e delay was a
godsend to the Americans, who now learned the strength of the enemy.

On the 23d--as always, eager to be at his enemy, and moving with his
characteristic energy--Jackson sent a small force down to make a night
attack on the British camp; also a schooner, heavily armed with cannon,
to co-operate from the river. It was a wild and inconsequent fight; but
it checked the advance of the British, who now were still more impressed
with the need of reinforcements; it aroused the confidence and fighting
spirit of the Americans, and it enabled Jackson to take up a defensive
line behind an old canal, extending across the plain from river to
swamp, and gave him time to fortify it. At once he raised a formidable
barricade of mud and timber, and strengthened it with cotton-bales from
the neighboring plantations. The cotton, however, proved rather a
nuisance than a help, as it took fire under the attack, and smoked,
annoying the men. The "fortifications of cotton-bales" were only a
romance of the war.

On the 25th arrived Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law of Wellington
and an able soldier, to take command, and on the 28th the British
attacked the extemporized but strong breastworks, confident of success.
But the sharp-shooters from the backwoods of Tennessee under Carroll,
and from Kentucky under Coffee, who fought with every advantage,
protected by their mud defences, were equally confident. The slaughter
of the British troops, utterly unprotected though brave and gallant, was
terrible, and they were repulsed. Preparations were now made for a
still more vigorous, systematic, and general assault, and a force was
sent across the river to menace the city from that side.

On the 8th of January the decisive battle was fought which extinguished
forever all dreams of the conquest of America, on the part of the
British. General Pakenham, who commanded the advancing columns in
person, was killed, and their authorities state their loss to have been
two thousand killed, wounded, and missing. The American loss was eight
killed and thirteen wounded. It was a rash presumption for the British
to attack a fortified entrenchment ten feet high in some places, and ten
feet thick, with detached redoubts to flank it and three thousand men
behind it. The conflict was not strictly a battle,--not like an
encounter in the open field, where the raw troops under Jackson, most of
them militia, would have stood no chance with the veterans whom