Through the Perilous Fight Read online

  By June, Cockburn had decided he preferred the Colonials to his own Royal Marines, finding them stronger and less likely to desert. The only time he was disappointed was when several Colonials were found asleep at their posts in July. Cockburn ordered the offenders to wear their jackets inside out and cut off their grog.

  While freeing the slaves was in the self-interest of the British, they relished their role as liberators exposing the hypocrisies of American liberty. Most of the escaped slaves—including many women, children, aged, and infirm—were unfit for service, and were a burden for the British, who had to feed, clothe, and shelter them. But the escapees provided invaluable intelligence, guiding the British through the backwoods and waters, often with more intimate knowledge than their former masters. What Cockburn appreciated the most was the unalloyed fear they inspired in the Americans.

  All summer, as he awaited the arrival of Cochrane with the reinforcements, Cockburn continued preparations for an invasion. He and his captains took soundings of the Potomac and Patuxent, looking for the best route to Washington. He gathered intelligence from newspapers, which helpfully reported troop strengths and movements, and from informants, of which there was no shortage. He trained his seamen as soldiers, ready to join an invasion force. In his letters to Cochrane, Cockburn pressed for an attack on the capital. “[T]he country is in general in a horrible state it only requires a little firm and steady conduct to have it completely at our mercy,” he wrote June 25.

  Accompanying raiding parties along the shores, Cockburn was almost disappointed at the lack of resistance: “Not a militia man or soldier to be seen except we hunt for them in the woods & then they only play at Hide & Seek with us.”

  One man was ready to challenge Cockburn: Joshua Barney, commander of the U.S. Chesapeake Flotilla. Red-nosed and ruddy-cheeked, with sparkling black eyes, the fifty-five-year-old Barney had a gentle face that belied his long and adventurous life at sea. The Maryland native had fought as many, if not more, naval battles against the British as any living American, and he was eager for another fight.

  Raised on a farm outside Baltimore, Barney had resisted his parents’ efforts to steer him toward a respectable life in a mercantile firm, and instead gone to sea at age twelve. When the American Revolution broke out he was already an experienced sailor, and at age seventeen he became the youngest captain of a Continental Navy frigate. He captured the British warship General Monk on Delaware Bay in 1782, an action “justly deemed one of the most brilliant that ever occurred under the American flag,” in the view of James Fenimore Cooper. Barney was taken prisoner three times by the British, dramatically escaping once, and the experiences left him with a lifelong dislike of England.

  “To content himself with following the plough, watching the growth of his corn, or shearing his merinos, while the blast of war was blowing in his ears, would have been an effort beyond his philosophy,” his niece wrote.

  Joshua Barney, while serving in the French Navy.

  Near the end of the Revolutionary War, Barney sailed to Paris to deliver dispatches to Benjamin Franklin, who took a liking to the young naval hero and presented him to the royal court. A charmed Marie Antoinette allowed the handsome American the honor of kissing her cheek. Back home, Americans celebrated the dashing Barney in verse and prose, including the popular song “Barney, Leave the Girls Alone.”

  Brave, steady, and intrepid, Barney was dogged all his life by a prickly pride that was quick to find insult. A perceived slight prompted him to turn down a commission with the U.S. Navy after the war and instead serve with the French navy in the West Indies. Some considered him a traitor, given the tense relations that then prevailed between the United States and France. After resigning from the French navy in 1802, Barney returned to Maryland, where he dabbled in business and politics. Twice he had offered his services to the U.S. Navy, but both Jefferson and Madison turned him down.

  Barney had just retired with his wife in May 1812 to a farm in Elkridge, outside Baltimore, when word came that the United States had declared war. “To content himself with following the plough, watching the growth of his corn, or shearing his merinos, while the blast of war was blowing in his ears, would have been an effort beyond his philosophy,” his niece later wrote.

  Barney packed his clothes, rushed to Baltimore, and within three weeks was roaming the Atlantic in command of the privateer Rossie, an armed cruiser. Over the next four months he captured eighteen British merchant vessels valued in total at $1.5 million, completing one of the most spectacular privateering runs of the war. Returning in November 1812, he tried again to retire to his farm, but it was too much to ask with Cockburn marauding unfettered up and down the shores of his beloved Maryland.

