Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  As soon as the 5th Maryland began its retreat, Winder sent a messenger to President Madison reporting that his army had been driven back, but that he intended to form a new line of defense somewhere between Bladensburg and the Capitol. Then Winder dispatched an aide with an order for General Smith, the District militia commander: Retreat.

  The day hung in the balance. Ross and Cockburn, who earlier thought the battle won, rushed forward to the line. Ross brought up the 4th Foot, its troops utterly exhausted by their race to catch up to the battle. The scorching day had reached 100 degrees; three men collapsed and died from heatstroke while climbing the one hundred feet of elevation from the river to Barney’s position. But the arrival of the reinforcements lent critical support to the British assault.

  The tall Irish general cut an imposing figure on the handsome Arabian steed he had brought from France. Ross took personal command of Thornton’s brigade, renewing the advance and blunting the U.S. Marines’ charge. The shock of the American assault had worn off, and there were not enough marines and flotillamen to sustain it. The Americans pulled back under heavy fire from British sharpshooters. Captain Miller, the Marine commander, found himself in an impromptu duel with an enemy assailant. Each man leveled his musket, fired, and missed, but the British soldier was able to reload and fire again while Miller fixed his flint, shattering the captain’s arm. Another U.S. Marine officer was shot through the neck, and nearly a quarter of the Marine detachment was dead or wounded.

  As Ross directed his troops forward, a burst of Barney’s grapeshot killed his horse, throwing the general to the ground. Ross was uninjured, though a later inspection found four musket ball holes in different parts of his clothing.

  Cockburn directed rocket fire, mounted on a white charger and conspicuous in his gold-braided hat and blue uniform with epaulets. His alarmed aide, Lieutenant Scott, urged the admiral to take cover. “Poh! Nonsense,” Cockburn replied. He supervised as Royal Marine Lieutenant John Lawrence and Tonnant Masters Mate Jeremiah McDaniel fired several rockets directly into the American ranks.

  “Capital!” Cockburn cried. “Excellent.” But almost immediately, McDaniel was shot in the face. As Cockburn called for medical assistance, a musket ball tore the stirrups off the admiral’s saddle. Cockburn dismounted, and while Scott and a Royal Marine tried to repair his saddle with twine, a round shot flew in, killing the marine. But Cockburn, like Ross, was untouched.

  Ross had no interest in directly attacking Barney’s guns. Riding a new mount, the British general moved to Barney’s far right flank, directing an attack up the hill where Colonel Beall was positioned with 700 men, most of them Annapolis militia.

  Beall was a Revolutionary War veteran who had served bravely with the Continental Army at Long Island, but his men were untested militia, still exhausted from their sixteen-mile run that morning to Bladensburg. From their hilltop vantage point, the men had nervously watched the British advance inexorably through American lines, and now it appeared they were next. “A good many of our men stared as if they were looking at ghosts,” wrote Captain Sprigg.

  As the British drew near, an aide to Winder arrived with instructions to withdraw immediately. Beall was incredulous. “Does General Winder order me to retreat before we have fired a shot?” he asked. Beall did not order a retreat—he later said he did not remember receiving the order—and in any event it was too late. As the aide repeated Winder’s order, the British opened fire from the woods on the right.

  Lieutenant Colonel William Wood, Thornton’s second in command, led the charge from the ravine but was badly wounded by a shower of musket balls. Nonetheless, under Ross’s command, the British continued up the hill. After firing several ineffectual rounds, most of the unnerved militia fled, ignoring every effort at rally. The British surged to the top of the hill.

  From Barney’s position below, Charles Ball, the slave turned flotillaman, watched with disgust as the American right flank dissolved. “[T]he militia ran like sheep chased by dogs,” he said.

