Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Allen’s house, stable, and carriage house were soon aflame, along with his fish house, barrels of salted fish, and other provisions. His granary, packed with barrels of sugar, casks of nails and tobacco, bolts of linen, and other goods, was torched. Liquor casks were knocked open and molasses mixed in, and raiders made off with the family Bible. The home of Allen’s brother was next; when his sister-in-law and her baby were found inside, Cockburn ordered his men to remove the woman and child, and get on with the destruction. The home and all adjoining buildings were set afire, and the sailors and Royal Marines helped themselves to clothes and food. The destruction continued all around town. Any valuables that could not be carried off were smashed to pieces—desks, bureaus, clocks, and mirrors among them. Beds were cut open and feathers scattered in the wind.

  Before departing to impose the same fate on Georgetown across the river, Cockburn surveyed the damage. The hillsides and harbor were in flames, the town’s tavern, storehouse, three granaries, and most of its seventeen houses destroyed, and smoke from burning farmhouses, ships, warehouses, and shops curled through the sky. “This will do,” Cockburn told his officers.

  Then the admiral turned to Allen. “How do you like the war now?” he asked.

  They did not like it much, neither Allen nor many other Americans. Congressman Charles J. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, traveling to the capital soon after the attacks, encountered universal rage wherever he passed. “On my way from Philadelphia to Washington, I found the whole country excited by these depredations,” Ingersoll wrote. “Cockburn’s name was on every tongue, with various particulars of his incredibly coarse and blackguard misconduct.”

  Writing to her cousin Edward Coles on May 13, First Lady Dolley Madison described the uproar over Cockburn’s attacks and the “terror and reproach” that he would visit Washington next. The first lady told her cousin that the government had discovered a British plot to sneak a raiding party to burn the president’s house. “I do not tremble at this, but feel affronted that the Admiral (of Havre de Grace memory) should send me notis that he would make his bow at my Drawing room soon,” she wrote.

  As far as Cockburn was concerned, the sacks of Frenchtown, Havre de Grace, Fredericktown, and Georgetown had quite salutary benefits. “These examples had their intended effect, and during the future operations in this country, the American Inhabitants did not again offer irritating or useless resistance,” he wrote.

  Cockburn was ruthless, but not vicious. He was cruel, but not for cruelty’s sake. Cockburn was practicing a form of total warfare a half century before William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea. His goal was simple: Destroy the country’s will to fight. He wanted to inflict so much damage to the rich country around the seat of government that the Madison administration would find it impossible, politically or militarily, to continue the war, much less send troops to attack Canada.

  It would not be hard, Cockburn believed—it was already obvious the charm of war had vanished for the Americans. “How anxious they are to have an end of this foolish mad war which they rushed so headlong into,” he wrote.

  Under Cockburn’s rules, a house that was abandoned meant the owner had joined the militia, and so it was fair game to be torched. If the home owner stayed and showed any resistance, his house could be torched. Those who chose to defend their homes were “guilty of the unnatural sin of protecting their own country,” Frederick Chamier, a midshipman on the expedition, later wrote. Cockburn’s men became “consummately skilled in the art of house-burning,” Chamier added.

  Americans in Cockburn’s path were expected to turn over their livestock, tobacco, and any other goods needed by the British; Cockburn considered it “the price of his forbearance to them.” Those who resisted were likely to have food and supplies confiscated; those who agreed would be paid, though sometimes only a nominal amount. The choice was often to sell to the British at the price offered—and risk being labeled a collaborator—or lose the goods, and suffer the home or plantation to be burned.

  Cockburn viewed Americans as naughty children who needed to be taught a lesson. The attitude was reflected in the derisive British nickname for the Americans: Jonathan, the simple-minded, wayward brother of John Bull. “My ideas of managing Jonathan, is by never giving way to him,” Cockburn told Cochrane.

  Cockburn had a firm sense of moral rectitude, operating under a particular code of conduct. He considered it “dastardly” when Americans in hiding took potshots at his troops. Any farm, house, or town allowing it was to be stormed and its occupants taken prisoner, likely to be shipped to Halifax and perhaps never to return home.

