by Peter Snow
Barney was one of the first to flash the news to Washington that the British had landed. At nine o’clock that Friday morning he sent off an urgent letter to Madison’s Secretary of the Navy, William Jones. Barney wrote, ‘Sir, One of my officers has this moment arrived from the mouth of the Patuxent, and brings the enclosed account.’ He detailed a full list of the ships that had anchored and went on: ‘A large number of small boats are now under way standing up the Patuxent, with a number of men, with a determination to go to the city of Washington as they said yesterday. They have taken all the horses in this part of the world…’ Barney’s letter went on to say that people had heard Cockburn boasting he would dine in Washington on Sunday after destroying Barney’s flotilla.
If earlier reports had caused alarm in Washington, Barney’s provoked panic. Everything that weekend was terror and confusion. There was now no doubt that a British army was on American soil and as little as two days’ march away, bent on the destruction of at least one major US city. But which one? The Potomac River led only to Washington; the Patuxent offered an approach to Annapolis and Baltimore as well. The fact that there were now three possible targets heightened the confusion. Jones’s reply to Barney, written at lunchtime that same day, Friday 19 August, said: ‘Appearances indicate a design on this place, but it may be a feint, to mask a real design on Baltimore.’ As for Barney’s flotilla, Jones was emphatic that it should not be allowed to fall into British hands. ‘You will run no hazard of capture … should he advance upon you with an overwhelming force, you will effectually destroy the flotilla by fire, and with your small arms, retire as he advances, towards this place, opposing by all means in your power, his progress…’
William Winder was frantic. ‘The innumerably multiple orders, letters, consultations and demands … can be more easily conceived than described,’ he said, ‘and occupied me nearly day and night … and had nearly broken down myself and assistants…’ The beleaguered Commander in Chief had to admit that, of the 15,000 troops that were supposed to be available from the four neighbouring states, only a few hundred were in the field to confront the conquerors of Napoleon. Winder wrote another desperate letter to the Secretary of War John Armstrong. ‘Would it not be advisable’, he asked, ‘to make an appeal to the patriotism of the country, at the present moment, for volunteers, without regard to their legal obligations as militia men?’ Anything to get a force in the field. Forget the red tape.
Winder reckoned Annapolis, Maryland’s capital thirty miles east of Washington, was the British target. The only senior cabinet minister, apart from Madison himself, who now believed that British sights were set on Washington was James Monroe, the Secretary of State. When the news came in from Point Lookout, the morning before, Monroe went to see the President. ‘I remarked that this city was their object,’ Monroe reported later. ‘He concurred in the opinion.’ Monroe also wrote to Armstrong: ‘The movement of the enemy menaces this place among others … in a more imminent degree than any other.’ But then, demonstrating his contempt for Madison’s military chiefs, Monroe offered to go to Benedict himself and report back what the enemy was up to. Madison agreed, and at lunchtime on the Saturday Monroe, whose job was supposed to be foreign affairs, rode off, like a glorified intelligence officer, to scout the front line with an escort of dragoons.
No doubt Monroe relished the risk he was taking. He was something of a Revolutionary War hero: he had been injured at the Battle of Trenton in 1776, and he’d become a colonel before the end of the war, in his early twenties. By Sunday morning, even though he’d left his telescope behind, he was able to make out the forest of British masts at Benedict and send a written report back to the President. The British were still disembarking, but he couldn’t make an estimate of their numbers. He said he wasn’t sure they were headed for Washington, but ‘the best security against this attempt is an adequate preparation to repel it’.
The commander of Washington’s own District of Columbia militia, Major General John Van Ness, had long been vainly pressing Armstrong to build proper defences. When he heard that the British had entered the Patuxent, he again urged Armstrong to take immediate steps to defend the city. But the Secretary of War replied: ‘Oh yes! by God, they would not come with such a fleet without meaning to strike somewhere, but they certainly will not come here: what the devil would they do here?’ Van Ness disagreed. The British, he said, were out to capture or destroy America’s seat of government. ‘No, No!’ retorted Armstrong. ‘Baltimore is the place, sir; that is of so much more consequence.’ Armstrong also did his best to belittle Van Ness. In a letter to a friend he said Van Ness was ‘a fellow who has not military knowledge enough to command a Corporal’s Guard’.
