by Peter Snow
It was James Monroe who was the first on the field that morning. He’d persuaded Madison to let him go ahead and see how things looked. He wasn’t happy. He told one commander, ‘Although you see that I am active, you will please to bear in mind that this is not my plan.’ One cavalry commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jacint Lavall, rode up and told Monroe he’d had no orders and couldn’t find Winder. Where should he place his men? Monroe didn’t help by ordering Lavall to ride his men into a ravine from which they could see nothing of the battle. Lavall later complained that he was given no idea of where any of the other American troops were on the battlefield. Monroe’s dispositions prompted Armstrong to describe him as a ‘blundering tactician’ – which was pretty rich coming from the man whose own nonchalant attitude that morning had left his colleagues in despair. The most unsettling of the barrage of orders that rang out before the battle began was the last-minute command to Stansbury’s troops to move back from their front-line support of the artillery and riflemen to a position no less than 500 yards behind. This left the ‘flanks of the artillery and riflemen unprotected’, said Stansbury later. ‘Whose order this was, I know not; it was not mine, nor did it meet with my approbation; but finding a superior officer on the ground I concluded he had ordered it, consequently did not interfere.’ Stansbury then rode up the hill to try and find out who had given the order. He located Winder, who had now appeared on the field, and asked him what was going on. Stansbury’s report doesn’t make clear what answer he got. Whoever did give this crassly incompetent order – and it’s widely accepted it was Monroe – the result was disastrous. The American army now found itself split not into two but into three lines so separated from each other that they could do nothing to support each other. This was the dysfunctional state of the American high command as the first British soldiers appeared in the streets of Bladensburg on the other side of the river marching down towards the bridge.
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William Winder’s opponent, General Robert Ross, was by contrast driving his men into battle with a headstrong self-assurance that had some of his aides trying to restrain him. Harry Smith, who’d deplored the general’s caution two days earlier, now thought him reckless. ‘We old Light Division [men]’, Smith wrote, ‘always took a good look before we struck … I was saying to General Ross we should make a feint at least on the enemy’s left flank, which rested on the river higher up…’ But Ross wouldn’t listen to him. He was fired up by the ardour of one of his senior commanders, Colonel William Thornton, who was directing his men down the hill towards the bridge. ‘To my horror and astonishment,’ Smith wrote later, ‘General Ross consented to this isolated and premature attack. “Heavens!” says I, “General Ross, neither of the other brigades can be up in time to support this mad attack, and if the enemy fight, Thornton’s brigade must be repulsed.”’
Neither Ross nor his forward brigade commander was going to be talked out of it. The 85th Light Infantry, with George Gleig among them, marched down the hill and towards the bridge. These were the men who had won Wellington’s praise three years earlier for their extraordinary bravery at the Battle of Fuentes d’Oñoro in May 1811. But their enemy here in the USA hadn’t yet seen how they could fight. ‘The Americans,’ recalled Gleig, ‘from the instant that our advanced guard came in view, continued to rend the air with shouts. Our men marched on, silent as the grave and orderly as people at a funeral.’ Immediately the American guns the other side of the bridge opened up on them. ‘A continued fire was kept up, with some execution, from those guns which stood to the left of the road,’ reported Gleig; ‘but it was not till the bridge was covered with our people that the two-gun battery upon the road itself began to play … and with tremendous effect; for at the first discharge almost an entire company was swept down.’
