When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  That same morning in the upper reaches of the Patuxent a small detachment of Joshua Barney’s flotillamen under Lieutenant Solomon Frazier meticulously laid powder trails to the magazines on each of the seventeen gunboats in the flotilla. It was anchored as far up the river as Barney’s men had been able to penetrate. Barney himself and the rest of his force – dragging with them five large guns (two that could fire 18-pounder shot and three 12-pounders) – had abandoned the flotilla the night before and made for the Woodyard to reinforce Winder.

  It was eleven o’clock before Cockburn’s fleet of small ships rounded a bend above Pig Point and spotted Barney’s pennant on the sloop Scorpion anchored at the head of the long line of his flotilla barges. ‘Here, then,’ recalled James Scott, Cockburn’s aide-de-camp, ‘was the boasted flotilla. We had brought them to bay, and in a few minutes we should see what they were made of. The Admiral, dashing on in his gig, led the attack.’ But seconds later they saw smoke issuing from the sloop. The order was given to lie on their oars and ‘the Scorpion, like the venomous insect she was named after … turned the sting of death upon herself, and exploding, blew stars, stripes, broad pendant and herself into a thousand atoms’. Each of the boats behind, save one, then blew up as well. ‘It was a grand sight; one vast column of flame appeared to ascend and lose itself in the clouds; from the summit of the evanescent flash issued a black floating mass of smoke, which, quickly unfolding itself in curling wreaths, gradually but quickly obscured the heavens from our view.’ Only one vessel escaped and was captured. The British sailors looked on in ‘blank dismay … and all was disappointment and despair … [Barney] had the reputation of being a brave old seaman, but it was the general opinion throughout our fleet that on the appearance of the British flotilla he should have struck one blow for the honour of his flag…’

  Scott was sent off in Cockburn’s gig to reconnoitre the shore. He was passing some bushes when suddenly a shot whizzed past his ear. Scott couldn’t see anybody, but Cockburn called across the water to him, ‘He is below you, Scott, he is below you.’ ‘I jumped down,’ wrote Scott, ‘and found myself within arm’s length of an American seaman.’ Scott leapt on him and secured his sword arm. Cockburn shouted at him not to kill his opponent. So the American narrowly escaped ‘acquaintance with an excellent piece of cold steel’. Midshipman Samuel Davies recalled that two of Barney’s ‘damn rascals’ were ‘very near shooting the Admiral’. They were captured, he added, and turned out to have been ex-British sailors who’d deserted a Royal Navy warship and who would be hanged when the expedition was over.

  The self-destruction of Barney’s flotilla removed a force that has been extolled particularly by American commentators for its pluck and effectiveness in confronting the most powerful navy in the world at the time. In truth it was little more than a tiresome irritant to the Royal Navy, more renowned for what its flotillamen and their commander had achieved before and after the clashes in the Patuxent. Theodore Roosevelt, in his naval history, said, ‘it is very certain that the gunboats accomplished little or nothing of importance’. Barney’s barge force has been overrated, though the fighting skill and bravery of his flotillamen were second to none, as we shall see.

  While Barney had been making his arrangements for the scuttling of his flotilla, William Winder set off from the Woodyard with the men he had managed to muster to do battle with Ross’s main force. James Monroe went with him. ‘I entertained a hope’, Winder said later, ‘to have given the enemy a serious check…’ But he did nothing of the sort. First he learned that the cavalry he’d sent out to harass the British march the day before had retired without landing any effective blow. And when he did come within reach of the British, who’d started out from Nottingham at seven that same morning, he found they’d halted in a deliberate effort to confuse him. They’d stopped at a crossroads. Which way would Ross go? Would he lead his men straight on along the road that led to the Woodyard and Washington – the one Winder’s men were on – or would he head north to Upper Marlborough, a small town twenty miles from Washington? If they’d taken the Woodyard road to Washington, Winder might have had no choice but to fight. As it was, the British took the right fork and headed for Upper Marlborough. Rather than provoke an all-out battle with the British as they marched off, Winder withdrew his men way back to a spot called Long Old Fields. He was probably wise. The British had a force far superior in numbers and experience to the relatively small detachment Winder had moved off that morning. But it had been a futile day’s marching to and fro for the Americans, who’d been alerted as early as 2 a.m. Winder had lost a day, had exhausted and disheartened his men and had yielded valuable ground to the enemy. If he was to stop the British closing on the American capital his only chance now was to intercept them west of Upper Marlborough. That would have to wait until the next day.

