Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Before Ross landed at Benedict with his army, Cochrane had reminded Ross of Newark and York, and shared with him the letter from Prevost, which spoke of “the indispensable necessity of retaliating” to prevent the Americans from repeating such acts.

  Ross answered that he “had been accustomed to carry on war in a very different spirit in the Peninsula and France, and that he could not sanction the destruction of private or public property, with the exception of military structures and warlike stores,” according to an account written many years later by his aide Captain Duncan MacDougall. “It was not until he was warmly pressed that he consented to destroy the Capitol and President’s House, for the purpose of preventing a repetition of the uncivilized proceedings of the troops of the United States,” MacDougall added.

  “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,” wrote General Ross.

  The U.S. Capitol after burning by the British, sketch by George Munger in 1814.

  Returning from his tour of the city, Cockburn noticed Margaret Ewell’s cheeks were streaked with tears, but he was not as sympathetic as Ross. “Pray, Madam, what could have alarmed you so?” he asked in a sharp voice. “Did you take us for savages?” Introduced to several more Capitol Hill matrons, including Mary Hunter, the admiral laid on the charm as best he could. Cockburn said he “admired the American ladies—they made excellent wives and good mothers; but they were very much prejudiced against him.”

  Cockburn assured the ladies he would allow no plunder. In that spirit, he and Ross called off troops preparing to burn the Marine barracks and commandant’s house after pleas from neighbors that the strong wind would spread fire to their homes. But when an officer reported that the Bank of Washington could not be burned without harming neighboring property, Cockburn was impatient. “Well, then, pull it down,” he sternly ordered. Ewell intervened with Cockburn, despite feeling “somewhat of awe in the presence of this son of Neptune,” and told the admiral that the bank was private property.

  “Well, then, let it alone,” the admiral glumly told the officer.

  A few isolated incidents shattered the relative calm Thursday morning. A British soldier armed with a musket went on a robbery spree, but after residents reported him, he was apprehended by two British officers, taken back to headquarters, and ordered shot. Ross and Cockburn were about to enter the Ewell house for a midday meal when a drunken and disheveled woman, streaked with blood, ran up screaming. “Oh I am killed, I am killed! A British sailor has killed me!” cried the woman.

  An indignant Cockburn ordered his sailors mustered, directing that the man she designated as her assailant be shot. Ewell treated her wounds, which proved to be superficial, and found the delirious woman uncertain whether she had been attacked by an Englishman or an American. Still chagrined, Cockburn dropped the matter, but insisted Ewell take six doubloons to pay for her treatment.

  Cockburn’s harshest critics acknowledged that the British for the most part had “scrupulously respected” private homes. “Greater respect was certainly paid to private property than has usually been exhibited by the enemy in his marauding parties,” the Intelligencer conceded when it resumed publication. “No houses were half as much plundered by the enemy, as by the knavish wretches about the town who profited of the general distress.”

  MONTGOMERY COURT HOUSE, THURSDAY MORNING, AUGUST 25

  General Winder had chosen to reconstitute and resupply his army at Montgomery Court House, a small Maryland town now known as Rockville, fifteen miles northwest of Washington. From there, Winder said, “we could best interpose between the enemy and Baltimore,” which he and almost everyone else guessed would be the next British target.

  After retreating all the way from Bladensburg, Winder now spoke grandiosely of his plans to “intimidate and harass” the enemy. “I shall assemble the largest possible force I can here and make such movements as I think may be necessary to preserve Baltimore,” Winder wrote to Brigadier General John Stricker, a militia commander in Baltimore.

  Every hour brought reinforcements, some of them stragglers who had fled the field at Bladensburg but sheepishly returned. New volunteers were streaming in from western Maryland and Virginia, many lacking weapons.

