The issue became a fear that larger states would intrigue with a foreign power to overthrow the government. Hence, the U.S. Senate needed equal representation to prevent this from happening and provide a check on the House of Representatives.
Indignant at the suggestion that a state would intrigue with a foreign power, Rufus King rose in defense and refuted Bedford.
“I am concerned for what fell from the gentleman from Delaware—‘Take a foreign power by the hand’! I am sorry he mentioned it, and I hope he is able to excuse it to himself on the score of passion.”
King then made a pledge.
“Whatever may be my distress, I will never court a foreign power to assist in relieving myself from it.”
The vote that followed on the composition of the Senate was deadlocked at five to five, with the representatives voting in blocks by states. The issue went to a committee, which came up with the Grand or Great Compromise. The House of Representatives would be based on population and each state would have two representatives in the U.S. Senate. After a weeklong intensive debate, the smaller states won in a five-to-four vote, with the representatives of Massachusetts divided.
The representatives of smaller states who had been tepid or reluctant to create a new Constitution now had vested stake in it. Though Madison opposed the Great Compromise and equal representation in the Senate, which he considered unjust, it gave him what he ultimately wanted—a new Constitution based on a stronger national government held accountable by checks and balances among the branches.
Now, here he was in 1813 battling the U.S. Senate over his nominees. He couldn’t depend on Virginia’s having more votes than New York or Delaware to support his commissioners.
Madison also couldn’t depend on the very thing that had so often helped him: one-on-one conversations. His illness had prevented Dolley from entertaining, robbing him of the chance to speak and explain himself to members of the Senate in relaxed conversations over wine and ice cream. He had lost his best method for influencing the Senate. He had also lost his best technique for finding out just how cozy men like Rufus King were with Federal secessionists or others who would scheme against him and rejoin England or become their own new nation. Would he recover in time to save his nominees?
CHAPTER NINE
Washed Up at Craney
No one knows what Madison thought about as he fought the fever in June 1813. Before his illness, the gravity of his nation’s situation had weighed heavily upon him.
Perhaps he thought about the issues and stakes of the war. In his heart, he fervently believed that he had exhausted all diplomatic attempts to solve America’s problems with Great Britain. “On the issue of the war are staked our national sovereignty on the high seas,” he had told the American people in his second inaugural address in March.
Depriving U.S. sailors and ship owners of the ability to sell their cargo in foreign ports was unjust. What angered Madison more than stealing livelihoods from sailors was depriving them of their liberty. Forcing them to serve in the Royal Army and Navy was appalling, as the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair and dozens of other instances had demonstrated.
“They have retained as prisoners of war citizens of the United States not liable to be so considered under the usages of war,” he had said. While England naturalized thousands of citizens each year from other countries, it refused to allow America to do the same thing.
Worse, the British were “compelling [naturalized U.S. citizens] to fight its battles against their native country.”
As he tried to recover from his illness that summer, perhaps he thought about his recent special message to Congress on May 25, 1813, where he called for the end of impressment by the British. If he died now, it would be the last major message he would give them.
“The British cabinet also must be sensible that, with respect to the important question of impressment, on which the war so essentially turns, a search for or seizure of British persons or property on board neutral vessels on the high seas is not a belligerent right derived from the law of nations,” he had declared.
The British government had recently issued an edict saying that it would accept merchant products from some U.S. ports, namely those in New England, but not the rest of the nation.
This also outraged Madison. “And now we find them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force, by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated republic,” he said.
Perhaps he thought about his enemies as his fever raged day in and day out. His internal political opponents had often expressed outrage at criticism that they were un-American because they opposed his war. Robert Troup of New York represented the sentiments of the antiwar Federalists when he wrote: “What is meant when we are told we must be Americans and support our government? What? Are we so blindly devoted to the measures of a government apparently bent on a system of policy that is likely to ruin, not only our commerce, our agriculture, and, I fear, our Constitution and our liberties?”
Madison was also well aware that the British were not the only ones trying to sever the United States by inducing New England to secede and rejoin Old England. The whispers of Federalists had reached his ears on many occasions. But the idea that New England would secede defied logic in his mind.
“I have never allowed myself to believe that the Union was in danger, or that a dissolution of it could be desired, unless by a few individuals, if such there be, in desperate situations or of unbridled passions,” Madison wrote.
The president believed that every part of the nation had a vested interest in keeping the bond of states intact. He concluded that the East would “be the greatest loser, by such an event; and not likely therefore deliberately to rush into it.”
Madison believed that New England needed the South more than it needed England. He saw little basis for commercial advantage if New England rejoined Old England, which had more to gain in an alliance with the South, in his view. “If there be links of common interest between the two countries, they connect the South and not the Northern States with that part of Europe.”
Perhaps he thought about the irony of timing as he fought death. Congress had declared war a year earlier, on June 18, 1812. Unknown to America for weeks, Spencer Perceval, the cold, calculating British prime minister, had been assassinated by a deranged, disgruntled Englishman on May 11, 1812. Perceval had been the primary driver in Parliament behind the abusive trade policies against America.
