g and darkness, is not clearly known. The
British were surprised; but British soldiers are proverbially hard to
drive from their own position. The Americans had the advantage of making
the attack; but they were nearly all raw troops. Each side was confused
and uncertain of its own and the enemy's position. Coffee, on the left,
drove the British back towards the river, where they were protected by
an old levee, while the new levee on the bank shielded them from the
Louisiana's fire. On the right, the Americans were repulsed.
Reinforcements reached the British army during the action. At half past
nine the attack ceased. The enemy lost two hundred and sixty-seven
killed, wounded, and missing; the Americans, two hundred and thirteen.
The night attack, however, strengthened the Americans. The enemy,
overrating Jackson's force, became too cautious to advance at once, but
waited until the entire army should be landed. The Americans gained time
to build defenses.

Jackson chose a line two miles above the battlefield, marked by a
shallow canal or ditch which crossed the plain at its narrowest point,
from the swamp to the river. Behind the ditch he threw up a parapet. In
some places cotton bales were used, for the soil was but three feet
deep; at that depth one found water, as indeed one found water almost
everywhere,--in the foggy air, in the bayous, the river, the swamps, of
that low land about New Orleans. In a few days Jackson's arrangements
for defence were completed. Fifteen guns were disposed at intervals
along the line, some of them manned by Lafitte and his buccaneers. The
whole force numbered about three thousand, and the Kentuckians, though
not all armed, were used as a reserve. On the river the Louisiana and
the Carolina gave the enemy much trouble.

The British army, when completely disembarked, seemed to justify the
Duke of Wellington's confidence that it could rout any American army he
ever heard of. Seven thousand trained British soldiers, seamen, and
marines, and a thousand West Indian blacks, were assembled at Villere's
plantation, with from twenty-five to thirty guns. There were regiments
which had helped Wellington to win Talavera, Salamanca, and Vitoria, and
within a few short months some of these same regiments were to stand at
Waterloo in that thin red line which Ney and Napoleon's guard could
never break. Their general, Pakenham, Wellington's brother-in-law, was a
distinguished pupil of his illustrious ki