Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  Nonetheless, most Americans, including Madison, realized it had been a narrow escape from a national collapse. The public—especially those living in the Chesapeake region or along the frontier with Canada—was well aware of the failures, but saw survival as victory. That the nation suffered from partisan strife, economic chaos, and poor military leadership, and was led by a president who refused to seize additional executive authority, made it all the more remarkable.

  The Constitution had survived its first great test. American independence and sovereignty had been validated and the Founders’ grand revolutionary experiment preserved. Madison’s refusal to abandon the republican concept of government had been vindicated. “The ultimate good flowing from the disaster which at one moment clouded its prospects … is among the proofs of that spirit in the American people, as a free people, which, rising above adverse events, and even converting them into sources of advantage, is the true safeguard against dangers of every sort,” Madison noted upon leaving office.

  Ghent did not, on paper, address a single goal laid out by the United States in declaring war. Henry Clay considered the agreement “a damned bad treaty” because it ignored free trade and sailors’ rights. Yet in practice, British restrictions on the trading rights of neutral nations and impressments of sailors at sea into the Royal Navy declined dramatically with the end of the Napoleonic Wars. “Although the treaty seemed to have settled none of the issues that had caused the War of 1812, it actually had settled everything,” historian Gordon Wood has observed.

  This Second War of Independence, as many Americans of the day considered it, severed ties with America’s colonial past and represented a definitive end to the American Revolution.

  “I think it will be a long time before we are disturbed again by any of the powers of Europe,” James Bayard wrote to his son on Christmas Day 1814 from Ghent. Within a decade, the Monroe Doctrine warned European nations against any further colonization in America. A grudging respect had been established between the United States and Britain, neither of which would ever again go to war against the other.

  “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given, and which were daily lessening,” Albert Gallatin wrote a year after the treaty was ratified. “The people have now more general objects of attachment, with which their pride and political opinions are connected. They are more American; they feel and act more as a nation; and I hope that the permanency of the Union is thereby better secured.”

  America turned its attention west. Ghent called for an end to all hostilities with Indians and restoring pre-war boundaries, but this proved to be an empty promise. The ambiguous and unenforceable terms of the treaty did not impede the drive west. The Northwest Territory, rather than becoming the buffer envisioned by Britain, was soon carved up into the states of Indiana and Illinois, and later Michigan and Wisconsin.

  What the United States had learned was as important as what it gained. The war’s many failures demonstrated the need for a stronger regular army, including better officers and a superior military academy. The U.S. Navy was launched on a path toward becoming a global force, with steady congressional funding for ships. One troubling lesson was put aside: The war—the Chesapeake campaign in particular—had exposed the military, social, and economic vulnerability of a nation dependent on slavery.

  Three years after Ghent, Madison offered this wishful benediction: “[I]f our first struggle was a war of our infancy, this last was that of our youth, and the issue of both, wisely improved, may long postpone if not forever prevent, a necessity for exerting the strength of our manhood.”

  James Madison would never return to Washington and spent his nineteen remaining years in happy retirement at Montpelier, overseeing the five-thousand-acre plantation, experimenting with agricultural techniques, and consulting with his friend Thomas Jefferson on weather observations. With the aid of Dolley, he spent years creating an enormous record of the Constitutional Convention, believing it would serve “the cause of liberty throughout the world,” and that its publication would provide Dolley a source of income.

  His manservant Paul Jennings, who had accompanied Madison on his flight from Washington, was at his side throughout, particularly as the former president’s health began to fail. On a June morning in 1836, Madison was unable to swallow his breakfast. His niece asked what was wrong. “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear,” Madison replied.

  “His head dropped and he stopped breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out,” Jennings recalled.

  After his death, Dolley moved to Washington, scene of her glory days. She reveled in her role as grande dame of the capital, a familiar presence in her black velvet gown and white satin turban. A stream of callers visited her home across Lafayette Square from the President’s House, which served “like the residence of the Queen dowager.”

  She was careful to ensure that she received credit for saving the portrait of George Washington. Her famous letter dated August 23–24, 1814, often quoted as a contemporaneous account of the capture of Washington, appears to have been written around 1834, when her friend Margaret Bayard Smith asked her to furnish letters and recollections for a book. In 1848, when a controversy erupted over the circumstances of removing the portrait, Dolley wrote to a newspaper explaining why she ordered the servants to save the portrait: “I acted thus because of my respect for General Washington, not that I felt a desire to gain laurels; but, should there be a merit in remaining an hour in danger of life and liberty to save the likeness of anything, the merit in this case belongs to me.”

  In her later years, an economic downturn and crop failures at Montpelier left Dolley in a precarious financial situation, exacerbated by the spending sprees of her wastrel son, Payne Todd. In debt, she was forced to sell Montpelier in 1844. Dolley had promised to free Jennings in her will but instead sold him in 1846. In the last years of Dolley’s life, Jennings would often bring by baskets of goods sent by Senator Daniel Webster, who bought Jennings his freedom. Despite her hard last years, her death in 1849 brought the largest state funeral Washington had ever seen.