Had Madison known of his assassination, he might have encouraged Congress to delay voting on war so they could wait and see if the new British prime minister would change England’s policies toward America. Madison had responded: “The sword was scarcely out of the scabbard, before the enemy was apprized of the reasonable terms on which it would be re-sheathed.” Yet, it was too late. The war had begun.
Perhaps he thought about faith as he fought illness that summer of 1813. Maybe he reflected on faith in God, which had been fed by his college mentor and minister, John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps he also thought about his faith in the union of the states, in the patriotic spirit of every American bosom. He may have looked at the hope that individuals would fight for their turf, their homes, and their families. He may have been deathly ill, but he had not lost confidence in the American spirit.
Britain’s intentions in June 1813 were no surprise to those at the Gosport Naval Yard, especially the crew of the Constellation and the local militia. Patriotic Americans they were. These men had been anticipating an attack since the English arrived near their shores in March 1813. Their fears increased in May after Cockburn terrorized many of Maryland’s coastal towns. Unlike burning the houses of private citizens, an attack against Norfolk’s Naval Yard fit the average American’s expectations of warfare.
General Robert B. Taylor was in charge of Norfolk’s defenses. He wrote General Armstrong a letter on June 18: �
�Should the enemy . . . attack Craney Island, it must fall unless we throw the greater part of our forces there.”
Determined to prevent such a catastrophe, Taylor got to work. He ordered his men to erect a seven-gun battery, which included two twenty-four-pound guns, one eighteen-pound gun, and four six-pound guns. He placed another battery across the river. He also created a line of nineteen small gunboats. Taylor told Armstrong that he would try to trick the British by relocating tents from one side of the island to the other to hide their defensive capabilities.
Taylor couldn’t have been more correct about the enemy’s intentions. A newspaper later explained how the battle began.
“About daybreak the enemy were discovered with their barges pulling to shore about two and an half or three miles above the upper point of Craney Island,” the Boston Daily Advertiser reported of the two-prong attack that started on June 22, 1813.
The British deployed a line of barges, including the fifty-foot long Centipede, directly against Craney Island. These vessels suddenly ran aground. They were stuck in the mud; several feet of it, in fact. Jumping out of the boats, the British invaders immediately discovered that the mud was multiple feet deep. They started sinking. Their timing proved all wrong. Because the tide was in, they couldn’t safely wade through the water and mud to reach Craney Island.
About one hundred Americans commanded the U.S. artillery. Accurately aiming their weapons, they sank three of the enemy’s large barges, including the Centipede.
British marines also landed on the mainland northwest of the island. At first they were out of reach of U.S. artillery. But as they armed at Wise Creek, which was opposite of Craney, the island’s batteries also fired on them.
As the newspapers reported: “The batteries were manned with the troops stationed on the island, and a detachment of seamen commanded by the officers of the Constellation, who opened a heavy fire that compelled the enemy to retreat with great loss.”
One U.S. captain proudly wrote that the sailors of the Constellation “fired their 18 pounders more like riflemen than artillerists. I never saw such shooting and seriously believe they saved the island.”
Knowing that they had also captured eighteen enemy fighters, the captain continued his praise. “Our officers, soldiers, seamen, and marines exhibited the utmost coolness and enthusiasm.” The British casualties included three killed, sixteen wounded, and sixty missing, likely from drowning.
The failed invasion left the British humiliated. The timing of the tides was a foolish and avoidable mistake, one certainly known to Admiral Cockburn, who suddenly took satisfaction that Warren had snubbed his strategy and favored Beckwith’s. Now he couldn’t be blamed.
Elijah Mix’s torpedo may have failed earlier that month, but the victory the Americans felt after defending Craney Island was sweet retribution for Havre de Grace and other burned Chesapeake towns. Though a slingshot had yet to take out Cockburn or a cannonball decapitate him, they had defended Craney Island and the Constellation all the same. Surely the British would back off after being washed up. But they didn’t know just how stubborn a pirate-like admiral could be.
Three days after their defeat at Craney Island, Cockburn and the other British officers made a choice. Norfolk and Portsmouth were too well protected to attack now. They needed a more vulnerable spot to gain momentum. From his own experience, Cockburn knew that they should aim for a soft target like Havre de Grace, which was full of private citizens and a disorganized militia. They should avoid a location filled with prepared military, multiple guns, and a warship. What place could that be? They quickly made a plan.
In his long hours of illness, Madison likely thought of Dolley.
True love bears each other’s burdens. Dolley couldn’t bear to see her husband suffer. Likewise James felt sad when Dolley was ill. Years earlier in 1805, Dolley had turned to James for comfort while she was ill in Philadelphia and he was in Washington serving as secretary of state.
“I was so unwell yesterday, my dearest husband, that I omitted writing,” she’d explained.
