Through the Perilous Fight Page 32

  Hoping to destroy the American force before it could escape, Brooke ordered the men to fire as they charged forward. This time, however, the American line held determinedly as the British advanced within twenty yards, only wavering as the gleaming steel bayonets drew near. Even Cockburn credited the Americans with a dogged stand. “[T]he enemy kept up without flinching till our army reached the palings and began to break over, and through them,” the admiral recalled in his memoir of service.

  Without its left wing, the 1,400 militia troops holding the front were outnumbered and in grave danger of being cut off. The British Light Brigade moved in on the abandoned ground, turning the American left and throwing them “into great confusion,” Major Gubbins recalled. The King’s Own, which had completed its flanking maneuver, was close behind.

  As the British swarmed forward, Stricker at 3:45 p.m. ordered the line to retreat to the rear position held by the 6th Regiment at Cook’s Tavern. The troops had held the British off for an hour, but now wasted no time falling back.

  Cavalry, infantry, and artillery were jumbled together, looking for the best way out. Within fifteen minutes of the British charge, the Americans had been “utterly broken & dispersed,” Brooke said. The militia abandoned two cannons, and left behind its dead and at least two dozen wounded. The British gave no quarter to several sharpshooters discovered hiding in trees, who “were shot from their perches at leisure,” wrote Major Bowlby, with the King’s Own.

  The 5th Maryland brought up the American rear. Corporal McHenry carried out the regimental colors, and not a moment too soon, in his view. “Had not our company retreated at the time it did, we should have been cut off in two minutes,” he wrote. As it was, nearly a third of his company had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Every field officer in the regiment “received a touch,” but all escaped serious harm; Lieutenant Colonel Sterett, the 5th Maryland commander, was hit in the arm by a spent musket ball. Major Heath had a second horse shot from under him and was briefly stunned by a ball that passed through his hat and bruised his head.

  To the British, it looked like a rout; the Americans insisted it was an orderly retreat. Though bordering on panic, the American withdrawal possessed an order that had been entirely absent at Bladensburg. The City Brigade remained intact as a fighting unit, moving one mile to the rear and taking up a new position behind the 6th Regiment, nervously waiting at Cook’s Tavern. The men “mostly rallied well,” Stricker reported. Niles’ was measured in its judgment: “They retired in better order than could have been expected under a galling fire.”

  PATAPSCO RIVER, AFTERNOON, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

  Admiral Cochrane anchored Surprize at 3:30 p.m. near the mouth of Bear Creek, four miles from Fort McHenry. All day, the fleet had continued its steady but laborious progress through the Patapsco mud shoals. The five bomb ships, key to the attack, were expected to reach Cochrane’s position by evening; for safety reasons, they had been kept separate from the troopships and frigates while crews loaded them with munitions from tenders. The “bombs,” as they were called, would be anchored for the evening out of range from the fort.

  Cochrane trained a spyglass on the defensive line protecting Baltimore and could see the Americans hard at work throwing up earthworks. But from Cochrane’s vantage point, the earthworks did not appear to extend any great distance, and in a note intended for General Ross he suggested that rather than launch a frontal assault, the army might be able to simply skirt the defenses. Cochrane worried over one development. “The enemy have been sinking ships across their harbor all day, and in front of the fort,” he wrote. That meant the British ships would not be able to reach the inner harbor to bombard the town’s defenses. They would first have to capture or destroy Fort McHenry.

  Cochrane added a final message before sealing the note and sending it via boat up Bear Creek for delivery to Ross: “[A]t daylight we shall place the bombs and begin to bombard the fort.”

  METHODIST MEETING HOUSE, EVENING, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

  Though the Americans had only moved back one mile, Colonel Brooke soon gave up the chase. Rather than press his advantage against the retreating militia and move closer to Baltimore, still seven miles away, the British army commander stopped. Hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, the men were in no shape to continue the march, Brooke and Cockburn agreed.

