Letters

by John Barth

  He is relieved therefore to find that Cochrane and Ross are already of a mind to leave the Chesapeake for the present. As the fleet works its way down the Patuxent (old Dr. Beanes has been seized and put in irons on the Tonnant for arresting those British stragglers), Cochrane announces that while he has every intention not only to attack but to destroy “that nest of pirates… that most democratic town and… the richest in the union,” whose fleet of privateers has sunk or captured no fewer than 500 British ships since 1812, he will not do it until midautumn, when “the sickly season” in the Chesapeake is past. They will rendezvous off Tangier Island with Captain Parker’s Menelaus and Captain Gordon’s task force from the Potomac; reprovisioned, they will dispatch Admiral Cockburn and the prize tobacco to Bermuda and take the army on up to Rhode Island. Newport once captured, they will rest and wait for reinforcements. Then, when the Americans will have frantically dispersed their forces to defend New York and New England, they will sweep back to destroy Baltimore, maybe Charleston too, and end their campaign at New Orleans. That should wind up the war, even without further successes on the Niagara Frontier.

  Andrew is delighted. The trip north will give him time to make his own plans; from Newport it should be easy to slip away to Castines Hundred; perhaps by late October a treaty will be signed. Ross agrees with Cochrane; Admiral Cockburn cannot prevail against them. On September 4 the orders are given: thirteen ships to remain on patrol in the Chesapeake; the main body of warships and transports to re-rendezvous off Rhode Island; Cockburn to join them there after his errand in Bermuda—all this as soon as they are provisioned at Tangier Island. There the fleet anchors, on the 6th. A dispatch boat is sent off to London with Cochrane’s reports of the Washington victory and his plan to move north. Gordon’s ships are still working down the Potomac with their prizes from Alexandria; the Menelaus arrives from up the Bay with Sir Peter Parker in a box, shot by an Eastern Shore militiaman during a diversionary raid. (In London, Byron will merrily set about composing his Elegy.) The army disembarks for the night to camp on a Methodist meeting ground presided over by Joshua Thomas, the “Parson of the Islands.” Next morning early, Admiral Cockburn grumblingly weighs anchor and points the Albion south toward the Virginia Capes.

  And then, Henry, at midmorning the whole fleet makes sail, not for Block Island and Newport, but back up the Bay, toward Baltimore!

  Andrew declares himself as baffled by this sudden change of plan as all chroniclers of the period have been since. It cannot have been Cockburn’s doing: he and the Albion must be sent after and signaled to return. Some have speculated, faute de mieux, that the Menelaus fetched back, along with her dead young captain, irresistible intelligence of the city’s vulnerability and accurate soundings of the Patapsco River up to Baltimore Harbor. Others, that Joshua Thomas’s famous sermon to the troops on the morning of September 7, warning them that their attack on Baltimore was destined to fail, actually reinterested Ross and Cochrane in that project! We have seen how cautious a general Ross is, how fickle an admiral Cochrane: one can even suppose that the very dispatching of their withdrawal plans to London, and of Cockburn to Bermuda, inclined them afterwards to do what they’d just decided not to do.

  And there is another explanation, which Andrew ventures but, in the nature of the case, cannot be sure of. It is that the three commanding officers had secretly agreed from the first, upon their return to the fleet after burning Washington, to move directly upon Baltimore, and that the unusually elaborate feint down the Bay was calculated to deceive not only the defenders of that city but spies aboard the fleet itself. No one is named by name; no one is clapped into irons to join Dr. Beanes in the Tonnant’s brig or hanged from the yardarms. But it is as if (writes Andrew) his alteration of heart has writ itself upon his brow. He finds himself politely excluded from strategy discussions. To his remark that Cockburn will be particularly chagrined to miss the show if the dispatch boat fails to overtake him, the officers only smile—and by noon the Albion is back in view.

