RED GUARD VS. REAL HERO

ANDREW JACKSON AND THE MIRACLE OF NEW oRLEANS

(New York: Random House Large Print Ed., c 2017)

BY BRIAN KILMEADE and DON YAEGER

Review by Hugh Murray

As New Orleans celebrates its 300thanniversary, and the 202^nd year after Andrew Jackson saved the Crescent City from the British invaders, this book is a welcome fresh breath of history and a portrait of a hero who inspired his compatriots to fend off a larger force composed of veterans who had defeated the military genius, Napoleon. This book is even more welcome today as mobs in New Orleans have demanded the removal of Jackson's statue from Jackson Square in the French Quarter. Meanwhile a politically correct, Democratic mayor, Mitch Landrieu, has already approved the removal of the General Robt. E. Lee statue from Lee Circle and the removal of other statues of military figures like Gen. P. T. G. Beauregard.

Just as Mao's Cultural Revolution in China sought to destroy the history, traditions, and memories of the past – purging libraries, temples, schools, and universities of priceless articles; indeed closing schools, sending pupils to the countryside to be “educated” by the partisan peasantry, sending teachers and professors in dunce caps to be humiliated, beaten, and sometimes killed by the thought police of the Red Guard. The same destructive impulse occurs now in America, and the media is as complicit here as it was in Mao's Red Guard China. The elementary school I attended as a child was named for the first Jew to serve in the US Senate – Judah P. Benjamin. (A Floridian might make that claim, but Sen. David Yulee had converted to Christianity.) Later, Benjamin also served various posts in the Cabinet of Pres. Jefferson Davis – the first Jew in any American Cabinet. But, as some called him “the brains of the Confederacy,” the name of the school I attended had to be changed. After 8^th grade, I went for one year to Beauregard Junior High, named for the commander who ordered the firing by Southern troops on the Union held Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, thus beginning what most see as the first shot in the American Civil War. I attended Beauregard for one year, and many would assert that in doing so I was exerting my “white privilege.” Perhaps those critics are right, for attending that school at the same time was another teen who would become known throughout the world, another example of white privilege, Lee Harvey Oswald. Though the building still exists, there is no longer a Beauregard School in New Orleans, and his statue, at the entrance of City Park, has disappeared by order of Mayor (or is it Mao) Landrieu.

Christopher Columbus was revered as a great hero at the anniversary of his most important voyage, celebrated in 1892, but by the 500^th anniversary in 1992 he was maligned as an embarrassment, a villain, imperialist, colonialist, racist, and genocidal exemplar of white male privilege. A man once so honored that the capital of Ohio was named for him, as was even the American capital, Washington, District of Columbia! To those who defend Columbus by maintaining, without Columbus, there would be no America, the politically correct retort is: “Precisely.” They despise Columbus BEAUSE they hate America and all it stands for. And so too George Washington, the “father of his country,” now dismissed as just another slave owner. Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration of Independence, is reviled not only as a slave owner, but as one who took sexual advantage of one of his slaves. Madison, President during the War of 1812, another slave-driver, while Andrew Jackson, was worse – a slave owner, and the President responsible for the “trail of tears,” the removal of the Indians from the Southeast. Jackson even removed the 'civilized' Indians. They were so civilized they owned slaves. After their removal to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), during the American Civil War, many of the Indians chose to fight for the Confederacy.

When I was young the Democratic Party would have annual fund-raising dinners named Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners. The Democrats honored a founder and “re-founder” of their party. Today, many Democratic leaders are ashamed of both Jefferson and Jackson. So it is in this period of political correctness and Red Guard destruction, that we can all appreciate the courage of writers like Kilmeade and Yaeger in resurrecting the heroic struggle of Andrew Jackson to save New Orleans from the British invaders.

Kilmeade/Yaeger describe an encounter with British occupying forces when Jackson was a teenager. Tories informed the British of the rebel sympathies of his aunt and her relatives. At one point, an officer ordered the rebel youth to clean the mud from the Briton's boots. Jackson refused. The officer drew his sword, aiming to crash it down on the teen's head. Jackson raised his arm to deflect the blow, which cut his hand deeply, and still got through to leave a scar on his head. Jackson's brother and mother would soon die in events that Jackson related to this British raid, and consequently the youth retained a fiery hatred for the British.

Jackson was scrappy, a young man of the new American southwest. He learned law by clerking, but he was like Burr and Hamilton, willing to duel for his honor. He clearly held a macho ideal. When he heard of an Indian raid (the Red Sticks) in 1813 that wiped out over 200 settlers at Ft. Mims, Alabama near Mobile, Jackson was determined on revenge. He also suspected the British were supplying weapons to the Indians in order to promote attacks upon the Americans. After Jackson and his men decisively defeated the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend later that year, the Indian leader, William Weatherford, who was half Creek Indian and half Scottish, came alone to Jackson and offered his services as a defeated warrior. Jackson helped him.

