by Taylor, Alan
The Chesapeake Campaign, 1814. Map by Jeffrey L. Ward after an original map by Robert Pratt, published in Ralph Eshelman and Burton K. Kummerow, In Full Glory Reflected: Discovering the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society Press, 2012). Note the greater number of shore raids and their concentration along the Potomac and Patuxent Rivers in northern Virginia and southern Maryland, in comparison to the previous year. This new pattern reflected the greater aggressiveness of the British and the priority given to preparations for an attack on Washington, D.C.
Cockburn sought to neutralize southern Maryland, converting its people and resources into British assets. He promised to protect civilians who wisely submitted but to plunder those who stubbornly resisted. To qualify for protection, the locals had to stay in their homes rather than rally as a militia to attack the raiders. The inhabitants also had to show trust in his protection, by keeping nearby their livestock, goods, and slaves. The British bought provisions and animals at the Baltimore market rate, but the owners had no choice but to sell to the raiders. Admiral Edward Codrington explained that his superior, Cockburn, meant “to do fair justice and to give due encouragement to such inhabitants as remain on their property & have shewn no disposition to act hostile towards us.” To prove that point, the British officers whipped a few sailors caught pillaging the properties of submissive civilians, who were compensated in money and invitations to watch the floggings. Some of the worst offenders were the camp women who lodged in the transport ships. In August 1814, Codrington ordered, “None of the women are to be permitted to leave their ships.”29
All bets were off, however, when inhabitants shot at the raiders or fled and hid away their animals, slaves, and valuables. Captain Rowley noted, “If they run away & stock driven off—then we hunt for [that] stock, drive it down to the boats & take it off as plunder & fire their houses.” Runaways often led the British to the hiding places of cattle and militiamen. On July 11, Cockburn reported, “The other day two Heroes on Horseback fired at one of my Lieut[enant]s when on Shore and then rode off as hard as they could.” A black informant identified the suspects and their homes, which lay about three miles inland. That night, a runaway guided Lieutenant James Scott’s raiding party, which surprised and captured the men and took away their livestock. After smashing the furniture, Scott desisted from burning the house only because of plaintive appeals from “the distressed mother and sister for mercy.” Cockburn predicted that this punitive raid would “induce Jonathan to be more guarded in his behavior towards us & to treat us in future with due Respect.”30
To intimidate resistance, the British also took away militiamen for imprisonment in distant and frosty Nova Scotia. When the raiders seized men at night from beds in their homes, American officials protested that the rules of civilized warfare exempted militiamen from capture when not on active duty. The officials also complained that the raiders seized some men too old for militia service, including one ninety-five-year-old Virginian. Codrington retorted that because President Madison had begun the war and sent troops to ravage Canada, “terror & suffering” had to “be brought home to the doors of his own fellow citizens” as “the one way to shorten this Yankee war.”31
The raiders found plenty of cooperation in southern Maryland, where antiwar Federalists prevailed. They despised the Republicans for declaring war and sending the regular troops away to invade Canada, leaving them defenseless. In June the Madison administration briefly posted a new regiment of regulars to defend the mouth of the Patuxent, but they proved worse than useless, for the indolent officers allowed their raw recruits to roam, “committing depredations, on the person & property of the Inhabitants,” in the words of Joshua Barney. Quickly withdrawn, the regulars left the local defense to the militiamen, who balked at risking their lives in a lost cause. After more than a year of frequent alarms and prolonged exposure to harsh weather, the militiamen were fed up. In St. Mary’s County, their commander found “a thinly scattered population dispirited by a destruction of their property, worn out by fatigue & militia duty.” Given the apparent folly of resisting the raids, most men felt that discretion would best protect their property.32