  On Independence Day in 1813, Barney took up his pen and wrote a memorandum to Secretary of the Navy William Jones analyzing the British threat to the Chesapeake. To fight back, Barney advised building a mosquito fleet of armed barges to ply the shallow waters of the Chesapeake, powered by oars and light sails. “[F]orm them into a flying squadron … continually watching and annoying the enemy in our waters,” Barney recommended. It would be effective, Barney promised, and cheap—they could build fifty barges for half the price of one frigate.

  Jones, under intense pressure because of the navy’s inability to defend the Chesapeake, leapt at the offer. Barney would report directly to Jones and outside the regular navy establishment, thus skirting ticklish issues of seniority. In Baltimore, Barney worked for months building his flotilla, battling contractors with “thick skulls,” and recruiting crews. As the flotilla neared readiness in early 1814, Jones offered a benediction from Washington: “[Y]our force is our principal shield, and all eyes will be upon you.”

  Barney sailed from Baltimore with eighteen barges in late May, intending to attack the British base at Tangier. Getting wind, Cockburn ordered Captain Robert Barrie, commander of the 74–gun HMS Dragon, to hunt down Barney. After Barrie chased the American flotilla into the Patuxent, Barney staged a clever counterattack on June 10 at the mouth of St. Leonard Creek, a Patuxent tributary, running a British frigate aground before retreating up the creek and out of enemy reach.

  Seeking to draw Barney out of the creek, Barrie marauded up the Patuxent, burning towns and plantations, carrying off slaves and livestock, and torching whatever tobacco that could not be fit onto ships. On June 16, Barrie pillaged the town of Lower Marlboro. “[H]ere we passed the night without molestation though only eighteen miles from Washington,” the astonished captain reported to Cockburn.

  But Barney remained out of reach.

  Early on June 18, 1814, alarms sounded in Washington, warning that the British were coming up the Patuxent and again threatening the capital. The court where Francis Scott Key was trying a case abruptly adjourned. Key signed up again with Major Peter’s Georgetown militia, this time at the rank of lieutenant and with the title of quartermaster, responsible for procuring supplies.

  Peter marched with a light force of 280 militia and horse-drawn artillery from Washington on the morning of June 19, the cannons rattling through the streets. The roads into southern Maryland were jammed with terrified residents fleeing their homes along the Patuxent. Near the port of Benedict on the afternoon of June 20, an advance party of cavalry skirmished with an enemy raiding party, killing one and capturing five. The prisoners were unrepentant; one boasted that a large army was on the way and that a bloody war with America was the universal talk of the fleet.

  By the time Key arrived that evening with the main American force, the action was over. “We got there just in time to see the British vessels move off, so that we had nothing to suffer but the fatigue of the march & the inconvenience of such an excursion,” he wrote Randolph. The militia camped at Benedict for two weeks in case the British returned. Key’s adventures as quartermaster for the Georgetown Artillery were more comic than dangerous. “I have only to tell of being knocked down by a bone of bacon and pitched by my horse over head & ears into the river and thi
s is quite as much as I wish to know of the wars,” he told Randolph.

  Key wrote a reassuring note to his mother from the camp on June 23, telling her the British “have now gone down the river—and nobody seems to think there is any chance of their coming back again, at least, while the troops are in the neighborhood.”

  But Key was less sanguine in his note to Randolph, written July 3, two days after his return to Georgetown. Though there was much bravado in Washington about how the militia had once again stood up to the British, and the defenders were once more feted with a banquet, Key was under no illusions. “I fear that our situation here will be a very unpleasant one as long as the war lasts,” he wrote. “I know of no nation in the world whose situation is so critical as ours and fear that the storm which has desolated many others is just about to pass over us.”

  Key confessed to his friend that he was tempted to flee ahead of that storm. “I have had a great many uneasy thoughts (which I ought to be ashamed of) of what I should do with myself & where I should go to get out the reach of the visitation,” he wrote.

