by Steve Vogel
Jefferson, a widower, had often relied on Dolley as his unofficial hostess for parties at the President’s House. Upon moving in as first lady, Dolley supervised the decoration of the still-unfinished home in a style of classical décor based on excavations at Pompeii. The large oval drawing room was one of the most elaborate and elegant interior spaces in the entire country. Striking crimson red velvet curtains hung from windows that ran from just above the floor to the ceiling, looking south to the Potomac. The state dining room, featuring a large-as-life Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington on the wall above the dining room table, could seat forty in comfort.
Though the roof leaked, the mansion already had taken on an air of grandeur. The tan-colored sandstone exterior was whitewashed, making it stand out from the brick or wood frame of most Washington homes, and some residents had taken to calling it the “white house.”
But it was not Montpelier. A few days earlier, the president had wistfully picked up paper and pen to write to his mother, eighty-two-year-old Nelly Conway Madison, who lived at Montpelier. He assured Mother Madison that he and Dolley were in good health, but he had fading hopes of making it home. “I can not yet say how soon I shall be able to make you the visit usual at this season,” he wrote August 8. “You well know that it will afford me too much gratification to be delayed a moment longer than may be necessary.”
It was becoming increasingly apparent that it would be necessary to delay a visit for some time. Skinner’s note confirmed what James Madison had come to recognize in recent days: The United States was fighting for its survival.
Skinner’s warning was not the only one. Madison had just received an anonymous letter, dated “At Sea, July 27, 1814,” and postmarked in New York on August 1. Labeled as being from “a friend,” it likely was written by a sailor in the British fleet impressed into service against his will.
“Your enemy have in agitation an attack on the Capital of the United States,” the anonymous correspondent warned. “The manner which they intend doing it is, to take the advantage of a fair wind in ascending the Patuxent, and after having ascended it a certain distance, to land their men, at once, and to make all possible dispatch to the Capital, batter it down, and then return to their vessels immediately.” Madison turned the letter over to the commander of Washington defenses, who dutifully filed it.
At least as worrisome to Madison was the latest dispatch from Albert Gallatin, his trusted confidant and former Treasury secretary, now on diplomatic duty in Europe. The message, which arrived August 5, warned that the large British force bound for the United States was intent on inflicting “very serious injury” to America. Gallatin grimly noted that the United States could expect no help from either France or Russia. Several days after reading Gallatin’s message, Madison called for Congress to meet in special session in September to consider the gloomy situation.
Even with the British threat looming, Madison was forced to take time on August 13 to bring order to his dysfunctional cabinet, where tensions had reached new heights. He penned a letter rebuking his disruptive secretary of war, John Armstrong, for failing to consult with him on important decisions, including some, Madison icily complained, that he first learned “from the newspapers.” Armstrong was ordered to check with the president before making almost any decision of significance.
The president’s tiny frame, wan looks, and mild-mannered personality made him easy to underestimate. Dressed head to toe in black, from his coat to his breeches and silk stockings, Madison had “the air of a country schoolmaster in mourning for one of his pupils whom he had whipped to death,” a visitor to the President’s House wrote in 1813. Another visitor, Frances Few, thought Madison’s skin looked like parchment, and she was put off by his habit of staring at the ground. But, she added, “a few moments in his company and you lose sight of these defects.… [H]is eyes are penetrating and expressive—his smile charming—his manners affable—his conversation lively and interesting.”
They were windows to a mind that Thomas Jefferson, his closest friend, considered unrivaled in the land. Madison’s selection in 1776 as a delegate to the Virginia Convention drafting the state’s constitution marked the start of his lifelong collaboration with Jefferson. Madison’s brilliant and incisive mind left an indelible stamp on democratic thought at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and later in Congress, as author of the Bill of Rights.
For all his genius, the job of commander-in-chief was proving more challenging for Madison. During the buildup to war, he had made a few halfhearted proposals to increase military spending, and Congress had responded with halfhearted measures. Madison’s conviction, shared with Jefferson, was that a large standing army and the heavy debts and taxes that would be required to pay for it represented a threat to democracy.
When war had been declared in June 1812, the total strength of the U.S. Army was 11,744 men, almost half of them green recruits. Worse than the numbers was the quality of the officer corps, consisting of “swaggerers, dependents, decayed gentlemen, and others fit for nothing else,” in the view of one officer who was an exception to that rule, Winfield Scott, an ambitious young lieutenant colonel in 1812. The U.S. Navy had only fifteen vessels capable of going to sea, and was “so Lilliputian,” a despairing John Adams wrote his son, “that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.” Congress, opposed to a large standing navy, had refused to build any new ships.
With this feeble force, the United States had challenged one of the most powerful nations on earth. The British army, nearly a quarter of a million men strong, was a veteran, disciplined, and much-feared fighting force. The Royal Navy, with a thousand warships, was at the height of its glory, famously ruling the waves. Yet most of Great Britain’s armed forces had been tied up fighting France, and the British and Americans were fairly evenly matched on the ground in North America, with about 7,000 British and Canadian regulars and a small number of Canadian militia available. The Royal Navy, with about forty-five warships and an equal number of smaller vessels operating in American waters, held a stronger advantage against the U.S. Navy, though the vast majority of the British naval might lay across the ocean.