  The dusty and exhausted men of Captain Jenifer Sprigg’s Annapolis regiment reached the town Thursday morning, having marched most of the night with Winder’s forces retreating from Tenleytown. Sprigg fell into a trough of muddy water and lapped it up, alongside other parched men. “My horse being very thirsty, himself, pushed in among us and we thus all drank very quietly together,” the Maryland militia officer wrote. Since leaving Annapolis three days earlier, Sprigg had taken his sword belt up three notches, and he still had room to fit both his fists inside.

  Both the weather outside and the mood in the headquarters were tempestuous, and Winder was soon overwhelmed by the demands of officers clamoring for orders and the complaints of the men camped in the rain.

  Jacob Barker and Robert De Peyster, the visiting businessmen who had helped Dolley Madison escape the President’s House, arrived at Montgomery Court House to find a chaotic scene. They had left the portrait of George Washington for safekeeping en route at the Maryland farmhouse where they had spent the night. In the morning, they had nearly been arrested as spies by suspicious Americans before making their way to Winder’s camp.

  Barker was astonished to hear Winder speak of sending some of the reinforcements away. “Troops are pouring in from every direction, we shall have before night more than we can feed,” the general complained.

  Replied Barker, “Then send them on foraging parties in every direction, but for God’s sake do not release a man.”

  GREENLEAF POINT, WASHINGTON, NOON, THURSDAY, AUGUST 25

  The British had nearly completed the destruction of federal Washington, but one more target awaited: the Greenleaf Point Federal Arsenal. Though the retreating Americans had partially destroyed it, the British learned that weapons and a sizable amount of gunpowder were still stored at the site, two miles south of the Capitol at the southernmost tip of the city, where the Eastern Branch flowed into the Potomac River.

  Royal Marine Captain Mortimer Timpson, a sturdy and brave veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, was dispatched with a party of Royal Marines early in the afternoon to join another force of 200 men in destroying the arsenal. As the troops marched down a primitive road to Greenleaf Point, a leaden sky portending a storm turned almost midnight black. Low rumbles of distant thunder and faint flashes of lightning were accompanied by fitful gusts of wind.

  At the arsenal, the British found a cache of 150 barrels of gunpowder, and a river battery armed with eight cannons. Faced with the problem of destroying so much powder, the men threw barrels into a deep well near the magazine, “fancying there was plenty of water there to wet it,” Timpson later recalled. But they rolled so many barrels into the well that casks and loose powder rested above the waterline.

  Meanwhile, Timpson’s men worked on destroying a cannon. “We wanted to blow off the muzzle of the gun, and for that purpose placed another, loaded, at right angles with it,” Timpson said. The gunner stuck a slow-burning fuse in the touch hole of the loaded cannon so the men would have time to escape, but the fire burned down without discharging the cannon. The gunner tossed the fuse on the ground and replaced it with a new one.

  Rain was falling hard and the wind blew violently. From what Timpson and others later pieced together, a strong gust picked up the dropped fuse and blew it into the well. At 2:10 p.m., the earth shook and a column of fire shot from the well. Almost instantly, the arsenal’s magazine, a dozen yards from the well, blew with a tremendous explosion, tearing men apart and throwing their shredded bodies high in the air.

  “I found myself shot up into the air like a rocket,” Timpson wrote. “I went up some distance, and then fell on my face, while a quantity of ru
bbish [fell] on the back of my head at the same moment, I felt a sensation as if my head had been suddenly split open … and for some time lay senseless.”

  Rocks, earth, and body parts rained down through the black smoke, falling on men who had survived the initial blast and burying some of them alive. “The groans of the people almost buried in the earth, or with legs and arms broke, and the sight of pieces of bodies lying about, was a thousand times more distressing than the loss we met in the field the day before,” said a second officer.

  When he came to, Timpson had a severe contusion on his head and was “pretty well shaken to boot.” He found three dead men lying close to him, and two more bodies that had been blown over the trees into the water. In all, at least a dozen were dead and another twenty-five men were terribly wounded, some with limbs blown off.

