Through the Perilous Fight Page 24
UPPER MARLBORO, 1 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
During the night, one or more escaped British stragglers made their way from Upper Marlboro and were picked up by British patrols. Taken to Ross at the British camp at Nottingham, they reported that their erstwhile host, Dr. Beanes, had captured some of the men. Ross was infuriated; Beanes had been “one of those who had met us with a flag on our entrance into Marlboro,” the general observed.
For Ross, it was a question of honor. He had gone to extremes to respect private property and treat civilians with courtesy, particularly those he considered gentlemen. Beanes’s actions and words when the British quartered at his home, in Ross’s judgment, bound the doctor not to take up arms until the troops were back on their ships.
He ordered Lieutenant Evans to immediately return to Upper Marlboro, seize Beanes, and deliver an ultimatum to the town: If the prisoners were not returned before noon that day, Upper Marlboro would be destroyed.
Evans had put together a makeshift cavalry of 85 men mounted on assorted captured horses—“our Cossacks,” the British troops jokingly called them. At 1 a.m. Sunday the British horsemen thundered into Upper Marlboro and rode to Academy Hill. Beanes was “taken from his bed in the midst of his family, and hurried off almost without clothes,” according to an American complaint delivered to the British. The doctor was handled so roughly and hurriedly that his spectacles were left behind. Hill and Weems, who had picked the wrong night to spend at the Beanes home, were taken as well, and the three men were tossed onto horses without saddles. The British seized the still-loaded fowling piece the Americans had used to capture the stragglers.
Evans and his men searched other homes, including the nearby residence of the doctor’s brother, Bradley Beanes, looking for the British prisoners. When Bradley Beanes opened the door, Evans strode in with troops and scoured the house, but found nothing. Furious at being unable to locate the captives, Evans left town with a warning: “[U]nless they were returned before 12 o’clock the next day, they would lay the town in ashes,” a witness reported.
The party rode back to the British camp at Nottingham, with the elderly physician jostling along bareback through the night, clad only in his nightclothes. “To our no small surprise we saw our friend Dr. Bean brought in as a prisoner,” Gleig, at the camp, recorded in his diary. The three captives were brought before Ross, and when Beanes attempted to explain their actions, it only further infuriated the general. Beanes had “acted hostilely” toward his soldiers and then “attempted to justify his conduct when I spoke to him on the subject,” Ross later wrote. “I conceived myself authorized and called upon to cause his being detained as a prisoner.”
Ross, recalled Hill, “ordered us to be sent to the fleet.”
QUEEN ANNE, MARYLAND, EARLY MORNING, SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
Upper Marlboro was in a panic after Lieutenant Evans and his horsemen rode off. John Hodges was awoken by neighbors, who told him of the British threat and asked that he bring the prisoners back from Queen Anne. Hodges and his brother took off immediately, fearing their own families would be seized by the British as hostages.
“Never [were] people so universally alarmed on God’s earth as the people of Upper Marlboro,” former Governor Bowie later testified. “Death and destruction were threatening them every moment if they refused to deliver up these men.”
The Hodges arrived in Queen Anne, agitated and exhausted from the hard ride. They immediately met resistance over the idea of returning the prisoners, particularly the deserter, as the British would undoubtedly hang him. William Caton, a Queen Anne resident, told John Hodges “if he surrendered the deserter he was no American—he would stain his hands with human blood.” John Randall, in charge of the prisoners, refused to release the men without approval from Bowie, who was spending the night nearby. Upon arriving, Bowie at first refused to approve their release, but relented after hearing more details of the British threat.
But the governor insisted that Holden not be turned over. Robert Bowie, the governor’s son, argued emotionally against returning the deserter. “It would be murder,” he wept. Bradley Beanes tried to mediate a compromise, suggesting the “thing could be managed” by allowing the deserter a chance to escape.
