When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

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  It was one of the most startling and daring naval exploits in British history. Unlike most of the great waterway inlets on America’s east coast, the Potomac was regarded as impenetrable to large ships. It wound for more than seventy-five miles from its estuary in Chesapeake Bay over a series of shoals that made long stretches treacherously shallow. Even American warships helmed by expert pilots used to offload their guns to reduce the draught before attempting it. To a sizeable flotilla from a foreign power with no local help and hostile banks on either side, it was a death trap.

  Back on 17 August when Admiral Cochrane had first despatched his main naval force up the Patuxent to destroy Joshua Barney’s American flotilla and deliver Ross’s invasion force on to the road to Washington, he ordered two diversionary naval thrusts to confuse the enemy about the Royal Navy’s main target. One under Captain Peter Parker was to cause trouble in the northern waters of Chesapeake. It was abandoned when Parker himself was killed leading a disastrous attack on a coastal settlement. The other was the Potomac expedition.

  Two of Britain’s toughest seadogs, both Scotsmen, were put in charge of the squadron of warships which headed up the river that led direct to Washington. The overall commander, temporarily appointed commodore, was Captain James Alexander Gordon. His grandfather had fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie against King George II at Culloden, and James himself had a wild childhood in Aberdeenshire in which he enjoyed leaping out of the upper windows of his home, Kildrummy Castle. He grew up to be a giant of a man for those days – at well over six feet. He joined the navy at the age of eleven and was a master’s mate helping steer HMS Goliath into the anchored French line at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 when he was only seventeen. He fought the French in several ships and lost his leg to a 30-pound cannonball in 1811. By the time he joined Cochrane’s expedition Captain Gordon’s wooden leg could be heard clumping its way back and forth on the quarterdeck of his frigate Seahorse. He and his wife Lydia had eight children.

  Seahorse had thirty-eight guns. Her partner in this ambitious enterprise, HMS Euryalus, had thirty-six. Euryalus was commanded by an equally single-minded character, Captain Charles John Napier, who was – in contrast to Gordon – a stout and swarthy figure of a man. He’d been nicknamed Black Charlie ever since he joined the navy against the stern opposition of his father. The young lad was an unusual mixture. At fifteen he was so homesick when he served on the seventy-four-gun HMS Renown that he was seen to burst into tears. But he showed early signs of pluck as well. When a zoo keeper told him that one of the lions was so tame you could put your hand in its mouth, Charles Napier did just that – and got away with it. Thirteen years and several bitterly fought battles later, Black Charlie joined Cochrane as Captain of Euryalus, and was made second in command of the expedition up the Potomac. Cochrane knew Napier well: seven years earlier he had been instrumental in promoting the inspired young officer to the rank of commander. It was not surprising that Cochrane now chose Charles Napier for this challenging mission up the Potomac.*

  Between them Gordon and Napier had six warships, the two frigates, Seahorse and Euryalus, three bomb vessels and a rocket ship. They were accompanied by a small tender and despatch boat, the schooner Anna Maria. The rocket ship, Erebus, had sixteen guns on her upper deck and below a stack of 32-pound Congreve rockets. These newly concocted but hopelessly inaccurate weapons had done their bit to surprise and terrify the American army at Bladensburg. They packed a deadly punch of explosive. The bombships, Aetna, Devastation and Meteor, carried two mortars each, as well as between eight and ten guns. Naval guns fired solid shot: the advantage of the mortar was that it propelled 10-inch and 13-inch explosive shells over a considerable distance. Shells scattered their lethal fragments over a much wider area than a single ball.