Preferring British to American protection, many Maryland farmers barred militiamen from their premises. The owners reasoned that the militia would flee in a panic once they had attracted British raiders, who would then punish the farmers by looting and burning their premises. The compromised planters included Colonel Michael Taney, a Federalist who commanded the Calvert County militia. By covertly selling his cattle to the British and by immobilizing his militia, Taney secured his mansion and plantation from raids. Despite this passivity, Maryland’s antiwar governor, Levin Winder, kept his fellow Federalists in charge of the militia in the southern counties.33
If the militiamen bothered to turn out, they usually stayed at a safe distance from the raiders. Barney described the militia as “here and there, but never where the enemy was.” After several forays deep into southern Maryland, the British Captain Joseph Nourse reported, “I have never, at any time when landed, seen more than one or two armed people of the Militia.” Cockburn exulted that the passive militia left “the whole of the fine Country in this Neighbourhood completely at our disposal and Mercy.” After just 120 British raiders marched unopposed seven miles inland and back, Barney declared, “The people are all frightened out of their senses, running about the country like so many mad people.” In mid-August, a planter complained that the British felt so secure that after marching through St. Mary’s County, the officers “amused themselves at nine pins for an hour or two” before returning to their ships.”34
Disgusted by the local passivity, Barney charged the Federalists with sabotage and treason. He insisted that more inhabitants gathered to loot a beached American gunboat than to repel the British raiders. Rather than defend his flotilla, some locals fed information and supplies to the British and sabotaged a cannon at Benedict by spiking it. Barney dared not send an officer to scout the lower reaches of the river “for he would be betrayed by our internal foes, such is my situation.” He arrested one militia officer as an avid Federalist and suspected spy, but the secretary of the navy ordered the man’s release, deeming it virtually impossible to prove treason in a civil court.35
The local Federalists blamed Barney for provoking the British raids, and they saw no reason to risk their lives and farms to defend his gunboats. After losing property to a British raid, Thomas B. King denounced Barney as driven by Republican politics rather than military duty when he shifted his gunboats into the Patuxent: “as he knew Calvert, St. Mary’s, Charles, and Prince George’s Count[ies] were all Federalist, he thought it would be the means of making them all advocates of old Jim Madison, but . . . I think when I tell you the mischief the British have done it will be enough to make you and every man abuse Jim Madison and old Barney in Hell.” King ascribed every runaway, stolen cow, and burned barn to Barney’s attempt to force the southern Marylanders to fight the British.36
But submission to the British often failed to buy the promised protection, for Cockburn’s discrimination between the passive and the resistant broke down in practice. On July 30 at Chaptico in St. Mary’s County, the inhabitants did not resist, and Cockburn later boasted that he had protected their property. One of his captains reported, “The men all fled but the Ladies remained to see the wonderful Admiral Cockburn and the British folks.” If so, they saw Cockburn’s men ransack the village, breaking windows and wrenching off doors to steal their metal hinges. They even trashed the Episcopal church, shattering the windows, breaking the pipe organ and communion table, and ransacking the tombs in search of buried jewelry. One plundered tomb belonged to the family of Francis Scott Key, who would soon write the defiant “Star-Spangled Banner.”37
Driven to free and recruit as many runaways as possible, the raiders also took slaves away from any owner, no matter how submissive. John Rousby Plater surrendered his Sotterley Plantation to British power an
d obtained Cockburn’s pledge of protection, but forty-eight of the colonel’s slaves still left with the raiders. Colonel Taney’s tacit cooperation saved his buildings but not his slaves, whom the British welcomed as runaways. Barns and warehouses filled with tobacco also attracted indiscriminate looting because that commodity promised such rich profits to the naval officers.38
Many officers tolerated rampant plundering because they felt contempt for submissive Americans as dishonorable money-grubbers. One naval officer recalled a cooperative farmer on the Potomac: “He had two daughters, rather homely, and as uncouth as himself. They . . . seemed to know and care very little about what was going on; offered us a glass of peach brandy, and hoped the Britishers would not carry off their negroes, which appeared to be their only apprehension.” Lieutenant Scott disdained another farmer who offered to prostitute his comely daughters to the British officers if they would not take his cattle. In fact, the Britons came to buy them, to the man’s delight: “The farmer fairly gloated over his dollars as he counted them by tens into his bag, and offered, with the most cringing servility, to supply us with whatever quantity of cattle we might want.”39
