The Burning of the White House

by Jane Hampton Cook

  “The curtains! Oh the terrible velvet curtains! Their effect will ruin me entirely, so brilliant will they be,” he’d confessed to her. The oval room’s red curtains stood out from the cream wallpapered walls, white wood work, and a large French plate mirror over the mantel on the east wall. The style was Grecian and featured forty pieces of furniture, including two sofas and dozens of chairs, which were painted in white and gold or mahogany lacquer and depicted the U.S. coat of arms.

  In contrast, Dolley had chosen lighter-weight satin and damask for the curtains and décor of the smaller room in between the oval room and State Dining Room. Set in a sunny yellow motif, this room became her music room, complete with a pianoforte and guitar for entertaining. Given her sunny personality and the attention she gave to decorating the room, this was likely her favorite of the three entertaining rooms, which is where a miniature painting or engraving of her hung.

  On May 13, 1813, Dolley was also worried about another matter regarding Edward, who was the president’s only paid executive staff member. He prepared and copied letters for the president and delivered messages to Congress. Coles’s secretarial skills were as valuable to Dolley as they were to her husband. She relied on him to help her orchestrate and implement her weekly Wednesday evening open house parties and other social occasions.

  A bachelor, Coles had become a favorite among the single society belles attending Dolley’s events. Though a southerner who came from a family who owned a plantation not far from Thomas Jefferson’s homestead, Monticello, Edward’s Quakerism emerged more strongly than his culture.

  In March 1813 Edward had traveled to Philadelphia for medical treatment for hemorrhoids from Dr. Physick, who’d treated Dolley years earlier for a knee wound. Discouraged by his lack of improvement, Edward had written the president and asked to be relieved of his duties as his secretary. Dolley’s May 13 letter was a response on behalf of her husband. Employing Dolley for the task kept the matter private and unofficial.

  “Your letter caused me great affliction my dear cousin. The continuation of your illness and Payne’s reluctance at leaving America, left me not fortitude to write you until now,” she wrote, explaining that she’d received a letter from Payne from aboard his ship “in which he expresses satisfaction at all around him.”

  Relieved that Payne was well, Dolley desperately wanted to convince Edward to return to James’s service. “We indulge this pleasing hope, in addition to that of your remaining with us, to the last—not that I would, for the world, retard any plan for your prosperity,” she wrote, noting that she longed for his happiness.

  Though she knew how much Edward wanted to travel west and establish a colony for freed slaves, she wanted him to serve her husband a little longer. Thus, she used the sweetness of family ties as a strategy to bring him back.

  “And that of your connections—Among them there are none, who feel a more affectionate interest for you than Mr. Madison and myself. I hope you will believe, that such is our regard and esteem for you, that we should consider your leaving us, a misfortune.”

  She enlisted another strategy, answering his worry that his absence was burdening the president. Dolley assured him, “Mr. M. can do very well without a secretary until your heath is re-established.”

  In reality, with the Russian mediation offer and other pressing business in the upcoming special summer session, her husband really needed Edward’s assistance. She also needed help planning parties during the summer to give James informal opportunities to speak with members of Congress.

  Dolley reminded Edward of another rational truth about the West: “The winter is not a season for emigration—so that next spring or summer you will be better able to make your election—to go, or not to go.”

  She also invoked their shared faith. Edward was a devout Quaker. Though the Society of Friends had abandoned her, she had not fully abandoned their beliefs. She understood the pacifism of Quakers but she also believed in self-defense, as did many of them. She wanted Edward to know that she was not afraid of Cockburn or the threats against Washington City.

  “In my eyes as I have always been an advocate for fighting when assailed, though a Quaker—I therefore keep the old Tunisian saber within my reach,” she told Edward.

  The Tunisian saber was likely a diplomatic gift that James had received while serving as Jefferson’s secretary of state years earlier. A diplomat from Tunis and Algeria in Northern Africa visited Washington during that time. Folklore from that culture suggested that a woman who could dance with a sword on her head without the weapon falling carried her husband’s honor. Whether or not Dolley was aware of this symbolism, she tapped its meaning nonetheless.

  In the darkest hour of the nation’s capital, Dolley would soon carry her husband’s honor unlike any wife of the president who preceded her.

  While Armstrong dismissed rumors about British attacks on Washington City and Baltimore, the nation’s third-largest city, Elijah Mix did just the opposite. He was so concerned that he took major steps to prevent an assault.

  Mix had written President Madison a letter in April 1813 requesting financing to experiment with warfare technology. Madison agreed. Following up on the president’s decision, Navy Secretary Jones had written a letter to the commanding Naval officer in Baltimore to authorize Mix’s secret mission.

  “A Mr. Elijah Mix will call upon you by my order to furnish him with such aid in carrying into effect his plans for the destruction of the enemy’s ships,” Jones had explained, fearing the British were in close proximity to Baltimore and the upper Chesapeake Bay. His instruction was as clear as it was concise. “You will furnish him with 500 pounds of powder, a boat or boats and six men.”

