by Peter Snow
It wasn’t just Winder who was pressing Armstrong. The commander of Washington DC’s militia was Major General John Van Ness, a hard-headed realist and an influential Washington banker. He pressed Armstrong repeatedly to do something about the defences of Washington. Each time, Van Ness recalled, he was brushed off – ‘the Secretary generally treating with indifference, at least, if not with levity, the idea of an attack by the enemy’. Van Ness communicated his alarm to Monroe without effect, and even to President Madison, who referred him back to Armstrong. Virtually nothing was done. Van Ness wasn’t alone. Other senior officers were bewildered by the inaction too. One irate colonel wrote to a military colleague that he would be only too ready, if it were his job, to provide the forces to defend the city. There were plenty of ways in which ‘impediments could be thrown in the way of the enemy’, he said. ‘How long are we to be the laughing stock of the world?… The enemy can with a small force destroy Washington in its present situation … Surely it might and ought to be protected…?’
Throughout July and for the first two weeks of August the unfortunate Winder rode frantically around the countryside and in and out of the cities of Washington and Baltimore which were only thirty miles apart. He was desperate to do what he could to resist the British invasion that reports from Europe were warning of. He spent every hour of every day trying to secure himself an army and asking himself what he would do with it once he had it under his command. And then on 17 August his worst fears were realised. He was given the news from Point Lookout that the British fleet had arrived. But where would it land its troops and what would be their target?
3
Into the Patuxent
18–19 August
WASHINGTON AND THE Chesapeake are notorious for the fierce heat of August and the sudden storms that disturb the normal sultry calm. It was not the month to be in the US capital. The rivers that snaked towards Washington from Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac and the Patuxent, were reputed to be so dank and feverish that you risked your health venturing anywhere near them. When the Tonnant first anchored in the bay, Admiral Edward Codrington noted that the temperature on deck was 133 degrees Fahrenheit, though in his cabin he found it a bearable 83. On the morning of 17 August, as the ships prepared to move off from their assembly point at the mouth of the Potomac, George Gleig watched the sky, which had started ‘calm and serene’, suddenly cloud over and the water ‘began to rise in black waves tipped with foam’. The crews began to fear that a hurricane was about to arrive, but the scare quickly vanished, and the invasion fleet was soon under way.
In faltering winds Cochrane and Cockburn led the main force out of the Potomac into the bay and then north to the mouth of the Patuxent. All the time flag signals flew back and forth preparing the men for the landing. They were told to take three days’ worth of rations as well as their blankets, weapons and ammunition. The plan was to beach the troops halfway up the river at Benedict – some fifty miles from Washington – at dawn the following morning. But by evening they had only just reached the mouth of the Patuxent. The river was narrow in places and the depths uncertain. It would be foolish to tackle the Patuxent at night. Cochrane decided to anchor just outside the river until the first light of dawn.
The next morning the wind was hardly more helpful. But there was just enough for the ships to make it up the first few miles of the Patuxent. ‘The wind was light and contrary,’ wrote one artilleryman, ‘and the ships were compelled to beat up equally against the breeze and tide. They were consequently curiously intermingled and passing each other upon opposite tacks.’ It must have been an extraordinary sight. Harry Smith found himself looking back at the ships struggling up the river behind him and thinking it looked like ‘a large fleet stalking through a wood’.
Dozens of vessels of all sizes inched their way upstream. Huge queues of warships heaved themselves round from one windward beat to the other. For the frigates, sloops, brigs and schooners it was a swifter and easier passage; for the troop transports it was a tortoise-like crawl. And all the time the monotonous cries of the men on the lead lines warned of the quickly changing depths and bosuns shouted at the sailors to haul in or ease the braces and the sheets. Cochrane, determined to follow his landing force as far as he could up the river, left the Tonnant at anchor and shifted his flag to the frigate Iphigenia.
Those who had time amid all this activity to glance ashore were immediately struck by the beauty of the country on either side. Gleig thought it compared pretty favourably with home. ‘The sail up surpasses even that up the Thames, the woods are so fine, the cottages so beautiful and the cultivation so rich.’ He saw fields of Indian corn and ‘meadows of the most luxuriant pasture … whilst the neat wooden houses of the settlers, all of them painted white and surrounded with orchards and gardens, presented a striking contrast to the boundless forests which formed a background…’. A young midshipman called the river ‘lovely and romantic … how bountiful nature has been in her gifts to this favoured country’. It was indeed fertile land. This was Maryland, rich in pasture for cattle, rich too in corn and tobacco. Cockburn’s raids had stripped much of it in the past few months. But to the troops who’d been cooped up afloat on the Atlantic for ten weeks, Maryland looked like paradise. It would be solid ground beneath their feet, and it was teeming with fresh fruit and livestock. In places the banks were bustling with people too: ‘astonished slaves rested from their work in the fields contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of America beheld with perturbation, the tremendous preparations to devastate their blooming country’.
