I step off the tour boat and walk down the gangway, down a further expanse of concrete onto a path by an old plantation house and the shade of what looks like a sprawling live oak. The park ranger warns us that, while the shadiest spots are currently in the grass, it has recently rained and that you are at the mercy of fire ants, mud, water, and crawdads.
This, it strikes me, is a terrible place for a battle.
Or at least it would be in summer. Insects thrumming in the trees. The heat of the sun in unholy communion with the humidity of the swamp. Fire ants and crawdads angling for the soft, exposed flesh of British ankles. This is the Chalmette Battlefield, and Andrew Jackson/Johnny Horton’s Battle of New Orleans was fought here in the dawning days of 1815. Of course, we fought the bloody British near the town of New Orleans in the wintertime, when fog was the worst enemy on the battlefield. Worst if you’re the invaders. And you’re wearing bright red coats. And the locals have had time to prepare. Let’s not even talk about the potential for alligators lurking in every swampy ditch, or lined along the riverbank watching with 300 million year old eyes for errant swimmers. Crawdads, ants, fog, heat, insects, water, gators, kits, cats, sacks and wives—yes, this is a terrible place for a battle.
I did not see any alligators, so I must treat as apocryphal the notion that the American troops used any of them as artillery pieces. Jimmy Driftwood—if that is his real name—cannot be trusted as a historical source on crocodilian cannonry. The tourist boat that brought us here played the Johnny Horton rendition of The Battle of New Orleans as we docked. Sometimes I feel like the War of 1812 would be lost history if it wasn’t for this song. We fought the British…again? Lonnie Donegan recorded the song with his skiffle group in 1959. He’s British. He changes “bloody” to “bloomin’”. I bet he had never seen an alligator, much less powdered its behind. I think it did better overall than Horton’s version. But it’s kind of an abomination. I wonder what Jimmy Driftwood thought of this little proxy war. I wonder if there are alligators and I just didn’t see them. A terrible place for a battle.
The tour guide spent part of the boat trip down the river lionizing Andrew Jackson, the general in command of the American troops and the seventh American president. They have a statue of him in a square named for him in New Orleans. I want to ask about the slaves he bought and sold. I want to ask about the Seminole Wars. I want to ask about the genocide of the Indian Removal Act. But, like so many problematic figures in our past, its all too easy to sweep aside the complications that make up a human being, much less one in a position of unimaginable power, and see only the fair and the good in the polished reflection of the statuary horse he’s mounted on. And anyways, as we’ve established, this is a terrible place for a battle.
All that said, the overwhelming thing I think about as we leave is that the park as it stands now is a place of simple but great beauty. Spanish moss blows like galleon sails off the oak trees. A red-wing blackbird lands and struts around near the replica ramparts. Despite the heat, and the fire ants, and the mud, and the vicious crawdads, this is a place of enormous natural splendor, and 13 Americans and 291 Brits died terribly here fighting a war about maritime rights and naval seizure they probably knew little about while the powerful men responsible for it were busy signing the treaty that would end the war outright.
Every place is a terrible place for a battle.