by Steve Vogel
Consumed physically and spiritually with its struggle against Napoleon, Britain had little interest in launching a new conflict on an enormous continent across the ocean. The British paid scant attention to America and could not take the war talk seriously, considering how unprepared the United States was. Nonetheless, on June 16, Britain announced it would lift trade restrictions. That decision would have likely derailed the buildup to war, but the news arrived too late in Washington.
Congress’s vote for war was the closest in American history—79 to 49 in the House, and 19 to 13 in the Senate. The vote was split along regional lines, with the South and West strongly supporting war, and the North and East, except Pennsylvania, stoutly opposed. Even more pronounced was the split along party lines, as more than 80 percent of Republicans supported the war, while Federalists, without exception, opposed it. On June 18, 1812, Madison signed a proclamation declaring war on Great Britain.
A few hours after the vote, Randolph approached a group of war hawks with a warning. “Gentlemen, you have made war—you have finished the ruin of our country—and before you conquer Canada, your idol [Napoleon] will cease to distract the world, and the capitol will be a ruin.”
Like many across the country, Francis Scott Key was fervently opposed to the war. In part, this reflected his devout Christianity, and in part, his cultural affinity with England. Most of all, Key could not abide the idea that the United States would attack Canada—an innocent third party, in his view—to settle its grievances with England.
No less than Randolph, Key felt a foreboding of disaster, a sentiment heightened several days after the declaration, when a pro-war mob in Baltimore attacked the offices of the Federal Republican newspaper, which had published an editorial opposing the war. A second attack several weeks later was even more violent. One of the defenders of the newspaper, sixty-year-old James Lingan, a veteran of the revolution and friend of the Key family, was stomped and beaten to death. Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, the Revolutionary War hero and father of Robert E. Lee, was severely beaten and crippled for life by the mob, which poured hot wax in his eyes. Key was horrified by the violence and was left with a feeling that the country—and Baltimore in particular—would face divine retribution.
Randolph considered not standing for reelection. At Key’s urging, he ran again, but was defeated, and immediately left town for Roanoke, his cabin in Virginia. Randolph sent a letter asking that Key care for his rifle, flask, and papers, which he had left in his Georgetown lodgings in his haste to leave. Key, the dutiful good friend, had already taken charge of the belongings. Their friendship only grew as the nation settled into war during the subsequent months and then years, and the letters they exchanged became a chief joy for Key. Their correspondence reflected Key’s profound disgust and growing depression about the bitter divisions in America over the war and the ugly recriminations exchanged by Republicans and Federalists.
“The state of society is radically vicious,” Key lamented in 1813, suggesting to Randolph that the solution was to end party politics: “Put down party spirit; stop the corruption of party elections; legislate not for the next election, but for the next century.”
The war changed Key’s outlook on life and his view of himself. It shook his faith in man, though his belief in God was steadfast. He became dissatisfied trying court cases while the fate of the nation was at stake. Moreover, the war had brought business almost to a standstill. “I begin to fancy change of some sort,” he wrote Randolph in May 1813. He sometimes thought of jumping into the fray headfirst and other times wanted to escape it altogether.
That summer, he briefly considered running for political office, hoping he might be able to turn the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. “I did feel something like it—but the fit is over,” he wrote Randolph in August. “I have troubled myself enough with thinking what I should do—so I shall try to prepare myself for whatever may appear plainly to be my duty.”
He was given to introspective moods and periods of silence. Polly would sometimes find him in his study, on his knees in prayer. In the spring of 1814, he gave deep thought to abandoning his law practice and entering the ministry. The rector of St. Paul’s Parish in Baltimore proposed that Key join him as his assistant. For nearly a month he meditated on it, finally concluding that he was too far in debt and his family too large to make do on a minister’s salary.
Throughout these dismaying times, his primary outlet was literary: reading poems, discussing them with friends, devouring literary criticism journals, and writing his own verses. “[D]oes it not appear that to produce one transcendentally fine epic poem is as much as has ever fallen to the life of one man?” he asked Randolph in September 1813. “There seems to be a law of the Muses for it.”