  Cockburn respected bravery. Personal pleas from women—especially if they were good-looking or showed any spunk—appealed to his sense of gallantry. At Georgetown, on the Eastern Shore, when Catherine “Kitty” Knight—a tall beauty who in younger days had turned George Washington’s head—pleaded for the destruction to stop, a charmed Cockburn relented. “Apparently affected by my appeal, he called his men off, but left the fire burning, saying, ‘Come on boys,’ ” she later said.

  A disappointed sailor struck his boarding axe through the door panel of one of the spared homes, but dutifully followed the admiral back to the ship. Kitty Knight stamped out the fire.

  Bad as it had been in the spring of 1813, the war in the Chesapeake soon grew much uglier. In mid-June, Vice Admiral Warren sailed into the bay with an army regiment and two companies of French prisoners who had been pressed into service with the British. Rendezvousing with Cockburn, Warren planned to attack Norfolk and capture the USS Constellation, which was bottled up at the port by the British blockade. But the attack was poorly planned and badly executed, and the invasion force was repelled at Craney Island, which guarded Norfolk at the mouth of the Elizabeth River. Exultant American defenders poured fire on invasion barges stranded in the mud, capsizing a boat filled with French troops, and, according to British witnesses, shooting down the hapless men as they struggled in the water.

  Three days later, the British exacted a brutal revenge at Hampton, a village across the water from Norfolk but not as strongly defended. A landing force of Royal Marines and army troops routed the militia and captured the town. The French troops—thuggish desperadoes who had either deserted from the French army or been captured by the British during brutal fighting on the Iberian Peninsula—ran wild, raping, robbing, and murdering innocent residents, including the elderly and infirm.

  British officers did little or nothing to stop the rampage, and at least some of them thought it justified. “When our boats were struck, the Americans came down and shot the men swimming in the water; but the brutes got punished for it at Hampton,” a navy officer wrote to a colleague. Though at first they downplayed the incident, more senior British officers were privately mortified. Crimes were committed “for which England ought to blush,” Napier wrote. “Every horror was committed with impunity, rape, murder, pillage: and not a man was punished!” he added. The French troops were shipped to Halifax, never to fight again for England.

  The French troops were under the army’s command, not Cockburn’s, and there is no evidence that he sanctioned the atrocities. Yet Cockburn, like the other British commanders at the scene, bore a measure of responsibility. The admiral did not want a repeat of Hampton, and for his next operation, an attack on American shipping at the fishing village of Ocracoke, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, he ordered officers to ensure that “no mischief shall be done to the unoffending inhabitants.”

  Around the country, in any event, Cockburn was held responsible for the rape of Hampton. Washington feared it might be next. “The affair of Hampton, which I disbelieved until the publication in the Intelligencer, inspires us with a terror we should not otherwise have felt,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith, a friend of the Madisons.

  The panic grew in mid-July 1813, when Warren took ships on a foray up the Potomac River, hoping to so alarm Washington that it would abandon plans for further invasion of Canada.
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br />   American lookouts spotted the British movement, and on the morning of July 15, a messenger arrived in Washington reporting the fleet was in the Potomac. “Alarm guns were fired, and the bells set in motion, and very soon every person in the city was moving,” Elbridge Gerry, Jr., the son of the vice president, wrote in his diary. Francis Scott Key enlisted as a private with the Georgetown Field Artillery, organized by his neighbor, Major George Peter, an accomplished artilleryman who had received his commission from George Washington. But most of the men were, like Key, well-to-do Georgetown gentlemen with little or no military experience. Key was assigned the job of matross, a gunner’s mate responsible for loading and sponging a cannon barrel.

  By evening, the militia had assembled, many in spanking new uniforms, ready to march. Major Peter’s sister-in-law, Martha Peter of Georgetown, who as step-granddaughter of George Washington knew a real soldier when she saw one, was not impressed. “Each new-made officer vied with the other who should put on most finery; expecting, no doubt, by their dazzling appearance, to strike the enemy with dismay,” she wrote.