  He continued, “His plan is that of Fulton’s torpedo.” Robert Fulton, the builder of the steamship, had taken the name torpedo from an Atlantic Ocean fish that releases an electric discharge to incapacitate its enemies. The experiments focused on an explosive charge attached to the end of a long pole, which exploded when it touched the hull of a ship.

  Jones had confidence in Mix, who had been a prisoner aboard the Emolus, a British Navy cruiser supposedly lost early in the war. Instead, Mix had run the vessel ashore and seized its dispatches. A commissioned sailing master, Mix had recently served on Lake Ontario from the winter of 1812 through the spring of 1813.

  “He is an intrepid zealous man and means to perform the service in person . . . the greatest privacy ought to be observed,” Jones had written.

  Latrobe had served as the secret agent and financer behind the mission for Jones. Earlier on March 21, 1813, he had written to Fulton that “if I were unmarried, and under 25, I would borrow a few pairs of torpedoes, and if am not much mistaken, they should succeed in some stormy night at Norfolk, with the aid of two canoes. . . . The more dreadful the wind is, the darker, the better.”

  Knowing that the U.S. envoy to France, Joel Barlow, had sent several torpedoes from France, Latrobe had searched the Navy Yard. He’d found them buried in a heap and a barrel. Because the U.S. Navy didn’t have financing authorized for the project, Latrobe had put up his own money to pack and mail them to Mix under the label “mathematical instruments.”

  While all of Washington worried about the rumors of an invasion by Cockburn in mid-May, Latrobe focused on saving Washington through a covert operation. He wrote Fulton that their secret mission was under way. “Mix should be at Old Point Comfort (the lighthouse in Hampton, Virginia). The English Fleet is collected in Lynnhaven Bay.”

  Without Edward’s secretarial help, Madison continued to rely on his own hand to write letters. His indignation against British tactics came out through his pen.

  Twenty days after the burning of Havre de Grace, he sent a message to Congress. Deriding “the spirit and manner in which the war continues to be waged by the enemy,” he called their tactics a “savage fury.”

  Cockburn’s recent jaunt up the Chesapeake was nothing less than “a system of plunder and conflagration.” Both were “equ
ally forbidden by respect for national character and by the established rules of civilized warfare.”

  Then Madison focused Congress’s attention on good news: the success of the Hornet. “In continuation of the brilliant achievements of our infant Navy,” he wrote, “a signal triumph has been gained by Captain Lawrence and his companions in the Hornet.”

  The Hornet was an American sloop of war that had destroyed a British sloop of war, the HMS Peacock. The speed and skill of the Hornet’s crew were unparalleled. Madison believed the conquerors deserved the “highest praise” and full compensation from Congress. The House of Representatives agreed. The up-and-coming James Lawrence received a promotion to captain.

  Madison’s eye, however, like his war secretary’s, was far less on fortifying the Chesapeake and much more on continuing to bolster the Navy and Army in the North. The military’s top focus remained squarely and supremely on the Great Lakes and Canada. A victory there could change the direction of the war and force Britain to end its abusive practices against U.S. trade and sailors.

  “On the lakes our superiority is near at hand, where it is not already established,” Madison wrote hopefully.

  On military matters, this scholarly president deferred to plans created by the War Department and its generals. As a young man fresh out of college, Madison had served for a brief time in his local militia in Orange, Virginia. Once the Revolutionary War began in earnest, his sickly nature and small physique made this rich man a poor soldier. He exchanged a musket for books and pens, drawing upon them to serve at the convention to abolish Virginia’s royal charter and set up Virginia’s new government, and later, in the Continental Congress during the last years of the Revolution.

  Over the years Madison filled his mind with books on political science, such as Joseph Priestley’s An Essay on the First Principles of Government. Military science was better left to captains and major generals. Now as president, he had to rely on them for military decisions and success above his own instincts. Surely this was the best strategy he could employ?

  John Armstrong was one reason that Albert Gallatin had been eager to leave Washington and go to Europe as a peace commissioner. Gallatin had opposed Armstrong’s appointment as secretary of war in February 1813 and distrusted his loyalty to the administration, and for good reason. Though Armstrong had served as the top diplomat for the United States to France under Presidents Jefferson and Madison, many doubted his loyalties to them.

  The questions had started in 1810 after Armstrong had forwarded President Madison a letter from Napoleon’s foreign secretary. In vague terms the letter indicated that Napoleon would revoke France’s trade restrictions against America.

  Missing was Armstrong’s assessment or analysis of the letter and the foreign secretary’s true intentions. Madison had taken Napoleon at his word and issued a proclamation to reinstate trade restrictions against England if Parliament didn’t do the same and revoke its policies against America. Armstrong soon left his post and returned to America with fanfare, as if he were the hero of the decade. For awhile, he was.

  New York’s governor honored him with a dinner, and audiences applauded him when they learned of his presence in theaters. In Philadelphia, he received an even warmer welcome at a sumptuous dinner of prominent citizens. Then came more flattering offers. One friend suggested that he run for governor of Pennsylvania. Another went much further. No, he shouldn’t run for governor. He should become president of the United States!

  “I am a great favorite with both parties,” Armstrong confessed to a friend, though doubting the attention would last. As a military man and diplomat, he’d long enjoyed the nonpartisan status that came with those positions. “This cannot from its own nature, be of much duration.”

