Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  A large white sheet, a reasonable facsimile of a Bourbon flag, was flying on a pole from the house, but looking at the flames across the city, Sérurier was unsure that it would be enough protection from the British. “A profound darkness reigned in the part of the city which I live in, and one was delivered up to conjectures and to false reports … as to what was occurring in the quarter lighted by this frightful blaze,” he wrote. At 11 p.m., Sérurier saw a column, preceded by torches, moving from the Capitol toward the President’s House, a mile and a quarter down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The British marched two abreast in two columns, moving quickly but silently down the broad avenue. Ross and Cockburn were taking 150 soldiers and sailors to “Jemmy’s Palace,” as Cockburn insisted on calling it, leaving about 700 men from the 3rd Brigade camped just east of the Capitol. “[A]s soon as the town was ascertained to be completely, and decidedly in our possession, the troops were kept as much as possible, out of the town, and sufficient guards only were sent with the officers to destroy” the public buildings, according to Cockburn’s memoir.

  Even at this hour, the avenue was choked with dust, and the troops took care not to fall in the ditches that bordered the road. Still, Lieutenant Scott found himself admiring the grand pretension of the “fine and spacious causeway” laid out by Pierre L’Enfant, the designer of Washington.

  From the window of his home on Pennsylvania Avenue, William P. Gardner watched the troops marching by. Ross and Cockburn riding on horseback behind the troops, approached the house. With elaborate courtesy, the officers doffed their chapeau de bras and politely greeted him. After some pleasantries, Gardner addressed Cockburn. “I hope, sir, that individuals and private property will be respected,” he said. The admiral, joined by Ross, offered a pledge of “sacred honor” that this would be the case.

  Cockburn probed for some information. “Where is your president, Mr. Madison?” he asked. Gardner replied that he did not know, “but supposed that by this time he was at a considerable distance.” He was similarly noncommittal when Cockburn asked how much American force remained in the city. “Conjectures are various,” Gardner replied. “It is impossible for me to say.”

  By now Cockburn and Ross recognized they would not learn much from Gardner. After some further chat, “they then observed that they were on their way to pay a visit to the President’s House, which they were told was but a little distance ahead,” Gardner recalled. The officers bowed politely, and with a final suggestion that residents stay in their homes, continued along Pennsylvania Avenue.

  The troops paused at the intersection with Fifteenth Street, where the avenue elbowed around the Treasury building before turning back to the President’s House. While parched troops drank from the town pump, Ross and several officers stepped into a brick tavern at the corner of F Street to order dinner for the staff. By virtue of its convenient location near the President’s House, Mrs. Suter’s boardinghouse was a Washington institution, a popular gathering point for locals and government officials. Regular boarders included Postmaster General Return J. Meigs, but he, like the other renters, had vacated town.

  Barbara Suter, the elderly widow who ran the establishment, had been out of sorts since the invasion—“hardly sleeping at night, at all the daytime spent in fright,” she said. Both her sons were in arms, one as a flotillaman, the other with the militia, and she was alone except for a servant woman.

  Ross introduced himself, announcing that they had “come, madam, to sup with you.” Mrs. Suter pleaded that she had no food and suggested they try McLeod’s Tavern up the street. But Ross insisted he preferred the view at Mrs. Suter’s. From there the general and his officers could keep an eye on the troops at the President’s House while they conferred on plans. Assured that the British would return soon for their meal, Mrs. Suter and her servant went out to the yard to kill some chickens.

  PRESIDENT’S HOUSE, 11 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24

  Ross need not have placed the order for food. Moving on to the President’s House, the British walked unmolested through the front door and found the mansion deserted, but ready to host visitors. The table in the state dining room was set for dinner for forty. Plate holders by the fireplace were filled with dishes; knives, forks, and spoons were laid out; and fine wine poured into cut-glass decanters was chilling on ice on the sideboard. Unfamiliar with Dolley Madison’s hospitality, the British assumed the Americans had prepared a victory banquet.