British officers also promoted looting as an antidote to desertion. After one raid, a Marylander noted, “Their Men did not desert here nor will they so long as they can plunder unmolested. Plunder secures their fidelity.” After robbing Americans, the British sailors and marines became less inclined to join them. Previously rampant, British desertion dwindled during the profitable summer raids of 1814.40
Despite their broken promises, the British pacified southern Maryland as far north as the village of Benedict on the Patuxent. If the locals could not abide British domination, they fled with their livestock, slaves, and furniture. A Baltimore newspaper lamented that a tract fifty miles long by twenty wide had been “conquered” with “many families moving up north, literally choaking the roads with hungry fugitives of all colours and ages.” In August, Cockburn boasted that the inhabitants had “learnt that it is wiser for them to submit entirely to our Mercy than to attempt to oppose us in Arms. They very readily complied with whatever Directions I gave for the line of Conduct they were to adopt, and the Supplies they were to furnish to our Forces.” He felt amused when people begged for his permission to leave home to visit a relative or deliver a few geese to another farm: “In short, it is quite ridiculous the perfect Dominion we have from the Entrance of this River to Benedict.”41
Northern Neck
Cockburn alternated raids on southern Maryland with attacks on the Northern Neck of Virginia, primarily the counties of Westmoreland and Northumberland, which stretched for about 100 miles along the lower Potomac River. Prosperous in the colonial era, the Northern Neck had stagnated after the revolution as decades of cropping and erosion had depleted the fertility of the soil. Relatively poor and very rural, the region was a low priority for defense compared to the more populous and prosperous cities of Norfolk, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. A Northern Neck writer denounced the federal and state governments’ “false principle of economy and a cruel indifference” for abandoning the Northern Neck to “an exasperated foe and rebellious slaves.” Owing to “that fallacious and miserable argument which has caused all our evils—the calculating [of] dollars and cents,” both governments treated the region as too vulnerable to defend and too poor to bother with.42
The Northern Neck enticed the British as an especially vulnerable target with many slaves for liberation. The dispersed militia struggled to assemble before the mobile raiders could strike and withdraw to their ships. Westmoreland County had only 580 militiamen, and many were sick with the summer malaria. The militia grew weaker still as more farmers gave up and fled, removing their livestock and slaves. Colonel Richard E. Parker reported, “In many places corn fields are deserted and turned out, and every appearance of insecurity and wretchedness exhibited.” While guarding the many waterways to resist the British, the hard-pressed militiamen also had to watch a restive local majority of slaves.43
As in southern Maryland, the British promised to protect the passive and threatened to punish resistance. A Northern Neck man recognized “that they intended to lay the country waste—that those who remained at home, would be treated well and their property respected, but all who fled, or joined the militia, should become the peculiar objects of their vengeance.” Despite this threat, the Northern Neck Federalists as well as Republicans united against the raiders, unlike the Marylanders on the other side of the Potomac. In response, the raiders destroyed nearly all of the houses on their marches into the Northern Neck. During 1814, Westmoreland and Northumberland suffered far more raids, destruction, and lost slaves than the rest of Virginia’s Tidewater counties combined.44
On July 20, about 1,000 British marines and armed sailors landed to seize and ransack the village at Nomini Ferry. “Everything in this neighbourhood was . . . destroyed or brought off, and after Visiting the Country in several other Directions, covering the Escape of the Negroes who were anxious to join us, we quitted the River at dark and returned to the Ships carrying with us 135 Refugee Negroes,” Cockburn reported.45
