The Burning of the White House

by Jane Hampton Cook

  What fear she relayed! Mrs. Blount then shared her deepest emotions. “Oh my friend what distressing times every moment we have fresh news of the British depredations . . . I am so frightened that I scarce can write, the men flying to arms and the drums beating.”

  As these letters, and many others, showed, Dolley was a leader among women everywhere. These ladies looked to her for hope.

  Now it was time to talk, face to face. General Armstrong greeted General Wilkinson, who had finally arrived in Washington City on July 31. The pair discussed several possibilities for attacking key Canadian locations. The leading option was to move U.S. forces from Fort George to Sackets Harbor and then attack Kingston.

  Alternatives included a simultaneous movement from Lake Champlain to Montreal, where they might attack instead if the enemy weakened its forces at Montreal to save Kingston. Still a third option was to occupy a point on the St. Lawrence twenty miles below Ogdensburg. Then they could move at the same time as General Wade Hampton’s attack on Montreal.

  Wilkinson opposed Armstrong’s plans. Instead he suggested that operations should begin near Fort George. General Hampton should harass Montreal. If they were successful in those places, then they would be in a stronger position to attack Kingston.

  Armstrong disagreed. “Kingston, therefore . . . as well on grounds of policy as of military principle, presents the first and great object of the campaign.”

  Yes. No. Yes. No. The duo dueled in disagreement. Wilkinson later expressed contempt for the secretary and his plan, calling it “a pleasant work, to a minister in his closet, and quite easy of execution, on paper: where we find neither ditches, nor ramparts, nor parapets, nor artillery, nor small arms.”

  The battle for Canada was in jeopardy, but not only from the British. The internal squabbles of America’s generals were just as great a threat.

  There was one thing President Madison absolutely had to do before departing for Montpelier as the summer of 1813 ended. He had to write Albert Gallatin.

  “You will learn from the secretary of state the painful manner in which the Senate have mutilated the mission to St. Petersburg,” Madison penned, revealing his deepest regret. “It is not easy to express the mixed feelings produced by the disappointment or the painfulness of my own in particular.”

  He confessed that he had no indication before nominating him that the Senate would reject him. Sure, he knew that extreme Federalists would oppose it, but they didn’t have enough votes to kill it without moderates. He didn’t anticipate that Senator King would convince others to oppose the nomination on the grounds of incompatibility with Gallatin’s cabinet post.

  Madison explained to Gallatin why he didn’t pull him as Treasury secretary and re-nominate him as an envoy to the mediation: timing. Gallatin and the others had departed Washington in April and likely had reached St. Petersburg by July. If the mediation had taken place within a month, then they could be on their way home by now with a peace treaty in hand. So he hoped.

  “It was calculated, that the mediation, if accepted by Great Britain, would be over, and the envoys on their way home, before the decision of the Senate could reach St. Petersburg.”

  If so, then Gallatin deserved to remain as Treasury secretary when he returned. But Madison had good reason to fear that the envoys were headed home for a different reason. The possibility of Britain’s Parliament rejecting Russia’s mediation offer was increasingly worrisome.

  “Should the mediation be rejected as was becoming more and more probable,” he wrote, partially in cipher or secret code. There was “a temper in the body capable of going very great lengths” to degrade the executive.

  Then, as if communicating to a close friend, not an advisor, Madison also told Gallatin about his illness. “I have just recovered strength enough after a severe and tedious attack of bilious fever, to bear a journey to the mountains whither I am about setting out.”

  The president appreciated his mountain home of Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia, and admired those who had created it. John Madison, his great-great-grandfather, had come to the tidewater area of Virginia from England in 1653. John’s grandson, Ambrose Madison, was James’s grandfather. Ambrose patented 2,650 acres west of the tidewater in the area of Virginia known as the Piedmont. There his son James Sr. built the mansion called Montpelier, which held a spectacular view of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. The family moved into the house when James Madison Jr. was eleven.

  A sickly boy, the president had heard many doctors over the years suggest that the mountain air benefited his health. As he wrote Gallatin in 1813, he knew that he needed his mountain refreshment more than ever. “The physicians prescribe it as essential to my thorough recovery, and security against a relapse at the present season.”

  As Madison closed his letter, he worried that it would “be intercepted on its passage.” He rightly feared that English or French captains would capture the ship carrying his letter and prevent its arrival.

  For now it was off to Montpelier, which he had inherited after his father died in 1801. Born in 1751 as the oldest of twelve children, Madison also held the responsibility of overseeing the family plantation and caring for his mother, Nelly. He’d retreated there before, after falling ill while a student at Princeton College. Respite was what he needed then, and what he needed now. He would defer to his cabinet members to do their jobs in his absence. What he didn’t realize was that not everyone in his inner circle could be trusted.

  Mrs. Blount’s fears of Cockburn attacking North Carolina were well founded. Indeed. Cockburn completed a successful mission at Ocracoke, one of the most remote outer banks islands of North Carolina. The locale had been a favorite hangout for the pirate Blackbeard. Cockburn and his men had captured an eighteen-gun brig and taken the inlet. “I feel it right to state to you that the blockade of the Chesapeake is very materially, if not entirely frustrated at the port of Beaufort and the Ocracoke inlet,” he reported to Admiral Warren.

