Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  For two hours, both delegations painstakingly examined and corrected copies of the peace treaty, which were read aloud to make sure each was precisely the same. 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 problem now was to get three copies to Washington as fast and safely as possible. Usually, signing a peace treaty ended a war. But at the insistence of the British, the nations would remain at war until both ratified the treaty. Three times previously, to Britain’s great annoyance, the United States had insisted on changes to signed treaties. “Even if peace is signed I shall not be surprised if Madison endeavours to play us some trick in the ratification of it,” Liverpool had warned. Bathurst told General Pakenham before he departed for New Orleans that “hostilities should not be suspended until you shall have official information that the President has actually ratified the treaty.”

  One of three American copies of the treaty would be sent with Charles Hughes, who would sail from France. Henry Carroll, Clay’s private secretary, would leave for England to seek passage across the ocean with the second copy. A third would be sent via ship from Amsterdam. Anthony St. John Baker, the British secretary, rushed to London with the three British copies. After the prince regent ratified the treaty December 27, Baker set sail for America a few days later aboard the British sloop-of-war Favourite, which also carried Carroll.

  John Quincy Adams thought the American commissioners would be “censured and reproached” at home for the terms of the treaty. Nonetheless, before going to bed on Christmas Eve, Adams offered a prayer of thanks in his diary. “I cannot close the record of the day,” he wrote, “without a humble offering of gratitude to God for the conclusion to which it has pleased him to bring the negotiations for peace at this place.”

  WASHINGTON, JANUARY AND FEBRUARY 1815

  In the New Year, Washington anxiously awaited news of the British assault in the Gulf of Mexico. “The fate of N. Orleans will be known to day—on which so much depends,” Dolley wrote on January 14 to Hannah Gallatin.

  But no word arrived that day, and a week later, when the young visiting scholar George Ticknor attended a dinner at the Octagon hosted by the Madisons, the city was still in the dark. The twenty guests, including some congressmen and army officers, among them William Winder, stood about awkwardly before dinner was served, despite Dolley’s efforts at polite talk. A servant whispered in the ear of Madison, who immediately left the room, followed by his secretary, Edward Coles. The southern mail had arrived, perhaps with word from New Orleans.

  “The President soon returned, with added gravity, and said that there was no news! Silence ensued,” Ticknor wrote to his father. “No man seemed to know what to say at such a crisis, and, I suppose, from the fear of saying what might not be acceptable.”

  Finally, on February 4, news arrived of a tremendous victory at New Orleans. Major General Andrew Jackson’s army had repulsed a British attack, inflicting enormous casualties on the enemy and forcing their retreat. A happy crowd gathered that night on Pennsylvania Avenue, which was illuminated by torches and candles in windows. At Fort McHenry the next day, Armistead ordered the guns fired once again from the ramparts in salute.

  The celebration paled in comparison to the one ten days later. On February 13, rumors of peace swirled into Washington like a fresh breeze. The city waited in suspense until late afternoon on February 14, when a coach pulled by four foaming steeds thundered down Pennsylvania Avenue. Inside, Henry Carroll held a copy of the treaty he had brought by ship to New York and then by stagecoach to Washington. Cheering crowds followed the carriage as it picked up Secretary of State Monroe at his residence on I Street and continued to the Octagon. There the rest of the cabinet joined Madison and Monroe to carefully review the document. Soon after nightfall, members of Congress and citizens gathered at the house. When Joseph Gales, the editor of the Intelligencer, showed up around 8 p.m., he found the drawing room filled with people anticipating an announcement of peace.

  While Madison was tucked away with the cabinet in the round study on the second floor, Dolley presided over the festivities below, exchanging congratulations with well-wishers. “[T]he most conspicuous object in the room, the observed of all observers, was Mrs. Madison herself, then in the meridian of life and queenly beauty,” wrote Gales. He was invited to the study, where the cabinet members sat with “subdued joy” written on their faces. Even the prim Madison had a “sportive tone” as he announced the results of their deliberations: The treaty had been received and would in all likelihood be accepted.

