Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  But Ross was not interested in negotiating a deal; instead, he wanted to deliver a message: The public buildings of Washington would burn, but private property would be left alone. “Such of the inhabitants as remain quiet in their houses, their property should be respected, and nothing but the public buildings, and stores touched,” recalled Colonel Brooke, Ross’s second in command. Neither Cockburn nor Ross mentioned any attempts at negotiation in their official reports to superiors or in later accounts. In any event, had a proposition to spare the capital in exchange for ransom been received, President Madison later said, it would have been summarily rejected.

  Any call to parley made was either ignored or not heard by the Americans. Ross ordered a bugle to be sounded, indicating, he said, his “intention to enter the city.”

  The general rode forward at the head of a small party, the Capitol looming ahead. At the corner of Maryland Avenue and Second Street stood one of the finer homes in the neighborhood, the three-story redbrick Sewall house, home to Albert Gallatin for twelve years until he left for Europe on diplomatic duty. As the British rode past, a volley of musket fire rang out from the windows. “Here comes the English buggers,” someone inside hollered. Two British corporals fell dead, several other soldiers were wounded, and Ross’s horse was killed—the second of the day for the general.

  Ross ordered the house stormed while Cockburn rode back to bring up reinforcements from the light companies camped on the outskirts. The house was surrounded “in a twinkle of the eye,” according to Michael Shiner, but not quickly enough. Most of the assailants escaped, but after a struggle, the British captured three men inside.

  Over the years, the shots would be variously attributed to a drunk hiding in the garden, a female sniper, or one of two local barbers: a “worthless” French hairdresser in one version and a club-footed Irishman in another. Yet the evidence is clear that the assailants were Barney’s men. The three prisoners taken from the house were flotillamen, one of them an officer, according to an affidavit made in 1816 by Lawson Clarke, an American citizen who witnessed the attack.

  Roaming about Capitol Hill after the battle, unwilling to quit the fight, a party of flotillamen had slipped into the empty house and laid an ambush. The angry British might have killed the men, but Ross, seeing they were flotillamen, directed they be taken prisoner, declaring them to be “the only brave Yankees he had met with that day.”

  The captured flotillamen were unrepentant, boasting they would do it again if they had a chance. At least one British officer did not feel as charitable as Ross; he told the prisoners they “would be hung for what they had done as soon as they got them to their ships,” according to Clarke’s affidavit.

  “Hang and be damned,” a flotillaman replied defiantly.

  The citizens of Washington were at least as lucky as the British that the shots missed Ross. “I was informed by some of the British officers that it was a most fortunate thing that Maj. Gen. Ross was not killed, for in that event it would have been impossible to restrain the soldiery, who idolized him, from committing the most horrid outrages, both on our city and its inhabitants,” wrote Dr. James Ewell, watching the incident from Capitol Hill.

  Ross ordered the Sewall house burned, but was apologetic about it, later telling the owner, Robert Sewall, that “he felt it to be his duty to set fire to and burn the house, for the purpose of making a impression; which he did with reluctance, as it was his intention to respect private property while in Washington.”

  The troops expertly lit fires inside the beautifully furnished house, and fired several Congreve rockets into the burning house for good measure; when they exploded, Shiner said, “they made the rafters fly east and west.”

  But the British did not admire their handiwork for long. To the south, the sky was glowing with a much larger fire.

  “It was a magnificent sight—but truly awful and disgraceful to America.”

  Watercolor by William Thornton circa 1815, believed to depict the burning of the Washington Navy Yard.

  WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, 8:20 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24

  Captain Tingey was beside himself as he waited at the Navy Yard for Captain Creighton and Mordecai Booth to return from their scouting mission. It was well past 8 p.m., and he had heard unconfirmed reports that the British had entered the city. Tingey resolved to wait no longer than half past the hour before burning the yard.

