When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  For most of the day and throughout the night of 13–14 September the American artillery remained powerless to respond to the British bombardment. Hour after hour Barrett could not conceal his excitement at the sheer immensity of the Royal Navy’s firepower and he never appeared to doubt that it would lead to Baltimore’s collapse. ‘All this night the bombardment continued with unabated vigour, the hissing rockets and the fiery shells glittered in the air, threatening destruction as they fell, whilst to add solemnity to this scene of devastation, the rain fell in torrents.’ Late that night, after more than twelve hours of the Royal Navy’s attack on the forts, Cochrane ordered a further escalation. Captain Charles Napier, who had won great praise for his skill and bravery in the thrust up the Potomac against Alexandria, was ordered to mastermind a ‘diversionary attack’ up the Patapsco River. Napier was still suffering from the wound in his neck, which was to make him walk with a stoop for the rest of his life. But this mission was of the highest importance and it demanded a commander of his calibre. He was to take a fleet of small boats up the river – ‘their oars’, insisted Cochrane, ‘must be muffled’ – and go ‘close to the shore’, and then to anchor and ‘remain perfectly quiet until one o’clock’. At 1 a.m. the British guns would open up again, and Napier’s men would make as if to assault the forts from the beaches firing their muskets ‘occasionally using blank cartridges’. The operation was designed to distract the Americans from the attack that Colonel Brooke’s army would be making on the city’s defences at 2 a.m. Once Napier had heard that the army’s attack was ‘seriously engaged, you will return to this ship for further orders’.

  Napier transferred more than a thousand men to the launches and plenty of blank as well as regular ball ammunition for their muskets. Then, with the rain pelting down and making it very hard for any of the boat skippers to see more than a short distance ahead, Napier’s force moved off. The rain and the pitch dark soon fragmented this force, and half of the men found themselves heading direct for the harbour mouth. They were spotted by the American gunners in the Lazaretto battery and they soon turned around and scuttled back to the British fleet. Napier and the rest of the force managed to penetrate up the river as far as Fort Covington, but they were soon detected. John Webster in Fort Babcock, alerted by the increased British shelling that night, had already double-shotted his cannon with a mix of large 18-pound balls and grapeshot. And then, ‘about midnight I could hear a splashing in the water. The attention of others was aroused and we were convinced it was the noise of muffled oars of the British barges.’ He could even discern ‘small gleaming lights in different places’. Some of the lights appeared to be showing as far up the river as Fort Covington. Webster then personally supervised the priming of the guns in the pouring rain and helped aim them carefully at where he reckoned the British were. ‘I trained the guns and then opened on them, which caused the boats to cease rowing and a rapid firing followed from the barges, as well as from ourselves.’ He was sure he could hear the balls strike the barges, and his men told him they could hear the British screaming. Henry Newcomb’s guns in Fort Covington opened up too. The flashes of the British guns and the flare of the rockets now gave the Americans clear targets to aim at. It wasn’t long before Napier ordered his flotilla to abort and make all haste back to the ships. The Americans claimed that they had destroyed one barge and that they found a number of bodies floating on the water the following morning.

  Napier’s foray had certainly commanded American attention and he must have hoped that it would help divert attention from Brooke’s planned offensive that night. Even if he’d been unable to keep up the pressure until 2 a.m. as planned, Brooke would presumably still proceed with his scheduled attack. But, listen though they did, the British on their ships could hear no sound of firing from Brooke’s army. Either his attack had been postponed or something had gone wrong.

  21

  You go on at your peril

  13 September

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER Arthur Brooke had gone to bed knowing that the following day, Tuesday 13 September, he would face the greatest challenge of his career. Ross’s death had given him the chance to lead a British army to a historic victory. The Royal Navy would commence its bombardment of Baltimore’s coastal forts the following morning. If they could be suppressed, the city would be exposed to assault from the sea on one side and from his army from the other. And if his forces could break through as they had at Bladensburg and North Point, the city would be at his mercy.

