Through the Perilous Fight Page 8

  As proposed by Cockburn, a squadron led by Captain James Gordon would create a diversion up the Potomac, attacking any fortifications along the river and threatening Alexandria, Virginia, and Washington from the south. If needed, the ships of the Potomac squadron could evacuate the invading land forces. But Cochrane added his own twist: a second feint up the Chesapeake Bay. Captain Peter Parker would take several ships up the bay, hoping to draw troops away from Washington. Parker would also disrupt communications between Baltimore and Philadelphia, furthering the confusion.

  The briefing was over by 9 a.m., and the officers quickly dispersed to their respective vessels. Signals were sent to weigh anchor and raise sails. Within fifteen minutes, Gordon set sail into the Potomac aboard the 38–gun frigate Sea-Horse, accompanied by seven ships packed with firepower. Parker, aboard Menelaus, prepared to move up the bay with two schooners. The rest of the fleet was preparing to sail north toward the mouth of the Patuxent when the horizon darkened and the water whipped up, as if before a tempest. Then, as quickly as it had arisen, the storm threat dissipated, and the fleet was under way.

  WASHINGTON, 8 A.M., THURSDAY, AUGUST 18

  The city of Washington slumbered on the morning of August 18, 1814, as was usually the case any time Congress was out of session. Even James Madison, not the most social of men, described Washington as “a solitude” in the summer. The capital, now fourteen years old, had grown a bit since the days of John Adams’s administration, when the Abbé José Correia da Serra, the minister from Portugal, called Washington “the city of magnificent distances,” and another observer described Pennsylvania Avenue as “a mud-hole almost equal to the great Serbonian bog.”

  Washington’s population had reached 8,208 by the 1810 census, not including the 4,900 residents of Georgetown, which was within the District boundary, or the 7,200 people across the Potomac in Alexandria, also then part of the capital. But Washington itself remained a city of villages.

  The President’s House and the Capitol stood in the open like ancient Greek temples, with only scattered dwellings and buildings nearby, surrounded mostly by fields of wheat, corn, and tobacco.

  The U.S. Capitol in 1814.

  The capital’s elite, which included high-ranking government officials, foreign diplomats, military officers, and a native gentry of plantation families, were a “detestably proud” group, in the words of one visitor. The city’s good-size middle class included tradesmen, shopkeepers, and government clerks, some from families long settled in the area, others from more recent English and German immigrant stock. Lower-class whites, many of them laborers and indentured servants of Irish or northern European descent who worked laying out the streets and constructing buildings, lived in shacks and shanties scattered around town. A quarter of the city’s population was African American, including about 1,400 slaves and 800 free blacks, living in shacks, some in small clusters, and others in the shadows of fine homes.

  Washington was a curious mixture of hovels and mansions, about nine hundred scattered buildings, ranging from the elegant Octagon on New York Avenue to rude shacks that housed slaves. The President’s House and the Capitol stood in the open like ancient Greek temples, with only scattered dwellings and buildings nearby, surrounded mostly by fields of wheat, corn, and tobacco. Sheep and cattle grazed in pastures, bordered by woods of oak trees and tulip poplars. “It was no trophy of war for a great nation,” Richard Rush, Madison’s attorney general, later wrote. “Our infant metropolis at that time had the aspect of merely a straggling village but for the size and beauty of its public buildings.”

  The village awoke with a start at 8 a.m. Thursday, when a rider kicking up dust rushed to the plain brick building housing the State, War, and Navy departments, just west of the President’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue. He was carrying the message sent the previous morning from Point Lookout, warning of the growing enemy fleet.

  Secretary of State Monroe hurried to the President’s House to confer. “This city is their object,” Monroe told Madison, who agreed. The secretary offered to lead a troop of cavalry to scout the size of the enemy force, try to gauge their target, and send back reports on their movements. It was a most unusual role for a secretary of state to undertake, but Madison, desperate for intelligence, approved, and Monroe began assembling a scouting force to depart the next day.

