Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  The first sheet music for “The Star Spangled Banner,” printed in 1814 by Thomas Carr of Baltimore.

  CHAPTER 17

  Our Glorious Peace

  The Royal Navy frigate Iphigenia made swift passage across the Atlantic, landing at Spithead on the south coast of England just three weeks after Captain Harry Smith had parted from General Ross in the Chesapeake. Smith immediately rode by carriage to London, arriving at midnight, on Monday, September 26. Under his arm, the young army officer carried a wooden box with dispatches bearing the momentous news of Washington’s capture.

  Smith went straight to the War Office on Downing Street, filed his dispatches, and then found lodging in an overcrowded coffeehouse to get a few hours sleep. In the morning, he was brought before Lord Bathurst, the war secretary, who told him the intelligence he brought was so important that the prince regent, the de facto king of England, insisted on seeing him. They hurried to Carlton House, the royal mansion on Pall Mall in central London, where Smith waited in a large anteroom for thirty minutes while the secretary briefed the regent. Then the door opened. “The prince will see you,” Bathurst announced.

  Brash and ambitious though he was, Smith felt momentary qualms. “I know nothing of the etiquette of a court,” Smith warned the minister as they walked down a corridor. “Oh, just behave as you would to any gentleman,” Bathurst assured him. “Call him ‘Sir’ and do not turn your back on him.”

  They entered the dressing room, filled with every manner of clothing, perfume, snuff boxes, and wigs, all befitting the prince regent’s extravagant lifestyle. George Augustus Frederick had assumed the regency in 1811, when his father, King George III, had relapsed into insanity, and whatever restraint the prince had ever shown quickly disappeared.

  The prince regent rose to greet the visitors. General Ross had spoken highly of Smith in his report, he told the captain. Studying a map of Washington brought by Smith, the regent peppered him with questions about the operation. All the burned buildings were marked in red: the Capitol, and with it the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress; the President’s House; the Navy Yard; the Treasury; and the State, War, and Navy headquarters building. “He asked the name of each, and in his heart I fancied I saw he thought it a barbarian act,” said Smith.

  If so, the regent kept those thoughts to himself. His audience over, Smith backed out of the room with the secretary. “Bathurst,” the regent called as they left, “don’t forget this officer’s promotion.”

  “The reign of Madison, like that of Bonaparte, may be considered as at an end,” wrote the Evening Star.

  “The Fall of Washington—or Maddy in full flight,” a cartoon published in London in 1814.

  Outside, at the prince regent’s order, the guns of Parliament and the Tower of London thundered in salute of the news. As bells rang and word spread, a raucous celebration erupted in Hyde Park and spread across the city.

  “We stop the press to announce the receipt of the following most important intelligence from America,” the London Times declared in its September 27 edition: “the CAPTURE and DESTRUCTION, by his Majesty’s Forces, of the CITY OF WASHINGTON, on the 24th ult., after a severe, but brilliant action, in which the enemy was defeated with great loss.”

  The war, it seemed, was all but over. The United States had been given its just comeuppance. The newspapers were filled with righteous celebration of the victory over the treacherous Americans. “The reign of Madison, like that of Bonaparte, may be considered as at an end,” wrote the Evening Star. A satirical cartoon showed “Maddy in full flight,” off to Elba to join “his bosom friend” Napoleon.

  The Times, which dubbed Madison “the fugitive of Bladensburg,” was particularly triumphant. “Washington,—the proud seat of that nest of traitors, whose accursed arts involved us in war with our brethren beyond the Atlantic,—Washington captured, its dock, its arsenal, and all its public buildings destroyed, the heads of the faction beaten, disgraced and flying for their lives;—these are indeed impressive lessons, which we fervently hope and trust will produce their proper effect on the people of the United States.”