  One thing had changed under his command. Gone were the green coats or the French prisoners disguised as Canadian soldiers. While failing to acknowledge the extent of this unit’s atrocities at Hampton, Cockburn and other British officers nonetheless recognized the risk in keeping them. They put them on a ship and sent them away.

  By the end of summer, Cockburn had made his choice for winter quarters. He left the Chesapeake for the waters of Bermuda. There he could rest, recover, and revel in the glory he had attained by raiding innocent towns on the East Coast. He couldn’t have asked for better evidence of his capabilities. Surely the admiralty would notice, be pleased, and entrust him with attacking larger cities of even more importance. While merely fulfilling his orders, Cockburn was on his way to the promotions and future positions that he longed for.

  Armstrong also decided to leave Washington City. He wrote Wilkinson that he would soon join him at the front to “furnish with promptitude, whatever might be necessary.” Wilkinson, no doubt, hated the idea.

  Not only was he leaving Washington City to join his Northern army, but by doing so, he was also abandoning his responsibility to oversee the president’s policies for troops everywhere else, including the West, East, and South. He hoped his presence would finally lead to success in Canada, where it mattered.

  Meanwhile Madison remained confident in Armstrong. He had told Congress in May that “under a wise organization and efficient direction, the Army is destined to a glory not less brilliant than that which already encircles the Navy.”

  Would that glory come? If so, how?

  While Madison looked to the mountains for renewal and Armstrong looked to Canada for glory, Benjamin Latrobe said good-bye to Washington City.

  “Bidding adieu to the malice, backbiting, and slander, trickery, fraud, and hypocrisy, lofty pretensions and scanty means, boasts of patriotism and bargaining of conscience, pretense of religion and breach of her laws,” he wrote to a friend.

  Pained by the jealous maneuvers of rival architect Dr. Thornt
on, he continued his rant: “Starving doctors, thriving attorneys, whitewashing jail oaths, upstart haughtiness and depressed merit, and five thousand other nuisances that constitute the very essence of this community.”

  He was convinced that “the more you stir it, the more it stinketh.”

  Latrobe’s friend had asked a favor of him to pass along to Madison. Stung by Madison’s unwillingness to hire him as a military engineer and by Dolley’s refusal to say good-bye to them when they’d called on her during Madison’s sickness, Latrobe responded with equal parts bitterness and sarcasm. “So you really think that my good word would be of promise to you with the President. Wonderfully sagacious . . . what pray, does Mr. Madison care for you or for me? Every dog has his day, and ours is past.”

  Latrobe had concluded that Madison was stubborn. Because he was moving to Pittsburgh, he would never see the president again. This freed him to let loose with his pen, albeit privately to a friend. The words are among the strongest criticism that Latrobe ever wrote about the president.

  “As general, honest and right intentioned is our cold-blooded President, you might as well stroke an armadillo with a feather by way of making the animal feel, as try to move him by words from any of his opinions or purposes,” Latrobe concluded.

  He would miss seeing his accomplishments—the south wing of the Capitol, the interior of the President’s House, the Navy Yard arch, and others. Yet he couldn’t imagine any scenario that would cause him to return.

  Rufus King couldn’t have ended the summer of 1813 happier had he been elected president. The Maryland Gazette printed a column praising his return to the U.S. Senate and his recent leadership in that body.

  “All who have had an opportunity of witnessing any important discussion in the Senate, in which Mr. King has taken a part, have almost universally assigned him the palm,” the article began.

  His role in speaking truth to power, namely against Madison, had caught this newspaper editor’s attention. He saw King as a bipartisan man, capable of attracting praise from both parties. “His talents are spoken of in more exalted terms, even by his political opponents, than any other member of that body. . . . But since all parties now unite in speaking his praise, it is sincerely to be wished that his councils may produce that effect, which they so eminently deserve.”

  Then the editorialist took a veiled stab, an undercut, at the president: “And we do not think it would be too much to say, that he [King] is superior at this time to any other man of which the United States can boast.”

  King couldn’t help but feel uplifted. This editorialist noted his public service, honesty, and reputation for justice. More than anything, the fact that the Maryland Gazette was a southern newspaper made his Northerner heart sing. After all, if hundreds of others joined this editorialist, their combined chorus could send him to the President’s House one day.

  “With such a man at the head of our government, we might soon expect to witness a change in the gloomy aspect of our affairs, and that scene of prosperity again restored which formerly spread its blessings around us.”

  Perhaps after learning of the forty burned houses in Havre de Grace and reading of the lost dignity of the feminine souls in Hampton, this editorialist concluded that the people had been misled by wild opinions. King could be the answer to the nation’s woes. So they hoped.

  “If ever there is a time when honest men come again into fashion, it would be the pride of our nation to have a statesman like him to direct its affairs.”

  Thus, King ended the summer with a proverbial crown on his head—a fitting image for a man named King.