Van Ness, in despair at Armstrong, then called on Winder and found him ‘hesitating and undecided’ about what sort of force he needed from the District of Columbia. To which the exasperated general replied that Winder should order out every militiaman he could. Winder agreed to make another effort. But who should command them? As they were talking, Van Ness began to suspect that there might be a conflict between him and Winder about which of them would be in charge. He, Van Ness, after all was a major general, Winder only a brigadier general. At a later meeting he tackled Winder, who prevaricated. Van Ness then called on Armstrong, who said he’d ask the President to decide. The President left it to Armstrong, and Armstrong effectively ruled in Winder’s favour. Van Ness promptly resigned. It was managerial chaos.
While most people now began feverishly discussing what to do and where to go to escape the expected British onslaught, there were a few young lads whose hearts were stirred at the prospect of fighting to save their homes. One such was John Pendleton Kennedy. He was an eighteen-year-old law student in Baltimore with a strong romantic streak. He’d long found his law studies ‘inscrutable, dreary mystification’ and he leapt at the chance of being a soldier, a calling he described as ‘all sunlight and captivating glitter’. Kennedy joined the 5th Regiment of the Maryland militia. ‘Here I was,’ he wrote, ‘just out of college, in a very dashy uniform of blue and red with a jacket and leather helmet, crested with a huge black feather … with my white crossbelts, pure as pipe-clay could make them, my cartridge box and bayonet and a Harper’s Ferry musket of fourteen pounds…’
Kennedy spent most of his time at Fort McHenry, Baltimore’s great defensive bastion at the entrance to the inner harbour. He hugely enjoyed his bouts of military training there. He loved the eating and drinking, the storytelling and the joking. ‘Nothing’, he wrote, ‘is more natural than this association of youth, military ardour and susceptibility to the charms of female society … I visited a great deal among the young belles of the city and rather piqued myself upon the importance of belonging to the army.’
So, when the news broke that the British army had landed, Kennedy was delighted to get the order to march that Sunday morning. ‘It was a day of glorious anticipation’, he wrote, ‘with all the glitter of a dress parade…’ As they marched through the streets the pavements were crowded with admiring but anxious spectators, and the windows were filled with women: ‘friends were rushing to the ranks to bid us goodbye – many exhorting us to be of good cheer and do our duty; handkerchiefs were waving from the fair hands at the windows – some few of the softer sex weeping as they waved adieux to husbands and brothers.’ At every corner Kennedy found himself being cheered as he and his comrades moved briskly along to familiar music: banners fluttered in the wind and bayonets flashed in the sun. ‘What a scene it was, and what a proud actor I was in it! I was in the ecstasy of a vision of glory, stuffed with any quantity of romance.’ Kennedy knew he was marching to a real war: the enemy had landed and he was sure to meet them on a field of battle in a few days. Along with the marching soldiers went a wagon train carrying all the stores needed for the campaign – cartridge boxes, spare ammunition and powder. Officers rode swaggeringly up and down on horseback ‘with a peculiar air of urgent business’. Kennedy’s account of the march that fo
llowed, as the day became hotter, provided a vivid illustration of the ordeal that soldiers on both sides had to endure at the height of a Maryland summer. ‘We could not have been tramping over those sandy roads, under the broiling sun of August, with less than thirty pounds of weight upon us.’ His pack weighed ten pounds, his musket fourteen. He carried three or four score of musket balls. ‘But we bore it splendidly, toiling and sweating in a dense cloud of dust, drinking the muddy water of the little brooks … taking all the discomforts with a cheerful heart and a steady resolve.’
Kennedy recalled that on the first night of the march he and his comrades, who’d been used to a comfortable life, believed ‘the idea of a supper of fat pork and hard biscuit was a pleasant absurdity which we treated as a matter of laughter’. They massively overcooked the pork and ended up with ‘a black mess which seemed to be reduced to a stratum of something resembling a compound of black soap in a semi liquid state…’
Kennedy’s regiment was part of a force of some 1,500 militiamen under General Tobias Stansbury from Baltimore, which finally responded to Winder’s call. At last some Americans were beginning to wake up to the need to assemble a force to stop the British.
