Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Already fighting a war in Europe, Britain had not sought the conflict with America. But it had no interest in allowing the United States unfettered sovereignty, nor did it wish to cede any measure of control in North America. The Americans and the Loyalists who had moved across the border into Canadian territory after the American Revolution had competing visions for the future of the North American continent, neither involving the other.

  The American war against one of the world’s great powers had gone badly from the start for the United States and its small, unprepared military forces. Multiple invasions of the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada had ended in humiliating failure in 1812 and 1813.

  Now, driven by events across the ocean, 1814 was shaping up to be the darkest year in the young nation’s history. Napoleon’s abdication of power in April appeared to have ended two decades of hostilities in Europe. The British had been left in a commanding position to end the festering war in North America. Troops from the Duke of Wellington’s victorious army were being sent across the ocean to punish America for its treachery, and to force a humiliating peace on the country. The United States, its military forces spread thin, its economy in ruins, and its people bitterly divided by the war, was ripe for defeat. The American experiment was in danger of dying in its infancy.

  Walking the deck of Albion, Cockburn chatted amiably with Skinner. Cockburn handed the American agent a dispatch for Secretary of State James Monroe and a message for the Russian minister in Washington. As a courtesy, he also passed along a bundle of the latest English newspapers, though the most recent was already more than two months old. Skinner brought Cockburn news of “severe” fighting in July on the Niagara frontier between the United States and Canada, where American and British armies at Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane had clashed in the bloodiest battles the war had yet seen.

  They spoke about peace negotiations in the Flemish city of Ghent, where ministers from the United States and Britain had just convened. Few held much hope for peace. Cockburn knew all the British commissioners and complained to Skinner that they were a decidedly mediocre lot. The admiral posed a question: What did the American ministers think of the prospects for peace? Skinner replied that there had been no recent word from them.

  Cockburn could not resist smiling as he replied. The admiral was well aware that his words would soon make their way back to Washington, and almost certainly to the president himself.

  “I believe, Mr. Skinner, that Mr. Madison will have to put on his armor and fight it out,” Cockburn said. “I see nothing else left.”

  The townspeople now understood “what they were liable to bring upon themselves by … acting towards us with so much useless rancor,” Cockburn wrote.

  Admiral Cockburn Burning and Plundering Havre de Grace on the 1st of June 1813, etching ca. 1813 by William Charles.

  CHAPTER 1

  How Do You Like the War Now?

  TERRA RUBRA, MARYLAND, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1814

  The complacency in Washington bothered Francis Scott Key as much as anything. On August 10, the thirty-four-year-old attorney took up his pen to write his closest friend, John Randolph of Roanoke. The brilliant but eccentric congressman had retreated in self-imposed exile to his cabin in south-central Virginia after his efforts to avert war with England had failed and voters had tossed him out of office for his troubles. Key often wrote his brooding friend, keeping him abreast of developments in Washington.

  Though the administration of President James Madison had mobilized over the summer to protect Washington against the British threat, Key was painfully aware that little, in fact, had been done. “The government seem to be under little or no expectation of an attack upon the city,” Key wrote to Randolph. “With the present force of the enemy there is no danger; but if they are considerably reinforced, and we not better prepared, the approaching Congress may have more to do than to talk.”

  Key was at his parents’ farm at Terra Rubra, in the rolling hills of central Maryland, where he always retreated with his wife and children to escape the suffocating heat of Washington in summer. After a half-dozen years practicing law from his Georgetown office, Key had established himself as one of the foremost attorneys in the capital. But business always grew slow in summer, more so than ever this year, with the threat of Cockburn and the British on the horizon.

  Slender and of medium height, with a wiry frame and a slight stoop, Key had a mop of dark brown curly hair atop his handsome face, with an aquiline nose and deep-set blue eyes. His face often bore a pensive expression “almost bordering on sadness,” according to a contemporary, “but which, in moments of special excitement … gave place to a bright ethereality of aspect and a noble audacity of tone and gesture which pleased while it dazzled the beholder.”

  Key’s court oratory was attracting attention, as much for his style and charisma as for any legal brilliance. His language was beautiful, his voice sonorous, and his enunciation impeccable. But what people noticed most was the passion—“like lightning charging his sentences with electrical power,” a courtroom observer would say.

  Randolph’s last letter to Key had expressed hope that peace might be in the offing, but the latter did not share his optimism. “I do not think (as you seem to do) that our labours are nearly over—I do not believe we shall have peace,” Key wrote. “England will not treat with us but on high & haughty terms.”

  Before posting his letter, Key added a postscript with disturbing news about the British: “I have just read intelligence of the arrival of this formidable reinforcement & am preparing to set out for Geo Town in the morning—I fear we are little prepared for it.”

  Key was a child of the American Revolution, born at Terra Rubra in 1779. His father, John Ross Key, had returned home after leading a company of men from the mountains of Maryland to fight in New England with the Continental Army, and Frank was born before the elder Key departed to rejoin George Washington for the Yorktown campaign. Back at Terra Rubra with his wife, Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, and son, after the British surrender, John Key settled into a comfortable life as a country squire and attorney.

