by Peter Snow
Monroe recognized that ‘A tempest of dissatisfaction at the late events rages here with great fever.’ Worse than that, many people were persuaded that any further military action against the British would be disastrous. ‘The people are violently irritated at the thought of our attempting to make any more futile resistance,’ wrote Anna Maria Thornton. Her husband went further. William Thornton sought out the President to inform him that the people of the devastated capital – like the people of Alexandria – wanted to send a deputation to meet the British and discuss terms. As the news of the Washington catastrophe spread, Americans as far away as New York were bewildered and angry. ‘Where are our commanders?’ asked the New York Evening Post. ‘Why have we nothing to satisfy the public mind, in such a disastrous crisis? It is a fact that to this hour we know not where our army is, or whether we have any. Our president and his secretaries are also missing, and no one knows where to look for them! Was there ever such a thing before in a civilized nation? A country invaded – battles fought – and yet no official account of the movements of either friend or foe.’ Graffiti were scrawled on what was left of the walls of public buildings in Washington: ‘James Madison is a rascal, a coward and a fool.’
It was in this atmosphere of growing demoralisation and despair that Madison suddenly began to pick himself up and restore his severely damaged authority. He was encouraged by James Monroe and the Navy Secretary William Jones, who were appalled and ashamed by the news from Alexandria. Alexandria, said Jones, had been presented with such ‘degrading and humiliating terms as to excite the indignation of all classes of people’. The President was galvanised. He gave his Secretary of State, Monroe, full authority – for the time being – to do whatever was needed to oversee the city’s and the country’s defence. And when Thornton broached the idea of a mission to talk to the British, Madison and Monroe acted with a new resolve. ‘The President forbade the measure,’ Monroe stated in a memorandum recording events at the height of the crisis. He added that ‘if any deputation moved towards the enemy it should be repelled by the bayonet’. An awareness of the depth to which the nation had sunk somehow reanimated Madison’s leadership. Margaret Bayard Smith alluded to Madison’s ability to lose his normal appearance of ‘calm serenity’ if the ‘powers of his mind were called into action. His brow was knit – deep and strong lines gathered on his forehead … and to the deep lines of thought thus developed was added that air of unyielding determination…’
Madison’s resolve may have been further strengthened by the sudden arrival of his wife Dolley. She had left her country retreat that morning before receiving his message telling her to stay away from Washington. Her two close friends, Anna Maria Thornton and Margaret Bayard Smith, met her that evening and said that although she ‘seemed much depressed and … could scarcely speak without tears’ she was ‘very violent against the English – and wished we had 10,000 such men as were passing (a few troopers) to sink our enemy to the bottomless pit’. When she heard of the surrender of Alexandria she said the people ought to have allowed their town to be burned rather than submit to such terms.
William Thornton, who, like James Ewell, had raised suspicions that he had been close to collaborating with the enemy, was quick to demonstrate that he was an enthusiastic patriot as well as a realist. When his idea of a deputation to the British was rejected out of hand by the President and Monroe, he immediately went home and fastened on his sword – much to the distress of his wife – and went round energetically supporting the President’s call to arms. He went out of his way – in a letter to the city’s leading newspaper – to reject ‘several misrepresentations’ which he said were being made about his conduct. When the President asked him to help defend the city once the British had left, he said he immediately rose to the occasion: ‘I went to the different quarters and gave, as far as I could, every assistance in my power to fulfil the wishes of the government.’
Army units began to return to Washington, ordered back by the President and Monroe. They were told that their duty was to defend the city and not let the enemy break into it again. Three senior naval officers were despatched to intercept and attempt to destroy Captain Gordon’s British squadron as it made its way back down the Potomac with any prizes it had seized in Alexandria. They would establish shore batteries on the river to cause what damage they could and also attempt to destroy the British squadron with fireships.
