Prelude to Glory, Vol. 9

by Ron Carter

  Their host held back nothing. Beds and bedrooms were made available. Hot water was poured into the white porcelain basins for washing. As if by magic, a huge supper appeared on the dining room table, complete with buttermilk and tarts, and while the hungry men sat at the table, the house staff was in their bedrooms, brushing the road dust from their tunics. Caleb Bentley and his wife and household showed the courtesy of asking few questions.

  They were finishing the blueberry tarts when a knock came at the front door. Bentley excused himself and hurried from the room, fearful that the British had somehow learned the president of the United States was inside and had come to complete what would be the master stroke of the entire British campaign—taking the American president captive!

  He opened the door and facing him were two young men in the uniform of army officers.

  “May I help you, gentlemen?” Caleb asked.

  “Sir, we are two personal aides to President Madison. We’ve been tracking him most of the day. Has he stopped here?”

  Bentley said, “Remain here for a moment,” and walked quickly back to the dining room.

  “Mister President, are you expecting two young aides? In uniform?”

  Madison stood, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “Are they here?”

  “At the front door.”

  Madison followed Bentley, who threw the door wide, and Madison faced his two aides, with relief flooding through his system.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  Madison turned to Bentley. “These young men have been of tremendous help. Would it be possible for them to—”

  He got no further.

  Bentley boomed, “Come in, come in! You look like you could use a meal yourselves. And a bath and bed. Follow me.”

  It was deep into the evening when President Madison gathered his group around the great dining table, tired, weary, needing rest, but determined.

  He was brief.

  “Gentlemen, I have determined that we are going to return to the city tomorrow.” He waited for the shocked murmuring to quiet, then turned to his aides. “Have you been there in the past two days? Seen it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What condition is it in?”

  The young men glanced at each other before one answered. “Destroyed. Unbelieveable.”

  “Did any government buildings survive?”

  “Only one that we saw. The patent office.”

  “The Executive Mansion?”

  “Gone.”

  Madison drew a great breath and slowly exhaled it. “We will return tomorrow. In the morning, as early as you and your horses are fit to travel, would you take half of my escort party into the city and find all the cabinet and government department heads possible? Ask them to assemble at the patent office at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you. Now I believe we should all get some rest.”

  A somber, pensive Madison sat for a long time in the yellow lamplight of his bedroom, pondering, reflecting, searching for a plan to reunite his country, to restore the faith and confidence of the people in their leaders, and he went to his bed and to his sleep with gaps and holes in his thoughts and no conclusions.

  He was washed and dressed for breakfast by half past eight o’clock and was greeted at the foot of the stairway by Bentley.

  “Good morning, Mister President. I trust you slept well?”

  “Good, thank you. Much refreshed.”

  “Your aides left shortly after four o’clock. They had a good breakfast.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Come into the dining room. Breakfast is prepared, and the others are waiting.”

  It was midmorning when Madison and his escort and the few cabinet and government heads that had arrived at the Bentley estate mounted their horses and turned them southwest, toward the burned-out city. They rode apprehensively, with little talk, as they crossed the Anacostia and came into the streets of the capital. They sat stiff in their saddles, staring at the charred hulks of the government buildings, some still smoldering, with black holes like dead eyes where windows had been, and they felt the eeriness of vacant, silent streets where the clamor and bustle of people and carriages intent on running the United States government had ceased to be.

  The party tied their horses before the patent office and followed President Madison inside to the conference room, where they sat at a very long table amidst shelves of the huge ledgers in which the creative genius of a multitude of Americans was recorded. Including his escort and James Monroe, there were more than ten people gathered. Madison drew out his pocket watch—fifteen minutes before one o’clock on the afternoon of August 27, 1814—and sat down at the head of the table.

  “We will wait until one o’clock,” he announced.

  At ten minutes before one o’clock the two aides walked into the room, leather heels clicking in cadence on the hardwood floor.

  Madison looked up. “Were you able to find any more cabinet members? Department heads?”

  “Yes, sir. Perhaps ten. They should be here shortly.”

  They came in singly and in small clusters. By five minutes past one o’clock, more than thirty men had gathered around the table or in the room.

  Madison took a deep breath and rose and addressed them.

  “Thank you for coming. Our purpose today is to make an assessment of two things. First, the condition of the city and the governmental functions, and second, how has this disaster affected the general populace of the country?”

  He started around the table, inquiring of each man what he had seen personally, and one by one their dark reports poured out.

  The British hit the city at about eight o’clock in the evening on August 24. An infuriated British Admiral George Cockburn demanded burning the entire city—government buildings, residences, memorials—everything—avenge the burning of York, the small capital of Canada on Lake Erie, by the Americans in July of 1813.

  British Major General Robert Ross limited the order: burn the government buildings, but spare the residences.

