Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory
In 1815 Britain's crack troops, fresh from the victories against Napoleon, were stunningly defeated near New Orleans by a ragtag army of citizen soldiers under the commander they dubbed "Old Hickory", Andrew Jackson. It was this battle that defined the United States as a military power to be reckoned with and an independent democracy here to stay.
This book sets its scenes with an almost unbelievably colourful cast of characters, starting with the extraordinary coalition of militiamen, regulars, untrained frontiersman, free blacks, pirates, Indians and townspeople. Robert Remini's vivid evocation of this glorious, improbable victory is more than a masterful military history. It proves that only after the Battle of New Orleans could Americans say with confidence that they were Americans, not subjects of a foreign power. It was the triumph that catapulted a once-poor, uneducated orphan boy into the White House and forged a collection of ex-colonies and dissenters into a nation.