  Working from his makeshift headquarters on the first floor of the McKeown Hotel, at the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Brigadier General William Winder, the commander of the Tenth Military District, sent out a flurry of orders. The District militia was called en masse, and thousands more militia troops were requisitioned from Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

  Winder had been a whirlwind of activity in the seven weeks since his appointment to lead Washington’s defenses, but he had accomplished virtually nothing. Few troops had been raised, no defenses erected, and no plan of defense developed.

  Nothing close to the 15,000 men Madison had ordered to the field or held in immediate readiness was available. Winder had been given authority on July 17 to call out 3,000 militia, but thus far he had managed to round up a grand total of 250 men. Moreover, Secretary of War Armstrong had provided Winder with barely 600 army regulars, not even a third of what Madison had ordered. At best, if 1,400 militiamen stationed in Baltimore were counted, Winder had about 2,100 men immediately available for Washington’s defense.

  Winder, a thin man whose sharp features and wispy brown hair gave him an elfin look, was showing every sign of being overwhelmed by the responsibility. It was no simple matter to pick a good general, Jefferson lamented after the war’s disastrous first year. “The Creator has not thought proper to mark those on the forehead who are of the stuff to make good generals,” he wrote. “We are first, therefore, to seek them, blindfolded, and then let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses.”

  Any marks of greatness the thirty-nine-year-old Winder had displayed thus far were as a Baltimore attorney, not a general. In a state that had many brilliant lawyers, the urbane and amiable Winder was considered at the top of the profession. Though a Federalist, he supported going to war and volunteered his services; Madison, eager to broaden political support for the war, tendered Winder a commission in March 1812 as a lieutenant colonel in the regular army, though the lawyer had only limited militia experience.

  “The Creator has not thought proper to mark those on the forehead who are of the stuff to make good generals,” Jefferson lamented.

  Brigadier General William Winder, commander of the Tenth Military District.

  After war was declared, Winder marched an infantry regiment from Maryland to the Niagara front, where his relative competence and unquestioned bravery won him promotion to brigadier. But in June 1813, after American forces invaded Canada across the Niagara frontier, Winder blundered into enemy lines during a British night counterattack at Stoney Creek, on the shore of Lake Ontario, and was captured.

  The British considered him a particularly valuable prisoner. “Be careful of exchanging Genl. Win-der,” a British officer warned. “He possesses more talent than all the rest of the Yankee Generals put together.” This said more about the other American commanders than it did about Winder. Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott, who served with him on the Niagara front, had a more sour view of Winder’s abilities. “It is a misfortune to begin a new career with too much rank, or rather, too late in life,” Scott later said.

  Winder was held as a prisoner for nearly a year in Quebec, where he put his skills as a lawyer to work, negotiating a prisoner reparation agreement that defused a tense stand-off between the U.S. and British governments. Released in the spring of 1814, Winder arrived in Washington in late June, just as the president was looking for someone to command the new military district overseeing Washington’s defenses.

  Madison and Monroe were reasonably satisfied with Winder’s negotiations with the British. More relevant was the fact that the general’s uncle, Levin Winder, happe
ned to be governor of Maryland, a state bitterly divided over the war. It would be up to Maryland to supply a large part of the militia needed to defend the capital. Despite Armstrong’s objections, Madison and Monroe calculated that the appointment of William Winder as commander was the best way to ensure that the governor, a Federalist lukewarm at best in his support for the war, sent the needed troops.

  Winder’s inexperience quickly showed. He embarked on a lengthy tour of his new command, intently studying the terrain, examining defenses, and issuing batches of memos. In one eighteen-day span, he traveled about Maryland, visiting Baltimore, Annapolis, Upper Marlboro, Nottingham, Piscataway, Warburton, and Port Tobacco, some of them two or three times. Instead of raising troops or developing a coherent strategy, he immersed himself in details. In the meantime, no defenses were built in or around Washington. The city “had no fortresses or sign of any; not a cannon was mounted,” Attorney General Rush later said.