4
A black floating mass of smoke
20–22 August
JOSHUA BARNEY, THE commodore of the American flotilla of barges, had been in many scrapes before. He’d fought for his life in desperate naval battles with spars, sails and rigging crashing on the deck all round him. He had harried Cockburn’s powerful fleet with his shallow-draught gunboats with negligible loss of life. But now he and his flotilla were trapped in the upper reaches of the Patuxent. Like James Monroe, Barney’s scouts had seen the scale of the British landing force. Barney knew it would be suicide to lead his gunboats downstream to Benedict and make an assault on the much larger British ships.
At seven on the morning of Saturday 20 August Barney sent a message to the Navy Secretary in Washington. What was he to do about the British threat to his little fleet and to the American capital? ‘No doubt,’ he wrote, ‘their object is Washington, and perhaps the flotilla.’ There had been talk of dragging the flotilla’s barges across land from the Patuxent to the South River a few miles north-east, but Barney had scotched that. Spies and other disaffected local people, angry at Madison’s failure to protect them from the British, would be quick to tell the enemy where the flotilla was. If it managed to escape to another river, the British would soon have it bottled up again. The Navy Secretary’s reply was blunt and to the point: destroy the flotilla rather than let the British seize it. Barney should then lead the flotillamen back to help defend Washington. ‘Your force on this occasion is of immense importance and is relied upon with the utmost confidence.’ Barney’s dream of foiling the Royal Navy on the water was to end in heartbreak, but he and his men would soon play a vital role in the fight for the capital.
William Winder, America’s commander in the field, after his near breakdown a day earlier managed to pull himself together sufficiently to send off some cavalry to tackle the British. He told them ‘to fall down upon the enemy, to annoy, harass and impede their march by every possible means, to remove or destroy forage and provision … and gain intelligence’. And the next day, Sunday the 21st, Winder rode to the Woodyard, a convenient assembly point about halfway between Washington and the Patuxent River, to meet what troops he could muster in a further effort to disrupt any British advance.
* * *
General Ross was in no hurry to move forward. His men were still disembarking from the ships on the Saturday morning, and George Gleig and Lieutenant Williams, another young officer in the 85th, reckoned they had time to go off and do some private foraging. Others had been on the rampage before them, and they found little left in the way of livestock and vegetables. They finally came to a cottage whose garden, pigsty and poultry pen had been thoroughly ransacked. ‘There was a wretched old woman here,’ reported Gleig, ‘who began to weep bitterly as soon as she beheld us.’ They assured her they meant no harm, and then applying the rules of conduct that others had clearly ignored, they astonished her by paying ‘a quarter dollar piece’ for her last fowl. But no sooner had they sat down to tuck into their lunch than the bugles sounded. They stuffed what they could of the meal into their haversacks, buckled on their gear and hurried off. Gleig and his men were light infantrymen. They found themselves in the leading brigade – led by Colonel Thornton – of about 1,200 men including ‘a hundred armed negroes’. As they stood, lined up and ready to march, Robert Ross and his staff rode up to shouts of applause. ‘The General pulled off his hat, smiled and bowed to his soldiers.’ On his order to march off there was ‘another hearty cheer’.
The high spirits didn’t last for long. It was the time of day when the heat of the sun was at its fiercest. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the air was still. The notorious humidity of this part of America’s eastern seaboard soon had the men sweating into their clammy woollen uniforms. Three months at sea had made them utterly unfit for a long march. They were weighed down by their muskets and ball ammunition, by the spare clothes and three days’ rations they were carrying in their packs. Gleig saw more men fall behind from fatigue that day than on any march in the Peninsula. ‘Never, perhaps, did an army exhibit such symptoms of deficiency, not in courage but in bodily strength, as we all exhibited this day.’ Ross kept them struggling on for only four and a half miles before he called a halt. Gleig and his men were put on picket duty at a nearby farm, and were immediately confronted by a bad-tempered, weather-beaten old farmer. ‘He was a keen democrat, a thorough Yankee and abhorred the English with all his heart … he spoke much of the iniquity of the invasion but comforted himself by anticipating the utter destruction of those engaged in it.’ But he was hospitable enough to produce some peach whisky which went down well with his uninvited British guests. After the oppressive heat of the day the British, sleeping in the open, had to endure a night of thunder, lightning and drenching rain.