Ross organised his men into three brigades of between 1,100 and 1,500 men each. He had four regiments to call on. All had a distinguished record in the war with Napoleonic France. There was the 85th Light Infantry, the Buckinghamshire Volunteers. Wellington had been generous in his praise of their stand at Fuentes d’Oñoro three years earlier where they lost fifty-three men. From then on they had shared in every savage battle he’d fought. George Gleig had joined them as a young subaltern at the bloody siege of San Sebastián in 1813. Now the 85th formed the core of Ross’s 1st Brigade under Colonel William Thornton, who had led them through all their fiercest encounters in the Peninsula. Thornton’s outstanding courage, bordering on recklessness, would be one of the highlights of this campaign.
The 2nd Brigade was formed of men from the 4th and 44th Regiments. The 4th King’s Own was one of the oldest regiments in the army: it had fought for William III at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and it had fought with Wellington throughout the Peninsular War from 1808 to 1814. The 44th had spent the last few years fighting the French in the Mediterranean under Colonel Arthur Brooke. Another Northern Irishman, without Ross’s flair but with much of his experience, Brooke had signed up with the 44th East Essex Regiment back in 1793 and fought with them against the French in Egypt. He would now command the second of Ross’s brigades and his beloved 44th was part of it.* He records in his diary how disappointed his men had been when they were told they were not going home but to America. ‘All this’, he wrote, ‘could not be very agreeable from the general to the drum boy.’
Finally the 21st North British (later Scots) Fusiliers would form the bulk of Ross’s 3rd Brigade. They fought for the King against both Jacobite rebellions, of 1715 and 1745, and were in the front line against Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, where the second of those uprisings was conclusively defeated. Their commanding officer and now brigade commander was Lieutenant Colonel William Paterson. He was out to avenge the humiliation the 21st had suffered when it was part of the surrender at Saratoga in the American War of Independence. A further 1,000 marines and some 700 sailors brought the total number to around 4,500.
By the evening of Thursday 18 August the ships had managed to penetrate several miles up the Patuxent. There had – to their astonishment – been no sign of any attempt by the Americans to interrupt their progress. A couple of guns on an elevated section of the river bank could have caused havoc. But
there was not even a rifle shot. As they anchored for the night the brigade commanders issued their detailed orders for the landing which would begin at first light.
At five the following morning, Friday 19 August, a gunboat was anchored off Benedict in case the Americans offered any resistance to the landing. Eight miles downstream a gunshot gave the signal for the troops to clamber over the sides of the ships and into a fleet of smaller boats which would ferry them up to Benedict. Each man was heavily loaded with weapons, clothing and rations: the soldiers carried muskets, powder and at least sixty balls; the officers – like Gleig – pistols and sabres. As well as his weapons and food, Gleig brought a telescope and a cloak to sleep in. Slung over his left shoulder was a haversack containing, among other things, a spare shirt, a pair of stockings, a foraging cap and three pounds of salt pork and two and a half pounds of biscuit. Gleig knew the march ahead would be a lot tougher than in the Peninsula. There were no tents for shelter, no horses to ride, no mules to carry their kit, and the heat was as intense as anything they’d experienced in Spain.
The armada of small boats had to row eight miles against the stream to Benedict: a daunting challenge. For Gleig it was a nightmare. ‘How it came about, I know not, but in my eagerness to reach terra firma, I sprang with five dozen men and one brother officer, into a broad-bowed punt which, being supplied with no more than a couple of oars, moved against the stream at a rate of half a mile per hour.’ Gleig faced the prospect of a sixteen-hour voyage ‘under a broiling sun’. ‘Boat after boat, and barge after barge passed us by, without bestowing upon us any other notice than a volley of jokes, or repeated peals of laughter; till at length a worthy midshipman took pity on us and threw us a line.’ This lucky break saw Gleig ashore at Benedict by noon. More than 4,000 fully equipped men were successfully disembarked. Only three artillery pieces were landed, one 6-pounder and two 3-pounders. Because Ross could not be sure he would find horses to drag the guns and their store wagons, he would have to rely on a squad of a hundred sailors to do it.
Benedict today remains the ‘small straggling place’ Gleig described in 1814: a few houses scattered on a low-lying river bank where the river narrows and shoals. When the British troops landed they found it deserted. The news from Point Lookout had sent people scuttling for safety. Again, there was no sign of American opposition. The men made the most of what for many was their first chance to luxuriate on dry land for weeks. Some stretched their limbs. Others just basked at full length on the grass. Fires were soon blazing and camp kettles boiling. The more adventurous, like Gleig, went off to see what they could find. They all knew Cockburn’s orders that there should be no plundering of local property unless resistance was offered. Perhaps to reinforce this, a warning had been circulated that the Americans might well have poisoned any food or drink that they left behind. This didn’t stop Gleig and a few soldiers, who found a dairy farm near by, from devouring a pot ‘of delicious cream, which occupied one of the shelves’. George Chesterton, a twenty-year-old artilleryman scarcely out of school in England – his uncle was a French general – had been inspired to join up by stories of derring-do in the war against Napoleon. He was quick to seize the chance to go on land. He and an adventurous friend rowed ashore and ‘signalised our first landing in America by the timely capture of some sheep’.
