Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Ross directed Lieutenant Evans to quietly prepare to retreat but to keep the destination from the men to preserve secrecy. Harry Smith was shocked when Ross informed him of the plan. “Tonight? I hope not, sir,” he told the general. Smith urged Ross to wait until early morning, warning that the men were exhausted and a night march would be chaotic. But Ross wanted to take advantage of the confusion wrought by the storm and depart before the Americans regrouped.

  The general arranged for Ewell to care for the British soldiers who were too severely wounded to travel. “I am much distressed at leaving these poor fellows behind me,” Ross told the doctor, who assured him they would be well cared for by the Americans.

  A clever deception disguised the withdrawal. The British set an 8 p.m. curfew to keep residents inside their homes. They broadly hinted they were on their way to Georgetown; Ewell got the impression from Ross that they intended to destroy the foundry. The troops stoked campfires with enough wood to keep them burning for hours.

  Shortly after sunset, just twenty-four hours after capturing Washington, the British abandoned the American capital. The 3rd Brigade, positioned at the main British camp a mile from the Capitol, moved in front, followed by the 2nd Brigade, while the Light Brigade, marching from Capitol Hill, covered the withdrawal. The British had gathered “forty miserable looking horses” and seized every wagon, oxcart, and carriage they could find to carry the lightly wounded. Cart wheels and horses’ hooves were muffled by cloth, and “they went away so easy that you scarcely could hear them,” said Michael Shiner, the young slave.

  The troops marched in good order to Bladensburg in ninety minutes, halting to load the wounded and distribute provisions. The moon had risen by the time they reached the village, and the pale light revealed the grim sight of corpses strewn about the battlefield. Although the British rear guard, aided by field slaves from the nearby Riversdale plantation, had already buried more than a hundred bodies, many more remained, grotesquely transformed by the terrible heat and violent rain. “[T]hey appeared to be bleached to a most unnatural degree of whiteness … and the smell which arose upon the night air was horrible,” recalled Gleig.

  The light infantry troops hunted for the haversacks that they had tossed aside in the heat of the battle. Many could not find their own and simply took one belonging to a comrade. In the village, two days of provisions were distributed. Barrels of flour were knocked open, and each soldier loaded some in their packs.

  British surgeons who had been tending the wounded at a makeshift hospital in Bladensburg selected those well enough to travel, and they were mounted onto horses or loaded into wagons. Another eighty-three men would have to be left in American hands, among them Colonel Thornton, Lieutenant Colonel Wood, and Major Brown, three of Ross’s best officers. Some of the men were in great pain and distraught at being left in a foreign land. One sergeant, shot through both thighs by a musket ball, cried that he would rather be dead.

  Commodore Barney, still recuperating in Bladensburg with Marine Captain Samuel Miller and seventeen other wounded Americans, had been touched by the kind treatment he had received from the British, his lifelong enemy. Captain Wainwright “behaved to me as if I was a brother,” the commodore reported. Ross was confident that Barney would ensure that the British wounded would be treated well and exchanged for American prisoners. The general left gold coins to pay for their care.

  At midnight, bugles sounded and the British again took up the march. For an army that had scored such a singular victory, the retreat from Bladensburg was oddly panicked. “Such a scene of intolerable and unnecessary confusion I never witnessed,” said Smith. Beyond town, the road worsened, covered with trees blown down in the storm. “Exceeding darkness” forced the column to stop frequently.

  Exhausted men struggled to keep up and fell off by the dozens. The “fatiguing march through narrow and intricate roads on the night of the 25th August occasioned some men to quit the ranks,” Ross reported. Many soldiers tossed out their flour, weary of the extra load, and while a waste of vital provisions, the white powder blazed the trail for lagging troops, who followed like modern-day Hansels and Gretels. “If it had not been for the flour thus marking the track, the whole column would have lost its road,” said Smith.

  The sun had been up for several hours when Ross finally halted around 8 a.m. The men collapsed under trees, on roadsides, or anywhere they could find, and were asleep in an instant. Said Smith, “Our soldiers were dead done.”

