The Battle of New Orleans 243 



by no such misgiving's. In saturnine, confident 

 silence they lolled behind their mud walls, or, lean- 

 ing- on their long rifles, peered out into the gray 

 fog with savage, reckless eyes. So, hour after hour, 

 the two armies stood facing each other in the dark- 

 ness, waiting for the light of day. 



cesses, the tumult rather subsided than was quelled" (iii, 

 377). And again: "This storm seemed to be a signal from 

 hell for the perpetration of villany which would have 

 shamed the most ferocious barbarians of antiquity. At 

 Rodrigo intoxication and plunder had been the principal 

 object; at Badajos lust and murder were joined to rapine 

 and drunkenness; but at San Sebastian the direst, the most 

 revolting cruelty was added to the catalogue of crimes one 

 atrocity, of which a girl of seventeen was the victim, staggers 

 the mind by its enormous, incredible, indescribable barbar- 

 ity ... a Portuguese adjutant, who endeavored to prevent 

 some wickedness, was put to death in the market-place, not 

 with sudden violence from a single ruffian, but deliberately, 

 by a number of English soldiers . . . and the disorder con- 

 tinued until the flames, following the steps of the plunderer, 

 put an end to his ferocity by destroying the whole town." 

 Pakenham himself would have certainly done all in his 

 power to prevent excesses, and has been foully slandered by 

 many early American writers. Alluding to these, Napier re- 

 marks, somewhat caustically: "Pre-eminently distinguished 

 for detestation of inhumanity and outrage, he has been, with 

 astounding falsehood, represented as instigating his troops 

 to the most infamous excesses; but from a people holding 

 millions of their fellow-beings in the most horrible slavery, 

 while they prate and vaunt of liberty until all men turn in 

 loathing from the sickening folly, what can be expected?" (v, 

 p. 31). Napier possessed to a very eminent degree the virtue 

 of being plain-spoken. Elsewhere (iii, 450), after giving a 

 most admirably fair and just acgount of the origin of the 

 Anglo-American war, he alludes, with a good deal of justice. 



