by Peter Snow
What is beyond dispute is that the British did not pursue the Americans far beyond the battlefield. Brooke says ‘the day being far advanced’ [it was actually only mid- to late afternoon] ‘and the troops much fatigued we halted for the night on the ground of which the enemy had been dispossessed’. Scott and some seamen pursued the Americans into the woods they’d been defending. They caught up with one rifleman who, Scott reckoned, clearly believed the ‘erroneous idea’ which their officers had impressed upon them that they’d receive no mercy from the British. The man levelled his rifle from only six yards away, and when Scott told him to surrender, ‘instead of complying with my command, he fired. The ball grazed my left side, cutting my flannel waistcoat, and unfortunately entered the breast of a fine young man close behind me, named Edmondson.’ The American was shot dead by two of Scott’s men as he ran away. But Scott then watched in horror as a young British lieutenant – before Scott could stop him – mistook Edmondson, still writhing on the ground, for a ‘skulker’ and despatched him with his sabre.
Brooke ordered the men to find a spot to bivouac just beyond the battlefield. ‘A field of battle is a sickening sight when the fever of the blood has cooled, and the enthusiasm of desperate strife subsided into calm reflection,’ wrote James Scott. He was sent by Cockburn to do what he could for the wounded. He found his sergeant, who’d been hit, ‘near a small bush, under which he had taken shelter, stiff with the clotted gore that had issued from his wounds, but in tolerable spirits’. Scott had the man moved to a large house near by which was serving as a field hospital. Its owners had removed all their furniture, so the wounded lay about on the floor awaiting medical attention. There were too few doctors to give the men the immediate treatment many of them needed, but two American doctors stayed behind to help when their army withdrew. Gleig remarked that there was not ‘the smallest distinction made between the Americans and the English…’. But few complained. ‘A groan or shriek would, indeed, occasionally strike upon the ear of the bystander; and even a querulous exclamation, as the moving of another’s leg or arm happened to bring it into contact with some unfortunate man’s broken limb.’ Gleig came across one wounded American in the woods and the man screamed in terror, assuming Gleig would finish him off. But Gleig managed to reassure him, and moved him to the hospital where he had his leg amputated. Amputation was often the only remedy doctors could safely offer a man with a musket ball lodged in a limb. There was reckoned to be a high risk of death from lead poisoning and gangrene if the ball could not be very quickly and cleanly removed.
George Chesterton, the Royal Artilleryman, saw several cartloads of wounded being wheeled off to the ships over very rough ground. ‘Their piteous groans, as the ever-increasing inequities of surface caused painful jolts, and consequent irritation to their fresh and inflamed wounds, awakened the deepest commiseration.’ He was sent back to the rear to stock up with ammunition for the guns, and passed a dead American officer. He noticed the man was wearing ‘a good pair of Hessian boots’. No point in wasting them on a dead man, he thought, and he stooped down to pull them off. But then ‘I suddenly relented, and inwardly denouncing the spoliation of the dead, hastily forbore and cursed my first intentions.’ But ten minutes later he was back. His scruples, he said, had ‘somewhat abated, and I returned to the spot unsentimentally disposed’. But he found that someone else, ‘a less fastidious wanderer’, had pre-empted him. The boots had gone. He wasn’t too sorry that he’d been ‘spared the perpetration of an ignoble deed’.
The night after his victory at North Point, Arthur Brooke could take his rest well satisfied with his first day as commander of the army. His first fight with the enemy had not been without cost, but he had won it. He had defeated the best men Baltimore could field in a bid to stop him. The road to a city far richer than Washington was now open. And the next day his final assault on it would be backed by the immense firepower of the Royal Navy. That night, 12–13 September 1814, the defenders of Baltimore prepared to face bombardment by the guns, rockets and bombs of the most powerful navy in the world.