  At Tingey’s side was Sailing Master William V. Taylor, a cool-headed New England mariner who had fought alongside Oliver Perry at Lake Erie. While they waited, Taylor readied the stores and vessels for firing.

  Finally, Creighton and Booth galloped into the yard. Not only were the British in town, Creighton reported, but he had narrowly escaped with his life after riding through the fire of a company of enemy troops on Capitol Hill.

  Tingey considered the news “incontestable proof” that it was time to burn the yard. The commandant pulled out his watch. It was twenty minutes after eight. He and Taylor went to work. They used torches to ignite powder trails leading to a line of storehouses. “[I]n a few moments the whole was in a state of irretrievable conflagration,” Tingey reported. They moved toward the wharf. At the shipwright’s department, the hull of the brand-new frigate Essex was nearly complete, her bottom ready for coppering, her masts almost finished, her gun carriages nearly done, and her sails ready. Argus was at the wharf, with all her armament and equipment on board.

  Secretary Jones had been insistent that the ships, so close to completion, not fall into British hands. Tingey and Taylor touched torches to the rigged vessels, which were immediately enveloped in flame. Sickened by the sight, Tingey acted on a sudden impulse and ordered another new vessel at the wharf, the schooner Lynx, not to be fired.

  Almost everything else was in flames: stacks of timber, the boatbuilder shops, the medical store, the plumber and smith shops, the sawmill with its tools and machinery, the rigging loft, the gun carriage shop, and much more. The nearby ordnance store detonated, adding to the conflagration.

  The skeleton American crew—Tingey, Creighton, Taylor, two lieutenants, several marines, and a few African American workers—mustered in two boats. “[I]t was warm indeed before we could pull off from the flames,” Taylor wrote to his wife, Abby. “We then lay on our oars to witness this destructive scene.… It was a magnificent sight—but truly awful and disgraceful to America.”

  U.S. CAPITOL, 9 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24

  That sight lit the night as British troops with rockets took position in a field on the east side of the Capitol. Mary Hunter, who had stayed at her home at Capitol Hill while her husband took their children to safety, watched the proceedings with dismay. “I will leave you to conjecture what our feelings must have been when we saw the British flag flying on Capitol Hill,” she wrote to her sister. A grim-faced British officer rode up to her door and asked suspiciously about the absence of her husband—Rev. Andrew Hunter, a scholar who served as chaplain and mathematician for the U.S. Navy. “I … looked at him fully in the face and very deliberately told him that my husband was gone to take a family of young children from witnessing such a horrid scene,” Hunter wrote.

  The Capitol—or the “palace in the wilderness,” as some called it—stood almost alone atop Capitol Hill. The dome familiar to later generations was not yet built; instead, a two-story wooden gangway, which crossed a vacant yard intended one day to hold a rotunda, joined the two rectangular sandstone wings. The Capitol had been under construction for two decades, and from the moment President Washington laid the cornerstone in 1793, the project had proven to be contentious and expensive.

  When Washington became the capital in 1800, the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and Library of Congress were crammed into the still-unfinished north wing. In 1807, construction of the south wing had moved far enough along for the House to move into a magnificent chamber designed by Benjamin Latrobe. If Dolley Madison’s oval drawing room at the President’s House was the most elegant room in America, th
e hall of the House of Representatives, with its ornate carvings and statues, was the most beautiful. William Allen, architectural historian for the Capitol, later wrote, “It was being built for the ages, a permanent ornament for the republic’s future.”

  The evidence suggests that, even before setting foot in Washington, Ross and Cockburn had agreed to burn the government and military buildings in Washington, despite claims otherwise. Lieutenant Gleig, who remained with the main force outside of the capital, later blamed the shots fired from the Sewall house for prompting the British to immediately “burn and destroy everything in the most distant degree connected with government.” Lieutenant Scott, Cockburn’s aide, likewise wrote that “the conduct adopted by the Americans, in disregarding the various parleys sounded by the General before our entrance, and the fire of concealed enemies, were the causes of the destruction of their Capitol and public buildings.”

