The Battle of New Orleans

Would anyone believe that the War of 1812—the last time our nation fought England—would be news? Well it is. And not just because the battle occurred 200 years ago right now.
I was taught in school that, while the battle was a victory, it was also irrelevant because the peace treaty between the US & England ending the war had already been signed.
In reality, historians now say, the peace treaty was only as good as the paper it was written on.
The news is the big discovery in from British war records: A set of secret orders was given to Maj. Gen. Edward Pakenham, the commander of the British invasion of the Gulf Coast. They told Pakenham to fight on regardless of any peace deal & capture New Orleans.
We Americans don’t appreciate how close the British came to seizing New Orleans & radically changing the course of American history.
The British viewed the sale of the Louisiana territory by Napoleon Bonaparte to Thomas Jefferson as illegal. Great Britain “had never been reconciled with the loss of its colonies” in North America. “They planned to colonize Louisiana.”
The stand by Jackson & his makeshift army, then, takes on new meaning.
Almost 300 British soldiers were dead & almost six times as many were wounded, captured or missing after a multi-pronged attack by the British on the makeshift fortifications the Americans had erected on the two banks of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans. The defeat caused the British armada to retreat to Mobile & definitively ended the War of 1812, and the two countries never went to war again.