  Dolley’s cousin, Sally Coles, came to the head of the stairs, crying “Peace! Peace!” and instructed John Freeman, the butler, to dole out wine liberally to all. “I played the President’s March on the violin, [Jean-Pierre Sioussat] and some others were drunk for two days, and such another joyful time was never seen in Washington,” Paul Jennings, the president’s servant, later wrote. Madison and his cabinet, Jennings hastened to add, “were as pleased as any, but did not show their joy in this manner.”

  The next morning, the Senate convened at the Patent Office to consider the treaty, and on February 16 voted 35–0 in favor of ratification. Madison sat at a circular mahogany table in the Octagon’s round study that day and signed the treaty. At 11 p.m., Monroe exchanged ratified copies of the treaty with St. John Baker, the British secretary, who had arrived from New York. The treaty was binding.

  On February 18, Madison sent a message to Congress calling the conclusion of the war “highly honorable to the nation” and marked by “the most brilliant successes.”

  “The late war,” Madison continued, “although reluctantly declared by Congress, had become a necessary resort to assert the rights and independence of the nation.” In that, the president said, it had succeeded. Now that peace had come, Madison added with a tone of hopefulness, “the nation can review its conduct without regret and without reproach.”

  GULF OF MEXICO, FEBRUARY 1815

  Word of Ghent arrived in the Gulf of Mexico a month after the disastrous Battle of New Orleans, carrying with it the air of defeat for what was left of the British expeditionary force. “I cannot help viewing the terms of this peace as discreditable to the country, and I feel it the more since our failure at New Orleans,” Codrington wrote. The scale of the defeat was unimaginable for the British. “There never was a more complete failure,” he told his wife.

  The New Orleans campaign, with more than two thousand British casualties, had taken a heavy toll on the men who had captured Washington. Navy Lieutenant George Pratt, who had directed the firing of President’s House, was riddled with musket balls and killed during a gunboat battle on December 14 for control of Lake Borgne, east of New Orleans.

  The British army paid an especially heavy price during the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, and the battalions that had fought in the Chesapeake, which by dint of their experience were chosen to lead the attack, suffered many of the casualties. The 44th Foot had been assigned to carry bundles of cane stalks and ladders to enable the follow-on troops to cross a ditch and scale the ramparts protecting the American line at the Rodriguez Canal. But Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Mullins, leading the 44th, botched the job and the materials were left behind, throwing the entire attack into confusion and leaving the troops to be mowed down by the American line. The 4th Foot and 21st Fusiliers were “exposed to a sweeping fire which cut them down by whole companies,” recalled Lieutenant Gleig. “They fell by the hands of men whom they absolutely did not see.”

  Captain Harry Smith, who had arrived from England with Pakenham and the reinforcements on Christmas Day, watched the general gallop forward into “the most murderous and destructive fire.” Within minutes, Pakenham was cut down and lay dying. Trying to rally the attack, Major General Sir Samuel Gibbs was killed, and Major General Sir John Keane seriously wounded.

  Colonel William Thornton nearly turned the tide of the battl
e by capturing an American battery on the opposite side of the Mississippi. Jackson feared his victory might be lost if the British were able to turn the guns on the American line across the river. But with Pakenham’s force decimated, Major General John Lambert, the senior British commander still on the field, ordered Thornton to retreat.

  Including Ross, the British had lost three generals and a fourth incapacitated since the attack on Baltimore. “It is certainly a fault in these Peninsular Generals—their exposing themselves as they do,” Codrington chided in the letter to his wife.

  Following the British army’s defeat at New Orleans, Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane attempted to attack the city by sailing up the Mississippi, but the Royal Navy could not get past Fort St. Philip, thirty miles downriver from the city. British forces withdrew nine days after the battle. Sailing east along the Gulf Coast, the British captured Fort Bowyer on February 11 and were threatening nearby Mobile when news of the treaty arrived.

