CHALMETTE BATTLEFIELD, LA (AP) — Two hundred years after the Battle of New Orleans was fought on a bitterly cold and foggy Jan. 8 in 1815, no one knows for sure what happened to the remains of the hundreds of British soldiers killed on that bloody day.
Perhaps they were buried where they fell on the battlefield. Or they ended up in a mass burial behind what was at the time the British line — and what today are the grounds of a long-shuttered aluminum smelter. Perhaps their remains were dislodged by floodwaters and lost to the swamps.
"It is one of the great mysteries of the battle — no one knows where their bodies went," said Christina Vella, a Tulane University historian.
Now, in conjunction with the battle's bicentennial, British authorities and the National Park Service are in discussions about constructing a memorial to the fallen British. A 100-foot high obelisk honors the slain American soldiers — even though there were only 13 of them.
It was a miserable winter. The British suffered from dysentery, fatigue, a lack of supplies and many other hardships in the dreadful Louisiana swamps. At night, when they made fires, American sharpshooters harassed them from the woods and Indian warriors ambushed them.
When the British chose to make their assault on New Orleans, it went very badly. The Americans had erected a formidable wall and quickly had the upper hand. Nearly 300 British soldiers were dead and almost six times as many were wounded, captured or missing after the multi-pronged attack. The Americans, led by Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson, lost 13 soldiers and some 60 other soldiers were wounded, captured or missing.
The defeat caused the British armada to retreat to Mobile and definitively ended the War of 1812, and the two countries never went to war again.
The British were a motley crew.
"They were Irish, ex-cons, prisoners of war, people who'd been kidnapped," Vella said. "There was this rabble just as bad as anything (Andrew) Jackson had to fight with. Many of them had also never seen battle. People who hated their officers."
The National Park Service has attempted to locate mass British graves and in 2000 archeologists scoured the battlefield.
"If they were buried there, we found no evidence," said John Cornelison, a National Park Service archaeologist. He said one hypothesis, based on historical accounts, suggests the soldiers were buried where the remains of the rusting Kaiser aluminum smelter is today.
Another hypothesis, championed by British military historian Timothy Pickles, suggests the soldiers were buried on the battlefield and that their remains were washed away in floods.
"They were buried where they fell," Pickles said. He said British accounts tell of an agonizing time burying the dead in the swampy ground.
Under British military practice, the soldiers were stripped of their regimental property — including their uniforms — before being buried, Pickles said. One gruesome historical account tells of the owner of the plantation where the battle was fought visiting the battlefield in the wake of the bloodshed and finding bodies popping up in the mud. The plantation owner never returned to his plantation and apparently died in part from the shock of his terrifying discovery.
As for the slain British officers, including the commander Maj. Gen. Edward Pakenham, it's known what happened to them: Their entrails were buried and their embalmed bodies shipped back to Britain in rum barrels.
– by AP Reporter Cain Burdeau
