I have respect for anyone who wears the
military uniform of their country, official heroes and cowards alike.
But it seems to me the official coward makes the greater sacrifice.
They suffer only scorn and disgust for their incompetent public service. Yet,
inevitably, they can always be depended upon to provide the
melodramatic contrast required to make the hero’s' medals shine
that much brighter. As just one example, you might say it took the
scarifies of six cowards to burnish Andrew Jackson's medals bright
enough to be seen in Washington, D.C. You could say that, but that
would not be fair to either Jackson or the six cowards.
Andrew Jackson looked like a hero. He
stood over six feet tall, and at 130 pounds was razor thin, with
piercing blue eyes. In 1812 he had a head of bright red hair and the
emotional responses of a fifteen year old juvenile delinquent. He was made a general of the Tennessee militia, by popular acclimation,
and ordered to take his farmers down the Mississippi River to
Natchez, where they would be enveloped into an army to defend New
Orleans. Secretary-of-War John Armstrong can be forgiven if he was
anticipating a British move against the vital and vulnerable port.
And upon learning the British were too busy in Europe to bother with
America, his rational decision was to send all the militia units
home. But the way Armstrong went about it was typical of the man -
petty and cheap. Upon reaching Natchez, Jackson was ordered to
disband his men and sent them home without pay.
It was honorable of Jackson that he
refused. In violation of his orders Jackson safely marched his men
home, as a unit. And he maintained such discipline on that march that
he earned the title “Old Hickory”, after the wood that broke
before it bent. And only when they were safe at home did Jackson
release his men from their units, with the promise that they would be
paid for the extra month of service on the march. It was a display
of common sense and humanity worthy of a hero. And it got Jackson
reprimanded, and left behind when the war heated up along the
Canadian border.
The unanticipated result was that on
September 14th and 15th , of 1814, when the
British ships attacked Fort Bowyer at the entrance to Mobile Bay (above),
there was nobody left in the south to command the defense of the New
Orleans and the southern coast, except Andrew Jackson. The attack
on Bowyer was repulsed, but the assault threw militia all along the
coast into a panic, especially the 500 or so members of the First
Regiment of the West Tennessee Militia manning a run down outpost of
Fort Charlotte, guarding the mouth of the Mobile River. The water in
their fort was bad, the food was scarce and lousy, and disease was running
rampant. And in a case of spectacular bad timing, many of the
Tennesseans decided at this moment, to go home.
They had enlisted in June back in
Nashville, for three months, and as they figured it, as of September
20th , 1814, their time was up. So that morning about 200
of them just left. Desertion was common, but organized desertion
could not be tolerated. The army offered a $10 reward for each man
returned to his unit, and by November 2nd, 166 men had come back,
under arrest or voluntarily. Between December 5th, and
December 18th, 1814, those men were tried for mutiny in
Mobile , by officers of the Tennessee Militia. The verdicts was then
sent for review to Andrew Jackson, 150 miles away in in New Orleans.
He was kind of busy at the time -
recruiting, arming and drilling the local militia. On the December
23rd Jackson led 2, 000 men in a desperate night attack
against an English advance guard of 1,800 men at the Lacoste's
Plantation, 9 miles south of New Orleans. Jackson's force was thrown
back, but British causalities were heavy enough they were now
cautious, giving Jackson just enough time to fortify the canal 4
miles south of town. On January 8, 1815, the 11,000 man British force
attacked the 2,500 Americans. The result was decisive. The British
lost almost 300 killed and 1,200 wounded, and were forced to retreat.
American casualties were 13 killed and 39 wounded. Jackson's victory
was nothing short of a miracle.
The day after - January 9th, 1815 -
Jackson returned to his headquarters in New Orleans to find among
other things waiting for him, the verdict from the court martial in
Mobile. Jackson approved it and sent it back without comment. Two
Tennessee officers were dismissed, and a third had his sword broken
over his head, before being dismissed. Most of the 160 enlisted men
lost half their pay, had half their head shaved before being drummed
out of camp. The six seen as ringleaders were condemned to be executed
by firing squad. But before that could happen, the British captured
Fort Bowyer on February 12th. British men-of-war carrying
1,400 infantry and 11 cannon now entered Mobile Bay, and prepared to
attack the pitiable Fort Charlotte and Mobile. Only the arrival of
word of the peace treaty signed in Ghent (and negotiated by John
Quincy Adams) two months earlier (on December 24, 1814) saved the
fort, and maybe New Orleans and maybe Andrew Jackson's career. The
end of the war did not save the six condemned men.