  But halting with hours of sunlight remaining meant the army would not be in position to attack Baltimore first thing the following morning. The caution reflected the fact that the British had been bloodied. As at Bladensburg, the attacking British had suffered more dearly than the Americans at North Point, with at least 46 dead and 295 wounded. The British grossly exaggerated American casualties, reporting hundreds dead or wounded and a thousand men taken prisoner. The 5th Maryland had been “nearly annihilated,” Brooke claimed in his report to London. But in reality, the American toll was relatively light: 24 dead, 139 wounded, and 50 taken prisoner.

  The British established their headquarters around the Methodist Meeting House, which had been abandoned by the Americans. The church was converted into a hospital treating wounded from both sides. “The temple of God—of peace and goodwill towards men—vibrated with the groans of the wounded and the dying,” Scott wrote. A Methodist minister visiting the meeting house soon afterward described it as looking more like a slaughterhouse than a place of worship.

  James H. McCulloh, Jr., a U.S. Army garrison surgeon who had received his medical degree two months earlier, ministered side by side with the British surgeons, who showed great “humanity” to the wounded Americans, he reported. McCulloh helped treat twenty-eight wounded Americans, two of whom died. The dead were consigned to hastily dug graves.

  As Cockburn watered his horse at a pool below a wooded rise, a party of retreating Americans fired a volley, hitting several men and wounding the admiral’s horse. “Oh you damned Yankee, I’ll give it to you,” Cockburn yelled, shaking his fist, but the men escaped.

  PATAPSCO RIVER, EVENING, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

  General Ross’s body arrived by the waterside early in the evening, wrapped in the Union Jack. Commander William Stanhope Badcock, captain of the frigate Brune, carried the general’s body by boat to the warships anchored in the Chesapeake. The general was placed in a hogshead of Jamaican rum to preserve his remains for burial.

  For Admiral Codrington aboard Tonnant, the “distressing tidings” about Ross rekindled his doubts about the wisdom of the attack on Baltimore. “He is a most severe loss to his country and to us at this most important juncture,” Codrington wrote his wife. He added, “Heroism will do wonders certainly, and there is that still to look to; but, I believe there is too much on hand even for that, and I wish the job were well over.”

  Aboard Surprize, anchored upriver four miles from Baltimore, Cochrane received word of Ross’s death at 7:30 p.m.; shortly afterward the letter he had sent to the general was returned unopened. Cochrane readdressed it to Colonel Brooke and penned a cover note. “The sad accounts of the death of General Ross has just reached me,” Cochrane wrote Brooke.

  With Ross gone, Cochrane’s main concern was to make sure that Brooke understood Baltimore was to be destroyed. “It is proper for me to mention to you, that a system of retaliation was to be proceeded upon—in consequence of the barbarities committed in Canada,” Cochrane wrote. The admiral had received a new letter from Lord Prevost, the British commander in Canada, reporting that American troops had burned and looted the village of St. David’s in Ontario, and asking that Cochrane take “severe retribution” for the act.

  “[I]f Genl. Ross had seen the second letter from Sir George Prevost he would have destroyed Washington and Georgetown,” Cochrane informed Brooke. The plan to retaliate against Baltimore was “perfectly known to Rear Adl Cockburn and I believe Mr. Evans,” Cochrane added. Brooke had some leeway to demand ransom instead of burning homes and other private property, though all public property should be destroyed.

  Added Cochrane: “You will
best be able to judge what can be attempted—but let me know your determination as soon as possible that I may act accordingly.”

  COOK’S TAVERN, EVENING, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

  General Stricker was relieved to find the British were not giving chase, and he was not inclined to wait for them to change their mind. The American commander feared his weary men could be turned by another enemy attack. Before sunset, Stricker ordered a further retreat, back to the defensive line protecting the city.

  Samuel Smith had ordered Stricker to delay as long as feasible, not to hold at all cost. The City Brigade had accomplished its goals, and then some. They had slowed the British advance and inflicted significant casualties on the enemy. And most important, though the Americans did not yet know it, General Ross had been killed.

  Still, the retreat had the taste of defeat—it carried a sickening similarity to the disaster at Bladensburg three weeks earlier. The fall of Baltimore, like Washington, appeared inevitable to many.

