by Peter Snow
Smith had been blandly ignoring all this. Backed enthusiastically by Baltimore’s increasingly confident committee, he was throwing all his energy into ensuring that Baltimore would learn the lessons of Washington. He believed that, if he was to save his city, he had to ignore federal incompetence and rely on local enterprise and enthusiasm. Earthworks had to be constructed, reinforcements summoned from other states, weapons of all types procured, forward medical posts established. While older men stuffed cartridges with powder, women could wrap bandages. The all-powerful committee ordered ‘all wheelbarrows, pick-axes, spades and shovels’ to be assembled in special places so that those who were not on militia duty and ‘the free people of colour’ could help build up ramparts of earth to defend the city. ‘The owners of slaves are requested to send them to work,’ said the committee. Few failed to rally to the call. Sam Smith’s twelve-year-old nephew was reported missing from home by his parents and was found digging trenches with a family shovel. The committee ordered ‘All those houses where spirituous liquors are retailed to be closed at 9 o’clock every night and to remain closed during the night.’ And the committee had the power to order the arrest of people who were ‘in the constant habit of making use of very improper and intemperate expressions calculated to produce disunion’.
Letters written by Smith in early September are bursting with impatience over the lack of equipment for troops arriving from neighbouring states. He managed to assemble a very substantial force of militia from Pennsylvania and Virginia, but he told James Monroe, ‘They have muskets, but they don’t have cartridges, ammunition, tents or camp kettles.’ He wrote to the military authorities in Philadelphia that 2,000 of their men had arrived without cartridge boxes. ‘You will therefore without a moment’s delay forward that number to this post.’
Smith had the valuable support of the American naval commodore John Rodgers, who commanded 1,000 seamen from various ships and units. His flotillamen, who had fought so well with Joshua Barney at Bladensburg, and other marine gunners helped to man the forts guarding the harbour mouth. Rodgers had fired many a broadside from the warships he’d commanded at sea. He would now be based on the eastern heights of Baltimore with many of his naval guns guarding the likely land approach to the city. He had his own bitter personal reasons for wanting to see the British crushed. His home town and his own house had been burned down in a raid by George Cockburn, and his wife and family had had to shelter elsewhere. His wife now wrote to him: ‘Oh my husband! Dearest of men!… When I think of the perils to which your courage will expose you, I am half distracted, yet I would not have you different from what you are…’
Smith and his fast-growing army could hardly believe their luck in having more than two weeks to build up their strength before the British arrived. Cochrane’s dithering allowed him to muster a force of up to 15,000 men. Many of them were new to the ranks, and they came from all walks of life. Edgar Allan Poe’s seventy-one-year-old grandfather was there. He had responded to a call to the elderly who were capable of carrying a gun. There were butchers, carpenters, customs officers, clerks – all with the same intent: to stop Baltimore suffering the fate of Washington. One of them recalled how ‘every heart [was] bursting with shame … the horrible mismanagement at Washington has taught us a useful lesson and we must be worse than stupid if we do not make proper use of it’. George Douglas was a merchant with the rank of private on the now well-fortified eastern heights on Hampstead Hill. He could see ‘an extensive and beautiful prospect of a multitude of tents, baggage, and cannon in every direction … at least a mile of entrenchments with suitable batteries were raised as if by magic…’. All sorts of people had been working on them, ‘old and young, white and black … All hearts and hands have cordially united in the common cause.’
A Baltimore judge, Joseph Nicholson, was a militia captain. He now commanded a motley group of artisans in the gun emplacements of Fort McHenry, and was one of the few Baltimoreans who had his doubts about Sam Smith. Smith, he wrote, had assumed command ‘without authority at the request of some of our citizens’. The British would have found Baltimore ‘an easy prize’ if they had marched directly from Washington. ‘If they come now … they will have a fight, but I am not quite sure that it will be a hard one.’ And he went on: ‘Our militia are so raw, and so totally undisciplined, and our commanding general so entirely unqualified to organise them, that I have very little confidence of our success.’
More than two weeks after the disaster at Washington, there was no sign of any British approach to Baltimore, and Nicholson and his men were given leave to take time off in the city. It was noon on Saturday 10 September. British ships were apparently heading south – down the bay. But by Saturday evening they had tacked around and were heading back with a fair wind behind them. Up to fifty ships approached the mouth of the Patapsco in driving rain. Nicholson and his men were back in the fort by midnight. ‘On our arrival,’ recalled one of his men, Isaac Munroe, ‘we found the matches burning, the furnaces heated and vomiting red shot, and everything ready for a gallant defence.’
At noon the following day, Sunday 11 September, the gun on Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore harbour sounded the alarm. The bells of Christ’s Church, cast in a foundry in Britain, clanged out their warning that the British enemy were at hand. Cochrane’s fleet was anchoring off North Point, just thirteen miles down the road. The army that had burned the White House was preparing to land and march on Baltimore.
