Through the Perilous Fight Page 23

  Samuel Smith had never been much 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.

  Major General Samuel Smith, commander of American forces in Baltimore.

  After Bladensburg, city leaders agreed on one thing: They wanted Smith, and not Winder, to take command of the defense of Baltimore. On the morning of August 25, a delegation of senior military commanders in the city, including Major George Armistead, the commander at Fort McHenry; Captain Oliver Perry, the hero of Lake Erie, in town awaiting command of a new ship; and Brigadier General John Stricker, a Maryland militia commander, went to the city’s Committee of Vigilance and Safety to make the highly unorthodox request that Smith take command of Baltimore. The committee promptly endorsed the proposal. Smith was eager to do so, but he wanted approval from higher authority. Baltimore Mayor Edward Johnson, chairman of the committee, sent a message by express to Governor Levin Winder in Annapolis asking that Smith be invested with the necessary powers.

  Governor Winder seemed no more eager to have his nephew remain in command than anyone else. “There can be no doubt as to the propriety of … Smith’s taking command under present circumstances and I conceive it to be his duty to do so,” Levin Winder replied after receiving Johnson’s letter the night of August 25. The governor supplied a nebulous statement implying that Smith’s assignment was in “conformity” with a request from the federal government. This was enough for Smith and the committee members, who claimed that Smith had thus been called into service of the United States at the rank of major general and hence could take command from Winder.

  General Winder was dumbfounded upon reading Smith’s message Friday night. “[T]he manner in which Genl. Smith had placed himself in command in my absence is at least very singular,” he wrote to the War Department. Winder rushed on to Baltimore, intending to confront Smith about “the palpable mistake on his part.”

  UPPER MARLBORO, FRIDAY, AUGUST 26

  Roused from their exhausted sleep at noon Friday, the British troops marched in oppressive heat toward Upper Marlboro, continuing without halting until they arrived at dusk. Contrary to American expectations, the British were not en route to Baltimore. As they moved out of Washington, the British had broadly hinted that their destination was Baltimore, asking about the roads to the city, available supplies, and the forces defending the city. The Americans “took the bait,” recalled Harry Smith.

  Ross had, in fact, seriously considered taking his army overland directly to Baltimore to capitalize on the sensational capture of Washington. “[T]he disorganization of the enemy’s public departments, the confusion and dismay of the country seemed to justify the attempt,” George De Lacy Evans wrote in his memorandum on the operation.

  The distance from Bladensburg to Baltimore by land was little more than thirty miles, no farther than the march back to the ships anchored off Benedict. But attacking Baltimore would take Ross fifty miles from the ships, a dangerous distance for such a small force.

  If Cochrane could be persuaded to immediately send at least some of the fleet toward Baltimore, it could be a different matter altogether. “Had there been five or six large vessels, in the upper part of the bay to receive or assist the army in case of disaster this attempt perhaps would have been made,” Evans wrote. But given that Cochrane had “decidedly dissented” from attacking Washington, Evans noted, no one on the expedition—not even Cockburn—was willing to further test the vice admiral’s ill humor with the suggestion.

  Ross decided it best to get his physically spent force back to the ships. Once the army was reunited with the fleet, and his men rested and supplied, an attack on Baltimore could be prepared.

  Yet Ross was missing an extraordinary opportunity to fall on the undefended rear of a panicked, demoralized city. Though Baltimore was well defended by water, almost all of its land defenses were oriented for an attack from the east. Baltimore lay wide open to a land attack from the southwest via Washington. Rash as an attack would have been, it may well have succeeded. Baltimore had been given a respite.

  BROOKEVILLE, MARYLAND, 9 P.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 26

  Darkness had settled by the time President Madison and his party reached the little town of Brookeville, on the road from Montgomery Court House to Baltimore. The Quaker village, with two mills, a tanning yard, a blacksmith shop, and a private boys’ academy, lay in an idyllic valley surrounded by hills and woods. “In this secluded spot one might hope the noise, or rumor of war would never reach,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith, who had taken shelter in the village with her family after fleeing Washington.

