Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  The light was visible in Baltimore, too, forty miles northeast of Washington. From the ramparts of Fort McHenry, Private Benjamin Cohen could see an eerie glow on the horizon. “As the moon went down, the luster became more clear and defined, rising and falling on the horizon like fitful coruscations of the Aurora Borealis,” another witness wrote. Residents watching from atop Federal Hill wondered if Baltimore would be next.

  Candles were not necessary for dinner at Mrs. Suter’s boardinghouse. Admiral Cockburn, by one account, blew them out on the table, remarking that he preferred to eat by the light of the burning buildings across the street. Certainly the fires far outshone the pale moonlight coming through the windows.

  The admiral had joined Ross and ten other officers at the boardinghouse, now serving as the general’s temporary headquarters. Jaunty humor aside, Mrs. Suter detected a subdued mood as the officers ate their chicken dinner. All were disappointed at the escape of Madison, and they speculated on his whereabouts. Of more immediate concern to Ross and Cockburn was uncertainty over Captain Gordon’s location. The commanders had expected the ships would be available to evacuate the army if need be; moreover, if the squadron no longer posed a threat, the Americans might be able to concentrate their forces and launch a counterattack.

  An officer walked in to ask whether the War Department, on the west side of the President’s House, was to be burned. “Certainly,” Cockburn declared.

  But Ross demurred. “It will be time enough in the morning, as it is now growing late, and the men require rest,” he told Cockburn. The admiral, however, was not ready to quit for the night. He declared the nearby Bank of Metropolis “ought to be burned,” but gave up the idea when the bank cleaning lady, Sarah Sweeny, persuaded him that the building was owned by a poor widow.

  As the troops marched back along Pennsylvania Avenue to their camp on Capitol Hill, Cockburn mounted a small gray horse to search for the offices of the National Intelligencer, Washington’s premier newspaper. The editor, Joseph Gales, Jr.—Cockburn’s nickname for him was “Josey”—was a staunch supporter of Madison and the war, and the admiral had long been annoyed by the newspaper’s unflattering coverage of him. The Intelligencer was considered an organ for the Madison administration; just that morning, it had assured readers that Washington was safe. Gales, born in Sheffield, England, came to America as a boy with his father, a publisher who had fled Great Britain for fear of being persecuted for selling the works of Thomas Paine. The younger Gales had followed his father into the newspaper business. Cockburn considered Gales a traitor who “had out-heroded Herod in his abuse of his countrymen,” in the words of one member of the expedition.

  Near the McKeown Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, Cockburn encountered Chester Bailey, a U.S. mail stage operator, and asked for directions to the Intelligencer, declaring “he must destroy it, as his friend Gales had written some tough stories about him.” Bailey claimed he did not know the paper’s location, and Cockburn’s patience wore thin when two other men similarly pleaded ignorance. The admiral warned them they would be seized unless they showed him. The men promptly pointed out the office just up Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Cockburn decreed the building be immediately burned. Before sailors could carry out the order, several women who lived in adjoining houses beseeched him to stop. If he torched the Intelligencer, the entire block would burn. Cockburn addressed the crowd of onlookers: “Good people, I do not wish to injure you, but I am really afraid my friend Josey will be affronted with me, if after burning Jemmy’s palace, I do not pay him the same compliment.”

  The admiral turned to his men: “So my lads, take your axes, pull down the house, and burn the papers in the street.” Given the late hour, Cockburn agreed the job could wait until morning. Posting a sentry at the newspaper office, Cockburn “bid goodnight” and offered assurances before riding off: “Be tranquil, ladies, you shall be as safely protected under my administration as under that of Mr. Madison.”

  Cockburn was in high spirits as he made his rounds, chatting with bystanders and missing no opportunity to blame the president for the disaster: “You may thank old Madison for this; it is he who has got you into this scrape.”

  After returning to England, George Cockburn posed for this portrait displayed at the Royal Academy in 1817, which showed him standing proudly before the burning American capital.