  It was an incredibly arduous voyage up the Potomac. As Charles Napier observed: ‘the navigation is extremely intricate … the charts gave us mostly very bad directions and no pilots could be procured’. On the second day they reached the notorious Kettle Bottom shoals. These were a random group of shallows with narrow passages between them, so narrow that even if the ship in front appeared to pass through one, the ship behind could easily ground – as Napier found to his cost. Seahorse led the way, taking regular soundings and managed to find a channel, but Euryalus following carefully behind suddenly stopped. Even the lead line cast over the side of the frigate showed plenty of water right beside the ship. ‘A diver went down’, wrote Napier, ‘and found, to the astonishment of all on board, that an oyster bank, not bigger than a boat, was under her bilge. After some hard heaving, we floated.’ But no sooner was Euryalus free than Seahorse grounded. And Gordon had to unload up to ten of her thirty-eight guns and much of her stores before she could be refloated. One after another the ships grounded and were refloated until they finally cleared the shallows.

  But then the wind turned against them. For five whole days the only way they could move the vessels upriver was to heave them forward on their anchors. It was a laborious process known as ‘warping’, unimaginable to today’s ships’ crews who don’t have to depend on wind-power. Two small boats were lowered overboard and each in turn rowed some distance forward to dump one of the ship’s anchors. The ship’s crew would then heave on the anchor’s hawser and haul the ship up to the anchor before the second small boat took its turn to carry another anchor forward and repeat the exercise. For five whole days Gordon’s crews bent their shoulders to the capstans. By the evening of 24 August they’d clawed their way just fifty miles upriver and anchored off Maryland Point, still thirty miles short of Washington. And what they saw that evening made their hearts sink. They watched the sky light up as Washington burned. ‘The reflection of the fire on the heavens was plainly seen from the ships, much to our mortification and disappointment,’ Napier remembered, ‘as we concluded that that act was committed at the moment of evacuating the town.’ Ross and his army did indeed leave the city twenty-four hours later, but Gordon and Napier had come too far to think of turning back. Besides, by pressing ahead and threatening Washington from the south, they believed they could distract American attention and help Ross’s withdrawal. So on they went, stopping only on 25 August to repair severe damage to the ships’ rigging when they were hit by the same whirlwind that hit Washington.

  Throughout the long trip Gordon strictly forbade any landing for looting or any other mischief. But Napier couldn’t resist going ashore when he spotted one ‘agreeable-looking residence – the first indeed we had observed on the banks of the river’. There Napier found an American farmer who was ‘not the most polished man in the world’, with two daughters ‘rather homely, and as uncouth as himself’. They offered Napier a glass of punch brandy and told him they hoped the ‘Britishers’ would not carry off their slaves, ‘which appeared to be their only apprehension’.

  On the evening of 27 August Gordon’s squadron found itself confronted by the only real obstacle that lay between them and their goal. On a hill on the east bank of the river guarding the final approach to the capital was the heavily fortified stronghold of Fort Washington. It had a garrison of sixty men, twenty-seven mainly heavy guns inside and outside its walls, and 3,500 pounds of gunpowder in its magazine. Gordon and his men were exhausted. They had had only two nights’ real sleep since they left Chesapeake Bay and Gordon said he believed that ‘each of the ships was not less than twenty different times aground and each time we were obliged to haul off by main strength’. But he immediately began the bombardment of the fort. He was then astonished to see that the garrison promptly abandoned the place. ‘Supposing some concealed design I directed the fire to be continued. At 8 o’clock however my doubt was removed by the explosion of the powder magazine.’ It was the massive blast that also startled Madison in Washington. The commander of the American garrison, Captain Samuel Dyson, had decided to spike all his guns and then destroy the place rather than fight it out. He claimed in a letter to the War Secretary John Armstrong, wh
o was by this time already beleaguered and utterly discredited by what had happened in Washington, that he had been authorised to abandon his post. Dyson said that Winder had sent him oral orders ‘in case I was oppressed by, or heard of, an enemy in my rear, to spike our guns and make my escape’. He wrote that when he saw Gordon’s ships approaching and heard that the British were also marching on the fort from Benedict (which they weren’t), he and his officers agreed that ‘the force under my command was not equal to the defence of the place’. Dyson was later court-martialled and sacked from the army for conduct unbecoming an officer. He was acquitted on a further charge that he’d been drunk at the time.

