by Peter Snow
By this time – around ten o’clock – the first definitive message arrived relating to the whereabouts of the British. They were marching direct on Bladensburg. They would clearly attempt to cross the river at the bridge there and then descend on Washington. Winder, suddenly all action, ordered his whole army – including General Smith’s men in Washington – to put on all speed to Bladensburg and take up a defensive position there. Stansbury and his men were also ordered finally and emphatically to retrace their steps to Bladensburg. This time Stansbury promptly agreed. Winder departed, leaving Armstrong with Madison, who was clearly now deeply anxious about the likely outcome of a battle for Washington with his two top military men, Armstrong and Winder, so obviously at loggerheads. Madison later wrote that he turned to his War Secretary and ‘expressed to him my concern and surprise at the reserve he showed at the present crisis, and at the scruples I understood he had at offering his advice or opinions…’. And Madison went further. He said he himself would go to the front line and be ‘near at hand … to remove … any difficulty on the score of authority’ between Armstrong and Winder. Madison, who had no military experience, was in such despair at the prospects for the battle for Washington that he felt he had to go to the battlefield and oversee it himself. Armstrong rode off, soon to be followed by Madison and Richard Rush. Rush was by far the most junior member of the cabinet, but he was close to Madison: the President trusted him and felt comfortable with him at his side. As the two men rode away, Campbell, the Treasury Secretary, fearful for the President’s safety, handed Madison his brace of duelling pistols.
John Pendleton Kennedy, still in his dancing shoes, was one of Stansbury’s men who had marched back and forth through the night. By morning he was ready to drop. ‘I slept as I walked. At every halt of a moment whole platoons laid down in the dusty road and slept till the officers gave the word to move on. How very weary I felt.’ At length they were allowed to lie in a field of stubble and grab some sleep. ‘Mine was the sleep of Endymion. When I awoke I was lying on my back with the hot sun of a summer’s morning beaming upon my face.’ By 11 a.m. he and all the other troops under Stansbury’s command were back at Bladensburg.
The only unit that was being left behind in the rush to Bladensburg was that of Joshua Barney still guarding the lower Eastern Branch Bridge, even though the enemy were now clearly headed elsewhere. Winder had denied Barney’s flotillamen a battle with the British the day before; now it looked like they’d miss the decisive battle for Washington. Barney had no time for Winder: his daughter and biographer Mary Barney calls Winder ‘the commanding general, if indeed he could be properly so called’. He was now fuming about his pointless assignment on the bridge. Then suddenly the President rode past on his way to Bladensburg and greeted him. Barney immediately asked permission to abandon his position and move his men and guns to join the army at Bladensburg. He said it was absurd for his formidable force of flotillamen to be wasted where they were. ‘A midshipman with half a dozen men’ could stop the enemy crossing the bridge. John Armstrong quoted Barney saying the job could have been done by ‘a corporal and six men’. Madison agreed. Barney and his men should move at once to Bladensburg. They would be a useful reinforcement. They were to prove more than useful: they would play a vital role in preserving the honour of the United States.
* * *
The British army had been on the road to Washington since 5 a.m. For a time Ross persisted in keeping the Americans guessing by sticking to a road that led to both the still-intact bridges. But by 9 a.m. he was clearly on the road to Bladensburg. It would have been more direct to approach the capital across the Eastern Branch Bridge, but Ross knew it would be a simple matter for the Americans to deny access by destroying a small section of it. The river was too wide to cross anywhere south of Bladensburg without a massive amphibious operation.
There was a nervous moment when some American sharpshooter took shots at Ross and Cockburn and their aides. ‘Three or four of these gentlemen’, James Scott recalled, ‘were suddenly discovered above us on a high bank secured by a paling. The acting Quartermaster General [none other than the eager George de Lacy Evans] was the first to observe them, mounted the bank by the slope leading up to their hiding place, clapped his spurs into the flanks of his charger and gallantly taking the pales, leaped into the thick of them … they instantly threw away their rifles and scampered into the brushwood…’
For the first few hours of the day the British army had to make its way through difficult wooded country, but by 9 a.m. the country had opened out, the road had widened and the going had become easy. George Gleig saw increasing signs of life on both sides. The sight of villages, farms and rich meadows cheered up the troops – many of whom were beginning to flag. ‘To add to the general spirit of exhilaration, the bugles of the light corps sounded a lively march, and the troops moved, in spite of the heat and weakness, merrily, gaily and rapidly.’ But the high spirits didn’t last long. ‘The sun beat upon us in full force; and the dust rising in thick masses from under our feet, without a breath of air to disperse it, flew directly into our faces … I do not recollect a period of my military life during which I suffered more severely from heat and fatigue … it is not surprising that before many hours had elapsed numbers of men began to fall behind from absolute inability to keep up.’ At around ten o’clock Ross called a halt. ‘We threw ourselves upon the grass and in five minutes the mass of the army was asleep. My eyes were closed before my head hit the ground…’
Ross gave his men an hour to rest, then, clearly energised by the prospect of a showdown with the Americans, he ordered his army on under an unyielding sun. It wasn’t long before his troops were plainly wilting again, ‘some of the finest and stoutest men in the army being literally unable to go on’. The British forces were hardly in a state to fight a battle, but by noon that is exactly what they realised they would have to do. They began to discern a great cloud of dust rising a mile or two to their left, and then ‘on turning a sudden angle in the road … the British and American armies became visible to one another. The position occupied by the latter was one of great strength and commanding attitude.’ But Gleig observed that as the Americans were composed chiefly of militia they ‘exhibited to our eyes a very singular and very awkward appearance. Sufficiently armed, but wretchedly equipped, clothed part in black coats, others in blue, others in ordinary shooting-jackets, and some in round frocks … they might have passed off very well for a crowd of spectators, come out to view the approach of the army which was to occupy Washington.’ Some, dressed in blue jackets, looked to Gleig like regular troops, but the rest ‘seemed country people, who would have been more appropriately employed in attending to their agricultural occupations’.
