The Burning of the White House

by Jane Hampton Cook

  Not long after 4:00 a.m. on May 3, 1813, British Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn gleefully watched his fifteen small boats launch his squadron’s latest attack. Before him was the fishing nook of Havre de Grace, Maryland, a stage stop on the road between Baltimore and Philadelphia. Cockburn’s target was a small battery of cannon on shore. His order was firm and succinct: Fire!

  As the admiral later reported to his superior officer, “A warm fire was opened on the place at daylight from our launches and rocket boat, which was smartly returned from the battery for a short time.”

  His excitement accelerated. The British launch boats didn’t let up. “Their fire rather increasing than decreasing” while the American fire “out from the battery soon began to slacken.”

  Cockburn, a forty-one-year-old Scot who had started living aboard Royal Navy ships at age nine, smiled with a buccaneer’s glee as his men fired yet another round at the battery. Named Congreve after the English colonel who invented them, these rockets left a red glare as they soared toward the battery. William Congreve was a British engineer who had created these weapons based on ones fighters in India had hurled at British forces in a recent war. In Congreve’s version, the warhead was a cone-shaped cylinder attached to four-foot wooden poles. By changing the elevation of their A-shaped launching frames, Royal Marines could adjust the distance of the Congreve rockets, which could soar as far as two miles.

  As Cockburn attacked Havre de Grace that morning, one rocket soon did something that none of the others had done so far. The weapon struck and killed a local militiaman, who was returning fire from shore. Scared by their friend’s death, the rest of militia fled to the woods. Only the brave Irish American John O’Neil stood his ground and stayed with the battery.

  Cockburn next ordered fifteen launch boats carrying 150 marines to land on shore to burn the entire town. Why commit such an atrocity? The residents weren’t employed by the federal government. Nor were they housing a U.S. warship. Their crime, in Cockburn’s view, was taking precautions to defend themselves and signal that his marines were coming. After learning that Cockburn had burned some boats in nearby Frenchtown, they had placed cannons—two six-pounders and one nine-pounder—on Havre de Grace’s banks.

  Their efforts had backfired. Instead of repelling the British, their warning shots had attracted them. As Cockburn reported: “I observed guns fired and American colors hoisted at a battery lately erected at Havre de Grace at the entrance of the Susquehanna River.”

  The sight of these new defensive weapons had given the rear admiral the justification he’d been looking for to invade and burn the town. “This of course immediately gave to the place an importance, which I had not before attached to it, and I therefore determined on attacking it.”

  After all, the more cannon, gunpowder, tobacco, flour, and livestock Cockburn could capture, the better he could bolster and feed his forces. He also had his eye on the bigger picture. With any luck, he could dampen the resolve of average Americans to fight him in the future.

  Cockburn didn’t know it, but Havre de Grace was one of the most patriotic places in America. Incorporated as a city in 1785, this Maryland locale sat at the top of the Chesapeake Bay and intersected with the Susquehanna River. Proud of the American Revolution and its heroes, the town’s founders gave their streets patriotic names, such as Congress and Union Avenues along with Washington, Adams, and Franklin Streets.

  Though its boulevards were distinctly American, the city’s name was decidedly and purposefully French. When the Marquis de Lafayette, a Revolutionary War hero and French general, sailed down the river and saw this genteel spot, he called out exuberantly: “C’est Le Havre,” or “This is the Havre.” The spot reminded him of the beloved French port city Le Havre de Grace, which means “harbor of grace.” Flattered by the marquis’s compliment, the townspeople named a street for Lafayette and their fishing town for their French twin.

  By 1789 this herring hamlet was so well regarded, patriotic, and genteel that congressmen from Pennsylvania and Maryland initially thought it would be an ideal location for the nation’s new capital. More than twenty cities and locales vied for the honor, which, of course, was ultimately given to the hundred-square-mile district that became Washington City.

