by Peter Snow
In the interval between the flight of the US army and the British advance, American looters had moved into the vacuum and snatched what they could find in places like the White House and the Navy Yard. As the British approached, the looters vanished, and Ross sought to exert a measure of control. He appeared determined to prevent his men being accused of plundering private houses, and he issued orders that looting should be outlawed. We know of at least one British officer who later won the respect and gratitude of the Americans for carrying out Ross’s orders. Major Norman Pringle was detailed with his company of grenadiers to protect private property on Pennsylvania Avenue. One American old soldier who talked to the local community after the British had left noted that Pringle carried out his task ‘faithfully and successfully’. There were even accounts of British soldiers, who were caught looting, being lashed or shot.*
One Washington resident, William Gardner, leant out of his window as the British were passing and addressed Cockburn. ‘I hope, Sir, that individuals and private property will be respected.’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ replied Cockburn, ‘we pledge our sacred honour that the citizens and private property shall be respected. Be under no apprehension. Our advice to you is to remain at home. Do not quit your houses.’ Cockburn then went on to ask where President Madison was. Gardner replied that he was probably a long way off. ‘We have got your Commodore Barney prisoner with us,’ said Cockburn. ‘So I have heard, Sir, and that he is badly wounded.’ ‘Yes, Sir, he is badly wounded but I am happy to say not mortally. He is a brave man and depend upon it, he shall be treated with the greatest humanity and kindness.’ At which Ross, who was riding beside Cockburn, added: ‘Yes, Sir, he shall be taken good care of.’
Ross stopped at a street corner just 200 yards short of the White House, where a boarding house overlooked the Presidential mansion. It was owned by Barbara Suter, an elderly lady who had two sons serving with the American forces, one a soldier, the other a sailor who’d fought with Joshua Barney and been wounded at Bladensburg. ‘It was’, said Mrs Suter, ‘a whole week of great trouble.’ She said she remembered ‘hardly sleeping at night, and all the day time spent in fright’. She was alone in the house with just a servant when suddenly it was surrounded by soldiers whom she first mistook for Americans. But then an officer walked in and introduced himself as General Ross saying he had ‘come, madam, to sup with you’. She told him she hadn’t any food in the house and that he’d do better to go across to Macleod’s Tavern where they’d be able to look after him. Ross replied that Macleod’s Tavern wouldn’t do because it didn’t overlook the public buildings as her house did. He told her he’d like her to prepare supper for himself and a few other officers who’d come back later. Trembling with fear, Barbara Suter and her servant reckoned they had no choice but to warm up some bread and go out and kill the chickens in the yard.
11
The dreadful majesty of the flames
24 August, night
IT WAS AROUND an hour before midnight on Wednesday 24 August. A small detachment of British soldiers led by George Cockburn and Robert Ross, accompanied by their staff officers, crossed the road and approached the supreme sanctum of American power. The White House was dark, deserted and unprotected. Arthur Brooke, one of Ross’s brigade commanders, wrote later that he found it hard to believe the Americans ‘would tamely allow a handful of British soldiers to advance into the heart of their country and burn and destroy the capital of the United States’. Allen McLane, a senior military aide to William Winder, was just one of many American participants who felt that the British could have been stopped before they reached this far. ‘I could see many opportunities lost,’ he was to write later. Proper use of Winder’s and Barney’s forces earlier should have crippled the enemy’s advance. ‘A legion of … troops … could have entered Washington and have routed Ross, Cockburn and as many of the incendiaries, drunk on the night of the conflagration, as they pleased to select…’ but just about every chance had been missed. ‘Such reflections’, said McLane, ‘are too mortifying to dwell on.’
Ross and Cockburn entered the mansion of the fourth President of the United States as easily as if they’d been invited guests. It was by far the finest and most elegant building in Washington. If Presidents like Madison and Jefferson had had their way, it would have been a much more modest home in line with their view that the American republic and its leaders should have no pretensions to all the pomp and opulence of the old British monarchy. But the White House was the brainchild of George Washington, America’s first President, who wanted to see a residence that would be the centrepiece of his new city – matching the grandeur of the Capitol at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And Washington decreed that the President’s House would be built of stone not of brick, the material used in nearly every other fashionable dwelling in the republic. Washington’s chosen architect, James Hoban, an Irishman from Kilkenny, designed him the fine Anglo-Palladian building with its ornate stonework decoration that is still – with the exception of the later porticoes, north and south – the essence of today’s White House. Hoban’s work was overseen by three commissioners including William Thornton, whose enthusiasm and persistence helped ensure that it was completed in time for America’s second President, John Adams, to take up residence there in 1800. It required a team of specially imported Scottish stonemasons to craft the intricate detail of Hoban’s decorative stonework. And it wasn’t just the ornamentation that was built to last, it was the very fabric of the building itself. The sandstone from the Aquia quarries in Virginia formed the outer layer sixteen inches thick. Inside that would be an inner lining of clay bricks around twenty-four inches thick. And the insides of the walls were lathed and plastered. To seal the porous sandstone, the exterior was coated with several layers of whitewash. Washington didn’t live to see the building completed. The cornerstone was laid in October 1792; Washington died in 1799, a year before his successor, President Adams, moved into the finished building in November 1800.