The British had reached the outskirts of the village of Bladensburg on the east bank of the river. It was the very village that General Tobias Stansbury and his large American force had occupied twelve hours earlier before Stansbury had decided to withdraw and head back towards Washington – against Winder’s orders. As Ross looked down on Bladensburg from the high ground of Lowndes Hill, he saw the Americans fast taking position on the other bank of the river. Their number was clearly greater than his. The village on the east bank, beneath him, appeared unoccupied. His scouts reported that it was indeed empty, and he decided promptly to advance down the hill, through the village and across the narrow bridge that led straight into the heart of the American position. Robert Ross was now eager for battle, all his caution swept away. He was seized by the almost reckless enthusiasm that had prompted him to plunge into battle against the French at Vitoria and Orthez. Courage and forthright leadership had won him the devotion of his troops in the Peninsula and the admiration of the Iron Duke. Now he would display it again. With only a few minutes of briefing his various commanders, and without even waiting for the whole of his army to arrive, he ordered his men into the village and across the bridge. Ross was playing for the highest stakes. Defeat would mean an almost certain court mar
tial.
* * *
By eleven o’clock that morning, Wednesday 24 August, the United States President and his Commander in Chief were on the field at Bladensburg. It was a short ride – six miles north-east of the capital. There they found Stansbury’s and Smith’s forces together with a number of other units rapidly taking positions on the west bank of the river. James Monroe, the Secretary of State, was there too, busily deploying the units where he thought fit. Madison had agreed to let him leave the earlier meeting in Washington and ride ahead of the others to see what he could do. Madison’s first thought was to cross the bridge and see what was happening in the village on the other side. He was well on his way when William Simmons, an American scout who’d been keeping an eye on Ross’s approaching army, rode up to him in great haste. ‘Mr Madison, the enemy are now in Bladensburg.’ ‘The enemy in Bladensburg!’ gasped Madison in surprise. Simmons then watched the President and his party all turn their horses and ride back at speed to the American lines. ‘I called out aloud: “Mr Madison, if you will stop, I will show them to you; they are now in sight.”’ But they all rode off very fast except Richard Rush, the Attorney General, who told Simmons he doubted that there were British in Bladensburg. But the sight of a few British redcoats gathering in the village street was enough to send Rush galloping off to safety. His hat flew off and Simmons had to shout at him to come back for it.
With every sign that a battle was about to begin, Madison and Rush had time for a brief meeting with Monroe, Winder and Armstrong. One of Madison’s reasons for coming to Bladensburg was to reassure Armstrong that he could readily offer advice to Winder about where to place his troops and how to fight the battle. Winder had said he wanted advice: Armstrong should feel free to offer it and he, the President, would be there to show that this was in order. Madison recorded every detail of what followed in his own personal memorandum of what happened that day: ‘I asked [Armstrong] whether he had spoken with General Winder on the subject of his arrangement and views. He said he had not. I remarked that though there was so little time for it, it was possible he might offer some advice or suggestion that might not be too late to be turned to account.’ Armstrong and Madison then rode up to Winder, but ‘the unruliness of my horse prevented me from joining in the short conversation that took place. When it was over, I asked General Armstrong whether he had seen occasion to offer any improvement in any part of the arrangements. He said that he had not; that from his view of them they appeared to be as good as circumstances admitted.’ Armstrong persisted in keeping himself at arm’s length from any responsibility for the city’s defence. Moments later the first shots rang out. Rush’s memory of this many years later was of British rockets flying over their heads as they sat on their horses. Armstrong and Winder ‘were in close view of the front line, as was the President, doing what they could do to encourage the resistance’. Madison now observed to his three cabinet ministers that it was time for them to withdraw and leave matters to the ‘military functionaries’. Armstrong later remarked that after these words from the President: ‘I now became, of course, a mere spectator of the combat.’ He was no doubt relieved that Madison was apparently freeing him from any further involvement – but he may also have been smarting at his own failure to play a stronger hand.*
Madison and his ministers rapidly retired to the rear. Some, unkindly, said later that the President fled from the field. One typically hostile voice in the opposition newspaper Federal Republican accused the President of being ‘the first to fly … and on his very countenance bore the marks of fear and trembling’. Other, less biased reports say Madison waited near the battlefield with Rush until they learned the outcome of the battle before returning to Washington. Back home Madison had left his wife to supervise the preparation of a meal for himself and his cabinet at the end of a hard day. ‘Mrs Madison ordered dinner to be ready at 3 as usual,’ recounted Paul Jennings, the White House servant. ‘I set the table myself and brought up the ale, cider and wine and placed them in the coolers, as all the cabinet and several military gentlemen and strangers were expected.’