Tempers cooled. The governor’s son noted “they had enough to do to fight the enemy.” The prisoners were released into the hands of the Hodges brothers, the younger Bowie, William Lansdale, and several others. They worked to approach British lines with the captives and seek to negotiate further.
FORT WASHINGTON, DAWN, SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
Captain Gordon waited until first light Sunday to finish off Fort Washington. The men of the Potomac squadron had been uncertain whether the tremendous explosion at the fort Saturday night came from a lucky shot or was an act of self-destruction. Most guessed the latter, but they were nonetheless amazed when the landing party confirmed the Americans had destroyed the fort. “[W]e were at a loss to account for such an extraordinary step,” wrote Captain Napier, who estimated capturing the fort would have cost the British at least fifty men, given its commanding location.
During the night, Captain Dyson had retreated with the fort’s garrison along a road four miles upriver before taking a ferry across the Potomac to Virginia. As they marched away in ignominy, Dyson insisted that they had done the right thing.
No one was more dismayed by the destruction of Fort Washington than the citizens of Alexandria, six miles upriver. The thriving town remained one of the busier ports in the country, though its days as a rival to New York and Boston were past. Despite its wealth and prestige, Alexandria was utterly helpless. There were no fortifications or natural defenses protecting the city, just deepwater wharves along an open stretch of the Potomac. Blocks of warehouses and brick homes stood within easy range of naval gunfire. The city fathers had warned Madison in May 1813 that Alexandria would be defenseless should the enemy ever penetrate the Potomac past Fort Washington, but the president merely observed that it was impossible to defend every assailable point.
After the British landed at Benedict, the Alexandria militia had been called to the defense of Washington, taking all the city’s artillery, save two twelve-pounders with no ammunition. The militia had been utterly squandered by General Winder, who left the Alexandrians idling near Fort Washington for several days until after the battle at Bladensburg, and then sent them back across the Potomac and ordered them to march north. When Fort Washington blew, no one in Alexandria knew where the militia was, though it turned out Winder had them sitting nineteen miles from the city. There were perhaps a hundred men left in the city who could hold a musket.
With the enemy squadron in sight, the Alexandria Common Council voted unanimously Sunday morning to seek surrender terms. At 10 a.m., after the British ships sailed past the smoking ruins of Fort Washington, a small boat left Alexandria under a flag of truce, bearing the mayor and two other city delegates. Reaching the squadron, they came aboard Seahorse to meet with Gordon. The delegates expressed hope that Gordon would follow the example set by Ross and Cockburn in Washington by respecting private property. The captain curtly replied that he did not need prompting on how to behave.
WASHINGTON, MORNING, SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
Madison, like everyone else in the capital, did not immediately know what had happened to Fort Washington the previous night, though it had not sounded encouraging. As he awaited news Sunday morning, the president wrote to Dolley advising she not return yet to the capital after all. “You may be again compelled to retire from it, which I find would have a disagreeable effect,” he wrote. Politically, it would be humiliating to flee the capital a second time. On the other hand, Madison added, “Should the ships have failed in their attack, you cannot return too soon.”
Madison and Monroe inspected the city on the warm and windy day, examining the cracked and blackened walls of the President’s House. “Who would have thought that this mass so solid, so magnificent, so grand, which seemed built for generations to come
, should by the hands of a few men and in the space of a few hours, be thus irreparably destroyed,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith, also surveying the scene that day. The Madisons’ belongings were nothing but ashes.
The presidential party visited the Navy Yard and inspected the federal arsenal, scene of the catastrophic explosion. Most disheartening was the view from Greenleaf Point, where they could see the British ships approaching Alexandria. Fort Washington, obviously, had fallen, and word arrived that Alexandria intended to surrender. It seemed clear that the British would continue upriver to Georgetown, probably to destroy the foundry, Monroe mused.
