When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  It was useful practice for what was to follow. The first major candidate for destruction now lay right in front of Ross and Cockburn – the United States Capitol that housed the two chambers of the United States Congress.

  10

  The barbarous purpose

  24 August, evening

  JUST A MILE from where Ross and his troops were advancing to the doors of the Capitol, Thomas Tingey listened to a last-minute plea from Captain Creighton not to set fire to the Navy Yard. ‘He was’, said Tingey, ‘extremely averse to the destruction of the property.’ But Tingey told him that his orders from the Navy Secretary left no choice. If he neglected to deny the British possession of the Yard, he would be guilty of a crime against the state. He told Creighton, Booth and what was left of his staff to make sure boats were ready for their escape. Then he ordered them to put matches to the powder trains that had been laid to the storehouses and to the ships in the yard, and ‘in a few moments the whole was in a state of irretrievable conflagration’.

  It was an agonising moment for Thomas Tingey. He’d supervised the construction of the Navy Yard back in 1800 and been its commandant for the last ten years, proudly and meticulously nursing it into the magnificent facility it was by 1814. Now nearly sixty-five years old, he was watching the crowning work of his career going up in flames. Worse, he had been supervising the completion of three warships, vital to the US war effort. The frigate Columbia could have been launched within ten days. All that remained to be done was the copper-plating of her hull. Her masts and spars were nearly finished: there was enough timber on the wharf to complete them. Her sails were waiting, folded up in a nearby loft, for her standing rigging to be finished. All Columbia’s blocks, dead-eyes and the major parts of her gun carriages were ready to be heaved on board together with a whole stack of water casks and other large storage barrels. One match to the powder trail that led to the new frigate and – as Tingey put it – she was ‘immediately enveloped in a sheet of inextinguishable fire’. The sloop of war Argus with all her armament and other equipment aboard except her sails, which were still in the loft, was also torched. Most of the Yard’s buildings were set alight too, and they burned furiously – the mast shed, the joiners’, plumbers’, painters’, smiths’ and boat-builders’ shops, the sawmill, and the sheds where the naval gunnery equipment, cordage and sails were stored – all were consumed by the fire. But Tingey allowed himself to make one exception. He hesitated before the brand-new schooner Lynx, and ‘from a momentary impulse … I directed her not to be fired, and have the satisfaction to say that in an almost miraculous escape, she is still “ours”.’ Miraculous it was, because the next morning the British went into the Yard and destroyed anything that hadn’t been burned the night before. But somehow Lynx was overlooked.

  Mordecai Booth had left Tingey and just reached safety the other side of the Potomac when he looked back and saw the tongues of flame licking the sky above the Yard. He heard an explosion which he thought must be the ordnance store blowing up. But then around fifteen minutes later Booth saw ‘a sight, so repugnant to my feelings, so dishonorable, so degrading to the American character, and at the same time so awful – [it] almost palsied my faculties…’. The British had set fire to the United States Capitol.

  A few minutes earlier Ross’s staff officer George Evans had applied himself with typical relish to the task of battering in the doors to Congress. It was the first and only enemy break-in to America’s new legislature in its history. Twenty-one years earlier America’s first President George Washington had brushed aside the designs of a whole crowd of full-time professionals and chosen one by a close associate of his, Dr William Thornton. This was the same talented William Thornton, also a doctor of medicine, who together with his diarist wife Anna Maria would witness the burning of Washington in 1814. The Capitol stood much as he had designed it in 1793: two great separate sandstone blocks in fine classical Greek style – one, on the north side, housing the Senate, the other the House of Representatives. Between them was a wide gap which Thornton and his successors planned one day to cover with a great dome. But at this early stage the space was filled by a long temporary wooden passageway linking the two houses of Congress.