The President and his guests would never sit down to the dinner, and James and Dolley Madison would never spend another night at the White House.
7
Bladensburg: a fine scamper
24 August, afternoon
IT WAS SOON after midday on Wednesday 24 August that the Battle of Bladensburg began. The Americans had the advantage of numbers and location: there were around 6,000 of them in defensive positions facing Ross’s army of 4,500, which had to attack across a river. On the American side veterans like James Monroe knew that they were not facing the bungling British army they’d defeated in their fight for independence thirty years earlier. But most American troops, inexperienced though most of them were, were fired up with patriotic enthusiasm. They were defending their young country against an enemy who’d sailed from the other side of the ocean to ravage their capital and burn their homes. ‘As for me – not yet nineteen,’ wrote John Pendleton Kennedy, describing his march down from Baltimore, ‘I was too full of the exaltation of the time to think of myself – all my fervor was spent in the admiration of this glittering army.’
On the ground – as Gleig, Scott and Ross himself noted – the Americans held a commanding position on the west bank of the river. They occupied partly wooded ground that sloped down from a ridge one and a half miles away. The stream in front of them was 50 yards wide with only a narrow bridge offering the British a crossing point. Stansbury had prudently ordered forty horsemen with axes to cut away the bridge. But in the rush to take up their positions that morning someone had overlooked Stansbury’s command to destroy it. ‘Why this order was not executed, I never could learn.’ The river was fordable 100 yards further upstream, but if the bridge was there, the British would use it.
This wasn’t the only failure of foresight on the American side. The deployment of their forces was woefully maladroit. Their units were strung out in three lines so widely separated from front to rear that they could give little support to each other, and none of the lines was long enough to avoid being outflanked to left and right. The weakest of the three lines, the front line facing the river crossing, was the one that should have been the strongest. The place to stop the British was where they were most vulnerable – crossing the river. The only American firepower with the range to hit the bridge was a battery of six 6-pounder guns placed about 300 yards from the crossing. The gunners struggled – in the short time they had – to conceal their cannon behind embrasures which had been designed for much bigger guns. So they had little protection and they had only scant infantry support on either side of them.
Closest to the guns was Major William Pinkney with his two companies of riflemen. Pinkney was a distinguished lawyer and diplomat: he had been Minister to Britain and President Madison’s Attorney General. He now suddenly found himself in the very front line of the battle for Washington. He commanded around 150 men from Baltimore armed with rifles, which were proving far more effective than the old musket. Both fired musket balls propelled from the barrel by the blast of a powder cartridge stuffed down it and ignited by the spark from a flint released by a trigger. But the musket’s barrel was smooth. The ball that shot out of it quickly lost its range and accuracy: you were lucky to hit someone you were aiming at 100 yards away. The most effective range of the musket was under fifty yards. The groove of rifling spiralling its way up the inside of a rifle’s barrel sent the ball spinning far more accurately over a longer distance. The rifle’s effective range was between 200 and 300 yards. It was slower to load – the best soldiers could fire a shot from a rifle every thirty seconds compared to every twenty seconds from a musket. But when you could kill an enemy 300 yards away, the advantage was clear. The rifle was fast becoming the favourite weapon of the American frontiersman but it was not yet established as the prime military weapon, and in this campaign it had been largely unavailable even to men described as ‘riflemen’. The Bri
tish had rifles too, but the vast majority of Ross’s soldiers were armed with muskets. The British veterans had years of exhaustive experience in fast-loading their muskets. Besides, hundreds of hours of drill and manoeuvre had taught them the rigour of maintaining their lines shoulder to shoulder no matter what was thrown at them. And in close combat a quick flash of steel and a click would signal that every man was fastening a bayonet to the end of his musket. Only the very bravest would stand in their way.
The American army’s ill-prepared dispositions were a direct result of the confusion of command at the top. William Winder, who had pleaded for guidance earlier in the day and got short shrift from Armstrong, had turned up too late at Bladensburg to do much to readjust the posture of his forces. They were largely in the positions that General Stansbury and General Walter Smith had chosen for them over the previous twenty-four hours. Stansbury’s men, mainly from Baltimore, in the front lines, Smith’s men, mainly DC militia, in the third line, a whole mile behind the others at the top of the long slope. There was also a small contingent of regulars in the third line under Lieutenant Colonel William Scott, and at the last minute Joshua Barney and his flotillamen and marines dashed into the line thanks to Madison’s acceptance that they’d been wasting their time guarding the Eastern Branch Bridge.