Key was appalled in the fall of 1813 by an American military campaign targeting Montreal, and when British victories at Crysler’s Farm in Ontario and Chateauguay in Quebec forced the United States to abandon its plans, he shared his delight with Randolph. “The people of Montreal will enjoy their firesides for this, and I trust many a winter,” Key wrote. “This I suppose is treason, but as your Patrick Henry said, ‘If it be treason, I glory in the name of traitor.’ I have never thought of those poor creatures without being reconciled to any disgrace or defeat of our arms.”
Yet Key felt quite differently about the United States being invaded. When the British threatened Washington in the summer of 1813 and again when they returned in 1814, Key volunteered with the local militia. Most of the U.S. Army was staged on the Canadian front, leaving the defense of Washington to ill-trained, poorly equipped local militia units. Amateur soldiers such as Key were the rule in the militia, and he had seen enough to be alarmed at the dire state of local defenses.
As the war entered its third year, Key’s sense of foreboding grew. “We see what other nations have suffered—shall we escape so much more lightly?” Key wrote in his August 10, 1814, letter to Randolph. “I shall be most happy to find myself mistaken in these fears.”
HMS ALBION, THE POTOMAC RIVER, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1814
Key and other like-minded Americans would not be mistaken, as far as Rear Admiral George Cockburn was concerned. The admiral’s raiders had taken so much loot from Kinsale and other Potomac towns that on the same day Key wrote his letter, Cockburn dispatched a ship packed with booty to the British base in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
It was time to prepare for bigger and better targets, however. Cockburn was expecting the arrival any day of the fleet commander, Vice Admiral Cochrane, with reinforcements. The 4,000 troops on the way were a far cry from the 15,000 or more Cockburn had expected, but that was certainly no reason to call off the campaign for Washington.
Cockburn’s belief in himself was unmatched. “Cockburn’s confidence in his luck is the very thing most to be feared,” complained British army Lieutenant Colonel Charles Napier, who served with the admiral in the Chesapeake. “It is worse than 1000 Yankees.”
Cockburn’s hooked nose, hooded eyes, arching eyebrows, and imperial bearing gave him a haughty look, one he put to good use. He enjoyed the fear he inspired, particularly with stupid or duplicitous men, whom he despised. Cockburn—he pronounced it “Coe-burn,” though to his annoyance the Americans pronounced it “Cock-burn”—professed to have “total indifference” to the virulent attacks against him in the American press, but he avidly read the newspapers and kept careful score of who said what.
The Cockburn family came from the rocky glens and high moorlands of the border country between Scotland and England, a land of feuds and bloodshed. Cockburn legend held that the family had been given land by King Malcolm as thanks for their help in defeating his enemy, Macbeth, around the year 1057. The admiral could trace his ancestry to Sir William de Veteri-Ponte, a knight who died fighting for Robert the Bruce in 1314 at Bannockburn, where the Scottish army won a stunning victory over the English.
Born into an upper-middle-class family in 1772 in Middlesex, outside London, George Coc
kburn was raised by a mother, Lady Augusta Ann Cockburn, who placed high value on learning and shining manners. His father, Sir James Cockburn, a dynamic and wealthy Scottish merchant, began a steady decline into debt the year George was born. By 1781 he was declared bankrupt and a few years later the family was forced to move out of their fashionable home. George was groomed from an early age for a life in the Royal Navy, attending navigational school in London, and sent to sea at age fourteen as a servant on an 18–gun navy sloop. Despite the hard times, Sir James still had influential friends in the navy, and George was placed under the wing of a powerful patron, Lord Samuel Hood, who arranged the right appointments for his apprentice. In 1793, at age twenty, Cockburn was chosen for promotion to lieutenant, launching his career as a naval officer just as revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain, an event that would shape his life. Cockburn soon had command of his first ship, Speedy, and proved to be a bold, meticulous, and energetic officer.