  Two lieutenants, George De Lacy Evans of the army, and James Pratt of the navy, were assigned the burning of the Capitol building. With miners and sappers and a company of infantry, they smashed through the front doors and marched into both chambers of Congress, the House and the Senate, searching for records, but found very few; the vital documents had been saved by frantic clerks who had thrown them into wagons and carriages and any wheeled vehicle they could find and whipped terrified horses at stampede gait across the river into Virginia to save them wherever they could find space. The British threw lamp oil onto the draperies and the floors and systematically set each room ablaze, then the great rotunda, and finally the broken doors. The flames leaped high into the night sky while some Americans stood in the streets with tears flowing as the roofs finally gave way and caved in, to throw a mountain of sparks into the sky.

  At about ten-thirty pm, Ross and Cockburn led one hundred fifty red-coated regulars from the Capitol building down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Executive Mansion. They battered down the front door and with drawn swords searched every room. On the table in the great dining hall they discovered a sumptuous dinner, still warm, untouched, waiting for the president and his guests. Cockburn and Ross gleefully invited all the officers in their group to take their places at the table where they took devilish pleasure in devouring everything, including that which was in the ovens and on the stoves in the kitchen. Then they set the torches to the Executive Mansion, from the second floor down to the first, and stood surrounding it while it burned. They did not leave until the blazing roof collapsed and sparks leaped upward two hundred feet. The roofless building smoldered until all that remained were the smoke-blackened outside walls, with gaping holes where the windows had been.

  It was shortly before midnight when Ross and his men broke their way into the Treasury Building, certain they would find locked vaults holding
gold and silver bars. They found the vault doors standing open and all the treasure gone, saved by clerks who had loaded it into army wagons and moved it across the river. Ross gave the orders, and his men emptied lamp oil onto the hardwood floors, backed out of the building, and tossed torches through the open door. The building burned to the ground, a pile of charred timbers and blackened stone.

  Cockburn then led his men to the huge navy yards on the Anacostia River, anxious to destroy the single largest naval facility in the United States. Mordecai Booth, a common clerk, had tirelessly worked to load most of the vital records and government properties into wagons bound for Virginia. American Captain Tingey anticipated the arrival of the British and quickly shouted his orders to destroy the stripped-down naval yards altogether. Within minutes the entire place was ablaze, and with it the nearby rope works where hawsers were made. Tied to the docks was a frigate, the Essex, and a sloop, the Argus, both nearly completed, waiting only for detailing. Cat-footed seamen climbed the ropes into the riggings to set the furled sails ablaze, then retreated into the holds to fire the bowels of the ships. The flames could be seen as far north and east as Charles County, Maryland.

  At midnight Cockburn, caught up in his role of conquering hero, discovered the office of the newspaper, The National Intelligencer, with its owner, Joseph Gale, standing defiantly on its steps with more than twenty neighbors. Cockburn ordered them to stand down while he burned the building, and Gale, with his neighbors beside him, stood solid, defying Cockburn with their shouts that it would be a travesty to put the entire neighborhood at risk of being burned if fire were set to the newspaper office. Cockburn was caught in a dilemma he could not resolve: how many civilians would he have to shoot before he could burn the newspaper office, and what would become of him if he did it? He relented. Keep your newspaper office but go home. Get off the streets. He posted pickets, and the citizens left.

  In the dead of night, with rain steadily falling, both Cockburn and Ross marched their troops back to their camps, only to return the following morning.

  Cockburn led his troops to the navy yards and finished the destruction of every building, including the critical rope works.

  Ross and his troops sought out the big, square building that housed the State Department, hoping to seize the original drafts of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. After all, what greater insult could be heaped on these ridiculous rebels than to seize the documents on which their folly was founded? Ross was angered and frustrated to discover that Chief Clerk John Graham had seized most of the State Department documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, loaded them all into linen sacks, and gotten them out of town to Fredericksburg, Maryland. Ross set the building on fire and moved on to the building that housed the War Department, stormed the halls, and set the fires that burned it to the ground.

  They came to the patent office and shot the lock off the front door to enter the building. They were met there by Dr. William Thornton, the United States director of patents. White-faced with fury, Thornton shook his finger in their faces and condemned them for even thinking of destroying the patent office. After all, he shouted, it contained only private items belonging to private citizens and records of inventions that would benefit the entire civilized world! How dare they think to destroy it!

  Ross backed out of the building and left it intact.

  He sent the Twenty-First Infantry to find the fort at Greenleaf’s Point and see to it the entire spread of buildings was burned and the huge powder magazine destroyed. The redcoats found the fort partially burned, but the powder magazine intact. They thought they were following their orders when they dropped the hundreds of barrels of gunpowder into a huge well on the grounds, unaware that the water level inside the well was far too low to cover them. The last barrel had just been thrown into the hole when a spark from somewhere—perhaps a cigar—followed it down. Every keg of powder exploded with flame and dirt and wreckage being hurled three hundred feet into the air. The ground tremor reached twenty-five miles, and the resulting crater was monstrous. The explosion was heard twelve miles north of Bladensburg. Forty-two British regulars were knocked rolling, twelve dead, thirty wounded.