  When the British burst in, they found themselves confronted by an opulence they’d never expected. Thornton’s early designs had been adapted and ornamented by another English-born architect, Henry Latrobe. Latrobe had nothing but contempt for his predecessor, whom he described as a ‘physician … very ignorant of architecture’. Latrobe tasked Italian craftsmen to give the Capitol’s interior a lavish flavour of the Renaissance. He was particularly proud of the sumptuous chamber of the House of Representatives. The British could have had no idea of the time and care that he and his team had lavished on it. Latrobe boasted that the twenty-six-foot-high Corinthian columns ‘of solid and beautiful freestone’ crafted by Giovanni Andrei were the work of ‘an artist of first rate excellence’. And over the Speaker’s chair Giuseppe Franzoni had carved a ‘colossal eagle in the act of rising, with wings spread for flight’. Its head, said Latrobe, was ‘a scrupulously correct copy of the head of the bald eagle peculiar to our country’. Beneath it was a marble statue of Liberty holding in her hand the Constitution of the United States.

  James Scott conceded that the Capitol building was ‘beautifully arranged’, but he was scathing of the richness of what he saw. ‘The interior accommodations were upon a scale of grandeur and magnificence little suited to pure republican simplicity. We might rather have been led to suspect that nation … was somewhat infected with an unseemly bias for monarchical splendour.’ Scott described the eagle as ‘looking towards the skies, emblematical, it is to be presumed, of the rising greatness of the young nation’. Scott was, as usual, at the side of George Cockburn, who was clearly bent on destroying the building as soon as possible.

  One story going the rounds less than a month afterwards was that Cockburn ‘in a strain of coarse levity, mounting the speaker’s chair, put the question: “Shall this harbour of Yankee democracy be burned? All for it will say Aye,” to which loud cries of assent being vociferated, he reversed the question, [and] pronounced it carried unanimously.’ Cockburn, with Ross making no objection, then directed the burning of the entire building. They started by firing rockets into the roof, but it was made of iron and wouldn’t catch alight. So they piled all the chairs and other furniture, library books and papers on the tables and set light to it all. The entire building was soon being consumed by flames, and the Library of Congress which was packed with thousands of volumes of books – many of them chronicles of political history by British authors – was also burned out. Franzoni’s sculptures in the House of Representatives and Andrei’s columns were destroyed, as were the rich red silk curtains with their green lining behind the Speaker’s Chair. Only the Capitol’s outside walls, badly blackened by the fire, survived and some of the more solidly built stonework, like the famous corncob capitals which can still be seen today in the Senate vestibule. Cockburn, wandering into the office used by the President when he visited Congress, helped himself to one memento. It was a slim book, beautifully bound, with the words ‘The President of the United States’ stamped in gilt on the cover. It was President Madison’s personal copy of the government’s receipts and payments for the year 1810. Cockburn wrote inside the cover: ‘Taken in the President’s room in the Capitol, at the destruction of that building by the British, on the capture of Washington 24th August 1814, by Admiral Cockburn, and by him presented to his eldest brother, Sir James Cockburn of Langton Bart, Governor of Bermuda’. It was later discovered by an antiquarian, Dr Rosenbach, who presented it to the Library of Congress in 1940.

  It wasn’t long before the night sky over Washington was illuminated by the fierce red glow of the two massive fires – at the Capitol and at the Navy Yard. It was just after 9 p.m. George Gleig, who was with the main body of the army outside the city, was awestruck by the scale of the conflagration. ‘The sky was brillia
ntly illumined … and a dark red light was thrown upon the road, sufficient to permit each man to view distinctly his comrade’s face. Except the burning of St Sebastian’s [after the British storming of the city in Spain which Gleig watched in 1813], I do not recollect to have witnessed at any period of my life a scene more striking or more sublime.’ All the same, when Gleig later heard the extent of the destruction that Cockburn and Ross had set their hands to, he couldn’t help observing that the burning had, in his judgement, gone too far. ‘Unfortunately … a noble library, several printing presses and all the national archives were likewise committed to the flames, which, although no doubt the property of the government, might better have been spared.’ Harry Smith was at Ross’s side throughout and he wrote later that he found it all too much for his sensitivities. He deplored the way his commanders went about destroying the city.