While all this was going on, the man who still officially held the office of War Secretary chose to return to the capital. John Armstrong’s name was on everyone’s lips as the man who had failed to provide for the defence of Washington, and some people had been heard saying they ‘were disposed to hang him’. He finally returned from Virginia on Monday morning, 29 August. With the British at Alexandria, Armstrong went to inspect defences on the Potomac, and he was soon being met by men who openly denounced him. One prominent citizen told him he was the cause of all the disasters that had befallen the city. Shortly afterwards General Walter Smith, commander of the Washington militia, was confronted by a group of officers who told him: ‘There, Sir, are our swords. We will not employ them, if General Armstrong is to command us, in his capacity as Secretary of War. But we will obey the orders of any other member of the cabinet.’ The general immediately sent two of his top aides, Major John Williams and Major Thomas McKenney, to find the President and tell him that ‘every officer would tear off his epaulets if General Armstrong was to have anything to do with them’. Smith told McKenney: ‘Say to the President that under the orders of any other member of the Cabinet, what can be done will be done.’ They sped off on horseback and tracked down Madison, who told McKenney to go back and assure General Smith that Armstrong would be giving no more orders.
That evening the President rode in person to John Armstrong’s lodgings. He wrote his own account of the confrontation that then took place. They were meeting, said Madison, ‘under apprehensions of an immediate visit from the force of the enemy at Alexandria’. The President told his War Secretary that ‘violent prejudices were known to exist … particularly against me and himself as head of the war department; that threats of personal violence had … been thrown out against us both, but more especially against him’. Madison told Armstrong what General Smith had reported about the refusal of the troops to take any more orders from him. Armstrong replied that ‘he had been aware of the excitement against him; that it was altogether artificial, and that he knew the sources of it and the intrigues by which it had been effected’. Madison said that what made people resentful was their belief that Armstrong had not done enough to defend the city. ‘I added that it would not be easy to satisfy the nation that the event was without blame somewhere, and I could not in candour say that all that ought to have been done had been done and in proper time.’ When Armstrong answered that he had ‘omitted no preparations or steps whatever for the safety of the place’, the atmosphere began to heat up. ‘I replied’, recorded Madison, ‘that as the conversation was a frank one, I could not admit this justification, that it was the duty of the Secretary of War not only to execute plans, or orders committed to him, but to devise and propose such as would in his opinion be necessary and proper.’ Madison added ‘that it was due to truth and to myself to say, that he [Armstrong] had never appeared to enter into a just view … of the danger to the city; that he had never himself proposed or suggested a single precaution or arrangement for its safety, everything on that subject having been brought forward by myself’. ‘I remarked’, Madison recalled, ‘that it was not agreeable thus to speak’ and that he had always treated Armstrong with friendliness and confidence. Armstrong must have suspected that Madison would then formally fire him, but the President was too subtle for that. ‘The conversation was closed’, wrote Madison, ‘by my referring to the idea of his setting out in the morning on a visit to his family…’
Whether or not Madison actually wanted Armstrong to resign, it was only a few days before the War Secretary did so, bitterly blaming everyone but hims
elf. He wrote a snarling piece in the Baltimore Patriot accusing Madison of yielding ‘to an impulse so vile and profligate, so injurious to truth and so destructive of order…’. He went on to complain, ‘It became a system to load me with all the faults and misfortunes which occurred.’ As for the defeat at Bladensburg, Armstrong asserted: ‘If all the troops … had been faithful to themselves and to their country, the enemy would have been beaten and the capital saved.’ Armstrong also blamed Monroe, whose ‘lust for power is insatiable’, for the defeat at Bladensburg. He wrote, ‘It is a well known fact that to this man’s interference in the arrangements [on the field] much of our misfortune on that day was owing … With men of such imbecility I cannot longer connect myself.’ It was Madison – not Monroe – who was instrumental in securing Armstrong’s departure, but Monroe had long abhorred Armstrong and had advised Madison not to promote him. Monroe also had every interest in further discrediting a man he had seen as a possible rival in a future contest for the US presidency. Now, with Armstrong gone, Monroe became incontestably the second most powerful man in Washington. Madison asked his Secretary of State to take over the duties of War Secretary as well.*
15
Do not attack Baltimore!
