When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  They were married in September 1794, and so began one of the most unlikely but successful Presidential partnerships in American history – the thoughtful, preoccupied husband and the outgoing, vivacious wife. ‘Her smile, her conversation, and her manners are so engaging’, remarked one congressman, ‘that it is no wonder that such a young widow with her fine blue eyes … should indeed be a queen of hearts.’ George Washington met her at a Washington party in 1795 and remarked afterwards, ‘Mrs Madison was the sprightliest partner I’ve ever had.’ ‘She was humble-minded, tolerant and sincere,’ wrote her grand-niece Lucy Cutts, ‘but with a desire to please and willingness to be pleased which made her popular, and always a great friend and support to her husband.’ She called him her ‘darling little husband’; she combed his hair and wrote letters to him when he was ill. After James had won the Presidential election in 1808, his defeated opponent, Charles Pinkney, remarked, ‘I was beaten by Mr and Mrs Madison … I might have had a better chance had I faced Mr Madison alone.’

  When James became President in 1809, Dolley redecorated Jefferson’s dowdy White House with sumptuous furnishings: Jefferson’s study was reborn as the State Dining Room with a large portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart as its centrepiece. Dolley Madison’s drawing room adjoined the State Dining Room: it was elegantly furnished with pieces rather more delicate than the giant sideboard next door. The main, much larger drawing room stood in the centre of the south front with a door opening on to the terrace. Dolley embellished it with elegant mahogany furniture and rich red velvet curtains, which cost her a crippling $4 a yard. They were matched by red velvet cushions on the newly designed Grecian-style chairs; each chair bore a gilded and varnished US coat of arms.

  Each Wednesday the Madisons held an open house which became famous for its informality and the easy way in which Dolley drew together people of all political persuasions. While the President would retire to a corner to talk politics, his wife would be chatting to everyone, an unmistakable focus of fun and fashion. She was blessed with a rich memory. One guest observed that she always found time to speak to everyone and never forgot a name. At one drawing-room party she wore a pale buff-coloured velvet dress with a very long train, a Parisian turban of the same buff-coloured velvet and white satin, with two Bird of Paradise plumes, and a pearl necklace, earrings and bracelets. Her friend Margaret Bayard Smith wrote that ‘she looked like a queen’. Washington Irving described her as a ‘fine, portly, buxom dame, who has a smile and pleasant word for everybody’. Dolley had a passion for ice cream, which was generously served at her parties, and she was often seen to take a pinch of snuff from a little silver box she carried around. One of her guests observed that she was ‘not in the least a prude, as she once told an old bachelor and held up her mouth for him to kiss’. By 1814 Dolley Madison’s ‘drawing rooms’ had become an established part of fashionable life in Washington.

  One of the ironies of the time was that the White House was largely staffed by slaves. Even the country estate owned by one of the prime architects of America’s liberal constitution, the comfortable Madison family mansion at Montpelier in Virginia, housed 120 slaves. Like two other early Presidents with tobacco plantations in Virginia, Washington and Jefferson, Madison depended on slave labour. However uneasy the deeply principled James Madison might have been about slavery, he felt he had no choice. He and his wife treated their slaves with obvious humanity, but they never freed them. Madison’s own personal servant, Paul Jennings, was devoted to his master. He later wrote that he never saw Madison lose his temper and ‘never knew him to strike a slave; neither would he allow an overseer to do it’. If a slave was reported as stealing, rather than punish the man Madison would have a private talk with him.

  Each year as the busy Washington social season drew to a close in the summer, the Madisons would spend some time at their country house Montpelier 100 miles to the south-west. Their elegant Georgian mansion, which still commands a tranquil view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, offered a welcome retreat from the heat and bustle of Washington – particularly in wartime. But in 1814, after a break there in May, they spent the summer in the White House. Too many alarm bells were ringing in the capital.

