When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Introduction

  1. Eager souls panting for fame

  17 August

  2. The great little Madison

  17 August

  3. Into the Patuxent

  18–19 August

  4. A black floating mass of smoke

  20–22 August

  5. Not till I see Mr Madison safe

  23 August

  6. Be it so, we will proceed

  24 August, morning

  7. Bladensburg: a fine scamper

  24 August, afternoon

  8. Barney’s last stand

  24 August, afternoon

  9. Save that painting!

  24 August, evening

  10. The barbarous purpose

  24 August, evening

  11. The dreadful majesty of the flames

  24 August, night

  12. Damn you! You shan’t stay in my house

  25 August

  13. Into the Potomac

  26–27 August

  14. A tempest of dissatisfaction

  28–29 August

  15. Do not attack Baltimore!

  End of August

  16. Is my wife alive and well?

  End of August

  17. The star-shaped fort and its banner

  1–11 September

  18. Many heads will be broken tonight

  12 September

  19. The Battle of North Point

  12 September

  20. The rockets’ red glare

  13 September

  21. You go on at your peril

  13 September

  22. Unparalleled in history

  Aftermath

  Photographs

  Author’s Note

  Notes and References

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Praise for When Britain Burned the White House

  Copyright

  To all my grandchildren

  Maps

  1. USA, 1814

  2. Chesapeake Bay area

  3. The advance to Washington, 20–24 August 1814

  4. Battle of Bladensburg (1), 24 August 1814

  5. Battle of Bladensburg (2), 24 August 1814

  6. 24–25 August 1814

  7. 12 September 1814

  8. Battle of North Point, 12 September 1814

  9. 13–14 September 1814

  Introduction

  ON A SWELTERING August evening, a group of British soldiers and sailors sat down to a meal in the State Dining Room of America’s White House. They hadn’t been invited. They had invaded the capital of the United States, had seized the President’s house and were now helping themselves to the meal that he and his first lady had prepared for their guests. To the British officers and men who’d been marching for days the food and drink were like a gift from the gods. Royal Navy Lieutenant James Scott wrote in his diary that the President’s Madeira wine tasted like ‘nectar’. It was 24 August 1814. Thirty years after the United States had won its independence, the British were back.

  The extraordinary story of how these intruders, at the head of a British force of 4,500 men, came to occupy and then burn the city of Washington has become the stuff of legend. President Obama greeted Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, at the White House in March 2012 by reminding him that two centuries earlier his countrymen had ‘really lit the place up’. Cameron replied that he was a ‘little embarrassed’ by what his ancestors had got up to. Tony Blair, an earlier Prime Minister, was typically a bit more flip: ‘I know this is kind of late – but sorry!’ Even Bob Dylan wrote a special couplet referring to Britain’s burning of the White House for his song ‘Narrow Way’.

  The British invasion of Washington is not an episode in their history that Americans recall with much relish – any more than the French do the Battle of Waterloo. In Britain, very few people know it happened or even that there was a so-called War of 1812. It was actually one of the defining moments in the history of both countries. For America it was the only other time – before the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 – that outsiders succeeded in striking at the core of American state power. But within three weeks the young republic was to transform utter humiliation into triumph. And Britain was to see one of the most daring and successful military enterprises in its history bring it face to face with the limits of its imperial power. These three weeks provide a revealing commentary on the personalities of the two nations, now inseparable friends, then bitter enemies. The story is greatly enriched by first-hand accounts from characters in all walks of life on both sides of the conflict. They are as compelling a group of eyewitnesses as any you’ll find in history. All – even the military – speak with a disarming immediacy and candour about the bloodshed and destruction and the strengths and weaknesses of those in command.

  Most of the British men who tell us how they came to be in the White House that night had fought their way through western Europe defeating the armies of the French Emperor Napoleon. Harry Smith, an ambitious young officer in the Rifles, had recently seen burning and destruction in plenty as he campaigned through Spain and southern France with the Duke of Wellington. His only regret in being posted to America was that he had to leave behind his devoted Spanish wife, who had accompanied him throughout the Peninsular campaign. He was now a senior aide to the army commander, Major General Robert Ross, another uninvited guest at the White House table. Ross wore on his neck the vicious and still unhealed scar of a wound he had suffered in a battle with Napoleon’s men in southern France. He too had had to leave a much loved wife behind. Months earlier she had crossed the Pyrenees to treat his wound. She was now languishing at their home in Northern Ireland, deeply unhappy without him. His letters to her reveal a kindly and deeply sensitive man, tormented by news of her loneliness and depression. He had been beset too by doubts about his campaign: he would not have led his men into Washington but for the persistent needling of another man eating the President’s dinner that night– the fiery Rear Admiral George Cockburn. Cockburn’s own words and the accounts of those who knew him testify to his sharp tongue and fearsome reputation. To the Americans he was a ‘brutal monster’ for the raids he had made on their coastal towns over the previous year. Cockburn had relished the hard-bitten life of a sailor from the moment he served as a frigate captain’s servant at the age of ten. His chief aide was now James Scott, a dashing young sailor with an unashamed weakness for flirting with ladies no matter what language they spoke. He writes with delightful indiscretion about the debates within the British high command which he often attended. All of these men dined at the President’s table that night and then set the White House on fire: it still bears the burn marks to this day. One prolific diarist who wasn’t actually at the meal but who describes the scenes there and throughout those dramatic weeks in more detail than anyone else was George Gleig, whose adventures read like those of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe.