  It was perhaps the most destitute moment America had yet experienced. The country’s great landmarks, including the Capitol and the President’s House, were empty, smoldering shells.

  A view of the President’s House in the city of Washington after the conflagration of the 24th August 1814.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hide Our Heads

  WASHINGTON, MORNING, FRIDAY, AUGUST 26

  The British were gone from Washington, residents discovered at first light. But every vestige of American leadership, power, or authority had also vanished. Winder and his army were fifteen miles away at Montgomery Court House. Nobody knew where Madison was. “[H]e fled so swiftly, that he has never been heard of since,” Martha Peter wrote on Friday to a friend. “The whole cabinet are off, no one knows where.” Even Mayor James H. Blake had fled to Virginia.

  It was perhaps the most destitute moment America had yet experienced. The country’s great landmarks, including the Capitol and the President’s House, were empty, smoldering shells. Every government building save the Patent Office had been destroyed. Many private homes, spared by the British, had been left roofless by the storm, and their contents ruined by rain. “[I]t seems as if the elements were conspiring to make the scene and times truly awful,” Anna Thornton recorded in her diary.

  Most people were relieved that the damage was not worse. Georgetown was entirely untouched. Francis Scott Key wrote his mother of his astonishment at “how mercifully we have all been spared here, the enemy not even entering our town, which I am sure they would have done, had they not gone off with such unnecessary precipitation.”

  But no one in town felt safe. Cockburn and Ross would return to burn the foundry above Georgetown, many assumed. Even more worrisome, the British squadron in the Potomac continued its inexorable sail upriver, threatening Alexandria, Washington, and Georgetown. But most of all, residents feared their own slaves. Rumors flew that armed blacks “would take advantage of the absence of the men to insult females, and complete the work of destruction commenced by the enemy.”

  Adding to the sense of apocalypse, looters were running rampant through the city. Some of the city’s dispossessed—poor laborers, blacks and whites alike—helped themselves to whatever they could find.

  William Thornton, returning from his country home Friday morning to check on the Patent Office, was surprised to find the British gone, but even more shocked to see looters removing thousands of dollars’ worth of property from public buildings and empty homes. Thornton swung into action, claiming authority as a justice of the peace. He organized civilian volunteers to guard the President’s House and then rushed to do the same at the Capitol. Hearing of “dreadful” plunder at the Navy Yard, Thornton hurried to the scene, chased off the looters, and was posting guards when Captain Tingey sailed back yet again on his gig. The yard commandant discovered “such a scene of devastation and plunder took place in the houses … as is disgraceful to relate—not a movable article from the cellars to the garrets has been left us—and even some of the fixtures, and the locks of the doors, have been shamefully pillaged.” Even the yard’s bells were stolen.

  Thornton spotted four British stragglers roaming near the Navy Yard. With no American troops to be seen, Thornton sought help from Sergeant Robert Sinclair of the 21st Fusiliers, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the wounded British troops left on Capitol Hill. Sinclair, grateful for the care the men were receiving, agreed to supply ambulatory British troops to accompany citizen patrols. The arrangement with t
he enemy was unusual, but Thornton was acting in a vacuum.

  Mayor Blake returned by ferry around 3 p.m. and discovered that 90 percent of the residents had fled, and those who remained were in “great agitation and alarm.” He rushed to assert control, though Anna Thornton was dismissive. “Our stupid mayor … ran away in the hour of danger,” she wrote in her diary. Blake called together all remaining citizens at the McKeown Hotel that evening to set up self-defense patrols. He vetoed Thornton’s arrangement with the British troops, saying it reeked of “impropriety.” Thornton refused to attend the meeting and retired back to his farm, insulted at the lack of gratitude. The mayor himself patrolled the streets with his musket.

  The looting was brought under control, but the damage did not stop. A marine guarding a naval magazine undiscovered by the enemy was spooked by rumors that the British were returning, and dumped four hundred barrels of gunpowder into the river.

