When Britain Burned the White House

by Peter Snow

  On another occasion Chesterton and some mischievous comrades tried to trap a runaway calf in a farmer’s field. When they couldn’t catch it, much to the farmer’s mirth, one of the party made a noose as if to hang the farmer if he didn’t catch the calf. The wife was so terrified that the men relented – ‘We found the joke had gone too far’ – and did a whip-round to compensate the terrified wife. They often sat and chatted with American families. ‘I remember on one occasion, sitting in the richest imaginable rural parlour and enjoying a lively chat with a pretty, interesting, well educated girl, about twenty years of age, and with her respectable father.’ Chesterton and his mates enjoyed an hour of ‘agreeable conversation, and we parted with tokens of mutual cordiality, and moralised upon the painfulness of national enmities’.

  George Chesterton and his comrades were lucky that their sometimes rascally conduct escaped the notice of Edward Codrington, the admiral responsible for discipline in the fleet. In a series of letters to his ships’ captains he declared that ‘plunder and robbery has been committed on shore … and that even women from some of the Transports have been guilty of enormities shocking to humanity’. He said ‘great outrages’ had been committed ‘upon the houses and property of inhabitants…’ and that only senior officers or people in their company would be allowed ashore. He made an example of one group of men who’d robbed a family in a village. He had them taken ashore and there in the presence of the people whose house they’d robbed, and watched by the boys who’d been part of their raiding party, the ringleader would be given four dozen lashes and his henchman three dozen. A surgeon would be on hand ‘to see that no more of this punishment be inflicted at one period than the parties could bear’.

  When the Commander in Chief, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, heard the news of Ross’s successful assault on Washington, he sent a fast vessel to recall Captain Gordon’s squadron from its diversionary attack up the Potomac. Early on 1 September the eighteen-gun sloop HMS Fairy arrived off Alexandria ordering them back to join the main fleet. Gordon and Napier mustered their large flotilla of twenty-one prize ships loaded with produce taken from the town and set off down the river on 2 September. If their voyage up the river had been a navigational nightmare, their voyage down it was at risk of being suicidal. The Americans had prepared two sets of shore batteries, one of them with a furnace that could heat up the roundshot and convert it into balls of fire that could set light to a wooden ship. Furthermore they sent flaming fireships floating towards the English fleet in order to set it ablaze. And as if all this wasn’t enough, one after another Gordon’s vessels again grounded and had to work their way free, sometimes under heavy fire. In the event, brave small boat crews towed the fireships away, the squadron’s broadsides outgunned the shore batteries, and all the ships that took the ground were pulled free.

  The squadron rejoined Cochrane’s fleet in Chesapeake Bay after twenty-three days and many sleepless nights. They had suffered forty-two casualties – seven killed and thirty-five wounded including Captain Charles Napier, who was wounded in the neck by a stray musket ball. His boss, James Alexander Gordon, was more than generous in his report to Cochrane: ‘To Captain Napier I owe more obligations than I have words to express.’ Gordon’s Potomac operation had been as successful as that of Ross and Cockburn in penetrating deep into enemy territory. It had caused a few more days of anxiety in Washington, and the surrender of Alexandria amplified America’s humiliation. The twenty-one captured ships and their cargoes earned the crews and their officers a tidy sum in prize money. ‘It was’, Edward Codrington wrote, ‘nothing less brilliant than the capture of Washington.’ Theodore Roosevelt, US President and naval historian nearly a century later, called it ‘a most venturesome feat reflecting great honour on the Captains and crews…’. Even the disgraced John Armstrong commended Gordon for his ‘skill, diligence and good fortune’.