  The militia marched ten miles to Fort Washington, which commanded the Potomac River from atop a bluff on the Maryland shore. Detachments blocked roads leading from the Potomac. Patrols went out around the clock, scouting for any sign of a British landing. Madison’s cabinet rode down in a sulky to review the troops, who were reported to be “full of ardour and enthusiasm.” Madison, seriously ill with a bilious fever, remained at the president’s house under Dolley’s care. In Washington, men too old to march with the militia formed volunteer companies to patrol the streets each evening.

  Aboard his flagship HMS San Domingo in the Potomac, Warren was pleased to hear the British approach had caused “much confusion” in Washington. But upon reaching the Kettle Bottom Shoals, about halfway from the bay to the capital, the ever-cautious admiral concluded that his heavy, gun-laden ships could not pass through the dangerous shallow waters. On July 21, the fleet turned around.

  The threat had passed. The militia proudly marched back to Washington, where they were greeted with cheers and dinner parties. Madison and his cabinet were pleased the militia had shown they could protect the capital from the British threat. After some final flourishes, Cockburn and most of the British fleet sailed in September 1813 for Bermuda, where they would refit and rest for the winter. Washington settled into complacency.

  His eyes “were windows to a mind that Thomas Jefferson, his closest friend, considered unrivalled in the land.”

  James Madison in 1817.

  CHAPTER 2

  Laid in Ashes

  Rear Admiral George Cockburn returned to the Chesapeake Bay in February 1814 with one overriding conviction: Washington must be taken.

  A new commander-in-chief was en route who would likely be very interested in Cockburn’s ideas. The Admiralty in London had recalled the lethargic Vice Admiral Warren as commander of the North American Station in November and replaced him with Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, an expert on amphibious warfare and an inveterate hater of America.

  After arriving in Bermuda and taking command on April 1, Cochrane issued his subordinate a carte blanche. “You are at perfect liberty as soon as you can muster a sufficient force, to act with the utmost hostility against the shores of the United States,” Cochrane wrote. “Their sea port towns laid in ashes & the country wasted will be some sort of a retaliation for their savage conduct in Canada; where they have destroyed our towns, in the most inclement seasons of the year; it is therefore but just, that retaliation shall be made near to the seat of their government from whence those orders emanated.”

  Cochrane was referring to an infamous incident on the Niagara frontier in December 1813, when American troops had burned the town of Newark (modern Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), leaving some four hundred civilians homeless in the dead of winter. Moreover, eight months before that, on April 27, 1813, rampaging American troops acting without orders had looted York, the capital of Upper Canada, and were blamed by the British for burning the provincial parliament.

  Cockburn had, of course, been laying seaports in ashes and wasting the country for some time now. Havre de Grace, Frenchtown, Fredericktown, and Georgetown had been destroyed almost exactly a year earlier, well before the British in the Chesapeake had heard anything about the nearly concurrent sack of York, and eight months before Newark was burned. Now, however, Cockburn had official sanction, and henceforth the British would claim that their actions in the Chesapeake were in retaliation for American actions in Canada.

  Cochrane was eager to make a “considerable” attack in the Chesapeake to force the Americans to divert troops from Canada. He was expecting reinforcements from Europe but was unsure of how many or when they would arrive. He remained in Bermuda for months anxiously awaiting more information, unsure where to attack.

  Cockburn suffered no doubts as to his course of action. He had learned a great deal from the 1813 campaign, all pointing to the conclusion that the American capital could be captured with ease. He laid the groundwork, confident he could persuade the new chief when the time came. “The Rear-admiral had, from the commencement of his operations, always fixed an eye of peculiar interest upon Washington,” Lieutenant James Scott, Cockburn’s aide, later wrote. “It had been the concentrated object of his thoughts and actions; every measure he adopted was more or less remotely connected, conceived, and carried into execution, as affording preliminary steps to the final accomplishment of the grand ultimatum of his exertions.”