  An encouraging message reached Brooke on the evening of the 12th from the British Commander in Chief, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane. He was all ready to give his bomb ships the order to open fire as soon as the light came up the next day. Cochrane told Brooke that he had looked at the fortifications the Americans had thrown up in front of Baltimore, and ‘It struck me that this entrenched camp may be turned.’ Brooke wrote back to say that ‘in the morning we hope to proceed at about twelve or one to work our destruction…’ and he added: ‘your fire I should think on the town would be of infinite service to us’. He ended by expressing ‘my hope for our mutual success’.

  It was another wet night. The rain was so heavy that soldiers struggled to keep their weapons dry. The lucky ones had leather cases which gave their muskets some protection; others did their best to shelter their guns under their arms. In the morning the troops were ordered to lighten their loads by dumping their blankets, most of which were sodden with the rain. Gleig got up, ‘absolutely heavy with the load of moisture which hung about me … My very skin was perforated – I was wet to the bones and marrow.’ The army moved off and soon there was the welcome sound of the supporting British naval bombardment over to their left. Gleig led a patrol to keep an eye on the army’s flank, and it wasn’t long before he came across two Americans as he struggled through some undergrowth. ‘Holding a cocked pistol in my hand, I ran towards them and commanded them on pain of death to surrender.’ Gleig had to knock a rifle out of the hand of one of them, who promptly burst into tears. He said he didn’t mind what Gleig did to him as long as he would spare the life of his father, who was lying badly wounded on the ground. Gleig took one look at the father and saw that he was actually dead. ‘God forbid that I should do injury either to a father or a son under such circumstances,’ he said and moved on, leaving the young man to cope with his father’s corpse.

  After trudging through woods and clambering over a number of trees the Americans had cut down in their path, Brooke and his army suddenly broke out into much more open country which fell away before them and then rose to a ridge that concealed the city of Baltimore directly behind it. The ridge was heavily fortified. Brooke was immediately struck by the scale of the defences Baltimore’s General Sam Smith had constructed: ‘Found the enemy strongly posted on high hill, a regular ditch and strong redoubts…’ He and his staff estimated that the line of ramparts and entrenchments was manned by as many as 15,000, perhaps even 20,000 men, five times the size of their own army. For once their estimate was about right. They also counted about 120 guns in well-dug emplacements. Some of them were heavy naval 32-pounders. Loaded with grape or canister they would pack a lethal punch against advancing infantry. As Gleig put it: ‘A moment’s survey of these hills served … to convince us that something more than a mere continuance of our march would be required to make the prize our own.’ Brooke and Cockburn rode at a safe distance along the whole American line to make their own assessment. They were in no doubt that a head-on attack would be near suicide. But Brooke observed that the American left wing appeared poorly defended and that, ‘by making a night attack, I might gain his flank and get into his rear’. This was, he reckoned, ‘perfectly feasible’, and he would attack at night when the American guns would be least effective. The assault would be launched at two o’clock the following morning – on 14 September. Two columns would wheel around the American left where the line of guns appeared to end and another column would stage a diversionary attack on the
American right. It would only be a feint. Brooke’s main punch would hit the Americans on their extreme left where their line was weak. But the navy’s support would be critical through this operation, and so James Scott, Cockburn’s right-hand man, was sent off to communicate the plan to Alexander Cochrane’s ships bombarding Fort McHenry. Scott says that when he reached the beach the man who ‘gave me a passage off to the Admiral’ was none other than Captain Sir Thomas Hardy, former captain of the Victory who had famously kissed Nelson as he died of his wound at Trafalgar nine years earlier.

  With the decision made to wait until the early hours for the night attack, Brooke’s army remained stationary in front of the American lines all evening. From Cockburn and Brooke downwards hopes were high that the American position could be carried and that they’d be in Baltimore by breakfast. ‘The odds were unquestionably tremendous…’ wrote George Gleig, ‘yet there was not a man amongst us who entertained a doubt as to the issue of the battle, let it begin when it might. We despised the Yankees from our hearts, and only longed for an opportunity to show them how easily they could be beaten.’

  Gleig and his comrades were again placed as sentries forward of the main force, and they were soon drenched in the rain which began again that evening. After a struggle with the sodden wood lying about, they finally got a fire alight to give them some warmth. Their spirits rose even more when they found an empty house a couple of hundred yards ahead of them. They looked everywhere – without success – for food, but then one of the soldiers noticed that ‘the wily Yankee to whom this house belonged, unable or unwilling to remove his wine, had adopted the common precaution of blocking up the entrance to his vaults with brick work’. A soldier smashed through it with the butt of his musket, and they found a well-stocked wine cellar. ‘In five minutes the cellar was crowded with men, filling, in the first place their own haversacks and bosoms, and then handing out bottles, with the utmost liberality, to their comrades.’ Gleig and one of his friends laid hands on ‘a flask of exquisite cognac with two magnums of superior Bordeaux’. They took them back to their post, tucked into a salt-beef supper, then lit their pipes and – in spite of the rain – sat by their fire ‘in a state … of maximum enjoyment’.

  George Chesterton was less lucky. He had to struggle to keep his artillery ammunition as dry as he could. He smothered it in blankets then, soaked to the skin, went off to report to his commanding officer. He searched for some time in the pouring rain and finally tracked him down snugly sheltering in a pigsty. ‘He recommend me to take care of myself, so I joyfully made for a large and blazing campfire contiguous, where I hoped to dry my saturated garments.’ No sooner had Chesterton managed to dry himself and his clothes than the heavens opened again, and ‘I was again drenched.’ He finally eased his way into a barn full of 21st Fusiliers fast asleep: one of them rather grumpily moved over to give him a piece of floor to sleep on.

  Brooke had spread the word earlier in the evening that the army should be ready to mount his planned night attack once the navy resumed its bombardment of the coastal forts. And while it was still light he and Cockburn were just returning from a final inspection of the enemy’s position when James Scott hurried back from his visit to the Commander in Chief. Cockburn, obviously in high spirits, greeted him cheerily and asked, ‘Well Scott, have you delivered my message to the Commander in Chief? We have had an excellent view of their defences; before two o’clock tomorrow morning all that you now see … will be ours. What force is to assist us on the waterside?’ Scott gave Cockburn an unsealed letter – which he had already scanned – with the words: ‘I trust, Sir, the contents of this despatch will not frustrate your’s [sic] and the General’s plans’ (Scott mistakenly promotes Brooke to the rank of general). Scott watched Cockburn’s face fall as he studied the letter. Its ‘perusal … dispelled the animated smile of confidence from his brow, and he handed it to General Brooke’.

  The letter was from Cochrane, and it came as a crushing blow to both Cockburn and Brooke. It was addressed to Cockburn. ‘My Dear Admiral. It is impossible for the ships to render you any assistance – the town is so far retired from the forts. It is for Colonel Brooke to consider under such circumstances whether he has force sufficient to defeat so large a number as it [is] said the enemy has collected, say 20,000 strong or even a less number…’ The letter goes on to suggest that to go ahead ‘will be only throwing the men’s lives away and prevent us from going upon other services’ (this clearly refers to Cochrane’s ultimate aim of switching his campaign to the south and attacking New Orleans). ‘At any rate a very considerable loss must ensue and as the enemy is daily gaining strength his loss let it be ever so great cannot be equally felt.’

  Cochrane’s letter is in striking contrast to his message to Brooke of the night before in which he states that the American position ‘may be turned’. The letter is not an order. Cochrane was a lot senior to Brooke, but Brooke – like Ross before him – was free, as the army commander, to make up his own mind. Cochrane appears to accept this when he says ‘It is for Colonel Brooke to consider…’ But he then goes on to state bluntly that to go on with the fight would risk heavy losses and jeopardise the next stage of the campaign. He’s saying to Brooke, ‘You’ll go on at your peril and you’ll get no support from me.’

  The other remarkable thing about the letter is that, at the foot of it, Cochrane indicates that it was written at 9.30 that morning, only two and a half hours after his bombardment of the forts had begun – hardly time enough to be sure whether his bomb ships would succeed or fail in suppressing Fort McHenry and the other gun positions protecting Baltimore harbour. Cochrane had of course watched the Americans sinking ships to close the harbour mouth. He must have realised that, even if he suppressed Fort McHenry, this barrier would preclude his ships penetrating the inner harbour to bring their guns within range of the city itself. Unless he could land guns on the shore and roll them forward, he would be powerless to give artillery support to Brooke. But he was to continue the blasting of the coastal forts for the best part of the next twenty-four hours. And he gave no intimation to anyone on the ships that he regarded any further fighting as futile. Quite the contrary: he continued it and even intensified it by moving his bomb ships forward in the early afternoon. And in the evening he gave the order for Captain Napier’s midnight attack on the forts to coincide with Brooke’s planned night attack. In spite of his disenchantment with the whole project from as early as breakfast time on 13 September, he continued with the bombardment in case Brooke rejected his advice and went ahead with his night attack.

  Brooke faced an agonising decision. Cockburn was, predictably, forthright in urging him to press on – just as he had done when Cochrane had advised Ross to abandon his advance on Washington. ‘The Rear Admiral’, recalled Scott, ‘was still for proceeding…’ But Arthur Brooke felt he couldn’t defy Cochrane. ‘All my hopes were in a moment blasted,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It would have been presumptuous in me to say I could take such a force without great loss, more especially having only about four thousand men. If I took the place I should have been the greatest man in England. If I lost, my military character was gone forever.’ He did promise Cockburn that he would put the issue to a Council of War of his top military commanders, and invited Cockburn to attend it. Scott says Cockburn ‘instantly declined’, suggesting that the admiral was exasperated and deeply disappointed by what he saw as Cochrane’s faintheartedness. The Council met till midnight. According to George Evans, who was there, Brooke summoned the meeting because he felt he was ‘in an embarrassed situation’. The Council agreed unanimously on just one point, ‘the conviction of success in the event of an assault – but three senior members considered the attempt improper in opposition to the judgement of the Vice Admiral. Being unable to obtain unanimous sanction, Col. Brooke decided on retreat.’ So instead of attacking in the early hours, the army would retire to the ships. The Baltimore operation was off. The ambitious dream of securing an even richer prize
than Washington was abandoned.

  To young soldiers like George Gleig, who’d never experienced defeat in battle – either in the Peninsula and southern France or in America – the order to retire came as a bitter shock. ‘It is impossible for me to convey any idea of the disappointment, or rather humiliation, experienced and expressed by persons of all ranks,’ he wrote. ‘In all night operations a compact body of veterans, well disciplined and orderly, are at all times an overmatch for whole crowds of raw levies.’ To Scott it was ‘a mortifying result after the brilliant success of the 12th’. But even Gleig, writing in a rather different tone in another book, recognised that without the coastal forts being suppressed and the navy assaulting Baltimore from the other flank, a land attack would have ‘cost us dear’. The counsel that prevailed in the end was that of Harry Smith, Edward Codrington and now Cochrane, who felt that Baltimore was a battle too far. Admiral Codrington was in no doubt that left to himself Robert Ross would not have advanced on Baltimore but was talked into it by Evans and Cockburn. ‘I was surprised that so sensible a man as General Ross should be led away by the opposite opinions,’ he wrote to his wife when he sent her the news of Ross’s death. He told her he believed that ‘the operation was based on poor intelligence and that there was little chance of capturing Baltimore … it was well defended’. But George Cockburn was not going to give way to what he saw as the fainthearts. In a conversation with the American Skinner the next day he said: ‘Ah, if it had not been for the sinking of those ships across the channel, with the wind and tide we had in our favour we would have taken the town.’

  George de Lacy Evans, who had been as eager as Cockburn to persist with the attempt on Baltimore, was beside himself with frustration and fury at the aborting of the operation. He came close to accusing the navy of cowardice: he remarked in the memorandum he wrote at the time that ‘our vessels were not permitted within cannon range’ and that no one was killed on board. ‘This was not the description of co-operation that General Ross had been led to expect. The enemy’s batteries were not very formidable. Some distinguished naval officers volunteered to attack them or force the chain of small vessels which had been nearly sunk at the entrance of the harbour.’ And if Brooke had attacked Hampstead Hill, ‘the extreme darkness of the night favoured us, we had observed the ground carefully … and at the very hour determined for the assault … a storm and torrent of rain commenced which must have rendered firearms nearly useless, and we should have probably penetrated the enemy’s lines without having received a shot’. And Evans concluded his diatribe with the words, ‘one of the most glorious opportunities which ever presented itself has irretrievably been lost’.