  While waiting for Gordon and his squadron to return to Chesapeake Bay, Cochrane and his commanders had continued their debate about what to do next. Ross’s objections had – for the moment – removed the immediate prospect of an attack on Baltimore. Cochrane and Ross sent accounts of their successful campaign back to London. The news would take a month to reach Britain. Ross modestly reported to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Bathurst, that ‘the troops under my command entered and took possession of the city of Washington’. He left it to Cochrane to boast – in his report to the Admiralty – of ‘a series of successes in the centre of the enemy’s country surrounded by a numerous population’. But Ross didn’t conceal his pride in letters to his wife and sister-in-law. ‘Our little operation here’, he wrote to Maria Suter, ‘will no doubt appear brilliant and so, not to speak too partially of our own feats, it ought.’ To his wife Elizabeth, he wrote: ‘My Ly will surely be pleased to find that our arms have been … crowned with a success that I had no reason to expect … Fortune favoured us and we succeeded beyond our most sanguine expectations…’ Ross paid particular tribute to George Cockburn, saying the attack on Washington was the admiral’s ‘original suggestion’, and he went on: ‘I trust that all our differences with the Yankees will shortly be settled. That wish is, I believe, very prevalent with them, they feel strongly the disgrace of having lost their capital, taken by a handful of men, and blame very generally a government which went to war without the means or the abilities to carry it on … The injury sustained by the city of Washington in the destruction of its public buildings has been immense and must disgust the country with a government that has left the capital unprotected.’ Ross was right about the immediate effect on Madison’s government, but his burning of the new nation’s proudest monuments was in a matter of days to put new heart into Americans and determination never to let such a thing happen again. A country divided about the wisdom of going to war would find a new unity in its fury at what had happened to its capital.

  But Robert Ross had a personal concern that went far deeper than his pride in what he had achieved in the field. His wife’s depression and loneliness, which must have been distressingly conveyed in her correspondence to him, now sadly lost, was constantly on his mind. He began his letter to her not with the story of his exploits but with the words ‘It is, my best loved Ly, with feelings of the most acute misery that I take my pen to write to you.’ He told his wife that the letters he received from her ‘completely overwhelmed’ him. ‘I declare to you if it was in my power to leave the army I would without hesitation fly to you.’ He begged her to try and be cheerful at the prospect of their meeting soon, and asked her to put the ‘care of our dear children’ before anything else. ‘The war cannot last long. We then meet, my Ly, never again to separate.’

  Harry Smith was a happy man. He was chosen by Ross to carry his despatch bearing the good tidings to the government at home. Smith was one of Ross’s aides but hardly his closest. He may have had his doubts about his commander’s competence, but he never doubted his humanity: ‘Kind-hearted General Ross, whom I loved as a brother … there never was a more kind or gallant soldier,’ wrote Smith. ‘I had not been to England for seven years. Wife, home, country, all rushed in my mind at once.’ Smith was overjoyed at the prospect of seeing his wife, Juana. He had left her in France three months earlier. Before that, the couple had been inseparable from the day Smith married the fourteen-year-old Spanish girl at Badajoz until the end of the Peninsular campaign.

  As he prepared to leave, Smith worried about the pressures that would now be brought to bear on Ross in his absence. He was particularly concerned about the influence of George de Lacy Evans, another of Ross’s aides for whom Smith clearly felt a competitive dislike and even a pang of jealousy. ‘Sir Alexander Cochrane, Admiral Cockburn and Evans, burning with ambition, had urged General Ross to move on Baltimore. The General was against it, and kindly asked my opinion. I opposed it, not by opinion or argument, but by a simple statement of facts.’ Evans was junior to Smith, but Smith knew that Ross liked and respected Evans and might be persuaded by him
once he, Smith, was away. Ross was indeed so delighted with Evans that he wrote to the War Secretary requesting Evans’s double promotion from lieutenant to major, skipping the rank of captain. It was a preposterously ambitious suggestion, and was rejected by Lord Bathurst.

  Smith’s case against attacking Baltimore was that the enemy was now concentrated there in strength, its harbour could be seriously obstructed by sunken ships, and British troops, now ravaged by a spreading epidemic of dysentery, would be unlikely to repeat the kind of triumph they’d achieved at Washington. Smith says he ended by telling Ross that success at Baltimore would add little to the effect of Washington, but that a reverse ‘would restore the Americans’ confidence in their own power and wipe away the stain of their previous discomfiture’. Ross listened and then said, ‘I agree with you. Such is my decided opinion.’ ‘Then, Sir, may I tell Lord Bathurst [the War Secretary] that you will not go to Baltimore?’ When the general said yes, his aide recorded, ‘I was delighted, for I had a presentiment of disaster, founded on what I have stated.’ It is only fair to observe that Smith does have a habit of trying to ensure that he is on the right side of history. He wrote his autobiography long after all these events, and with Ross long dead and no one else to gainsay him, he could happily invent conversations that never took place. Which is not, of course, to say that he did.