This was the magnificent mansion, fourteen years old by this time and lovingly furnished by Dolley Madison, that Cockburn, Ross and their staff now explored by torchlight. And they were immediately struck by the smell of cooked food emanating from the Dining Room in the south-west corner of the ground floor and the kitchen near by. None of them had eaten properly since an early breakfast around five or six that morning. None of them imagined they would be treated to a feast prepared for a President.
‘We found the cloth laid for the expected victorious generals, and all the appliances and means to form a feast worthy of the resolute champions of republican freedom,’ wrote James Scott. The table was laid for forty. Paul Jennings, Madison’s manservant, had done his job well. He had set the table with a damask tablecloth, matching napkins, silver and delicate wineglasses. ‘Several kinds of wine in handsome cut glass decanters were cooling on the sideboard; plate holders stood by the fireplace, filled with dishes and plates; knives, forks and spoons were arranged for immediate use…’ – Gleig, who wasn’t an eyewitness himself, had the scene described to him in great detail. In the kitchen, he tells us, ‘spits loaded with joints of various sorts turned before the fire; pots, saucepans and other culinary utensils stood upon the grate; and all the other requirements for an elegant and substantial repast were in the exact state which indicated they had been lately and precipitately abandoned’. Harry Smith, who was there, recalled, ‘We found supper all ready, which was sufficiently cooked … and which many of us speedily consumed unaided by the fiery elements and drank some very good wine also.’
Scott walked over to where he saw the wines cooling in ice together with what he described as ‘a large store of super excellent Madeira’. He helped himself to at least one generous glassful. ‘Fagged nearly to death, dusty, feverish, and thirsty, in my extremity I absolutely blessed them for their erring providence. Never was nectar more grateful to the palates of the gods, than the crystal goblet of Madeira and water I quaffed at Mr Madison’s expense.’ Someone,
possibly Cockburn, then proposed a toast to ‘peace with America and down with Madison’.
Robert Ross himself relished the irony of America’s successful invaders enjoying the defeated President’s hospitality. ‘The fare … intended for Jonathan was voraciously devoured by John Bull, and the health of the Prince Regent, and success to his Majesty’s arms by sea and land, was drunk in the best wines, Madison having taken to his heels…’
Cockburn had met a young American bookseller, Roger Weightman, in the street and insisted on the man accompanying the British party into the White House. There Cockburn teased him mercilessly and made him drink the health of ‘Jemmy’ Madison. Then the British party explored the White House to look for a few souvenirs. In the President’s dressing room upstairs they noticed a lot of drawers half opened with contents spilling on the floor: they reckoned it was either the work of local pilferers earlier or the results of Dolley’s rush to grab what she could before she escaped. Cockburn told Weightman that he could take something ‘to remember the day’. The terrified and baffled bookseller reached for something that was obviously valuable, no doubt hoping to save it. But Cockburn, whether to avoid being accused of looting or just to taunt the young man further, said, ‘No No … that I must give to the flames.’ Weightman had to settle for an armful of trinkets Cockburn gave him from the mantelpiece. Cockburn then helped himself to one of Madison’s hats and snatched a cushion from Dolley Madison’s chair, saying with a smirk that it would remind him of ‘her seat’.
James Scott went off on his own private scavenge. He went upstairs and tried on one of Madison’s shirts. ‘I accordingly doffed my inner garment, and thrust my unworthy person into a shirt belonging to no less a personage than the chief magistrate of the United States: the operation equalled in luxury and benefit the draught in the banqueting room.’ One contemporary letter writer, Phoebe Morris, claimed that the British ‘ruffians tore down’ a portrait of Dolley Madison in her private sitting room ‘and swore that they would “keep Dolley safe and exhibit her in London”’. A twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in the 85th Light Infantry, glorying in the name of Beauchamp Colclough Urquhart, had a lucky find. He spotted James Madison’s very smart dress sword and reckoned it would make a fine addition to his collection. Twenty-one years later Urquhart would inherit the Scottish estate of Meldrum, and the sword no doubt had pride of place among the family treasures. George Chesterton, who didn’t take part in the advance into the city, said there was a lot of ‘idle gossip’ among those who claimed to have walked off with White House treasures. ‘Almost everyone you met had some relic to produce snatched from the possession of “Maddison” … I examined with nice curiosity a pair of “diamond” shoe-buckles (unmistakingly paste) which came from that inexhaustible source.’