  But the war came in the shape of an exhausted and homeless president who had been traveling on horseback most of the day without food or rest. Turned down for lodgings at the first house where they stopped, the presidential party continued to a brick Federal-style house that was home to village postmaster and storekeeper Caleb Bentley and his wife, Henrietta. Though as Quakers the Bentleys were staunchly opposed to war, everyone in the household went to work making the president and his party welcome. Beds were placed in the parlor, and supper prepared, and the house overflowed with guests.

  Madison had left Dolley at Wiley’s Tavern in Virginia at midnight the previous night, just a few hours after joining his wife. Learning that Monroe was on his way to link up with Winder’s army at Montgomery Court House, Madison decided to do the same. Rumors circulated that the British had moved into Northern Virginia, and this may have contributed to Madison’s decision to leave Wiley’s in the middle of the night. Accompanied by a small group that included Rush, Jones, and Mason, and escorted by a growing number of dragoons, the president rode ten miles to Conn’s Ferry, above Great Falls. But by the time they arrived, the Potomac was swollen from the storm and impossible to cross.

  Jones returned to Wiley’s to rejoin his wife and Dolley, while Madison and the rest stayed Thursday night near the ferry landing, likely at the Conn family farmhouse. Even when morning came, it was hours before they could cross the dangerously turbulent river. Once in Maryland, Madison’s party traveled ten miles up the Falls Road to Montgomery Court House, where the president hoped to find Winder’s army. But when they arrived, Madison learned that the army was already on the march for Baltimore. The exhausted presidential party continued another eight miles to Brookeville.

  For one night, the tiny Quaker village served as the de facto capital of the United States. Dragoons pitched tents near the mills along the village stream and lit campfires. Guards trampled Henrietta Bentley’s rosebushes and vegetable garden. Villagers came by to pay their respects to the president, who appeared grave but not dispirited by events. Madison “anxiously enquired after Colonel Monroe and Armstrong, saying he did not know where either of them were,” a visitor wrote. Madison learned Monroe was with the army, camped five miles up the road at Snell’s Bridge, while Armstrong and Campbell were in Frederick. The war and Treasury secretaries were the only ones who had gone to Frederick, as originally instructed by the president.

  At the dinner table, fellow refugees did not hold their tongues. “The defense of the city was freely criticized and the situation of the country as freely spoken of,” one guest reported. Madison said little other than to express surprise at reports that the British had destroyed the office of the Intelligencer but not yet touched the Foxall Foundry.

  Around 10 p.m., after finishing dinner, the president sat down in a Windsor chair with a writing arm in Henrietta Bentley’s upstairs bedroom and stayed up late writing and reading dispatches, trying to gather his disparate government. “I will either wait here till you join me, or follow and join you as you may think best,” he wrote to Monroe. “If you decide on coming hither, the sooner the better.” Secretary of the Navy Jones, still with Dolley in Virginia, would return to Washington “the moment he hears of its evacuation.”

  Since he ha
d left Washington to inspect the army on the morning of August 22, Madison, sixty-three years old and in poor health, had been in the saddle fifteen to twenty hours a day for four days, through terrible heat and storms. He would be ridiculed as a coward who fled the battlefield, but for all his faults as a commander-in-chief, Madison had shown remarkable courage and determination through the crucible. After writing his final dispatch, Madison slept a few hours in the oasis of the Bentley home.

  In the morning, a dispatch arrived in Brookeville from Monroe with the momentous news that the enemy had abandoned the capital and was retreating to their ships. Monroe advised an “immediate return to Washington.”

  Madison sent messages by express to Armstrong and Campbell in Frederick and to Jones in Virginia urging their quick return. The president also gave the trooper riding to Virginia a note for the first lady. Addressed simply to “my dearest,” the president’s letter said he was immediately setting out for Washington. “You will all of course take the same resolution,” Madison wrote. “I know not where we are in the first instance to hide our heads; but shall look for a place on my arrival.”