  On Barney’s left, the District militia troops came under attack by the 44th Foot, which had broken off its chase of the Maryland militia to join the assault on the final American line. With his left flank dangerously threatened, General Smith ordered the District militia’s 2nd Regiment, positioned in the rear, to rush forward and bolster the line. Just then, Smith received orders from Winder to retreat. Angry protests erupted from the men, many of whom had yet to fire a shot. “Victory was doubtful, but we did not cease to expect it, until we were ordered to retreat, nobody near us could tell why,” said a soldier in Captain Davidson’s infantry company.

  The U.S. regulars under Lieutenant Colonel Scott had impatiently awaited orders to advance even as the British moved within pistol-shot range and opened fire, hitting a half-dozen U.S. troops. The regulars were returning fire when Winder rode up and ordered them to retreat. When an officer protested, Winder angrily repeated his order.

  With the British closing on both flanks, Winder likewise aborted an attempt by the District militia to hold, directing Smith to instead make a stand on the heights of Washington, about a mile and a half before the Capitol. Peter and the Georgetown Artillery skillfully covered the retreat, and the District militia pulled back in relatively good order. Winder did not bother sending word to Barney that he was retreating.

  The commodore was infuriated, if not particularly surprised, to see he had been abandoned. “[N]ot a vestige of the American Army remained,” Barney later reported to Navy Secretary Jones.

  The flight of Beall’s regiment was particularly aggravating, as it gave Ross a commanding height to pour fire on Barney’s gun crews. The British pushed forward sharpshooters, one of whom felled Barney’s horse from under him. Another shot killed Sailing Master John Warner at the commodore’s side. “[T]o the honour of my officers & men, as fast as their companions & mess mates fell at the guns they were instantly replaced from the infantry,” Barney reported.

  As Barney stood by the guns, a musket ball slammed into his thigh. The commodore stayed on his feet and told no one, not wanting to alarm the men. But his situation was desperate. The gun batteries were out of ammunition and could not be replenished. The ammunition wagon drivers—civilian hires—had fled. Dozens of his men were dead or wounded, and he was nearly surrounded. Barney ordered the guns spiked and his men to retreat.

  Loss of blood soon made it impossible for Barney to disguise the severity of his wound. He was faint and could scarcely hold up his head. Three officers tried to carry the commodore, but he was so weak they put him down. Barney ordered them away, but Sailing Master Jesse Huffington stayed, tending Barney’s wound.

  The British swarmed around the battery, shooting or bayoneting those who refused to surrender. Royal Navy Midshipman Samuel Davies, the son of an English parson, squared off with “a dam rascal” who had killed one of the British sailors. “[H]e made the first blow at me with his sword at my head I parried it off like a sailor with my cutlass and then it was my turn so I run him through the guts and killed him,” Davies wrote in a letter to his mother.

  Bullets flew after the escaping flotillamen. “I had my horse shot through the head and my hat shot through the crown,” reported Sailing Master John Webster. “I did not take time to pick up my hat.”

  A British corporal from the 85th Light Infantry found Barney lying in his blood by a gun battery, still tended by Huffington. The commodore was not going to surrender to an enlisted man, and he directed the soldier to find an officer to handle the matter with proper decorum. The soldier promptly returned with Captain Jonathan Wainwright, commander of Albion. Learning the infamous Joshua Barney was finally in British hands, Wainwright went to find the admiral.

  Cockburn, accompanied by Ross, quickly appeared. Wainwright introduced the admiral using the English pronunciation, “Coe-burn.”

  “Oh,” replied Barney. “ ‘Cock-burn’ is what you are called hereabouts.”

  The commodore’s impertinence aside, the two Bri
tish commanders had been much impressed by Barney’s fearless fight and summoned an army surgeon to treat his wound. “Those officers behaved to me with the most marked attention, respect and politeness,” Barney later said.

  “Well, Admiral, you have got hold of me at last,” Barney told Cockburn.

  Cockburn was magnanimous in victory. “Do not let us speak on that subject, Commodore,” Cockburn replied. “I regret to see you in this state. I hope you are not seriously hurt.”

  “Quite enough to prevent my giving you any trouble for some time,” said Barney.