  “Admiral COCKBURN, it is said, will have the red ribband,” the Times reported. “The merits of this gallant officer are spoken of in the highest possible terms by great authorities, who admire his conduct, particularly in the exploit at Washington, which was his plan; and look, if an opportunity offers, to his becoming a second NELSON.”

  A brilliant future was likewise predicted for Ross. The prince regent sent word to the general of his admiration for the Washington affair, “so well calculated to humble the presumptuousness of the American government.”

  Eager to deliver the coup de grace on the reeling Americans, the government agreed to send Ross more troops, adding two battalions to the reinforcements already sailing to attack New Orleans. “The superior talents which you have displayed in your first battle prize are a sufficient pledge of the ability with which you would conduct operations on a larger scale,” Bathurst wrote Ross. The minister noted the general’s refusal to allow Washington to be plundered “will be remembered by the enemy, if not with gratitude, at least with admiration.”

  That said, Bathurst urged the general to show no such mercy to Baltimore, suggesting that if Ross were to “make its inhabitants feel a little more the effects of your visit than what has been experienced at Washington, you would make that portion of the American people experience the consequences of the war, who have most contributed to its existence.”

  Keeping his promise to General Ross, Captain Harry Smith traveled by stagecoach to Clifton, in Bristol, on England’s southwest coast, to deliver the general’s letter to Elizabeth Ross. “We found … Mrs. Ross in the highest spirits at the achievements of our arms under her husband,” Smith later wrote.

  A family friend wrote to Elizabeth that Ross would be delighted with the sensation caused by his feat. “I cannot imagine any addition he even could wish to the fame he has so well earned, to be the wonder of the day,” he wrote. In Ross’s home village of Rostrevor, at the foot of the Mourne Mountains on the coast of northern Ireland, the streets were illuminated by bonfires and the leading citizens threw a joyous banquet toasting the general’s accomplishment.

  Unknown to anyone in England or Ireland, Surprize arrived from the Chesapeake in Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia on September 28, one day after Smith’s arrival in London. The next day, salute guns on land and sea were fired while Ross’s coffin was carried to the burial ground at St. Paul’s Church, where his remains were interred in the churchyard.

  The latest American rejection of the British demands at the peace talks in Ghent reached London just after the news of Washington’s capture. The British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, told Bathurst there was no rush to reply to the Americans: “Let them feast in the meantime upon Washington.”

  The carillon at St. Bavon Cathedral was ringing for Christmas by the time the delegates sat at a long table at 6 p.m. to sign, seal, and exchange the treaty.

  The Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814

  Bathurst immediately dispatched the news to the British delegation in Ghent. “I hope you’ll be able to put on a face of compress’d joy at least, in communicating this news to the American ministers,” the war secretary wrote to Henry Goulburn, leader of the delegation. The Americans were to be reminded of Washington at every opportunity, Bathurst added, and told “that considering the force now directed against them their affairs are more likely to become worse than better.”

  GHENT, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1

  John Quincy Adams had read newspaper accounts that described the large British fleet threatening the Chesapeake, and he had a premonition of ill tidings. “The next news will be the taking of Washington or Baltimore,” Adams wrote in his diary on September 30.

  Adams and Albert Gallatin were the only members of the American delegation in Ghent at the moment. The rest of the American commissioners had made use of another interminable delay in t
he talks to make a field trip to Brussels, as much to get away from the tediousness of Ghent as to escape Adams. Strong personalities all, the commissioners had spent much of their time squabbling and were thoroughly sick of one another’s company in the three-story house they shared on the Rue des Champs. The pious Adams took many solitary walks, seeking to avoid the endless card games, bad wine, and cigars of which Henry Clay was so fond. More than once, Adams had risen in the predawn blackness just in time to hear the party winding down in Clay’s room.