He responded immediately after reading her words. “I have received my dearest yours begun on the 15th and continued on the 16th. The low spirits which pervade it affect mine.”
Such a tender response revived her from the doldrums, as she conveyed in subsequent correspondence. “The letters of my beloved husband are always a cordial to my heart—particularly the one received yesterday which breathes that affection so precious that I wept over it in joy.”
On another occasion Dolley had written him, “Your charming letter my beloved has revived my spirit and made me feel like another human being—so much does my health, peace, and everything else, depend on your affection and goodness.”
That June of 1813, as he fought fever and felt her wipe wet washcloths on his face or clean his legs and remove his soiled sheets, he knew how much she loved him. More than ever, her love was his balm.
Meanwhile Benjamin Latrobe realized he would not be able to say good-bye to Dolley or the president in person as he left the city for his new life in Pittsburgh.
“It is not probable that I shall ever have the honor again to see you,” Latrobe wrote to her. Melancholy mastered his mind, preventing him from seeing the fruits of his success in Washington, such as the renovation of the President’s House or the completion of the House of Representatives wing at the Capitol.
“For the waste of life, of reputation, and of fortune which my ten years of public service have brought upon me . . . my greatest consolation will always be, that I have not forfeited the personal respect and friendship of the president and yourself.”
Meanwhile, as Madison fought death, the British were ready to turn their redcoats, and Canadian green coats, into pirates once again. The atrocities these buccaneers would soon commit, including violence against women, would surpass their arson against Havre de Grace. Their wake of infamy would horrify Americans from the East Coast all the way to New Orleans.
CHAPTER TEN
Atrocious Hampton
The “unfortunate females of Hampton who could not leave the town were suffered to be abused in the most shameful manner,” Major Stapleton Crutchfield, a U.S. commander, wrote to the governor of Virginia about the British attack on Hampton, Virginia, on June 25, 1813.
Founded in 1610 at the mouth of the James River, Hampton—which means “homestead”—was one of the oldest seaports in the United States. Those who settled Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 identified the spot where three rivers came together: the Elizabeth, Nansemond, and James Rivers. They called the area Hampton Roads after Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton. Henry was a patron of Shakespeare and an important leader of London’s Virginia Company that sponsored early settlements in Virginia. In 1610 the colonists established Hampton as a small town with a church.
Two hundred years later, in 1810, Hampton was part of Elizabeth City County, whose population of 3,600 was nearly three times smaller than Norfolk’s population of 9,190. Because cotton was its dominant crop and manufacture, Hampton was an agrarian hamlet, and thus perfect prey for what the British needed after Craney Island—a quick and easy victory.
Just as Blackbeard and other pirates had easily attacked the area in the 1700s, so Cockburn swaggered into Hampton with little opposition. This time the admiral had more authority. He sent his marines and green-coated Canadians under the leadership of Colonel Beckwith. Outnumbering the Americans, the British approached from the rear and met about 450 local Virginia militia, who soon fled, just as Cockburn predicted. What was next for the admiral? Burning, of course.
Cockburn and Beckwith confiscated a house in town, kicked back, and let the fun unfold under the leadership of their officers. By delegating their authority, they had what they needed most: cover from responsibility. What mischief was made could be blamed on others. Cockburn also allowed Beckwith to issue the official report, which he did.
“The gallantry of Captain Smith, the officers, and men of the two com
panies Canadian Chasseurs who led the attack was highly conspicuous and praiseworthy,” Colonel Beckwith soon praised in a letter to Admiral Warren, adding, “as well steadiness and good conduct of the officers, and men of the hundred second regiment and the Royal Marines.”
Why did he report such admiration? Bravado. After their failure a few days earlier, Beckwith longed to impress Warren with news of their successful conquest. The Baltimore Patriot printed a very different account of what happened at Hampton.
“Our sod must be purified from the pollution of these miscreants, who do not bear the attributes of an honorable enemy, but are more cruel than savages, and more rapacious than pirates,” the editors described of Cockburn’s and Beckwith’s men.
The truth about Hampton was so vile and atrocious that newspapers throughout the U.S. soon revealed the details—though hesitantly because of concerns of propriety.
The National Intelligencer in Washington City was one such newspaper. Like many others, editor Joseph Gales reprinted an investigative reporter’s account, which broke the bounds of social mores of what was acceptable to publish at the time.
“We copy from the [Richmond] Enquirer, the following extracts of a letter to the editor of that paper. We almost shrink from the task of recording such atrocities. But our public duty and the present circumstances of this district require it,” he explained of his decision to print something so shocking.
Didn’t he have an obligation to warn Americans, especially the ladies of East Coast towns, about what might happen to them if the British attacked their city? Yes, he did.
“It may be soon our turn to encounter this band of blood hounds, whose course is marked by fire and sword and brutal violence. Let every man remember the sad fate of Hampton, and prepare to take a signal revenge on the ruthless despoilers of female innocence.”
The Burning of the White House Page 10