by Peter Snow
John Stricker, the American 3rd Brigade commander, had halted his main force at a spot where the North Point peninsula was at its narrowest, about midway between Baltimore and the British anchorage. The neck of land here was as little as a mile wide: Bear Creek cut into the peninsula from the Patapsco on the south side, and Bread and Cheese Creek from the Back River to the north. Across this isthmus Stricker established his main position. But he sent 200 of his best men, including a number of riflemen, forward to do what damage they could to the advancing British.
The ground was wooded. The riflemen, working as they did best, as individuals with weapons with which they were as skilled as any in the world, picked their way through the undergrowth and soon spotted the approaching redcoats. Shots rang out: some British soldiers fell, but their weight of numbers ensured that they had no trouble pushing the Americans back. Gleig was one of those near the front: ‘we drove them from thicket to thicket, and tree to tree, not, indeed, with any heavy loss, for they were no less expert in finding shelter than in taking aim…’. The heat was stifling and progress was slow, but the Americans were being pushed back. There was no need for Ross to do what he did next. Not satisfied with the speed of the advance, he chose to ride right forward to see for himself what the opposition amounted to. ‘How bitterly had the whole expedition cause to lament that step,’ wrote Gleig. Ross took one good look at the ground ahead, decided he needed more men up front and turned to Cockburn, who, typically, had accompanied him to this exposed spot right at the front line. Ross just had time to shout to the admiral, ‘I’ll bring up the column,’ and turn his horse around, when a shot rang out. ‘An American rifleman singled him out,’ says Gleig, ‘he fired, and the ball, true to its mark, pierced his side.’ The fatal shot is reputed to have been fired by either Private Daniel Wells or Private Henry McComas. They were hiding in trees when they saw Ross approaching on horseback. Both were shot dead by the British moments later – even before they’d had time to reload their weapons. The ball passed through Ross’s left arm and into his chest. ‘I chanced to be standing at no great distance from him; I saw that he was struck, for the reins dropped instantly from his hand, and he leaned forward upon the pommel of his saddle … His horse making a move forward, he lost his seat, and but for the intervention of his aide de camp’s arm, must have fallen to the ground.’ The first the troops following up knew was when the ADC raced past them ‘with horror and dismay on his countenance and calling loudly for a surgeon’.
Cockburn watched as the general’s wounds – in his arm and chest – were bandaged up. ‘He assured me that the wounds he had received in the performance of his duty to his country caused him not a pang; but he felt a lone anxiety for a wife and family dearer to him than life…’ Ross handed Cockburn a locket saying, ‘Give that to my dear wife and tell her I commend her to my king and my country.’ The admiral then watched Ross’s aides racing to carry him back towards the ships, but they knew he was dying. ‘My impression’, Cockburn later recalled, ‘is that if he could have been borne easily on a good litter to the boat instead of being jolted down to it in a cart, he might possibly have been saved. Although’, he added, ‘I would not like his friends to know that such was my impression, as it would now avail to no good purpose.’ One of Ross’s aides, Captain Edward Crofton, escorted the cart and was with Ross when he died before they reached the shore. A small rowing boat carried his body back to the fleet wrapped in the Union Jack. Crofton wrote to Ross’s mother-in-law and told her of the ‘impressive lesson which I received in viewing the dying moments of a Christian hero. His last words were “O! My beloved wife and family…”’ Admiral Codrington wrote: ‘he is a most severe loss to his country and to us at this most important juncture; and to his wife, with whom, after long experience, he lived in the sincerest affection, the loss of all her earthly bliss!’
When Sir Alexander Cochrane, the Commander in Chief, passed on the news to the War Secretary in London, he expressed the hope that ‘a grateful country will provide’ support for Ross’s wife and family.