Madison knew that the United States had little military capability. A war under these conditions was reckless, without a doubt. Madison’s hope was that the United States could get away without fighting the war—or at least not much of one. Declaring war, in Madison’s mind, was partly a bluff, to draw Britain’s attention to American grievances. Soon after the vote for war, Madison put out peace feelers, but the British were too baffled by the machinations to respond.
From the start, the fundamental American strategy was to conquer Canada. The United States intended to capture two of the Canadian colonies that made up British North America, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, or respectively modern-day Ontario and Quebec. What to do with them could be determined later. Westerners would be happy to keep the vast territory, or at least permanently remove the British from the North American continent. For Madison, conquering Canada was a means to an end, a bargaining chip to force Britain to cease its trampling of American sovereignty.
The warnings of John Randolph and other naysayers were dismissed. “[T]he acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching,” Jefferson wrote soon after war was declared. Canada’s population of 500,000 was only a fraction of the 7.5 million living in the United States. Quebec was filled with native French who hated the English, while Upper Canada included many settlers who had migrated from the United States. Surely, the thinking went, the Americans would be greeted as liberators.
Canada would be invaded on three fronts. In the Northwest, which included Ohio and the territories of Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois, an army assembled in the summer of 1812 to attack across the Detroit River into Upper Canada. Farther east, in New York, troops would invade across the Niagara River, while a third force, from upstate New York and New England, woul
d attack Montreal.
After war was declared and before the invasions were launched, Madison made the rounds in Washington, visiting the War and Navy departments to bestow words of encouragement “in a manner worthy of a commander in chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade,” wrote Attorney General Richard Rush. But from the start, the war did not go as the commander-in-chief planned.
In the northwest, the aging and corpulent Brigadier General William Hull led an army of volunteers and militia across the Detroit River into Ontario, only to lose his nerve and scamper back to Detroit, where he soon capitulated to a lesser force of British and Indians. On the Niagara front, a second American army surrendered after a brutal fight at Queenston Heights on the Canadian side of the river. The attack on Montreal ended in disgrace after the U.S. commander, General Henry “Granny” Dearborn, withdrew in panic. Other than a few shining single-ship victories at sea—including those of the USS Constitution—the war in 1812 had been a debacle for the United States. Madison was elected to a second term that fall with barely more than 50 percent of the popular vote in the divided country.
The second year of war, 1813, saw more American success, but the victories were tempered by costly defeats. Captain Oliver Hazard Perry won control of Lake Erie in September, enabling an American army under Major General William Henry Harrison to reestablish control of Detroit and much of the Northwest. But on the Niagara front, bloody back-and-forth fighting through the year ended with the British torching American settlements along the Niagara River. To the east, another attempt to capture Montreal ended again in futility. To top it off, Cockburn and his marauders had descended on the Chesapeake Bay, spreading terror on a new front much closer to Washington and bringing a torrent of criticism on Madison.
The outlook for 1814 could not have been more alarming. Almost every ship from Europe brought disquieting news of continued British success in the war with France. The defeat of Napoleon by allied armies at Leipzig in October 1813 forced the emperor to retreat to France. With the allies closing in on Paris, Napoleon abdicated unconditionally on April 6, 1814. Word of the fall of Paris arrived in Washington on May 9, followed by discomforting reports that the British were sending a punitive expedition to the Chesapeake.
Wellington was ordered in April to assemble an expeditionary force on the coast of Bordeaux and load them onto ships bound for North America, with the goal of ending the festering American war, punishing the United States, and perhaps even forcing the dissolution of the union. Some 6,000 men were being sent to Canada for an offensive into New York along the Hudson River and Lake Champlain, intended to cut New England off from the rest of the country. A smaller force of 4,000 sailed to join Admiral Cochrane’s force on the east coast, with the goal of diverting American forces from the Canadian front.
The Madison administration finally stirred to action after a dispatch arrived from Gallatin on June 26 warning of a British attack that might dismember the union. A sobered cabinet agreed the next day that U.S. diplomats preparing to negotiate with the British in Ghent could abandon the American demand to end impressment, if necessary, to reach a peace agreement.
Madison decided the government should do more to protect Washington. At his order, the cabinet convened again at noon, July 1, 1814, at the President’s House. The dramatic developments in Europe had utterly transformed the situation. Madison warned “unequivocally” that Washington presented “the most inviting object of a speedy attack.”
Yet no one else in the cabinet shared his concern. “I was not equally impressed with the apprehension of immediate danger,” Secretary of the Navy William Jones candidly admitted. Secretary of State Monroe was skeptical the British had the logistical wherewithal to mount such an operation, while Secretary of War Armstrong thought the whole idea that the British would attack Washington was ludicrous.