Madison was determined that Washington and Georgetown not fall again. A fight must be put up. But the idea ran into immediate resistance around the city. “A general alarm in the city as it is expected the fleet will come up, and the sailors be let loose to plunder and destroy,” Anna Thornton wrote in her diary. “The people are violently irritated at the thought of our attempting to make any more futile resistance.”
Mayor John Peter of Georgetown protested the plans to “give battle again” and reported his town wanted to surrender. Near the still-smoking ruins of the Capitol, panicked citizens accosted Madison. Washington was in a deplorable state and in no condition to mount a defense, they argued.
Dr. Thornton, acting as self-appointed spokesman for the citizens, reported they would send a delegation to the British commander to capitulate. Madison and Monroe angrily forbade any such action. If any delegation moved toward the enemy, Monroe warned, it would “be repelled by the bayonet.”
Talk of capitulation quieted. Inspired by the defiance, Thornton rushed home to arm himself, to the dismay of his wife. “Dr. T. came home and distressed us more than ever by taking his sword and going out to call the people and to join them,” Anna Thornton wrote in her diary.
Monroe swung into action, ordering batteries thrown up along the city’s Potomac shore, including one at Greenleaf Point, another at Windmill Point south of Georgetown, and a third near the destroyed Long Bridge over the Potomac. He also ordered guns across the river on Mason’s Island to be repositioned, but the colonel in charge of the battery refused, disputing Monroe’s authority. Monroe told the officer to obey or else retire from the field. “The colonel preferred the latter,” Monroe wrote.
Meanwhile, the District militia under General Walter Smith was arriving back in the city. They had been en route to defend Baltimore when General Stansbury learned that the British army was retreating to its ships. Reports also arrived of great alarm in Washington and Georgetown over a rumored slave insurrection. At Smith’s urgent plea, Stansbury sent the District troops back to the city and continued with the Maryland troops for Baltimore.
Smith’s command camped at Windmill Point, building and manning the Potomac batteries to defend the foundry upriver. Francis Scott Key, who could see the enemy ships from his home in Georgetown, joined in the preparations.
Anna Thornton, for one, was not impressed by all the talk and activity, writing in her diary, “It sounded very bold to say they would not surrender—after we were conquered and the public property lay in ruins.”
Dolley Madison returned to Washington Sunday afternoon. “I cannot tell you what I felt on reentering it—such destruction—such confusion!” she later wrote her friend Mary Latrobe. “The fleet full in view and in the act of robbing Alexandria! The citizens expecting another visit …” She rode by carriage past the shocking sight of the President’s House and continued to the nearby home of her sister, Lucy Cutts, on F Street.
Dolley had not received Madison’s letter that morning advising her to stay away, and the president was pleased to find her at the Cutts home when he returned from his tour of the city. The first lady, however, was deeply despondent. “She could scarcely speak without tears,” said Margaret Bayard Smith, who along with Anna Thornton paid a call on her that evening. When a few American troops marched by the house, Dolley said she “wished we had 10,000 such men … to sink our enemy to the bottomless pit.” Monroe, who had joined them, solemnly agreed the British “were all damned rascals from highest to lowest.” But Anna Thornton had little sympathy as Dolley railed against the British. “She had better attribute the loss of her palace to the right cause viz want of proper defense in time,” Thornton confided to her diary.
The Cutts house had been the Madisons’ home for eight years before they had moved into the President’s House, and they chose the familiar setting as the new de facto executive mansion. Soldiers and citizens soon surrounded the home, while messengers darted in and out. Dragoons camped outside the house to guard the president, not so much against the British as against threats of violence from angry citizens. Madison conferred with his cabinet about whether he should issue a proclamation from Washington responding to the burning of the capital’s public buildings.
That evening, back at his home, Rush wrote a memorandum urging the president to do so. It was critical that the administration shape the narrative of “an event … destined to be always prominent in our national history,” Rush wrote. “We should be prompt to tell of the act ourselves and in our own way, without holding back as if from shame and suffering our enemies alone to embarrass it with nothing but their own malicious comments.”
