A victory as never crowned the wars of the world: the Battle of New Orleans in American historical memory

Abstract

The year 1816 witnessed Americans around the country celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans with enthusiasm rarely paralleled in the early United States' young history. Over the next two centuries the idea of the battle became the tool of numerous politicians, social groups, and cultural movements each defining their version of the events legacy. Each successive generation of Americans have learned a new discriminate version of the narrative that met the socio-cultural needs of that time and place in the United States. Those individual iterations not only shaped the memory of the battle in the contemporary time of its development, but also influenced the iterations developed by later generations. Depictions of the battle as the triumph of the frontier farmer in the earlier national period set the stage for the rise of Andrew Jackson to the presidency. Jacksonian renditions of the battle alienated Whigs and forced them to cease commemorating the event. Almost two centuries of African-American exclusion from the battle's main narrative limited the ability of National Park Service personnel to reach out to that community even into the late twentieth century. Understanding these popular versions of the battle's narrative gives new insight into the generations of Americans that developed their version of their national history. Also, examining the consequences of the individual versions of history offers the chance to learn how historical commemoration effects the public's understanding of its history. This is especially timely as the two hundredth anniversary of the battle approaches and various agencies are already at work developing the latest version of this important time in American history.