by Peter Snow
When Thornton arrived at the Patent Office he was told that he could remove anything in the building that was private. He replied that there was nothing in the building that was public property. Inside, he said, were hundreds of models, which it would be impossible to remove. ‘To burn what would be useful to all humanity’, he told the British, ‘would be as barbarous as formerly to burn the Alexandrian library, for which the Turks have been ever since condemned by all enlightened nations.’ His plea was successful. The Patent Office was left undisturbed, and William Thornton, hugely relieved, returned to his family in Georgetown. He was home in time for lunch, and in her diary that day his wife Anna Maria wrote that her husband had, ‘by his exertions, saved the Patent Office from destruction’. She described some of the fires the British had lit and wrote: ‘It appears almost miraculous that the whole place was not consumed. But great pains were taken by the English not to injure private property.’
William Gardner, who’d talked to Cockburn from his window in Pennsylvania Avenue the evening before, was particularly impressed by the conduct of one British officer that morning. He was, recalled Gardner, ‘a young man of age 26 or 27, remarkably handsome in his person and of very intelligent mind’. Gardner reported to him that a man he knew had been robbed by a British soldier. The officer promptly told him to run with him to the man’s house, which Gardner did – without pausing to put on his jacket. And as they rushed up, they found the same soldier looting someone else’s house. ‘You villain,’ shouted the officer, ‘you have turned thief and are disgracing your country.’ The soldier protested his innocence, but the officer ‘closing his fist gave the soldier a most violent blow, which staggered him considerably and his hat fell to the ground. I took it up,’ wrote Gardner, ‘and found it filled with silk shawls and silver articles of value which I pulled out and showed to the officer.’ The officer then struck the soldier with the butt of his pistol and told him to follow him immediately to the army headquarters. ‘I was later informed that he was taken out on parade the same day and shot.’
Ross and Cockburn spent much of the day – in between their bouts of burning and destruction – in the company of Dr Ewell. He made no secret of his fellow feeling with them, which many of his countrymen later classed as collaboration. At one moment a woman dashed up shrieking: ‘O I am killed, I am killed! A British sailor has killed me!’ Cockburn furiously ordered the perpetrator to be rooted out and shot, but Ewell took one look at the woman, whom he described as ‘a common strumpet’, and pronounced that she had only slight wounds and was far too drunk to identify her attacker.
Ewell was in his dining room with Cockburn when a delegation from the town of Alexandria, just seven miles down the Potomac River, knocked on the door. It was only natural that the people of Alexandria, like the people of the even closer settlement of Georgetown, were terrified for their safety with the British causing mayhem on their doorstep. The town council of Alexandria had made earnest pleas to Winder in the presence of James Madison himself to apprise him ‘of the necessity of providing some adequate defence against an attack by water’. They warned that, unless defences were provided, the town would ‘be compelled to make the best terms in its power’ with the enemy. Both communities preferred to forestall a British rampage by offering to negotiate. They had watched with horror the botched and hopeless fight for Washington, and were determined not to suffer the same fate. James Ewell wrote, ‘The terror struck into our people … rolled on in such conglomerating floods to Alexandria that it acquired a swell of mountainous horrors, that appear to have entirely prostrated the spirits of the Alexandrians. Men, women and children saw nothing in their frightened fancies but the sudden and total destruction of their city…’
It wasn’t just the British army threatening the people of Alexandria: they’d also heard news of a major naval squadron heading up the Potomac towards them under the command of Captain James Alexander Gordon clearly bent on creating further destruction. Gordon was still a day or two short of Alexandria, but the prospect of their town being stormed by land and sea was enough to prompt the Alexandrians to send a four-man delegation to talk to Cockburn. The admiral replied that he was ready to talk about some arrangement with them but they would have to agree to supply his army with provisions. And according to Ewell, who witnessed the encounter, Cockburn added: ‘Let me tell you that for every article we take you shall be allowed a fair price.’
The biggest death toll by far that day was the result not of enemy action but of what looks like a clumsy accident. In the early afternoon a British captain led his company of soldiers to a spot called Greenleaf Point where he’d been told to destroy an American gunpowder magazine. They found the magazine empty. The powder had been removed earlier and dumped in a disused well. By an appalling coincidence the British soldiers were relaxing by the well and one of them threw a lighted match or a cigar end into it. There was a gigantic explosion. James Scott’s account suggests that it was the British team’s fault. He says they were the ones who removed the powder and threw it down the well. But they dropped the casks down carelessly making no allowance for sparks flying around as they caught on the well’s stone walls. However the accident was caused, around thirty soldiers died instantly. Body parts were thrown far and wide, and an immense pile of rubble from the crater made by the blast crashed down and buried many others alive. The survivors were – in the words of Dr Ewell, who saw them carried to lodgings next door to his house – ‘horribly mangled’. An American officer who visited the site a day later wrote that he witnessed ‘the horrible spectacle of legs, arms and heads protruding from the mounds of earth thrown up by the explosion’.