* * *
No one doubted the effect that news of Ross’s death would have on morale. When they carried him back they kept him covered in the hope that no one would know who the wounded man was, and George de Lacy Evans, his devoted aide, said that his death was ‘concealed from the troops’. But it was a vain hope. ‘The sad and mournful glances of the men as he passed by betrayed their knowledge of the fatal truth and the estimation in which he was held by the army.’ As the columns of men passed his body, Gleig recalls, ‘No language can convey any adequate idea of the sensation which this melancholy event produced in the bosoms of all who were aware of it. It may with truth be asserted that a general, young in command, has rarely obtained the confidence of his troops in the degree in which General Ross had obtained it.’ ‘I cannot mention or depict the sorrow every soldier in the army felt,’ wrote a corporal in the Scots Fusiliers; ‘he was well beloved by every man in the army.’ George Chesterton was struck by the extraordinary intensity of the despair that he witnessed everywhere that morning: ‘Every face betokened grief, and many hundreds were constrained to give vent to their tears.’
Ross was a huge loss to the British army in America at this particular moment. He always led his men from the front. He was excessively brave – to an extent that was to prove fatal. His impulse to take personal risks in battle may have influenced him to expose his men to excessive danger on the bridge at Bladensburg. Many have questioned his judgement in ordering them across it in such haste at the start of the battle. In contrast, his occasional diffidence and caution had exasperated Cockburn and had led some to question the consistency of his leadership. But he was immensely popular with the men who witnessed his courtesy and gentleness of character – rare qualities in those tough times when the iron rule of discipline left little room for sensitivity in a commander.
The man who now suddenly found himself propelled into command was Colonel Arthur Brooke. He was a veteran forty-two-year-old battalion commander, who had led his 44th Regiment through many a Mediterranean battle with the French. He used to enjoy wearing the Sultan’s gold medal which he’d been awarded for helping to throw Napoleon out of Egypt. He was another Anglo-Irishman like Robert Ross – and the Duke of Wellington. His family were landed gentry with a vast estate at Colebrooke in Northern Ireland. Brooke’s family was later to give Northern Ireland a prime minister, Lord Brookeborough, and Winston Churchill his most valuable military aide, Field Marshal Alan Brooke. Unlike Ross, Arthur Brooke had a wife who did not yearn mournfully for his return. While Elizabeth Ross languished in tortured loneliness, Marianne Brooke was left in the care of Lord Belmore, who seems to have made the most of Arthur Brooke’s absence by having an affair with her.* Brooke was a competent commander – he had led the pincer movement that helped scatter the Americans at Bladensburg. But he was never to enjoy the depth of respect and affection Robert Ross did. To George Gleig, Brooke was ‘an officer of decided personal courage, but, perhaps, better suited to lead a battalion than to guide an army’.
Brooke had no time to be troubled by any self-doubt. The moment he heard Ross was wounded, he spurred his horse to the front: ‘I rode as fast as I could … and found our advanced light troops halted, who informed me that the enemy were drawn up in an opposite wood … and on my going to a rising ground in order to reconnoitre I found him strongly posted.’ The American advance guard, which had been sent forward to skirmish with the approaching British, had withdrawn to where Colonel Stricker had formed his line. Brooke found himself looking at a row of guns flanked by thousands of American troops apparently determined to fight. Within an hour of taking command he faced what looked like the opportunity of a lifetime. If he could scatter these Americans at North Point as decisively as Robert Ross had at Bladensburg, the city of Baltimore would surely be at his mercy.
19
The Battle of North Point
12 September
BRITAIN’S NEW COMMANDER kn
ew he was facing an enemy that was, as he put it, ‘strongly posted’. The Americans were drawn up on the edge of a wood protected by a palisade with a wide expanse of open ground in front of them. Brooke could spot around half a dozen guns in the American front line. ‘I now saw’, he recalled, ‘there was no time to be lost, the enemy having about twelve thousand men.’ Even by the usual standards of exaggerating the size of an enemy, this was ludicrous. The Americans had just 3,000 men, Brooke had a thousand more. But, even if he hoped the Americans would run away as fast as they had at Bladensburg, he recognised that he risked losing men in the initial assault, and that he needed to find a way of avoiding an all-out frontal attack on a powerful position. It didn’t take him long to concoct a plan: bombard the enemy’s centre and look for a way of turning his flank.
