Andrew Jackson gained lasting fame and captured the imaginations of many Americans on January 8, 1815, in his successful defense of New Orleans from British assault. Here the controversial Major General captured widespread and enduring fame. Sharp-eyed yeoman farmers from America’s thriving West, poor but proud, stared down Europe’s fi nest men, so the quickly spreading story went, and cut them down with superior rifle skill. It is perhaps both ironic and appropriate that Jackson’s victory came nearly two weeks after emissaries at Ghent signed a treaty effectively ending the war, and that he owed his triumph to modern artillery and a racially diverse force of various Indian tribes (including some Alabama Creeks), free blacks, and even middle-class whites, not the poor woodsmen of legend. Americans wanted to believe that plain farmers had left their plows to defeat the invading British, much as they believed their parents had done during the Revolutionary War. In fact, the most “legendary” of these yeomen, immortalized in song as the “Hunters of Kentucky,” ran away. “The Kentucky reinforcements,” Jackson noted after the battle, “in whom so much reliance had been placed, ingloriously fled.”
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Becoming Alabama:
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