  CHAPTER 9

  They Feel Strongly the Disgrace

  Toward dawn, a brief but violent thunderstorm swept through the captured capital. Flashes of lightning competed for brilliance with the flames, which were dampened by the torrential rain. At 5:30 in the sultry morning, Admiral Cockburn toured the smoldering city on his white mare, accompanied by only three men, a measure of his contempt for any lingering American threat. He rode along Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House, likely for the satisfaction of seeing Madison’s home in ruins. The mansion was a hollow shell, little more than charred sandstone walls. The results at the Treasury building, on the other hand, were disappointing. The rain had doused the flames, and the fire would have to be relit.

  Troops from the Light Brigade, who had spent the night at the main British camp on a field one mile northeast of the Capitol, marched into town to rekindle old fires and ignite new ones. The men, wet but rested from the battle, were accompanied by a contingent of thirty African American Colonial Marines carrying rockets and powder. Ross remained at the Capitol Hill headquarters, leaving the troops under the command of Colonel Timothy Jones. The Treasury building was soon burning again, and by 8 a.m., the brick building housing the War, Navy, and State departments went up in flames, fueled by voluminous government records.

  Near the Capitol, Lieutenant Scott took a detachment of sailors to burn one of the town’s ropewalks, stocked with cordage, hemp, and tar to make the rope crucial for navy ships. The men knocked the heads off dozens of tar barrels and poured it over cords. Once ignited, fire raced through the long building, and a dense, black smoke, with red flames flashing within, rolled over the city, giving “it the appearance of a Tartarus upon earth,” Scott wrote.

  Cockburn was merry as he made his rounds, chatting with bystanders at the McKeown Hotel and missing no opportunity to blame the president for the disaster: “You may thank old Madison for this; it is he who has got you into this scrape.… We want to catch him and carry him to England for a curiosity.” He showed off his souvenirs from the President’s House and told many “coarse jests” about Madison, whom he likened to an “old woman.”

  One American told Cockburn that if George Washington were alive “you would not have gotten to this city so easily.”

  “No, sir,” Cockburn was quick to reply. “[I]f General Washington had been president, we should not have thought of coming here.” Washington, he added, would never have left his capital defenseless to pursue conquest abroad.

  Washingtonians did not quite know what to make of Cockburn. “[S]uch was his manner—that of a common sailor, not of a dignified commander,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith. “He however deserves praise and commendation for his own good conduct and the discipline of his sailors and Marines, for these were the destroying agents.”

  A delegation led by the mayor of Georgetown approached the admiral and pleaded for the port town to be spared, assuring him the citizens did not intend to resist. “[A]s well they might; for I do not believe there were twenty men in town …” Martha Peter scoffed in a letter. “Cockburn replied, that, as our president would not protect us, they would.”

  The Intelligencer would not be as fortunate. Cockburn rode to the paper’s office to personally oversee the destruction he had promised the night before. The admiral was ready to have the building pulled down with stout ropes, but neighbors again interceded, this time pointing out that Gales did not actually own the building. Cockburn countermanded his order. Instead his men smashed the presses, destroyed the furniture, and threw all the types and printing materials out the upper windows. “Be sure that all the ‘c’s a
re destroyed so the rascals have no further means of abusing my name as they have done,” he joked.

  Cockburn helped his men dump back issues of the paper, records, and other property on the banks of a canal running behind the building. Gales’s reference library of several hundred books was added to the pile, which was then set afire. The editor’s nearby home at Ninth and E streets might have met the same fate, but the housekeeper cleverly disguised it by closing the shutters and chalking for rent on the front door.

  Gloomily eating breakfast in Georgetown, Dr. William Thornton, designer of the Capitol, learned that the British planned to burn the Patent Office. This was also a matter of direct concern; Thornton, a Renaissance man in the Jeffersonian mold, had been superintendent of patents since Jefferson appointed him to the job in 1802. Thornton had long dabbled in his own interests and inventions, most recently working on a new musical instrument, which was stored at the Patent Office at Blodgett’s Hotel. The three-story, government-owned building, which filled much of the block at Eighth and E streets, also housed the Post Office Department. Thornton and his assistants had taken the patent documents to safety before the British arrived, but it had been impossible to remove hundreds of bulky invention models that were stored at the office.