18
Many heads will be broken tonight
12 September
GEORGE COCKBURN RELISHED the prospect of a new battle as the fleet came to anchor off North Point. He was glad Ross and Cochrane had swallowed their doubts about Baltimore, but he was exasperated by the loss of momentum. ‘Ample time had now been afforded to the Americans to call in the troops from all around,’ he noted in his ship’s log. He guessed, rightly, that the people of Baltimore had used every moment of the past two weeks to bolster their defences. But none of that was going to dissuade him from accompanying Ross’s army to Baltimore, and he had no trouble persuading Cochrane to allow him to ride alongside the troops again. He would stick close by Ross and give him ‘every assistance within my power’. The two men were now close brothers-in-arms: Ross had spoken warmly of Cockburn’s encouragement in the attack on Washington. They might have to fight harder at Baltimore than at Bladensburg, but the outcome would not be in doubt. The city would be a far richer prize than Washington or Alexandria.
George Gleig had been scanning the Maryland coast with mounting excitement as the fleet drew nearer to North Point. It sailed past a number of watchtowers and signal stations, and, as the warships approached each of them, horsemen would leap into the saddle and gallop off. ‘Beacon after beacon burst into a blaze; guns were fired from every tower; and telegraphic communication carried on without intermission.’ Gleig watched panic-stricken villagers abandoning their homes with their belongings strapped on wagons. As they neared the elegant state capital, Annapolis, Gleig thought it a tempting target, but ‘we passed it by … hugging ourselves in the idea that another, and no less valuable one, was before us’.
As the sun went down on 11 September, the water around the anchored ships was flat calm. A bright moon rose, and Gleig found himself captivated by the light it cast on the beach, the green fields and the woods behind. The only sounds were the calls of the sentries every half-hour: ‘All’s well!’ But he was quickly snatched from his reverie by the bustle and noise of the army preparing for a mass landing in the early hours. He and the other officers supervised the handing out of three days of provisions for each man. Because Baltimore was reckoned to be only a day’s march away, the men would travel light. They would need only a spare shirt and a blanket. But because it might be hard to rush more ammunition forward, they were each made to stash away twenty extra musket balls and cartridges in their ammunition pouches – eighty rounds a man.
By 3 a.m. the moon had gone. The night was pitch dark. In
total silence the men climbed down into small boats and rowed ashore under the guns of a specially anchored brig just 200 yards off the beach. Every precaution was taken in case the landing was opposed. Gleig’s boat was the second to run up the beach. ‘We leaped from the bow, one after another, and collecting close to the water’s edge, proceeded at a quick pace, to ascend a sloping sandbank.’ They lay flat on their bellies and waited for the signal to move. Then they ran forty more yards inland and dropped to the ground again. ‘We held our very breath, in anxious expectation of what the next moment might bring forth.’ But as the day dawned it became clear that there were no enemy guarding the shoreline, and the army was able to muster in the fields behind the beach and prepare to advance on Baltimore. By seven o’clock the entire army was ready to march off.
Rear Admiral Edward Codrington, still aboard, wrote to his wife: ‘The work of destruction is now about to begin, and there will probably be many broken heads tonight … the army with as many seamen and marines as could possibly be spared were landed this morning and are now on their march to the town of Baltimore, distant about 15 miles by land and 12 by water.’
It was Captain James Alexander Gordon’s task to make the approach to Baltimore by water. His legendary passage through the shoals of the Potomac made him Cochrane’s natural choice to lead the squadron of frigates and bomb ships which now braved the shallows of the Patapsco to take up a position off Fort McHenry and prepare to support the army’s attack on the city. The problem was that the river was only just deep enough for a frigate to pass through. One of Gordon’s most experienced officers, who’d fought with Nelson at Trafalgar, recalled: ‘The labour of getting up to Baltimore without pilots, feeling our way with the lead, whilst boats on each bow and one ahead were sounding also, gave little time for respite. The heat of the weather too was very great, the thermometer varying only from 79 to 82 in the shade … which added much to the exhaustion.’ Cochrane himself had shifted his flag to a frigate to accompany Gordon up the river. Gleig writes that Gordon was directed ‘clapping a press of canvas upon his ship, to drive her, in case of any sudden obstruction, through the mud; and to break, at all hazards, such booms or other impediments as might be laid across the channel’.
Robert Barrett was in the frigate HMS Hebrus as she and the other ships struggled up the river. ‘Well do I remember the scene. Our boats were ahead sounding: I was in our launch, with the stream and kedge anchors, and cables coiled away in her ready to heave the ship off if necessary…’ The midshipman watched as a measured line of spun yarn, marked off in three-, four- and five-fathom lengths (eighteen, twenty-four and thirty feet), was dropped in the water, weighted down by marlinspikes, to test the depth. And he recalled the sailors chanting ‘And half – three! By the mark – three!’ and so on. ‘Notwithstanding all these precautions we frequently grounded on the numerous shoals which abound in this channel.’ Barrett himself was busy casting out the anchors whenever they had to pull the ship free, ‘until I was literally covered with mud from head to foot in the process’. ‘The bomb vessels, brigs, and frigates’, reported Codrington, ‘are all pushing up the river with an eagerness which must annoy the enemy, I presume, as much as it delights me … my heart is deeply interested in the coercion of these Baltimore heroes, who are perhaps the most inveterate against us of all the Yankees.’