  Despite failing to become the nation’s capital city, Havre de Grace grew in population. By the time Cockburn launched his rockets against it in 1813, this fishing hamlet was part of Harford County, whose population had topped two thousand in the 1810 U.S. Census.

  Cockburn had arrived for his American mission less than three months earlier. With Britain’s war against the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte winding down in Europe, the Admiralty in London had ordered him to relinquish his command in Spain and travel to British-controlled Bermuda. From there he had sailed to Lynnhaven Bay, the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, to await the arrival of his commanding officer, Admiral Sir John B. Warren, and receive instructions. While there he had accomplished his first raid: pillaging the pantry of the Cape Henry lighthouse, not far from where the Jamestown settlers had first landed in America in 1607. Warren soon joined Cockburn and shared a top secret letter from Henry the third Earl Bathurst, the British secretary of state for war and the colonies.

  “It having been judged expedient to effect a diversion on the coast of the United States of America,” Bathurst had written, noting the plans of the U.S. military to “wrest from His Majesty” Upper and Lower Canada in the 1813 military campaign. British naval forces were to attack towns and frighten vulnerable residents along the Chesapeake Bay.

  Raiding should be easy, the British top brass had reasoned. With such a weak militia system and thousands of regular U.S. troops deployed to Canada, the U.S. government could not possibly protect every nook and cranny on its jagged eastern shore. If successful, these raids would convince American politicians to withdraw U.S. troops from Canada and defend their homeland instead.

  Warren had ordered Cockburn to enforce a British blockade of the Chesapeake. By the end of April 1813, Cockburn had swept up the bay and burned five schooners in Frenchtown. After one of his men deserted, he rightfully feared that the deserter would tell the people of Havre de Grace of his plans.

  Cockburn had long despised deserters. He believed in a practice called impressment, in which British ship captains possessed the right to search U.S. merchant ships and seize anyone they suspected of being a deserter, proof or not, U.S. citizenship papers or not.

  Desertion and mutiny frequently threatened the size of Cockburn’s and other British commanders’ forces—and thus their ability to sail—and the British response to it had given Congress a moral reason to declare war against England on June 18, 1812. More than any other qualm with Britain, American government leaders had long despised their use of impressment. The U.S. State Department later estimated that 5,000 men—both deserters and bona fide U.S. citizens—had been impressed.

  Some Americans, such as John Quincy Adams, the top U.S. diplomat to Russia at the time, had concluded that the number was higher. On his voyage to Russia in 1809, Adams had witnessed a British captain attempt to impress a legitimate American sailor. He believed impressment was as immoral and unjust as the slave trade. Realizing that hundreds of cases had been unreported, he’d calculated the number of impressments to be much higher, at 9,000. To many Americans, the British government had used desertion as an excuse to take or impress legitimate U.S. citizens and force them to fight for England and against their own nation. No matter that Parliament needed every man it could find to fight France’s Napoleon, England was denying a man’s right to his citizenship or to change it, which was an insult to U.S. sovereignty and independence.

  This conflict between desertions and impressment had affected the timing of Cockburn’s decision to attack Havre de Grace. Knowing that one of his men had escaped near the town, Cockburn had smartly delayed his invasion plans in case the deserter had warned the town. The evidence from his spyglass suggested that the rascal had indeed betra
yed him.

  For two days he watched from a distance as 250 Maryland militia vigilantly patrolled the shore. They had kept their arms ready night and day. Then by May 2 they had fled, perhaps feeling exhausted or deceived by the deserter. They went home to quietly rest that night. Taking advantage of their absence, Cockburn ordered his men to fire upon their battery before dawn on May 3. Now it was time to invade.

  Admiral Cockburn delighted as his marines landed on shore and marched through town with as much confidence and ease as if they were local residents. Cockburn’s captain, Lieutenant Westphal, “very judiciously directed the landing of the marines on the left, which movement added to the hot fire they were under, induced the Americans to commence withdrawing from the battery to take shelter in the town.”