  Returning from his walk on the evening of October 1, Adams found Gallatin waiting. The Swiss-born diplomat spoke quietly and matter-of-factly. Washington had been captured and its public buildings destroyed, he reported. Gallatin feared the news would shake continental Europe’s confidence in America’s prospects. Adams spent a restless night, too distressed to sleep. Though awake when the morning finally came, he stayed in bed an hour longer than normal, unable to face the cold day. The burning of Washington was a “catastrophe,” he said, and would prove a “trial of the national spirit.” But reflecting further, he concluded it disgraced Britain more than the United States.

  Henry Clay, Jonathan Russell, and Christopher Hughes, the secretary to the legation, were attending the theater in Brussels when Hughes overheard a British officer boasting in the lobby: “Have you heard the news? We have taken and burned the Yankee capital and thrown those American rebels back half a century.” Hughes gathered Clay and Russell and told them they must leave immediately. The mortified Americans returned to Ghent, where they found a packet of the most recent London newspapers sent by Goulburn, along with a sarcastic note suggesting that the news would relieve the Americans’ boredom.

  It was the insult of it all that bothered Clay. The loss of the buildings “gives me comparatively no pain,” Clay wrote in a letter. “What does wound me to the very soul is that a set of pirates and incendiaries should have been permitted to pollute our soil, conflagrate our Capital, and return unpunished to their ships.”

  On October 8, the British delivered new terms to the Americans. Coming as it did after the fall of Washington, the note was dressed in moderation. The British had quietly dropped their earlier demand for military control of the Great Lakes. Liverpool had also concluded that the Americans would never accept the British demand to create a buffer state for the Indian tribes in the Northwest. The British replaced it with a new ultimatum: Restore to the Indians all rights, possessions, and privileges they held before the war. This would afford some protection to Canada. If the Americans did not agree, the peace conference would end.

  The Americans felt they had no choice but to accept, though they worried it would set a dangerous precedent. On October 14, the delegation sent a mildly worded reply raising no objection, with the stipulation that it not set a precedent. The language they used was so nimble that Goulburn was not even convinced the Americans had accepted the demand. But London seemed satisfied, and negotiations continued.

  The American position was precarious, Adams knew. In his diary, he wrote, “May it please God to forgive our enemies, and to turn their hearts.”

  TERRA RUBRA, MARYLAND, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5

  After months of disruption from the war, Francis Scott Key was eager to return his family to Georgetown and try to resume some semblance of normal life, though he had grave doubts this would be possible. By October 5, Key, Polly, and their six children had all gathered at Terra Rubra for the journey to the capital.

  Key had already been back in Georgetown briefly to attend to business, and found two letters from John Randolph waiting. Key learned that even Randolph, the most inveterate of war opponents, had taken up arms and volunteered to Virginia’s defense when the British attacked up the Potomac. Back at his home, Randolph had grown alarmed at the lack of any word from Key since the eve of Bladensburg. “Thank God! Georgetown is safe,” Randolph wrote. “Pray, let me hear from you.”

  Before leaving Terra Rubra, Key composed a long letter of reply to Randolph, apologizing for not writing since the battle. “From that day to this I have hardly been a day at home & could write you such an account of my adventures as would tire us both,” he wrote. “You will be surprised to hear that I have since then spent eleven days in the British fleet.”

  Describing the bombardment he had witnessed, Key called Baltimore’s escape providential. But he worried the country had not learned its lesson. “Whether this gentle paternal chastisement we have been suffering will be sufficient for us is yet to be seen—I have my fears,” he wrote.

  Key made no mention to Randolph of the song lyrics he had written, which seemed to have fallen from his mind. Indeed, Key offered no soaring rhetoric about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Instead his feelings of helplessness with the war, disgust with the government, and humiliation over Bladensburg spilled out.

  “There is great alarm in the city and Georgetown about the removal of the seat of government,” Key wrote. “I am so uncertain about my own movements that I care but little about those of the government. If the war lasts (as I think it will) I cannot see how I can live in Georgetown; & perhaps if the great folks move off little people can live cheaper. As to the disgrace of abandoning the seat of government & acknowledging that the Conquerors of Canada cannot defend their own Capital, it would be a serious thing to a people not already in the very dust & mire of ignominy.”

