Six Frigates
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Admiral Cochrane seemed to harbor a deep personal enmity toward the Americans, possibly dating back to the combat death of his brother, Charles, at Yorktown in 1781. From the outset of his command, he left no doubt that he would wage a ruthless war. As retribution for the destruction of British shipping and the burning of several Canadian towns, he authorized Cockburn “to act with the utmost hostility against the shores of the United States.” In February 1814, Cockburn arrived in the Chesapeake and carried out an effective campaign of terror and harassment throughout the bay region. On July 18, Cochrane circulated an order directing his commanders to burn all American towns, houses, and private property that came within their reach. The commercial blockade was extended to include all of New England. In the early spring of 1814, a British force penetrated eight miles up the Connecticut River and burned all the shipping it could find. Another expedition conducted hit-and-run attacks against the small, largely undefended seaports of Buzzards Bay in southern Massachusetts. For four days in August, Commodore Hardy’s Long Island Squadron bombarded the town of Stonington, Connecticut, with rockets, incendiary missiles, and exploding bombshells. British troops occupied coastal Maine between the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy, requiring the inhabitants to swear an oath of allegiance to George III.
In July, four battalions of British troops under the command of Major-General Robert Ross sailed from the Gironde River in France. After six years of hard campaigning, these battle-seasoned veterans of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign might have liked to be sent home rather than across the ocean to fight (and possibly die) in a conflict they could only regard as a sideshow to the war they had just won; but they had no say in the matter, and would do as they were ordered. Joined at Bermuda by additional reinforcements from the Mediterranean, they sailed in a fleet of fifty-one sail, including twenty troop transports, reaching the Virginia Capes in mid-August. Had they attacked Norfolk immediately, they would have almost certainly taken both the town and the long-blockaded Constellation, which had been stripped of most of her remaining crew the previous April; but instead, they sailed up the bay to rendezvous with Admiral Cockburn’s squadron at Tangier Island. An additional battalion of Royal Marines was assembled from all the ships of the British fleet, bringing the total invasion force to four thousand.
The entire region was critically underdefended. Although recruiting had increased the U.S. Army’s total strength to more than forty thousand, the administration had continued to deploy most new recruits to the Canadian frontier, leaving the south heavily dependent on local militias. The only active American naval force on the bay was a small flotilla of row galleys, gunboats, and armed barges under the command of Joshua Barney, which had been bottled up in the Patuxent River by Cockburn’s huge fleet. On August 17, Cockburn sent a strong force up the river, followed the next day by General Ross and several troop transports. Faced with inevitable defeat, Barney scuttled the flotilla and marched his sailors overland from Nottingham to Washington to assist in the defense of the capital. Cockburn, Ross, and the British invasion force landed at Benedict, Maryland, on the nineteenth and marched east at a frightening pace. With terrible suddenness, the nation’s capital was in jeopardy.
Assuming the British would not or could not advance that far inland, Secretary of War Armstrong had neglected the city’s defenses. But Ross’s veterans had won the Peninsular Campaign by outmarching their enemies, and they could cover twenty miles a day on decent roads. The British could attack Washington from any direction they chose, and the local American commander, Brigadier General William Winder, was suddenly faced with the problem of defending several places at once. Covering fifty miles in four days, including feints to the west and north, the British troops advanced south along the Bladensburg Road toward Washington. Winder hurried his army of several thousand regulars and militia to cut off the British advance and was reinforced at the last minute by Barney’s sailors and marines; but the Americans reached the field too late to prepare strong fortifications, and when the British appeared at midday on August 24, they charged, flanked, and quickly routed the defenders.
The Battle of Bladensburg, also known as the Bladensburg Races, was by far the most ignominious defeat ever suffered by an American army in the field, up to that time and ever since. In fairness, however, it should be said that the retreat highlighted the distinctive traits of Yankee ingenuity and self-reliance. Realizing there was no time, in all the confusion, to check in with their commanding officers, the soldiers and militia did not wait to be told to run for their lives. They knew a man could move faster when not burdened with weapons, ammunition, and extra gear, so they left most of it behind. Sensing that if they all ran away in the same direction, the British would follow and attempt to renew the battle, they split up into small groups and took different routes of escape—north to Baltimore, south to Virginia, west through the capital, over the Rock Creek bridges into Georgetown, and a few even doubled back to the east. Nor could it be said that the Americans were not physically fit. “Never did men with arms make better use of their legs,” a British lieutenant later wrote, and even Admiral Cockburn was impressed by the “Swiftness with which the Enemy went off.” Some hardly stopped running until they had reached their homes and farms, 50 or 100 miles away.
Only the sailors and marines, acting as artillerists under the command of Commodore Barney, stuck to their guns. When about five hundred American soldiers broke and ran from the high ground behind them on the right, the British were able to take up a position on their flank, and their situation became hopeless. Barney’s horse was shot out from under him; he got back to his feet, and was shot in the thigh. The sailors and marines fought on, with replacements stepping forward as the men serving the guns were killed; but after a stubborn defense, finding the British infantry closing from every direction, Barney gave the order to surrender. General Ross and Admiral Cockburn advanced and spoke personally to Barney, treating him (in the commodore’s words) with “the most marked Attention, respect, and Politeness.”