  As this pirate-like admiral observed, some Americans hid behind trees or inside houses and aimed their muskets at his invading marines. “They commenced a teasing and irritating fire from behind their houses, walls, trees etcetera, from which I am sorry to say my gallant first lieutenant received a shot through his hand whilst leading the pursuing party,” Cockburn wrote.

  Despite his injury, Lieutenant Westphal continued the pursuit “with which he soon succeeded in dislodging the whole of the enemy from their lurking places and driving them for shelter to the neighboring woods.”

  Cockburn hated this type of dastardly guerilla warfare. He complained that the Americans took “every opportunity of firing with their rifles from behind trees or haystacks, or from the windows of their houses upon our boats . . . or whenever they can get a mischievous shot at any of our people without being seen or exposed to personal risk in return.”

  His lieutenant “had the satisfaction to overtake and with his remaining hand to make prisoner and bring in a captain [John O’Neil] of their militia. We also took an ensign and some other individuals.”

  Cockburn’s marines then divided into groups of thirty to forty and went from house to house, prompting more Havre de Grace residents to flee to the woods. From his ship the admiral couldn’t see what happened when his men entered the houses, but he could see the results after they left: smoke and flames.

  As he watched the increasing inferno, Cockburn may have sneered: Wonder what little Jemmy thinks of his war now? He had frequently mocked James Madison, who was a mere five feet, four inches tall. Yet, he really didn’t understand the genius of America’s fourth president. Though Madison was short in stature, he possessed a giant intellect. He had one of the brightest minds in the United States.

  Unknown to Cockburn that day, President James Madison was about to make a choice that he hoped would change the trajectory of the war and send Cockburn home—permanently.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mighty Little Madison

  President James Madison had no idea that Havre de Grace was in flames that day. The nation’s capital city was sixty-eight miles from the inferno. In those days before the telegraph and telephone, news traveled slowly.

  Hence, while Cockburn took pleasure in attacking American civilians after dawn, the president sat in the President’s House in Washington City and prepared to send the U.S. Senate a request—perhaps the best opportunity for peace since the war began. On Madison’s mind that May morning was a hopeful mediation proposal to end America’s war with England.

  “The high character of the Emperor Alexander,” began the president’s letter to the U.S. Senate. Alexander was the youthful, dashing emperor of Russia, the czar who competed only with Napoleon, France’s emperor, for power in Europe.

  The chief architect of the U.S. Constitution, Madison was the key political power player in America. He’d recently been contemplating an opportunity for triangulation in his foreign policy.

  Emperor Alexander had proposed to mediate a peace treaty between Great Britain and the United States. Russia would act as a neutral party, a friend to both countries, in an effort to end the war. Would the honorable President Madison accept?

  More than anything, Madison wanted to say yes. How he longed for a true solution to America’s problems with England. With the war going poorly along the Canadian border—including the embarrassing surrender of Fort Detroit in the Michigan Territory in August 1812—the more quickly he could achieve peace with fair trade and respect for the citizenship of U.S. sailors, the better.

  But past diplomatic failures had led to the current war in the first place.

  Each direct negotiation with the British before the War of 1812 had failed. First, in 1809, not long after assuming office, President Madison had tried to negotiate with David Erskine, the top British envoy to the United States. They soon came to an agreement for resuming trade, making reparations for an attack on a U.S. ship in 1807, and repealing Britain’s Orders in Council, which were policies by the British government that oppressed U.S. trade to gain the advantage in England’s war against France.

  The Orders in Council required U.S. ship merchants to receive British licenses to trade with other European countries and dock in British ports before selling their cargo throughout Europe. These orders, along with the practice of impressment, were the greatest sources of strife between the United States and Great Britain. Complicating these disagreements were Napoleon’s reciprocal orders that required neutral ships, including American vessels, to first obtain French licenses and visit French ports before selling their goods in Europe.