  Ross turned to Cockburn. “I told you it was the flotilla men,” he said.

  “Yes!” the admiral declared. “You were right, though I could not believe you. They have given us the only fighting we have had.”

  As the surgeon dressed Barney’s wound, Ross and Cockburn conferred in low tones. Then the general turned to Barney. “Commodore Barney, you are paroled, where do you wish to be conveyed?” It was a generous gesture of respect, sparing Barney the indignity of being held prisoner. Ross offered to take Barney to Washington, but the commodore declined, having no interest in seeing the capital in British hands. Barney asked to be taken instead to Bladensburg. Ross ordered a sergeants guard to carry Barney on a litter, and Cockburn directed Wainwright to accompany the commodore and attend to his needs.

  Barney winced as the soldiers jostled him along the road, and Wainwright ordered them to put the commodore down, complaining that the soldiers did not know how to carry a man. A gang of sailors gingerly carried Barney the rest of the way, although one could not resist calling mockingly to a group of American prisoners: “Come over here, Yankees, to see your countryman Barney, he looks like a spread eagle, Yankees.”

  A captured flotillaman, his arm dangling from a severe wound, was overcome by emotion at the sight. Kneeling, he kissed Barney’s hand and burst into tears. The British sailors were moved by the devotion shown to Barney, dabbing their eyes and blowing their noses. “Well, damn my eyes!” said one. “If he wasn’t a kind commander, that chap wouldn’t ha done that.”

  PRESIDENT’S HOUSE, 3 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24

  Dolley Madison had ordered dinner to be ready at 3 p.m. as usual, despite the cannon fire audible from Bladensburg. It was not planned to be a victory banquet, as later claimed. Hospitality was always the order of the day in Dolley Madison’s home, and she was determined to convey business as usual. Every day since the invasion, with Washington bustling with officers and transients, the table had been set in preparation for unexpected guests.

  Dolley had been peering through her spyglass in every direction all day, hoping to see the president returning. “She was so confident of victory that she was calmly listening to the roar of cannon, and watching the rockets in the air,” according to her friend, Margaret Bayard Smith. Nonetheless, Dolley made sensible preparations for hasty departure if warranted. A wagon had been procured to carry off valuables, and the horses harnessed to the carriage.

  Hospitality was always the order of the day in Dolley Madison’s home, and she was determined to convey business as usual.

  Dolley Madison

  In the dining room, Paul Jennings busied himself with preparations for the meal. The fifteen-year-old slave, born at Montpelier, had accompanied the Madisons to Washington in 1809 at the start of the president’s first term to help with household chores. “I set the table myself, and brought up the ale, cider, and wine, and placed them in the coolers, as all the cabinet and several military gentlemen and strangers were expected,” he later wrote.

  In the kitchen below, Jean-Pierre Sioussat, chief of the household staff, supervised the cooking. French John, as he was known, had arrived in America as a seaman aboard a French frigate in 1804 and decided to stay. The polished Parisian quickly rose through the ranks of domestics and landed a job at the President’s House, where he had made himself an indispensable part of Dolley’s social offensive. Always resourceful, French John offered to lay a train of powder to blow up should the British enter the President’s House. “To the last proposition I positively object,” Dolley told her sister. Instead of sabotage, Sioussat prepared for dinner, ensuring that plates were placed in tin warmers on the hearth and wines decanted into cut-glass bottles on the sideboard.

  Shortly before 3 p.m., a lone rider galloped down Pennsylvania Avenue, covered with dust. James Smith, Madison’s manservant, rode up to the President’s House, waving his hat, and crying, “Clear out, clear out!” The British had crossed the river at Bladensburg and were rapidly marching on to the city, Smith announced. The American troops “had broken and run,” he reported. The president wanted “his lady to quit the city immediately.”

  “All then was confusion,” Jennings recalled.