  Americans looked on in horror and shame as the British began to burn their capital city. Anna Maria Thornton and her husband William watched from a distance as the buildings to which he had devoted so much energy and devotion were engulfed by flames. Like their friends the Madisons and the Bayard Smiths, they’d decided not to risk staying at their home in the city. They were in Georgetown and heading west, fearful that the British might chase US forces even beyond Washington. Others had opted to stay, like Dr James Ewell, who clung to the hope that the British would spare his family because they’d moved down the street to care for a desperately ill Mrs Orr. It was from her house that Ewell and his family watched the Capitol burn. ‘Never shall I forget my tortured feelings,’ Ewell recalled, ‘when I beheld that noble edifice wrapt in flames, which, bursting through the windows and mounting far above its summits, with a noise like thunder, filled all the saddened night with a dismal gloom.’ As if this sight and their harrowing day wasn’t enough for the Ewell family and the invalid who was now their hostess, there was suddenly a great rapping at Mrs Orr’s front door. On the doorstep were five or six British soldiers, ‘asking politely for something to eat’. The Ewells immediately set a cold ham, a loaf of bread and butter and wine in front of the men, who were obviously ravenous but were, according to Ewell, ‘conducting themselves with the utmost good behaviour’.

  James Ewell glanced across at his own house down the street and his heart sank when he saw what looked like a light in every room. In the reflected flames of the Capitol it almost looked as if it too was on fire. Fearing for his property, in particular his precious library of medical books, he asked the soldiers who were still tucking into their supper if they could help. The sergeant in charge of the men said he doubted that the doctor’s house was on fire but he and his men would certainly do what they could. It turned out that his house had not been burned but plundered. One of Ewell’s servants came back to report that the culprits were British soldiers.

  A friend, a local priest, then appeared and asked if he would like to meet the two British commanders, Ross and Cockburn, with whom he’d been talking. They were, he said, ‘perfect gentlemen’. Ewell readily assented, hoping to secure his house and what was left of his belongings. The priest led him to the admiral whom he introduced mistakenly as ‘General Ross’. ‘My name is Cockburn, Sir,’ said the admiral in a brisk and piercing tone of voice. Ewell was face to face with the man whose reputation for vandalism and terror was legendary. Nothing daunted, Ewell told Cockburn that he understood that private property was to be held sacred. ‘It will be so deemed,’ replied Cockburn. To which Ewell replied: ‘Some of my furniture, apparel and plate has been plundered.’ When Cockburn asked him whom he had left in charge of his property, he replied his servants. To which Cockburn retorted, ‘Well, Sir, let me tell you it was very ill confidence to repose your property in the care of servants.’ Ewell says he was then spared further conversation with the abrasive Cockburn by the arrival of General Robert Ross, who’d overheard enough of Ewell’s talk with Cockburn to know that his house had been robbed. ‘In a tone that will forever endear him to me as a “perfect gentleman” indeed, he observed that he was very sorry to hear that my house had been disturbed, and begged that I would tell him which it was, and he would order a sentinel to guard it.’ When the doctor pointed out his house, Ross exclaimed – with what Ewell described as ‘an amiable embarrassment’ – that it was the house that he’d chosen as his headquarters. Ewell said he was glad to hear it and that he was sorry the general hadn’t taken the place earlier as that would have protected it. Ross replied that he ‘could never think of trespassing on the repose of a private family, and would order his baggage out of my house immediately’. Ewell would hear none of it and pressed Ross to remain in his house. Ross politely agreed, promising to cause ‘as little trouble as possible’.

  The doctor then took Ross up to his own bedroom, which was the best furnished in the house with a large mattress on the bed. Ross was reluctant to accept the offer of the bed but in the end graciously accepted. He told Ewell that he should go and bring his family home. ‘I am myself’, said Ross, ‘a married man, have several sweet children and venerate the sanctities of conjugal and domestic relations.’ Ewell decided to leave the house to Ross and Cockburn, but, writing this account after the departure of the British, he paid particular tribute to Ross’s ‘consummate modesty and politeness’. The image of a victorious commander in chief treating his defeated enemies in such a way was ‘a spectacle too honourable to human nature and too conducive to the general good to give offence’. Ewell went on to write that he hoped his full narrative of his remarkable encounter with Ross would – after the war – ‘rekindle the pleasant flame of former friendship’. There were many Americans who thought Ewell a traitor for his dealings with the British. He came in for some scathing comment in the press, but he remained unrepentant.