  At dusk Friday, Captain Elias Caldwell, a Supreme Court clerk serving as a militia commander, entered the city with a troop of Washington Light Horse cavalry. The capital was back in American military hands, and a relative quiet settled on the city.

  “Would to God it had been in my power to have reached Washington in time to have aided in its protection,” Rodgers wrote Navy Secretary Jones.

  Captain John Rodgers

  Captain John Rodgers arrived in Baltimore Thursday night, August 25, on his way to Washington with four hundred marines and sailors, but learned to his shock that he was too late. “Would to God it had been in my power to have reached Washington in time to have aided in its protection,” he wrote Navy Secretary Jones.

  Now Rodgers’s job was to defend Baltimore, but the city seemed ready to raise a white flag. “When we got to Baltimore the citizens had not determined to defend the town,” wrote Marine Lieutenant John Harris. “I believe had not Commodore Rodgers and his crew arrived there as soon as they did they would have capitulated.”

  The news from Bladensburg and Washington had shocked residents and militia alike. “This came upon us like an avalanche causing the spirits of many to sink,” recalled Captain James Piper, a company commander with the 6th Maryland Regiment. The militia scattered at Bladensburg returned to Baltimore in a panic. Private Henry Fulford of the 5th Maryland, who had run for his life during the fighting, made his way home to Baltimore and spread word that the city was doomed. “They will be here in a few days and we have no force that can face them,” he wrote in a letter on August 26. “I think the only way to save the town and state will be to capitulate.”

  “We expect every instant to hear that they have taken up the line of march for this place and if they do we are gone,” Private David Winchester wrote to his brother in Tennessee.

  Residents of Baltimore had good reason to suspect they would be next. The British had long wished ill to the city, a center of pro-war sentiment and home to many of the privateers who tormented English shipping. Mobtown, as it was sometimes called, was a raucous city of forty-one thousand, teeming with sailors, merchants, ship workers, and laborers from around the world, Germans, Scots-Irish, and French among them. Baltimore was the most pro-war, Republican city in the country, and its ugly mob violence against opponents of the war had given it notoriety both in America and England.

  Built around a harbor off the Patapsco River, the port had grown from modest beginnings into the nation’s third-largest city, fueled by booming trade that sent flour and tobacco to Europe for manufactured goods, and to the West Indies in exchange for molasses, sugar, and slaves. The British blockade had dried up much of the trade, but ship owners and merchants were still making healthy profits thanks to privateering, and warehouses were filled with captured riches.

  Privateering had been a common practice for centuries, but the United States had made particularly good use of the practice over the course of this war. The government issued letters of marque to the owners of hundreds of ships, authorizing them to capture or destroy British vessels and cargo on the high seas. “They will make the merchants of England feel and squeal and cry out for peace,” Jefferson assured Monroe. A veritable private navy had been launched, including fifty-eight privateer ships fitted out from Baltimore alone, more than any other American port. Though the Royal Navy had bottled up the U.S. Navy, they were unable to deal with the swarms of privateers.

  Two-masted schooners built at the city’s shipyards in Fells Point—Baltimore Clippers, as they were called—were known around the world for their beauty and speed. The ships, with distinctive long raking masts, were ideal for privateering, carrying their weight high and sailing faster and closer to the wind than any in the Royal Navy, making them almost impossible to catch. The privateers inflicted millions of dollars in damages to British commerce, capturing some 1,338 enemy vessels, more than one-third taken by Maryland ships. In the summer of 1814, the British were losing an average of fifty ships a month to American privateers, most of them in British waters.

  Two-masted schooners built at the city’s shipyards in Fells Point—Baltimore Clippers, as they were called—were known around the world for their beauty and speed.

  A Baltimore clipper.