Assigned to patrol in the Gulf of Genoa, Cockburn to his great fortune joined a squadron commanded by a dashing young captain named Horatio Nelson. Inspirational, warm, and brave, Nelson took a quick liking to Cockburn, finding in him “zeal, ability and courage, which are conspicuous.” Nelson gave him command of Minerve, a captured French frigate. At age twenty-four, Cockburn had charge of a crew of 286 and served as the senior captain in Nelson’s squadron. Nelson came to think of Cockburn almost as an alter ego, trusting him with command in his absence and telling him, “we so exactly think alike on points of service that if your mind tells you it is right, there can hardly be a doubt but I must approve.”
Nelson and Hood set Cockburn on his way, and he continued rising on assignments around the globe. In 1803, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to America, sailing to Norfolk, where he first laid eyes on the Chesapeake Bay, and then to New York City, where he caused an uproar when he successfully demanded the city surrender eight British sailors who deserted his ship. Following an extended mission in the Indian Ocean, Cockburn fought the French in the West Indies while commanding the 80-gun Pompee, one of the Royal Navy’s finest ships-of-the-line—as the largest warships were called. By 1809, Britain had been at war for sixteen years, and Cockburn at sea for most of that time. On a visit home that year, at age thirty-seven, he proposed marriage to Mary Cockburn, a third cousin with whom he had kept an affectionate relationship over the years. Though the wedding was delayed so Cockburn could participate in the invasion of Holland, the couple’s first and only child, Augusta, was born in the summer of 1810.
In 1812, at the relatively young age of forty, Cockburn reached flag rank and commanded a squadron off Cadiz, Spain, where by the end of the year, quiet prevailed in the war between England and France. The Admiralty, looking for a more important job for Cockburn, cast its gaze across the Atlantic.
The first seven months of the war with America had been embarrassing for the Royal Navy. Consumed by the great struggle with Napoleon, the most powerful naval force in the world had devoted scant resources to the American war. In 1812, the frigate USS Constitution—Old Ironsides, as she was known forever after—defeated HMS Guerriere and HMS Java in separate battles at sea, while the USS United States captured HMS Macedonian, all humiliating defeats for the British. The aging Vice Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren was conducting a lackluster campaign on the Atlantic seaboard and needed the boost of an aggressive subordinate. Cockburn would be a perfect choice.
The British naval historian William James, who was in America when the war broke out, later wrote that until Cockburn’s arrival, the inhabitants of the Chesapeake Bay region “would scarcely have known, except by hearsay, that war existed.” That was about to change.
On the evening of March 3, 1813, Rear Admiral George Cockburn sailed aboard HMS Marlborough through the Virginia capes and into the Chesapeake Bay, accompanied by a small squadron. Ten days later, after a quick survey of his new domain, Cockburn made a bold prediction. Given reinforcements, he wrote Warren, “I have no hesitation in pronouncing that the whole of the shores and towns within this vast bay, not excepting the Capital itself will be wholly at your mercy, and subject if not to be permanently occupied, certainly to be successively insulted [i.e., attacked without warning] or destroyed at your pleasure.”
It would really be at Cockburn’s pleasure. Though he was the subordinate officer, Cockburn believed Warren too passive and that it had been a mistake to leave the bay unmolested. He was determined to end “this supineness.”
The two-hundred-mile length of the Chesapeake Bay was ideal for an expeditionary force. Its waters teemed with crabs, oysters, bluefish, and bass, providing ample food. The bay was a water highway to America’s interior. The rivers flowing into the bay—among them the Elizabeth, James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac, Patuxent, Patapsco, and Susquehanna—provided ready access to some of the richest land in the country, as well as the cities of Norfolk, Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore. Along the bay’s eastern shore, another series of rivers put the British within easy reach of many fishing ports and bountiful farmland. The one problem was that much of the bay was shallow—its average depth only twenty-six feet—and the rivers were filled with shoals and mud banks that made navigation hazardous for a deepwater navy.
