The Burning of the White House

by Jane Hampton Cook

  Madison decided to use the timing of Congress’s adjournment between March and May to his advantage. Why wait to send a letter of acceptance to Emperor Alexander when he could send members of a delegation instead? What better way to prove his sincerity for achieving peace? Hence, Madison took a political risk to negotiate peace.

  He explained his decision this way to Congress: “Three of our eminent citizens were accordingly commissioned, with the requisite powers to conclude a Treaty of Peace with persons clothed with like powers on the part of Great Britain.”

  He had chosen Albert Gallatin, his Treasury secretary, and U.S. Senator James Bayard of Delaware, to join Adams in Russia. Adams’s peace delegate nomination was obvious. Since 1809, he had developed relationships with Russian government officials and secured promises from them to trade with U.S. merchants. His success was a key factor in Alexander’s decision to favor the United States by offering to mediate the peace treaty.

  In choosing Bayard, Madison flattered the Senate by trusting one of their own for this important task. Bayard’s selection also gave Madison a chance to prove that his intentions were bipartisan. Bayard was a Federalist, albeit a moderate one, who opposed declaring the war but supported funding it.

  Then there was Gallatin. Oh, Albert Gallatin. How Madison respected and treasured his friend and cabinet member. A naturalized U.S. citizen who came from Switzerland, Gallatin understood Europeans better than most members of the U.S. government. He’d also been very loyal to both Presidents Jefferson and Madison as leader of the Treasury. The past few years had tried and tested the nation’s finances in ways that neither Gallatin nor Madison could have imagined. The need to fund the war had led Gallatin to pressure Congress to raise taxes, authorize millions in loans, and enact other unpopular measures. Senators and U.S. representatives who opposed the war had prevented Congress from adequately funding the war. Gallatin’s popularity with them was especially low.

  Madison believed that Gallatin deserved this gallant opportunity. Sending his Treasury secretary abroad would send a strong signal that America was serious about peace. Hence, Gallatin, Bayard, a few members of their families, and other assistants, including Madison’s stepson, left in April 1813 to ensure a summer arrival in St. Petersburg.

  “[A]s further proof of the disposition on the part of the United States to meet their adversary in honorable experiments for terminating the war, it was determined to avoid intermediate delays,” the president explained of their departure before receiving confirmation by Congress. They needed to make the eighty-day journey before the sailing season in Russia ended.

  Now he needed the U.S. Senate to trust his reasoning and motives for selecting these peace negotiators and sending them overseas without first receiving Senate consent. As the man who defended the Constitution clause by clause in debates at the convention that created that document in 1787, Madison knew better than anyone the power of the president to nominate diplomats and the duty of the Senate to vote to confirm them. The Senate wanted an end to the war, and Madison knew it.

  “The issue of this friendly interposition of the Russian Emperor, and this pacific manifestation on the part of the United States, time only can decide,” he concluded his letter.

  Thus, the president did what he often did. He relied on the roles of government as defined by the law while also appealing to common sense. Politics, however, often defies even the most practical decisions.

  That day, while Madison wrote Congress in hopes for peace, Jared Sparks became an eyewitness to the destruction of Havre de Grace. An ordinary citizen, Sparks held extraordinary observation skills. He later reported that the Royal Marines entered a house and plundered “it of such articles as could be of any service to them.” They used their hatchets to open locked drawers and then slipped the booty into their knapsacks. When their looting was complete, they torched the home.

  “This was not a work of much time, and as soon as it was accomplished, they set fire to the house, and entered another for the same purposes.” The marines repeated their ritual. Again. And again.

  Knowing his men were carrying out his orders, Cockburn decided to join them. He landed on Havre de Grace’s shore easily, as if he owned the town. In that moment, he did. As he’d written to Admiral Warren three days before the attack, “Should resistance be made, I shall consider [what I take] to be prizes of war.”

