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Various contingents of the American army moved along the Federal Road with some units, especially those with arcillery, turning south to follow the Pearl to Gainesville where small bouts took them on into New Orleans. Some of the soldiers, struck by the aspcct of the valley, would return as settlers after the war.
On December 12 the mightiest armada ever to approach the shores of'-. America loomed off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Boasting the firepower of\ 1,000 guns and manned by 20,000 veteran sailors, soldiers, and marines, the British fleet anchored at the north end of the Chandelcurs and in the lee of Cat and Ship islands. To oppose this, Jackson could count two warships in New Orleans, five small schooner-riggcd gunboats on the lakes, one steamboat, and 4,500 mostly inexperienced troops.
The struggle for New Orleans began on December 13, 1814, in Mississippi Sound. Youthful Lieutenant Thomas Ap Catesby (“Tac") Jones commanded the five American gunboats and two tenders stationed at Fort St. Louis, really only a small battery on the shore of the Bay of St. Louis. His orders were to intercept the British fleet at Pass Christian, fall back to the Rigolets, and "sink or be sunk.” The relative power of his mosquito fleet rendered only the latter possible.
Forty-five shallow draft barges, each mounting a bow cannon and filled with British sailors and marines, moved to the attack. Jones, in accordance with his orders, fell back before them. At the Bay of St. Louis seven barges detached to shell the shore battery and its protecting tender, Sea Horse. The Americans fought for half an hour, blew up the ship and battery to deny the ordnance to the British, and fled overland to New Orleans.
Jones retreated all night before the on-rowing barges. The next day, with his gunboats stuck in the muddy shallows off the Rigolets, Jones stood and fought. After two hours of gore, grapeshot, and flashing blades, the wounded Jones surrendered in defeat. He had followed his orders, preserved his honor, and gained precious time for Jackson.
On Christmas live in Ghent the American and British peace commissioners signed the treaty ending the War of 1812. Two weeks later, on January 8,
1815, Andrew Jackson’s ragtag army of free blacks and pirates, Creoles and Kaintucks, Mississippians, Georgians, and Tennesseeans ratified it with musket butts, bullets, and cannonballs. At battle’s end 2,036 redcoats, many of them crack veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, littered the field in front of a rampart of Mississippi mud on the Plain of Clialmette.
In the euphoria following the battle, a proud new spirit swept the ranks of the defenders. The polyglot inhabitants of the Gulf Coast now saw themselves as Americans, and that spirit of nationalism swept the country. Sectionalism vanished, at least for a rime, as the nation embarked on its common goal, “manifest destiny.”
The Great Migration, temporarily checked by the war, resumed with the defeat of the Indians and the British. By 1817 sufficient population existed to warrant congressional sundering of the huge Mississippi Territory into the State of Mississippi and the Territory of Alabama (which in turn achieved statehood status two years later). The new Mississippi-Alabama line, which followed the water divide between the valley of the Pascagoula and Mobile Bay, closed the fourth side of the rectangle already hounded by the barrier islands, the Pearl River, and the 31st parallel to create the Mississippi Gult Coast Panhandle.