Tecumseh and Brock

by James Laxer

  The Battle of Bladensburg, which would determine who controlled the approaches to Washington, was fought on August 24, a miserably hot day. For hours, both American and British soldiers marched to the site of the coming fight. American militiamen, many of them attired in civilian clothing and looking distinctly unmilitary in black coats or shooting jackets, were exhausted by the time they reached Bladensburg. On the other side of the river, closing in on Bladensburg from the opposite direction, were British troops in their customary red coats. Buglers played marching airs to buoy the spirits of the soldiers, some of whom fell to the side when they were overcome by cramps and weakness.21 A few dropped dead, struck down by dehydration. Six thousand, three hundred Americans equipped with twenty-six guns, including twenty 6-pounders, were assembled in a strong position on the heights above the town of Bladensburg. Facing them were twenty-six hundred British soldiers.

  Stansbury placed his artillery and riflemen at the front of the line to oppose any river crossing by the British, and positioned his militia in the rear. Higher-ups could not resist the temptation to interfere with the deployment. Secretary of State Monroe arrived at the American lines and pulled the militia back, leaving the artillery and riflemen with no nearby reserves to support them. The British, throwing conventional military thinking to the winds, decided on an immediate attack.22 Forgoing further reconnaissance and any attempt to outflank the Americans, the troops of the 85th Light Infantry ditched their packs and charged, some through the woods, some across a bridge, and others across the stream. Although the British encountered heavy fire and took casualties, the attackers held their ground. The 4th and 44th Regiments joined the attack. The Americans resisted for a time, but when the British set up wooden launchers and fired Congreve rockets against them, their first line broke and the militiamen took to their heels. The rockets created the shock and awe expected of them. While some Americans continued to hold, Winder ordered them to retreat. The effective resistance of the U.S. forces was at an end.23

  In a letter to Secretary of War John Armstrong, written from Baltimore three days after the battle, Winder laid blame for the American defeat on the half-hearted effort of a part of his force. “The contest was not as obstinately maintained as could have been desired,” he wrote, “but was by parts of the troops sustained with great spirit and with prodigious effect, and had the whole of our force been equally firm, I am induced to believe the enemy would have been repulsed notwithstanding all the disadvantages under which we fought.”24 It was the sort of letter, expressly penned to shift the blame for the defeat, that was written all too often by the politicians-turned-commanders who regularly led American troops during the war.

  Uniquely in American history, much of the top leadership of the U.S. government was on hand to witness the debacle. In addition to Monroe, who had foolishly interfered with the placement of the militia, the president and the secretary of war arrived on the scene. As the commander-in-chief watched the beginning of the rout of his forces, he noted to Monroe and Armstrong, “It would be now proper for us to retire to the rear, leaving the military movement to military men.”25

  The redoubtable Commodore Joshua Barney managed to play his part in the losing cause at Bladensburg. Having lost their flotilla, Barney’s naval men managed to tow some of their cannon with them and, acting as infantry, they used their guns to halt a British advance. Just as the American front was collapsing around him, Barney was severely wounded in the thigh. Losing a great deal of blood, Barney was forced to lie down. He ordered his officers to leave him, which they refused to do. When a British officer learned who he was, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn were brought to him. As Barney wrote a few days later, “Those officers behaved to me with the most marked attention, respect and politeness, had a surgeon brought, and my wound dressed immediately. After a few minutes [of] conversation, the general informed me (after paying me a handsome compliment) that I was paroled, and at liberty to proceed to Washington or Bladensburg.”26

  General Ross decided against any pursuit of the Americans, noting in a missive to London that “the rapid flight of the enemy and his knowledge of the country, precluded many prisoners being taken.” The British victory against superior numbers — the U.S. militiamen could not hold their own against British regulars — opened the way to Washington. The British had lost 64 men and 185 were wounded, while their foes had suffered 26 casualties and 51 wounded.27