  To the relief of Ross and Cockburn and the astonishment of many Americans, Winder had done little or nothing to attack or obstruct the British advance. Charles Ball, an ex-slave fighting with Barney who’d helped scuttle the flotilla, reckoned US commanders should have taken action in the woods on the way from Benedict. ‘One hundred Americans would have destroyed a thousand of the enemy by felling trees and attacking them in ambush.’ Joshua Barney and his 400 flotillamen and guns reached the Woodyard around noon. Barney had had to endure the distant sound of his vessels exploding one by one, and was naturally eager to engage the enemy. But no sooner had he arrived than he was, we’re told, ‘astonished to perceive the whole army in motion of retreat’. He thought this was ‘precipitate and injudicious’. Winder rode up and did his best to explain to Barney that when he had learned the British were on their way to Upper Marlborough, he felt he had to pull back in order to intercept any march on Washington. Barney concluded that Winder was a near-useless commander in chief. James Monroe watched Winder’s fruitless marching and counter-marching with increasing anxiety. He sent a message to President Madison saying ‘the enemy are in full march for Washington. Have the materials prepared to destroy the bridges…’ He added an afterthought before he sent it: ‘You had better remove the records.’

  One man who took his cue from James Monroe was Stephen Pleasonton, a clerk in the State Department. He decided that the department’s books and papers including some priceless documents drawn up in the first years of the American Revolution were too valuable to risk seizure by the enemy. He bought some coarse linen bags, crammed the documents and books into them and began to pile them on to carts to take them off to the other side of the Potomac. Just as he was lugging one load of papers down the passage that separated the State Department from the War Department, John Armstrong, the Secretary of War, appeared on his way to his room. He stopped a moment and Pleasonton later recalled him saying that ‘we were under unnecessary alarm, as he didn’t think the British were serious in their intentions of coming to Washington. I replied that we were under a different belief, and let their intentions be what they might, it was part of prudence to preserve the valuable papers of the revolutionary government, comprising the declaration of independence, the laws … the correspondence of General Washington…’ and several other documents. The doughty Pleasonton first had the carts taken to a mill just above Georgetown. But, judging it unsafe to leave them there, he had other wagons take them thirty-five miles off to a farm in Virginia where they stayed safely locked up for weeks. There were conscientious clerks in the Capitol too. Two assistants found an ox cart to rescue precious papers from the House of Representatives; another wagon carrying papers from the Senate lost a wheel and later turned over. But all the documents were in the end safely stowed away.*

  There were military stores to be moved too, great stacks of gunpowder kept in Washington’s naval headquarters on the Potomac waterside. Its commandant, Commodore Thomas Tingey (pronounced Tinjy), was very proud of his Navy Yard and anxious to stop such lethal material falling into British hands. He instructed his trusty and resourceful orderly, Mordecai Booth, to move what powder he co
uld out of the city to safety. Booth acted instantly, as if his life and career depended on the outcome of his mission, documenting his every action in a special report for his boss. He had a fretful day procuring wagons to transport the powder. In the general panic wagons were in huge demand. He had no way of securing them apart from declaring that he was confiscating them for Commodore Tingey. One after another people made their excuses. Few drivers were impressed by his efforts to commandeer their vehicles. He almost had a stand-up fight with a pair of men driving one wagon. ‘They made use of such language as was degrading to gentlemen – I had no one to enforce the detention of the wagon and it was hurried off in opposition to my positive command to the contrary – and except I had used violence [I] could not have prevented it.’ After exhaustive efforts Booth managed to secure four wagons, loaded them with 120 barrels and two casks of gunpowder and had them transported safely out of the city. Tingey rewarded his dedication by removing Booth’s family to safety. ‘Seeing my children out of the reach of a ferocious and vandal enemy was delight indeed…’ Booth remarked.