With the road to Washington now completely undefended, the tired British troops rested for two hours and then resumed marching, reaching Capitol Hill at 8:00 p.m. Cockburn and Ross had already reached their controversial decision to burn all the public buildings in the city, an act of vandalism that even Napoleon had not practiced in the many foreign capitals he had occupied. Apologists later linked the act to the burning of buildings in York (modern-day Toronto) by American troops, but the British commanders did not refer to that precedent as a justification at the time. Flames devoured both the House and Senate wings of the Capitol, the White House, the Treasury, the War and Navy Office buildings, and the great bridge across the Potomac. The Library of Congress, a collection that had been largely assembled by Jefferson, was a total loss. The offices of the National Intelligencer were smashed up as punishment for all the invective the paper had hurled at the British over the years, and Cockburn ordered that the C’s be removed from the lettertypes and destroyed, “so that the rascals cannot any longer abuse my name.” Before setting fire to the White House, Cockburn and his officers, famished after a long day of marching, fighting, and burning (marching and burning, especially), sat down to eat a dinner that had been left behind by the Madisons in their haste to evacuate. As a souvenir, Cockburn took a seat cushion from Dolley Madison’s chair. Fortunately for the capital’s inhabitants, the well-disciplined British troops committed no civilian atrocities, and only one private home was destroyed, after shots were reportedly fired from it.
Secretary Jones had left orders that the Washington Navy Yard, with all its ammunition and naval stores, must be destroyed rather than permitted to fall into the hands of the enemy. As news arrived of the British advance, the staff of the yard scrambled to obtain horses and wagons to transport as much of the movable supplies as possible to safety, but the rout at Bladensburg had been so swift and unexpected that there was hardly any time. Captain’s Clerk Mordecai Booth learned of the defeat when he saw the
retreating American army passing the Capitol. “Oh! My Country! But I blush Sir! to tell you,” he later told Navy Yard Commandant Thomas Tingey, “I saw the Commons Covered with the fugitive Soldiery of our Army—running, hobbling, Creeping, & apparently pannick struck.”
Riding at full gallop through the woods and past the marine barracks, Booth heard the whistling of musket balls overhead. He raced through the Navy Yard gates and informed Tingey that the city would soon be in the hands of the enemy. Working quickly, the two men set matches to trains of gunpowder leading into all the administrative buildings, tradesmen’s shops, sail loft, timber sheds, arsenal, and storehouses on the property, and all were soon engulfed “in irresistible flame.” Rushing down to the river, they set fire to a new frigate, the Columbia, still on the stocks but caulked and nearly ready for launch; and to the new sloop of war Argus, which lay alongside the wharf, virtually ready for sea. Both vessels were “immediately enveloped in a sheet of inextinguishable fire.”
The inferno quickly spread through the entire complex: the ground was covered with “Chips, Timber, Pitch, Tar, and other combustible matter, [and] to set fire to any one object must produce the successive conflagration of the whole.” An inventory of the destroyed naval stores, taken afterward, included (in part): “about 100 Tons of Cordage, some Canvas, a considerable quantity of Salt petre, Copper, Iron, Lead, Block Tin, Blocks, Ship Chandlery, Naval and Ordnance Stores, implements and fixed ammunition, with a variety of manufactured articles in all the Branches; 1743 barrels of Beef and Pork, 279 barrels of Whiskey, and a moderate Stock of Plank and Timber.” The Tripoli Monument, a 30-foot-high marble column erected in honor of the officers killed in the Mediterranean, escaped with only minor damage, and can be seen today on the grounds of the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
The following morning, a British party arrived at the Navy Yard to make certain that the devastation was complete. Less than an hour was needed to finish the job, which they did by setting fire to the ropewalk and arsenal, which had escaped the previous evening’s conflagration. Then Cockburn, Ross, and the British invasion force retreated from the capital, maintaining their remarkable pace over the ground, and re-embarked into their ships and transports on the Patuxent on August 29.
It had been a daring and crushingly successful foray. In eleven days, the British had penetrated fifty miles inland, trounced an army twice the size of their own, occupied and wrecked the American capital, and escaped to the safety of their fleet, having suffered casualties of only 64 killed and 185 wounded.
At the same time, a British squadron under the command of Captain James A. Gordon had warped up the Potomac River against contrary winds, grounding repeatedly on the Kettle Bottom shoals, and engaged Fort Washington in a brief artillery duel that ended when the American garrison spiked their guns and fled. The squadron, which comprised two frigates, three bomb vessels, and a rocket ship, took up position at Alexandria and prepared to bombard the town. The Americans unloaded provisions from all the merchant shipping, and several vessels were sunk to prevent capture. Captain Gordon offered to spare the town, but his conditions were humiliating: all vessels must be immediately surrendered; the Alexandrians must themselves reload all the provisions and cargoes that had been removed during the squadron’s approach, including all that had been sent inland in wagons; and the vessels that had been sunk to prevent capture must be raised from the bottom of the river, restored to sailing condition, and handed over to the British. The town council acceded to Gordon’s terms the same afternoon. The squadron dropped back down the river with twenty-two prize vessels in company, fought its way past a series of newly erected shore batteries, and rejoined Admiral Cochrane’s fleet on September 9.