  That same afternoon the Tonnant is met by the frigate Hebrus carrying a truce party of Marylanders come to negotiate for the release of Dr. Beanes: the U.S. prisoner-exchange agent John Skinner and that lawyer whom we last saw at the Bladensburg Races, Francis Scott Key. They are given immediate audience with Ross and Cochrane, the more cordial because they’ve brought letters from the British wounded left under Joshua Barney’s supervision; they are told at once that though Beanes will be released to them in reward for the kind treatment of those wounded, the three Americans must remain with the fleet until after the attack on Baltimore, lest they spoil the surprise. The Tonnant being overcrowded with senior officers, Key and Skinner are then transferred, as a civilized joke, to the frigate Surprize, and Andrew Cook (without explanation) is transferred with them. Indeed it is from Key, whom he quickly befriends on the basis of a common admiration for Joel Barlow’s non-epical verse, that Andrew learns for certain that their target is not Annapolis or Alexandria—whence Captain Gordon’s task force has yet to return—but Baltimore.

  Our forefather’s words here are at once candid and equivocal. I described myself, he writes, as an American agent who, to remain useful to my country and avoid being hang’d, had on occasion to be useful to the British as well. Whose pretence to Cochrane & Co. was necessarily just the reverse. Whose true feelings about the war were mixt enough to have carry’d off this role successfully for a time; but who now was fallen into the distrust, not only of “John Bull” & “Brother Jonathan,” but of myself. Key rather shares these sentiments: he regards the war as an atrocious mistake, Baltimore as a particularly barbarous town; he is disposed to admire the British officers as gentlemen of culture. But with a few exceptions he has found them as offensively ignorant and scornful of Americans as the Americans are of them; the scores of desertions from the British rank and file—desertions from the “winning” to the “losing” side!—have shown him the appealing face of democracy’s vulgar coin; and the destruction of Washington touched chords of patriotism he has not felt since 1805, when he was moved to write a song in honor of Stephen Decatur’s naval triumphs at Tripoli. The defacing of the navy’s monument to that occasion has particularly incensed him: did Andrew know that the invaders went so far as to snatch the pen from History’s hand, the palm from Fame’s?

  There was a vandal with a poet’s heart, Andrew uncomfortably replies, to whom the fit response might be another patriotic ode, one that will stir the indignation even of New Englanders. Pen has a natural rhyme in men, for example, does it not, and palm in balm. Shall they give it a go?

  Their camaraderie remains on this level, for Key is either ignorant of the actual defense preparations of Baltimore (which information Andrew solicits in the hope of both restoring his credit with Ross and Cochrane and misleading them) or distrustful of his new companion. The combination of pens and statuary suggests to Andrew that graven is a more promising rhyme for Barlow’s raven than the one Lord Byron came up with: he volunteers it to Key and resolves to send it on to Byron as well, for consideration in some future elegy to Sir Peter Parker.

  When the fleet turns off the Bay and up into the Potomac on the 8th, they wonder whether they have been yet again deliberately misled; whether a follow-up attack on Washington is the real, at least the first, objective. But on the 9th they meet Captain Gordon’s flotilla returning from Alexandria; the diversion has been a standby for rescuing Gordon if necessary. The combined forces stand back downriver, anchor overnight at the mouth of the Patuxent, and on the 10th run north past frantic Annapolis. They sail through the night and by afternoon on Sunday the 11th begin assembling at anchor off North Point, at the mouth of the Patapsco, within sight of Fort McHenry eight miles upriver. “The Americans”—so Admiral Cochrane now refers to them, without a glance at Andrew—are transferred from the Surprize back to the flag-of-truce sloop they’d arrived on, still monitored by a British junior officer: Dr. Beanes is paroled to join them, and Andrew is included in their party
without comment. He sees his erstwhile companion Admiral Cockburn rowed over from the Albion to the shallower-draft Fairy to confer with Ross about their landing strategy (they are to take the army and marines overland from North Point to fall on Baltimore from the east, while Cochrane moves a force of frigates, bomb ships, and rocket launchers upriver to reduce Fort McHenry and move on the city from below). He sees Admiral Cochrane transferred from the heavy Tonnant to the lighter Surprize in preparation for that maneuver—wherefore “the Americans” have been shifted. Andrew waves tentatively, still hopeful; but if Cochrane, Ross, and Cockburn see him, they make no sign.