  The survivors picked through the rubble, pulling out those who could be saved. Said Timpson, “We then, those who could work, dug a hasty trench, into which we were forced to throw the dead in the best manner we could; for it was getting late, and we had to retreat.”

  The sickening concussion of the arsenal explosion was felt across the city, and the smoke, flames, and flying debris were visible for miles. Yet the blast was only part of the fear sweeping the town, as it came in the midst of one of the most powerful storms ever to hit Washington. Strong storms were not unusual in the region, but few people had ever experienced one like this. Some American and British accounts loosely and incorrectly called it a hurricane. But the storm’s approach from the west strongly suggests it was a line of severe thunderstorms that spawned one or more destructive tornadoes.

  The roaring wind collapsed houses, felled chimneys, and uprooted trees, according to a newspaper account. Roofs were “whisked into the air like sheets of paper,” wrote Lieutenant Gleig, and the rain “resembled the rushing of a mighty cataract.”

  Mary Ingle, then a thirteen-year-old living at her parents’ home on Capitol Hill, later recalled “the crash and glare of incessant thunder and lightning, and the wild beating of the rain, mingled with the sound of roofs tearing from their supports, and the whir of heavy bodies flying through the air and falling upon the ground beneath.” A flash of lightning illuminated a featherbed flying in the wind.

  The storm, by one witness account, seemed “to exert its utmost rage on the Capitol Hill,” where the British had their forward camp. The winds knocked down piles of weapons, including two small cannons that were “fairly lifted” from the ground and carried several yards to the rear, according to Gleig.

  A few soldiers tried to brave it where they stood, but most flung themselves on the ground or ran for shelter behind walls and buildings. Collapsing houses and chimneys killed several men, by one account. Gleig, on horseback, was nearly carried away by the wind. “It fairly lifted me out of the saddle, and the horse which I had been riding I never saw again,” he later wrote. To Captain Harry Smith, the storm seemed of biblical proportions. “I never witnessed such a scene as I saw for a few minutes,” he later said. “It resembled the storm in Belshazzar’s feast.”

  In parts of the city, every house was damaged. The Patent Office, spared that morning by the British, lost part of its roof. At the Navy Yard, Lynx had its foremast torn off. The winds broke the draws on the Long Bridge, the new mile-long span across the Potomac leading to Alexandria. Militiamen guarding the Virginia side of the bridge, nervous that the British were about to cross, ignited their end of the bridge, causing a British detachment on the Washington side to do the same to prevent any American attack.

  Sweeping southeast, the storm hit the British fleet at Benedict at 2:30 p.m., when gale-force winds “lashed the smooth and placid waters of the Patuxent into one vast sheet of foam, which covered both our rigging and the decks with its spray,” wrote Midshipman Barrett. The frigates Hebrus and Severn were driven onto the shore, while Albion was knocked off her anchor.

  On the Potomac, Gordon’s squadron was caught as the ships laboriously beat up the shallow flats of the broad river, still some twenty miles south of Alexandria. The men scarcely had time to take down the sails when the storm hit. “The squall thickened at a short distance, roaring in a most awful manner, and appearing like a tremendous surf,” wrote Captain Napier, the second in command. His ship, Euryalus, lost her bowsprit and the heads of all three topmasts to the raging wind. Meteor was blown over on a bank and all the other ships damaged as well. The damage was so severe, Napier wrote, that “Captain Gordon thought the game up” and made plans to turn back.

  In Washington, after the wind subsided, the rain fell in torrents for two hours. Cockburn, who waited out the storm at Dr. Ewell’s home, emerged and stood with a group of officers at a well on New Jersey Avenue. Spotting a woman watching from a doorway, Cockburn called to her, “Great God, Madam! Is this the kind of storm to which you are accustomed in this infernal country?”

  “No, sir,” the woman answered. “This is a special interposition of Providence to drive our enemies from our city.”