  On the afternoon of the battle, the president’s wife, Dolley, remained in the President’s House, hoping for news of an American victory. By the time the president returned to the residence at around 4:30 p.m., however, his wife had departed for Virginia, insisting that Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington must be brought along. Dolley was not willing to tarry while the portrait was being unscrewed from the wall; as she later noted in a letter to her sister, “I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out.”28 A fifteen-year-old personal slave by the name of Paul Jennings was ordered to stop unscrewing the painting by Jean Pierre Sioussat, a French confidant of Dolley’s. Sioussat proceeded to cut the painting free with a knife and insisted that it not be rolled up, for fear that it would crack. The painting was shipped to the home of a Virginia farmer, who safeguarded it for the next few weeks.29

  After defeating the Americans at Bladensburg, a brigade of British troops, under the command of General Ross, set out along the road to the capital. Accompanied by Admiral Cockburn, the force arrived in Washington at twilight, proceeding into the square on the east side of the Capitol.30 Gunfire erupted as American snipers took aim at the British. “Part of the enemy,” Corporal David Brown of the 21st Fusiliers later wrote, “being Concealed in one of the houses, fired upon our approach, which killed two of our Corporals and General Ross got his horse shot from under him.”31

  After the snipers vanished, Ross ordered the house from which the shots were fired to be put to the torch. Next came the two wings of the Capitol, one for each house of the U.S. Congress, joined together by a wooden structure. Lieutenant George de Lacy Evans, the deputy quartermaster general of the British 3rd Brigade, and munitions expert Lieutenant George Pratt of the Royal Navy organized the burning of the stone edifice, which was not easily set alight. Eventually they launched Congreve rockets at the Congressional House, and flames shot forth from windows and doors.32 On the western side of the Capitol, the Library of Congress was also torched.

  Before the destruction of the Capitol, Admiral Cockburn visited offices on the ground floor of the House of Representatives and wandered into a room used as an office by the president when he visited Capitol Hill. There, Cockburn found a green leather volume — the president’s own copy of the record of revenues and expenditures of the U.S. government in 1810. The admiral took the volume with him and later made a gift of it to his brother, the governor of Bermuda.33

  That evening, Captain Thomas Tingey of the United States Navy diligently set alight the Washington Navy Yard, following the instructions of William Jones, the secretary of the navy. Tingey was determined to prevent the British from capturing the yard’s munitions. He proceeded with the conflagration, despite the arrival of a number of people who feared that the fire would threaten their nearby property. As he reported to Jones several days later, these concerned citizens endeavoured “to prevail on me to deviate from my instructions.” Tingey did not heed their pleas, but he did wait until 8:30 p.m., when the afternoon’s breeze had subsided.34 Tingey’s demolition lit up the night sky. People saw the terrible glow from across the Potomac in Virginia and from as far away as Baltimore to the northeast.

  At around 10:30 p.m., Ross and Cockburn assembled a force of about 150 men to take their assault to the President’s House. Along the way, a man by the name of William Gardner called to Cockburn from the open window of his home on Pennsylvania Avenue: “I hope, Sir, that individuals and private property will be respected.”

  “Yes, Sir,” replied the admiral
, who guided his horse under the window. “We pledge our sacred honour that the citizens and private property shall be respected. Be under no apprehension. Our advice to you is to remain at home.”35

  The arrival of the unwelcome guests at the executive mansion was captured in Ross’s journal: “So unexpected was our entry and capture of Washington; and so confident was Maddison [sic] of the defeat of our troops, that he had prepared a supper for the expected conquerors; and when our advanced party entered the President’s house, they found a table laid with forty covers. The fare, however; which was intended for Jonathan was voraciously devoured by John Bull; and the health of the Prince Regent and success to his Majesty’s arms by sea and land, was drunk in the best wines.”36

  The British commanders and a lucky few of their men savoured the food and enjoyed the fine wines. Then the victors explored the house. Some of them found pristine shirts, one belonging to the president, and put them on to replace the sweaty clothes they were wearing. A few more jocular games were played in the building before it was destroyed. Cockburn, who revelled in such scenes, picked up a cushion from Dolley Madison’s chair to remind him of her “seat.” As the British left the President’s House, soldiers set beds, curtains, and other combustible materials on fire.37 Near the mansion, the Treasury building was also torched, its valuable contents having been removed beforehand by the Americans.