The American fire drove Gleig and his men to seek shelter behind one of the houses in the village. ‘Cannon shot after cannon shot continued all the while, to pass through the thin brick walls about us … at last a ball struck a soldier between Williams and myself, and carried off his leg. The boy looked at me as much as to ask how, under such circumstances, he ought to behave,’ wrote the young subaltern who’d seen far worse when fighting with Wellington in the Peninsula, ‘and though I dare say his courage was quite equal to mine, I really could not help laughing at the peculiar expression which passed across his countenance.’ Moments later Colonel Thornton rode up and exclaimed, ‘Now my lads, forward! – You see the enemy; you know how to serve them.’ Gleig and his comrades leapt to their feet and rushed towards the bridge. Seven men were immediately mown down by the guns, and Gleig also noticed a group of riflemen firing at them from the belt of woodland on the other bank. ‘These, taking cool and deliberate aim from their lurking places, soon began to gall us with their fire.’ Gleig’s friend Williams, another young subaltern, had a reckless streak in him and at one particularly exposed point he called out to his men to follow him and then shouted at Gleig: ‘Now, who will be the first in the enemy’s lines?’ Gleig tried hard to restrain him from rushing ahead, but ‘at the very moment when I was repeating my entreaties … a musket ball struck him on the neck and he fell dead at my feet. The bullet passed through his windpipe and spinal marrow, and he was a corpse in an instant.’ One captain in the 85th, John Knox, wrote home that he’d never received such fire. He passed the mangled bodies of three officers and eight or nine men of his regiment sprawling on the ground dead or wounded: ‘Thinks I to myself, thinks I, by the time the action is over the devil is in it if I am not either a walking major or a dead captain.’
One thing the American militia could do very well was to fire their weapons accurately. One American observed that what made the sharpshooters such deadly executioners was ‘The universal use of firearms in our country in shooting crows and squirrels, deer and pigeons, woodpeckers and bullfrogs…’
Harry Smith felt vindicated. ‘It happened just as I said. Thornton advanced, under no cloud of sharpshooters such as we Light Division should have had, to make the enemy unsteady and render their fire ill-directed.’ Without covering fire Thornton’s men, crowding across the bridge and jostling each other for space on the narrow walkway where only three people could move abreast, began to suffer severe casualties. For several minutes the withering rifle and cannon fire had the British at bay. There were cheers from the American side as the head of the British column halted for a time on the bridge. ‘As soon as the enemy perceived the head of our column pause to draw breath for a moment,’ wrote one 21st Fusilier, who went forward with the 85th, ‘they set up three cheers, thinking, I dare say, that we were panic-struck with their appearance.’ Thornton’s men were, as Harry Smith had forecast, seriously exposed. In his haste to get at the enemy, Ross seems to have ignored the fact that he could have sent some of his men wading across the river in support. In hurrying to despatch his troops unsupported across the bridge he had taken a serious and unnecessary risk.
As Harry Smith watched Thornton’s thrust across the bridge, he found himself exclaiming: ‘There is the art of war and all we have learned under the Duke [of Wellington] given in full to the enemy!’ The struggle to cross the bridge became a desperate one, with officers shouting encouragement and sometimes having to threaten their men to push them on to the narrow walkway. Slowly but surely, drawing on the raw courage that was second nature to them after the struggle through Spain, the redcoats of the 85th stormed across to the other side of the bridge. ‘It was not without trampling upon many of their dead and dying comrades that the light brigade established itself on the opposite side of the stream.’ At least one American soldier could only admire the discipline and determination that spurred them across. ‘The fire I think must have been dreadfully galling, but they took no notice of it; their men moved like clockwork; the instant a part of a platoon was cut down it was filled up by the men in the rear without the least noise and confusion whatever…’ Ross at last reinforced the crossing by sending some of the new units, who were joining him f
rom behind, across the ford in the river. In the shelter of the banks they were much less exposed than the men on the bridge. The British presence on the west bank built quickly and the balance of the struggle began to shift.
While this bloodletting was taking place on the bridge, the irrepressible George Cockburn and his ADC James Scott were looking for a chance to become involved in the action. Scott recalled the Americans giving a great cheer when the first wave of British troops were forced back across the bridge. He watched a ‘gallant soldier of the 85th, a Scotchman, whose arm had been shattered by a round-shot, and was still dangling by a fibre to the stump … seating himself on the steps of a house as the clamorous shout was rending the air … “Dinna halloo, my fine lads,”’ the Scot shouted back, ‘“you’re no’ yet out of the wood; wait a wee bit, wait a wee, wie your skirling.”’ Scott then goes on to claim that he and Cockburn and Ross crossed the bridge at the same time as Thornton. ‘The Colonel dashed forward, followed by his gallant regiment, in a manner that elicited enthusiastic applause from the General and his companion the Rear Admiral…’ Scott watched Thornton leap off his horse, when it fell dead beneath him and draw his sword to lead his men forward against the first American defences.