Later in the day Ross moved his men up to high ground behind Benedict. The troops prepared to bivouac for the night and, in case the Americans staged a surprise attack, pickets were posted in a wide circle and the three guns placed with lighted slow matches beside them. But ‘Jonathan’, the British soldiers’ nickname for their enemy, was nowhere to be seen. (In colonial New England Jonathan was such a common name around Boston in 1776 that the British had called all American revolutionary soldiers ‘Jonathan’.)
Ross could now make his plans for the next few days in the light of the orders he’d received from London. The army commander was a cautious strategist. He had to match the ambitious objective that Cockburn had persuaded him and Cochrane to accept with the guidance he had received earlier from Lord Bathurst, the Secretary for War. Ross had been told Cochrane was in overall command, but he, Ross, was in charge of any troops on shore. Bathurst had made clear that it was for Ross to explain to Cochrane the pros and cons of any course of action, but ‘you will consider yourself authorized to decline engaging in any operation which you have reason to apprehend’ would lead to failure or undue losses. And Bathurst imposed an important strategic limitation on Ross’s freedom of action. The British government was not after all out to reconquer the United States but, in the jargon, to ‘give them a good drubbing’ in order to secure acceptable peace terms. The force Bathurst had despatched with Ross was not strong enough to do more than hit and run. It was not an army of occupation. So Bathurst’s orders went on: ‘You are not to engage in any extended operations at a distance from the coast.’ This rather vague but clearly important stipulation was to haunt Ross and Cochrane for the next few weeks. How far was ‘at a distance’?
Another problem for Ross – and for Cochrane – was that these orders made no allowance for the third figure who was sure to insist on a key role in any military adventure on shore – George Cockburn. Cockburn had one clear and immediate responsibility. He would lead a cluster of small boats to attack and destroy Joshua Barney’s American flotilla bottled up in the upper reaches of the river. Ross would march his army along the bank in parallel, so that each could come to the other’s aid if they ran into opposition. Once that had been achieved, Cockburn would have little formal authority apart from command of a few hundred sailors in his force. But Ross knew that the man who had urged him and Cochrane, the Commander in Chief, to go for Washington was unlikely to allow himself to be left out of the action. Cockburn, for his part, may have feared that either Ross or Cochrane, or both, would have second thoughts about allowing the army to push on to Washington once the first objective had been achieved. He was determined not to allow them to flinch. He also managed to get a defiant message through to the American President. In conversation with John Skinner, a go-between who dealt with prisoners on both sides, Cockburn remarked: ‘I believe, Mr Skinner, that Mr Madison will have to put on his armour and fight it out. I see nothing else left.’ Skinner lost no time in reporting this to Madison himself.
Bathurst’s orders had also touched on another highly sensitive issue – what to do about American slaves who wanted to desert and might even be ready to rise against their white masters. America was racked by deep unease and even dissension about slavery. It was part of everyday life on the tobacco plantations of Virginia – like those of the late George Washington, Jefferson and Madison, and on the cotton farms in the deep south. But in the northern states slavery was either disapproved of or illegal. But everywhere there was widespread fear of a slave revolt. Margaret Bayard Smith, a luminary of fashionable Washington who became a close friend of Dolley Madison, described the country’s slaves as ‘our enemy at home’. She wrote in her diary back in 1813, ‘I have no doubt that they will if possible join the British.’ The son of Madison’s Vice President, Elbridge Gerry Junior, wrote in his diary: ‘Should we be attacked, there will be great danger of the blacks rising, and to prevent this, patrols are very necessary, to keep them in awe.’ Tempting as it might be for British commanders to provoke a black rebellion, Lord Bathurst was adamantly against – on moral grounds. ‘You will not encourage any disposition which may be manifested by the negroes to rise upon their masters.’ Humanity, he said, forbade any idea of prompting warfare that ‘must be attended by atrocities’. If individual slaves wanted to desert or join the British ‘Black Corps’ of negroes – that was permissible, but the slaves should immediately be freed.
The irrepressible George Cockburn, in his eighteen-month Chesapeake campaign, had already recruited blacks. He was for stretching Bathurst’s rule as far he could, short of openly promoting a slave rebellion. He told his Commander in Chief, Cochrane, that the blacks who’d managed to d
esert to the British side were ‘getting on astonishingly and are really very fine fellows … they have induced me to alter the bad opinion I had of the whole of their race’. Cockburn’s ADC, James Scott, writes of the ‘runaway negroes, who flocked over to us in such numbers that every transport which brought us provisions and naval supplies generally returned with a live cargo of blackies, their wives and children’. Cochrane himself believed that with the blacks properly armed and backed by a large British force, ‘Mr Madison will be hurled from his throne’. One of Cockburn’s naval officers recalled: ‘A great many black slaves, with their families, used to take advantage of our visits to come away with us. Some of their first exclamations were, “Me free man; me go cut massa’s throat; give me musket,” which many of them did not know how to use when they had it.’
Not all slaves were attracted by British offers of freedom. One who preferred to chance his luck on the American side was Charles Ball, who spent his life escaping from slave masters and somehow managed to make a living claiming that he was free. In August 1814 he had been hired as one of Joshua Barney’s crewmen. He was employed as a part-time seaman, part-time cook in one of the barges in Barney’s flotilla.