  Moreover, no states supplied anywhere near the number of militia requested. Even Winder’s uncle held back, unwilling to send militia needed to defend Maryland’s towns and shores from Cockburn’s raids. Virginia was in a similar position. Pennsylvania temporarily lacked the authority to call out its militia because the state was in the midst of changing its laws.

  As for the District of Columbia militia, none of its 2,000 militia troops were on duty as the British sailed up the Patuxent. Major General John Van Ness, the commander of the District militia, had suggested his brigades be rotated on to duty to keep troops available, but Armstrong had refused, insisting the men were close enough to summon in an emergency.

  That emergency was clearly at hand.

  PATUXENT RIVER, THURSDAY, AUGUST 18

  The mighty British fleet—ships-of-the-line, frigates, schooners, and brigs, all flying the red and white flag of Britain and festooned with long and tapering pendants—sailed into the mouth of the Patuxent River at 5 a.m. Thursday. No American force challenged them, but the river did its best to hold the invaders at bay. After hours of sailing, the British had made little progress against a flood tide, strong current, and shifting winds. The ships laboriously worked their way back and forth across the river, passing one another on opposite tacks.

  No one appreciated the spectacle more than the soldiers. “[T]he decks of all the vessels thronged with troops arrayed for landing,” wrote Captain George Laval Chesterton, an army artillery officer aboard one of the transports. Many were getting their first good look at America, and they were astonished at the beauty of the Patuxent landscape, admiring the fields of Indian corn, the luxuriant pastures, and the neat plantations, all surrounded by boundless forests.

  By mid-morning, the wind had died completely, forcing the fleet to anchor below Point Patience, where the channel narrowed and the tidal stream strengthened. Commanders fretted they were losing the element of surprise. Cochrane sent signals for troops to be ready to land at a moment’s notice. Troops were to pack lightly, carrying a blanket, an extra shirt, a pair of shoes, and stockings. Three pounds of pork and two and a half pounds of biscuit were issued to each man. Cartouche boxes were filled with fresh ammunition and arms and accoutrements handed out.

  The big ships would not be able to sail much farther up the river, and Cochrane used the delay to move troops to the frigates and lighter vessels. He transferred his command from Tonnant to join Ross aboard the lighter-draft frigate Iphigenia.

  Finally, in late afternoon, a breeze kicked in from the southwest, and the fleet moved upriver, aided by the tide. The course grew more tortuous as the Patuxent narrowed and grew shallower. It was an intricate ballet calling for extraordinary seamanship and coordination. Occasionally a ship would run aground, but the crews would quickly free it. “The air literally resounded with the shrill pipe of the boatswain; and the loud, but measured, cadences of the men in the chains, who hove the lead and shouted forth the soundings,” wrote Chesterton.

  Eventually the ships-of-the-line could go no farther and anchored, and the frigates soon followed suit. The smaller ships continued upriver until darkness set, anchoring a few miles below Benedict. Word spread that they would land in the morning.

  Those who had not been part of Cockburn’s force for the previous year expected the Americans to attack. Codrington, captain of the fleet, considered it “comparatively extraordinary” that the Americans had not taken advantage of the terrain to do so. At several points, the high, wooded banks offered spots where artillery could do tremendous damage to the crowded, slow-moving ships below.

  But there was nothing, no sign of the Americans.

  Moving by land and water up the Patuxent, the combined army and navy forces appeared to spell doom for Barney and his flotilla.

  Map showing the route of the British from the Patuxent River to Washington, published in 1818.

  CHAPTER 4

  What the Devil Will They Do Here?

  BENEDICT, FRIDAY MORNING, AUGUST 19

  The first landing boats were lowered well before dawn into the dark waters of the Patuxent River, and by first light, there was movement throughout the fleet. Soldiers clambered down to the boats, carrying their weapons and haversacks stuffed with three days’ provisions and spare clothes. The British invasion was under way.