  “One thousand dollars reward will be given . . . for the head of the notorious, incendiary, and infamous scoundrel, the violator of all laws, human and divine, the British Admiral George Cockburn,” James O. Boyle had offered.

  As the summer ended, Philadelphia’s Democratic Press wasn’t the only publication to advertise a call for Cockburn’s assassination in August 1813. Many around the country read that ad in their newspapers and felt similar sentiments about this ravaging pirate disguised as an honorable British admiral. Some called him a burglar and other names for his wake of destruction. Yet, no slingshot or torpedo had struck Goliath. No sword had yet to cut off his head. No Peter sliced his ears. At the end of summer in 1813, he simply slipped away to Bermuda for the winter.

  What would happen next? Would America’s second war with England return to traditional fighting between armies and navies, or would terrorism worsen? Indeed. Cockburn wanted to take a bow at the President’s House.

  In fact, he was so confident of his charming abilities that he was sure he could set one of Dolley’s parties ablaze by his very presence. Yet he didn’t have what he needed most to accomplish such a feat at a fête. He still needed something he didn’t have—a superabundant force of multiple thousands. Something big would have to happen. Something really big.

  PART II

  1814: White House Ablaze

  There is a secret in life, better than anything a fortune teller can reveal. We all have a great hand in the forming of our own destiny.

  —Dolley Madison

  This illustration shows the charred walls of the White House after the British military burned it on August 24, 1814. Courtesy Library of Congress, from an engraving by William Strickland after a watercolor by George Munger

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The White House

  The term White House appears to have started as a slur, at least in the newspapers.

  “I will turn Jefferson out ‘of that white house and hang him’ and that ‘congress I will pack off,’” Vice President Aaron Burr told a general. Burr’s quotation was printed in New York’s Republican Watch-Tower on January 30, 1807.

  This was one of the first—if not the first—newspaper references to the term White House. Burr was later tried and then acquitted for treason.

  The origin of the President’s House dates to 1792, when President George Washington held a contest to select the design for the mansion. The winner was James Hoban, an Irish-American architect and builder whose classical, stately drawing had impressed Washington. Unlike then-secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, who preferred a red brick building and submitted his own secret contest entry, Washington believed the executive leader of a republic deserved a grand, sturdy house made of stone.

  The choice made sense. Washington had used white paint and sand to make his private pinewood house, Mount Vernon, resemble stone. For the president’s palace in Washington City, Hoban used the finest cut of masonry, called ashlar, to build a bona fide stone house. The intricate scalloped carvings above the north door added elegance and beauty.

  While George Washington never lived in the President’s House and died in 1799 before its completion, the executive mansion embodied his ideas as much as the city that carried his name. Though made of whitewashed stone, the residence was initially called the President’s House or President’s Palace, not the White House.

  As “White House” had been hurled against Jefferson, so it was used to attack Madison. “If the dispatches from France and the news from the Chesapeake and Virginia don’t drive the poor little viceroy in the white house crazy, he must be as tough as a pine knot,” reported Georgetown’s Federal-Republican newspaper.

  Another Baltimore editorialist, who claimed to be a friend of the president’s, admonished him, saying, “The American people placed you at the helm of government” and you have a “duty to steer it aright.”

  A Maine editorialist warned Madison that if he didn’t take greater control of his cabinet, the American people would replace him: “The next presidential period shall bring a more energetic and manly tenant into the white house.”

  Speaking truth to power, the Baltimore editorialist angrily concurred: “You hear no language like this at the drawing room parties of ‘the white house.’” This was not the only time that Dolley’s parties were used to criticize the president.

  “Dazzled with the
blaze” is how a Maine editor described the figurative effect of one of Dolley’s open house gatherings on her husband. Not only that, but because of these events, the president was also “enveloped in the smoke . . . or turned giddy with the flattery.” In this man’s view, Madison was a lightweight because he engaged in too much frivolity. What a contrast this was to those who saw Madison as a shriveled man lacking passion.

  With so much animosity, how did “White House” become a term of endearment? Though it’s impossible to know for sure, Dolley Madison, whether consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, may be responsible. One party of hers in particular appears to be the start of turning a slur into a salute of pride.

  After a refreshing break at Montpelier, James and Dolley returned to Washington City in the autumn of 1813. In many ways, life now seemed much brighter. Madison’s health was restored and Edward Coles had resumed his secretarial duties.

  Best of all, the social season was starting. Dolley couldn’t contain her exuberance as she soon wrote to Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. “We have ladies from almost every state in the union, and the city was never known so thronged with strangers—Thus, it is a pleasing and instructive scene for the young.”

  On December 20, 1813, Dolley set the White House ablaze with a glow and merriment that caught the eye of an influential Philadelphia reporter visiting Washington City. Once again, the Democratic Press created a sensation. This time, the wave of excitement centered not on an advertisement seeking Cockburn’s head on a plate, but on the novelty that this reporter, using the pseudonym Tyro, found at “the White House.”

  “You can little imagine how great a privation it is to a stranger in this place, to be shut out of the capital for four days in succession,” Tyro began, writing of the Thirteenth Congress’s short break.