  “Not so, Madam,” Cockburn retorted. “It is rather to aid your enemies in the destruction of your city.”

  NORTHERN VIRGINIA, THURSDAY, AUGUST 25

  President Madison had been up since early morning, still searching for his wife. The fresh fires in Washington were visible across the river. He left the Salona mansion, where he had spent the night, and retraced his steps to Wren’s Tavern in Falls Church, accompanied by Rush. At the militia headquarters, the president spoke with Captain George Graham, commander of a troop of Fairfax dragoons, hoping for word of Dolley’s whereabouts and updates on the location of General Winder and the American army. Graham had little information but assigned two Virginia militia troopers to ride with Madison, the first guard for the president since he left Washington.

  Madison left to look again for Dolley at Salona, but upon arriving he discovered that she had come and gone, heading farther west on the Leesburg Pike for Wiley’s Tavern. Madison took off in pursuit, but he had only traveled a few miles on the Falls Road when the storm forced him to take shelter at a crossroads tavern five miles from Little Falls bridge. The rains and winds sent trees crashing to the ground and turned the road into a river.

  Dolley and her party had left Rokeby well before dawn and had made slow but steady progress to Wiley’s, a little tavern in the middle of an apple orchard near an aptly named stream known as Difficult Run. The black sky burst open shortly before they arrived, and the wind dashed apples against the building. The tavern was crowded with angry refugees, few of them happy to see the drenched first lady. Some spoke harshly of the president’s “misconduct and pusillanimity.” The tavern keeper’s wife exploded with anger when she learned the first lady was upstairs. “Miss Madison! If that’s you, come down and get out! Your husband has got mine out fighting, and damn you, you shan’t stay in my house; so get out!” Others intervened, and Dolley remained, ignoring the hostile glares. After the storm passed, she anxiously awaited the president, saving him a bit of the scant meal that was served.

  Madison and his party slogged through the muddy road, covered with debris from the storm. The president finally arrived, weary and anxious, reunited with his wife after one of the most momentous days in the nation’s history, and likely the most demeaning for any American president. He ate the food Dolley had saved and slept a few short hours.

  CAPITOL HILL, EVENING, THURSDAY, AUGUST 25

  A ghastly column of British troops struggled back from the arsenal to the British camp on Capitol Hill. Those who could walk carried mutilated men. “[I]t was with the greatest difficulty that I could manage to march with the men,” Major Timpson wrote. The British set up a hospital on Carroll Row, a line of houses across from the Capitol. Dr. Ewell helped treat the forty-seven wounded, many of them “shockingly mangled,” he said.

  Ross seemed near tears as he surveyed the men lying burnt, bruised, and torn on the floor. Even Cockburn, legendary for his iron nerves, was shaken. Many of the survivors were “so dread
fully mutilated that instant death would have been a blessing to them,” said Lieutenant Scott, Cockburn’s aide.

  The dual calamities of the explosion and storm had taken a toll on the British and hastened their departure from Washington. The vital Foxall Foundry above Georgetown remained intact, but British scouts had apparently spotted a makeshift American force defending the site. Sending troops across town to destroy it this late in the day would likely mean staying a second night. Ross decided not to delay his departure and expose his small force to counterattack, and the foundry was spared.

  “The object of the expedition being accomplished I determined before any greater force of the enemy could be assembled to withdraw the troops,” Ross wrote in his official report. Cockburn likewise was satisfied nothing would be gained by staying longer, “the general devastation being completed,” he wrote in his report.

  Despite all the evidence of Winder’s incompetence, it seemed inconceivable that the Americans would not mount a counterattack. The British suspected American troops were still on the heights above Georgetown. Ross had already moved some of the troops farther from the town, “as we could scarce think the Americans … would tamely allow a handful of British soldiers to advance through the heart of their country, and burn, and destroy, the Capitol of the United States,” Colonel Brooke wrote in his diary.