The Americans [would be] little better than prisoners in their own country.

From The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory by Robert V. Remini.  Page 5.

It was a battle that changed the course of American history; a battle that convinced Americans they had earned the right to be independent and that their sovereignty would be respected once and for all around the globe; a battle that thundered a once-poor, wretchedly educated orphan boy into the White House.

The battle took place during the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States on the Plains of Chalmette, approximately ten miles south of New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Two armies faced each other. The attacking force consisted of roughly eight thousand disciplined regulars of the British army, including the Royal Fusiliers, Highlanders, Light Infantry, and Light Dragoons, a West Indian regiment, and sailors from the fleet anchored in the Gulf of Mexico. They expected to punch their way straight north to New Orleans, collect the “Beauty and Booty” that awaited them, and then head up the Mississippi Valley to join with British troops coming from Canada, effectively slicing the United States in two. As Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, put it, once the large seaport towns of America were “laid in ashes” and New Orleans captured, and the British had command of “all the rivers of the Mississippi valley and the Lakes . . . the Americans [would be] little better than prisoners in their own country.”

The defending army consisted of about four thousand frontiersmen, militiamen, regular soldiers, free men of color, Indians, pirates, and townspeople who were strung along a line from the Mississippi River to a cypress swamp and crouched behind a millrace ditch that had bales of cotton placed atop its northern edge.

It was January 8, 1815, and as the light of a new day dawned, a Congreve rocket, followed immediately by another, soared from behind the British line and hung for moments in midair before exploding over the field below. Red-coated officers ordered an advance; the disciplined veterans of the army of the Duke of Wellington rushed forward; the battle between these two armies began. When it was over, nothing for the young country would be the same.