Buchanan makes other errors in Jackson's favor, too. He attributes great military significance, for example, to the Battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, which Jackson won. But Jackson's victory, while important symbolically, came after a peace treaty was signed. Buchanan, it seems, feels an affinity with the notoriously pugilistic Scotch-Irish general, and so he bends history to make Jackson more heroic. Jackson's troops at New Orleans were a ragtag brigade of free blacks, Choctaw Indians, and assorted white Southerners, so Buchanan, ever styling himself the populist, contrasts this "all-American army" favorably against the effete troops whose losses in Washington allowed the British to torch the White House. But it was really the Northerners' victories, at Fort McHenry and elsewhere, that led to the Treaty of Ghent.