  Mary Hunter was another who stayed in the city. Her husband, the Reverend Dr Andrew Hunter, was Chaplain at the Navy Yard. They had no illusions about the kind of destruction to expect from the British army. The family’s estate in New Jersey had been devastated during the Revolutionary War. But the two of them agreed that Mary should remain at home to try to protect the house with her housekeeper and one black servant while Andrew went off to safety with their children and other servants. ‘I will leave you to conjecture’, she wrote to her sister Susan six days later, ‘what our feelings must have been when we saw the British flag flying on Capitol Hill, and the rockets brandished for the destruction of our Capitol and for what other property we knew not.’

  That evening Mrs Hunter was confronted at her front door by a horseman she described as a ‘grim looking officer’ who asked where her husband was. She told him he wasn’t at home. The officer asked where he was. Not at home, she replied; he’d left that morning. Why? asked the man. ‘I then looked at him full in the face and very deliberately told him that my husband was gone to take a family of young children from witnessing such a horrid scene.’ When, asked the man, would he be back? She replied that under the existing circumstances she hardly expected him to return home. Deciding that generosity was the better part of valour, she then invited the British officer to help himself to whatever he wanted from her sideboard. ‘While he was regaling himself, I asked in my turn what they were going to do; whether to burn the city generally, or confine themselves to the public buildings?’ He replied that that would depend. If people remained in their houses and offered no resistance, private property would be safe. But houses where arms were found or where anyone resisted, would be burned down.

  Mary Hunter then crossed the road to a neighbour’s house to get a better look at the Capitol. She and her servants found a group of British officers there helping themselves to some food they’d found. ‘Seeing us alarmed they said everything that could be said to quiet us.’ And Hunter herself told them she had seen ‘a lot of British officers who were gentlemen, and that I could not bring myself to be afraid’. They talked of burning the Washington Bank, but when they were told that the fire would quickly spread to other nearby private houses, they agreed to sp
are it. They then told her they wanted to do all in their power to mitigate the distress of the citizens of Washington ‘against whom they had no enmity … Their war was with the government and not with the people. All this relieved our fears concerning the city and ourselves.’ Back in their own house, Mary Hunter and her two attendants watched the destruction of the Navy Yard from the top of the house. ‘No pen can describe the appalling sound that our ears heard and the sight that our eyes saw.’ It was ‘an awful scene … the most suicidal act ever committed’. They saw warships in flames and the immense quantity of dry timber ‘produced an almost meridian brightness. You never saw a drawing room so brilliantly lighted as the whole city was that night.’

  It was now after 10 p.m. Leaving the blazing Capitol behind them, Ross, Cockburn and their escorting units proceeded up the great wide expanse of Pennsylvania Avenue. They marched along, two abreast, some of them carrying lanterns. Their pace was fast, and every now and again, when the officer in front heard men talking to each other, he shouted back, ‘Silence! If any man speaks in the ranks, I’ll put him to death.’ The avenue they marched along would have looked primitive to a modern eye, surrounded as it was by only a few mainly timbered houses, but it was every bit as ambitious in scope as George Washington’s visionary architect, the French-born Pierre L’Enfant, had planned it. The grandest stretch was the mile between the Capitol and the White House. James Scott called it a ‘fine and spacious causeway’. There was a dual carriageway in the centre for horse riders and horse-drawn vehicles with a row of trees and generous footways for pedestrians at either side. L’Enfant had set himself the task of designing a city ‘proportioned to the greatness which … the capital of a powerful empire ought to manifest’. When he began, Washington was little more than a village in a marsh: two decades later, in 1814, the nation’s capital was beginning to show signs of matching up to those early pretensions.