  Well before the British fleet arrived in the Chesapeake, warning of London’s newly aggressive attitude had reached Washington. A senior American envoy exploring peace prospects in London wrote to a colleague in Washington that the end of the war in Europe and the defeat of Napoleon had transformed the situation. ‘A well-organized and large army is at once liberated from any European employment, and ready, together with a superabundant naval force, to act immediately against us. How ill prepared we are to meet it in a proper manner no one knows better than yourself.’ We hear that there are voices in Britain which ‘revel in the idea of burning the cities and towns, the mills and manufactories of that country [the United States]; at the very least, they talk of forcing Mr Madison from his seat and new modeling the government’.

  James Madison knew very well how ill prepared America was for a determined attack from Britain. In the first two years of the war his forces had at least managed to hold their own against the might of the British empire. Fighting on land had been indecisive, and at sea in a number of encounters American warships had done notably well. But things were already changing. The British were reinforcing their army in Canada, and the havoc Cockburn’s squadron was causing much nearer home was becoming intolerable. Many Washingtonians blithely dismissed the idea that the British would strike as far inland as the new capital. But the Madisons had watched Cockburn’s raids with deepening anxiety. As early as the spring of 1813 Dolley wrote to her cousin about the ‘fears and alarms that circulate around me’. She said people were expressing ‘reproach’ that her husband’s government was not doing enough to prepare. Quite the contrary, she said, ‘considerable efforts’ were being made for defence and she added that, although she was a Quaker, ‘I have always been an advocate for fighting when assailed…’ As for Cockburn, rumours were flying around that he was threatening to burn the White House over her head and carry her off to London to parade her in the streets. Dolley said she wasn’t one to ‘tremble’ at any threat Cockburn might make. By the summer of 1814 she was more concerned about threats to her husband, the President, than to herself. ‘I am not in the least alarmed at these things but entirely disgusted and determined to stay with him.’

  James Madison’s reaction to Cockburn’s depredations was to seek the help of someone who was already an American naval hero, Joshua Barney. He would now play a spectacular role in the events of summer 1814. Born in a coastal village in Maryland in 1759, Barney angered his father by announcing at the age of ten that he’d had enough of school and wanted to go to sea. His father managed to resist for only two years, and at the age of twelve Barney was a sailor on his brother-in-law’s brig. By the time he was fifteen he had established such a command over his fellow crewmen that he became captain when his brother-in-law died on the voyage. In the American War of Independence Barney led a daredevil life of adventure as an American privateer. He seized a number of British ships, and when captured himself and locked up in a British gaol in Plymouth he escaped dressed as a British officer. In 1782 he was sent to Paris to deliver papers to the US mission there. We are told by Barney’s biographer, his daughter-in-law Mary, that Queen Marie Antoinette was so impressed by the young naval officer that instead of offering him her hand to kiss she offered her cheek. Once Britain and America were at peace Barney found himself in Napoleon’s navy and still capturing British ships. But with the start of the War of 1812 he was back in America skippering a privateer schooner, the Rossie, which seized no fewer than eighteen British ships in four months. With a record like that it was hardly surprising that, when Barney suggested building a special flotilla of shallow-draught barges to fight Cockburn’s marauding British fleet in Chesapeake Bay, President Madison agreed. His Naval Secretary, William Jones, wrote to Barney: ‘Your force is our principal shiel
d and all eyes will be upon you.’ ‘I am anxious to be at them,’ Barney replied.

  The idea was that Barney’s barges, which were built over the winter of 1813–14, would be able to harass and perhaps disable Cockburn’s warships in the shallow waters in and around Chesapeake Bay. Barney’s and Cockburn’s ships clashed twice in the River Patuxent on the west side of the bay in June 1814. The battles were a disappointment for both sides. Barney’s men fought bravely but they managed to do little damage to the bigger British warships. And each time the British gave chase, Barney’s flat-bottomed barges retreated into shallow water. By the end of June Barney’s flotilla was tucked away so far up the river that the British were unable to get near it. It was secure enough but impotent. Madison had no effective floating naval force to counter the enemy armada that might sail into view any day.