  Resistance or not, at some point he saw his prize: a fine carriage. What a beauty it was. Should he take it? This vehicle belonged to a local ferry owner. Word was that another ferry owner along the river had sunk some of his boats to make the water too shallow for British ships to navigate. The decision had made the low water even more difficult to traverse. Realizing that his seventy-four-gun ships were too large, Cockburn was forced to transfer some of his men to smaller vessels to reach Havre de Grace. He “found that the shallowness of the water would only admit of its being approached by [smaller] boats.”

  Cockburn liked the carriage, which newspapers reported cost $1,000. He gave the order to seize it. His men complied, taking the carriage to a launch boat and transporting it to his flagship. By doing so he sent a retaliation message to ferryboat owners throughout the Chesapeake.

  Not long after he landed, the admiral encountered “two or three ladies who had courageously remained in their houses, during the whole commotion,” as Sparks chronicled. They implored him to save their houses. These women “endeavored by all the powers of female eloquence to dissuade him from his rash purposes.”

  The admiral was not immune to the sweetness of females. He was married to his cousin Mary and was the father of two children, including a daughter. Yet, he was unrelenting. Orders were orders. Why should he change them?

  The ladies were concerned about an elderly woman’s home, which was already damaged. Would he really stoop to such an atrocity by burning it completely? Though they didn’t dare tell him, the older woman was the mother of John Rodgers, who commanded the USS President. Under Rodgers’ leadership, the forty-four-gun President had captured nine British vessels in 1812. Fortunately Cockburn was unaware that Rodgers’s mother’s house was the source of their pleading.

  “But when they [the ladies] represented to him the misery he was causing, and pointed to the smoking ruins under which was buried all that could keep their proprietors from want and wretchedness, he relented and countermanded his original orders,” Sparks noted.

  Though the Rodgers house was partially damaged, it wasn’t completely destroyed. Cockburn then ordered all of the burning to stop. By this time forty of the sixty houses in Havre de Grace were ablaze. Those not on fire were “perforated with balls or defaced by the explosion of shells.” Debris, such as mattress feathers and broken glassware, filled the streets. Following the example of Cockburn’s capture of the carriage, officers sent fine tables and other quality items back to their cabins as mementos.

  The Royal Marines weren’t entirely malicious that day. After pleading by John O’Neil’s daughter, Matilda, they released the spirited militia captain who’d stayed at the battery when others fled early that morning. Cockburn was also so impressed with Matilda’s courage that he gave her a small turtle shell box to remember him. She didn’t need a token to remember someone as unforgettable as Cockburn.

  The British also spared the structure of St. John’s Episcopal Church—how seemingly kind of them. The inside was another matter. They destroyed every window and pew, including the pulpit.

  Cockburn felt justified in burning and destroying Havre de Grace. He wanted “to cause the proprietors to understand and feel what they were liable to bring upon themselves by building batteries and acting towards us with so much useless rancor.”

  Such illogical justifications were the pirate-like norm for this rear admiral. Most men of honor respected those who acted in self-defense; Cockburn punished people for it.

  He likely ended the burning and released O’Neil not as a result of the pleas of women but because better treasure awaited
him nearby. Someone gave him news of an even more enticing prize: an ironworks foundry.

  Hence, after four hours, Cockburn and his men left Havre de Grace. “I embarked in the boats,” he wrote. They traveled eight miles to Principio Creek in Cecil County. The Principio Foundry was one of only three in the United States that used the advanced technology of machines to bore cannon from solid metal castings. The foundry, one of the nation’s largest, was worth $20,000.

  “The most valuable works of the kind in America, the destruction of it therefore at this moment will I trust prove of much national importance,” Cockburn bragged.

  Personally leading this expedition, he spent the rest of the day there. His men destroyed fifty-one large-caliber guns and 130 small arms. Delighted at his success, Cockburn further boasted about accomplishing so much with so little: “After being 22 hours and constant exertion without nourishment of any kind.”