20
The rockets’ red glare
13 September
AT THE FIRST faint glimpse of dawn on 13 September most American eyes behind the walls of the forts on Baltimore’s river front were focused on the forest of British masts just three miles away on the Patapsco River. The safety of their city depended on foiling any British attempt to silence their guns and attack Baltimore from the water to match Colonel Arthur Brooke’s assault by land.
General Sam Smith had no doubt that the fate of his city would be decided that day. He had 12,000 men and several batteries of guns deployed along Hampstead Hill protecting the city from Brooke’s approaching army. He argued that Stricker’s force had done what it could to stem the British advance at the Battle of North Point. Smith had hardly expected him to turn them around. What mattered, Smith insisted, was that Stricker’s action had boosted the city’s morale. Stricker had been ‘brave and skilful’, his men had ‘shown the coolness and valour of veterans’. But Brooke had not been stopped: Smith expected him to be at the very edge of the city within hours. And now that threat was reinforced by the Royal Navy: if its guns could shatter Baltimore’s harbour defences, the city would be wide open to attack from the beaches as well. Smith looked to George Armistead and his men and guns in Fort McHenry and the string of smaller forts along the bank of the Patapsco.
Fort McHenry was critical to the shoreline’s defence. The persistent efforts of Sam Smith and George Armistead had made it a formidable stronghold. Its sixty guns, solidly placed within the fort and in emplacements on the foreshore, could shatter any attempt by warships to enter the harbour. There were twenty 24-pounders within the fort itself. Outside, in what were called the ‘water batteries’, were twenty-eight 36-pounders and twelve 18-pounders. They could smash any vessel that approached within a mile and a half of the muzzles of their barrels. They could spray lethal canister or grapeshot at any troops that managed to land and attack the fort’s walls. This key stretch of coast was protected by several other batteries too, but principally by three close neighbours of Fort McHenry. On the far side of the harbour mouth – to the east – was the Lazaretto, three guns manned by forty-five of the flotillamen who’d fought so obstinately under Joshua Barney at Bladensburg. In the harbour mouth itself, between the Lazaretto and Fort McHenry, the Americans sank a number of ships to make it impassable.
Beyond Fort McHenry, a mile and a quarter north-west, was Fort Babcock. It was commanded by flotilla Captain John Webster, who had had his hat and his horse shot through as he fought beside Joshua Barney at Bladensburg. He’d been a seaman since he was fourteen and had been third lieutenant on Barney’s privateer Rossie in dozens of scrapes with the British. He’d fired many a broadside at the Royal Navy at sea. Now aged twenty-six and in command of fifty men, Webster had his chance to bombard the enemy from a battery firmly based on land. Sam Smith had picked Webster personally to man a vital link in Baltimore’s defences. Webster later recalled that his position was ‘open and exposed’. His six 18-pounder guns were not tucked snugly behind castle walls but protected only by a ‘breastwork of about four feet high’. His powder magazine was dug into a hill a little way off, and so his men would have to sprint backwards and forwards to fetch the powder from it.
A quarter of a mile further on Lieutenant Henry Newcomb was in charge of eighty seamen and up to ten guns at Fort Covington. He had been singled out for command after his persistent and plucky efforts to disrupt the British navy’s foray up the Potomac to Alexandria. His small gunboats had harried Captain Alexander Gordon’s squadron and he’d steered a fireship at the British warships – only just managing to leap off it before it was enveloped in flames. Newcomb had failed to destroy the British in the Potomac: he was now determined to foil their attack on Baltimore. In his hour-by-hour account of the day he recorded that it began ‘hazy’ with ‘moderate breezes’. At 6 a.m. he watched a line of British war
ships fanning out two and three-quarter miles from Fort McHenry and three miles from where he was.