  The sight tickled Ross’s Irish fancy. “So unexpected was our entry and capture of Washington, and so confident was Madison (President of the States) of the defeat of our troops, that he had prepared for supper for the expected conquerors; and when our advanced party entered the president’s house they found a table laid with 40 covers,” he delightedly wrote his brother-in-law, Ned Glascock. “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, Madison having taken to his heels and ensured his safety on the opposite bank of the river.…”

  Exuberant toasts were offered: “Peace with America—war with Madison,” proposed Ross. “Nor was Mr. Madison’s health forgotten, in his own best claret, for being so good a fellow as to leave us such a capital supper,” recalled Major Norman Pringle, commander of the 21st Regiment Grenadier Company.

  Lieutenant Scott, exhausted and feverish with heat and thirst, picked up a crystal goblet of Madeira and gulped it down. He pronounced it “super-excellent.” The men, including a company of hungry Fusiliers, wolfed down the food.

  Cockburn also enjoyed himself thoroughly. The admiral had recruited a local book dealer, Roger Chew Weightman, as a guide. The twenty-seven-year-old businessman had served as a cavalry lieutenant at Bladensburg and “ran as fast as the rest of them,” he later said. Weightman was apparently checking on property he owned near the President’s House when Cockburn found him. Weightman dutifully complied when Cockburn insisted he take a seat and join in a toast to “Jemmy.”

  The admiral looked around the magnificently furnished mansion. Beautiful furniture—sofas, writing tables, and cushioned chairs—filled many of the rooms. Thomas Jefferson had collected some of the items in France, and others had belonged to George Washington and John Adams. Most of the Madisons’ possessions, including china, wardrobes, clothing, books, wine, letters and papers, and a pianoforte, had been left behind.

  “Take something to remember this day,” Cockburn magnanimously told Weightman. The book dealer picked something valuable, hoping to save it.

  “No, no,” cried Cockburn, “that I must give to the flames.” The admiral had issued strict instructions that nothing valuable be taken, as it might be construed as looting. That had not been the case at Havre de Grace or the other Chesapeake towns, but with Ross on the scene, everyone had to be on their best behavior. The admiral grabbed some ornaments off the mantelpiece. “But here, these will answer as a memento,” he said, handing them to Weightman.

  “I must take something too,” Cockburn muttered. Looking round, he settled on a chapeau de bras belonging to Madison. Then he snatched a cushion off Dolley’s chair, remarking that it would serve as a lovely reminder of Mrs. Madison’s derriere.

  Soldiers and sailors roamed through the mansion grabbing souvenirs. Lieutenant Beau Urquhart of the 85th made off with Madison’s dress sword. Another soldier grabbed a miniature portrait of the first lady from her parlor. Madison’s small medicine chest, made of walnut, brass, and ivory, was taken. (It was presented to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 by the Canadian grandson of Thomas Kains, who had been purser aboard one of the ships on the expedition. “How time mellows our perspective of events,” President Roosevelt wrote in a thank-you note.) Most contented themselves with pictures and books. Someone grabbed a bundle of notes scribbled in pencil sent by the president to Dolley, which she had left in a table drawer.

  Scott made his way upstairs and found hims
elf in the president’s dressing room. Drawers had been left open and the portmanteaus were half-filled; either the president had packed in a hurry, or someone had already rifled through the place. Coated with dust and grime, Scott eyed Madison’s clothing. “The snowy clean linen tempted me to take the liberty of making a very fair exchange,” he recalled. The lieutenant stripped off his filthy inner garments and thrust his arms into one of the president’s clean shirts.

  After an hour of feasting and roaming, it was time to get to the real business of the night. A detail was sent to obtain fire from a small beerhouse across from the Treasury. Meanwhile, soldiers and sailors gathered furniture, including three dozen hand-carved, gilded chairs, and piled it in the drawing room. Sailors broke open windows and soaked the bedding with lamp oil. As Ross supervised the men in the salon, a messenger delivered a note from Sérurier requesting a guard be posted at the Octagon. Ross sent word back that the French minister’s residence “would be as much respected as if His Majesty found himself there in person.”