  His faith, Key hoped, would provide the answer. “Where a man finds that he may be usefully employed, where he seems to be placed by a Master whose work he is to do, there, whatever may be the difficulties of such a situation, he ought to stand & fall—certainly he ought not to leave it without evident necessity.”

  Cockburn was certainly not done with the Patuxent, whatever Washington thought. On July 3, as Key fretted about the British to Randolph, the rear admiral ordered Albion to weigh anchor from Tangier and sail toward the Patuxent.

  Joshua Barney’s flotilla was on the loose again, lurking in the upper reaches of the river. Cockburn, though annoyed, could not disguise a trace of admiration for Barney’s exploits. “How sharply and unexpectedly Jonathan has exerted himself,” he wrote to Cochrane. The British had thought Barney was trapped in St. Leonard Creek, where he had retreated following the flotilla’s first clash with the enemy on June 10. But after U.S. Army troops and U.S. Marines set up batteries on bluffs overlooking the mouth of the creek, Barney prepared a bold breakout attempt. On the night of June 25, the flotilla moved silently down the creek. In the predawn darkness, the American shore guns opened up earlier than Barney expected, catching both the British and the flotilla by surprise. Barney rushed into the fray with the cannons on every flotilla boat blazing. But after furious exchanges of fire, the poorly coordinated attack appeared to have failed. Barney was retreating back up the creek when he noticed the British had left a gap at the mouth while they repaired a damaged ship.

  Barney seized the moment, ordering the flotilla to reverse course and make full speed for the Patuxent, successfully breaking the blockade. “I had the mortification to observe them rowing down the creek, and up the river,” Captain Thomas Brown, the chagrined British commander, reported to Cockburn.

  Despite his anxiety over Barney’s escape, Cockburn sensed an opportunity. True, the flotilla threat had to be eliminated before the capital was attacked. But by fleeing up the Patuxent, Barney had presented Cockburn with an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

  Cockburn believed the Patuxent held the key to capturing Washington. The river was not the most direct or obvious route to the capital, and that was part of the attraction. A British advance up the Potomac would leave little doubt Washington was the target. But a move up the Patuxent would be more ambiguous. It might mean an overland attack on Baltimore or Annapolis—or perhaps just a move to trap Barney.

  For two weeks the admiral scouted the area, noting the lack of defenses, foraging for supplies, and teaching locals the Cockburn rules of fighting. Near Drum Point in St. Mary’s County on July 8, when two brothers from the Holton family took a potshot at one of Cockburn’s lieutenants and rode off at a gallop, Cockburn exacted methodical revenge against the “two heroes on horseback,” as he sarcastically called them. “I ascertained who they were & where they lived, & that night I sent to their house [and] destroyed everything belonging to it.” The two sons, pulled from their beds, were made to watch the destruction in their bedclothes, alongside their mother. Only a mirror was spared, at the pleading of the youngest child in the family. The elder sons were taken to Albion, where Cockburn ordered them sent to Halifax. “I trust this example … will induce Jonathan … to treat us in future with due respect,” he told Barrie.

  Cockburn believed the Patuxent held the key to capturing Washington. The river was not the most direct or obvious route to the capital, and that was part of the attraction.

  Sketch by Commodore Joshua Barney in August 1814 showing the British blockade at the mouth of the Patuxent River.

  Cockburn did not want to linger in the Patuxent, worried that if he stayed too long the American government might finally build defenses on the roads leading to the capital. In mid-July, Cockburn embarked on an elaborate deception to keep Washington guessing at his intentions. He left Captain Joseph Nourse with a squadron in the Patuxent to continue the usual raids and keep Barney bottled up. Cockburn departed the river with the rest of his ships and headed for the Potomac, hoping to take the enemy’s attention with him. “After making a flourish or two there, sacking Leonards Town [on the Potomac’s Maryland shore] … I shall again move elsewhere, so as to distract Jonathan, do him all the mischief I can and yet not allow him to suspect that a serious and permanent landing is intended anywhere,” he wrote July 16.