  Unable to be in two places at once, U.S. merchant ships couldn’t first visit both France and England. To make matters worse, many British sea captains raised U.S. flags and forged paperwork to sneak their cargo into French-controlled ports. At the same time, both French and English sea captains confiscated American ships, sailors, and their cargo. So, while impressment was the moral impetus for the war, England’s and France’s anti-American trade policies served as the economic and political catalysts.

  How happy Madison had been to seal that agreement with English envoy Erskine in 1809. The president had been so confident of success that he had sanctioned U.S. trade with Britain once again. Hundreds of American sailors and dozens of ships had sailed exuberantly for Europe that summer with high hopes of earning money for their cotton, sugar, indigo, coffee, and other goods without British interference.

  The problem, however, was Erskine’s bosses. Saying he had exceeded his instructions, the British government disavowed Erskine’s agreement shortly after the paperwork arrived in England. This put all of the American ships that had just set sail at increased risk for capture and confiscation by British sea captains. With no other viable options, Madison reinstated trade restrictions against England.

  The failure of the Erskine agreement infuriated the pro-British Federalist Party in America, especially in New England. A Southern Republican—whose party later became the Democratic Party—Madison was aware of their opposition.

  “We regard Erskine’s arrangement as little, if any, better than an act of swindling,” Robert Troup, a Federalist in New York, complained in a letter to a U.S. senator.

  Troup was a Revolutionary War veteran who represented an Englishman’s real estate interests in New York. His Federalist sentiments were typical. Some New England foes accused Madison of insulting the prince regent of England—the future King George IV—who ruled instead of his living but insane father, King George III.

  “Hence the adjustment with Erskine was accompanied with expressions so offensive towards the king as would ensure its rejection,” complained Timothy Pickering, a former secretary of state, Federalist, and U.S. senator from Massachusetts.

  The British government then sent Francis Jackson, Erskine’s successor, to Washington City. Jackson soon proved as haughty as he was hostile. Negotiations with him and another British envoy failed, as did U.S. diplomats negotiating in London. The United States and England were deadlocked.

  With Madison’s support, a majority of Congress declared war against England on June 18, 1812.

  Because Madison was informally considered to be the father of the Constitution
and the man who most influenced its three-branch blueprint, who would dare question the constitutionality of his decisions as he led America’s second war with England? Yet, despite his high character and past contributions, his enemies were growing stronger with each passing political tide.

  Madison likely sat in his office on the second floor of the President’s House to write his May 3, 1813, letter to the U.S. Senate. Thomas Jefferson, Madison’s immediate predecessor and the nation’s third president, had used this space, which came to be known as the Green Room, as a dining room to entertain. But because the floor could hold only fourteen seated guests, Madison converted it into his office.

  In May 1813, Madison’s secretary, Edward Coles, was ill and recovering in Philadelphia. Without a secretary, Madison wrote and made copies in his own hand. Emperor Alexander’s offer gave him hope. Maybe the tensions with England were too great and the U.S. government needed an arbitrator. Perhaps a fresh approach, such as mediation by a third party, would work.

  “The high character of the Emperor Alexander being a satisfactory pledge for the sincerity and impartiality of his offer, it was immediately accepted,” Madison wrote of his decision.

  Though he’d learned of the Russian offer in late February 1813, politics had prevented him from officially notifying the Twelfth Congress at the time. The Senate and House had adjourned a few days later, right before Madison’s second inauguration on March 4, 1813. He also didn’t have time to write the emperor a letter of acceptance and receive a reply before the new Thirteenth Congress began a special summer session at the end of May to resolve war issues.

  A letter could only travel as quickly as the ship delivering it. As Madison had learned, correspondence with his diplomat John Quincy Adams in Russia took an average of eight weeks in one direction between May and September. Depending on the severity of the frozen water imprisoning Russia’s capital in winter, ship travel took six to eight months the rest of the year. Passage also depended on whether U.S. ships could make a journey without being captured or detained by English or French ships or their allies.