  Gordon and Napier were delighted. They reckoned the capture of the fort by force could have cost them up to fifty men. Gordon had now more than accomplished his mission. But there was another tempting target just an hour or two’s sail up the river. Four miles short of Washington, which Ross’s army had already devastated, was the prosperous town of Alexandria. Its mercantile trade had once rivalled New York and Boston. Rich Virginian planters and political leaders like George Washington had bought fashionable clothes and furniture imported by its traders. With the war in its third year, many of them were as deprived and disaffected as the merchants and shippers of New England, whose congressmen had voted against the war in the first place. And now their livelihoods and homes faced the very real threat of destruction from an enemy flotilla on their doorstep. The Mayor, Charles Simms, who was a leading attorney and merchant, and other prominent Alexandrians decided they had no choice but to surrender. The town was more or less undefended: there were one or two militia units within reach, but after the Battle of Bladensburg the idea of attempting to resist appeared futile. They sent a deputation in a small boat to meet the British squadron under a flag of truce and offered to surrender the town if the British would promise to respect private property as they had in Washington. Gordon politely told the men that he would deliver his terms once his squadron had anchored off the town. That way the Alexandrians would be in no doubt that, if they rejected his terms, he could enforce them. A hundred British guns could destroy the town in minutes.

  14

  A tempest of dissatisfaction

  28–29 August

  BY THE MORNING of 29 August Captain James Alexander Gordon was ready. His ships were at anchor on the seafront of Alexandria. He wrote down his terms for the town’s surrender and had the document delivered to the town council. The deal would guarantee their lives and homes but it would cost them dear. All military stores should be handed over. All vessels and all merchandise ‘must be delivered up’ and ‘possession will be immediately taken of all the shipping’. Gordon even insisted that a number of ships, which had been sunk in the harbour to avoid capture, should be refloated and reloaded with their cargoes. Gordon’s final demand was that refreshments should be delivered to his ships; these would be ‘paid for at the market price by bills on the British government’. It had long been a custom, rigorously enforced by Wellington in the Peninsula, that food supplies raised from local people should be paid for. It was a fine principle, sometimes ignored: Gordon was going to insist that his men respected it on this occasion.

  It didn’t take the town council long to agree to the terms – with one or two minor concessions that they persuaded Gordon to accept. The British promptly spent three days raising the sunken ships, and loading them and many others – twenty-one ships in all – with a massive cargo of booty. They amassed around 1,000 hogsheads of tobacco, some 15,000 barrels of flour, together with scores of bales of cotton, stocks of wine and other useful stores. Alexandria’s merchants stood mournfully watching their warehouses being emptied. The British sailors made a thorough job of it, but they cast an occasional glance over their shoulders in case they were attacked.

  Alexandria’s leaders came in for scathing censure afterwards for surrendering to the British. They said the criticism was ‘cruel and unfounded’. A group of indignant citizens of the town wrote a public letter to both houses of Congress: ‘What alternative had we to tell the enemy we could not resist, because we had not the means? We yielded to superior power. Our weakness has been no crime. Our reliance upon the protection of our government has been our misfortune.’ The Mayor himself wrote a revealing letter to his wife, Nancy, on 3 September expressing his admiration for the way the British navy had conducted itself. ‘It is impossible that men could behave better than the British behaved while the town was in their power. Not a single inhabitant was insulted or injured by them in their person or houses.’ Charles Simms even went on to deplore the ‘outrage’ committed against a lone British midshipman who was assaulted by three American naval officers on the quayside. He was seized by his neck scarf and was being dragged away struggling when, luckily for him, the neck scarf came undone and he escaped. Simms found himself having to explain to a furious British captain that the townspeople had had nothing to do with the attack and ought not to be held responsible for it. There was general panic in the streets as people expected the British to react violently. Women and children ran about screaming and there was widespread alarm, but, mercifully for the town, the British captain’s ‘fury seemed to abate and he went off’. Simms very wisely apologised to Gordon for this bizarre incident, which Gordon took with good humour as a young officers’ prank. But he warned the Mayor to make sure it didn’t happen again. British gunners had been on the point of firing their carronades: another such incident could lead to the destruction of the town. Gordon’s deputy, Charles Napier, described the affair as ‘neither more nor less than an American midshipman’s lark – and it appears they have larking mids [midshipmen] as well as us – but it had well nigh put the town in a blaze’.