  Say now, Muse, for Henry’s sake, what Key can’t see, nor John Skinner nor Dr. Beanes nor Andrew Cook, from where they languish for the next three days. Speak of General Sam Smith’s determination that the Bladensburg Races shall not be rerun: his mustering and deployment of 16,000 defenders, including the remnants of Barney’s flotillamen, behind earthworks to the east of town and fortifications around the harbor; his dispatching of an attack force at once to meet the enemy at North Point when he’s certain they’ll land there. Declare what Major Armistead at Fort McHenry knows, and no one else: that the fort’s powder magazine is not, as everyone assumes it to be, bombproof; that one direct hit will send his fort, himself, and his thousand-man garrison to kingdom come and leave the harbor virtually undefended. Tell my son of the new letter that now arrives by dispatch boat from Governor-General Prevost in Canada to Admiral Cochrane, reporting further American atrocities on the Niagara Frontier and urging the admiral again to retaliate, not with indemnifications, but with fire. The British and even the American newspapers are praising Ross for his restraint in Washington: his firing only of public buildings, his care not to harm noncombatants; such solicitude is not what Prevost wants, and Cochrane is determined this time that Ross shall be hard, that the governor-general shall get what he wants. Say too, Muse, what Ross and Cochrane themselves can’t see: that even as this letter arrives, its author, at the head of an invasion force of 14,000 British veterans in upstate New York, is suffering a double defeat. His naval forces on Lake Champlain are destroyed before his eyes that same Sunday morning, and just as he commences a land attack on Plattsburgh in concert with it, he intercepts a letter from Colonel Fosset of Vermont to the defending American General Macomb, advising him of massive reinforcements en route to his aid. That very night, as Ross’s army lands for the second time in Maryland, Prevost panics and orders a retreat back to Canada.

  The letter from Prevost to Cochrane is authentic; the one Prevost intercepts from Fosset to Macomb is false. Those 10,000 reinforcements do not exist. The U.S. Secret Service has forged the letter and entrusted its delivery to “an Irishwoman of Cumberland Head” whom they know to be a double agent; as they hope, she dutifully betrays them and delivers it to Prevost instead of to Macomb. Was it you, my darling (Andrew wonders at Rochefort a year later, from the deck of Bellerophon), who forged that letter for the Secret Service, or who posed as that Irishwoman? Were you reversing the little trick we play’d on General Hull at Detroit? May I believe that you too think it time to end the British dallying at Ghent and conclude a treaty, now that our Indian Nation seem’d assured?

  Andrée does not reply. He will never know, nor we.

  Say on then, Muse, for Henry, what you saw and Andrew didn’t at the Battle of Baltimore, which like the Battle of Plattsburgh never quite took place. It is Monday, September 12th, still warm in Maryland and threatening rain. Ross and Cockburn begin their overland advance, pause for breakfast at a convenient farmhouse, and decline the owner’s cautious invitation to return for dinner: he will dine that evening, Ross declares, “in Baltimore or in Hell.” A few hours later, on Cockburn’s advice, he rides back a bit to hurry a light brigade along in support of his advance party, who have got too far ahead of the rest and are meeting the first desultory American fire. As Ross trots down the North Point Road, the anonymous, invisible Americans fire again from their concealment in a grove of oaks. One bullet strikes him in the arm and chest: he falls, he speaks of his wife, he dies. The invasion will go forward, that day and the next, under Ross’s successor and Admiral Cockburn, who commands only his own small band of marines. The American advance line will retreat, but in less disorder than at Bladensburg; they will regroup with the main force of militia at Sam Smith’s earthworks to await the real assault. On Tuesday the 13th Colonel Brooke (the new British commander, even more cautious than his predecessor) and Admiral Cockburn will position their forces before those earthworks and wait for news of Cochrane’s success at Fort McHenry before mounting their attack. And for all of Cockburn’s exasperated urgings, that attack will never be mounted, because that news will never come.

