Coolly, as though at a prize turkey shoot on a tavern green, the American riflemen fired into these masses of doomed men, and every bullet found its billet.
On the right of the line a gallant British onslaught led by Colonel Rennie swept over a redoubt and the American defenders died to a man.
But the British wave was halted and rolled back by a tempest of bullets from the line beyond, and the broken remnant joined the general retreat which was sounded by the British trumpeters.

An armistice was granted next day and in shallow trenches the dead were buried, row on row, while the muffled drums rolled in honor of three generals, seven colonels, and seventy-five other officers who had died with their men.

Behind the log walls and earthworks loafed the unkempt, hilarious heroes of whom only seventy-one had been killed or hurt, and no more than thirteen of these in the grand assault which Pakenham had led.

"Old Hickory" had told them that they could lick their weight in wildcats, and they were ready to agree with him.
Magnificent but useless, after all, excepting as a proud heritage for later generations and a vindication of American valor against odds, was this battle of New Orleans which was fought while the Salem ship, _Astrea_, Captain John Derby, was driving home to the westward with the news that a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent.

With a sense of mutual relief the United States and England had concluded a war in which neither nation had definitely achieved its aims.