  John Moore, a civilian riding into town in his two-wheel cart, encountered retreating 5th Maryland soldiers who told him the American army had been defeated. Moore took two wounded men in his gig, including one who had been shot through the thigh and another who looked close to death. Reaching the city, Moore found pandemonium. “Heavens, what a scene was exhibited here last evening!” Moore wrote the next morning to his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, who had fled town. “As I rode along with my wounded up the street, I was surrounded with crowds, clasping their hands together, writhing with agony, and uttering in loud exclamations their despair and grief.” A nervous militia commander had ordered a ropewalk burned to prevent it from falling into British hands, and the black smoke drifting across the city only added to the despair.

  At Fort McHenry, Major Armistead studied the approaching Royal Navy flotilla and feared an amphibious attack was imminent. “From the number of barges and the known situation of the enemy, I have not a doubt but that an assault will be made this night upon the fort,” he wrote Smith at 4:30 p.m.

  All day, booming cannon fire had reverberated from the Patapsco Neck, carrying to Baltimore and to the ships on the river, including the American truce ship, where Francis Scott Key heard “the sound of battle,” he later said.

  By midnight, the City Brigade had reached Worthington’s Mill, just ahead of the defensive line at Hampstead Hill. The men spent a sleepless night, expecting a British attack at any time. Captain James Piper, a militia company commander, later recalled the wait: “Our guns were charged, our ammunition boxes replenished and our matches lighted & our eyes anxiously directed to the eastern hills & the main road leading from North Point, for hours expecting to see the enemy in full force to commence the onslaught.”

  METHODIST MEETING HOUSE, 12:30 A.M., TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

  Just after midnight, a torrential downpour began. At the British camp, the rain fell with such violence that the sodden troops, most lying in the open, spent much of the night trying to keep the firelocks of their muskets dry under their elbows. Some found sleep impossible, as agonizing cries from the wounded carried through the dark night.

  At the Meeting House headquarters, Brooke reviewed plans with Lieutenant Evans and other officers. At 12:30 a.m., a messenger delivered Cochrane’s note promising naval support. “[Y]our fire I should think on the town would be of infinite service to us,” Brooke wrote in a hastily scribbled reply to the admiral.

  Brooke also made clear in his note that he had no intention of sparing Baltimore. The army, he assured Cochrane, would move in the morning “to work our destruction.”

  “The hissing rockets and the fiery shells glittered in the air, threatening destruction as they fell,” wrote Midshipman Barrett, aboard Hebrus.

  Bombardment of Fort McHenry by Alfred Jacob Miller.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Rockets’ Red Glare

  At dawn, the bomb ships Devastation, Terror, Volcano, Aetna, and Meteor maneuvered into place in the water off Fort McHenry, casting an appearance as ominous as their names. Another dozen ships, including the rocket ship Erebus, took their stations in close support, awaiting orders to begin the bombardment. Although the morning was hazy, soldiers at the fort had no trouble seeing the threatening warships, anchored in a half circle two miles out.

  The low and squat bomb ships had none of the grace and grandeur of the ships-of-the-line and frigates. Yet the bombs were the most devastating siege artillery afloat. They carried a mix of enormous 10- and 13–inch mortars, capable of firing 200-pound explosive shells as far as two and a half miles. Volcano was armed with a particularly insidious bomb known as a carcass, a hollow shell filled with flammable ingredients—pitch, powder, sulfur, and saltpeter—perfectly designed to incinerate a city.

  Cockburn was convinced Fort McHenry could not hold up to the punishment they would deliver. “[T]here is not a fort, from Norfolk to Baltimore that has a bombproof casement in it,” he had assured Cochrane. Still, it had been a struggle to get the bomb ships. Cockburn had been asking for them since arriving in the Chesapeake in March 1813, and a year later, the Admiralty had only sent rocket ships, which he complained were “of no more to throw against a fort than a toasted biscuit would be.”

