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by: Remini, Robert V.

ISBN: 9780670885510 | 0670885517

Only Robert Remini--whose "majestic biography" (The New Yorker) of Andrew Jackson won the National Book Award--could have brought to life this famous, pivotal, but almost forgotten battle. In 1815, Britain's crack troops, fresh from victories against Napoleon, were stunningly defeated near New Orleans by a rag-tag army of citizen soldiers under the fledgling commander they dubbed "Old Hickory." It was this battle that defined the United States as a military power to be reckoned with, and an independent democracy here to stay. A happenstance coalition of Militiamen, regulars, untrained frontiersmen, free blacks, pirates, Indians, and townspeople--marching to "Yankee Doodle" and "La Marseillaise"--pepper The Battle of New Orleans with a rich array of characters and scenes. Swashbuckling Jean Lafitte and his privateers. The proud, reckless British General Pakenham, and his miserable men ferried across a Louisiana lake in a Gulf storm. Partying Creoles who drew the line at blacking out their street lamps. The agile Choctaw and Tennessee "dirty shirt" sharpshooters, who made a sport of picking off redcoat sentries by night. And Jackson himself--tall, gaunt, shrewd, by turns gentle and furious, declaring "I will smash them, so help me God!"His improbable victory, uniting a rainbow of dissident groups, finally proved the United States' sovereignty to the world. It was a battle that catapulted a once-poor, uneducated, orphan boy into the White House and forged a collection of ex-colonies into a true nation.

Robert V. Remini has been called by The New York Times the "foremost Jacksonian scholar of our time." In addition to his three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson, he is the author of biographies of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and a dozen other books on Jacksonian America. Among his many honors are the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation Award, the Carl Sandburg Award for Non-Fiction, the University Scholar Award of the University of Illinois, and the National Book Award. He is professor emeritus of history and research professor emeritus of humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Wilmette, Illinois.