  The principal American characters and the stories they tell are no less compelling. James and Dolley Madison presented America with a striking partnership between a cerebral and often withdrawn President and his warm-hearted, gregarious and very practical wife. He won undying fame as the key draughtsman of
the American republic’s constitution, but was a near disastrous failure as its commander in chief when the War of 1812 reached this dramatic climax. Dolley was widely acclaimed for her plucky conduct during those August days in 1814. The letters of James and Dolley Madison and their friends Margaret Bayard Smith and Anna Maria Thornton provide a candid picture of the President’s attempt to manage a desperate situation, and the crushing humiliation of having to abandon his own home. Madison was let down by the conduct of two seriously flawed characters: John Armstrong, the Secretary of War, and his military commander William Winder. Both may have had their merits but they both failed each other and their country. The cast of American players in the drama has its winners as well as its losers: the energetic Secretary of State, James Monroe, and Sam Smith, the resolute American commander at Baltimore, both helped Madison restore America’s faith in itself. There are a number of soldiers too like John Pendleton Kennedy who give us a taste of how ordinary Americans weathered the storm. Kennedy dashed so quickly into action that he found himself wearing his dancing pumps on the battlefield. And if there was one clear American hero, it was Joshua Barney, the mastermind behind the team of flotillamen who caused the British much mischief. He had been a swashbuckling privateer in the American and French navies and claimed he had once kissed Marie Antoinette. Barney was eventually to die of the wound he received fighting the British.

  The accounts of these central characters on either side are at the heart of what is the most striking episode in an otherwise almost forgotten war. It began in 1812 and ended in 1815 with no material gains for either Britain or America. In just one month in the summer of 1814 the fortunes of both sides rise and fall with spectacular impact. The sack of Washington is only an early highlight in a story that reaches its height at Baltimore three weeks later. What happened there did much to soothe America’s sense of national humiliation at the burning of Washington.

  The fierce struggle of August and September 1814 was one of the last bouts of fighting between two nations that later became the closest of allies. It defines the strengths and weaknesses of each: the British empire – overstretched and arrogant, but fielding a navy and army of experienced veterans who could sweep all before them; the young American republic, struggling with internal divisions but infused with a freshness of spirit and patriotic fervour. And underlying this often bloody conflict is the grudging respect that often marked dealings between the two sides. This was after all a battle between two supposedly civilised nations who spoke the same language, shared family ties and were neither of them bent on the other’s outright ruin. It is notable how, just occasionally, the essential humanity of the two countries took some of the edge off the death and destruction.

  1

  Eager souls panting for fame

  17 August

  THE AMERICAN WATCHMAN on the aptly named Point Lookout awoke to an astonishing sight. Thomas Swann stood gazing at up to fifty warships flying the British flag anchored in the wide expanse of water at the entrance to the Potomac River in Chesapeake Bay. He’d never seen anything like it: mighty warships like the eighty-gun Tonnant, captured from the French at the Battle of the Nile and one of the champions of the British fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, along with several other seventy-four-gun ships of the line, as well as some smaller, faster frigates and, scattered among them, clusters of schooners and sloops of war. There were troop transports, which Swann reckoned must be carrying thousands of fighting men, and bomb ships which could cause devastation ashore with their long-range mortars. He was looking at the largest British force to hit the Chesapeake since Britain had tried and failed to crush the American revolution thirty years earlier. The bay was of great strategic importance: it commanded the approaches to the cities of Washington, Annapolis and Baltimore. Of the three, Baltimore was the largest and most prosperous with a well-protected harbour. But Washington had the prestige of being the home of Congress and the President.

  It was dawn on 17 August 1814. Within hours the news would be in Washington some eighty miles away. War was about to come to the very heart of the United States. Swann, a lawyer and volunteer observer, sent an express letter to the War Secretary John Armstrong detailing the fifty-one ships he counted in the bay. One terrified American eyewitness in the coastal town of York wrote to his local newspaper that the appearance of this ‘formidable’ enemy fleet could only mean ‘our property destroyed, our dwellings in ashes, our wives and children homeless and defenceless’.

