Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Cockburn barely had time to reacquaint himself with his wife, Mary, and their now four-year-old daughter, Augusta, at their home in Cavendish Square, London, before he was called back to duty for a special assignment: “the perfectly secure detention of the person of general Bonaparte,” and his removal to one of remotest places on the planet, the windswept island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, 4,600 miles from England. There could be no repeat of Elba. The prince regent had personally approved Cockburn’s selection, depending “on the well known zeal and resolute character of sir Geo. Cockburn, that he will not suffer himself to be misled imprudently to deviate from the performance of his duty,” wrote Lord Bathurst, the war secretary.

  Cockburn was unruffled by the task. “You may depend on my taking care of the common disturber,” he assured London.

  Meeting with Cockburn, Napoleon bitterly protested his exile, having expected to live “in tranquility” in England, but Cockburn had none of it. “We did not think it necessary to enter into the merits of the question with him,” wrote Cockburn. Napoleon was likewise “extremely indignant” to have his entourage’s baggage examined before it was allowed on board Northumberland, but Cockburn ignored the protests, confiscating weapons, as well as four thousand gold napoleons to be held by the British government.

  The admiral and the former emperor were soon locked in psychological battle. “It is clear he is still inclined to act the sovereign occasionally; but I cannot allow it and the sooner therefore he becomes convinced it is not to be admitted, the better,” Cockburn wrote in his diary of the voyage.

  Napoleon walked the deck of the ship bareheaded, expecting the English officers to remove their hats. “Observing this, I made a point of putting my hat on immediately,” Cockburn wrote. His officers followed suit, and Napoleon “seemed considerably piqued,” Cockburn noted with satisfaction. Every night, Cockburn sat next to Napoleon for dinner and listened bemusedly to Napoleon’s extravagant accounts of his wars, from the failed Russian campaign to his foiled hopes to conquer India. Cockburn was particularly interested when Napoleon mentioned he would have lent the United States “any number” of ships-of-the-line to fight Britain, but Madison had never asked for help. Cockburn and Napoleon followed their dinners with long walks on the deck, their conversations sometimes “free and pleasant” and other times under “a frank strain.”

  Cockburn was not overly impressed with Napoleon, considering him to be hypocritical and often irrational, as well as an accomplished liar. “[O]n the score of talent, he was an ordinary character,” he later said. Still, the admiral took care to make sure Napoleon was comfortable, in keeping with the prince regent’s instructions. They had not sailed far before Cockburn realized he was short one critical supply. “I find General Bonaparte and all his suite drink great quantities of claret which my present stock will perhaps not be adequate to maintain,” Cockburn wrote. He sent one of the ships escorting the expedition to fetch sixty cases.

  After seventy-two days at sea, Northumberland sighted St. Helena on October 15. Cockburn alerted Napoleon, who took a spyglass and dourly scanned the brown and gray wall of volcanic rock rising 2,500 feet from the sea. Once on the island, an aide to Napoleon complained that the temporary accommodations in Jamestown were not adequate for the emperor. “I have no cognizance of any Emperor being actually upon this island,” Cockburn replied.

  Cockburn set up the strictest security across the island. Boats patrolled the coast, sentries manned checkpoints, troops enforced curfews, and the admiral received reports twice a day of Napoleon’s exact whereabouts. The former emperor was not going to escape on Cockburn’s watch.

  After turning charge of Napoleon over to Lieutenant General Sir Hudson Lowe, Cockburn sailed for England in June 1816. Napoleon was relieved to see the admiral leave, describing Cockburn in terms not unlike those Cockburn used to describe him: “He is not a man of a bad heart; on the contrary I believe him to be capable of a generous action; but he is rough, overbearing, vain, choleric, and capricious; never consulting anybody; jealous of his authority; caring little of the manner in which he exercises it, and sometimes violent without dignity.”

  Still, Napoleon compared him favorably to Lowe, who would remain in charge until Napoleon’s death in 1821. “Cockburn was at least straightforward and sincere,” said Napoleon. “He was a man—an Englishman.”