Cockburn now decided to try his hand at directing the rocket firing, ‘mounted on his white charger, his conspicuous gold-laced hat and epaulettes fully exposed within one hundred and thirty or forty yards of his foes’. Scott says he was standing beside him, after ‘Jonathan [the Americans] had, I guess, very discourteously unhorsed me by one of his round shot’. ‘I trust, Sir,’ said Scott, ‘you will not unnecessarily expose yourself, for, however the enemy may suffer, they will regard your death as ample compensation.’ Scott hoped this would induce the admiral to shift a few yards to his right where he would have been protected by a small stone quarry. ‘Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!’ came Cockburn’s reply. The admiral was eagerly observing a British lieutenant firing off some rockets at the American lines. The famous Congreve rockets, recently invented by a major general of that name, whose hopeless inaccuracy drove the Duke of Wellington to regard them with contempt, were devastating if they found their target. They rarely did, but the noise they produced and the fiery trail they left behind them were entirely new and terrifying to the Americans. Imagine a modern firework hurling an explosive warhead packed with several pounds of lead shot over a range of up to 3,000 yards. That was way beyond the range of cannon fire. And the rockets the admiral watched were clearly more accurate than most. They ‘went directly into the enemy’s ranks, creating a fearful gap, and a much more fearful panic in the immediate vicinity. “Capital!” he [Cockburn] exclaimed, “excellent!”’ Just at that moment the assistant rocket artilleryman, who was the master’s mate from HMS Tonnant, fell severely wounded. The admiral comforted him, praised what he had done and promised him promotion. Then a musket shot passed between the admiral’s leg and the flap of his saddle, cutting the stirrup leather in two, without doing any damage to him or the horse. He dismounted, and Scott was endeavouring to lash the broken parts together with a piece of twine, assisted by a marine, ‘when a round shot came over the saddle and dismissed my assistant to the other world’.
* * *
William Pinkney was crouching with his riflemen in the American front line beside the guns which had pounded away so successfully at the British on the bridge. But as the minutes went by, he watched the British begin to consolidate their position on the river bank below him. ‘A large column of the enemy, which was every moment reinforced, either by the way of the bridge or by the ford immediately above it, was able to form on the Washington side, and to menace the battery and the inadequate force [Pinkney’s own] by which it was supported.’ Pinkney only had to glance over his shoulder to see that the next line of troops was a long way behind him, moved there by either Monroe or Winder just before the battle began. The troops he had been depending on to support his men and the gunners ‘had now, to the great disappointment of my companies and of the artillery, been made to retire to a hill several hundred yards in our rear…’.
Suddenly the first American line buckled in the face of the relentless forward tramp of the redcoats of the 85th. ‘The company on our right’, recalled Pinkney, ‘discharged their pieces and fled, although [their commander] appeared to do all in his power to restrain them, as I myself did.’ Pinkney’s riflemen were now, as he put it, ‘without other known aid than the other company on the left’ and they faced ‘the whole force of the enemy, which was rapidly accumulating’. Pinkney’s men loosed off some more rounds which were ‘manifestly destructive and for a short time seemed to produce disorder and hesitation in the enemy’s ranks’. But the British were now nearly overrunning the guns next door to Pinkney’s men, and the gunners, unable to lower their barrels because of the height of the embrasures, began to haul their guns back. Pinkney’s men now decided, without waiting for his approval, to withdraw with the gunners. ‘Our small force (somewhat more than one hundred men) could not hope to make an effectual stand against the enemy … if they had remained much longer, they must have been taken prisoners or cut to pieces.’ Pinkney says he had thought that they should try to hold on and ‘venture upon another fire’, but he recognised that retreat was actually the only wise option. He was suffering himself from a musket wound that had shattered his elbow.