  Thornton leapt into action, abandoning his breakfast and gathering a small delegation to rush with him to the city. They approached Colonel Jones, overseeing the destruction of the War, Navy, and State headquarters building. Thornton started with a small request, asking if he could remove his musical instrument from the Patent Office before it was burned. The amiable Jones replied that as the British did not wish to destroy private property, he was “perfectly at liberty to take it.”

  By the time Thornton reached Blodgett’s, British soldiers under the command of Jones’s subordinate, Major Waters, were preparing to burn the building. Thornton was inspired to save much more than one instrument. Virtually everything inside was private property, Thornton told Waters. The building contained hundreds of models and it would be impossible to remove them all. Burning them “would be a loss to all the world,” Thornton declared. It “would be as barbarous as … to burn the Alexandrian Library for which the Turks have been ever since condemned by all enlightened nations.”

  Flustered by the histrionics, Waters held off, but told Thornton they would need a ruling from Jones. The two men found the colonel a few blocks away at the Intelligencer, where his men were helping Cockburn destroy the newspaper’s property. Jones readily agreed to spare the patent building; the admiral, busy wreaking vengeance on Gales, was apparently not consulted.

  NAVY YARD, MORNING, THURSDAY, AUGUST 25

  The British did not seem to mind that the Americans had beaten them to burning the Navy Yard. “Admiral Cockburn said he was glad of it, as it saved him the trouble,” according to a witness. Nonetheless, the admiral sent a party under Captain Wainwright to make sure the job was complete.

  Arriving at the smoldering yard around 8 a.m., Wainwright found locals roaming the property, scavenging what they could. The neighborhood to the east was home to poor families living in shanties who made meager livings off the Navy Yard and had not bothered to flee the British. Some delinquent youth—“home-nursed ragamuffins,” Latrobe called them—tried to follow Wainwright’s men into the yard, but the officer ordered them out and shut the gate. Looking about, the British found a surprising amount of material had survived the fire. Down at the wharf, the cooper’s shop and timber sheds had escaped the flames, as had stores filled with canvas, lines, and nautical apparatus. These were quickly put to the torch.

  The British had hardly left, closing the gate behind them, when a small gig surreptitiously landed at the Navy Yard at 8:45 a.m. A stout man hopped onto the wharf. After spending the night across the Potomac in Alexandria, Captain Thomas Tingey had sailed back to check on his beloved yard.

  It was a desolate sight, particularly with the new fires crackling. Tingey found the schooner Lynx laying alongside the still-burning wharf, unharmed—Wainwright’s men had somehow missed it—and hauled her to a safer position. Tingey was relieved to see that the commandant’s home where he lived had been spared; the British had deemed it private property. But to his dismay he saw that “a parcel of wicked boys in the neighborhood” with no such scruples was plundering the home.

  Tingey persuaded helpful residents to move his most valuable material and furniture to the homes of reputable neighbors. But a yard supervisor warned Tingey not to stay long, as Cockburn was looking for him—“having expressed an anxious desire to make me captive,” Tingey reported. As a native Englishman, Tingey could expect little mercy from the admiral. If Cockburn did not already know of Tingey’s return, he would soon, the supervisor warned. Tingey reluctantly sailed off.

  Before long, a detachment of Royal Marines arrived at the yard to spike cannons. Entering through the spacious gateway, they were greeted by the Tripoli monument, a column of Italian Carrara marble with allegorical statuary on the base honoring fallen heroes of the Barbary War. As the nation’s first military monument, it was a source of great pride to Americans, and a tempting target to the British.

  A stout man hopped onto the wharf. After spending the night across the Potomac in Alexandria, Captain Thomas Tingey had sailed back to check on his beloved yard.

  Captain Thomas Tingey, commandant of the Washington Navy Yard.

  Cheering troops clambered onto the monument, snatching the palm from the hand of Fame, breaking the pointed forefinger off the hand of America, and grabbing the golden pen from the hand of History, a female figure recording the heroics of the Americans at Tripoli. A British officer, seething that the United States had declared war on Britain while she fought Napoleon, later told an American prisoner the act was “a rebuke to the lying Yankee officers, who should have no more deeds of valor to record.”