Ewell counted forty-seven men who would need their wounds urgently attended to. He remembers Ross being particularly moved by their plight. ‘He observed, looking at me with an eye of searching anxiety: “I am much distressed at leaving these poor fellows behind me. I do not know who is to mitigate their sufferings.” “The Americans, General Ross,” I replied, “are of the same origin as yourself. We have, I trust, given you many splendid instances of our humanity in the course of this unfortunate war; and you may rely on it, Sir, no attentions in my power shall be withheld from them.” He gave me a look of gratitude which I shall never forget.’ It would be easy to dismiss the behaviour of men like Ewell, Thornton and Gardner as cowardly collaboration with their country’s enemy. But the evidence suggests that they were men of dignity and honour who behaved as they believed civilised men should.
Later that afternoon a storm of wind and rain struck the city and the area around it. It was so violent many called it a hurricane. One eyewitness said early growls of thunder suddenly turned into a ‘terrific tornado … The sky changed from the peculiar leaden hue portending a wind storm, into almost midnight blackness. Then came the crash and glare of incessant thunder and lightning, and the wild beating of the rain, mingled with the sound of roofs tearing from their supports, and the whir of heavy bodies flying through the air and falling upon the ground beneath.’ George Gleig saw ‘roofs of houses [being] torn off by it, and whirled into the air like sheets of paper whilst the rain which accompanied it resembled the rushing of a mighty cataract … The darkness was as great as if the sun had long set.’ The storm reached the fleet too – where the ships’ crews waited anxiously for news of the invasion of Washington. Harry Smith said the storm lasted twenty minutes. ‘It resembled the storm in Belshazzar’s feast, and we learned that even in the river, sheltered by the woods, several of our ships at anchor had been cast on their beam ends.’ Harry Smith allowed himself a generous dollop of poetic licence here. The Bible makes no mention of a storm at Belshazzar’s feast. Robert Barrett called it a ‘hurricane of the most tremendous description. It drove both the Severn and our own ship on shore, close to the village [of Benedict] and lashed the smooth and placid waters of the Patuxent into a vast sheet of foam.’
* * *
Ross now decided that the time had come to abandon Washington and return to th
e ships. Cockburn didn’t disagree. The mission had been successfully accomplished. The rainstorm had stopped the fire spreading and devouring more of the city: it had even doused the flames at the White House and Congress leaving much of their walls intact. But within the limits the British had set themselves – no permanent occupation, no unbridled plunder, no wild destruction of private property – the raid on Washington had achieved its purpose: decisive defeat and utter humiliation of the enemy, the proudest monuments of America’s capital devastated. The question now was what effect the victory would have on the war, and whether there was anything more the British task force could do to hasten its end. Lord Liverpool’s Tory government in Britain, battered and impoverished by two decades of war in Europe, was daily more anxious to find an honourable end to the contest with America. As the war dragged on, both sides came to appreciate that while they were each winning tactical victories here and there, strategically they were gaining nothing. Neither side had managed to inflict a decisive blow on the other. But now there was an opportunity for the British to do just that. If the army that had destroyed Washington could swiftly destroy another major American city, Britain could be close to landing a knockout blow.
Only thirty-five miles up the road from Washington lay a no less tempting target. Washington was the heart of America’s state power, but in population, wealth and commercial dynamism it was a mere village compared to Baltimore. Maryland’s big city was one of the busiest, richest and most ambitious of the burgeoning cities on America’s east coast. Its population of some 50,000 was six times the size of Washington’s. Before America’s trade was deadened by the Royal Navy’s blockade, Baltimore was an exuberant mercantile centre, its harbour bustling with ships loading tobacco and wheat from Maryland and fertile neighbouring states and unloading sugar from the Caribbean and luxuries from Europe. It offered Atlantic traders a shorter route to Ohio and the expanding midwest than Philadelphia or New York. But most provocatively Baltimore was the home of the scores of American privateering skippers who often managed to evade the Royal Navy and cause havoc to British commercial shipping. The British called Baltimore ‘that nest of pirates’. Joshua Barney had been the city’s most renowned maritime hero before Madison lured him away to harry the British. His flotilla was built in Baltimore shipyards.
There were some – like his aide George Evans – who urged Ross to march straight for Baltimore. It would fall easily. Its face was to the sea: it was hardly defensible against a land attack. The fleet could sail up Chesapeake Bay and join the army at Baltimore. The navy would bombard from the east, the army would attack from the west. ‘Before the retreat was decided upon,’ wrote Evans in his official memorandum, ‘the propriety of a movement on Baltimore was agitated … the army was provided with an abundance of guides capable of affording the most ample information, a thousand horses could have been supplied in two days and the brilliant result of the late enterprise, the disorganization of the enemy’s public departments, the confusion and disarray of the country seemed to justify the attempt.’ Cockburn too, in typical gung-ho fashion, recorded that he believed if they moved on Baltimore ‘without loss of time’ they would ‘get possession also of that place without any very great loss or difficulty’.
* * *
The people of Baltimore themselves had no doubt they were next in line. One Baltimore soldier wrote to his brother, ‘To my sorrow it is not to end here. We expect every minute to hear that they have taken up the line of march for this place, and if they do we are gone.’
