by Peter Snow
* Madison was not the last President to be present on an active battlefield. President Lincoln actually came under fire twice at Fort Stevens in Maryland on 11 and 12 July 1864.
* These are the figures Ross reported to London; the American commander Winder reckoned that the British lost at least 400. Gleig estimated that ‘upwards of 500 men were killed and wounded’ (Gleig, Fire and Blood, p. 88).
* See here and here.
* Napier was so hungry for experience of battle that during one slack period in his career he went to visit his brother, a junior army officer, and three cousins, all colonels, fighting with Wellington in the Peninsula. He managed to get himself slightly wounded at the Battle of Bussaco in 1810, when one of the colonels, Charles James Napier, actually fell severely wounded into the arms of the other Charles, his naval cousin. Colonel Charles James Napier was to go on to command a brigade under Admiral George Cockburn when he was conducting raids on the American coast in 1813. He was heartily critical of Cockburn and his methods. See here.
* Monroe was haunted for the rest of his life by the charge that he had engineered the resignation of John Armstrong. Long after his Presidency – he was to succeed Madison – Monroe begged Thomas McKenney, who was at his bedside as he approached his death, to use his knowledge of what had happened that weekend in August 1814 to absolve him of all responsibility for Armstrong’s departure.
* See here.
* The equivalent of less than $300 million today.
* The Duke of Wellington made a revealing and caustic comment on Cochrane’s character in a letter to Lord Longford, his wife Kitty Pakenham’s brother. Referring to the mission of another brother-in-law, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, to serve under Cochrane at New Orleans a year later, Wellington wrote: ‘I cannot but regret that he was ever employed … with such a colleague.’ The object of Cochrane’s expedition, asserted the Duke, was ‘plunder’ (Wellington to Longford, 22/5/1815, in Pakenham, p. 37).
* Commodore Joshua Barney and General John Stricker, a militia commander at Bladensburg, were two members of the special three-man committee appointed to superintend the making of the flag.
† Although eighteen states had joined the Union by 1814, the stars and stripes remained limited to fifteen until 1818. From then a new act reduced the stripes back to thirteen but added a new star for each state. So today’s US flag has thirteen stripes and fifty stars.
* The only other reported lapse of discipline at this stage was the story that a girl had to leap out of an upstairs window of the Shaw family’s house to escape a British lieutenant who was trying to kiss her. Ross had the young officer sent back to his ship (Eshelman, Sheads and Hickey, p. 167).
* The author contacted the Brooke and Belmore families and it appears to be widely accepted that Belmore was the father of Marianne Brooke’s daughter, Juliana, born in 1814.
* The regiment was commanded by Major Faunce; its commanding officer, Arthur Brooke’s elder brother, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Brooke, missed the North American campaign due to illness.
* See here.
* Hoban made it all happen relatively quickly because he agreed to use wood rather than brick for many internal partitions. These were not built to last and the building had to be totally reconstructed in 1948–52.
