When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  * * *

  The Treasury Building Grassi and McElroy saw wrapped in flames was only just across the road from the White House. Cockburn and Ross were by this time so impatient to get the job done that they ordered the firing of the Treasury before they’d properly examined it. The flames had already taken hold when someone discovered a great iron door which they tried but failed to break open in the conflagration. In the end an officer managed to smash a window and scramble into what looked like a strongroom and the men contrived to help him manhandle some heavy chests out of it and on to the street. There was a flutter of excitement that they might have set hands on a stock of bullion, but it turned out their effort was in vain. The boxes contained nothing of interest, the Americans having taken care to remove all the gold and silver in their retreat. Scott wrote of the men’s frustration ‘on finding that the contents would by no means compensate us for our exertions and possible suffocation’.

  The two commanders, who’d already tasted a few of the delicacies on the President’s table, now hurried back to Mrs Suter’s. They must have had some appetite left, because they now attacked the supper she had prepared for them. After they’d eaten, Ross went off to catch up on sleep in the bed he’d been offered by Dr Ewell, leaving Cockburn to settle one more score. He and Scott had spotted the offices of the National Intelligencer, the newspaper that had, said Scott, ‘for ever taken the lead and given the keynote to the Republican press in vilifying England and the English’. Scott described the editor, Joseph Gales, as ‘an Irish renegade’. He and his paper had often used colourful language to describe Cockburn’s depredations of the last few months.

  Cockburn was just ordering the place to be burned down when a bevy of local women appeared to plead with him not to start a fire that would threaten their houses. He agreed and ordered the building pulled down with ropes passed through one window and out of another: this allowed the men to heave down the wooden-framed building. All the papers inside were piled into a large bonfire and the printing press itself was smashed to pieces in the street. Cockburn took particular delight in watching all the letter Cs being destroyed. ‘The rascals can have no further means of abusing my name,’ he said gleefully. It was, said Scott, ‘a fitting purification of the instruments of corruption and falsehood emanating from a traitorous proprietor’. Cockburn explained to the women: ‘Good people, I do not wish to injure you, but I am really afraid my friend Josey [Gales] will be affronted with me, if after burning Jemmy’s palace, I do not pay him the same compliment.’ He told some others: ‘you may thank old Madison for this [destruction], it is he who has got you into this scrape … we want to catch and carry him to England for a curiosity’. Scott reports that the women asked him for the name of this chivalrous British officer who had granted their request to spare their houses. ‘Why, that is the vile monster, Cock-Burn,’ replied Scott, pronouncing the middle consonants as the Americans always did. ‘A half uttered shriek of terror escaped from the lips of some of them as the dreaded name tingled on their ears. The announcement was electrifying … they had absolutely stood in the presence of and amiably conversed with that most venomous of all “British sarpents” and for whose head a reward of one thousand dollars had been publicly offered.’ They parted on the best of terms.

  A number of Americans commented on how Cockburn’s restraint and respect for the citizenry of Washington contrasted with his barbaric reputation. The normally vehement Niles’ Register newspaper commented on 27 August that apart from burning the public buildings the British had ‘otherwise behaved much better than expected’. The National Intelligencer newspaper wrote that, when it came to looting, the Americans were guiltier than the British: ‘No houses were half as much plundered by the enemy as by the knavish wretches about the town who profited of the general distress.’ Margaret Bayard Smith, as patriotic as any Washingtonian, observed in a letter she wrote six days later that Cockburn ‘deserves praise and commendation for his own good conduct and the discipline of his sailors and marines’. She noted that Cockburn and his men were ‘perfectly polite to the citizens. He bade them complain of any soldier that committed the least disorder and had several severely punished, for very slight offences. All provisions were paid for.’ She generously omitted to mention the President’s dinner that the British had wolfed down at the White House. Bayard Smith, who wasn’t there at the time, but got the story from her neighbours a day or two later, said Cockburn was seen a number of times riding his white mare up and down the avenue. He stopped at one house and asked a young lady: ‘Were you prepared to see a savage, a ferocious creature, such as Josey represented me? But you see I’m quite harmless, don’t be afraid. I will take better care of you than Jemmy did!’ The admiral’s manner, Bayard Smith remarked, ‘was that of a common sailor, not of a dignified commander…’. But she went on, ‘I must praise his moderation, indeed his conduct was such as to disarm the prejudices that existed.’ Well pleased with his reception and the work he’d done that night, George Cockburn finally returned to headquarters at the Capitol for a few hours’ sleep.

