General Andrew Jackson Calls for Blacks to Enlist in War of 1812.
The future president, outnumbered and facing a flotilla of British troops, issues a “Proclamation” from Mobile, AL, “To the free colored inhabitants of Louisiana…to rally around the standard of the Eagle.” 450 men of color responded and their two battalions significantly helped repulse the British assault in the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson extolled, “Natives of different states, acting together, for the first time in this camp … reaped the fruits of an honorable union.”
General Jackson not only shamefully reneged on his promises of freedom, money, and land, but fearing that fugitive and free blacks threatened the Mississippi Territory and the Carolinas, had his troops annihilate the old Spanish “Negro Fort” in Florida that protected hundreds of them already settled and productive, including many who’d delivered him from certain defeat at New Orleans.
Contemporaneous military depictions of the war excluded free and enslaved blacks and often the Native Indian participants too, so the Department of the Army commissioned this rendition by H. Charles McBarron, at right: December 23 Night Attack and the Free Men of Color and Choctaws. It depicts the earliest point of American resistance at Villere Plantation in 1814, of hand-to-hand fighting in dense fog by Major Daquin’s Battalion of volunteer African and Native Americans still dressed as civilians. The American attack on the enemy encampment was so unexpected and severe it denied the British an easy victory over the as yet undefended city. U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC.