by Peter Snow
The men in Brooke’s army would never tire of debating what would have happened if they’d pressed on with their night attack on Baltimore. Some argued that the loss of their general on 12 September was the death blow to the enterprise. If Ross had survived, and had led his men against the Hampstead Heights, the argument ran, the Americans would have been routed. With Ross rather than the competent but uninspiring Arthur Brooke at their head, even 20,000 militia wouldn’t have stopped them. Baltimore would have suffered the fate of Washington. But Ross would have received the same disheartening news from Cochrane – that the navy couldn’t suppress the forts and smash its way through the sunken ships and into the harbour. On past form Ross was as unlikely as Brooke to have been persuaded by Cockburn to defy their Commander in Chief and push on with the offensive.
And what prospects would there have been for that night attack, whether led by Brooke or by Ross? What chance was there that they would have overcome the Americans ‘without a shot’ as Evans believed? The assault would have been launched at the extreme left-hand edge of General Sam Smith’s line on the north-east side of the city. By an irony Smith had shifted a large slice of his militia there under the command of William Winder, the loser at Bladensburg. To his credit Winder carried out the manoeuvre, according to Smith, ‘with great skill and judgment’. The British would then have clashed immediately with the man they had humiliated three weeks earlier, now determined to redeem himself. And even if Winder had been beaten back, the thousands of Americans in entrenchments beyond would have had to be dislodged if the British were to secure their flank and rear as they pressed ahead. And the defenders of Baltimore were far better drilled and motivated by Sam Smith’s weeks of meticulous preparation than the army Winder had commanded in the approaches to Washington. Besides they would have outnumbered the British attacking force by some ten to fifteen thousand men. The odds at Bladensburg had been two to one. Here they would have been up to five to one.
But if, despite all these doubts, the British had succeeded in smashing their way into Baltimore, they would have denied the Americans the single most satisfying outcome of the War of 1812. It was an event that was to become embedded in American history as one of the country’s foundation myths. It took place at dawn the following morning as Cochrane decided to call an end to his bombardment of the forts twenty-five hours after it had begun.
The man who was to create this myth was the young American lawyer Francis Scott Key, who had successfully secured the release of Dr Beanes a few days earlier.* The pair had not yet been allowed to leave for home, and Key had spent the night anxiously watching the relentless British shelling of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. He was standing on the deck of the small ship on which the British had insisted on confining him to avoid him revealing their plans. He had a clear view of the smoke and debris thrown up by the explosions of the rockets and bombs, and his fertile imagination conjured up pictures of the suffering the British must be inflicting on the garrison of this and the other forts. It seemed to him less and less likely that the fort could survive the bombardment. As the first light on Wednesday 14 September began to distinguish the fort’s embattled walls in the gloom, he strained his eyes to see any sign of life. Were there still Americans alive in it? Had the British silenced its guns? And – worst fear of all – was the fort in British hands? William Beanes was beside Key. His eyesight was poor: he could make out little in the morning haze. ‘Can you see the flag?’ he kept asking. ‘Before it was light enough to see objects at a distance,’ reported Key’s brother-in-law, ‘their glasses were turned to the fort, uncertain whether they would see the stars and stripes or the flag of the enemy.’ And then through the gloom Key could just spot the flagstaff inside the fort and a giant flag flying from it. It was unmistakable. It was not the Union Jack. It was the great banner with its fifteen stars and fifteen stripes which George Armistead had commissioned Mary Pickersgill and her daughter to make the previous summer. Key’s spirit leapt. The Americans still held the fort. Baltimore had survived the British attack. And there and then ‘in that hour of deliverance and joyful triumph, my heart spoke: and “Does not such a country and such defenders of their country deserve a song?” was its question’. The young lawyer jotted down the lines of a poem that was to become more celebrated than any other in American history.
Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there –
Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
Francis Scott Key wrote these words in note form on the back of a letter which he happened to have in his pocket. He finished the poem, four verses in all, in the boat that took him ashore when the British released him. Once their mission had been abandoned, they had no reason to detain him any longer. He went to a Baltimore hotel and wrote the poem out in full and showed it to Judge Joseph Nicholson, his brother-in-law, who’d just returned from his post in Fort McHenry. Nicholson, who’d endured the entire bombardment inside the fort, told Key ‘he was so much pleased with it that he immediately sent it to a printer’. And less than a week later it was published in a local paper and was widely welcomed by the public. Key set the words to the tune of an old English song club favourite ‘Anacreon in heaven’, and it became an immediate hit in America. Over a century later, in 1931, it finally became the US national anthem.
The British seaman Robert Barrett saw the star-spangled banner too – from the deck of his frigate Hebrus as she and the other ships weighed anchor and turned away down the river. ‘It was a galling sight for British seamen to behold. And, as the last vessel spread her canvas to the wind, the Americans hoisted a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery and fired at the same time a gun of defiance.’ Barrett was another who believed that if Brooke and Cochrane had displayed ‘ordinary judgement, perseverance and decision’ they would have won the day. ‘When the squadron retreated from Baltimore, sullen discontent was displayed and malevolent aspersions cast upon our veteran chief…’
Sam Smith’s foresight and tenacity had paid off. He didn’t realise that the British were leaving until daylight. He decided his troops were ‘so worn out with a continued watching and with being under arms during three days and nights’ that he made no effort to pursue Brooke back to the ships. But that was a mere trifle compared to what he and his fellow citizens felt they’d achieved. The events of that night and the following morning, 14 September, may have seemed little more than a frustrating setback for Britain, but the United States would interpret them as a glorious triumph. The British decision to end an inconclusive naval stand-off and to abort a major operation on land was transformed by American myth-makers into a resounding victory that would become an emblematic moment in US history. Without any clash on the battlefield the young American republic had humbled the might of the British empire. The rebuff to Britain at Baltimore decisively demonstrated America’s independence of its former master. And this explosion of national pride was only to be magnified by the events of the remaining months of the war.
22
Unparalleled in history
Aftermath
WITH THE DEPARTURE of the British army from Baltimore the so-called War of 1812 between Britain and America had only four more months to run.
An exultant James Madison had even more to celebrate when he addressed the new session of Congress on 20 September. A powerful British thrust south from Canada had been thrown back at Plattsburg in New York State and General Andrew Jackson had crushed Britain’s allies, the Creek Indians, in the south. The news only further depressed spirits on Alexander Cochrane’s ships as they sailed off
to their West Indies base in Jamaica to prepare for the winter campaign against New Orleans. Cochrane put the best gloss he could on the reverse at Baltimore, even claiming in a private letter to the head of the Admiralty that he had always been against the Baltimore operation. He wrote that he had been ‘extremely urged by the General to which I reluctantly consented’.
When the accounts of the setback reached London in late October, newspapers put a brave face on it. The Morning Post called it ‘a most brilliant victory over the American army before Baltimore’. The Prime Minister Lord Liverpool was more plain-spoken. He wrote to his Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh that the news from America was ‘chequered’. One of his key negotiators at the peace talks at Ghent in the Netherlands was more downbeat. The news was ‘very far from satisfactory’, and Baltimore ‘will be considered by the Americans as a victory…’. If the success at Washington had boosted Britain’s chances of winning the peace terms it wanted, Baltimore and Plattsburg had changed all that. Liverpool’s government was now, like Madison’s, deeply concerned by the cost of the war. It was involving Britain in ‘prodigious expense’. In desperation he turned to the Duke of Wellington and asked him to take command in America, ‘to place the military operations on a proper footing and give us the best prospects of peace’. Wellington, who thought the war a waste of money and lives, was quick to decline the invitation and to point out that the government could not hope to gain much at the peace talks. The Duke, then Ambassador in Paris after his successful campaign against the French in Spain and southern France, wielded immense influence. And his judgement as well as the severe economic pressures helped propel Liverpool’s government towards a peace settlement at Ghent which effectively left each side where it had been before the war began. Both sides abandoned territorial ambitions. Britain renounced any claim to places like Maine, America scrapped any claim to Canada. No one mentioned the Royal Navy’s outdated impressment policy that had been one of the war’s main causes. The Treaty of Ghent was signed on 24 December 1814. Nothing was gained, nothing lost by either side: only the American Indians lost out. The British had been anxious to guarantee the rights of the tribes who had fought so loyally on their side. But they had little support from their Canadian subjects, and their own enthusiasm for the rights of Indians waned as the war went on and peace beckoned. The Indians were effectively ignored. The British government could heave a huge sigh of relief. Castlereagh wrote to Liverpool, ‘I wish you joy at being relieved of the millstone of the American war.’
But the last tragic phase of the War of 1812 was about to be acted out – with neither of the combatants in America aware that peace had been signed. It took a month for news to cross the Atlantic, and only two weeks after the signing in Europe the armies of Britain and America faced each other just outside New Orleans. On 8 January 1815 Cochrane’s much larger British force, with old comrades like Harry Smith, George Chesterton, George Gleig and James Scott now fighting under Wellington’s brother-in-law, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, threw itself against the army of General Andrew Jackson. They were up against the ablest general in the United States. Jackson was as well entrenched as Sam Smith had been at Baltimore and his men equally motivated. Pakenham led a poorly co-ordinated attack on the American defences and what followed was a near massacre. Britain lost 700 dead including Pakenham himself, America just seven. Another 1,400 British were wounded and 500 captured. Harry Smith, who had been posted back to America after only a few weeks with his beloved Juana, described it as an ‘awful disaster’. The American fire was the ‘most murderous I ever beheld before or since’. New Orleans was an utterly futile waste of life: even if the British had triumphed, captured the city and plunged deep into Louisiana, they’d have had to hand every inch of it back under the peace treaty signed a fortnight earlier 5,000 miles away.
To James Madison’s administration the news of Andrew Jackson’s victory came like a gift from God. Dolley Madison had had a wretched autumn, much of it in tears, cursing the British and fretting for her husband’s fractured reputation as a war leader mocked by most Americans. He had, after all, launched a country equipped with one of the tiniest navies into a struggle with the greatest naval power in the world. But after New Orleans the President could boast of a defeat of the British empire as conclusive as any in the whole war. It allowed Americans to banish the humiliation of Bladensburg and Washington to an obscure page of history – just as in Britain victory at Waterloo, only five months later, would eclipse the memory of New Orleans. James Madison had declared war on Britain over issues that had become irrelevant, a war that would win America no material gain and cost many lives. It was no second war of independence as some have dubbed it: Britain never intended to repossess the country it had lost thirty years earlier. But it did mark the coming of age of the United States, the birth of a new American pride and self-confidence. The raising of the star-spangled banner on 14 September 1814 became a symbol of this new determination. James Madison and his successors unashamedly abandoned their reservations about defence. They signalled their support for strong regular armed forces, and set the country on a path of expansion on land and at sea. During the next forty years the United States thrust out west from its small enclave on the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific 3,000 miles away. This great new enterprise soon made the drive to compete with British seapower in the Atlantic seem far less important.
Madison and his wife Dolley took up residence in one of the very few fashionable properties in Washington left intact – the Octagon House, which still stands on the corner of 18th Street and New York Avenue. It was built for the wealthy Tayloe family by William Thornton, designer of the Capitol, and the Madisons did their best to revive the colourful lifestyle that had made them so popular in the White House. Both James and Dolley were in the Octagon House on 14 February 1815 when the news finally reached them from Ghent that they were officially at peace with Britain.
At eight o’clock that night Dolley Madison threw open the doors and in poured congressmen, senators and other leading citizens right across the political spectrum. An eyewitness watched Dolley Madison ‘in the meridian of life and queenly beauty’ presiding over the joy and splendour of the scene. ‘No one could doubt, who beheld the radiance of joy which lighted up her countenance and diffused its beams around, that all uncertainty was at an end, and that the government of the country had, in very truth … “passed from gloom to glory”.’ Even the servants weren’t forgotten. Dolley Madison’s cousin Sally Coles rushed to the top of the basement stairs shouting ‘Peace, Peace!’ and the butler was ordered to serve out wine freely in the servants’ hall. Paul Jennings, the Madisons’ black servant, played the President’s March on his violin. He recalls the major-domo, Sioussat, being ‘drunk for two days’, and ‘such another joyful time was never seen in Washington’.
The city gradually recovered from the war. The Capitol was rebuilt after a proposal to shift the capital from Washington was narrowly defeated in Congress. James and Dolley Madison were never again to occupy the White House. It took its original designer, James Hoban, and his team three years to restore and re-whiten the walls and completely refurbish the interior.* The next President to move in was James Monroe, Madison’s natural successor as President, who’d played such a leading role throughout the crisis of 1814. He took up residence in the reconstructed White House more than three years after the British had set it on fire. His wife, Elizabeth, was nowhere near as amiable and accessible as Dolley Madison had been. Under President Monroe, however, the United States, by expanding its borders and its influence in the Americas with its imperious ‘Monroe Doctrine’, became an increasingly important world power.
Of those Americans who had fought at Bladensburg, only Joshua Barney emerged with any credit. He had little time to enjoy being a national hero: he never really recovered from his wounds and died in 1825. William Winder, like John Armstrong, had suffered too much obloquy to have any career prospects. Remarkably he was cleared by a court of in
quiry and ‘commended’ for having heroically ‘done his duty under circumstances beyond his control’. He died ten years later. James Madison generously wrote to Winder’s son in 1834, assuring him that his father had behaved ‘with gallantry, activity and zeal … during the action’. John Pendleton Kennedy, the man who had turned up on the battlefield in dancing pumps, switched from soldiery to literature and became a popular American novelist, striking up a friendship with the British writer William Thackeray. He also flourished as a politician. He entered Congress and became Navy Secretary in 1852. Francis Scott Key returned to his law practice and became the capital’s Attorney General in 1833. He never knew that one day the words he’d written at Fort McHenry would become the most famous song in the United States, its national anthem.
George Armistead continued as the commandant of Fort McHenry, but his health was not good and he died in Baltimore, a national hero, in 1818 at the age of thirty-eight. By an irony both his grandson and the grandson of Francis Scott Key were imprisoned in Fort McHenry for their southern confederate leanings in the American Civil War – when the fort became a federal prison with a fearsome reputation. Sam Smith, who more than anyone deserves the credit for saving Baltimore, remained a formidable figure in the US Congress for another nineteen years and died at the age of eighty-six in 1839.