  As warnings of a substantially increased British threat reached him that summer, Madison’s most important task was to make sure that the country’s defences were in order and that the right people were in command. And this is where Madison got it spectacularly wrong. There were three key people in positions of power under the President. The most controversial of the three was the fifty-five-year-old John Armstrong, whom Madison had appointed Secretary of War eighteen months earlier. He was intellectually able but an arrogant man, who, as Tacitus famously said of the flawed Roman Emperor Galba, appeared to everyone to be capable of ruling until he tried it.* Both Jefferson and Madison gave Armstrong jobs that he notably failed in. His main weakness was his abrasive, intolerant and occasionally indolent personality. He began his life opposed to the old Jeffersonian Republican party. The principled view of Republicans like Jefferson and Madison was that a standing army could threaten the democratic will of the people. They were determined to resist pressures for the powerful central government which their Federalist opponents demanded. The Republican party was strong in the centre and south of the country, the Federalists in the north-east. Armstrong started as a Federalist from Pennsylvania and believed in a strong central state with a regular army. His views changed over the years and by the time he was forty he described himself as a Democratic Republican. Jefferson appointed him Minister to France in 1804 but his high-handedness soured relations between the two countries. Things got so bad that Napoleon complained that the American government was ‘not represented here; that its minister does not know French; is a morose man with whom one cannot treat’.

  When war broke out with Britain, Armstrong became a brigadier general and, because Madison wanted support from the northern states, he appointed him Secretary of War in 1813. Armstrong won approval for speeding up the promotion of some promising young officers, but soon lost it again when he massively overstepped his powers by taking command of the army fighting British Canada on the Great Lakes. It didn’t help: the campaign was a failure. In 1814 he again interfered in the northern campaign which was as inconclusive as it had been the year before. Madison had every reason to dismiss Armstrong, but he didn’t. He did however issue an order on 13 August 1814 reducing Armstrong’s powers in a number of areas, which only served further to worsen the fragile relationship between the President and his War Secretary.

  All this led to increasing tension between Madison and the second key figure in his administration – James Monroe, his Secretary of State. Monroe, a highly ambitious and very competent man, had long loathed Armstrong. Monroe was another Virginian, like Madison and Jefferson. Unlike Madison he had distinguished himself as a soldier in the Revolutionary War. He had made his mark too as a diplomat: he had been America’s Minister in London and Paris. Aged fifty-six in 1814, he was tall, with a healthy physique and broad shoulders. He tied his hair at the back with a black ribbon. His gaze was strikingly clear and direct. Jefferson thought him so honest that ‘if you turned his soul inside out there would not be a spot on it’. Whether Monroe was jealous of Armstrong or just downright disapproved of him, he did everything in his power to persuade Madison to dismiss him. When Armstrong took over command in the north, Monroe wrote to the President arguing that it was dangerous for a government minister to perform the duties of a lieutenant general. The constitution, he pointed out, demanded a separation of powers. By December 1813 Monroe was going even further – telling Madison that Armstrong was corrupt, promising officers promotion in order to win their support. ‘It is painful for me to make this communication to you nor should I do it if I did not most conscientiously believe that this man if continued in office will ruin not you and the administration only but the whole republican party and cause.’ If this dysfunctional relationship between two key members of his cabinet was not bad enough, Madison made one further disastrous mistake. In the belief that the American capital was at risk from any British attack on the mainland, he appointed Brigadier General William Winder the commander of a new military district which comprised the two vital cities of Washington and Baltimore. Winder was the nephew of Levin Winder, the Federalist Governor of Maryland, the state that surrounded Washington DC. Madison no doubt believed that Maryland’s support would be critical if Washington were threatened by a British invasion and so he may have believed that the elevation of the Governor’s nephew might help secure the capital. William Winder, a somewhat insecure thirty-nine-year-old, had only limited military experience. But the omens were hardly promising. He had succeeded in getting himself captured in a clash with the British a year earlier. Madison was promoting an undistinguished soldier to buy a political favour.