If issued quickly, the proclamation would reach Europe on the same ships bearing the news of Washington’s fall, offering immediate reassurance that the union still held. “The very dating of it so soon again from Washington” would squelch the inevitable talk of moving the capital, Rush wrote.
To this point, Madison’s wartime leadership had been largely disastrous, hemmed in by his constitutional principles against a powerful executive. Moreover, Secretary Jones observed, Madison’s accommodating nature was not well suited to “the vicious nature of the times.” Yet now, at the lowest point of his presidency, Madison recognized that the moment demanded a show of strength.
BRITISH LINES, SOUTHERN MARYLAND, MIDDAY, SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
The American party seeking to save Upper Marlboro hurried toward enemy lines with their captives, as the deadline for returning the prisoners to the British was fast approaching. “There was no time to spare, it being then near 12 o’clock,” recalled Gustav Hay, one of the Americans. Hoping to clarify the British demands, Robert Bowie and William Lansdale rode ahead. They soon encountered the British party led by Lieutenant Evans, who told them the conditions were simple: Deliver the men, or Upper Marlboro would be “utterly destroyed.”
The remainder of the American party had traveled about eight miles when they decided it was too risky to bring the deserter any closer to British lines. Holden and a second prisoner who had just confessed that he, too, was a deserter, were left at a brick house on the road, under the guard of Benjamin Oden, Jr. Continuing with the remaining prisoners, the Americans almost immediately ran headlong into the British force. Evans exploded with rage upon finding two of the British missing. “By God, gentlemen, you’ll all be ruined; you are keeping them prisoners yet,” Evans told the Americans.
When Hodges protested they could not give up a deserter, the threats grew more dire. “Gentlemen, do you mean to cheat us?” another British officer interjected. “If you treat us this way, we shall do as we did in Spain—put you all to death, and destroy everything.”
“Where are the other two?” Evans demanded. “You wanted to sneak off with two, did you?” Terrified, Hodges and Lansdale denied it. “No we don’t—they are up at that house,” one of the Americans replied, pointing to the location.
Inside the house, the two deserters saw the British detachment approaching, and with Oden’s assent, they took off running. Within minutes Evans reached the house and knocked Oden to the ground. When Oden denied knowing the whereabouts of the two men, Evans threatened to set the house afire. Then a woman in the house—unidentified in later court testimony—pointed in the direction the men had fled. Evans and his men chased after them. Both deserters were captured, though Holden later managed to escape.
ALEXANDRIA, 10 A.M., MONDAY, AUGUST 29
Alexandria faced its own ultimatum. By early Monday morning, Captain Gordon’s squadron, including the 38–gun Seahorse, the 36–gun Euryalus, two rocket ships, two bomb ships, and a schooner, was arrayed several hundred yards offshore from the city. Their menacing guns covered the waterfront from north to south, with enough firepower for the entire town to be “laid in ashes in a few minutes,” by Mayor Charles Simms’s estimation.
At 10 a.m., an officer from Seahorse delivered Gordon’s terms of surrender: Every ship in the city would be taken by the British, as well as all the merchandise and naval supplies in the warehouses. Ships that had been sunk to avoid capture would be raised, and all merchandise taken from the city for safekeeping must be retrieved and turned over to the British. Alexandria was given one hour to reply.
When city officials pointed out that they had no way to retrieve merchandise already sent from the city, the officer waived the requirement. He also said the British sailors would take care of raising the scuttled vessels. Beyond that, there was little to discuss. The Alexandria council deliberated only a short time before agreeing. The city had been “abandoned to its fate,” Mayor Simms said.
“One hardly knows which to admire most,” marveled the British naval historian William James: Gordon’s delay in delivering his surrender terms until the ships were set up, “or the peremptory and humiliating conditions which he did enforce.” Gordon himself later told his wife he had given the city “pretty hard terms.”