  For the British, the cost was very low: “I have much pleasure in being able to add that excepting Lt. Westphal’s [hand] wound we have not suffered any casualty whatever.”

  In contrast, the people of Havre de Grace had suffered great losses of life, dignity, and property.

  “But the most distressing part of the scene, was at the close of the day, when those, who had fled in the morning, returned to witness the desolation of their homes, and the ruin of all their possessions,” Jared Sparks reflected.

  Those whose houses were burned now owned only the clothes on their backs. “They returned wretched and disconsolate, and seemed overwhelmed with the thoughts of the misery and want which awaited them,” Sparks continued. Neighbors who had something left offered clothes and other necessities to those who now had nothing at all.

  The people of Havre de Grace didn’t understand why the war had come to their shore. Sparks described their sense of injustice: “No reasons of a public nature could have induced it. No public property was deposited there, nor were any of its inhabitants engaged in aiding the prosecution of the war.” He couldn’t “assign any cause other than the caprice of its projector, for this violent attack on a defenseless and unoffending village.”

  Though drunk with power and feasting on adrenaline, Cockburn was not satisfied when he returned to the thirty-six-gun HMS Maidstone after his near-twenty-four-hour rampage. He never was. Only one thing could quench his war-thirsty spirit: defeating the Americans. More than anything, he seemed to want revenge, glory, and promotions. He sought revenge for British deserters who had abandoned his ship in New York a decade before and also for his insane king’s embarrassing loss of the American colonies and their commerce a generation earlier.

  Cockburn wanted glory for England and the crown. Perhaps he also had his eye on a promotion. Admiral of the fleet was a nice proposition. What better way to accomplish all of these things than to follow orders and invade other towns along the Chesapeake? If successful, he just might get a crack at the best prize of all: the destruction of Washington City. Now that would put him on glory’s fast track with the admiralty in England.

  To do this Cockburn needed something that he didn’t have—a superabundant force. His hundreds of marines were hardly the thousands he needed to seize Norfolk, the town harboring a valuable U.S. military ship, much less this degenerate nation’s capital city set in an unprotected wilderness.

  Though the admiral had his eye on Washington and the president, he was also intrigued by the president’s sociable, buxom wife: Dolley Madison. So was everyone else.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hello, Dolley

  To Dolley Madison, Cockburn was more than just a pirate. He was also a savage.

  “We cannot be surprised at a breach of promise in our enemies, when we think of their savage style of warfare at Havre de Grace and other places,” Dolley wrote in a letter on May 6, 1813, three days after the burning.

  The news had come by stagecoach to the Madison-leaning Washington City newspaper the National Intelligencer. Bombarding a U.S. military ship in war was expected, but burning a sleepy town? That was barbaric. Inflicting suffering on innocents, especially women and children? Why, that was nothing less than terrorism.

  As she’d done many times before, Mrs. Madison wrote that day to Phoebe Morris, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of her dear childhood friend Anthony Morris. Dolley had first met Anthony in Philadelphia, where her family, the Paynes, had moved in 1783, when she was fifteen.

  Dolley was the oldest of eight Payne children—four boys and four girls. Though Dolley carried an Irish lineage on her mother’s side, Anthony reflected that “her complexion seemed from Scotland, and her soft blue eyes from Saxony.” With a “stately step and the sweet engaging smile,” teen Dolley had brought an air of freshness to Anthony and his friends: “She came upon our comparatively cold hearts in Philadelphia, suddenly and unexpectedly with all the delightful influences of a summer sun . . . with all the warm feelings, and glowing fancies of her native state.”

  Dolley had spent most of her childhood in Hanover County, Virginia, on a plantation north of Richmond. Her parents were Quakers, Christians known as the Society of Friends. Because they believed that everyone held the potential to carry God’s grace in their hearts, the Friends opposed war and dividing people by class or race. With such an egalitarian view, Quakers were generally hospitable people, known for opening their homes to anyone who called. These tenets of equality eventually led many Quakers, including Dolley’s parents, to oppose slavery.