  Terra Rubra, named for the red soil of the surrounding land, had been in the family for generations. Key’s great-grandfather, Philip Key—a descendant of John Key, poet laureate to King Edward IV in the fifteenth century—arrived from England in 1726 and a quarter century later took a patent on 2,800 acres in the foothills of Maryland’s Blue Ridge, between the Monocacy River and its tributary, Big Pipe Creek. Though the land was only ten miles from the Mason-Dixon Line—close enough to spot Big Round Top at Gettysburg on a clear day—the Keys lived the life of southern planters. The family owned scores of slaves, and they grew corn, wheat, flax, buckwheat, and tobacco. The big, white-plastered mansion, fronted with two-story columns, was the finest in the area, with two long brick wings running back on each side and a courtyard paved with brick imported from England.

  Frank—as family and close friends knew him his whole life—inherited a wistful and dreamy character from his mother. He and his younger sister, Anne, with whom he was very close, spent countless hours wandering the land, alongside winding, rippling creeks and through meadows framed by blue-tinged mountains. Sometimes they sat by the springhouse, scribbling poetry.

  Most unforgettable was the July morning in 1791 when President George Washington, en route to Pennsylvania, stopped at Terra Rubra, visiting the company commander who had brought him troops from Maryland. Many of John Ross Key’s former riflemen flocked from miles around to hear Washington speak from the portico of the Key home and give heartfelt thanks for the aid he had received “in the darkest hours of the Revolution.”

  At age ten, Frank was sent to grammar school in Annapolis, and he spent much of the next decade studying in the elegant state capital. There he fell under the spell of Philip Barton Key, his dazzling uncle. Philip Key had split with his brother during the revolution, joining the British and serving as an officer in a Maryland Loyalist regiment. At
war’s end, Philip Key’s property in Maryland was confiscated, and he moved to England to study law. But in 1785 Philip returned to Maryland and was welcomed back by his brother, who shared with him their father’s inheritance. When Frank Key was accepted at St. John’s College in 1794, his uncle was a leader in the Maryland bar, and upon graduation, it was agreed that young Key would stay in Annapolis to study law.

  Key lived with his uncle, who supervised his study and made sure his nephew met everyone of importance in town. Among those Frank befriended was another young law student, named Roger Brooke Taney. Taney was meticulous and serious, while Key was lighthearted and impulsive, but they soon developed a bond that proved to be lifelong.

  His face often bore a pensive expression “almost bordering on sadness,” according to a contemporary, “but which, in moments of special excitement … gave place to a bright ethereality of aspect.”

  Francis Scott Key

  In his second year of study, Key met the beautiful and charming Mary Tayloe Lloyd, or Polly, as she was known, the youngest daughter of an old and wealthy Annapolis society family. When Polly agreed, after three years of courting, to marry the young man from the hinterlands, her friends thought he was marrying up. “I must tell you the great event of Annapolis society,” Rosalie Stier Calvert wrote to her sister in December 1801. “Polly Lloyd is to be married next month to Frank Key who has nothing and who has only practiced for two years as an [attorney].”

  Key established a law practice in Frederick, a thriving city of German immigrants twenty miles southwest of Terra Rubra. With Key’s encouragement, Taney set up practice there as well, and he courted Key’s sister. When the tall and gaunt Taney married cheerful and bright Anne at Terra Rubra in 1806, it was likened to “the union of a hawk with a skylark.”

  After two years in Frederick, the twenty-six-year-old Key moved to Georgetown to join Uncle Philip, who had outgrown Annapolis and established a lucrative practice in the nation’s capital. Once again Philip shepherded his nephew about town, introducing him to the elite and setting him up with important cases.

  Francis Scott Key soon made a name for himself in the capital’s nascent legal community. His involvement in the spectacular Aaron Burr treason case in 1807, representing two adventurers who had aided the former vice president in his bizarre plot to create an independent republic and invade Mexico, helped establish him. He made his Supreme Court debut during the case, arguing before Chief Justice John Marshall in the high court’s chamber on the ground floor of the Capitol.

  The Keys made their home in Georgetown, the old tobacco port just up the river from Washington that was included in the District of Columbia’s boundaries. They lived in a modest but attractive brick Georgian home on Bridge Street—today M Street—on a slope overlooking the Potomac. Two large parlors downstairs served for entertaining, while the basement, which opened up to the river, included a large kitchen, dining room, and conservatory. Outside was a beautiful terraced garden with lofty walnut trees and Lombardy poplars, and a lawn and orchard sloping to the Potomac’s edge.

  When his uncle was elected to Congress and gave up law, Key took over the practice and moved the office into a one-story wing of his Georgetown house. With six children by 1814—the youngest, Edward, was born in September 1813—the home was as much a nursery as a law office. Key supervised the children’s instruction, teaching them letters and tutoring them in the classics. He was an indulgent father, lavishing the children with toys, books, and music lessons, but strictly insisting they attend services every Sunday at nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church. Theirs was a merry household, with Key given to leaving notes in rhyme around the home for his wife.