  Cochrane “seems most amazingly cast down by this peace,” Rear Admiral Codrington wrote his wife. Cochrane anxiously sailed for the Chesapeake, hoping to attack Baltimore or other eastern cities if Madison rejected the peace. But on March 7, as the fleet approached Georgia to rendezvous with Admiral Cockburn, Cochrane learned from a passing American schooner that the treaty had been ratified.

  Codrington, for one, was ready to go home. “I would give all my share in the harvest of prize-money to be now making sail for dear old England,” he told his wife.

  CUMBERLAND ISLAND, GEORGIA, MARCH 1815

  Rather than sulk at being left out of the New Orleans expedition, George Cockburn had seized the opportunity to operate free from Cochrane’s fickle decisions. After departing Bermuda and collecting the remaining British force from the Chesapeake in December, he had sailed south. In January, his forces seized Cumberland Island, Georgia, which Cockburn intended to use as a base to terrorize the southeast coast, including Charleston and Savannah. But a note arrived from Cochrane about January 20 with the stunning news of New Orleans—“a reverse so little expected,” Cockburn called it.

  Nonetheless, he seemed little discouraged. From his headquarters in Dungeness House, the grandest home on the island, he pursued an ambitious scheme to form an alliance with the Creek Indian confederation and encourage them to rise up against the Americans. Cockburn relished the thought of the fright such an alliance would create. “I think the savage Cockburn, as I am termed among my Yankee neighbors, when joined by the Indians will create no small consternation in the country,” he wrote to the Admiralty on January 28.

  Cockburn fortified the island and launched work on an immense wharf. He recruited more escaped slaves for the Colonial Marines from plantations along the coast, and as many as 1,700 slaves descended on the British. Cockburn contented himself with raids on St. Simons and Jekyll islands while he prepared to attack Savannah and Charleston. But on February 25, an American officer under a flag of truce brought word that a peace treaty had been signed.

  Cockburn was incredulous. “That Jonathan should have been so easily let out of the cloven stick in which I thought we so securely had him I sincerely lament,” he wrote to Captain Edmund Palmer, the captain of Hebrus.

  The senior American commander in the region proposed suspending hostilities. Cockburn declined, awaiting word of the treaty’s ratification, but he took no more offensive action. He made good use of the time, sending ships loaded with prize goods to Bermuda and taking in more escaped slaves. Then a Swedish cruiser arrived from England with the deflating news that the British prince regent had ratified the treaty. “This peace … has knocked all my schemes on the head and I suppose I shall soon have official notification on this subject from Washington,” Cockburn wrote.

  The Americans sent official word of Washington’s ratification on March 2. Cockburn agreed to end hostilities, but he did not stop loading booty. When a delegation of Americans arrived March 5 seeking the return of property as stipulated by the treaty, the admiral was not helpful. The Americans produced as evidence a copy of the treaty as printed in the National Intelligencer, but Cockburn was disdainful, insisting that the newspaper was not an authoritative document.

  The Americans also demanded the return of their slaves, as specified by the treaty. But Cockburn refused to turn over slaves unless they wanted to leave, and few did. Consulting Blackstone’s legal reference, Cockburn argued that slaves became free the moment they arrived on British soil, and that a British ship of war qualified as such. But five escaped slaves who had enlisted in the Colonial Marines after the treaty was ratified were handed back, as Cockburn concluded they should not have been taken.

  Cockburn evacuated Cumberland Island on March 18, quitting American soil. When he arrived in Bermuda on March 28, he learned he had been nominated in England as a knight commander of the military order of the Bath.

  On April 8, Cockburn issued his last orders to the fleet, saluting his men for their “invariably cheerful, gallant and steady behavior.” With that, the admiral abandoned the waters of North America and, after a two-and-a-half-year absence, set sail aboard Albion for England.

