Events

The battle was fought two weeks after the peace treaty was signed, but the news had not yet crossed the Atlantic. On January 8, 1815, British Major General Sir Edward Pakenham ordered a frontal assault across open ground against Andrew Jackson''s fortified position along the Rodriguez Canal, south of New Orleans. The attack was a catastrophe. American riflemen, artillerymen, and pirates cut down over 2,000 British soldiers in less than thirty minutes. Pakenham himself was killed by grapeshot while trying to rally his retreating troops. American casualties totaled roughly 70. The Treaty of Ghent, formally ending the War of 1812, had been signed on December 24, 1814, in a Belgian city thousands of miles from the fighting. Ships carrying the news would not reach American shores until February. Jackson and Pakenham fought and died without knowing the war was already over. The irony has defined how Americans remember the battle ever since, but calling it meaningless ignores its actual consequences. Jackson had assembled one of the most diverse fighting forces in American military history. Behind the cotton-bale and earthwork fortifications stood U.S. Army regulars, Tennessee and Kentucky militia, free Black soldiers from New Orleans, Choctaw warriors, Baratarian pirates led by Jean Lafitte whose local knowledge of the bayous proved invaluable, and Creole volunteers. The British force, fresh from victories against Napoleon in the Peninsular War, expected to sweep aside colonial militia. They were wrong. The lopsided victory transformed American politics. Jackson became the most famous man in the country overnight. The Federalist Party, which had opposed the war and even flirted with secession at the Hartford Convention, was destroyed by the wave of nationalist fervor that followed. Jackson rode the fame to the presidency in 1828, inaugurating the era of populist democracy that bears his name. The battle also killed any remaining British ambitions to reclaim influence in the Mississippi valley, securing American control of the continent''s interior.

President William McKinley placed Alaska under military rule on January 7, 1900, establishing the Department of Alaska as a military district governed by Army officers. The decision formalized a system of federal control over a territory that had been administered haphazardly since its purchase from Russia in 1867. Alaska had been bought for $7.2 million, roughly two cents per acre, in a deal negotiated by Secretary of State William Seward. Critics called the purchase "Seward's Folly" and "Seward's Icebox." For the first seventeen years after acquisition, the territory had no legal system, no formal government, and no civil administration. The Army garrison, the customs collector, and occasional visits from revenue cutters constituted the entire federal presence. Congress passed the Organic Act of 1884, creating a civil government with a governor and a federal judge, but the act explicitly denied Alaskans a territorial legislature or a delegate to Congress. The Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-1899 brought tens of thousands of prospectors to Alaska and the Yukon, overwhelming the territory's minimal government infrastructure. McKinley's imposition of military rule was a response to the lawlessness that accompanied the gold rush. Army officers served as administrators, judges, and peacekeepers in mining camps that had sprung up faster than civilian government could follow. The military administration lasted until 1912, when Congress passed a second Organic Act granting Alaska a territorial legislature. Alaska's indigenous populations, who had governed themselves for thousands of years before either Russia or the United States arrived, had no voice in any of these arrangements.