Still, the cabinet unanimously went along with Madison’s proposal that the War Department establish a new military command responsible for the defense of the capital: the Tenth Military District, made up of the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia, and all of Maryland, including Baltimore and Annapolis. Madison wanted two or three thousand U.S. Army troops immediately deployed between the Patuxent River and Washington, and another ten to twelve thousand militia and volunteers from Washington and the neighboring states held in readiness.
“The administration are beginning (I understand) to think that the war on our coast may be almost as serious a one as that they are waging in Canada,” Francis Scott Key observed in his letter to Randolph on July 3. “They have ordered 2000 men here. But if the British receive the reinforcement they expect, this force will be quite inadequate.”
Madison, however, was satisfied that the measures taken would safeguard Washington and the region, and he turned his attention to other matters. In that, he failed to calculate the stubborn recalcitrance of John Armstrong, his secretary of war. Armstrong never denied that he was insulting to many in Washington, including most of the cabinet. In his view, they richly deserved it. “In the discharge of my duty, I have never hesitated … giving offence to bad or incompetent men, hence it is, that all my signal enemies are of one or the other of these two descriptions,” Armstrong would later say.
Madison had chosen Armstrong almost by default after the inept William Eustis resigned under pressure as secretary of war in December 1812. The president wanted Monroe to take the position, but Monroe instead wanted a military command to lead the next invasion of Canada, and in any event, northern senators did not want a Virginian in the job. Armstrong, a former senator and diplomat who had served as a staff officer with the Continental Army at Trenton and Saratoga, had a reputation for military expertise, which was needed at the moment. Just as important to Madison, Armstrong was from New York, and his appointment allowed the president to quell political complaints about his cabinet’s geographic balance. Several cabinet members had deep misgivings about Armstrong, knowing firsthand his corrosive personality. Even Jefferson, who had appointed Armstrong minister to France during his presidency, considered him “presumptuous, obstinate, & injudicious.”
In one area, Armstrong did a great service as secretary, invigorating the army with younger and bolder field commanders, among them Andrew Jackson and Winfield Scott. But in most respects he was a disaster. He meddled with commanders in the field and had stormy relations with his generals. He feuded with the rest of the cabinet, especially Monroe, who was furious when Armstrong blocked his appointment to command the northern army. He was disloyal to the president, keeping him in the dark, misleading him, and maneuvering to look good at Madison’s expense. An air of political intrigue continually surrounded Armstrong, and many suspected, not incorrectly, that he was preparing to run for president.
In December 1813, Monroe urged Madison to fire Armstrong, accusing the secretary of botching the northern invasion and stabbing the president in the back. “[T]his man if continued in office will ruin not you and the administration only, but the whole republican party and cause,” Monroe warned the president. But Madison, as usual, preferred to paper over differences rather than endure the political embarrassment in firing Armstrong. By 1814, Madison was left with an acrimonious cabinet that verged at times on paralysis.
Most disastrous was Armstrong’s refusal to defend the nation’s capital, which he steadfastly insisted would not be a target. He ignored pleas that the army build earthworks to defend Washington, insisting the focus be kept on Canada. In some respects, his hands were tied. The administration had chosen to continue its offensive against Canada in 1814, despite repeated dismal failures and limited resources and troops. Diverting troops from the Canadian frontier to defend Washington was exactly what Cockburn and the British wanted, and Armstrong refused to do it.
Armstrong considered Madison a rank amateur in military matters and thought the president’s orders to create a new command for Washington’s defense silly. He was further miffed by Madison’s selection of Brigadier General William Henry
Winder to command the new military district. Monroe opposed Armstrong’s choice, the far more experienced Brigadier General Moses Porter, apparently on no other grounds than that he was Armstrong’s choice.
Armstrong reacted by washing his hands of the whole matter and drifted into sullen uncooperativeness. Despite Madison’s orders, Armstrong told Winder he could only have 1,200 regular soldiers and that the balance of his command would have to come from militia. When Winder suggested calling up some militia immediately, Armstrong balked. It was best to wait until “the spur of the occasion” demanded their presence in battle, he insisted.
Winder feared that if called at the last moment, the militia would be of no more use than a “disorderly crowd,” and asked Armstrong July 9 to immediately call out 4,000 militia. The secretary waited a week before begrudgingly authorizing Winder to call 3,000 militia into service.
Preoccupied by events in Europe and Canada, Madison did little to monitor the situation. Though evidence of Armstrong’s failure to prepare for Washington’s defense accumulated, the president was not willing to intervene. This reflected his habitual caution, but it was also a matter of principle. Unlike Abraham Lincoln a half century later, Madison was unwilling to seize strong executive power, determined not to undermine the foundations of republican government he and Jefferson had created.
But people in Washington could see nothing was being done, and they were growing angry. Dr. James H. Blake, mayor of Washington, complaining of “the defenseless state of this city,” led a delegation of prominent citizens to meet with the president in mid-July and urge that more be done.
“For some weeks, the citizens have expected a visit from the British, and repeatedly called upon the Secretary of the War Department and the President for protection,” Martha Peter wrote to a friend. “The first laughed at what he called their idle fears. The President said he was called on from all quarters for protection; that he could not protect everyone; and the District must take care of itself.”