  The wagon was hastily loaded with a hodgepodge of valuables: silver plates, china, cabinet papers, a few books, and a small bronze clock that had been in the President’s House since the Adams administration. At the last minute, Dolley ordered the long, crimson red velvet drapes from the drawing room placed on the wagon. The bulky fabric took up valuable space, but the first lady apparently wanted to save some part of the most elegant room in America. The wagon was dispatched to Maryland for safekeeping.

  A small crowd gathered at the President’s House as news spread. Her friend Charles Carroll of Bellevue urged Dolley to come with him to his Georgetown mansion, where others were gathering. Jacob Barker, a thirty-four-year-old New York financier who had secured funding for the war and become friendly with the Madisons, hurried to the President’s House with his friend and fellow Quaker Robert G. L. De Peyster to help. Dolley’s sister, Anna Payne Cutts, frantic over the “horrible” news, rushed from their nearby home with her husband, Richard, to join Dolley in flight.

  Dolley’s first instinct was to wait for Madison, but Carroll and the others persuaded her there was no time. Dolley ordered her carriage brought to the door. Passing through the dining room, she shoved into her purse all the silver that could fit.

  Barker and others were ushering Dolley to the waiting carriage when her eye fell on the portrait of George Washington hanging on the wall behind the dining room table. It must not be left behind, she decided. Fifteen years after Washington’s death, the Gilbert Stuart portrait had taken on great symbolic importance to the young nation, and its capture would be a huge coup for the British.

  Dolley ordered the servants to take the portrait down. It would not budge. The canvas was stretched on a light wooden frame within a heavier gilt frame, which was screwed firmly to the wall. French John and Tom Magraw, the president’s Irish gardener, struggled fruitlessly to pull it off. Minutes passed. Dolley’s sister begged her to get in the carriage and leave, and Carroll scolded her for risking capture to save a painting. Dolley could see the lead elements of the routed army passing by outside. The road would soon be too jammed with troops to escape.

  “[A] rabble, taking advantage of the confusion, ran all over the White House, and stole lots of silver and whatever they could lay their hands on,” Paul Jennings complained.

  Paul Jennings, the young Madison family slave who helped save the portrait of George Washington and accompanied the president on his flight from Washington. (Photograph taken in the 1850s.)

  Finally, Dolley ordered the frame broken. French John and Magraw smashed the gilt frame with a hatchet. The portrait, still in its stretcher, was gingerly lowered to the hands of Barker and others below, and placed on the floor. “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the wall, remaining with them until it was done,” Dolley later wrote. Sioussat and Jennings, however, recalled that she left before the portrait was down.

  “It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington … and carried it off,” Jennings wrote in his memoir. “This is totally false. She had no time for doing it.… All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squ
ares off, and were expected every moment.”

  In any event, at nearly eight feet tall and five feet wide, the portrait was too large to fit in the waiting carriage. Dolley agreed to depart without it, but under one condition: The painting must not be left at the President’s House. “Save the portrait of General Washington, if possible,” she told Barker. “[I]f you cannot save it, destroy it—under no circumstances allow it to fall into the hands of the British.” Barker promised Dolley that they would see to it.

  By 3:30, Dolley jumped into the carriage with several others, including her sister Anna Cutts, and Dolley’s servant girl, a slave named Sukey. “I lived a lifetime in those last moments waiting for Madison’s return, and in an agony of fear lest he might have been taken prisoner!” she told a friend. Madison’s coachman, Joe Bolen, took off for Carroll’s Bellevue mansion on Q Street in Georgetown, and Richard Cutts followed in his carriage. John Freeman, the butler, drove off with his wife and children in the coachee, carrying a feather bed lashed to the back. Most everything else—including much of the public property collected over the terms of four presidents, and the Madisons’ personal valuables—was left behind.

  Dolley fought a last impulse to stay. “I confess that I was so unfeminine as to be free from fear, and willing to remain in the castle,” she wrote several months later to a friend. “If I could have had a cannon through every window, but alas! Those who should have placed them there, fled before me, and my whole heart mourned for my country.”