  Monroe showed up in Brookeville soon after his note. At noon, accompanied by Monroe, Rush, and a guard of dragoons, the president set out for the burned capital—“our suffering city,” Margaret Bayard Smith called it.

  UPPER MARLBORO, AFTERNOON, SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

  The departure of the British from Upper Marlboro seemed like cause for celebration to Dr. William Beanes, who had hosted the commanders on their way to Washington. After Ross’s army left town early in the morning to march for Nottingham on the Patuxent River, Beanes invited several local friends and luminaries to join him for a meal at his home at Academy Hill.

  Robert Bowie, the distinguished former governor of Maryland, was one of the guests invited to join Beanes Saturday afternoon, along with the doctor’s brother, Bradley Beanes; William Hill, another doctor who lived outside of Marlboro; and two other acquaintances, William Lansdale of Upper Marlboro and a teenage boy, Philip Weems.

  Though the British had left Upper Marlboro, more than a hundred stragglers were roaming the countryside, pillaging homes, taking horses, and stealing food. As Beanes and Governor Bowie strolled around the doctor’s property, they encountered a British soldier trying to “steal the refreshments” from the garden and forced him to surrender. The captive, Thomas Holden, told the men he was a British deserter, and they took him to Dr. Beanes’s home.

  The guests soon realized that more British were on the loose in Upper Marlboro. “Whilst at the doctor’s we saw several stragglers belonging to the Army of the enemy passing through town to join the Army,” Hill later reported. Bowie, an old warhorse who had commanded a militia company during the revolution, proposed capturing them. William Beanes readily agreed, perhaps eager to burnish his credentials as a patriot after the friendly welcome he had given the British. Not everyone thought it a good idea. “[S]everal gentlemen who were present urged the dangerous consequences might result from it while the enemy were so near,” according to a newspaper account written several days later. Cockburn had torched towns for less.

  Nonetheless, Beanes, Bowie, Hill, and several others set out, armed with a fowling piece, and caught at least three stragglers. But several others escaped. Unlike Holden, the stragglers had apparently not deserted but were trying to rejoin their army.

  The town was soon in an uproar over fears of British retaliation. Bowie, concerned that upset residents would release the prisoners, turned to two reliable local brothers, John and Benjamin Hodges, to move them to a safer location. The prisoners were taken nine miles northeast, to the town of Queen Anne, on the upper Patuxent River, where residents mounted a guard.

  Upper Marlboro, it seemed, was safe. The party over, Hill and Weems stayed for the night at Academy Hill, and Dr. Beanes went to bed.

  POTOMAC RIVER, EVENING, SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

  At 5 p.m., Captain Gordon’s Royal Navy squadron came into view of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate on the Potomac River. The ten-day journey up the Potomac had been arduous, from the endless groundings in the Kettle Bottoms to the contrary winds and the tremendous squall two days earlier. The storm damage had almost compelled Gordon to turn around, but the crews had swiftly repaired the ships, and at last a fair wind brought them up a broad stretch of river leading to Alexandria and Washington. Just beyond Mount Vernon, on the opposite Maryland shore, lay the last obstacle. “Fort Washington appeared to our anxious eyes; and, to our great satisfaction, it was considered assailable,” wrote “Black Charlie” Napier, Gordon’s second in command.

  The squadron stopped just out of the fort’s gunshot range while Gordon prepared an attack. The bomb vessels moved within range of the fort, dropping anchor and preparing for an immediate bombardment to weaken the defenses. At first light the next morning, Gordon planned to land forces and storm the fort.