  Returning to England, Cockburn found his fame assured, both as the man who burned Washington and the man who escorted Napoleon to exile. He would soon reach the highest levels of the Royal Navy.

  As first lord of the Admiralty and a Tory member in the House of Commons, Cockburn enjoyed holding other government officials in fear and awe. Cockburn was unconcerned by the notoriety of the Chesapeake campaign—to the contrary, his portrait displayed at the Royal Academy showed him standing proudly before the burning American capital, shrouded by black smoke, one hand resting on his hip, the other on his sword.

  Nearly two decades after the war ended, Cockburn sailed once again for American waters, assigned in 1833 as commander-in-chief of the North American Station. In the face of rising American power in the Western Hemisphere, Cockburn’s return was a not-so-subtle reminder of the continued reach of Great Britain. Nor was the ship Cockburn chose for his flag without irony: the 52–gun President. “My Friend Jonathan,” Cockburn wrote, unable to resist the old derisive nickname for the Americans, was “very quietly and friendly disposed toward us.”

  Cockburn served a second stint as first naval lord in the 1840s, overseeing the Royal Navy’s transition from sailing ships to steam and screw technology. After retiring as first naval lord in 1846, he was promoted in 1851 to admiral of the fleet by Queen Victoria.

  Two years later, while visiting the Royal Leamington Spa with Lady Cockburn and their daughter, Augusta, to take the waters, Cockburn suffered a major heart attack on August 19, 1853. The “Wellington of the Navy,” as the local journal called him, died at age eighty-two.

  Cockburn was “one of the ablest and most distinguished officers that ever wore the Royal naval uniform,” wrote The Nautical Standard in London. “He became a scourge, as his name became a terror, to the United States,” the United Services Magazine, an English military journal, wrote admiringly. “Here, he carried everything before him.”

  The admiral was remembered with less affection in the United States, where the Star and Banner of Gettysburg reported his death with some satisfaction. “No biography is needed [to] tell Americans of the character of a man, who, whatever may be the estimate of his valor in England, has secured an immortality of infamy by his cruelties in Chesapeake Bay during the last war between this country and Great Britain.”

  Elizabeth Ross’s terrible premonitions had come true, and upon her husband’s death, she left England and returned to the family estate in Rostrevor to raise their two young sons and daughter. Despite her grief, Ross had the presence of mind to request an unusual honor. Writing to Lord Bathurst in 1815, she suggested it would be “most gratifying” if the prince regent granted the family permission to add the title “of Bladensburg” to her children’s names. The prince regent agreed, and the title Ross of Bladensburg, “unique among official distinctions of commoner families,” was bestowed.

  In Rostrevor, the local nobility and gentry joined with Ross’s former officers in 1826 to raise a hundred-foot-high granite obelisk on a hill with a majestic view overlooking the waters of Carlingford Lough, an arm of the Irish Sea. By the mid-twentieth century, the memorial had fallen into neglect. During the years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, some feared the memorial to a British army officer might be blown up by Irish Republicans, as happened in 1966 to Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin. But the local government council refurbished and reopened the monument in 2009, preparing for the two-hundredth anniversary of Ross’s death in 2014.

  Ross himself remains in a tomb in the old burying ground of St. Paul’s Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an ocean from home.

  Elizabeth Ro
ss’s terrible premonitions had come true.

  Memorial to Robert Ross erected by his officers and citizens of his hometown of Rostrevor.

  Sir Alexander Cochrane escaped any official sanction for the disaster at New Orleans, though he “should have been tried by court-martial and shot,” in the view of British army historian John Fortescue, who accused the admiral of callously sacrificing troops for the purpose of “filling his own pockets” with the loot he hoped to capture. Wellington blamed Cochrane for the death of his brother-in-law, General Pakenham. “I cannot but regret that he was ever employed on such a service or with such a colleague,” Wellington lamented.