On February 21, 1815, the six men were
brought to the scene of execution, and made to kneel on their own
coffins. In charge of the detail was Colonel William Russel, U.S,
Army. He urged the condemned to, “Die like men – like
soldiers....Meet your fate with courage.” When asked if they had
any last words, a Baptist preacher who had been hired as a
substitute, began to sob. Private Henry Lewis said nervously,.”I
have fought bravely, you know I have...I would not wish to die this
way. I did not expect it.” On command, 36 regular soldiers fired,
six aiming at each of the condemned militiamen. In checking the
bloody results, five were dead, and Sargent David Morrow was found to
have four musket ball wounds. He pleaded with Russel, “Have I not
atoned for this offense? Shall I not live?” The colonel allowed him
medical care, but the answer was no. He died four days later, “in
great agony.”
To those involved it was a very great
affair and likely produced more than a few nightmares over the
lifetimes of the executioners. History barely took note, until late
January of 1828 in Philadelphia, when Irish transplant John Binns
reprinted an anti-Jackson item (above) which he labeled “Monumental
Inscriptions”. Originally he had created it as what we might call a
one page “blow in” for his newspaper, the Democratic Press during
the 1824 election.Then it barely raised a flicker of interest. This
time it's 15 X 24 inches, with six coffin woodcuts in two rows, instantly became infamous as the “Coffin
Handbills”, plural because in the end there would be 26 versions
of it.
It was a “Swift Boat” attack,
hitting Jackson in his strongest position, his military record. The
body of most of the “Coffin Handbills” carried a poem,
“Gen Jackson and the Six Militiamen.” It read, in part, “Twas
on the twentieth day of June, Their three months tour began; And when
the ninety days were done, Their thoughts all homeward ran...Then
General Jackson called a court, These citizens to try. Three officers
of every sort Determined they should die...Then General Jackson
issued out, An order from his pen, That in four days they should be
shot - These six militia men..And God forbid, our President This
Jackson e'er should be; Lest we should to his camp be sent , And shot
for mutiny.”
John Binns had to endured picketing of
his shop and home, and a few rocks thrown as his windows, back in
1824. But this time his friends had to physically defend the
property, stopping arsonists and vandals. His fellow Irish American
William Duane from Philadelphia, and a Jackson supporter, declared
that Binns “now hangs, gibbeted in the pillory of public opinion”
Another Adams newspaper, The United States Gazette, responded for
Binns, dismissing Duane as behaving with “his accustomed egotism,
and pomposity.” Things were getting personal.
By March the Coffin Handbills were
virtually flooding New Hampshire. And Isaac Hill, who had published
the smear that John Quincy Adams had pimped for the Czar, was forced
to spend several issues of his weekly Concord “Patriot”,
defending Jackson. In one issue he dismissed the attack by pointing
out that Jackson“...On the 8th of January, 1815 ...murdered in the
coldest blood 1,500 British soldiers...” Hill's exasperated comment
went national in the Jackson Press. But by June the anti-Jackson
handbills were being reprinted in Henry Clay's old newspaper, the
Kentucky Reporter, in Lexington.
An
editorial in the Nashville Republican and State Gazette, published
the year before, now seemed prophetic. “If one half or less of the
evil told of them is true”, wrote the generally neutral newspaper,
“they deserve to be objects of universal repulse and scorn.... A
stranger might say to an American, “Am I or am I not, to believe
your political writers? If I may credit them, your nation must be
degenerate indeed” Indeed.
Removed from the context of the
assaults on Fort Bewyer, and the vulnerable situation of Mobile,
Alabama, as was done by the handbills, Jackson's approval of the
execution appears cold and callous. But then political advertising is
not supposed to be informational, but motivational. And in such
situations the less information the public has, the easier it is to
spur them to action. For myself, reviewing all the information from
150 years distance, the fairest observation seems that all wars are
made up of immoral actions and unproductive sacrifices. That is why
war is to be avoided until absolutely unavoidable. General Andrew
Jackson's signature on the order of execution was not unusual at the
time. But going through with the executions after the war had ended -
that was as cold and as callous as hell. But did it hurt Jackson's
candidacy in 1828? Not much.
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