Cockburn’s instructions were to close the mouth of the Chesapeake, blockade the ports and harbors, capture and destroy trade and shipping, and gather intelligence. Wasting no time, Cockburn moved up the bay in force on March 31. The war was going to be fought on new terms, the admiral made clear to his men. “I am sorry to say violence and brutality are without control,” Royal Marines Captain Thomas Marmaduke Wybourn wrote his brother-in-law from the mouth of the Rappahannock on April 4. “[E]very town, village and hamlet throughout these rivers are to be annihilated and plundered.”
Throughout April, the British established their dominance of the bay, attacking ships, raiding the shores, and setting up temporary bases. They menaced Annapolis and Baltimore, raided islands in the bay, skirmished with militia, and burned plantations. The village of Frenchtown, near the head of the bay, was plundered and burned on April 29.
The real shock came a week later at Havre de Grace, Maryland, a busy little port on the west bank of the Susquehanna just above its confluence with the Chesapeake. Sailing away from Frenchtown with his loot, Cockburn’s attention had been piqued when militia manning a battery at Havre de Grace made the mistake of firing at his distant ships and raising their colors in cocky defiance. “This of course immediately gave to the place an importance which I had not before attached to it, and I therefore determined on attacking it,” Cockburn reported to Warren.
On Saturday afternoon, May 1, a British deserter warned townspeople that an attack was imminent. The town jumped into action; women and children were sent away, and 250 militiamen manned positions all night. But no attack came. “Exhausted with fatigue, and believing themselves to have been deceived, the inhabitants retired quietly to rest the next night,” wrote Rev. Jared Sparks, who tutored children in the town.
It was a mistake. At midnight May 2, Cockburn loaded Royal Marines onto barges and snuck up on the town. At daybreak, the British fired rockets from the boats, striking one unlucky militiaman and “leaving not a single vestige of him,” Wybourn reported. The militia scattered, and terrified residents poured out of homes. The British raiders landed and proceeded to methodically destroy Havre de Grace. They separated into bands of thirty or forty men and worked their way through every house in town, knocking down doors and splintering wardrobes and bureaus with their hatchets. After the raiders took what they pleased, they torched the house and moved to the next. Soon little could be heard but the roaring of flames, the crash of falling timbers, and the occasional sobs of residents.
As the rampage continued, Cockburn came ashore and was accosted by several women, who pleaded for him to stop. “He was unmoved at first,” Sparks wrote, “but when they represented to him the misery he was causing, and pointed to the smoking ruins … he relent
ed and countermanded his original orders.”
By then, about two-thirds of the sixty-two homes in the town were ablaze. Cockburn was satisfied. The townspeople now understood “what they were liable to bring upon themselves by building batteries and acting towards us with so much useless rancor,” he reported to Warren.
To further make his point, Cockburn chose as his next targets the towns of Georgetown and Fredericktown, pretty fishing villages on opposite sides of the Sassafras River, which fed into the upper bay from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Learning from informants that the towns were safe havens for trading vessels, Cockburn headed up the river on the night of May 5. Early the next morning, the British intercepted a boat with two Americans. Halting his boats about two miles below the towns, the admiral sent the Americans back with a message for the residents, reminding them about “what had happened at Havre de Grace, and to invite them to pursue a different line of conduct,” Cockburn reported.
The flotilla had moved another mile upriver when the Maryland militia answered Cockburn’s invitation with heavy fire from both banks. An undeterred Cockburn—“a droll character & witty in the midst of any danger,” Captain Wybourn wrote—led an assault that scattered the militia.
Captain John Allen, an American militia commander who stayed in town to watch his property, soon encountered Cockburn, who turned on Allen in a fury. “Had you not fired, and I had taken any thing away, I would have paid for the same; but now, damn you, I will pay you in your own coin,” the admiral told him. With that, Cockburn set loose his raiders: “Go on, my boys, knock down, burn, and destroy.”