  As predicted by his American friends, the unstoppable Colonel William Thornton eventually won promotion to major general in 1825 and was knighted in 1836. But Thornton never fully recovered from the multiple wounds he had received at Bladensburg and New Orleans, and becoming “subject to delusions,” he shot himself in 1840.

  Two of Ross’s officers—Harry Smith and George De Lacy Evans—“were to grow into the most accomplished British generals of the coming half century,” in the view of one British historian. In India, Smith won a decisive victory over the Sikhs at the Battle of Aliwal in 1846, and in South Africa, he served as governor of the Cape Colony, where his much-beloved Spanish bride, Juana, gave her name to the town of Ladysmith.

  Evans, though seriously wounded at New Orleans, returned to Europe in time to fight at Waterloo. His army career would span nearly a half century, including as a field commander in the Crimean War. Evans reacted sharply to the publication of the Historical Memoirs of Sir George Cockburn in 1828, with its insinuation that the admiral, not Ross, had directed the capture of Washington; most blamed the editor for the slights to the general, though the account is clearly based on Cockburn’s handwritten “Memoir of Service.” Evans wrote a response maintaining that the admiral had accompanied Ross’s army to Washington “only as a volunteer.” Cockburn and Evans, the two men most responsible for Ross’s decision to capture Washington and attack Baltimore, are buried within a stone’s throw of each other at the atmospheric Kensal Green Cemetery in west London.

  Lieutenant George Gleig, after finishing his studies at Oxford, served thirty years as chaplain-general of the army. The publication of his memoirs about the campaign for Washington, Baltimore, and New Orleans launched a prolific literary career. Gleig died in 1888 at age ninety-two, possibly the last surviving member of the remarkable little army that captured Washington.

  The estimated 3,000 to 5,000 former slaves from the Chesapeake who fled to the British seeking their freedom met mixed fates. The majority of the slaves who did not enlist to fight were sent to Nova Scotia. More than 2,000 were left standing on the docks in Halifax in the early months of 1815, with no money and little clothing, and they shivered through their first winter in deplorable condition. Hundreds died of disease or poverty. Some scratched out lives as farmers or servants, eventually establishing themselves in communities where their descendants still live. Other former slaves went to the West Indies, where, it was alleged, some were sold back into slavery.

  The Colonial Marines had better control over their destinies. After the war ended, the six companies of former slaves were garrisoned in Bermuda for fourteen months, helping build a new Royal Navy dockyard. The British, eager to keep the services of the reliable Colonials, wanted to transfer them into the army’s West India regiments. But the Colonials refused; they had done their service and wanted to live as free men. The British offered to send them to settle as independent farmers on Trinidad, the British colony off the coast of South America.

  About seven hundred Colonial Marines arrived in Trinidad in August 1816, and though they formally disbanded, they organized villages based by military company, each supervised by a former sergeant. They proudly identified themselves as Americans and were soon known colloquially as “the Merikens.”

  Among them was Sergeant Ezekiel Loney, the young slave who had escaped from Virginia’s Northern Neck in the summer of 1814 and fought at Washington and Baltimore. Loney married, had children, and remained part of the thriving community of company villages that still exist. Nearly two hundred years later, in 2009, some of Loney’s descendants traveled from Trinidad to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake, where the Colonials had trained. The waters of the bay had long since claimed Fort Albion, which lay submerged off the southern coast of the island. The family members said prayers and poured libations, and the children cast origami boats made of rice paper into the water.

  The community of Colonial Marine descendants, said Tina Dunkley, one of the Loney family members who made the journey, is an “extraordinary testament to the intrepidness of thousands of enslaved Africans who vied for their liberation under the most daunting conditions.”

  The capture of Washington by the British took its place as one of the boldest military feats of the age. “The world was astonished to see a handful of seven or eight thousand Englishmen making their appearance in the midst of a state embracing ten millions of people, taking possession of its capital, and destroying all the public buildings, results unparalleled in history,” the Baron de Jomini wrote in his classsic, The Art of War.

