ud and logs from the swamp to the river. At first the British tried to
batter down these breastworks with their cannon, for they had many more
guns than the Americans. A terrible artillery duel followed. For an
hour or two the result seemed in doubt; but the American gunners showed
themselves to be far more skilful than their antagonists, and gradually
getting the upper hand, they finally silenced every piece of British
artillery. The Americans had used cotton bales in the embrasures, and
the British hogsheads of sugar; but neither worked well, for the cotton
caught fire and the sugar hogsheads were ripped and splintered by the
roundshot, so that both were abandoned. By the use of red-hot shot the
British succeeded in setting on fire the American schooner which had
caused them such annoyance on the evening of the night attack; but she
had served her purpose, and her destruction caused little anxiety to
Jackson.

Having failed in his effort to batter down the American breastworks,
and the British artillery having been fairly worsted by the American,
Pakenham decided to try open assault. He had ten thousand regular
troops, while Jackson had under him but little over five thousand men,
who were trained only as he had himself trained them in his Indian
campaigns. Not a fourth of them carried bayonets. Both Pakenham and the
troops under him were fresh from victories won over the most renowned
marshals of Napoleon, andover soldiers that had proved themselves on a
hundred stricken fields the masters of all others in Continental Europe.
At Toulouse they had driven Marshal Soult from a position infinitely
stronger than that held by Jackson, and yet Soult had under him a
veteran army. At Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, and San Sebastian they
had carried by open assault fortified towns whose strength made
the intrenchments of the Americans seem like the mud walls built by
children, though these towns were held by the best soldiers of France.
With such troops to follow him, and with such victories behind him in
the past, it did not seem possible to Pakenham that the assault of the
terrible British infantry could be successfully met by rough backwoods
riflemen fighting under a general as wild and untrained as themselves.

He decreed that the assault should take place on the morning of the
eighth. Throughout the previous night the American officers were on
the alert, for they could hear the rumbling of artillery in the British
camp, the mu