  WASHINGTON, MARCH 1815

  Cockburn and the British had done Washington a great service, some residents had come to believe. “The burning of the public buildings in Washington is the best thing that has happened in a long time, as far as we are concerned, since this has finally settled the question of whether the seat of government would stay here,” Rosalie Stier Calvert wrote to her sister. “In the future they will no longer keep trying to change it, and as long as the union of states stands, the government will remain in Washington, despite the jealousy of Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore.”

  Before word of peace arrived, Congress had debated whether Washington should be rebuilt on a smaller, less grandiose scale. Laws “need not be enacted in a palace,” argued Senator Eligius Fromentin of Louisiana, who proposed a plain, functional building to replace the Capitol. But the Senate voted 20–13 to restore the federal city as it was. On February 13, Madison signed legislation authorizing the government to borrow a half million dollars to rebuild the President’s House, the Capitol, and other public buildings.

  “We are under great obligation to the British who burnt our buildings, for the Congress determined to repair them, & have given perfect confidence now by having voted half a million of dollars for this end,” Dr. Thornton wrote to Colonel Thornton.

  With the ratification of the treaty, the reconstruction of Washington began in earnest. James Hoban, the Irish-born designer and builder of the President’s House, was hired to rebuild the mansion, as well as the nearby War and Treasury buildings. Hoban, the foremost builder in Washington, soon had artisans and mechanics hired in good numbers and stonecutters ready to work. Architect Benjamin Latrobe was brought back to oversee the Capitol’s reconstruction, and after inspecting the building, he was relieved to see how much had survived. “The mischief is much more easily repaired than would appear at first sight,” he wrote. Rebuilding was well under way at the Navy Yard, including a new ten-foot-high wall to protect against looters.

  Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington was back in the city. Six weeks after the burning of Washington, businessman Jacob Barker had picked it up at the Maryland farmhouse where he had left it for safekeeping and turned it over to Monroe, who, by Barker’s account, promised to have it varnished and placed in a new frame.

  Ten wagonloads of books were on their way to Washington from Monticello, as Congress had purchased Jefferson’s library for $23,950. They would not regret the decision, Jefferson said, calling it “unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the U.S.; and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.”

  With the arrival of “our glorious peace,” as Dolley Madison termed it, the rancor toward the president had dissipated and the crowds had returned to the first lady’s social gatherings. Though Congress adjourned March 4, “still our house is crowded wi
th company,” she wrote to Hannah Gallatin the following day. “[I]n truth ever since the peace my brain has been turn’d with noise & bustle. Such over flowing rooms I never saw before—I sigh for repose.…”

  Key did not disguise his pride in the song, paraphrasing an old saying that “if he could be allowed to make a nation’s songs, he cared not who made its laws.”

  Francis Scott Key’s original handwritten manuscript of “The Star Spangled Banner”

  EPILOGUE

  At noon on August 7, 1815, a small British cutter came alongside the 74–gun HMS Northumberland, anchored away from public view off Berry Head on the Devonshire coast of England. The short but somewhat heavyset Corsican captive aboard the cutter was instantly recognizable, even had he not been wearing the Grand Croix of the Legion d’Honneur on his left breast. Coming aboard the warship, Napoleon Bonaparte grandly greeted the British officer who was to carry him to his final exile.

  “Here I am, Admiral, at your orders!” If there was any mockery in Napoleon’s tone, Rear Admiral George Cockburn ignored it. Still, Cockburn could hardly disguise his annoyance later that day when Napoleon condescendingly pinched his ear, a habit of Bonaparte’s when he spoke to subordinates. But Napoleon would soon learn who was in charge.

  Returning from America, Cockburn had landed at Spithead on the south coast of England on May 5, 1815. But instead of the peace he had expected, Cockburn found Europe in convulsion. Napoleon had escaped from exile in Elba, reclaimed power in France, and raised a great army. Then on June 18, 1815, an allied force under Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and a month later, the emperor surrendered to the British.