  Nourse assured Cockburn the Americans were quite confused: “Jonathan I believe is so confounded that he does not know when or where to look for us and I do believe that he is at this moment so undecided and unprepared that it would require but little force to burn Washington, and I hope soon to put the first torch to it myself.”

  Cockburn was of the same opinion: “Mr. Maddison must certainly be either in confident expectation of immediate peace, or preparing to abdicate the chair.”

  BERMUDA, AUGUST 1, 1814

  At the North American Station headquarters, Sir Alexander Cochrane had been delighted by reports that London was sending him 20,000 or more reinforcements. He envisioned joining them up with an army of free slaves Cockburn was training in the Chesapeake. “[W]ith them properly armed & backed with 20,000 British troops, Mr. Maddi-son will be hurled from his Throne,” he exulted in a note to Cockburn July 1.

  Certainly Washington and Baltimore could be captured and either destroyed or held for ransom, he informed London on July 14. But later that same day, Cochrane received word that London had sent only 4,000 troops.

  Cochrane was discouraged. Not only were there fewer troops than expected, Cochrane concluded by July 23 that it was too close to the “sickly season” to launch operations in the Chesapeake region. He considered the hot August and September weather “the worst enemy we have to contend with”; he feared the fevers and dysenteries that had ravaged the British the previous summer. Cochrane was leaning toward an attack in the safer climes of Rhode Island or New Hampshire.

  Then, on July 25, HMS St. Lawrence arrived in Bermuda from the Chesapeake, bearing letters from Cockburn outlining his secret plan for the capture of Washington. Cockburn’s confident assurances restored Cochrane’s willingness to at least visit the Chesapeake.

  At the end of July, the army reinforcements from Europe under the command of Major General Robert Ross arrived in Bermuda. Cochrane and Ross agreed to set sail for the Chesapeake to rendezvous with Cockburn and briefly inspect the theater.

  At noon on August 1, aided by a fresh breeze, Cochrane and Ross departed Bermuda aboard Tonnant, with the troopships to follow two days later.

  BALTIMORE, THURSDAY, AUGUST 11

  On the morning of August 11, American agent John Skinner sailed into Baltimore harbor, returning from his visit to the British fleet in the Potomac, where he had heard Rear Admiral Cockburn’s suggestion that President Madison don his armor and prepare to fight.

  It was not the first time Skinner had heard Cockburn talk about capturing Washington. That was part of Cockburn’s regu
lar repartee—boasts and threats, “delivered under the guise of badinage,” and meant to keep Skinner and the Americans guessing. Whenever they reached a point of contention in their discussions, Cockburn would jovially brush the matter aside. “Ah, well, we’ll waive it for the present, I’ll settle that affair at Washington.” Skinner would smile politely at the jests.

  This time, though, Skinner was not so sure that the admiral was joking. Cockburn was the sort, he knew, who might jest about capturing Washington and still do it.

  Skinner wrote the president reporting the admiral’s boast.

  WASHINGTON, SATURDAY, AUGUST 13

  The war had kept James Madison in Washington all summer. Instead of retreating to the comforts of his Montpelier plantation at the foot of the lovely Blue Ridge during the hot months, as was his custom, the sixty-two-year-old president remained in the capital, both to stay on top of developments as well as to assuage fears about the city’s vulnerability. On Tuesday, Madison and his cabinet had traveled by Navy barge ten miles down the Potomac to Fort Washington to inspect newly repaired gun mounts, hoping the visit would calm concerns that the fortress was woefully unprepared to defend the capital.

  Madison and his wife, Dolley, were staying at the President’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue, despite worries that remaining in Washington would expose him again to the bilious fever that nearly killed him the previous summer. Still, conditions were better at the President’s House for the Madisons than they had been for their predecessors. When John Adams moved into the mansion in November 1800, it was still a work site, smelling of horsehair plaster and wallpaper paste, and with a yawning abyss where the grand staircase was supposed to go. The mansion remained under construction during Jefferson’s eight-year tenure, with constant upheaval from the Virginian’s attempts to redesign the mansion to his own liking.