John Spencer Cooper’s ROUGH NOTES OF SEVEN CAMPAIGNS IN PORTUGAL, SPAIN, FRANCE AND AMERICA DURING THE YEARS 1809-15

The author, Sergeant John Cooper, returned to England upon the surrender of French forces and was due for discharge but was shipped to America to fight in the battle of New Orleans in 1815. Cooper only wrote what he saw himself and was able to verify from the regimental Orderly Book.

This is part of his account of the British assault upon the American defensive positions:
“Another man, about ten or twelve files on my right, was smashed to pieces by a cannon ball. I felt something strike my cap; I took it off, and found a portion of his brains sticking to it, about the size of a marble. A young man on my left got a wound on the top of his head, and ran to the surgeon behind us: he was dressed and sent into his place again. Close to him, another man had his arm, near the shoulder, so badly fractured that it was taken out of the cup. A few yards behind sat a black man, with all the lower part of his face shot away; his eyes were gone, and the bones of his brow all jagged, and dripping blood. Near him, in a ditch, lay one of the 43rd, trying to hold in his bowels.”