  Jennings flourished in freedom, raising a family and working for the Department of the Interior. He owned a home in Washington when he died in 1874, and his descendants still live in the area. In 2009, on the 195th anniversary of the burning of the President’s House, family members visited the White House of President Barack Obama and viewed the portrait of George Washington that Paul Jennings helped save.

  Blame for Bladensburg was assiduously avoided. Madison and Monroe, riding the triumphs of the war’s last months and its happy conclusion at Ghent, escaped with their reputations intact. Secretary of War John Armstrong fought against any responsibility from his exile in New York, where he wrote a bitter memoir blaming Monroe, “this busy and blundering tactician,” for his disastrous movement of the troops before the battle.

  A sympathetic military court of inquiry concluded in 1815 that William Winder warranted no censure for the Bladensburg disgrace, taking “into consideration the complicated difficulties & embarrassments under which he laboured.” Winder resumed his law practice, was elected to the Maryland State Senate, and was nearly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Though everyone seemed to think more highly of Winder when he was out of uniform, there was no escaping the cloud of Bladensburg, which hung about him until his death in 1824.

  Joshua Barney’s last battle was with Congress. Returning to Baltimore during the final months of the war to take command of the flotilla, Barney learned that not only was Congress refusing to compensate his men for their belongings lost when the flotilla was scuttled, but the government had no money for their back pay. “[T]he conduct of Congress to those under my command has been infamous,” Barney fumed. He resigned in disgust but soon returned to duty with a pledge not to “lay down my sword, until death, or a peace such as our country ought to obtain; external enemies or internal traitors, notwithstanding.”
Once peace was ratified, Barney presided over the disestablishment of the Chesapeake flotilla.

  Doctors had been unable to remove the musket ball lodged in his hip at Bladensburg, and he never fully recovered. Nonetheless, Barney was ready for new adventures, and in 1818 he pulled up stakes in Maryland, packed up his family, and headed west to start a new life in Kentucky. But he died en route in Pittsburgh in December 1818 at age fifty-nine, from lingering effects of the wound, possibly including lead poisoning.

  Two centuries after its demise in a noble but futile attempt to defend the nation’s capital, Barney’s flotilla was returning to light.

  Wood trim from boat recovered at the Scorpion excavation on the Patuxent River in 2012.

  For more than a century, the hulks of some of Barney’s flotilla boats remained visible in the mud of the Patuxent River, visited by fishermen, relic hunters, and adventuresome children. But gradually the remains receded, whittled by salvage hunters and buried in silt. By the 1950s, they had disappeared entirely.

  In 1979, a team of marine researchers, led by Donald Shomette and Ralph Eshelman, explored the waters near Pig Point and located a seventy-five-foot-long shipwreck, which they tentatively identified as Scorpion, the flagship of Barney’s flotilla. After a limited, monthlong excavation, the wreck was reburied under four feet of mud to protect it from decay. Three decades later, divers from the U.S. Navy and the state of Maryland began exploring the site, with plans to excavate it in 2014. Two centuries after its demise in a noble but futile attempt to defend the nation’s capital, Barney’s flotilla was returning to light.

  Unlike Bladensburg, the commanders at Baltimore were lionized after the war. The city of Baltimore commissioned portraits by the artist Rembrandt Peale of its heroes, among them George Armistead, Samuel Smith, John Stricker, and Joshua Barney. Armistead, recovering from his exhaustion after the battle, soon won promotion to lieutenant colonel and wide acclaim as the hero of Fort McHenry. “So you see my Dear Wife all is well, at least your husband has got a name and standing that nothing but divine providence could have given him, and I pray to our Heavenly Father that we may live long to enjoy,” he wrote Louisa.

  But Armistead lived only four years after the bombardment, remaining in command at Fort McHenry until his death in 1818. “The procession of military and citizens was the most numerous ever witnessed in Baltimore,” Niles’ reported.

  Smith resigned his commission when General Winfield Scott was given authority over the Baltimore militia in 1815. But Smith was not finished with public life, winning election to the House in 1816 and later returning to the Senate. When a bank failure led to riots in the streets of Baltimore, Smith, then eighty-three, was called back to take command of the militia and promptly restored order. Citizens turned to him one last time to serve as mayor until shortly before his death in 1839.

  The three navy captains who rallied Baltimore would never return to the glory they achieved during the war. John Rodgers, who feared he would “nearly go crazy” with the coming of peace, had to content himself with largely administrative chores for much of the next twenty years as president of the Board of Navy Commissioners, until his death in 1837. Oliver Hazard Perry, whose remaining career was marred by a bitter dispute over a subordinate’s performance at Lake Erie, was sent by President Monroe to combat piracy in South America in 1819. He contracted yellow fever and died at age thirty-four. David Porter, court-martialed for insubordination after attacking a Spanish town in Puerto Rico without orders in 1825, served three years as commander-in-chief of the Mexican navy and twelve years as U.S. chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, where he died in 1843.