End of August
ROBERT ROSS, GEORGE Cockburn and their victorious soldiers and sailors, who had stolen away from Washington on the night of 25 August, took four days to return to their ships. They were back at Benedict on 29 August ready to embark. It had been an astonishing achievement. Many years later, George Gleig, by then a budding historian looking back over the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, remarked that among all the other events:
the campaign at Washington was, I believe … but little spoken of; and even now, it is overwhelmed in the recollections of the all-engrossing Waterloo; but the time will probably come when he who … penetrated upwards of sixty miles into an enemy’s country, overthrew an army more than double his own … took possession of the capital of a great nation and … returned in triumph to his fleet, will be ranked … among … those who have most successfully contributed to elevate Great Britain to the height of military glory …
The Americans allowed the British army to retire without any interference. Their sharpshooters and cavalry skirmishers could have caused the British no end of trouble in some of the wooded country on the way. But they were glad enough to see them go without provoking further fighting. Ross halted his army briefly, around midnight, at Bladensburg where ‘the dead were still unburied, and lay about in every direction completely naked. They had been stripped even of their shirts and … the smell which arose upon the night air was horrible.’ Any wounded who could be safely removed were heaved gently on to a dozen wagons for transport to the ships. But the most severe cases would have to be left behind. Gleig made his way into one house which had been converted into a hospital for the worst casualties and ‘found them in great pain, and some of them deeply affected at the thought of being abandoned by their comrades, and left to the mercy of their enemies’. But Gleig was able to add that in the event such fears did an injustice to the Americans, ‘who were found to possess at least one generous trait in their character, namely that of behaving kindly and attentively to their prisoners’. Before he left the makeshift hospital Gleig shook hands with one of his own company’s sergeants, who burst into tears when he saw him. The man was too badly wounded to be moved: a musket ball had passed through both of his thighs.
Harry Smith had been correct to warn his chief, General Ross, that the night march would be an ordeal for the troops. There were constant delays as the head of the column lost its way in the darkness. Many men were so exhausted after several sleepless nights that they collapsed on the roadside. Ross had no choice but to allow a six-hour rest at eight o’clock the following morning. ‘No bed of down could have proved half so luxurious’, recalled James Scott, ‘as the green sward on which I stretched myself. In less than five minutes I was wrapped in forgetfulness.’
There was only one curious exception to the Americans’ failure to molest Ross’s withdrawal. A seemingly minor incident at the time, it led to one of America’s proudest moments – the unfurling of the star-spangled banner over a fort in Baltimore which inspired the US national anthem. The story of how this happened is one of the most intriguing in Anglo-American history and reveals much about how national myths are created. It began during the British retreat – on 27 August – with the arrest of Dr William Beanes. Beanes was the respected local doctor in Upper Marlborough who had made a point of being gracious and hospitable to Robert Ross on his way through the town a week earlier.* The doctor and two friends were enjoying a drink in Beanes’s garden after the British army had passed back through the town on its way to the ships. The three men heard that some British stragglers had stayed on in the town after the rest had passed through and were now bent on robbery and looting. One report says three of the stragglers burst into the doctor’s garden and insolently demanded a drink. The elderly doctor, who was effectively the town’s patriarch, briskly set about rounding up the stragglers and locking them up. But one of them managed to escape. He dashed off, rejoined the British army and reported the arrest of his mates.
That night, 27 August, a troop of mounted British soldiers raced back to Upper Marlborough, released the detained stragglers and burst into William Beanes’s bedroom in the small hours. The doctor was unceremoniously dragged out of bed and forced to ride the thirty-five miles to Benedict together with his two house guests. They were quickly released but the doctor was kept in detention. He was treated not as a prisoner of war but as a civilian who had won the respect and gratitude of the British commanders for his sympathetic attitude a week earlier but had now betrayed that trust.