When after years of British provocations, Pres. Madison and the Democratic-Republicans finally declared war on Britain in 1812, Jackson was delighted and volunteered his services. Unfortunately, the incompetent War Department generally ignored Jackson's pleas on the need to defend New Orleans, the linchpin of the future of the American West. During the War of 1812 the Americans attempted to invade and conquer Canada, and failed in 1812-13, and in 1814 the British raided the east coast, burning the American capital in Washington and nearly capturing Baltimore. In 1814 in Belgium, peace talks had begun, but there were clauses implying that whoever conquered territory at the end of the war might be able to retain it.

The British sent an expedition of thousands led by Admiral Alexander Cochrane, and General Edward Pakenham, who had won a fine reputation in battles against Napoleon and his allies in Spain and France, and who was hailed as “the hero of Salamanca.” He was also a brother-in-law to the Duke of Wellington (and Pakenham was to become governor of New Orleans, once he had taken the city).

Kilmeade's book includes over half dozen maps to follow the course of the invadsion. Meanwhile, Jackson scrambled to raise a motley crew of US regular army men, Tennessee and Kentucky Volunteers, Free People of Color from Louisiana, Jean Lafitte and his pirates, men of New Orleans society, and any others who might be recruited. Slaves were inducted to dig the trenches to defend the main line at Rodriguez Canal against possible British assault.

The British outnumbered the Americans by at least 3 to 1. Moreover, some of these same British troops had helped defeat the mighty Napoleon. By contrast, the American militia had utterly failed to defend the nation's capital in 1814, and Jackson's impromptu aggregate might run away at the first shot. But they did not. While the statistics may be only approximate, the Americans lost between a dozen and 300; the British between 1,000 and 3,000, including Gen Pakenham himself. Not only was New Orleans saved, but the British would no longer be able to supply Indians with weapons, or promote intrigue to sever Louisiana and the lands west of the Mississippi to a greater Spanish empire in North America or some other anti-American schemes. America would continue to hold the crucial port of New Orleans and new American settlers could continue to pour across the mountains, selling their goods down the Mississippi, and the American republic could continue to expand and fill the continent.

The man most responsible for this victory was Andrew Jackson. This book reminds us of what a hero he was. And if it were so easy to defend New Orleans, why did New Orleans fall so quickly to the Yankees during the Civil War? Early in the Civil War Naval Line Officer James Farragut captured New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy, in April 1862. Farragut was born near Knoxville, Tennessee, and resided in Virginia, but he chose to remain on the side of the Americans with the outbreak of war. After the capture of New Orleans, Yankee ships could travel up the Mississippi on longer missions. Later Farragut would become an admiral in the US Navy. The authors should have contrasted the determined and successful defense of New Orleans by Jackson with the Confederacy's loss both of its largest city and of control over the lower Mississippi to the Union invaders.

When New Orleans women gave icy welcomes to the occupying Yankee troops, preferring to spit on them, New Englander Union Gen. Benjamin Butler issued an order that such ladies were to be treated as women of the street (as prostitutes), which caused an international outburst concerning the oppressive Yankee regime. Butler responded with something else to anger the Confederates. Onto the base of the famous statue of Andrew Jackson in Jackson Square, Butler had a few words of Jackson inscribed, modifying them only slightly. Jackson was a slave owner, but in the conflict over nullification in the 1830s, Jackson defied Calhoun and the pro-secession theoreticians: “The Union must and shall be preserved.” These words Butler added that to the base of the statue, and now the Left demands the removal of the statue from Jackson Square!

As America now demotes, denigrates, and dismisses its real heroes, it has begun to replace them with a new set, a set that cannot be easily judged as politically incorrect. The Super heroes of comics and films are no longer really “American heroes.” The movies that tell their stories are shown, not only in America, but round the world, and with China's huge market, the villains can no longer be Chinese. The super heroes no longer illustrate American values, but global values. These fictional heroes are “safe.” No one will discover that they were once slave owners. No one will uncover that they once said something bad about an Amerindian, or bullied a gay, or mocked an Asian's accent, or grabbed a woman, or kissed a man, or tweeted that the only good Martian was a dead Martian. The new super heroes are safe and fun and can appeal to the world. But Jackson is a real hero, a man who said and did things that will NOT appeal to everyone, a man who had faults, a man who was flawed, a man who was human; a hero who was a man. Yes, Jackson was a real hero, who was able to defeat some from the greatest army of his time and save the area west of the Mississippi and New Orleans for the great American experiment in republican government.