  But in the report he would soon send to London, Ross called the destruction of Washington’s public buildings “the object of the expedition.” He described beginning the work immediately upon entering Washington, “judging it of consequence to complete the destruction of the public buildings with the least possible delay so that the army might retire without loss of time.”

  Captain Harry Smith was blunt about the British intentions. “We entered Washington for the barbarous purpose of destroying the city,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Admiral Cockburn would have burnt the whole, but Ross would only consent to the burning of the public buildings.” The young officer had served with Wellington and had no objection to burning arsenals, dockyards, frigates, barracks, and the like, but this was something entirely different. “[W]ell do I recollect that, fresh from the Duke’s humane warfare in the South of France, we were horrified at the order,” he later wrote.

  Lieutenant Evans shared no such compunctions and led the assault on the Capitol. Wary of another ambush, the British troops formed a line, raised their muskets, and fired a volley into the building. Evans and his men entered through a large door on the northeast side, and Cockburn followed with a party of sailors.

  The British were startled by the grandeur of the building, particularly in comparison to its surroundings. Scott chortled about America’s “unseemly bias for monarchal splendor.” Impressive as the building was from the outside, the sights inside were even grander. “It was an unfinished but beautifully arranged building; the interior accommodations were upon a scale of grandeur and magnificence little suited to pure Republican simplicity,” Scott said.

  Cockburn poked into a room on the ground floor of the south wing, where Madison had a small office that he used for signing bills. The gilt lettering on the green leather label of a book caught Cockburn’s eye: “President of the U. States.” The bound volume with marbled sides was rather mundane, an account of the receipts and expenditures of the U.S. government for the year 1810, with entries ranging from the payment of bounties on pickled fish to pension payments made to Pierre L’Enfant for his work in designing the city of Washington. But a book belonging to “Jemmy” Madison was worth keeping as a souvenir. Later Cockburn would write on the inside cover, “Taken in President’s room in the Capitol at the destruction of that building by the British on the capture of Washington 24th August 1814.”

  The tour complete, it was time to destroy the Capitol. The British considered blowing it up with gunpowder captured at Bladensburg, but decided against it, as the debris might damage homes in the area. It would have to be burned.

  The British started in the south wing. Cockburn’s sailors, well versed in arson, took the lead under the command of Lieutenant George Pratt, an expert on pyrotechnics. Sailors rubbed gunpowder paste on the woodwork around doors and windows and set them afire. A mass of papers from the clerk’s office, among them the secret journals of Congress, proved a handy source of combustible material. They fired rockets through the roof of the House chamber, but to their surprise it did not ignite. Men sent to investigate discovered that the roof was covered with sheet iron. Undaunted, they tossed the representatives’ mahogany desks, tables, and chairs into a pile in the middle of the room, sprinkled it with rocket powder, and ignited it. The red silk drapes, trimmed in gold, were torched. “[T]here was no want of materials for the conflagration,” Benjamin Latrobe later wrote in a sad letter to Jefferson detailing the destruction. Dry loose lumber used for stages and seats in the galleries fueled the fire. The great chamber was soon ablaze with heat so intense that the glass of two hundred skylights in the ceiling melted. Behind the Speaker’s desk, a marble statue of Liberty was consumed by fire. The sandstone columns were “unable to resist the force of flame, and I believe no known material would have been able to resist so sudden and intense a heat,” Latrobe wrote. “The exterior of the columns and entablature scaled off, and not a vestige of sculpture or fluting remained.”

  A book belonging to “Jemmy” Madison was worth keeping as a souvenir. Later Cockburn would write on the inside cover, “Taken in President’s room in the Capitol at the destruction of that building by the British on the capture of Washington 24th August 1814.”

  The President’s account book, later returned to the Library of Congress.