  Can you see, Muse, through the rain of that sodden Tuesday, the letters going back and forth between Brooke and Cochrane, army and navy? Cochrane has written Ross on the Monday afternoon that, as best he can see from the river, the flank of Sam Smith’s earthworks may be turned without a frontal assault. His letter comes back that evening unopened, together with the news of Ross’s death. Unperturbed, perhaps relieved, Cochrane orders the body preserved in a cask of Jamaican rum and dashes off encouragement to Colonel Brooke: Prevost says burn, burn; I will take Fort McHenry (the harbor, alas, is blocked with scuttled privateers); you take the city. On Tuesday morning his bomb and rocket ships open fire, out of range of the guns of the fort. Three hours later he is already wavering; another letter goes down the river and up the North Point Road, this one to Brooke via Admiral Cockburn: It appears we cannot help you; the city is too far away, the fort too strong; consider reconsidering whether Brooke should attack at all. But he sustains the one-way bombardment into the afternoon, and the garrison at McHenry must take their punishment without reply. Even Cochrane cannot see the one bombshell out of hundreds and hundreds that lands directly on the powder magazine, goes through its roof with fuse still sputtering and, like the one bullet that felled General Ross, might have rewrit this chapter of history had not a nimble nameless fellow leaped to douse it. Cochrane moves his ships in closer; the Americans at last and jubilantly return the barrage; he moves back out of range. Nothing is working. Here’s a letter from Brooke, fifteen hours late: he will be in Baltimore by noon! But it’s past three, and there’s no sign of action at the earthworks. Cochrane can’t see what you can, Muse: that Brooke has got his letter, explored the enemy’s flanks and found them defended, and agreed with Cockburn that a night attack is the best strategy. As Cochrane reads this letter, Brooke is writing him another: the army and marines will attack at 2:00 A.M.; will the navy please stage a diversion on the farther side of Fort McHenry, as if moving up to threaten Baltimore from the west?

  Letters! This second of Brooke’s received, unhappy Cochrane replies (to Cockburn) that the plan is folly: the navy can do nothing; McHenry will not fall; New Orleans is a richer city anyroad; retreat. It is Tuesday evening, rain coming down hard now. Cockburn scoffs at this letter—Washington all over again!—and urges Brooke to ignore it: Attack, attack. Brooke’s junior officers are of the same mind; retreats do not earn promotions. But command is heavy: if the army takes the city but the navy cannot take the fort to load prizes, there will be nothing but an expensive bonfire to show for possibly very high losses. If the army fails and the navy succeeds (as seems unlikely), the fall of Fort McHenry will mean nothing. The officers—not including disgusted Cockburn—argue till midnight, when Brooke wearily pens his last to Cochrane: We are following your advice; as the navy cannot take the fort, we shall retreat to North Point and reembark.

  But on that same midnight (you can see and say, Muse, what they cannot)—suspecting that Cockburn might persuade Brooke to ignore these letters and attack—Cochrane dispatches after all, reluctantly, the diversionary force Brooke has requested but no longer wants. And here, Henry, our ancestor comes back into the tale. You have seen him, all this while, fretting through the bombardment with Key & Co. back at the main fleet anchorage. He is truly sa
ddened, as you saw, by the news of Ross’s death: the man was overcautious, perhaps, but brave and not bloodthirsty, an officer and gentleman. You have seen Andrew fear for the fate of Baltimore if—as seems likely from Prevost’s letter and Cochrane’s first to Colonel Brooke—Cockburn has his way with the city. Rumors abound like Chesapeake mosquitoes; every dispatch boat leaves its message like a wake behind. Old Dr. Beanes complains he can’t see a thing; Andrew borrows a spyglass from the British lieutenant in charge of them and confirms through the day that Armistead has not yet struck his colors at McHenry. There is a bad moment towards late afternoon, just after the one heavy exchange of fire from the fort, when they lose sight of it, the big 30-by-42-foot Stars and Stripes, in the smoke and rain, and wonder whether after all the fort has died. But John Skinner recollects that there is a second flag there, a smaller “storm flag” for squally weather; he optimistically proposes that the renewed silence means only that the bomb ships have retired back out of range, and that Major Armistead may be using the lull to hoist a banner more appropriate to the wretched weather. Key is unconvinced. Dr. Beanes fears the worst.