  The skies were darkening and it looked as if a storm was coming. Standing near the monument, Martha Ann Fry, the daughter of a neighborhood widow, saw a red-coated officer with the golden pen in his hand. “[A]fter holding it some time, he threw it down and damn’d himself that they had had trouble enough,” she recalled.

  The British departed. Fry picked the pen off the ground and gave it to a child.

  CAPITOL HILL, MORNING, THURSDAY, AUGUST 25

  At his headquarters on Capitol Hill, General Ross showed nothing of Cockburn’s good cheer. His face was shrouded with worry, and he seemed to regret some of the night’s activities. Ross was particularly chagrined to learn the fires had consumed the Library of Congress. “[H]ad I known it in time the books would most certainly have been saved,” he told his host, Dr. Ewell. Moreover, he would not have burned the President’s House had Dolley Madison been there, he told the doctor. “I make war neither against letters nor ladies, and I have heard so much in praise of Mrs. Madison that I would rather protect than burn the house which sheltered such an excellent lady,” Ross said. Consoling the doctor’s frightened wife, Margaret, Ross called the entire affair lamentable and blamed “the necessity” for the British actions on the American rampage in York.

  York—modern-day Toronto—had a population of 625, small enough to even make Washington look like a city, and it was the capital of the sparsely populated province of Upper Canada, not a nation. Yet the burning of York provided the British invaders with useful symmetry for justifying their actions in Washington.

  Brigadier General Zebulon Pike—the explorer of the Southwest who discovered what became known as Pike’s Peak in 1806—led an American landing force on the shores of Ontario near York on April 27, 1813, and routed the British and Canadian defenders. But as the British withdrew, their powder magazine blew, creating a tremendous blast that killed Pike and dozens of American soldiers. Angry and undisciplined American troops went on a rampage through the captured town, looting homes and burning several government buildings, and, acting without orders, were likely responsible for burning the parliament building.

  Yet retaliation had n
ot brought the British army to Washington; George Cockburn had. Although the myth would grow that the British had marched to Washington to avenge York, the British were certainly not in arrears for vengeance. How could Cockburn be outraged over American actions in Canada, after Havre de Grace, Georgetown and Fredericktown, and Hampton?

  From the start, Cockburn had pressed for the capture of Washington as a strategic blow, the logical continuance of his campaign of terror in the Chesapeake, meant to persuade Americans of the high cost of war, ferment disunity, and punish Madison. Ross had come to share Cockburn’s view, seeing the real value of burning Washington as forcing an end to the war. In a letter he wrote to his wife shortly after Washington’s capture, Ross made no mention of retaliation, but instead described it as a stroke that would soon end the war.

  “They feel strongly the disgrace of having had their capital taken by a handful of men and blame very generally a government which went to war without the means or the abilities to carry it on,” Ross wrote. “The injury sustained by the city of Washington in the destruction of the public buildings has been immense and must disgust the country with a government that has left the capital unprotected.”

  Nonetheless, Ross likely would not have consented to burning Washington’s public buildings had he not believed the act to be justified as a response to American actions in Canada. Retaliation was a secondary, but potent, reason. It was not so much York but the more recent burning of Newark and Port Dover that was on British minds. Though the U.S. government later disavowed it, the burning of Newark at the order of an American commander in December 1813 probably fueled more British anger than any other American action during the war and set off a cycle of reprisal along the Niagara frontier. The British soon burned almost every town on the American side of the Niagara, including the village of Buffalo. In retaliation, an American army regiment destroyed Port Dover on the Canadian side of Lake Erie in May. Again the American commander was reprimanded, but Lord Prevost, the British commander in Canada, called for revenge. It was “the disgraceful conduct of the American troops in the wanton destruction of private property on the north shores of Lake Erie” that Prevost cited in his request for retaliation, and which in turn prompted Cochrane to issue his infamous “lay waste to destroy” order in July.