succeeded in setting on fire the American schooner which had
caused them such annoyance on the evening of the night attack;
but she had served her purpose, and her destruction caused little
anxiety to Jackson.

Having failed in his effort to batter down the American
breastworks, and the British artillery having been fairly worsted
by the American, Pakenham. decided to try open assault. He had
ten thousand regular troops, while Jackson had under him but
little over five thousand men, who were trained only as he had
himself trained them in his Indian campaigns. Not a fourth of
them carried bayonets. Both Pakenham and the troops under him
were fresh from victories won over the most renowned marshals of
Napoleon, andover soldiers that had proved themselves on a
hundred stricken fields the masters of all others in Continental
Europe. At Toulouse they had driven Marshal Soult from a position
infinitely stronger than that held by Jackson, and yet Soult had
under him a veteran army. At Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo, and San
Sebastian they had carried by open assault fortified towns whose
strength made the intrenchments of the Americans seem like the
mud walls built by children, though these towns were held by the
best soldiers of France. With such troops to follow him, and with
such victories behind him in the past, it did not seem possible
to Pakenham that the assault of the terrible British infantry
could be successfully met by rough backwoods riflemen fighting
under a general as wild and untrained as themselves.

He decreed that the assault should take place on the morning of
the eighth. Throughout the previous night the American officers
were on the alert, for they could hear the rumbling of artillery