  Driven from the south wing by the heat, the British rushed across the wooden gangway to the north wing of the Capitol, housing the Senate, Supreme Court, and Library of Congress. The last was home to some three thousand books, meant to provide Congress with reference to history, law, and the classics, many of them hard-to-find volumes from Europe. Now, together with the library’s manuscripts, maps, and furniture, the books fueled a furious inferno throughout the north wing. The fire was so hot that the marble columns in the neighboring Senate chamber turned to lime and collapsed, and the exterior walls nearly collapsed.

  The vaultlike basement chamber below, where John Marshall presided over the Supreme Court, was damaged but survived the fire with its Doric columns still standing. A vestibule outside the chamber featuring unique corncob columns was spared, as were hallways and staircases providing an escape route for the British.

  “I shall never forget the destructive majesty of the flames as the torches were applied to beds, curtains, etc.,” wrote Harry Smith. “Our sailors were artists at the work.”

  Capture of the City of Washington, engraving published in London in 1815.

  The fire burst through the windows of the Capitol. “The flames floated away in masses, which alighted upon the houses to leeward, setting them ablaze likewise,” said Scott. Some of the congressional records had been moved for safekeeping to a nearby house on North Capitol Street that had once been owned by George Washington, but there was no refuge there from the flames. The townhouse caught fire, apparently from sparks, and the records were destroyed.

  As the inferno blazed, troops stood outside watching the Capitol “wrapped in its winding sheet of fire.” Some felt chagrin. It was a “pity to burn anything so beautiful,” an officer said.

  Dr. James Ewell watched the flames mount far into the sky with a thunderous rumble. The forty-one-year-old physician had taken his wife and two daughters from their own home on Capitol Hill to that of an elderly and ill neighbor who had pleaded not to be left alone. Ewell left his own brick home, directly across from the Capitol at the northeast corner of First and A streets, in the care of servants.

  As Ewell and his companions contemplated the dismal scene, a loud rapping at the door startled them. A half-dozen British soldiers politely asked for something to eat. Some ham was quickly rustled up and set before the soldiers, along with a loaf of bread, butter, and wine. As they ate, Ewell saw a glow and feared his own home was blazing. Then his servant arrived to report the doctor’s house was not on fire; it had, however, been plundered. Ewell hurried to investigate, accompanied by Rev. A. T. McCormick, rector of nearby Christ Church. McCormick had already met Ross and Cockburn, and he assured Ewell they were “perfect gentlemen.”

  Near the doctor’s house, McCormick presented Ewell to a British o
fficer, whom he called “General Ross.” The officer coolly corrected them in a quick and piercing tone: “My name is Cockburn, sir.” After the proper introductions were made, Ewell complained that his furniture, clothes, and silverware had been plundered. Cockburn was singularly unimpressed. “With whom did you confide your property, sir?” he asked the doctor.

  “With my servants,” Ewell replied.

  “Well, sir, let me tell you it was very ill confidence to repose your property in the care of servants,” Cockburn lectured. The doctor had no one to blame but himself.

  Fortunately for Ewell, Ross intervened and apologetically asked the doctor to point out his house so a guard could be posted. Ewell showed Ross his home, and to the general’s embarrassment, it turned out that Ross’s staff had just chosen it as their headquarters. Ross offered to move his baggage out, but stayed at Ewell’s insistence; there was no better guarantee that the doctor’s home would be safe.

  But the British were not done for the evening.

  Across town, Louis Sérurier, the French minister, saw the enormous flames at the Capitol and Navy Yard lighting the night. “I have never beheld a spectacle more terrible and at the same time more magnificent,” he wrote to Talleyrand. Sérurier’s temporary residence at the Octagon, just west of the President’s House, was the most elegant private home in Washington and had been built by Colonel John Tayloe, a wealthy Virginia plantation owner. Tayloe was with the Virginia militia and his wife, Ann, had fled the city, but she had encouraged Sérurier to move into the Octagon, hoping that the home would be spared if the French minister occupied it.