  British troops were now less than a day’s march away. Within hours they could be in Washington. There were those who believed the British might be headed elsewhere, but to most people that looked a slim chance. What had seemed unthinkable only a few days earlier was now an imminent nightmare: the capital of the United States under enemy occupation. Evacuation was now everyone’s imperative, belongings first. And, after that, the ultimate guarantee of personal safety was a horse ready saddled in the stable. The streets were quickly full of wagons piled with furniture and everything else in the house that could be moved. Of course no one doubted that the army would fight to defend the city, but it was a brave family that would await the outcome of the battle. In the White House the President and Dolley Madison watched the signs of panic everywhere around them as their fellow citizens voted with their feet.

  James Madison felt he had to join his men in the field. He was no soldier, but in the only other war the United States had fought George Washington had always been at the head of his troops. Madison thought he had no choice: he had at least to show himself to the army and talk to his generals. But he feared for his wife’s safety alone in the White House. Madison asked Dolley if she could manage on her own. ‘He enquired anxiously whether I had [the] courage’, she recalled later, ‘or firmness to remain in the President’s house until his return … and on my assurance that I had no fear but for him and the success of our army, he left me, beseeching me to take care of myself, and of the cabinet papers, public and private.’ Madison set off accompanied by a small party of aides including his Attorney General Richard Rush and Navy Secretary William Jones. They reached a farm near Long Old Fields, where the main US force would spend that Monday night.

  Winder and his troops arrived the same evening and settled down near by. They took up position only seven miles short of Washington. The pressure was mounting on America’s beleaguered commander to make a stand. He was told that President Madison had arrived and that his party had been joined by the War Secretary John Armstrong. They would all meet with the President at six the following morning.

  The American camp that night was halfway between the capital and the British at Upper Marlborough eight miles away. One contemporary military expert said that Winder was taking a risk camping there and exposing his ‘disorganized’ army to attack from General Ross’s British veterans. One officer commented, ‘I made up my mind that if Ross, whose camp I had reconnoitred in the evening, was a man of enterprise he would be upon us in the course of the night and being determined to die like a trooper’s horse I slept with my shoes on.’ It was a tense night. And the exhausted troops were further disturbed by a sentry’s false alarm at 2 a.m. It was the second time they’d been roused and drummed into battle order in the small hours.

  * * *

  Ross and his army arrived in Upper Marlborough in the early afternoon of Monday 22 August after another hard day’s marching. They were delighted by what they found there. George Gleig described the town as ‘one of the most exquisite panoramas, on which it has been my fortune to gaze’. That didn’t stop him going off and helping himself to ‘five fowls … a loaf of bread, a sack of flour and a bottle of peach whisky’. The place was a patchwork of prosperous houses and rich meadows offering the army abundant supplies and its inhabitants, reported Ross’s aide George de Lacy Evans, ‘consist of a very respectable class, they have claimed protection on the promise of neutrality…’. Evans could not have been talking about most of the people of the town who had fled on the British approach, but one of the most ‘respectable’ who had stayed was Dr William Beanes, a well-to-do physician with a particularly elegant and spacious house. He immediately opened it to Ross, offering him food and lodging in the crusty accent of his Scottish ancestors although he had been born in America. ‘He professed moreover’, wrote Gleig, ‘to retain the feelings as well as the language of his boyish days. He was … hostile to the war with England which he still persisted in regarding as his mother country.’ The British officers were made very welcome and, when he supplied them with all the food they needed, he was paid for it in full. ‘The wily emigrant was no loser by his civility,’ remarked Gleig. Beanes wasn’t the only local Marylander ready to do business with the British. Cockburn and Ross had had little trouble picking up spies – and not just among the black slave population – ready to guide them through the countryside. America was divided about the war. Many, particularly in mercantile New England, felt the dispute with Britain was a mistake and would be murderous for their maritime trade. And in the Chesapeake area disenchantment with Madison for failing to protect them from Cockburn’s rampages had severely strained the patriotism of some.