In spite of Winder’s dispositions, the British saw no sign of any enemy horsemen. Vulnerable though the large British force was without its own cavalry, it was left undisturbed. Ross had the men up again two hours before dawn, and his newly invigorated army marched all the way to the small town of Nottingham sixteen miles to the north. It was, as the nineteenth-century American historian Henry Adams described it, a ‘midsummer picnic … through a thickly wooded region where a hundred militiamen with axes and spades could have delayed their progress for days, the British army moved in a solitude apparently untenanted by human beings till they reached Nottingham…’.
All the way there they were accompanied in the river to their right by Admiral Cockburn and a fleet of up to forty British shallow-draught boats and tenders on the lookout for Joshua Barney’s flotilla. At around midday when both Ross and Cockburn were passing Lower Marlborough, the two men met on the river bank for a talk. Cockburn was anxious to keep up the momentum of the British advance on the two agreed objectives – the destruction of the flotilla, and the attack on Washington. Ross was committed to the first but nervous about the second. Washington was still some forty miles off – inland. He was haunted by Bathurst’s instruction that he should never stray too far from the coast and he was aware that it was he, not Cockburn, who would bear the responsibility if anything went wrong with what would be a highly ambitious undertaking. His two aides, Harry Smith and George de Lacy Evans, were enthusiastic advocates of the plan to target Washington, and saw it as their job to help the general wrestle with his doubts and keep him on mission. Smith thought Evans a fellow as ‘goodhearted … as ever wore a sword’. He admired Ross too, and wrote of him as a ‘dear friend’, but he observed that the general was ‘very cautious in responsibility – awfully so, and lacked that dashing enterprise so essential to carry a place by a coup de main’. It was clear to Cockburn and to the two aides that Ross had not yet fully steeled himself for the job. But the immediate task was to eliminate Barney’s flotilla, and o
n that the two men were agreed. The next day Cockburn would push on up the river and hunt down the flotilla.
The army stopped for the night of Sunday 21 August at Nottingham. It had spent most of the day in woodland, and for the first time there was a skirmish with the Americans. A corporal standing beside Gleig said, ‘What is that? Do you see something, sir, moving through those bushes on the right?’ Gleig looked where the man pointed and saw the glint of what appeared to be a weapon. He had the bugle sounded and his men raced forward and the Americans soon made off leaving one dead. It was, said Gleig, a ‘trifling affair’ but it put the British on the alert. They were now in tobacco country and Gleig and his mates prepared themselves a bed of tobacco leaves in the shelter of a barn. ‘With a fire blazing before us and the remains of our supper taken away, we reclined pipe in hand, and drinking cup hard by, within the porch of the hospitable barn chatting…’
* * *
The American who was closest to all this action was still James Monroe, the Secretary of State, who was eagerly reliving his life as a Revolutionary War veteran, keeping as close an eye as he could on the British movements. He was lucky to avoid capture as he circled around Benedict and then rode up the road towards Nottingham. Indeed one report claimed he was just leaving Nottingham when the British entered it. He wrote to President Madison that the British were pushing up the Patuxent heading for Barney’s flotilla ‘or taking that in their way, and aiming at the city…’. Madison wrote to Monroe that they should be ready for the British to ‘risk everything … If the force of the enemy be not greater than yet appears and he is without cavalry, it seems extraordinary that he should venture on an enterprise to this distance from his shipping. He may however count on the effect of boldness and celerity on his side, and the want of precautions on ours.’ On Sunday evening Monroe turned up at the Woodyard and met William Winder who – to his delight – addressed him as ‘Colonel Monroe’. They talked briefly and then Monroe, utterly exhausted, retired to bed, leaving Winder to spend the night, as he himself described it, ‘writing letters and orders to various officers and persons’. Finally at dawn on Monday 22 August the American commander, who cannot have had much sleep, ordered off the first substantial detachment of around a thousand troops to confront the British at Nottingham. It was the first serious attempt to oppose them three full days after they had landed.