  Under the expert tutelage of Lieutenant Pratt, sailors moved through the mansion, igniting the premises. “I shall never forget the destructive majesty of the flames as the torches were applied to beds, curtains, etc.,” wrote Smith. “Our sailors were artists at the work.” The glorious house was soon engulfed in flames and smoke.

  Troops meanwhile broke into the redbrick Treasury building, just to the east of the President’s House, but were disappointed to find the money had already been spirited out of town. The men smashed windows and ignited the building. Then they discovered to their dismay that they had overlooked a ground-floor vault. The soldiers forced in a window and jumped into the burning building, but the “supposed chests of treasure” were found to hold worthless papers.

  Ross and Cockburn gathered with their men on the common just north of the President’s House and watched as the blaze consumed the house. Not all felt like celebrating. “Although they were the pride of the Americans, I must confess I felt sorrow when witnessing such magnificent buildings demolished,” Lieutenant Furlong of the 21st Fusiliers wrote in his diary.

  The main body of British troops, having rested several hours in Bladensburg, moved toward Washington after dark, the road illuminated by the dark red light thrown by the flames. “I think this was one of finest, and at the same time, the most awful sights I ever witnessed,” Colonel Brooke wrote in his diary. “[T]he columns of fire issuing from the houses, and dock yard, the explosions of magazines at intervals, the sky illuminated from the blazes, the troops all under arms outside the town, struck the mind with a something that can be better conceived than described.”

  Francis Scott Key kept watch at his home in Georgetown. Violent explosions shook the city and clouds of thick smoke filled the sky. Key was grateful that his children remained at Terra Rubra and Polly was safely outside the city at the Middlebrook tavern. When the British were finished with the federal city, Key felt “sure they would” continue on to Georgetown. The Foxall Foundry, the leading manufacturer of ordnance for the U.S. government, including the carronades for the USS Constitution, was too important a target for the British to ignore.

  Nearby, Key’s friends William and Anna Maria Thornton had taken refuge at Tudor Place, Martha Peter’s neoclassical mansion on the crest of the Georgetown heights. The Thorntons and Peter sat at the dining room window “and there witnessed the conflagration of our poor undefended & devoted city,” Anna Thornton wrote in her diary. “[T]he city was light and the heavens redden’d with the blaze!” she told friends. It seemed to her a miracle the whole city was not consumed.

  For them, the view was intensely personal. The burning city bore the name of Martha Peter’s stepgrandfather; it was a capital he had conceived and created for the new nation. But it was not sadness Peter felt so much as disgust at Madison and his government, so unworthy of George Washington.

  Dr. William Thornton, born in the Virgin Islands, had been in Tortola in 1792 when he heard of a competition for the best design of a capitol building. He had no formal architectural study and knew little about structural engineering; moreover, the deadline for entries had already passed, but Thornton was not deterred. Jefferson and Washington were captivated by the grandeur of his design and the practicality of his layout, and Thornton’s plan was chosen. Now, watching his creation burn, the normally loquacious Thornton would only say that he “beheld, in deep regret, that night, the tremendous conflagrations of our public buildings.”

  Mary Hunter watched from her home on Capitol Hill. The fire at the Navy Yard “produced an almost meridian brightness,” Hunter wrote her sister. “You never saw a drawing room so brilliantly lighted as the whole city was that night. Few thought of going to bed—they spent the night in gazing on the fires, and lamenting the disgrace of the city.”

  NORTHERN VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE, LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 24

  President Madison had a clear view of the disgrace as he rode through the Virginia countryside. To the east, columns of fire and smoke climbed through the night. The landmarks of Washington were visible, “some burning slowly, others with bursts of flame and sparks mounting high up in the dark horizon,” wrote Attorney General Rush, who, along with General Mason, accompanied Madison in his flight. “This never can be forgotten by me.”

  Paul Jennings, who had crossed the river with Madison, was left with other servants to follow on foot, but they later caught up with the president and his companions. At one point the group heard a tremendous explosion and saw buildings afire.