John Stricker, Brooke’s opposing commander, obviously knew his business. ‘The ground was well chosen,’ wrote Gleig; ‘for, besides the covering of wood which he secured for his own people, he took care to leave open fields in his front; by which means we were of necessity exposed to a galling fire, as soon as we came within range.’ Stricker had opted to straddle the narrowest point of the North Point peninsula, but he was exposed at one spot. Over to his left, on his north side, there was a gap between his left-hand battalion, the 27th, and the marshy bank of Bread and Cheese Creek beyond. He moved the 450 men of the 39th there to stop the British creeping round the end of his line. But he could see he needed another battalion – ideally at a right angle to the 39th – to thwart any attempt by Brooke (though he still believed Ross was in command) to turn his left flank. And so Lieutenant Colonel Amey was told to move up his largely untried 51st Militia, which had been in the second line facing eastwards towards the enemy. It was now told to wheel around and face north, so that it would make a neat right angle with the 39th. This manoeuvre would have been hard enough for a well-drilled unit of regulars to achieve, but, with the British now opening fire with their artillery and rockets, it was a massive ordeal for the men of the 51st. There were 700 of them and there was soon utter confusion as Amey lost his sense of direction and control. ‘The order being badly executed’, Stricker reported later, ‘created for a moment some confusion in that quarter.’ Stricker quickly sent in some of his best aides to orientate the 51st and it struggled into line, but its morale was in shreds.
Brooke’s guns – he only had three – were now exchanging fire with Stricker’s 4-pounders. And a handful of British rockets were loosed off over the disoriented American left. The 4th Regiment was despatched to circle round that flank.* It was now early afternoon, the warmest part of a day which one American officer wrote was already ‘intensely hot’. But Brooke was determined not to lose momentum. He lined up the 85th Light Infantry to his front with the 44th and 21st close behind. And while the artillery exchange went on, in order to give the 4th Regiment time to work its way around to the far right, he told his men to grab the chance of a quick lunch from their packs. Gleig noticed how effective the handful of British guns were in firing shrapnel shells at the Americans. Shrapnel had been introduced in the Peninsula to great effect. The round shells were fused to explode in the air and propel a lethal spray of musket balls into enemy ranks. Here at North Point Gleig saw them making ‘fearful gaps in the line’.
Brooke was not the only commander riding along his line waiting for the moment to order an advance. George Cockburn, proud of the fact there were seamen and marines near the front line, was, in typical style, making himself visible too. Far too visible for comfort. He had just had a narrow escape. Soon after Ross was shot, Cockburn saw an American soldier taking aim at him from behind a tree. According to Gleig, who recounts the story, instead of turning away or firing his pistol at the man, as others would have done, ‘the brave Admiral, doubling his fist, shook it at his enemy, and cried aloud, “O you damned Yankee, I’ll give it to you!” Upon which the man dropped his musket in the greatest alarm, and took to his heels.’ By the time Cockburn reached the battlefield a little later, he was, says his aide de camp James Scott, ‘well known to the enemy from his white horse and gold-laced hat … The instant he was perceived, the fire of the enemy’s guns seemed to follow him … the shot might be seen grazing before, behind, under, and passing over his horse. I several times heard the troops, as he approached in front of them, jokingly exclaim, “Look out, my lads, here is the Admiral coming, you’ll have it directly.”’
It wasn’t long before Brooke felt ready to order the advance right along the line. The bugle sounded. Bayonets fixed, the men moved forward across the open ground. They quickly started taking casualties, first from the American artillery – now firing grapeshot – and then, as they approached closer, from rifle and musket. Gleig observed that the Americans were stuffing the barrels of their cannon with anything that could cause damage: ‘old locks, pieces of broken muskets and everything which they could cram in…’.
On the American side John Stricker felt deeply bound to defend the honour of the United States and not to allow North Point to be another Bladensburg. It might be enough at least to be able to claim that he had delayed and weakened the British advance on Baltimore. His brigade consisted of the best troops the city could deploy. But already he had witnessed their fragility when the 51st under Colonel Amey had bungled its effort to shore up his extreme left. All he could do now was hope his left would hold as the main British advance smashed into his centre and right. He had stationed Colonel Sterett’s 5th Regiment on his right. It had fought better than most at Bladensburg. Stricker now depended on it to stay steady under fire if he was to hold his position.