  As Smith set off in the thirty-eight-gun frigate Iphigenia, Ross bid him a very warm farewell. The general asked him to call on Elizabeth, the wife he was so concerned about, and Smith promised he would. ‘A pleasant voyage, dear Smith, and thank you heartily for all your exertions and the assistance you have afforded me. I can ill spare you.’ ‘Dear friend,’ replied Smith, ‘I will soon be back to you.’ Smith then writes that he ended by asking Ross a question he had asked before: ‘And may I assure Lord Bathurst you will not attempt Baltimore?’ ‘You may.’ ‘These’, wrote Smith, ‘were the last words I ever heard that gallant soul utter.’

  16

  Is my wife alive and well?

  End of August

  FAVOURABLE WINDS BLEW Harry Smith – accompanied by a naval counterpart, Captain Wainwright – across the Atlantic to Portsmouth in southern England in a brisk twenty-one days. As he rode up to London on horseback, feeling hugely important as the bearer of a vital despatch, he felt ‘a maddening sensation of doubt, anxiety, hope and dread, all summed up in this – “Does your young wife live? Is she well?”’ He delivered his despatch safely to Downing Street, then rushed off and found an army friend who would know where Juana was staying at the time. ‘Is my wife alive and well?’ he asked. ‘Harry, in every respect as you would wish. I was with her yesterday,’ the friend replied. Smith burst into tears. ‘O thank almighty God,’ he gasped. He asked her address and was there within minutes. As his coach drove along, there was a yell. His wife had recognised the hand he pressed to the coach window as he peered through trying to read the street numbers. ‘Oh Dios, la mano de mi Enrique!’ she exclaimed. ‘Never shall I forget that shriek,’ he wrote later, ‘never shall I forget the effusion of gratitude to God, as we held each other in an embrace of love few can ever have known, cemented by the peculiarity of our union and the eventful scenes of our lives.’ Their dog, Pug, was ‘in her way as delighted to see me as her more happy mistress’. Juana told him that Pug had often comforted her by moaning pitifully when she was grieving.

  After this joyful reunion Harry Smith went to Downing Street and met Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War, who told him: ‘The intelligence you bring is of such importance, the Prince Regent desires to see you. We will go immediately.’ George III’s son, later George IV, was effectively running the country while his father was incapacitated. As Smith waited to see him, he was a bit nervous. But then he said to himself: ‘I never quailed before the dear Duke of Wellington, with his piercing eye, nor will I now.’ ‘Call him “Sir” and do not turn your back at him,’ advised Bathurst helpfully. ‘In we went to the Prince’s dressing room, full of every sort of article of dress, perfumes, snuff boxes, wigs, every variety of article, I do believe, that London could produce. His Highness rose in the most gracious manner, and welcomed me to his presence saying: “General Ross strongly recommended you to my notice as an officer who can afford me every information … the importance of which is marked by the firing of the Parliament and Tower guns you now hear.”’ Smith ‘could not refrain from smiling within myself’ that ‘all London was in an uproar’ at the news he had brought.

  Smith was ‘thunderstruck’ by the quality of military questions the Prince asked him. He looked at the plan of Washington Smith had brought with him – ‘with the public buildings burnt marked in red. He asked the name of each, and in his heart I fancied I saw he thought it a barbarian act.’ Smith told him he regretted there hadn’t been enough troops to hold Washington: that would have taken three times the number Ross had with him. The questions went on for a while and then the audience ended with the Prince Regent telling Smith he and the country were obliged to him. As Smith backed out of the room as instructed, the Prince told Bathurst, ‘Don’t forget this officer’s promotion.’ Smith was to make himself popular with another eminent family that very evening. Lord Bathurst invited him to dinner, and among the guests were Wellington’s ADC Lord Fitzroy Somerset, who was to lose his arm at the Battle of Waterloo the following year. Smith spoke rapturously about the Duke of Wellington, whom he regarded as ‘something elevated beyond any human being’. ‘I am glad,’ said a man sitting beside him. ‘He is my brother.’