  Fort Washington sat on a bluff at the junction of the Potomac River and Piscataway Creek. Its strategic position commanding the river channel had been long recognized, including by George Washington, who in 1794 recommended a fort be built on the promontory. Construction of the fort began in 1808 and was completed a year later. Though formally named Fort Warburton, after a nearby manor home, many people had come to call it after the first president. It was not a particularly grand honor. The fort consisted of little more than a small star-shaped earthwork with a circular gun battery, and was derisively described by a newspaper as “a mere pig pen.”

  President Madison sent Major Pierre L’Enfant, the engineer who designed the capital, to inspect the fort in 1813; L’Enfant concluded “the whole original design was bad” and recommended it be rebuilt. A few improvements were made, but in the summer of 1814 the guns were in poor condition and there was little ammunition. Yet despite all its problems, Fort Washington remained a formidable obstacle.

  Spotting the British sails late Saturday afternoon, U.S. Army Captain Samuel T. Dyson ordered the Fort Washington garrison to their stations. Dyson, an experienced regular army artillery officer recently released from British captivity, had assumed command three weeks earlier, and he was distressed at the condition of the fort and garrison. He had no more than 60 men, only enough to man five of the fort’s twenty-seven guns.

  Dyson could see smoke still rising from the capital, and to make matters worse, locals reported that the British army was marching on Fort Washington—though no one had actually seen them. Dyson concluded that “my miserable post and little band was all that survived the general wreck.” Despite the lack of any hard evidence, the rumors of a British army attack had convinced Dyson the fort was caught in a pincer between land and water.

  The panicking captain assembled his four junior officers. He informed them that he had orders from Winder to blow the fort should the enemy threaten capture. The captain asked his lieutenants to vote, and the result was unanimous: Blow the fort.

  Dyson gave orders to spike the guns and prepare to destroy and evacuate the fort. The troops were shocked. “We ought at least to give them one shot,” a soldier grumbled. Grimly, the men made preparations, setting a gunpowder trail to blow the magazine and leaving it rigged to explode. All the artillery was spiked. The men had barely left Fort Washington when the first British shell landed in a nearby creek.

  Aboard Seahorse, Captain Gordon was puzzled to see a trail of men apparently abandoning their position. Gordon suspected a ruse and ordered the fire to continue. To his surprise, there was no response from the fort.

  “The terms of capitulation of the town of Alexandria are so degrading and humiliating as to excite the indignation of all classes of people,” Secretary Jones wrote Rodgers.

  “Johnny Bull and the Alexandrians,” political cartoon by William Charles published in the U.S. in 1814.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Arrogant Foe

  WASHINGTON, EVENING, SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

  President Madison rode back into Washington at 5 p.m. o
n Saturday, three days after his inglorious departure. It was hardly a triumphant return. The presidential party had scarcely entered the city when they heard thunderous cannon fire coming from down the Potomac. Fort Washington was being battered, Madison and Monroe realized. One invading British force had left the city, but another was arriving.

  A report arrived in the traumatized city that six British ships were attacking the fort. If it fell, the British had an open route not only to Alexandria but to Washington and Georgetown as well. The Royal Navy, it seemed, intended to finish the job the British army had begun.

  Madison had no time to tour the burned capital. As the President’s House was in ruins, the presidential party hurried to Attorney General Rush’s home a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Madison conferred with Monroe and Rush. With federal Washington destroyed and a second enemy force on the city’s doorstep, the country faced its gravest crisis since independence.

  “Such was the state of affairs when the President entered the city on the evening of the 27th,” Monroe wrote. “There was no force organized for its defense.… The effect of the late disaster on the whole union and the world was anticipated. Prompt measures were indispensable.” As Armstrong was still in Frederick and Winder in Baltimore, Madison directed Monroe to take interim charge of the War Department as well as military command in Washington.

  The cannonading downriver continued until around 8 p.m., when the entire city shuddered with a severe concussion from that same direction. No one was quite sure what had happened. The city had a restless night, wondering, as Major McKenney wrote that night from Georgetown, “whether the explosion was the magazine of the fort, or a British ship.”