  John Skinner, who accompanied Francis Scott Key on his journey to lasting fame, was rewarded for his energetic wartime service with a job as Baltimore’s postmaster, but left his most enduring mark as founder of two pioneering periodicals: The American Farmer, the first successful publication covering agriculture in the United States, and American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, the nation’s first sports magazine. Bustling until the end, he died in 1851 at age sixty-three, after he fell down a cellar door at the Baltimore post office while hurrying to pick up some papers. Joseph Nicholson, who ensured Key’s song would be heard, suffered from faltering health and lived for only three years after the defense of Fort McHenry.

  Within days of his release from captivity, William Beanes was back in Upper Marlboro seeing patients. For the rest of his life, he remained close to Key, who witnessed Beanes’s will in 1827. Any time Beanes showed signs of temper, according to the tale later told by his grandniece, his wife, Sarah, silenced him by threatening to “to send for Admiral Cockburn.” True or not, Beanes lived quietly at Academy Hill until his death at age eighty in 1828, and was buried next to his wife in the garden.

  Three thousand citizens assembled on the lawn of the old courthouse in Frederick, Maryland, on August 6, 1834, for a great public dinner thrown by supporters of President Andrew Jackson to celebrate the town’s most famous resident, Roger Brooke Taney, who had just resigned after three years as Jackson’s attorney general. Rows of tables were covered with hams, beef, jellies, wines, and vegetables. Among the guests at the head table was the man Jackson had selected as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the capital’s chief prosecutor: Francis Scott Key.

  A speaker toasted Key as “an incorruptible patriot, worthy of being honored, wherever genius is admired or liberty cherished, as the author of the Star-Spangled Banner.” After glasses were raised and applause subsided, Key rose to make his own remarks. Modest and self-effacing, he had said little publicly about the song, but now, for one of the few recorded times in his life, he described the emotions that led to its creation. 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.” But Key was careful to note that “the honor was due, not to him who made the song, but to the heroism of those who made him make it.”

  Key by then was one of the most prominent citizens of Washington, not just as author of the song, but also as an attorney and in his new capacity as prosecutor. The years after the war had seen his law practice busier than ever. Key was capable of arguing both sides of the slavery issue. He once successfully represented a slave owner in opposing freedom for the children of a free mulatto woman, but he also provided legal advice to those seeking emancipation, and represented on a pro bono basis free blacks who were being sold back into slavery, “ready to brave odium or even personal danger on their behalf,” according to his friend, Rev. John T. Brooke. In 1825, after the Spanish slave-trade vessel Antelope was captured by a Baltimore privateer, Key unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Supreme Court that the slaves aboard the ship should not be returned to Spain, closing his argument with “a thrilling and even an electrifying picture of the horrors connected with the African slave trade,” a witness wrote.

  Fearing that mass emancipation would bring dire social and economic unrest, Key championed the American colonization movement, an odd venture that envisioned a gradual end to slavery by creating a colony in Africa for free blacks willing to leave America. Key helped write the American Colonization Society’s constitution, and traveled to churches, schools, and town halls to raise money. In 1820, the first free American blacks settled in what would become Liberia, whose capital, Monrovia, was named after President Monroe, a supporter of the effort. Colonization was met with scorn from southerners and bitter opposition from abolitionists, who saw it as a palliative that would perpetuate slavery. The idea never amounted to much, but Key, with utopian fervor, never abandoned it.

  There were happy days at the Key home in Georgetown, with its terraced garden leading down to the Potomac. Key had the gardener plant tiny round gardens for each child, with their names spelled by seedlings. But the idyllic times were shattered on July 8, 1822, when his eight-year-old son, Edward—the second-youngest of their nine children—went swimming in the river after school and drowned. Ed
ward, the heartbroken Key wrote, was “a beautiful boy, and his gentle and pleasing countenance was a true index of his disposition.”

  Key had been away on business in Annapolis, and he berated himself for his “unfaithfulness as a parent.” But in his absence, Key saw “the tenderness and compassion of the Heavenly Father who saw it necessary thus to chasten me.… I was spared all that stormy tumult of feeling endured by my poor wife and children who were at the scene of suffering, all that agony (which I know not how I could have borne) of hearing he was in the water, that they were searching for him, that he was found, that they were attempting to revive him, that it was in vain.”

  Key and Polly had two more children, and they were grandparents by the time their eleventh child, Charles Henry Key, was born in the summer of 1827. But after three decades in their Georgetown home, the Keys moved around 1833 to a smaller house on C Street in Washington. By then, only four children were still living at home. Beyond that, the character of the once-serene Georgetown home had been irreparably altered by “turbulence” from the construction of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, directly behind the house along the Potomac shore.

  After years of eschewing party politics, Key had embraced the new Democratic Party, which had emerged from the ruins of the old party system. In particular, Key supported its leader, Jackson, the hero of the common man. Though many of the Washington elite were leery of the backwoods war hero, Key found Jackson’s brand of populism refreshing, and he enthusiastically campaigned for his election in the bitter 1828 race against President John Quincy Adams. When a crowd of twenty thousand gathered in front of the Capitol to celebrate Jackson’s inauguration in 1829, Key was exhilarated. “It is beautiful!” he exclaimed to Margaret Bayard Smith, who nervously clutched his arm as they navigated the masses. “It is sublime!”