William Beanes would no doubt have spent the rest of the war in an obscure British prison if it hadn’t been for a young Washington lawyer who took up his case. Francis Scott Key, the thirty-five-year-old son of a prosperous Maryland plantation-owner and judge, lived with his wife Polly and eight children in Georgetown next to Washington. He was slight, with brown hair and blue eyes. He was deeply religious and had toyed with the idea of entering the Church. He opposed slavery and thought the war unnecessary and unwise. But he was a patriot and had made a name for himself as an articulate advocate with a passion for words: he wrote a poem about America’s action against the Barbary pirates from North Africa whose corsairs were a menace to international trade. Key’s poem mentioned the ‘star spangled flag of our nation, where each radiant star gleamed a meteor of war’. Key knew William Beanes, and when he heard that the old doctor had been captured he called on President Madison after he’d returned to Washington. He asked the President to give his sanction to him joining a special mission to the British. He would go together with the official prisoner exchange commissioner, John Skinner, and they’d appeal personally to General Ross.
Madison agreed and the two men sailed off in a small vessel under a flag of truce to rendezvous with Ross on HMS Tonnant at the mouth of the Potomac. They were greeted with civility and had the strange experience of being invited to sit down to dinner with the men who’d burned their capital. Skinner sat next to Ross, ‘the most reserved gentleman at the table’, and noticed a scar, still not properly healed, on the left side of his neck – the wound he’d suffered months earlier fighting with Wellington in the south of France. Key’s and Skinner’s hopes of freeing Beanes faded sharply when Cockburn launched an attack on the old doctor, saying that he’d betrayed his trust. But then Skinner handed Ross a bundle of letters written by British officers captured at Bladensburg who praised the way they’d been treated by the Americans. It was enough to make Ross relent and to persuade the naval commanders to agree that Beanes should be set free. Ross wrote in an official letter he gave to Skinner that he was agreeing to the release of Beanes ‘not from an opinion of his not being justly detained, nor from any favourable sentiment of his merit … but purely in proof of the obligation which I feel for the attention with which t
he wounded have been treated’. Key and Skinner were then allowed to give Beanes the happy news, but they were not for the moment permitted to leave the ship. They had seen and heard too much to be allowed to go home.
* * *
It had taken Ross’s army some time to re-embark after its successful attack on Washington. When the footsore marchers finally came within sight of the ships’ crews awaiting them in the Patuxent River a great roar of applause went up, and the men happily began embarking. Gleig could hardly wait for a clean shirt, a proper wash and his old bunk to sleep in. George Chesterton, whose job was to support the artillery, which consisted, he says, of just one 6-pounder, spent most of his time in the rear and missed the raid on Washington. But that allowed him to get up to more mischief on the river banks in what he called ‘foraging expeditions’ which clearly infringed the rules of proper military conduct. Some days they would merely fill the ships’ water casks from the wells dug on either side of the Patuxent. But on other occasions ‘we literally scoured the country…’. They knocked up farmhouses as late as midnight, woke up inmates and insisted upon the ‘pick of the pantry, yards or pigsty, upon our own terms … I am afraid we sadly lacked consideration for the harassed inhabitants of this war-girt coast.’ Chesterton added: ‘We paid where payment was practicable, but were not over-scrupulous in helping ourselves. We ran many serious risks, for patrolling parties of the Americans were abroad.’
One night their shouts woke a sleeping farmer. He appeared at his bedroom window and ‘solemnly protested that he had not a fowl or a pig upon his premises and employed such singular oaths to fortify his words, that we laughed … loudly proclaimed our disbelief and commanded him to descend…’. The half-dressed farmer, carrying his lantern, was then made to open the door to his outhouse. And ‘there arose such a cackling of fowls of various species, that our host stood convicted of something near akin to perjury, and we made uncommonly free with his stock’.