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  All this enemy activity in Alexandria and the spectre of another attack on Washington from this alarming new enemy force caused consternation in the capital. Anna Maria Thornton, who had stayed in the city with her redoubtable husband, wrote in her diary that there was ‘a general alarm in the city as it is expected the fleet will come up, and the sailors be let loose to plunder and destroy’. Margaret Bayard Smith came back with her family on the Sunday afternoon, 28 August. She was glad to find their house exactly as they’d left it. But the news that the British were helping themselves to ships and supplies in Alexandria was deeply unsettling. ‘What will be our fate, I know not. The citizens who remained are now moving out, and all seem more alarmed than before…’ Smith, who was also a bit of a poet and novelist, occasionally lets her emotions carry her away: ‘Oh that I, a feeble woman, could do something!… Rome was reduced still lower by the Goths of old than we are … May a Roman spirit animate our people…’ She had nothing but contempt for John Armstrong, the War Secretary: ‘Universal execration follows Armstrong, who it is believed never wished to defend the city, and I was assured that had he passed through the city the day after the engagement, he would have been torn to pieces.’ She said the city was beset with rumours: ‘we know not what to believe and scarcely what to hope. We are determined however not again to quit the house, but to run all risks here, as we find the enemy not so ferocious as we expected…’

  President Madison, who had returned in the hope that the worst of the crisis was over, was having second thoughts. On the Saturday morning he’d written to Dolley suggesting she should return. Reports the next morning that Fort Washington had fallen made Madison change his mind. ‘Should the fort have been taken,’ he wrote to her on the Sunday, ‘the British ships will be able to throw the city again into alarm … it will be best for you to remain in your present quarters.’ Confident that this would keep her safe and sound well away from Washington, Madison then set about trying to regain some kind of grip on his utterly disorganised administration. It wasn’t only in disarray; it was deeply discredited and resented. Most people were now blaming him and his cabinet for the humiliation of Bladensburg and the burning of Washington. The Federalist opposition, many of whom had opposed the war from the start, heaped conte
mpt on Madison and his government. Maryland Senator Robert Henry Goldsborough said that Washington ‘once very beautiful … is the dreadful monument of an unfortunate and ill-timed war, and the unerring evidence of a weak, incompetent and disgraced administration’.

  Newspapers, never at a loss for colourful language, poured out a torrent of invective against the country’s leaders. The leading opposition newspaper, the Federal Republican, accused Madison’s whole cabinet of being ‘completely panic struck’. The Portsmouth Oracle called it ‘an imbecile administration’. ‘Poor contemptible, pitiful, dastardly wretches!’ exclaimed the Virginia Gazette. ‘Their heads would be but a poor price of the degradation into which they have plunged our bleeding country.’ The humiliation and shame of what had happened weighed heavily on all. The ups and downs of the fighting were most powerfully felt by the men on both sides attempting to find ways to end the war at peace negotiations in Europe. Richard Rush, Madison’s Attorney General and close companion in those dark days, described the sense of national despondency in a letter to America’s chief peace negotiator in Europe – and future President – John Quincy Adams: ‘What a dreadful time we have had of it here lately: and yet not dreadful, were it not for the national disgrace. We cannot mince the matter; there is, I fear, no other view to take of it.’ Washington might be a meagre place, added Rush, but it was ‘the capital of the nation, and six thousand troops have laid its best parts in ashes’.