nge of prisoners. He had a turn for
verse-making. Most of his poems were mediocre, but the sight of the
Stars and Stripes still fluttering in the early morning breeze inspired
him to write certain deathless stanzas which, when fitted to the old
tune of _Anacreon in Heaven_, his country accepted as its national
anthem. In this exalted moment it was vouchsafed him to sound a trumpet
call, clear and far-echoing, as did Rouget de Lisle when, with soul
aflame, he wrote the _Marseillaise_ for France. If it was the destiny of
the War of 1812 to weld the nation as a union, the spirit of the
consummation was expressed for all time in the lines which a hundred
million of free people sing today:

O! say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?

The luckless endeavor to capture Baltimore by sea and land was the last
British expedition that alarmed the Atlantic coast. The hostile army and
naval forces withdrew to Jamaica, from which base were planned and
undertaken the Louisiana campaign and the battle of New Orleans.

* * * * *

The brilliant leadership and operations of Andrew Jackson were so
detached and remote from all other activities that he may be said to
have fought a private war of his own. It had seemed clear to Madison
that, as a military precaution, the control of West Florida should be
wrenched from Spain, whose neutrality was dubious and whose Gulf
territory was the rendezvous of privateers, pirates, and other lawless
gentry, besides offering convenient opportunity for British invasion by
sea. As early as the autumn of 1812 troops were collected to seize and
hold this region for the duration of the war. The people of the
Mississippi Valley welcomed the adventure with enthusiasm. It was to be
aimed against a European power presumably friendly, but the sheer love
of conquest and old grudges to settle were motives which brushed
argument aside. Andrew Jackson was the major general of the Tennessee
militia, and so many hardy volunteers flocked to follow him that he had
to sift them out, mustering in at Nashville two thousand of whom he
said: "They are the choicest of our citizens. They go at our call to do
the will of Government. No constitutional scruples trouble them. Nay,
they will rejoice