  Within minutes of the detonation, the heaviest storm in the memory of most descended, sweeping in from the southwest. Winds uprooted trees and tore great limbs from oaks that had been there for one hundred years. Shingles and shutters were ripped away, and some roofs were torn off houses. The streets were filled with flying branches and debris and dirt. A British officer and his horse were knocked off their feet to go rolling over and over in the fury of the howling wind. Close to forty British regulars were thrown down and injured. Then the rains came so thick men had to crouch and cover their faces to breathe. Lightning bolts turned the entire city brighter than noonday while thunder shook the ground.

  As the storm raged, Cockburn and Ross shouted orders, and their men retreated from the charred, smoldering wreckage of the United States capital, back north toward Bladensburg.

  The destruction of Washington, D.C., was complete.

  For a brief time Madison sat in the silence that surrounded the table before he again spoke.

  “Does any man present have any evidence of where the British intend striking next? Baltimore? Annapolis?”

  There was silence, and Madison moved onto the stand-or-fall question.

  “What has all this done to the citizenry? How do they now stand?”

  There was a pause, and one man asked, “Are you asking whether the country will continue to support the administration in prosecuting the war?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  The man took a deep breath, and every eye was on him, waiting.

  “May I speak candidly, sir?”

  “I expect it.”

  “Someone has written a message on the burned walls of the Capitol building, sir. It reads ‘George Washington founded this city after a seven years’ war with England—James Madison lost it after a two years’ war.’ I apologize, sir. I thought you would prefer to know the truth.”

  Madison’s voice was steady. “No need for apology. I wanted the truth.”

  The man quickly said, “But, sir, I must add, most people in this city do not blame yourself. They hold Secretary of War John Armstrong responsible. Most feel he is totally incompetent, and there is a rising sentiment among the citizens that if he does return to this city, they’ll hang him. The commanders of the local militia have already declared they will not take his orders again.”

  Madison looked into the man’s eyes, and then into the eyes of some of the others, and he saw resolve, and he felt a determination to move past a catastrophic disaster—a feeling that the rank and file of the government and the citizenry were coming together behind his leadership.

  The little man rose and squared his shoulders and faced them.

  “Gentlemen, it is on our shoulders to step forward and restore the government of our country. Now. Starting today. We will recall the vital records from wherever our workers have taken them, and we will open our government offices in hotels or private residences or wherever necessary, and we will continue with our governmental duties as the United States any way we can. Tell all governors, all generals, to do whatever in their judgment is necessary to start the rebuilding. Tell them to use local resources, and if needed, they have my authority to pledge government credit to pay for necessaries. And at every opportunity, tell the people who took it upon themselves to save our vital papers and our treasure that they have behaved heroically.”

  He paused, and then concluded. “I will expect a cabinet meeting to be arranged for two o’clock in the afternoon of August twenty-ninth. Two days from now. We will meet in this building. I ask those here to find the absent cabinet members and give them notice.”

  He stopped for a moment. “If there is nothing else, gentlemen, thank you for your support. This meeting is adjourned.”

  Notes

/>   On April 11, 1814, Napoleon surrendered to England. By late May, King George III had sent most of the ships and military that had been occupied with fighting the French to America, to end the war it was fighting with the United States. Almost overnight the British fighting forces in America were more than doubled, with the result that British naval forces came into almost instant control of Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and New York Harbor, essentially shutting down American commercial shipping and overpowering American military naval and ground forces.

  Facing what had every appearance of being the beginning of defeat for the United States, President Madison attempted to rally his politically divided cabinet and generals to determine what course the British would take and where they intended making their heavy attack: Washington, D.C., Annapolis, or Baltimore. Opinions were divided. With secretary of war John Armstrong generally viewed as incompetent, no plan of where to position the American military forces could be made. The result was a disorganized, shifting hodgepodge, with generals ignoring Armstrong and each other and doing what each felt was needed.

  The entire episode became a convoluted mess, both for the British and the Americans. Following all the events and all the personalities responsible would require an entire volume. For that reason, this chapter attempts to track only the central core of it. Thus, the names of all persons in this chapter are accurate, as are the events in which they participated. The battle at Bladensburg, reaching outward to at least ten small villages, is as set forth. The subsequent march on Washington, D.C., on the evening of August 24, 1814, is as represented, with the British arriving about eight o’clock pm The destruction of the city and the navy yards were as set forth, with the persons who conducted it accurately identified. British Admiral Cockburn and General Ross took one hundred fifty men to destroy the Executive Mansion, and found a sumptuous meal (as described) still warm and waiting in the great dining room. They promptly sat down and ate the meal, then systematically burned the building. Madison’s plan of where to meet in the event of evacuation quickly became impossible, with the result that President Madison fled the city, as did his wife, Dolley, each at different times, to different locations. The estates named Rokeby and Salona, and their owners, are historically accurate, where Dolley and James Madison stayed that night, to be united the next day, August 25, 1814, at Wiley’s Tavern.