His will had,
as it were, the force and the fixity of fate; that will carried him
triumphantly through his military and civil career, and through the
difficulties of private life. So intense and incessantly active this
peculiar faculty was in him, that one would suppose that his mind was
nothing but will--a will so lofty that it towered into sublimity. In him
it supplied the place of genius--or, rather, it was almost genius. On
many occasions, in the course of his long, eventful life, when his
shattered constitution made his physicians despair of preserving him, he
seemed to continue to live merely because it was his will; and when his
unconquerable spirit departed from his enfeebled and worn-out body,
those who knew him well might almost have been tempted to suppose that
he had not been vanquished by death, but had at last consented to
repose. This man, when he took the command at New Orleans, had made up
his mind to beat the English; and, as that mind was so constituted that
it was not susceptible of entertaining much doubt as to the results of
any of its resolves, he went to work with an innate confidence which
transfused itself into the population he had been sent to protect.
* * * * *
=_Brantz Mayer, 1809-.
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