  Cockburn, for his part, displayed no false modesty about the operation, later describing it as a “hostile tour in the heart of the enemy’s country which for the extent of ground passed over, the importance of its objects, and the mischief done the enemy, ashore, and afloat, in so short a space of time, is scarcely perhaps to be paralleled.”

  But what, in the end, had the Chesapeake campaign accomplished for the British? American troops were not diverted from Canada, as London had expected. Cockburn’s raids did leave Americans disgusted with their government’s failure to defend the homeland, but they sparked an even greater fury at the British. Beyond that, Cockburn and Ross had hoped the capture of Washington would bring down Madison’s government and force the United States to sue for peace on British terms. Had Baltimore fallen, their remarkable venture may well have succeeded. Instead, the reversal turned the tables, as the British faced growing pressure to make peace.

  “We should have been saved from that success, a thousand times more disgraceful and disastrous than the worst defeat,” Sir James Mackintosh, the Scottish historian and Whig parliamentarian, said during the debate on the Treaty of Ghent. “It was a success which made our naval power hateful and alarming to all Europe; which gave the hearts of the American people to every enemy who might rise against England; an enterprise which most exasperated a people, and least weakened a government of any recorded in the annals of war.”

  WASHINGTON, JANUARY 1, 1818

  New Year’s Day dawned sunny and pleasant in Washington, ideal weather for the public debut of the rebuilt President’s House. The mansion’s black burns and cracked stone were now covered by coats of white lead paint, better suited to hide the scars of war than the whitewash used prior to the British attack. Though the building was far from finished, some three thousand guests tromped through the house over raw yellow pine floorboards covered with carpets.

  President James Monroe graciously greeted the visitors who packed the house for three hours. “It was gratifying to be able once more to salute the President of the United States with the compliments of the season in his appropriate residence,” the Intelligencer wrote. Monroe had been so eager to move in after taking office in 1817 that he took up residency long before the mansion was ready, living for months amid hammering, sawing, painting, and varnishing.

  Monroe wanted to restore the presidency as a symbol of unity, with a rebuilt President’s House at its center. He and his regal wife, Elizabeth, shared a taste for elegance acquired from his diplomatic days in Paris in the late 1790s, and they brought French decorative arts and furniture to the mansion.

  Monroe’s eight-year presidency would be regarded as a great success, a period of peace, prosperity, and nonpartisanship that became known as the “Era of Good Feelings.” Monroe was able to point to th
e war as a triumph. “It has been said that our Union, and system of government, would not bear such a trial,” Monroe said. “The result has proved the imputation to be entirely destitute of foundation.… [O]ur Union has gained strength, our troops honor, and the nation character, by the contest.”

  James Madison, so reviled and ridiculed after the fall of Washington, left office riding a wave of goodwill and nationalism when he passed the torch of the Virginia dynasty to Monroe. “Not withstanding a thousand faults and blunders, his administration has acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all his three predecessors, Washington, Adams and Jefferson, put together,” John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson.

  The year 1814 had been a turning point in American history. It began with the United States facing great peril in its war with one of the world’s great powers. The country’s coasts were blockaded, its treasury was depleted, and some in New England were in favor of dissolving the union. When Washington fell in late August, the outlook could not have been bleaker.

  But just a few months later, by the war’s conclusion in February 1815, the outlook was very different. By many measures, the United States had lost the war. The invasions of Canada had ended in disgrace, and from a military standpoint, the U.S. Army’s history concedes, the war “at best … was a draw.”

  Yet the circumstances of the war’s end created a different sense in America. The chain of victories in the final months of the war, including Baltimore and Plattsburgh, proved the United States capable of stopping mighty Great Britain, and allowed the American delegation at Ghent to escape with far better terms than what could have been expected when negotiations commenced in August. The final triumph at New Orleans was so one-sided that it created a lasting belief in America that the United States had won the war.