  That evening in Upper Marlborough Robert Ross had another attack of nerves. He was thirty miles from his ships. Barney’s flotilla had now been successfully eliminated. He had given ‘Jonathan’ a severe fright. An advance on Washington – still fifteen miles away – was a daunting challenge for an army of little more than 4,000 men with no cavalry and only three small guns. Maybe he should proclaim ‘Mission Accomplished’ and return to Benedict. Ross recalled that Vice Admiral Cochrane, his Commander in Chief waiting with the ships, had had his doubts about Washington. Ross’s staff sensed the general’s renewed unease; he may even have talked openly about it to them. The ambitious George Evans hadn’t fought gallantly in India, Persia and the Peninsula only to be cheated of the final act in Washington. Evans and the equally impatient Harry Smith saw their leader’s commitment to what would be the crowning triumph of their mission ebbing away. They quietly agreed to send for George Cockburn. As evening fell Evans leapt on his horse and galloped off to the upper reaches of the Patuxent to entreat Cockburn to ride back with him. Only the forthright admiral would be able to convince Robert Ross once and for all to lead his British army on to Washington.

  5

  Not till I see Mr Madison safe

  23 August

  GEORGE COCKBURN SPENT the evening of Monday 22 August on the naval tender Resolution anchored in the upper Patuxent. He had a lot to congratulate himself about. He had accomplished the extinction of Joshua Barney’s flotilla without the loss of a single man. He had seized around ten merchant schooners, which had been protected by the flotilla, and loaded them with a vast haul of tobacco. True, he hadn’t led his men triumphantly into battle and grabbed the flotilla before it could be blown up, nor had he killed or captured more than a handful of the flotillamen. Four hundred had escaped. They had distinguished themselves in fighting his navy ships earlier that summer and would now be a valuable reinforcement for the American ground troops in the defence of Washington. But Cockburn was sure that Ross’s British veterans would be more than a match for any force that Madison and Winder could put into the field. And Cockburn hoped that his meeting with Ross that morning had removed any remaining doubts in the general’s mind about the wisdom of pressing on to the American capital. It was time to report h
is success to his Commander in Chief, Alexander Cochrane, in his flagship further down the river. Cockburn wrote that his vessels had ‘advanced as rapidly as possible’ towards Barney’s barges, but the British sailors ‘saw clearly that they were all abandoned and on fire with trains [of powder] to their magazines, and out of the seventeen vessels which composed this formidable and much-vaunted flotilla, sixteen were in quick succession blown to atoms and the seventeenth (in which the fire had not taken) we captured’.

  Before Cockburn had finished writing this letter, George de Lacy Evans rode up with the bad news that Ross’s doubts had returned yet again. He asked if the admiral would accompany him to Upper Marlborough in the morning to stiffen the general’s resolve. He even brought a spare horse with him for Cockburn to ride. Evans writes that Cockburn promptly agreed to this ‘with his characteristic zeal’. But the admiral made no reference to any of this in the letter he now completed and sent off to Cochrane, other than to end it with the words that Ross had ‘been good enough to send his aide de camp [Evans] to inform me of his safe arrival with the army under his command at Upper Marlborough’. Cockburn was walking a tightrope. He knew that Cochrane had his doubts too about the Washington plan and that of the expedition’s commanders he, Cockburn, was the only one consistently behind it. In fact Cochrane had that afternoon written a message to Cockburn implying that the operation should now be wound up. Writing at 5.30 p.m. Cochrane said: ‘I congratulate you most cordially on the destruction of Barney’s fleet and think as this matter is ended, the sooner the army get back the better…’ This message may not have reached Cockburn some thirty miles up the river till after he’d set off to see Ross the following morning. Evans says Cockburn did not read it till 24 August. If it did reach him before that, he chose to ignore it.