  The reason? Armstrong wasn’t a naturally charismatic fellow. He could be sharp, intense, and taciturn. He preferred winning battles to winning friends. The French government had often complained that he didn’t socialize enough and hid behind testy notes.

  Armstrong’s triumphant return to America had included a visit to Washington City on December 20, 1810. The president and his cabinet received him warmly.

  General James Wilkinson, who was in Washington at the time of Armstrong’s return, confessed to a friend that “Armstrong may take the White House this time two years if things are well managed.”

  Things were not. Armstrong didn’t run for governor of Pennsylvania, the state of his birth to Scottish American parents.

  “Our future destiny is not, as you know, in our keeping,” Armstrong had written to his brother-in-law. “What mine may be is very doubtful.”

  Realizing that he’d rather manage an estate than engage in presidential engineering for himself, he bought a sheep farm in New York off the Hudson River and settled there in 1811.

  But a stronger reason emerged. The promising letter of free trade with France that Armstrong had forwarded to Madison had proved to be deceptive. Napoleon had merely suggested through his foreign secretary that he might lift his policies—called the Berlin and Milan Decrees—not that he had actually done so. He had not and did not.

  The fallout for American ships that believed Napoleon had lifted his policies against them was disastrous. As one Federalist observed, “To the astonishment of their owners they find that the Berlin and Milan Decrees are not repealed; the officers of the [French] government seize and detain them.”

  Because Madison had trusted Armstrong about Napoleon’s intentions, American ships were in increased danger of having their cargoes plundered. This added to the perception that Madison favored France over England. Although Madison believed that France deserved war from the United States, he also understood that America couldn’t handle two wars with two European powers. To him, England was the greater threat. To his political adversaries, France was the worst menace. This division over foreign allies and foes divided the two parties.

  Albert Gallatin and other members of Madison’s cabinet had blamed Armstrong because he’d forwarded the letter without giving an assessment on the French government’s sincerity. As a result, he’d embarrassed the president.

  But Armstrong’s popularity made him a threat to Madison’s administration. When War Secretary William Eustis resigned after several military failures in 1812, Madison considered his options for replacing him. Two men turned him down. Talk of Armstrong’s political prospects as governor or president may have planted an idea in Madison’s mind of tapping his services in some other way to keep him from securing a place on the next presidential ballot. Hence, the president offered the post to the petulant Armstrong as a way to keep him loyal.

  Were the threats real to Washington in 1813? Or was this propaganda? The small size of Cockburn’s force made it doubtful that he could pull off an attack on Washington. His timing, however, would be ripe. In the weeks following the attacks on Havre de Grace, members of Congress were flocking to the nation’s capital for the special summer session. The surprise one legislator would bring would lead Madison to question his choices and strategies.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Knickerbockers

  Elijah Mix had heard the truth about Cockburn’s maneuvers. He had abandoned the Upper Chesapeake. No invasion of Washington City was imminent as May 1813 came to a close.

  Cockburn and his ships now docked in the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. Admiral Warren had departed for Bermuda in a convoy of forty vessels loaded with American treasure from the towns they had attacked in the Upper Chesapeake.

  Could Mix attack them before they traveled elsewhere, such as back up the Potomac River to Washington City? Mix and his men took their powder machines and experiments with them to Gosport Naval Yard in Norfolk, Virginia. There they developed a secret strategy to row a boat near an anchored enemy ship and then drop a torpedo into the water. He expected that the torpedo would drift toward the ship and explode.

  After Mix arrived off Norfolk’s coast and quietly set about to launch his weapon of surprise, another to
rpedo, a political one, shot from America’s largest city into Washington City. What a force this Knickerbocker would prove to be.

  After a ten-year absence from national elected office, Rufus King of New York returned to the U.S. Senate determined to take a firm stand. This time Madison had gone too far. King knew immediately what he should do on June 2, 1813, during the special session of the Thirteenth Congress.

  King was the most experienced politician in Washington, second only to the president. Their lives had followed similar paths. Like Madison, he had started his public service career as a legislator after the American Revolution. Madison had served in the Virginia House of Delegates and on the Governor’s Council, and King had taken his place in the House of Representatives of the Massachusetts General Court. King had subsequently served in Congress under the Articles of Confederation, which met in New York City. There he had met the wealthy Miss Mary Alsop.

  Still representing Massachusetts, King went on to participate in the Constitutional Convention, where Madison proposed the Virginia Plan, which created a foundation for the new Constitution. Both supported ratification of the U.S. Constitution and strategized together on how to convince Americans to support it. After marrying Mary, King moved from Massachusetts to New York.

  When George Washington became president, the New York State Assembly chose the logical, authoritative King as its first U.S. Senator under the Constitution. A few years later, during John Adams’s presidency, King served as the top U.S. diplomat to England. He felt comfortable in London, in part because New England’s manufacturing and mercantile economy was similar to England’s. As a result, he made many English friends and became increasingly pro-British, while Madison, a Republican Party leader, leaned more and more toward France, whose agricultural economy was similar to that of his beloved Virginia.