  The destruction continued the following day. The War Office and Navy Office in Georgetown were burned to the ground, and government supplies of cordage, hemp, and tar were set alight, spewing vast clouds of smoke into the air. The smoke was visible to members of the Virginia Militia, who decided to destroy the bridge across the Potomac to prevent it from falling into the hands of the British. On the afternoon of August 25, the day after the destruction of much of official Washington, the region was rocked by a violent wind and rainstorm that uprooted trees, tore up crops in farmers’ fields, and felled houses. The storm served as a metaphor for the British descent on the capital of the United States — furious and brief. At 9:00 p.m., without fanfare, the British who had visited such devastation on Washington marched out of the city and back to their boats at Nottingham.38

  In the aftermath of the burning of Washington, President Madison took up the issue in his report to the U.S. Congress: “Direct communication from the British commander indicates it is his avowed purpose to employ the force under his direction ‘in destroying and laying waste such towns and districts upon the coast as may be found assailable’ and subsequently British soldiers wantonly destroyed public edifices under the insulting pretext that it was done in retaliation for a wanton destruction committed by the army of the United States in Upper Canada when it is notorious that no such destruction was committed.”

  When Thomas Jefferson added his own criticism, John Strachan, who had witnessed the devastation of York the year before, addressed a letter to the former president: “In April 1813 the public buildings at York, the capital of Upper Canada, were burnt by troops of the United States, contrary to the articles of capitulation. They consisted of two elegant halls with convenient offices for the accommodation of the Legislature and of the Courts of Justice. The library and all the papers and records belonging to these institutions were consumed; at the same time the church was robbed and the town library totally pillaged. Commodore Chauncey, who has generally behaved honourably, was so ashamed of this last transaction that he endeavoured to collect the books belonging to the library and actually sent back two boxes filled with them but hardly any were complete. Much private property was plundered and several houses left in a state of ruin. Can you tell me why the public buildings and the library at Washington should be held more sacred than those at York?”39

  Jefferson did not reply.

  The British foray in Washington against enemy formations three times their army’s size was a considerable feat of arms. Not only did they leave the capital in ruins, they made off with two hundred cannon, five hundred barrels of gunpowder, and one hundred thousand musket cartridges. Admiral Cockburn later wrote in triumphalist terms that this achievement “for the extent of the ground passed over, the importance of its objects, the mischief done the enemy — ashore and afloat — in so short a space of time is scarcely perhaps to be paralleled.”40

  Madison and Monroe returned to Washington on August 28. With a British naval squadron at Alexandria, just across the Potomac, the American political leadership had reason to fear a second assault on the capital. The next evening, the president rode his horse over to the lodgings of Secretary of War John Armstrong. Earlier that day, Madison had been warned in the strongest possible terms by a militia general that his officers would not allow Armstrong, by then hated in the capital, to supervise them. In his meeting with Armstrong, the president said frankly that the British capture of the capital had ignited “violent prejudices” in the hearts of many against both of them. In light of the anger of the soldiers, Madison told Armstrong that it would be wise for the secretary to “have nothing to do with them.”41

  Ever haughty, Armstrong refused to shoulder any blame for the debacle. Although he had repeatedly made the case that the target of the British invasion was not Washington, he lashed out at his critics. To Madison’s surprise, instead of agreeing to a temporary absence, the secretary of war offered his resignation, insisting all the while that he had done nothing wrong.