The British had about 500 yards of open ground to cover. They moved forward, reported Gleig, ‘with their accustomed fearlessness, and the Americans with apparent coolness stood to receive them’. When the British were within 100 yards, the Americans fired their first small-arms volley. Smoke briefly obscured one line from the other. When a gust of wind blew it away, ‘a hearty British cheer gave notice of our willingness to meet them; and firing and running, we gradually closed upon them, with the design of bringing the bayonet into play’. The British held their fire, as they’d been trained to do, until only a few yards away. It was futile to fire a musket at much more than seventy yards’ range: at twenty to thirty yards, you were likely to hit. Still the smoke of the guns obscured the opposing lines from each other, and the British had to make do with firing at the flashes of the guns. Gleig received a blow in the groin from a grapeshot ‘which would certainly have killed me had not my haversack which the motion of walking had turned round intervened to save me’.
It is at this stage of the battle – with the British within twenty yards of the Americans – that the accounts of both sides diverge sharply. British eyewitnesses all assert that, the moment the two lines met, the Americans ran for their lives. Cockburn says they ‘gave way in all directions’. Scott says ‘our gallant troops rushing on, scaled the palings. The Americans could not stand cold steel and they fled in every direction.’ Gleig says that when the British rushed forward with the bayonet, the Americans did not attempt to resist ‘a shock which the flower of European armies had never been able to withstand … They lost in a moment all order, and fled, as every man best could…’ Brooke makes the most ambitious claim: ‘in less than 15 minutes the enemy’s forces, being utterly broken and dispersed, fled in every direction…’
Most American accounts are rather different. What there is no dispute about on either side is that, at a critical moment in the battle, Stricker’s left collapsed under pressure from the enveloping movement by Major Faunce’s 4th Regiment. The 51st, which had made such a fiasco of its move forward, now folded in the face of this onslaught. Stricker himself admits: ‘The 51st, unmindful of my object to use its fire in protection of my left flank … totally forgetful of the honour of the brigade, and regardless of its own reputation, delivered one random fire and retreated precipitately, and in such confusion as to render every effort of mine to rally them, ineffective.’
But Stricker insists that on the rest of his line, where the 27th held the centre, and in particular on the right where Colonel Sterett’s 5th was, fire was ‘well returned by the artillery, the whole 27th and the 5th…’. Much of the line, in other words, appears to have held under pressure and at least some units stood their ground ‘in spite of the disgraceful example set by the intended support on the left’. Captain James Piper reported (writing with hindsight a whole forty years later), ‘The American troops stood firmly to their posts, pouring into them as they came up a most destructive fire…’ But Piper goes on to say that this stand continued only until ‘a gap in the line was opened by the 51st regiment, whose colonel misapprehended the general’s order’. Piper suggests that the resistance continued until the left collapsed; Stricker suggests that it went on in spite of it. Either way, both American accounts go on to talk of an orderly withdrawal rather than the chaotic flight that the British claim. Stricker described his retreat with the words: ‘I was constrained to order a movement back…’ On this view it is possible to argue that North Point was an American success, certainly far short of a humiliating rout. As Piper put it: ‘The great object of the expedition had been accomplished – by giving the enemy a specimen of Baltimore bravery and sharp shooting in earnest…’ General Sam Smith, Stricker’s Commander in Chief, was full of praise for him: ‘General Stricker gallantly maintained his ground against a great superiority in numbers’ (the Americans did their share of exaggerating too – Smith said the British had near twice the number they actually had) and only when the 51st gave way was he ‘under the necessity of retiring to the ground in his rear’. But Robert Henry Goldsborough, the thirty-five-year-old US Senator and a major in the militia, is perhaps a more candid American eyewitness. He wrote a week later: ‘The affair at Baltimore was … as little glorious to our arms as that at Bladensburg. Our militia were completely defeated and routed.’ Once again, the attacking British suffered more casualties than the Americans, who were on the defensive behind their paling. British casualties were nearly 300 (thirty-nine killed, 251 wounded); the Americans lost under 200.