More British units, seeing the American front line in disarray, now poured across the bridge and the ford. ‘They fled precipitately,’ wrote John Bluett in his diary, ‘very wisely dropping their arms and making the best possible use of their legs.’ Captain Peter Bowlby recalled his own 4th Regiment following the 85th across the river and then swinging left. Bowlby was wounded: ‘I received a shot in the shin which splintered a bone but did not break it … I tied a handkerchief round it.’
Winder now realised far too late that his front line was dangerously exposed, and he ordered one of General Stansbury’s three battalions, who had been posted well behind the guns, to move forward and attempt to rescue them. The 5th Baltimore volunteer regiment advanced under Colonel Sterett. For a time they were supported by covering fire from Stansbury’s other two battalions, but these units were under heavy fire from the British rockets, which Cockburn and Scott were greatly enjoying helping to launch. They were now being fired more horizontally and, though still pretty inaccurate, the whoosh of the missiles and the trail of flame they left behind struck terror into Ragan’s and Schutz’s battalions. They turned and fled. Stansbury tried to rally them. ‘I rode along the line and gave orders to the officers to cut down those who attempted to fly, and suffer no man to leave the line.’ But though some units made a stand, most ‘fled in disorder … the retreat became general and all attempts to rally them and make a second stand, were fruitless’. Stansbury blamed the exhausting marching and counter-marching of the previous night (largely on his own orders) for his men’s collapse on the battlefield. And far from blaming Winder, Stansbury said the Commander in Chief had ‘displayed all possible zeal, activity and personal bravery’. Winder did indeed plunge straight into the battle: ‘I rode swiftly across the field toward those who had so shamefully fled and exerted my voice to the utmost to arrest them.’ They appeared to be ready to fight on, but when next he looked, ‘to my astonishment and mortification … I found the whole of these regiments … were flying in the utmost precipitation and disorder’.
Winder still hoped that Colonel Sterett’s 5th Regiment would hold out, but the men who had begun by acting so firmly ‘evinced the usual incapacity of raw troops to make orderly movements in the face of the enemy, and their retreat in a very few moments became a flight of absolute and total disorder’. Winder probably hadn’t helped by ordering them to retreat before it was clear that their position had become impossible. Once they began to withdraw they were quite unable to maintain any kind of order. John Pendleton Kennedy, who had gone into the battle with his head held high, now found himself among those who were ‘driven from the field with the bayonet. We ma
de a fine scamper of it. I lost my musket in the melee while bearing off a comrade … whose leg was broken by a bullet.’
Any chance that Colonel Lavall’s cavalry might ride to the rescue of the collapsing front line were dashed when Lavall felt forced to withdraw too. He could see very little of the battlefield from where he’d been posted by Monroe, and the next thing he knew his horsemen were being swamped by the great mass of infantry in headlong retreat. ‘All of a sudden our army seemed routed; a confused retreat appeared to be about in every corner of the battleground and the place we were occupying seemed to have been the one by which it was to be effected.’ Within moments Lavall found himself left with only fifty-five troopers facing the oncoming British. He reckoned there was only one course open to him – to follow the infantry off the field.
The cavalry were later criticised by Congress for not having seized the opportunity to counter-attack the enemy who were pressing forward in ‘open and scattered order’. Lavall’s response was unapologetic: ‘It has been wondered … why I did not cut to pieces four or five thousand of the British veteran troops with fifty-five men, all recruits, and upon raw horses … There is a distinction between madness and bravery.’ The unfortunate Lavall had had the task of trying to train his force of newly recruited dragoons over the previous few months with far fewer horses than he had men. He had finally managed to build up his stock of horses to full strength only a week earlier. One US officer in the army at the time, who later wrote a history of this episode, remarked that the cavalry were ‘mostly without any training or discipline whatever … A company of cavalry, formed in the heart of a large commercial city, might choose to assume the name of “Cossacks” … but they would remain, in reality, just what they were before – a parcel of ineffective clerks or journeymen mechanics.’