  Theirs was a merry household.

  The Key house in Georgetown, shown in an oil painting by Key’s grandson, John Ross Key.

  The home served as a salon for Washington’s social society, attracting a mix of judges, preachers, relatives, and congressmen. Uncle Philip was a regular visitor, as was William Thornton, Key’s eclectic friend who had designed the Capitol Building. The most frequent guest was Randolph, for whom the home was a refuge from the bitter and rancorous Capitol invective. The Virginian had become something of an eccentric uncle to the ever-growing brood of Key children.

  Randolph’s small head, raised shoulders, tiny waist, and long, thin legs gave him the look of a crane, an appearance made all the more pronounced by his clothing, usually a swallowtail coat adorned with a white cravat in which he would bury his neck. Randolph was a bitter misanthrope, known in Congress as rude, merciless, and venomous. But Key delighted in Randolph’s wicked wit and brilliant wordplay. The Virginian’s views stimulated his own intellect and served as fodder for endless debates.

  Key, a devout Episcopalian, preferred nights of quiet conversation and tended to exclude from his circle the more boisterous and hard-drinking young congressmen populating Washington. He would scurry past the taverns catering to such hellions, but once home with friends, he was not above opening a bottle of Madeira to relieve the piety, sipping on a glass or two himself.

  Guests would hold forth on the issues and literature of the day. Slavery and its ills were a common topic, though Key and his circle considered abolition far too radical a solution. The poems of Byron and Scott were dissected. Philip Key, a Federalist, would denounce the Madison administration’s foreign policy. But most of all in recent years, conversation had been dominated by the topic that had split both the city and the nation: the war with England.

  Reflecting angry divisions in America, a new Congress convened in Washington in November 1811, almost half of the members having replaced incumbents. Many of the newcomers were young Republican firebrands from the South and the western frontier, areas where support for a war with Great Britain was strongest. The war hawks, as Randolph mockingly dubbed them, were a formidable lot, among them John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and the man who quickly emerged as their leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky.

  The war hawks argued that the United States must put an end to the British harassment, which had only increased in recent years. Desperate for manpower to sail its huge fleet, and faced with continuous desertions, the Royal Navy had seized thousands of American sailors from U.S. ships and impressed them into use aboard its own. Some seven thousand American citizens had been taken from 1803 to 1812. Through a series of decrees known as Orders in Council, Britain had sharply limited U.S. trade with the European continent, further enraging Americans. Along the frontier with Canada, American settlers accused the British of arming Indians and inciting attacks by them.

  A war would be a golden opportunity to eject Britain from North America entirely, opening the West—and while they were at it, Canadian territory—to American settlement. Clay and others promised an easy victory over an enemy consumed with the fight on the European continent. Kentucky’s militia alone would be enough to capture Canada, Clay boasted.

  Randolph led the opposition, attracting crowds to the gallery with his diatribes, eviscerating opponents with his deadly debating skills, and slowing the rush to war with disruptive tactics. His high-pitched voice would rise to a shriek, and his gaunt, bony fingers would point at the targets of his recriminations. War was foolhardy, given the tiny size of the U.S. military, and the wrath it would provoke in Great Britain. It would be folly to leave the eastern seacoast unprotected while the army attacked Canada. How was it possible, he asked, for the nation to “go to war without money, without men, without a navy, … when we have not the courage to lay war taxes?”

  But the war hawks controlled the halls of Congress. Elected speaker, Clay consolidated his power in extraordinary fashion, packing key committees with war supporters. Clay even ordered the House doorkeeper to evict Randolph’s dog from the floor of the House, something no previous speaker had dared do.

  With a measure of regret, President James Madison had come to view a declaration of war as nearly inevitable, and necessary. Madison’s political views had been colored by a near lifetime of en
mity with Great Britain, dating back to 1774, when the British blockade of Boston Harbor prompted the young Virginian to join the patriots’ cause. Madison’s antipathy toward England only grew in the years after the birth of the American nation. During Washington’s presidency, he and Thomas Jefferson helped foster the birth of political parties by creating the Democratic-Republicans in part to counter the pro-British sympathies of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, which grew more pronounced after France declared war on England in 1793.

  Hostility toward Great Britain dominated much of Madison’s eight years as secretary of state during the Jefferson administration. War was narrowly averted after the Chesapeake-Leopard affair in 1807, when a British ship searching for deserters attacked an American warship sailing from Norfolk, Virginia. Jefferson and Madison imposed an embargo to punish Great Britain for the inflammatory attack, but the restrictions did far more damage to the American economy than England’s.

  War with England loomed from the beginning of Madison’s first term as president, in 1809. The administration struggled vainly for three years against the British trade restrictions and impressment of American sailors, and by 1812 Madison no longer seemed to think peace possible. “[T]housands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them,” Madison charged in a war message to Congress on June 1, 1812. Madison made no recommendation for or against a declaration of hostilities, instead observing that Britain was already in “a state of war against the United States.”