  WASHINGTON, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8

  That ignominy was plainly evident at the new presidential quarters at the Octagon. No one used to turn down invitations to Dolley Madison’s gatherings; now people sent regrets, or did not bother turning up. The Washington City Gazette was disappointed the Madisons even bothered; it had hoped that burning the President’s House would have “put an end to drawing-rooms and levees; the resort of the idle, and the encouragers of spies and traitors.”

  The Madisons did their best to ignore the disgust directed their way. “The administration are severely and almost universally condemned for their misconduct on that occasion,” Senator Jeremiah Mason of New Hampshire, a Federalist, wrote on October 6 to his wife, Mary. “They seem to be falling into general contempt. Poor Mrs. Madison, it is said, shows the most sensibility on the subject.… The disgraceful and distressing stories told are innumerable.” Virginia attorney William Wirt called on Madison a few days later and found the president in poor condition. “He looks miserably shattered and woebegone,” Wirt wrote his wife. “In short, he looks heart-broken.”

  George M. Dallas, Gallatin’s secretary, arrived from Ghent Saturday afternoon, October 8, with ominous news from the American delegation. The British were sending up to 15,000 reinforcements for an attack on New Orleans. Dallas also brought dispatches from the conference, written in late August, that described the British demands for the creation of an Indian buffer state and control of the Great Lakes. The private diplomatic correspondence was now out of date. But Madison shrewdly made the British demands and American responses public, thereby showing the Americans willing to negotiate but the British demanding fantastic concessions.

  Wirt found Madison’s “heart and mind were painfully full” of developments in New England, where unhappiness with the war had reached new heights and a regional conference was planned to consider action, possibly including secession. Some governors had refused to put their state militias under federal control and were discouraging enlistment in the U.S. Army. Unknown to Washington, Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong was about to enter into secret talks with the British commander in Halifax to make a separate peace with Great Britain.

  Meanwhile, the movement to relocate the capital appeared to gain ground. On October 6, the House narrowly approved a nonbinding resolution to leave Washington. Almost imperceptibly at first, but then with increasing fervor, the mood changed, fueled by the victories in Baltimore and Plattsburgh: The nation should rally around Washington. Remaining in place showed defiance to British power. If the capital were put on wheels, it was said, it would never stop rolling
.

  Supporters were bolstered by reports from engineers that the walls of the President’s House and both wings of the Capitol were in good enough shape to rebuild. At a mass meeting, citizens of Washington pledged to loan money to the government. While the bill to move the capital narrowly passed the House on its first reading, supporters of the city mustered their forces, and on October 17, a resolution to remain in Washington passed the House, 83 to 74.

  Dr. William Thornton took no small measure of the credit for himself. Had he not persuaded the British to save the Patent Office, Congress would have had no place to meet. Without it, the opponents of Washington would have carried the day, Thornton later claimed in a letter to the identically named British Colonel William Thornton, whom he considered a bosom friend by this point. “I believe they would now have succeeded if I had not prevailed on Major Waters & Colonel Jones to spare the Patent Office, containing the Museum of the Arts, which temporarily accommodates the Congress,” Dr. Thornton wrote. “Thus it was observed that one William Thornton took the city, & another preserved it by that single act.”

  Another ray of hope arrived in Washington in the form of a letter from Monticello. “I learn from the newspapers that the vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts, by the destruction of the public library with the noble edifice in which it was deposited,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend Samuel H. Smith, founder of the Intelligencer.

  Jefferson’s library at Monticello held more than six thousand books and was the largest personal collection in the United States, including many volumes acquired during the revolution and others while he was U.S. minister to France. The subjects were as wide-ranging as Jefferson’s mind: politics, law, history, science, Greek and Latin classics, rhetoric, and poetry were just a few.