Gordon’s delay allowed Baltimore to fortify its defenses by erecting new redoubts and earthworks, reinforcing the militia garrisons, and sinking block-ships off Lazaretto Point. Admiral Cochrane was determined to occupy the city, which was notorious as a hub of the American privateering industry. The British fleet did not take up position in the Patapsco until September 12. Troops were landed at North Point at dawn, but they failed to break through the American lines, and General Ross was killed by a sniper. That night, Cochrane brought his fleet up the river and anchored within cannon-shot range of Fort McHenry, the bedrock of the city’s defense. A Georgetown lawyer and militia officer, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the night bombardment from the deck of a truce ship, a few miles down the Patapsco. Moved by the sight of the American flag flying over the ramparts, illuminated in the glare of the Congreve rockets and in seeming defiance of the mortar shells bursting all around it, Key, who wrote verse on the side, reached for his pen and jotted down a few lines. The following day he reworked them into a poem, later set to music, which he entitled “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Baltimore refused to fall, and Cochrane, loathe to admit defeat in his official dispatches to the Admiralty, characterized the operation as a “demonstration” rather than an actual attempt to take the city. The fleet sailed down the bay to the Capes. A small force was left at Lynnhaven; Cockburn was dispatched to Bermuda for a refit; and Cochrane sailed for Bermuda with the main force and a small armada of prizes.
When news of Admiral Cockburn’s successful attack on Washington reached Monticello, Jefferson was incensed. Having taken a direct hand in designing the public edifices that had gone up in flames, and having personally collected and catalogued most of the books in the Library of Congress, the ex-president deplored “the Vandalism and brutal character of the English government.” He predicted that the event would arouse public sympathy for the Americans and anger against Britain, especially in Europe. “This will be worth the million of dollars the repairs of their conflagration will cost us,” he told Monroe.
Jefferson would be proven right. Humiliating as it was, the fall of Washington did not substantially interrupt the progress of the war. The young, underpopulated capital had not yet attained any real economic or strategic importance. Madison and his cabinet returned and took up leases in new buildings. Records were reconstructed, and dispatches were still sent and received from commanders at sea and in the field. Federalists who had clamored for accommodation to British demands found themselves weakened and discredited. Public opinion rallied around President Madison. The fate of Washington stiffened the defenses at Baltimore, and may have saved the city.
Then came news of a major American naval victory in the north. On the morning of September 11, in Plattsburgh Bay on Lake Champlain, a freshwater squadron under the command of Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough had engaged and defeated a British squadron of superior force. The two-hour battle was fought at anchor and at close range, with heavy casualties suffered on both sides. The British commodore, Captain George Downie, was killed early in the action, and Macdonough was twice knocked to the deck by flying debris, the first time by the decapitated head of one of his own midshipmen. The American vessels had set multiple anchors with springs on their cables, allowing them to “wind ship” (that is, to rotate 180 degrees and present fresh broadsides to the enemy) at a critical moment in the action. The contest ended with the capture of all the British ships, amounting to a frigate, a brig, and two sloops of war.
The Battle of Plattsburgh averted a threatened invasion of New York State. A British army of ten thousand men under the command of General Sir George Prevost, including more of Wellington’s feared veterans, had marched down the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, brushing aside several American infantry attacks, and would undoubtedly have continued into the Hudson River Valley if Downie had prevailed. Once the Americans had established control of the lake, however, General Prevost decided on a quick retreat to friendly territory, leaving his sick and wounded behind. The withdrawal, according to Downie’s first lieutenant, was carried out “in the most precipitate and disgraceful manner.” Prevost became a pariah among his officers, his soldiers, and the entire British people. Recalled to England to face a court-martial, he died before he could make his defense.
A rupture seemed inevitable, and the American envoys prepared to sail for home. This brought the issue to a head. If the American delegation left Europe, England would be forced to carry on the war for another year, at least. As this uncomfortable truth sank in, Lord Liverpool and his ministers began counting up the high economic, political, and diplomatic costs of the war. Napoleon’s downfall had seemed to free up military resources for deployment in America, but dissent among the allies now threatened a renewal of the war, and England’s ships and troops were needed in Europe. The new assertiveness of Russia was a major subject of discussion in London. The nations of continental Europe were jealous of England’s power, and their people (said Gallatin) openly “rejoiced at anything which might occupy and eventually weaken our enemy.” Post-Napoleonic France was sympathetic to the American cause, and allowed American privateers to outfit in its Channel ports. The repulse at Baltimore gave the lie to the British government’s assurances that an American capitulation was at hand. In Paris, crowds in the Palais-Royal gardens erupted into cheers at the announcement of Macdonough’s victory on Lake Champlain.