  In no time, the Patuxent was covered with a flotilla of barges and launches, all heading up the river. The current and tide ran strongly against them, and those disembarking from the bigger ships anchored downriver faced a stiff row of up to fifteen miles. Cockburn was in the first wave, leaving Albion at 4 a.m. to travel by barge a dozen miles to Benedict.

  At Benedict, the gun brig Anaconda lay 150 yards off the beach, moored with spring cables. Her broadside faced the shore, her guns loaded with grape and round shot to pepper the beach with deadly fire should the British face any resistance. But when the first boats landed at noon, not a whisper of opposition was to be found. Light infantry scouts checked some three dozen houses in the town as well as farmhouses in the countryside for several miles around, and found them empty, with signs of being hastily abandoned. The town of tidy wood-frame houses and neat gardens was the biggest tobacco port on the Patuxent and one of the oldest in Maryland, though its golden era as a prosperous trade and shipping center dated to colonial days. Benedict had been sacked and burned by Loyalist troops at the end of the Revolutionary War and no one wanted a second episode.

  As waves of troops landed, Ross established pickets and sent infantry to secure the heights around town. After many weeks confined to the ships, the men rolled on the sand, basked in the sun, and prepared camps. Given how long it would take to land his entire force from the distant ships, Ross did not intend to march that day. He used the time to organize his jumbled force into three brigades. The Light Brigade, which included the 85th Light Infantry bolstered by light companies from the other regiments as well as the Colonial Marines, would lead the way, under the command of Colonel William Thornton. The 2nd Brigade, under Colonel Arthur Brooke, included troops from the 4th and 44th regiments. The 3rd Brigade, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William Patterson, included a battalion of Fusiliers and a battalion of Royal Marines. Rounding out the force were assorted artillerymen, engineers, and teamsters, along with a contingent of 100 sailors from Tonnant to haul guns and supplies. A half-dozen nervous horses for the senior officers, including Ross’s favorite Arabian from the Peninsula campaign, were off-loaded by canvas sling. All told, the British force numbered about 4,500 men.

  “Such is the little army with which we invade America,” Lieutenant Gleig recorded in his diary.

  NOTTINGHAM, MIDDAY FRIDAY, AUGUST 19

  Ten miles upriver from Benedict, Commodore Joshua Barney was holed up at his headquarters in Nottingham, another Patuxent tobacco town. He had received no word that the British were just landing at Benedict; an officer who arrived at 9 a.m. with a scouting report knew nothing about it. But the officer did have detailed information about the size of the enemy fleet sailing up the river, and he reported that
the British had “a determination to go to the city of Washington.” Furthermore, the officer reported a teasing threat from Cockburn: “The admiral said he would dine in Washington on Sunday, after having destroyed the Flotilla.…”

  That was typical of Cockburn, but also very worrisome, as far as Barney was concerned. He immediately dashed off a note to Secretary Jones reporting Cockburn’s unsettling words and sent it by courier to Washington.

  Barney knew well how eager Cockburn was to even the score with the commodore after the American breakout from St. Leonard Creek two months earlier. Barney had been jubilant at the time. “[W]e have again beat them,” he proudly told Jones. But it was not seen as a great victory in southern Maryland, particularly when the British launched more terrifying, punitive raids to draw the flotilla out of hiding. Throughout the region, civilians blamed Barney for bringing the wrath of Cockburn upon their heads. In Calvert County along the Patuxent, it was a close call who was more unpopular, Barney or James Madison. “[W]hen I tell you the mischief the British have done,” Thomas King wrote his brother, “it will be enough to make you and every man abuse Jim Madison and old Barney in Hell if you could.”

  WASHINGTON, 2 P.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 19

  Navy Secretary Jones was unsure what to make of Barney’s report or Cockburn’s boast. Washington remained ignorant Friday afternoon that the British had begun landing troops that day at Benedict, forty miles from the capital. Jones, like others, suspected that the British move up the Patuxent was a ruse. “Appearances indicate a design on this place, but it may be a feint, to mask a real design on Baltimore,” the secretary wrote to Barney upon receiving the commodore’s report at 2 p.m.