  Harry Smith’s sensational news from America provoked an immediate outburst of national rejoicing. The big guns fired their salutes, church bells rang, hearts everywhere leapt at the prospect of another enemy humiliated and perhaps now hungry for peace. Britain was a country deeply fatigued by the long struggle with France, which now seemed to be concluded – with Napoleon apparently securely contained on the small island of Elba. The thankless and unproductive war with America had so far got nowhere after years of inconclusive clashes in the Niagara peninsula and tit-for-tat sparring at sea. The fighting had yielded no advantage for either side and had damaged trade. Now, suddenly, came the heartening news that Britain had delivered what must surely be a crushing blow to America.

  The newspapers published dramatic ‘stop press’ headlines on 27 September announcing the ‘brilliant’ achievement of British forces in the United States. ‘Washington, the proud seat of that nest of traitors,’ trumpeted The Times the following morning, ‘whose accursed arts involved us in war with our brethren beyond the Atlantic – Washington captured, its dock, its arsenal and all its public buildings destroyed – the heads of the faction beaten, disgraced and flying for their lives.’ The paper reminded its readers that it had been the Americans who’d started the war: its leaders had ‘deluded’ their people ‘into a war with her most natural friend and ally, Great Britain’. The US army, ‘drawn together to protect the seat of government under the eye of Mr Madison and his most notorious accomplices’, had been ‘put to flight’. The Morning Post called America’s defeat ‘an example of pusillanimity hitherto unknown in the long course of ages’. The Americans had ‘yielded an almost bloodless triumph’ to an enemy much smaller in numbers. ‘The deeper their shame, the higher must our exultation soar. But a few months have elapsed since the … downfall of the European tyrant. A similar blow has now wounded the power of his transatlantic imitator.’

  British opinion, however, was divided over the burning of Washington. The doubts Harry Smith himself had felt in the White House and which he detected in the Prince Regent were soon reflected in the press and parliament. The London Statesman said, ‘Willingly would we throw a veil of oblivion over our transactions at Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America.’ The Liverpool Mercury said that actions like the burning of Washington only heightened the violence of the conflict, and ‘a war of this kind will, even with success, reflect very little glorious on the victors’. The Annual
Register condemned such action as a return to ‘the times of barbarism … the extent of devastation practised by the victors brought a heavy censure upon the British character, not only in America, but on the continent of Europe’. In Paris the Duke of Wellington, no great enthusiast himself for Britain’s war in America, felt he had to ‘silence’ his volatile French lady friend, Madame de Staël, when she launched into a tirade against the burning of Washington. A leading critic of government in the House of Commons, Samuel Whitbread, deplored an action ‘so detested and abhorred by all who respected the character of this country and the civil rights of the world’. Whitbread said Britain had done ‘what the Goths refused to do at Rome’. The invaders of the Holy City had been persuaded that ‘to preserve works of elevated art was an act of wisdom but that to destroy them was to erect a monument to the folly of the destroyer … After sullying the British name,’ declaimed Whitbread, what had we gained?

  There were no such doubts in the reactions of British government ministers. If any of the more liberal of them shivered privately at the torching of the shrines of US democracy, they showed not a sign of it publicly. Quite the reverse. ‘Nothing could have been more complete and brilliant than the success of the combined operations on the Potomac and Patuxent,’ the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, wrote to Cochrane. ‘The capture of Washington cannot fail to make a lasting impression upon the American people and I trust its first effect will be to induce them to withdraw their confidence from a government who have wantonly led them on this unnatural war…’ Lord Bathurst went further. He praised Ross for the discipline he and his troops had shown in Washington. ‘It was prudent as well as merciful to show … such forbearance.’ But he went on to encourage him to pull no punches in inflicting more pain on the Americans. He urged Ross, if he now went on to attack Baltimore, to ‘make its inhabitants feel a little more the effects of your visit than what has been experienced at Washington…’ Bathurst, like Liverpool, had his eye on the paramount imperative of British policy. This expensive and pointless war should be brought to an end as quickly as possible. They now looked to their commanders in America to deliver a crippling blow to Madison’s administration. Only then would the Americans be persuaded to sign up to peace in the negotiations which were under way in the town of Ghent in the Netherlands. Madison had already told his negotiators they could quietly drop their demands for Britain to stop impressing sailors. The end of the Napoleonic Wars had removed Britain’s need for extra naval manpower. But the news of the success at Washington encouraged the British to stick to their demand that any territory seized by either side in the war should be retained. That would give Britain half of the land area of Maine. And a tough line should persuade America to renounce its designs on Canada and respect the rights of North American Indians who relied on British protection.