200 Years Ago--The Battle at New Orleans. No Parades? No Ceremonies? No Memory?

Anyone who has worked in the 19th century knows that the most important battle of the first half of the century was the Battle of New Orleans.

Elvis is important, but I guarantee you that Vernon and Gladys knew that he and Jesse Garon were born on the same day as the Battle of New Orleans.

a bit from MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE:

Auguste Davezac had led a remarkable life. Born in Santo Domingo in 1770, he was studying in France during the great uprising of 1791 in which two of his brothers were killed. The surviving members of the family fled to the new United States, settling in Louisiana, where Davezac rejoined them and studied law with Edward Livingston, of the prominent New York family, who became his brother-in-law. The great adventure of his life was being aide-de-camp to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and every American in the 1840s knew that whatever credit some precisionists gave to the Treaty of Ghent the war was really won at New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Jackson had sent Davezac to the Hague for much of the 30s as chargé d'affairs. As Jackson became more feeble and made fewer appearances even in Tennessee, Davezac was, by the 1840s, after his removal to New York, the living Manhattan connection to that still-recent battle which Americans cherished as ending the Second War for American Independence. At the dinner table in the Manhattan of the 1840s, with yet another war with England seeming imminent, over Oregon, that pasture ground for the bipedal American Buffalo, Davezac could tell intimate tales of Jackson and even tell about the legendary Jean Lafite (or “Lafitte”). Davezac was also a prominent literary man, capable of writing learnedly on Froissart's Chronicles in the November 1843 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one of his favorite places to publish. His contemporaries would have hooted at the idea that he was obscure. To be sure, Whigs could attribute his fame to his publicizing himself, as when Thurlow Weed in his Albany Evening Journal on November 12, 1844 referred to him as "glorification Davezac, who by his endless parrot songs of Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans" had "sickened and disgusted both friends and foes." (Everybody knew everybody: Melville gave Weed a copy of the Revised Typee in August 1846.)