It was a powerful array of up to eighteen warships. There were none of the huge line-of-battle ships with seventy-four or more guns: their hulls were too deep to clear the shallows of the Patapsco River. There were seven frigates and other smaller warships. But it wasn’t the conventionally armed ships with their rows of gun ports on either side that seized the attention of the defenders of Baltimore. The vessels on which they concentrated their gaze were the five bomb ships clearly taking pride of place in the British line. They were fearful instruments of war. Each of them carried a handful of medium-sized naval cannon, but the centrepiece of each ship was a pair of giant mortar guns that took up a wide expanse of deck amidships. The mortars were placed on massive base plates on the deck between the ship’s two masts. They packed an immense punch. They fired shells of 190 pounds – eight to ten times the weight of a typical naval round shot. And they could propel them for over two miles. That meant they could outrange anything the Americans could bring to bear on them. They were not very accurate but their destructive power could outreach the guns of Fort McHenry and its satellite forts by at least half a mile. The balance of power in this long-range gun battle would be heavily in favour of the British.
And so it proved. Britain’s Commander in Chief, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, appears to have been so confident of suppressing Fort McHenry that he had transferred his flag to the frigate Surprize and sailed up the Patapsco with Captain Alexander Gordon’s attacking squadron. And at six o’clock on that Tuesday morning, 13 September, Cochrane gave the signal to the bomb ships to begin their ranging shots. HMS Volcano fired the first shot, a hefty 13-inch mortar shell that exploded short of the coast. A second shot fell short too. All five bomb ships moved a little closer and by 7 a.m. all five were loosing off their giant mortar shells. Each time one of them fired, the downward force of the blast would make the whole deck tremble and momentarily thrust the ship’s hull two feet deeper into the water. The huge shells would lift off and climb to the peak of a great arc before plunging to a point usually wide of the intended target. The rockets for their part were like flying bombs, each with a fiery red afterglow, with widely varied trajectories – some describing long, lazy, almost vertical paths, others screaming horizontally across the water. The rockets and mortar shells were hopelessly inaccurate, but it was the very randomness of their scatter that made them such terrifying weapons. They could fall directly overhead or they could miss by hundreds of yards. And while the direct fire of the ships’ cannon, even if they’d been within range, would have done little damage to Fort McHenry’s low profile, its walls and emplacements were a poor defence against the lobbing of mortars and rockets. Armistead’s guess was that between 1,500 and 1,800 mortar shells alone – up to 150 tons of ordnance – landed around him in the next twenty-five hours. All the bomb ships had lurid names to awe their opponents: Volcano’s grim workmates were named Aetna, Devastation, Meteor and Terror and they were accompanied by a rocket ship, HMS Erebus, that fired even more erratically than they did.
Robert Barrett watched from the deck of the frigate Hebrus as the British guns pounded the forts. Just beyond them he and his mates could clearly see the masts of the merchant vessels and a ‘beautiful new frigate, the Java’, lying temptingly in the harbour, promising the British sailors a vast hoard of prize money if they could break in past the forts. Barrett was ‘confident that all on board the advanced ships had little doubt that the British ensign would soon proudly wave in triumph over the embattled fortress, whose embrasures presented a formidable line of artillery’.
For the next twenty-four hours this thunderous bombardment continued – the howl of the mortar bombs and the shriek of the incoming rockets mixed with the roar of the replying American guns. From the start all the American guns responded, many of them using the shot specially heated in the furnaces that made the balls into lethal incendiary bombs if they hit the wooden ships. But it soon became horrifyingly clear that none of the American shots were reaching the British ships, which were anchored well out of range. No American shore battery had the range of the bomb and rocket ships.
‘The enemy commenced the bombardment of Fort McHenry,’ wrote the American Lieutenant Henry Newcomb, ‘which was returned with shells and shot, but as they fell short, the fort discontinued firing, while the enemy continued to throw their shells with great precision and effect…’ George Armistead was soon near despair: ‘This was to me a most distressing circumstance as it left us exposed to a constant and tremendous shower of shells without the most remote possibility of our doing him the slightest injury.’ Armistead had earnestly requested a couple of heavy mortars. One had been delivered to him but without fuses or base. Another major worry for Armistead, as the bombs rained down around him, was the fact that the fort’s powder magazine was not bombproof. At one heart-stopping moment a bomb landed on it but failed to go off. Another direct hit and Fort McHenry could be blown sky-high. Armistead had his men carry barrels of powder out of the magazine and spread them out behind a high wall in the fort where enemy fire was most unlikely to reach them.