  12

  Damn you! You shan’t stay in my house

  25 August

  JAMES MADISON WAS the only US President in history to be a fugitive in his own country other than George Bush Jr who, nearly two centuries later, retreated to the US strategic command bunker at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, Nebraska on 11 September 2001 when terrorists struck Washington. Madison’s flight was far less efficiently organised. He crossed the Potomac at 6 p.m. on Wednesday 24 August 1814, accompanied by Richard Rush, the Attorney General, and the Navy Secretary William Jones. They had no idea where Dolley or the rest of the Jones family were, and so Madison sent off a note which he hoped would find her, suggesting they meet at Wiley’s Tavern near the Great Falls of the Potomac. Madison and his companions rode on horseback about six miles up the west bank of the river safely inside Virginia. Every now and then they’d pause on a piece of high ground and glance back at the fires in the capital. It was, recalled Rush, ‘a dismal sight … columns of flames and smoke ascending throughout the night … from the Capitol, the President’s House and other public edifices … some burning slowly, others with bursts of flame, and sparks mounting high up in the dark horizon’. It was getting late and the group decided to stop short of Wiley’s at the house of a churchman called John Maffitt in the village of Salona.

  By coincidence Dolley was only a mile away. She had not made it to Wiley’s either but had stopped at the house of a friend, Matilda Love. Sofas and other substitutes for beds were rapidly made ready for the unexpected guests. The women spent what one contemporary chronicler described as a ‘frightful, miserable night, all disconsolate, several in tears, Mrs. Madison sitting at an open window gazing on the lurid flames and listening to the hoarse murmurs of the smouldering city’. The next day, after a nervous journey through groups of refugees, Dolley Madison and her friends and attendants reached Wiley’s Tavern, the appointed meeting place. She was in for a shock. The inn was full of fugitive women whose husbands were still with the army and the moment they recognised Dolley they vented their anger on her for all their misfortunes. Some of them had even enjoyed her hospitality at White House parties. The wife of the President who had landed the country in such a catastrophe had no right to shelter in the same house as them, they said. According to the Madisons’ servant Paul Jennings, Dolley was unceremoniously shouted out of one house – perhaps it was the tavern – after she’d gone upstairs for a moment. ‘The lady of the house, learning who she was, became furious and went to the stairs and screamed out “Miss Madison, if that’s you, come down and go out! Your husband has got mine out fighting, and damn you, you shan’t stay in my house, so get out!”’ Jennings says he learned all this from Dolley’s servant Sukey who travelled with her. Madison himself came in for some catcalls when he reached the tavern later on, exhausted and soaked to the skin by driving rain. ‘He was insulted by some of the refugees, who held him responsible for their
misfortune.’ In spite of this humiliation, both James and Dolley Madison managed to arrange to stay at the tavern that night. She had even contrived to persuade the staff to set aside some food for him and his famished companions. But they were to spend another restless night. At midnight the rumour went around that the British were coming, and one story has it that Madison’s aides hurried him out of bed and into hiding in a small hovel in the woods. Before he left, he told Dolley to disguise herself and leave the tavern at dawn.

  Little did the President and his wife know it, but far from advancing beyond Washington that night of 25 August, the British had already left.