  This was too much, even for the gentlemanly Madison, who told his colleague that he had failed to foresee the threat to the capital and all of the consequences that flowed from its capture. Earlier, Armstrong had suggested that he might go home to his family in New York. The president ended the tense meeting by saying that he would have no objection if Armstrong followed through on the suggestion. The next morning, Armstrong sent a missive to Madison announcing that he was leaving for New York.

  A few days later, Armstrong sent a letter to the Baltimore Patriot that made the case for his actions during the siege of Washington. He ended the letter with a denunciation of the troops who had fled from the battlefield. “It is obvious,” he declared, “that if all the troops assembled at Bladensburg had been faithful to themselves and to their country, the enemy would have been beaten and the capital saved.”42

  While the British forces’ lightning attack on Washington was underway, their naval assault on the Potomac was proceeding according to plan. Captain Gordon’s ships managed to reduce Fort Warburton and then continued upstream, where they forced the humiliating capture of Alexandria. Having been beseeched by the town’s mayor and other notables to spare the municipality, Gordon issued an ultimatum. While a couple of demands were struck off the list as impractical, the town leaders pledged to hand over munitions, tobacco, flour, and cotton.

  The British held on to Alexandria, plundering the town for the goods on the list, until September 3, when they finally withdrew. Gordon was concerned about American threats vowing that his return voyage down the Potomac would be a living hell.43 Rumours that the Americans were setting up ambushes to strike Gordon’s ships as they navigated narrow stretches of the river were not ill founded. In the end, the Americans did manage a few attacks, even doing some damage to the vessels and wounding and killing a few British sailors.44 But Gordon’s fleet emerged largely unscathed at the end of the twenty-three-day sally. Many Americans were disgusted that Alexandria had offered no resistance to the invaders. Dolley Madison went so far as to tell friends that letting Alexandria burn would have been preferable to such a humiliating surrender.45

  Baltimore, America’s third largest city and a key commercial port, was the next obvious target for the British. When they learned the fate of the capital, many Baltimore residents were alarmed and pessimistic about what lay in store for them. Under the leadership of the mayor, a Committee of Vigilance and Safety was formed that included representatives from Baltimore’s wards and precincts. Its job was to counter defeatism, prevent loose talk, and look out for suspicio
us strangers.

  Hesitation on the part of the British proved costly. Cochrane, the man in charge, was skeptical of Cockburn’s instinctive response to assault Baltimore. Indeed, Cockburn’s squadron had just set sail for Bermuda when a message from Cochrane recalled him. After a week of reflection on the matter, Cochrane had decided that the British would proceed with an attack on Baltimore.

  When the British fleet sailed north en route for Baltimore, it passed before the eyes of the residents of Annapolis. Panic ensued in the old town that had briefly served as the capital of the United States. The ships sailed up the bay and anchored twenty-two kilometres southeast of Baltimore, at the mouth of the Patapsco River.

  During the early hours of September 12, landing boats conveyed the soldiers ashore. By 7:00 a.m. about five thousand men had disembarked at North Point, taking with them the horses needed to pull eight cannon, including two howitzers. The British plan was to defeat the American forces in a battle near North Point and then to swing around and take Baltimore from the north.46

  Ross and Cockburn led the troops, with Ross in command of the forty-five hundred soldiers and the admiral leading six hundred seamen and Royal and Colonial Marines. Leading a party of about fifty men ahead of the main force, Ross and Cockburn ran without warning into a screen of American soldiers, who had been deployed to warn of the enemy’s approach. U.S. cavalry and riflemen were directly in the path of the British commanders and their troops.

  To frighten the Americans into believing the whole British force was upon them, the commanders and their small party charged and drove off the soldiers. In the brief melee, however, General Ross was shot and severely wounded. Two hours later, he died.47 The death of the general, who was so highly regarded by his troops, had a dramatic effect on the critical events of the next twenty-four hours.