  Madison and his companions rode west on the Georgetown Road until reaching the Alexandria & Leesburg Road, which they followed to the town of Falls Church, about seven miles from Washington. There they stopped at Wren’s Tavern, an unofficial Virginia militia headquarters, where the president apparently sought the latest information on enemy movements. The party rode north about a mile to a home on Minor’s Hill, one of the highest points in the area, but the president found it packed with refugees. The group continued another two miles north to the rendezvous location, Salona, the stately Federal-style brick home of Rev. William Maffitt, in present-day McLean. There Madison anxiously awaited his wife.

  Dolley Madison and her entourage crossed into Virginia at the Little Falls Bridge, where the Potomac narrowed below a series of rapids. They traveled west on the Falls Road, climbing a long hill that ran along Pimmit Run before reaching Rokeby, the farmhouse of Dolley’s friend, Matilda Lee Love. The party halted for the night, too tired to continue another mile to Salona.

  Dolley did not receive the warmest welcome at Rokeby. When Love instructed her cook to quickly make a cup of coffee for the first lady, the elderly servant grumbled she would not rush, considering the president had “done sold the country to the British.” Even Love blamed the “miserable, imbecile government” for the loss of Washington, though tactfully she did not share her opinion with the first lady.

  Unable to sleep, Dolley watched the flames from the window at Rokeby.

  TENLEYTOWN, MIDNIGHT, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24

  The sight of the fires imbued General Winder with a new panic. Retreating past Georgetown with what remained of his broken force, he reached Tenleytown, about five miles northwest of the President’s House. Perched on the heights, Winder and his men watched the fires across the city.

  Hundreds more men abandoned the army at Tenleytown, ignoring Winder’s commands to halt. The general blamed the wretched state of his troops on the men themselves; he lectured in his report on “the great defects of all undisciplined and unorganized troops” and made no mention of his own catastrophic leadership.

  “[W]hen he might have prepared defenses, he acted as scout; when he might have fought, he still scouted; when he retreated, he retreated in the wrong direction; when he fought, he thought only of retreat; and whether scouting, retreating, or fighting, he never betrayed an idea,” Henry Adams wrote.

  As the flames below grew, Winder ordered a further retreat—his fourth of the day a
nd “another great error,” in the view of Major Peter, the Georgetown Artillery commander. Even in its broken condition, the American force on the heights posed a potential threat to the small British force in the city and would constrain its operations. Lacking cavalry, the British could not have approached the elevated position without plenty of time for the Americans to retreat. Yet the general was not willing to risk even that.

  After collecting all the men he could, Winder retreated another five miles northwest up the River Road, in the direction of Montgomery Court House in Maryland. Ensign George Hoffman, whose Maryland militia company had bolted at Bladensburg, could plainly see the Capitol and the President’s House burning as they retreated. The sight “made me regret that I survived the disgrace,” he wrote his father.

  The great fire could be seen in all directions, and for many miles.

  At Benedict, on the Patuxent River, where the main British fleet was anchored, sailors noticed the sky to the northwest “illuminated with a strong glare of fire during the whole night.” To their west, anchored on the Potomac River off Maryland Point, thirty-five miles south of Washington, the men of Captain Gordon’s squadron looked with dismay at the red sky. Still fighting contrary tides and winds, they were several days’ sail from Alexandria, while Ross had obviously beaten them to the capital. “The reflection of the fire on the heavens was plainly seen from the ships, much to our mortification and disappointment,” wrote Captain Napier, second in command. Gordon considered turning back but decided to continue, knowing that his squadron could provide a diversion if Ross’s small force was trapped.

  Light from the fires was visible in Leesburg, Virginia, thirty-five miles northwest of the capital, and Fredericksburg, Virginia, forty-five miles to the south. Daniel Sheldon, a Treasury employee fleeing to Frederick, Maryland, found “my journey during almost the entire of the night was illumined by the flames of the public buildings, which at the distance of 28 miles, where I stopped at one o’clock in the morning, were most dismally and most distinctly visible,” he wrote his father.