  The President appointed Winder without consulting his Secretary of War, John Armstrong. He was already beginning to doubt Armstrong’s competence for the job, although he still stopped short of taking Monroe’s advice and dismissing him. Armstrong was naturally upset. He also believed, rightly, that Winder was completely unsuitable for the job. He resented the fact that Madison had ignored the candidate he’d suggested. The scene was set for an administrative catastrophe. The Secretary of State and Secretary of War despised each other, and both of them believed they had more military competence than the man their President had appointed Commander in Chief.

  It was against this unpromising background that James Madison called a meeting of his top advisers at the White House on 1 July. The curious paradox was that of the four men with responsibility for the defence of the capital it was the man with the least military experience, Madison himself, who was the most concerned. He had told a colleague in June that what might prompt the British to make Washington a target was its weakness and the ‘éclat that would attend a successful inroad upon the capital, beyond the intrinsic magnitude of the achievement’. The President had written to Armstrong as early as 20 May 1814 that of all the places likely to be targets for British attack ‘the seat of government cannot fail to be a favourite one’. Armstrong didn’t believe Washington was in any danger. He had done little or nothing as Secretary of War to provide for coastal defences or any plan to obstruct an enemy advance on the capital. Monroe didn’t yet seem too worried. As for William Winder, it was only after he got his feet under his desk that he suddenly woke up to the enormity of the task before him if an enemy were to advance on the capital.

  The problem was that the United States had no ready force to confront such an emergency. The regular army – in line with the governing Republican party’s long-held suspicion of a standing army – was small and mainly occupied in the north on the Canadian border. There were in theory over 90,000 men in the country’s militia who could be summoned. They were drafted able-bodied men, who mustered for training only once or twice a year. There were volunteer companies as well – young lads eager for action, dressed in a wide variety of exotic uniforms, as rich in enthusiasm as they were poor in professional military skills. But they were not easily assembled, particularly if the call was from a different state. Winder’s problem was that the militia were the property of the states, not of the central federal government. The most available of the militia, Maryland’s, up to 6,000 strong, was already being deployed in defence o
f Maryland’s main city Baltimore by Governor Winder. He understood his nephew’s predicament, but the state of Maryland was his main concern. The unfortunate William Winder had even less success with Pennsylvania, whose 5,000 militiamen turned out to be unavailable because the state’s militia law had expired. An assistant to Pennsylvania’s Governor wrote apologetically to Winder that the ‘deranged state of our militia system prevented a more prompt compliance’. Winder spent the next few weeks desperately working on Virginia’s Governor for a contribution of 2,000 men and continuing to press Maryland’s. Armstrong suspected that the Virginians were more concerned to guard against possible slave risings on their plantations than against any attack on the nation’s cities.

  But it was worse than that. When Winder looked to Armstrong, his political boss, for help, he got none. On 9 July he wrote a plaintive letter to Armstrong saying that as things were going he was being promised only a very small force to defend his territory if the British appeared. ‘Should Washington, Baltimore or Annapolis be their object, what possible chance will there be of collecting a force, after the arrival of the enemy, to interpose between them and either of these places?’ And he went on: ‘If the enemy’s force should be strong, which, if it come, it will be, sufficient numbers of militia could not be warned and run together even as a disorderly crowd, without arms, ammunition, or organization, before the enemy would already have given his blow.’ Winder then went on to appeal to Armstrong to call out 4,000 militia without delay. He got no immediate reply. And throughout the next six weeks, his appeals to Armstrong fell on deaf ears. Since the Secretary of War did not believe there was a threat to Washington, he was going to do as little as he could to provide men or equipment to Winder, whom he anyway resented and despised. Armstrong said he believed the best way to instill fighting spirit in the militia was to field them only when the enemy actually appeared in view. Winder complained that the Secretary of War was for using the militia only ‘on the spur of the moment’.