At dawn on August 3, five hundred raiders landed at the mouth of Yeocomico River, where the militia commander, Captain William Henderson, had only one cannon and forty men. A British captain reported, “The boats grounded, the troops were out in an instant, though up to their hips in the water and [exposed to] galling fire, away we dashed.” The militia “fled in all directions,” and the British captured another prize cannon. Pushing inland, the victors plundered and burned fifteen homes along the six-mile route to Henderson’s home and store, which they also looted and torched. A nearby resident, Walter Jones, reported that the raiders “were joined by far the greater number of negroes, who were near their path.”46
During the afternoon, the British barges ascended the river to the village of Kinsale, where the raiders found a large militia force occupying a ridge. Colonial Marines led the British charge that took the ridge, killing eight militiamen and scattering the rest. After plundering and burning the village and three old schooners, the raiders withdrew with their plunder loaded on five other captured vessels. “The Buccaneers spared nothing at Kinsale but the hovel of a poor old negro woman,” complained one militia officer.47
By mid-August the British had devastated the Northern Neck. A resident lamented, “We are all here in the utmost confusion; houses and farms deserted, women and children living in tents in the woods. Every one has either deserted his neighborhood of the water or is in the militia.” General Hungerford complained, “Unless the Government will give this quarter more effectual aid, the ruffian system of warfare carried on by the enemy . . . will light up one universal conflagration throughout these counties.”48
Poison
By dominating southern Maryland and ravaging the Northern Neck, the British bred desperation among their foes. Angered by the destruction and frustrated by their weakness, some Americans concluded that the British deserved destruction by any means. At Benedict on June 17 and Nomini Ferry on July 20, the raiders found poisoned liquors left behind by retreating militiamen. At Benedict, the plot appalled a leading man, Clement Dorsey, who warned the British commander that at least one, and up to four, casks of whiskey had been tainted. Dorsey sought to prevent the British from burning the village in retaliation, but the naval officers had already staved the whiskey casks to keep their men from getting drunk. Thereafter, a British officer recalled, when his men found food or drink left behind, “we used to force the natives to eat a part first, that, in the event of its being poisoned, they might die with the Britishers.”49
A month later at Nomini Ferry, after routing the local militia, the British found glasses and a liquor bottle left on the porch of a house. Recalling the Benedict episode, Lieutenant Scott grew suspicious when he noticed that the glasses had not been used and that the bottle was full. A runaway slave confirmed that a militiaman had poisoned the alcohol, so the British burned the house
and put up a nearby placard declaring their reason. Retreating to their barges, the British burned every house en route. Years later Scott claimed that a naval surgeon had examined the bottle and found “a very large quantity of arsenic,” but in 1814 Cockburn regretted that the suspected bottle had been smashed before it could be tested.50
Probably the act of a rogue individual, the poisoning embarrassed the militia Commanders Hungerford and Parker, who convened an investigation by a panel of their officers, who cleared their superiors by denying that the liquor had been tainted. Parker claimed that he had taken a parting drink and had suffered no ill effects. Hungerford’s aide, John Taylor Lomax, also derided any reliance on the word of a black man: “That it was very probable that a slave in the moment of his liberation, might wish to excite as angry and vindictive a spirit as possible, in the bosoms of the enemies to his former masters.” More inclined to believe a slave than a Virginian, Cockburn dismissed the investigation’s report with contempt.51
The poisoning episodes compounded the British disdain for their foes as devious and dishonorable. The naval officers vowed to take a fuller revenge in their next and biggest attack: on the national capital of the despised republic. Captain Nourse longed “to burn Washington, and I hope soon to put the first torch to it myself.” With southern Maryland pacified and the Northern Neck devastated, the route to Washington lay open.52
Fire
During the spring, Cochrane had expected reinforcement by 20,000 veteran troops from Europe, but instead he got only 3,700 and not until mid-August. The modest numbers argued for restraint as did the caution of the newly arrived army general, Robert Ross, who cited his orders from Earl Bathurst to avoid risky battles and heavy casualties from “extended operations at a distance from the coast.” As a newcomer, Ross also lacked the burning contempt for Americans that Cockburn and Cochrane had developed during their operations in the Chesapeake.53