  But Cockburn’s persistence had finally paid off, and the Admiralty sent the bomb ships. The last one, Terror, the newest and most advanced of its kind, had arrived in the Chesapeake just days earlier. Her addition meant that most of England’s capability—five of the eight bomb ships in the Royal Navy—was anchored in the Patapsco. The fall of Fort McHenry seemed just a matter of time—probably no more than two hours, Cochrane boasted.

  Fort McHenry guarded the water approach to Baltimore from the tip of Whetstone Point, where the Ferry Branch led to the west of the city, and the Northwest Branch led to the harbor.

  Five bastions protruding from each corner of the pentagon-shaped structure gave the fortress its nickname: the Star Fort. The bastions, the fort’s most recognizable feature, were designed to protect the all-important shoreline batteries, which served as its first line of defense against a land assault. The fort’s brick walls surrounded a powder magazine, guardhouse, two enlisted men’s barracks, and officers’ quarters.

  But by 1812, the fort had fallen into disrepair. The river had washed away the ground from beneath the lower battery, and the gun platform was gone. As the British threat grew in 1813, Samuel Smith rushed to make repairs, organizing gangs of militia and civilians to rebuild the batteries. The most important improvement came courtesy of onetime enemy France, which loaned the city fifty-six big naval guns from L’Eole, a man-of-war that had wrecked off the Virginia Capes in a storm a few years earlier.

  Cockburn scouted the fort and harbor during a foray into the Patapsco in April 1813, learning much about Baltimore’s defenses, including the French guns. But Smith made good use of Cockburn’s visit to drum up support to improve the fort, using his clout in Washington and Baltimore to get the needed manpower and materials. He built two shore batteries and furnaces for heating shot, acquired gun barges, and set up river lookouts.

  A three-gun battery was also constructed across the water from the fort at Lazaretto Point, home to a quarantine hospital for contagious fevers. Lazaretto gave the Americans the ability to lay a deadly crossfire on any ships trying to approach the harbor. To protect against a landing via the Ferry Branch, two earthworks were thrown up along the shore west of Fort McHenry: Fort Babcock, which despite its name was little more than a four-foot-high earthwork, and Fort Covington, a more substantial fortification with ten-foot brick walls and a gun platform.

  Major Armistead, taking command at Fort McHenry in the summer of 1813, found the undersized garrison consisted of less than half a company. Armistead bolstered its size, placing newspaper ads offering enlistment bounties of forty dollars and 160 acres of land in the western territories.

  Armistead insisted on one other improvement soon after taking command. “We, Sir, are ready at Fort McHenry to defend Baltimore agai
nst invading by the enemy,” Armistead, by one account, wrote Samuel Smith in June 1813. “That is to say, we are ready except that we have no suitable ensign to display over the Star Fort, and it is my desire to have a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty in seeing it from a distance.”

  However she came by her assignment, the thirty-eight-year-old Pickersgill had quite a job on her hands. Born in 1776 in Philadelphia, she had flag making in her blood.

  Photograph of Mary Pickersgill later in life.

  The popular but unfounded story is that a delegation of officers including Armistead, Joshua Barney, and General Stricker called on Mary Pickersgill, a Baltimore flag maker, to request she sew two flags: a large garrison flag, measuring 30 feet high and 42 feet long, and a storm flag, smaller but respectably sized at 17 feet by 25 feet. The more prosaic truth is that they were likely requisitioned from Pickersgill by James Calhoun, the deputy quartermaster officer for the War Department in Baltimore.

  However she came by her assignment, the thirty-eight-year-old Pickersgill had quite a job on her hands. Born in 1776 in Philadelphia, she had flag making in her blood. Mary’s mother, Rebecca Young, had supported her family as a young widow by making flags, uniforms, and blankets for the Continental Army in Philadelphia, where her competitors included Betsy Ross. After her own husband died in 1805, Mary Pickersgill moved her family to the booming port of Baltimore, where she could expect steady business supplying the navy, merchants, and privateers with the colors and signal flags needed for communication on the water. Pickersgill ran the business from her brick home on Queen Street (now East Pratt Street), where she lived in the summer of 1813 with her mother, thirteen-year-old daughter Caroline, and three nieces.