  Cockburn selected Tangier Island, an isolated fishing village with a deepwater harbor in the middle of the Chesapeake, to build a major British base. From its central location, the British could monitor the enemy and launch operations on either shore of the Chesapeake. Not incidentally, Tangier was within easy sail of both the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, ideal for an attack on Washington.

  Sailors and Royal Marines began building a fort at the southern end of the island, clearing beautiful stands of wild cherry trees, pines, and cedars. Parson Joshua Thomas, an evangelical Methodist who preached on the island, approached the imperial Cockburn and stammered out a plea to save a grove of tall pines used for prayer meetings. “And who are you?” Cockburn asked sharply.

  “I told him, with my hat in my hand, that I was a ‘sinner saved by grace,’ ” Thomas later recalled. Cockburn’s face took on “an air of solemnity,” and he issued orders to spare the grove.

  By late spring, the base was largely constructed. Fort Albion, as it was named, was a little piece of England, with a church and twenty houses laid out in streets, a hospital large enough to treat a hundred patients, barracks for a thousand men, storehouses, parade grounds, vegetable gardens, meadows for cattle, and a burial ground. The spared pine grove in the midst of the fort became a favored spot, catching breezes off the water and “giving life and pleasure to the languid.” The romance of the place was lost on the sailors and Royal Marines, many of whom—Cockburn included—became ill with flux when well water turned brackish. The men also complained of “myriads of mosquitoes,” but Cockburn insisted they were no worse at Tangier than anywhere else in the bay.

  Fort Albion witnessed the birth of a new fighting force of escaped slaves, the Corps of Colonial Marines. Cockburn distributed a thousand copies of a proclamation Cochrane had issued from Bermuda inviting slaves in the Chesapeake region to join with the British, either to fight against their former masters or to settle in Canada or the West Indies.

  The Union Jack flew high over Fort Albion, establishing British dominion over the bay and serving as a beacon for escaping slaves, who flooded in as word of the British proclamation spread. At night, British barges went to prearranged meeting spots to pick up slaves willing to join. In one night, more than 140 slaves escaped. It was a perilous venture for the slaves—if caught, they risked execution or being sold out of state. Others likely perished when their canoes or rafts drifted to sea.

  Ezekiel Loney, a twenty-seven-year-old s
lave on Virginia’s Northern Neck, saw his chance when four British barges came up the Rappahannock River and appeared off the Corotoman plantation just after sunrise on April 20. The panicked overseer of the plantation grabbed his belongings, gathered the livestock, and fled, directing the slaves to hide in the woods. Returning an hour later, the chagrined overseer discovered that Loney and two other slaves “had gone off to the British.” The three men were soon on their way to Tangier.

  About two hundred enlisted to fight their former masters, among them Loney. Sergeant William Hammond, a tough and veteran Royal Marine, taught the former slaves the basics of marching and weaponry. By the time the fine April weather had turned into a hot and sultry May, the men had been issued Royal Marine red jackets and were ready to fight. Loney had shown enough promise to be promoted to corporal.

  Cockburn, who had been skeptical of how useful the Colonial Marines would be, found their skill as soldiers “astonishing” and soon was their staunchest advocate. They “are really very fine fellows,” he wrote Cochrane May 10. “[T]hey have induced me to alter the bad opinion I had of the whole of their race & I now really believe these we are training, will neither shew want of zeal or courage when employed by us in attacking their old masters.”

  At their first test, the Colonial Marines proved Cockburn correct, landing in a shower of grapeshot—cast-iron balls the size of golf balls, packed in a bag, which spread like shotgun pellets—while assaulting a militia battery May 29 at Pungoteague, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. “[T]hough one of them was shot & died instantly in the front of the others … it did not daunt or check the others in the least but on the contrary animated them to seek revenge,” Cockburn reported. To mark their bravery, Cockburn presented the proud Colonials with a six-pound field piece captured at the battle.