In Memory of Major Samuel Spotts

Samuel Spotts was born in Philadelphia on November 30, 1788, and entered the Army as a second lieutenant in 1812. He served under Jackson in the Creek and Seminole wars and was brevetted captain at New Orleans. In 1829 he received a brevet as major, dated to January 8, 1825, and became Assessor of the Port of New Orleans. He died in the city on July 11, 1833, reportedly of cholera, and was buried near the battlefield three decades before the national cemetery opened. Accounts place him at Battery Six with a twelve-pounder, and the first-shot story is tradition.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chalmette Battlefield — 0.3 mi
  The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.
• The Cabildo — 4.3 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 4.3 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Batteries Two and Three — steps away
• After the Battle — steps away
• Choctaw Nation — steps away
• U.S. Marines — steps away