John Webster had one desperate moment in Fort Babcock. Like Fort McHenry, Babcock had a powder magazine some way from the guns. Webster suddenly noticed that ‘one of my seamen, an obstinate Englishman, attempted to lay a train of powder to the magazine; without thought I laid him out for dead with a handspike [a crowbar]’. The man came to a little later and escaped before the firing stopped. By early afternoon the battered defenders of the forts had the further discomfort of heavy rain showers to cope with. Most of them standing around their guns had only their woollen blankets for protection.
In Baltimore itself, despite all the efforts of General Sam Smith, alarm among the citizens was now at fever pitch. Many had evacuated their homes and removed their furniture. Few stores were open. James Stevens, a Methodist preacher, wrote (in rather shaky spelling) to his sister in Pennsylvania that he could see on the one hand ‘the wagons, carts and drays, all in hast mooving the people and the poorer sort with what they could cary and there children on there backs flying for their lives’ and on the other hand he watched the British ‘bumbs lite and burst on the shore at which explosions the hole town and several miles out would shake…’.
* * *
Around 2 p.m. the Royal Navy had a lucky strike. Through the driving rain a British mortar shell dropped out of the sky on to a 24-pounder on Fort McHenry’s south-west bastion. It was one of Judge Nicholson’s guns. His lieutenant, Levi Clagett, was killed outright by the blast, which dismounted the gun and broke its carriage wheel. Isaac Munroe was only twenty-five paces away. Moments earlier he’d been standing beside Sergeant John Clemm, ‘a most amiable character’, when a bomb had burst over their heads. Clemm was killed when ‘a piece the size of a silver dollar, two inches thick, passed through his body in a diagonal direction from his navel, and went into the ground upwards of two feet’. Several more of Nicholson’s men were wounded. In spite of this loss, it is astonishing how few casualties the Americans suffered as they endured hour after hour of pounding by British shells. In all they lost four men dead and twenty-four wounded. George Armistead was tireless in encouraging his men. ‘No man ever behaved with more gallantry, firmness and constancy,’ recalled Nicholson. ‘We were like pigeons tied by the legs to be shot at, and you would have been delighted to have seen the conduct of Armistead.’
It was about this time, according to Armistead, that Cochrane, sensing that the Americans were in serious trouble, took the risk of ordering at least three of his bomb ships to move closer to the fort. They moved to within a mile and a half. It was the chance George Armistead had been waiting for. They were within range of his guns. He immediately ordered them all to open fire. Isaac Munroe watched Armistead mount the parapet and order the 24-pounders and then shortly afterwards the other guns to open up on the British ships that were now within range. ‘We could see the s
hot strike the frigates in several instances, when every heart was gladdened and we gave three cheers.’ Four musicians among the fort’s artillerymen struck up ‘Yankee Doodle’ on their fifes and drums. Armistead reported that his command was ‘obeyed with alacrity through the whole garrison, and in half an hour those intruders again sheltered themselves by withdrawing beyond our reach. We gave three cheers and again ceased firing.’ The British bomb ship Devastation was hit in the port bow and Volcano was hit twice. It wasn’t long before Cochrane pulled them back to where they could still inflict damage on the fort without being within range of its guns. ‘We were again foiled,’ recalled Isaac Munroe, ‘and were reduced to the dreadful alternative of facing by far the most tremendous bombardment ever known in this country without any means of resisting it…’ Robert Barrett was one of the crew of a launch sent from the Hebrus to reconnoitre the harbour mouth. But the American guns opened up so fiercely that Barrett saw the British bomb vessels wisely pulling back behind him. Another smallish British vessel was near by and Barrett watched as a ‘black man, who was standing up in the centre, was cut clean in half by one of the enemy’s shots. This was sufficient warning for us to shift…’