Ross and Cockburn appear to have had no difference of opinion about what was to happen next. Ross had been in two minds about the wisdom of proceeding as far inland as Washington, but there is no evidence that he opposed the torching of the chief public offices of American state power. He had been scrupulous – as had Cockburn, to the surprise of many Americans – about opposing the destruction of private property. If a house offered no resistance, it was not to be burned down. But the object of the raid on Washington was to deliver President Madison and his country a devastating blow and to make him pay a price for starting and continuing a war which the British government regarded as a deeply damaging and infuriating distraction. It was no part of this strategy to seize and hold on to the enemy’s capital permanently, but to have occupied the city and moved on without exacting some kind of spectacular retribution would have been seen as half hearted. Besides there was that outstanding score to settle – revenge for the American burning of the capital of Upper Canada. Robert Ross may have been a man of much gentler sensibilities than the hard-bitten Cockburn. But he now readily gave his assent to the act that was to echo down the ages as one of the most humiliating moments in American history.
Once his men had finished devouring the President’s supper, Ross ordered the chairs to be piled on the tables, and the furniture in all the rooms stacked up so that the fire would devour as much as possible. One soldier helped himself to as many of the plates, knives and forks as he could wrap up in the tablecloth. Ross lent a hand collecting the furniture and was distracted only by a messenger from the French Ambassador begging him to spare the French embassy. Ross replied that the French embassy would ‘be protected as much as though his Majesty [the King of France] himself was there in person’. It was again Cockburn’s men, the team of sailors under Samuel Davies, who went about the business of setting light to all the chairs, tables, curtains and upholstery that Dolley Madison had taken such pride in introducing to the White House in the six years she and her husband had been there. ‘I shall never forget the destructive majesty of the flames as the torches were applied to beds, curtains, etc. Our sailors were artists at their work,’ wrote Harry Smith.
Margaret Bayard Smith’s account suggests that, once the place had been made ready, as many as fifty sailors and marines ‘were marched by an officer … each carrying a long pole to which was fixed a ball about the circumference of a large plate’. These ‘balls’, presumably of a highly inflammable material, were set alight. Each man was then stationed by a window ‘with his pole and machine of wild fire against it’, and then ‘at the word of command, at the same instant the windows were broken and this wild fire thrown in, so that an instantaneous conflagration took place and the whole building was wrapt in flames and smoke’.
All stood and watched as the flames took hold of the White House. To save time during the construction of the President’s House, the floors had been fashioned not of marble, as intended, but of wood. Everything inside was combustible. Within minutes the interior was a raging inferno. In seconds the flames swept through the main reception rooms on the ground floor and devoured all the furniture and soft furnishings that Dolley Madison hadn’t managed to rescue. Only the great stone walls would withstand the destructive force of the conflagration. ‘I never saw a scene at once more terrible or more magnificent,’ reported the French Ambassador to his government.
William Gardner watched from the window of his house in Pennsylvania Avenue. First he saw the smoke belching out of the windows of the White House, ‘and in a short time, that splendid and elegant edifice, reared at the expense of so much cost and labour, inferior to none that I have observed in the different parts of Europe, where I have been, was wrapt in one entire flame’.
The British officers who’d been instrumental in preparing the White House for destruction had mixed feelings about their handiwork. Harry Smith reckoned his old boss the Duke of Wellington would never have behaved like this. ‘Well do I recollect that, fresh from the Duke’s humane warfare in the south of France, we were horrified at the order to burn the elegant Houses of Parliament and the President’s house.’ Charles Furlong, one of the party from the 21st Fusiliers who had eaten at the President’s table before helping set fire to the place, had his doubts too. ‘I must confess’, he wrote in his diary, ‘I felt sorrow when witnessing such magnificent buildings demolished.’
When the news of the burning of the White House reached the rest of the army and the fleet, opinions were divided too. The midshipman Robert Barrett said he believed the Americans had escaped lightly. The British action, he said, fell far short of the ‘stern severity’ that would have been justified after Ross was fired on as he entered Washington. This was enough reason for Ross and his army to subject the city to ‘a merciless and indiscriminate plunder’. George Chesterton had no doubt that the Americans deserved retribution, but he remarked: ‘on reflection even the victors grieved over the summary and cruel havoc they had made … The whole scene of explosion, spoliation, and ruin, combined to stamp such fierce and indiscriminate excess with a barbarian character.’
The fires at the White House and Congress raged on, and it was only when the heavens opened later that the rain brought merciful rel
ief to the stone outer walls that still stood in both buildings. They survive to this day – though they have been massively enlarged, strengthened and restored – and the White House still bears the scars, the burn marks, of the fire of 24 August 1814. All the interior fittings were destroyed. The only modest piece of furniture that someone managed to rescue was a small walnut, brass and ivory medicine chest. It emerged in the possession of a Canadian, Archibald Kains, in 1939, who gave it to President Franklin Roosevelt. It remained in the Roosevelt Library until 1961 when it was restored on loan to the White House – where it has remained ever since.
It was midnight but Ross and Cockburn had not finished yet. From the upper dormitory of the Catholic seminary of Georgetown University two of the staff watched the buildings blazing away in the city to the east. ‘The flames from those buildings were so great that a person could read at the college,’ wrote the Reverend John McElroy, the university’s bookkeeper. He and Father Grassi watched the British move on to burn the Treasury Building. They hoped that the enemy occupation would stop short of the university in Georgetown where a large number of local families had stored their plate and other valuables for safe keeping before fleeing the city.
