ind about seizing West Florida. In July, 1814, he wrote to
Washington for permission to take Pensacola, but no reply came, for the
War Department was occupied with General Ross. The absurd conduct of a
British officer, Colonel Nichols, who was at Pensacola with a force of
British and Indians, occupying one of the two Spanish forts there, and
issuing fiery proclamations, was enough to make Jackson act at once,
even if he had hesitated before. He answered the colonel's proclamations
with others equally fiery. But he had to wait for troops, which were to
come from the neighboring States of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and
Louisiana. Meantime, in September, a British squadron made a determined
attack on Fort Bowyer, at the entrance to Mobile Bay, and was repulsed,
with the loss of its flagship, by Major Lawrence and a small
garrison,--a gallant achievement, which made a good beginning of the
campaign. At the end of October, Coffee, now a general officer, with
nearly three thousand Tennesseans, reached the neighborhood of Mobile.
With these, and about a thousand of the regulars he had already, Jackson
promptly marched on Pensacola. One of the forts, and the city itself, he
took; the other fort, Barrancas, was blown up by the British before he
could reach it. The enterprise kept him but a week. It was all over
before he received, in reply to his own letter of July, a letter from
the Secretary of War forbidding him to attack Pensacola. Once again he
had taken the responsibility to do what he felt to be necessary.

By this time the government at Washington was alive to the great danger
of the Southwest. Hurried orders were sent to the governors of the
various States whose militia must be the main reliance for defence. It
was suspected that New Orleans would be the first objective of the
enemy, and a warning came to the city from Jean Lafitte, the leader of a
gang of smugglers, whom the British had tried to win over. But the
warning was not properly heeded, and Jackson himself was slow to make
up his mind where the enemy would strike. He lingered at Mobile until
November 22, and four days later Sir Edward Pakenham, with a large army
and a great fleet, sailed from Jamaica for New Orleans. It was not until
December 2 that a worn, thin man, tired and ill, whom nobody, failing to
observe the look in his eyes, would have taken for the conqueror of the
Creeks, rode into the curious little city that had been the French and
then the Spa