  The previous evening the bay had echoed to the thunder of British cannon. It was a salute to the final squadron to arrive, carrying 2,800 troops from southern France. Robert Barrett, a midshipman on the frigate Hebrus, had all the enthusiasm of a young lad of fifteen just embarked on a life of adventure. ‘It was a glorious and imposing spectacle to behold these noble ships standing up the vast bay … manned too with eager souls, panting for fame and opportunity to sustain the laurels they had gained in many a bloody field of Spain and Portugal.’

  Another inspired by the ‘glorious’ sight ‘of an English fleet standing up an enemy’s bay with all sails set’ was George Gleig. He was an eighteen-year-old subaltern with an amiable round face and curly hair, already a prolific and meticulous diarist. Until that spring he had been chronicling his adventures with the Duke of Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War against the French. But that war was over. France’s Emperor Napoleon had abdicated. And Gleig and his comrades had expected to go home. But pretty soon the rumour went around that the British veterans who’d fought their way through the Iberian Peninsula into southern France and others from the war in the Mediterranean would be off to America. With France defeated, now was the time to get the upper hand in another war that had become a futile drain on British resources – the conflict with the newly independent United States. The Americans were fighting the Royal Navy at sea and trying to seize parts of British Canada. Britain responded in the summer of 1814 with an enterprise designed to give the Americans what Britain’s Military Secretary, Colonel Torrens called a ‘good drubbing’. There was no plan to reimpose British rule.

  The American war was a tiresome sideshow for the British. They had been fighting a war of survival against Napoleon, whose domination of the European continent they saw as the paramount strategic threat. And so when America’s President James Madison declared war on Britain in June 1812, it seemed like a stab in the back. Madison was exasperated by what he saw as the intolerable excesses of the British empire. In applying a stranglehold on France, Britain had massively interfered with American ships trading with Europe. The Royal Navy also imperiously made a habit of impressing Americans into working on its warships – even if the men could demonstrate that they were American citizens. What was more, Americans driving west to settle in Ohio and beyond felt threatened by Britain’s support for the indigenous Indian tribes who stood in their way. And so, even though the United States had won its independence from Britain a generation earlier, it felt forced to declare war against the old mother country again.

  The war hadn’t gone well for either side. The Americans tried and failed to seize slices of Canada. Former President Thomas Jefferson (before he was succeeded in the White House by James Madison in 1809) had boasted that conquering Canada would be a ‘mere matter of marching’. The odds appeared to be massively in America’s favour. Upper Canada’s tiny population of less than 100,000 faced an American population of more than seven million. But it proved impossible for the American army to establish a permanent foothold across the frontier. And the British, although they possessed the most powerful navy in the world, suffered as much punishment as they inflicted in several naval encounters, and even had their Upper Canadian capital York (the modern Toronto) burned by an American marauding force in the spring of 1813. The parliament buildings there were reduced to ashes by soldiers who, the Americans claimed later, had run amok.

  This debilitating war remained inconclusive. Lord Liverpool’s Tory government in London was severely short of money after
two decades of fighting the French. So he leapt at the opportunity of peace in Europe – with Napoleon’s exile to Elba in the spring of 1814 – to deal a decisive blow against America. ‘Now that the tyrant Buonaparte has been consigned to infamy,’ thundered the London Times, ‘there is no public feeling in this country stronger than that of indignation against the Americans…’ Parliament, press and government switched the nation’s attention from Europe to America in language that knew no bounds. The Americans were called ‘loathsome’ and ‘hateful’ for having turned on Britain when it was fighting a war with the French. America’s President Madison was a ‘serpent’. Resentment still burned strong in Britain at the humiliating defeat it had suffered in the American War of Independence. Now it was free to turn up the heat on its former American colonies. And the fleet that appeared in the Chesapeake in August 1814 was there to do just that.

  * * *

  George Gleig was happy not to go straight home after Napoleon’s defeat. He was as keen as anyone, he wrote, ‘to gather a few more laurels even in America’. But over on the flagship, the Tonnant, Harry Smith, who’d seen rather more action than Gleig in the Peninsula, was much less happy. Two years earlier he’d rescued a beautiful Spanish girl of fourteen from British troops who’d gone berserk after their successful storming of the fortress town of Badajoz. Within minutes Smith proposed to her, and they married in the presence of Wellington, the Commander in Chief. Juana, Harry’s new wife, had followed him through many a scrape in the years of fighting that ensued. And he now found it ‘an awful trial’ to part with her. ‘I knew I must leave behind my young, fond and devoted wife, my heart was ready to burst.’ They spent their last few days together in a little skiff floating down the river from Bordeaux enjoying the ‘beauties of the scenery’, and he finally left her ‘insensible and in a faint’. Now Smith, who’d made his name as an energetic and forthright captain on Wellington’s staff, was attached to a new army commander, Major General Robert Ross. The Duke of Wellington himself showed no enthusiasm for the war in America. He had always believed that wars should have clearly defined and achievable goals: the American war had neither. But he admired Ross, who’d been one of his senior commanders in Spain and southern France, and the Duke was glad to see him presented with such a promising command.