  But Virginia law prohibited the freeing or manumission of slaves. When lawmakers changed this statute in 1782, the Paynes and other Quakers did just that: they freed their slaves in Virginia, abandoned a rural life, and moved to an urban locale to start over. As the nation’s second-largest city and the home to many Quakers, Philadelphia was a logical choice.

  When it came to marriage, however, many in the Society of Friends shunned outsiders, even Christians who were not Quakers. Soon after Dolley married Congressman James Madison in 1794, her Philadelphia Friends excommunicated her. Not only was he not a Quaker, but he was also seventeen years older than she. Worse, he was a plantation slave owner.

  Many Quakers were also upset that she’d not waited a full year to marry after the death of her first husband, John Todd, a Quaker who died along with 10 percent of Philadelphians in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. What they didn’t realize was that Dolley’s first marriage was more out of duty to her father than deep love for Todd. The increasingly impoverished Mr. Payne had insisted that she marry Mr. Todd to ease his pocketbook so he could feed her younger siblings. Agreeing dutifully, Dolley married Todd and had two children with him. Their youngest, an infant, also died in the yellow fever epidemic. By that time, her father also had died, likely of alcoholism. The death of her husband and father left Dolley vulnerable.

  As a young widow with a two-year-old son, named Payne, she needed the financial security that marrying Congressman Madison would give her. But she also knew he was highly attracted to her. Theirs wouldn’t be a match of duty from his point of view.

  “He thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his tongue, at night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep a calling on you to relieve his flame for he burns to such an excess that he shortly will be consumed,” Dolley’s aunt had conveyed to her of Madison’s affection.

  Madison was so taken with her that he worried another man would steal her away. “He hopes that your heart will be callous to every other swain but himself,” Dolley’s aunt continued. His worry was understandable. As Anthony had observed, “She could raise the mercury in the thermometers of hearts to fever heat.”

  Madison needn’t have fretted. While she may not have been madly in love with him at the time, she clearly respected and held some affection for him. “I give my hand to the man who of all others I most admire,” Dolley wrote to a girlfriend on her wedding day to Madison. “In this union I have everything that is soothing and grateful in prospect and my little Payne will have a generous and tender protector.” />
  Yet, she also closed that letter with her old name, Dolley Payne Todd, followed by a mysterious postscript. Perhaps showing her wedding-day jitters, she added, “Dolley Madison, Alas! Alas!”

  Though many Quakers abandoned the new Mrs. Madison, Anthony Morris continued to be her Quaker friend. Their ties were strengthened years later after Anthony’s wife died. Taking his teenage daughter Phoebe under her eagle-like wings, Dolley had embraced her with the affection of a mother tending her nest. In the winter of 1811, Phoebe lived in the President’s House, where Dolley taught her etiquette and introduced her to society. An extrovert who felt energized around people and at parties, Mrs. Madison helped many girls transition from gullible teens into polished young women.

  By May 6, 1813, much weighed on Dolley’s mind. Besides Havre de Grace, she pored her heart out to Phoebe about the great change in her life. She had a personal stake in her husband’s acceptance of Emperor Alexander’s mediation offer. Her now-grown son Payne had gone to Russia as a secretary for Mr. Gallatin. The decision made her anxious. “I have been sad at the departure of my child,” she confessed.

  She was also deeply sad for Phoebe and Anthony, who had been seeking a diplomatic appointment to Bermuda. British Admiral Warren had refused to grant permission for Anthony to cross the English blockade and enter Bermuda. By doing so Warren had defied the usage of nations for accepting passages for diplomatic voyages.

  Because Bermuda was fast becoming a staging post for the Royal Navy, Warren didn’t want Anthony or other Americans to discover key intelligence, such as the number of British marines and soldiers who were flocking there after fighting Napoleon in Europe.