  The most famous Baltimore privateer—even more successful than Joshua Barney—was Thomas Boyle, the thirty-four-year-old captain of the 14–gun schooner Chasseur, which would earn the nickname “Pride of Baltimore.” Cruising off the coast of Great Britain in the summer of 1814, Boyle captured or sank seventeen British vessels, causing uproar among English merchants. Even as Washington smoldered, Boyle cheekily delivered a proclamation declaring the entire coasts of Great Britain and Ireland to be “in a state of strict and rigorous blockade.” Insurers and merchants petitioned the king, complaining that British waters were infested with American privateers and that their actions had been “injurious to our commerce, humbling to our pride and discreditable” to the Royal Navy.

  The Royal Navy—particularly Admirals Cockburn and Cochrane—was eager to make a lesson out of Baltimore.

  MONTGOMERY COURT HOUSE, 10 A.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 26

  At his headquarters Friday morning, William Winder received intelligence that the enemy had evacuated Washington and “was in full march for Baltimore.” The general sprang into action, ordering his command under arms. At 10 a.m., the army took up the line of march on the road to Baltimore.

  In the two days since Bladensburg, Winder had assembled “a force respectable as to numbers and appearance,” in the view of Brigadier General Stansbury, the Maryland militia brigade commander. It included the U.S. infantry regiments that had served at Bladensburg, Major Peters’s redoubtable Georgetown Artillery, General Smith’s District militia, the Annapolis militia under Colonel Beall, riflemen from western Maryland, assorted cavalry, and some of Stansbury’s militia from outside Baltimore.

  By evening, the army had traveled a dozen miles, about one-third of the way to Baltimore, camping at Snell’s Bridge, where the Clarksville Pike crossed the upper Patuxent River. Winder was impatient to get to Baltimore to take command of the defenses, having “concluded his presence there was indispensible,” Stansbury recalled.

  Winder continued during the night for Baltimore, leaving Stansbury to follow with the troops in the morning. Though he had just presided over one of the greatest military debacles in America’s young history, Winder did not yet grasp how tenuous his hold on command was. As he rode obliviously through the evening, Winder was intercepted by a messenger rushing the opposite way, bearing an express from Major General Samuel Smith, the militia commander in Baltimore. Smith informed Winder that he had “assumed the command” in the city.

  Winder was astonished. President Madison had appointed Winder commander of the Tenth Military District, which expressly included Baltimore. Moreover, War Department policy held that regular army officers such as Winder were superior to all ranks of militia officers unless the latter had been formally called into federal service. But that had not stopped Smith.

  Samuel Smith had never been m
uch for legal formalities, either as a U.S. senator from Maryland or as one of Baltimore’s wealthiest merchants. Now sixty-two, with bushy eyebrows, prominent nose, and a stern face, he had commanded the Baltimore militia for three decades. During the Revolutionary War, Smith served as a company commander with Smallwood’s Battalion, part of the famed Maryland Line, which helped save the Continental Army with a brave stand at Long Island, and he escaped with George Washington aboard the last boats to evacuate. He served at Brandywine, Fort Mifflin, and Valley Forge, and after the war commanded the Maryland troops sent west to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.

  Back in Baltimore, business ventures in shipping, banking, and land speculation made him immensely rich. He launched a political career at age forty, serving first in the House of Representatives and since 1803 as a senator. Once a staunch Jefferson Republican, Smith split with Madison over foreign policy and became a leading member of the “Invisibles,” a group of Republicans who opposed the president. His brother and political protégé, Robert, had served as Madison’s secretary of state, but the president fired him for disloyalty and incompetence in 1811, replacing him with Monroe. Samuel Smith shared in his brother’s political disfavor with the Madison administration, and even fell off Dolley Madison’s social list.

  When war was declared, Smith, a staunch supporter of the conflict, focused attention on preparing the city’s defenses, a job for which he was uniquely qualified. His positions on the Senate naval and military affairs committees gave him powerful perches to ensure Baltimore received its share of military assistance from the government. As champion of the city’s merchant and shipping class, he could count on financial backing to build up defenses. Moreover, the militia troops loved him, not least because he regularly supplied them with rum and whisky.