militia were left to guard New Orleans on the
north. The Carolina had crept down the river opposite the enemy's
position, and at half past seven one of her guns gave the signal for
attack.

What followed, in the fo