  * * *

  Cockburn and Ross had spent their first night in Washington, on the 24th, sleeping soundly as the city’s public buildings blazed around them. They were with their troops near the Capitol, Ross in the bedroom he’d been lent by the benevolent Dr James Ewell. The doctor returned there around breakfast time and immediately made himself useful attending to the soldier who had been guarding Ross’s horse. The man ‘suddenly fell down in a fit. I hastened to the poor fellow and opened a vein, which gave him immediate relief.’ But then a file of British soldiers marched up led by a sergeant and one of them ‘desired me rather roughly, to give him some water’. Ewell promptly called to his servant to bring out ‘a pitcher’ of water, not suspecting for a moment that this would cause the soldier any offence. ‘You damned rebel,’ the man shouted at him, ‘do you think I am a beast, to drink out of a pitcher?’ Luckily for Ewell Robert Ross heard the soldier’s insolent language and walked out of the house to see what was going on. The man rapidly tried to shrink back among his mates, but the general, with a furious look, jerked him by the collar and exclaimed: ‘Villain, is this the way you speak to a gentleman, and in this moment too, that he is doing a kindness to a sick fellow-soldier of your own?… This conduct shall not pass unnoticed.’ Ross then turned to the doctor and said that every army had its scoundrels and he was sorry to say there were too many of them in his own army.

  Ross was then introduced to the doctor’s wife, who’d made no secret of her fear for herself and her family. ‘The general shook her hand with every mark of undissembled friendship,’ Ewell wrote in his diary, ‘expressed his deep regret to learn that she had been so seriously frightened, and lamented sincerely the necessity that had given cause to these tragedies, namely, the burning of the British capital in Canada.’ Ewell thought to himself that Ross’s case for burning Washington as an act of revenge was wearing a bit thin. And he had a point. York was burned in April 1813 by American troops who had lost all discipline: it was not a deliberate act ordered by the US government. Besides, towards the end of 1813, British troops had burned Lewiston, Blackrock and Buffalo. That, to many, looked like fair recompense for York.

  Ewell decided not to engage in heated debate with Ross about this, but he did say what a pity it was that the British had burned the library in the Capitol. At which Ross in his disarming way replied: ‘I lament most sincerely I was not apprised of the circumstances, for had I known it in time the books would most certainly have been saved.’ ‘Neither do I suppose, General,’ said the doctor, ‘you would have burnt the President’s house had Mrs Madison remained at home.’ ‘No, Sir,’ replied the general, ‘I make war neither against letters nor ladies, and I have heard so much in praise of Mrs Madison that I would rather protect than burn a house which sheltered such an excellent lady.’ This was more than a bit rich coming from the man who had a few hours earlier given the orders to burn the place down. Ross even went on to express his regret that Britain and America were fighting each other. It was, he said, a ‘war between two nations so nearly allied by consanguinity and interest’.

  Ross had particular praise too for Joshua Barney’s gallant stand at Bladensburg. ‘I am sorry he was wounded,’ he told Ewell. ‘Had half your army been composed of such men as this commodore … we should never have got to your city.’ Ewell noted that, unlike the sharp-tongued George Cockburn, Robert Ross did not publicly mock Madison or any other American official. Nor had Ross the brash outgoing personality of his naval counterpart. ‘His countenance’, reported Ewell, ‘seemed constantly shrouded in the close shades of a thoughtful mind.’ In spite of Ross’s obviously honourable and generous attitude, Ewell said, ‘I never saw the sunbeam of one cheerful smile on General Ross all the time he was in Washington.’

  Ewell saw some humanity in Cockburn too. He recognised that this would startle some of his readers: ‘What! Magnanimous traits in Admiral Cockburn! Impossible!’ But, Ewell went on to say, he did have an example or two. The admiral heard the Bank of Washington had not been burned down the night before in order to protect nearby private houses. ‘Well then, pull it down,’ he said. ‘Admiral Cockburn,’ said Ewell, ‘you do not want to injure private property.’ ‘I do not,’ replied Cockburn, ‘but this is public property’. ‘No Sir,’ went on Ewell, ‘the United States have no bank here now; this is altogether private property.’ ‘Well then,’ said the admiral, ‘let it alone.’

  Ewell had to fight for another building as well. His neighbour Elias Caldwell, commander of a company of volunteers, nearly lost his house when the British found some cartridges and cartridge boxes stacked there. When Ewell argued that Caldwell was a brave man who had only been doing his duty, Cockburn, after a word with Ross, spared the place.