* * *
Codrington was right. The citizens of Baltimore had every reason to stop British invaders from ruining their prosperity, and they’d had more than a fortnight since Bladensburg to prepare. And by now humiliation had given way to anger and a thirst for vengeance across much of the nation. James Madison had sensed the opportunity a week after the burning of Washington and had issued a proclamation on 1 September. He said that what British forces had done in Washington was a ‘deliberate disregard of the principles of humanity and the rules of civilised warfare … I therefore, James Madison, president of the United States, do issue this my proclamation, exhorting all the good people thereof to unite their hearts and hands…’ in order to ‘expel the invader’. A number of newspapers took up the call: it was time for patriotism to replace recrimination against the government. ‘The spirit of the nation is roused…’ trumpeted Niles’ Weekly Register. ‘War is a new business to us, but we must teach our fingers to fight – and Wellington’s invincibles shall be beaten.’ A Baltimore militiaman wrote to a friend, ‘We have recovered from our consternation. All hearts and hands have cordially united in the common cause … the horrible mismanagement at Washington has taught us a useful lesson, and we must be worse than stupid if we do not make proper use of it.’
With the arrival of the first intelligence that the British were anchoring at North Point General Sam Smith summoned his commanders and revealed his plan to defend the city. He would not send his whole army forward to meet Ross. He would keep his main force back behind the fortifications they’d erected over the previous three weeks on the city’s fringe. He couldn’t risk another Bladensburg – his army defeated in the open and his city at the mercy of the victors. Besides, there wasn’t much time: the British were less than a day’s march away. He would send his most trusty commander forward with just over 3,000 of his best men. The man he chose was Brigadier General John Stricker. Stricker, now aged fifty-five, had made his mark as a young officer in the Revolutionary War, and since then had advanced to command a brigade of militia. He was Joshua Barney’s brother-in-law, and like Barney he ran a thriving commercial firm in Baltimore and was one of the leading citizens who had pressed for Sam Smith to take command. Stricker’s 3rd Brigade was widely recognised as the best trained of Baltimore’s units, and he was now chosen by Smith to lead his men forward in the evening of Sunday 11 September and take up a blocking position on the road from North Point.
* * *
While the British ships worked their way up the Patapsco, Ross’s army tramped on towards Baltimore through quite dense woodland on the North Point peninsula. By breakfast time the leading troops had reached the Gorsuch Farm about two miles inland. The farmer, Robert Gorsuch, whether out of fear or a sneaking sympathy for the invaders, provided Ross, Cockburn and their staff with breakfast and enquired whether they’d be back to dinner that night. ‘No,’ said Ross, ‘I shall sup in Baltimore tonight – or hell.’
Not far away George Gleig and his light infantrymen spotted three American cavalrymen on a small mound watching the British advance. Gleig’s party began stealing through the trees hoping to catch the men by surprise. But Gleig and his men were in bright red uniforms, and that, as Gleig admitted, was ‘an inconvenient colour, in cases where concealment happens to be desirable’. The Americans saw them approaching, clapped spurs to their horses and galloped off. They didn’t go far. Minutes later, to Gleig’s surprise and delight, the three Americans were spotted again. This time Gleig and his squad were nearly upon them when they again raced off not on horseback but in a canoe. ‘They were paddling, as fast as they could, to the opposite shore. There was no time to lose. I called out to them to surrender … and commanded the whole of my people to level their pieces.’ This was too much for the Americans, who were young volunteers. They waved a white handkerchief and paddled back to hand themselves over. Gleig then took the three men to the farm where he found Ross and Cockburn laughing heartily at the antics of a few soldiers who’d thrown discipline to the winds and were frantically chasing after the farmer’s livestock.* The arrival of Gleig’s three prisoners soon had Ross earnestly asking them questions about the strength and quality of the American forces. They left him in no doubt that the city was well defended, by several batteries of guns on the heights manned by experienced seamen, and by a force of some 20,000 men – five times the size of Ross’s force. But the general showed no sign of hesitation: when someone observed that most of the American defenders were militia, he is said to have exclaimed: ‘I don’t care if it rains militia.’ Gone was the diffidence he had shown on the way to Washington when Cockburn had had to revitalise him. Robert Ro
ss was now all confidence and bravado. And that recklessness which had sometimes characterised his leadership led him to take a risk that would change the course of the campaign.
The officer who had led the army’s advance party to Bladensburg had been badly wounded in the battle. So Ross had had to appoint someone else. He wasn’t entirely confident that the replacement would be so reliable, and so, as his troops advanced on Baltimore, Ross himself was never far behind the men at the very front of his army. Soon after they left the Gorsuch Farm they ran into territory where the Americans for the first time mounted a dangerous threat.