If Ross saw the force of the argument for an immediate attack on Baltimore, he knew it wouldn’t be accepted. He’d allowed the dogged Cockburn to needle him into flouting the wishes of his Commander in Chief Sir Alexander Cochrane once. He wasn’t going to do it again. As Evans noted, Cochrane had disapproved of the advance on Washington. He would certainly disapprove of extending it to Baltimore. The idea was one that ‘No one would have ventured to propose’. James Scott, Cockburn’s ADC, concluded his brief account of the flurry of excitement for Baltimore with the mournful words: ‘The favourable moment was suffered to pass unheeded.’
That night Ross gave the order for the army to march. In total secrecy, they would march off – not towards Baltimore but the way they had come, leaving a wall of burning campfires to deceive the Americans into believing they were spending another night in Washington. Harry Smith was away briefly when the order was given, and when he returned and the general told him the army was to move out, Smith exclaimed: ‘Tonight? I hope not, sir.’ He pleaded with Ross to allow the men a night’s sleep and then proceed early the next morning, but Ross was adamant: ‘I have made the arrangement with Evans, and we must march.’ Smith no doubt bridled at the thought of Evans, his junior, having more apparent influence with Ross than he did, and he writes that he ‘muttered to himself’ that he wished he was serving under another commander.
Ross had no doubt that he was right. Delay, he reckoned, could allow the Americans time to assemble a force that would make the retreat very uncomfortable. At nine that night the army was on the move back towards the ships. The British would not march direct from Washington to Baltimore. But Baltimore would not escape a British assault: it would just be postponed for three weeks.
13
Into the Potomac
26–27 August
‘MY DEAREST,’ WROTE President James Madison to Dolley on the morning of Saturday 27 August, ‘I have just read a line from Colonel Monroe saying that the enemy were out of Washington and on the retreat to their ships. We shall accordingly set out thither immediately, you will of course take the same resolution.’ Madison told his wife he didn’t know where they would ‘hide their heads’ in the city once they arrived, but he’d sort something out. As suddenly as the dark hand of destruction and defeat had battered the capital and its people, it appeared to have vanished. Madison’s Secretary of State, the energetic James Monroe, sent a message from the army, which was now cautiously returning to the city, that the President could return and that he would come and help escort him back.
James Madison had just spent a quiet night with a family at Brookville back on the east bank of the Potomac. He was grateful for the rest after a harrowing three days riding from one place of refuge to another. He was reported to be calm and, ‘though much distressed by the dreadful event which had taken place, not dispirited’.
Once Monroe had arrived, Madison and the faithful Rush, his Attorney General, who’d been at his side throughout, saddled up and set out for home. It was noon. Five hours later they were riding into Washington and getting their first glimpse of the damage. Over the next twenty-four hours, avoiding the bodies of dead horses scattered outside, they inspected the Capitol’s two houses of Congress. Both were burned out, along with the central wooden structure that had bound them together. Rush wrote that they were ‘the most magnificent and melancholy ruin you ever beheld’. The marble floors of the chambers were littered with the smashed glass of the chandeliers that had lit them. When Margaret Bayard Smith and her family ventured back into the city the next day they found the shell of the House of Representatives still smoking, its ‘beautiful pillars … cracked and broken, the roof, that noble dome, painted and carved with such beauty and skill, lay in ashes in the cellar beneath the smouldering ruins…’. In the White House ‘not an inch, but its cracked and blackened wall remained’. Only days earlier Mrs Smith had seen it ‘splendid, thronged with the great, the gay and the ambitious’. Now it was ‘nothing but ashes’. It would take years to rebuild it – too long to allow the Madisons to return to it. ‘Who would have thought that this mass so solid, so magnificent,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘should by the hands of a few men and in the space of a few hours, be thus irreparably damaged.’
America had however been spared one horror that America’s slave-owners had long feared. There was no rising by the black slave population. Margaret Bayard Smith wrote that they ‘have behaved well, been quiet and in general appear to dread the e
nemy as much as we do. Thus we are spared one evil and the one I had most dread of.’
The two formidable doctors, James Ewell and William Thornton, and the handful of citizens who had braved the occupation had arranged the burial of the dead, almost all of them British, and the treatment of the enemy wounded. Thornton, who had spent twenty-four hours trying to persuade the British not to plunder and burn, found himself trying to curb ordinary Americans from looting their fellow citizens’ property. But at least the British had left, and Rush offered Madison lodging at his house, which still stood and could comfortably accommodate the President and his wife.
If Madison did have a few minutes that evening to sit back and hope that his city and its people could now look forward to a quick recovery, he was soon rudely jolted back to reality. Before it was dark, the noise of naval guns boomed across the waters of the Potomac. At eight o’clock the President and his colleagues were shaken by a mighty explosion from the fort that guarded the southern approaches to the city. Its powder magazine had detonated. The squadron of British warships that had been spotted days earlier moving up the Potomac had penetrated the upper reaches of the river and started shelling Fort Washington, which was evacuated without a fight. The capital, which only three days earlier had been invaded and devastated by an assault from the east, was suddenly wide open to attack from the south.