  All that morning, Thursday 25 August, the burning and destruction went on. The light infantry replaced the fusiliers as the core of the occupying force. Captain Wainwright of HMS Tonnant led a naval demolition party to the Navy Yard first thing in the morning and set about completing the work that Tingey, the Yard’s own commandant, had started the night before. A few more store sheds were set alight, and James Scott and another group – at Cockburn’s instigation – saw to the torching of the main ropewalk, a long shed used for spinning the great hemp warps, sheets, braces and other ropes for the warships. ‘The beautiful government ropewalk, with its adjoining ample stores of cordage, hemp and tar, filled to the roofs, was next visited under my orders.’ Scott told his men to spread the materials along the middle of the place and then, ‘knocking out the heads of some dozens of tar barrels, their contents were spread over the train. The whole was speedily in a state of ignition; black dense volumes of smoke, obscuring the heavens…’ Scott said the fire ran so rapidly along the 600-yard building that it was all ablaze within thirty minutes. ‘The red flames flashing forth from the lower part of the mass of heavy vapour gave it the appearance of a Tartarus upon earth. It was quickly reduced to a heap of smouldering rubble.’

  Remarkably, only minutes after the British incendiary teams had moved on, Tingey himself crept back to the Yard in his gig to see what had happened. It was 8.45 a.m. when he landed at the main wharf and was amazed to find – amid all the destruction – that the schooner Lynx had survived. He got his men to haul her out of harm’s way as best they could. Tingey was also delighted to see that his house had been spared, on the ground that it was a private residence, although local neighbours had looted it and other parts of the Yard.

  As the British teams headed towards their next target – the War Office – shots suddenly rang out. A horseman appeared from nowhere and charged down the street firing off his two pistols at the British troops. He was an American seaman, John Lewis, on a suicidal mission of revenge. Lewis was George Washington’s nephew. He had been seized from an American ship and forcibly impressed by the Royal Navy to fight in a British ship against his own country. He’d now escaped and was bent on retribution. Seething with resentment he galloped straight at the head of the British column and ran into a hail of fire from the troops. He fell mortally wounded in the middle of the road and his body lay there for hours.

  Harry Smith and James Scott were chatting outside their commanders’ headquarters when an American prisoner who’d been led past them suddenly made a dash for it. He snatched a British horse, leapt on its back and raced off. Quick as a flash Harry Smith was in the saddle chasing aft
er him. Scott was then treated to the sight of Smith slashing at the man, missing him, but bringing both of them crashing to the ground. Smith came away with only a scratch but the American broke his thigh and Smith promptly found him a doctor.

  The British team went on to burn down the War Office. Some precious relics, such as the flags and other regimental trophies they’d managed to grab from the British in the War of Independence thirty years earlier, had already been rescued, but huge quantities of furniture, documents and accounts were consumed by the flames. The next building identified for destruction was the Patent Office. This was the pride and joy of Dr William Thornton, the erudite physician who had designed the Capitol and was now the Patent Office’s superintendent. It was the home of a whole host of models of machines and gadgets submitted for patenting by inventors. Thornton saw it as a treasure house, a testament to the creative and innovative talents of Americans. The inventor Eli Whitney, for example, had patented his famous cotton gin, the labour-saving machine that extracted the seeds from cotton and transformed the American economy. ‘Hearing … while at breakfast in Georgetown, that the British were about to burn the War Office and the public buildings containing the models of the arts, I was desirous not only of saving an instrument that had cost me great labour, but of preserving the building and all the models.’

  He left his breakfast and cannily made sure he found someone – ‘one of the most respectable gentlemen of the district’ – to accompany him, ‘lest the malevolent should insinuate that I had in any manner held an improper communication with the invaders of the country’. Thornton and his comrade watched helplessly as the War Office was burned by a team of soldiers under the command of a Colonel Jones. He then asked the colonel if he could remove a musical instrument, a violin he was designing, from the Patent Office. The colonel promptly accepted, saying that it was not the army’s intention to burn any private property. Thornton then headed for the Patent Office but was delayed as he had some difficulty finding a replacement for his travelling companion who said he had had enough. Colonel Jones meanwhile was marching his men in two columns for the Patent Office backed up by a squad of blacks carrying a quantity of gunpowder to help with its destruction.