He had one major military obstacle, Barney. “But should you have any hopes of an army arriving, that could attack their capital, it would be very necessary that Barney’s flotilla should be pent up the creek.”
At this time, Barney was up a creek. Literally. His fleet was stuck in St. Leonard’s Creek, hemmed in by the British. He’d seen the futility of trying to win by attacking the British. “This kind of warfare is much against us, as they can reach us, when we cannot reach them, and when we pursue them, their light boats fly before us.”
Worse, his provisions would last only twelve days. But when the British ship Narcissus replaced another ship in their blockade, Barney gained an opportunity for learning intelligence.
“Deserters, of whom I have had six from the Narcissus say they [the British] will wait for troops from Bermuda, but little dependence can be placed in such information, at all events they have kept pretty well out of this creek for some days past,” Barney wrote to Jones.
While Cockburn acquired runaway slaves for soldiers, Barney acquired British deserters. Ironically, both ran from tyranny to freedom. British deserters often gave Barney what he most needed: intelligence.
From these departed Englishmen, he had learned that Cockburn’s captains continued to raid towns along the river, which was the very reason Barney had created his flying squadron in the first place. Questions arose. Wasn’t he forcing the British to use valuable resources to blockade him? And yet, wasn’t he also failing his countrymen by not preventing the British raids? He fretted over the likelihood.
Would he ever break through the stalemate and accomplish his mission to be a shield for the Chesapeake? With more men, maybe. While Barney put his hopes in reinforcements for getting him out of the creek, Jones sent him a most sobering letter. He wrote, “The force of the enemy present and accumulating in and near the Patuxent, either for the real or ostensible purpose of destroying or blockading the flotilla under your command, calls for a deliberate view of the motive and object of the enemy.”
Jones doubted that the British truly cared about the flotilla. What if their attention on it was nothing more than a ruse, a distraction from a planned attack? He posed the possibility this way in his letter to Barney: “Such a force will either accomplish his object, if the destruction of the flotilla be in reality the object.”
Jones concluded that Barney’s flotilla wasn’t that important to Cockburn. “Hence I believe he has other and greater designs.”
“A well-organized and large army is at once liberated from any European employment, and ready, together with a superabundant naval force to act immediately against us,” Albert Gallatin had written from his post in London.
He was correct. After the fall of Napoleon, instead of sending many of its troops home to their families, the British government decided to send thousands of them to America.
No sooner had Madison’s cabinet voted against taking impressment off the table as instructions for the peace commissioners than Secretary of State Monroe received this alarming information from Gallatin. Understanding its significance as a game changer, he shared it with Madison.
The news hit the president in the gut. Gallatin’s assessment was quite the opposite of what he’d shared with Jefferson a few weeks earlier. Instead of moving toward a swift peace with America following Napoleon’s demise, the British were bolstering their troops in North America.
Superabundant was the key word, as Gallatin conveyed: “And they will also turn against us as much of their superabundant naval forces as they may think adequate to any object they have in view.”
Madison reviewed the letter. Gallatin’s fears for his country were obvious. “How ill-prepared we are to meet it (it is well known); but, above all, our own divisions and the hostile attitude of the Eastern states give room to apprehend that a continuance of the war might prove vitally fatal to the United States,” the former Treasury secretary wrote.
Many questions emerged, but one stood out. What was the end game for the British? Gallatin doubted that the British intended to conquer all of America, only part of it.
Madison understood Gallatin’s words. The British were strategizing that Federalists in New England would break off and rejoin England or that a Federalist would become president in 1816. Revenge was a motive, though not fully revenge for the American Revolution but revenge for having the audacity to declare war against England in 1812 in the first place. Gallatin put it this way: “In the intoxication of an unexpected success, which they ascribe to themselves, the English people eagerly with that their pride may be fully gratified by what they call the ‘punishment of America.’”
He continued, “To use their own language they mean to inflict on America a chastisement that will teach her that war is not to be declared on Great Britain with impunity.” The British authorities had used newspapers, which they controlled, as propaganda to deceive the English people. “They do not suspect that we had any just cause of war, and ascribe it solely to a premeditated concert with Bonaparte at a time when we thought him triumphant and their cause desperate.”
The British government now had thousands of battle-hardened soldiers and sailors at its disposal. Why send them home to their families when they could use them for the good of Britain? What could be better than to use their experience and cause great mischief and harm to the United States? As Gallatin explained, “The numerous English forces in France, Italy, Holland, and Portugal ready for immediate service, and for which there is no further employment in Europe, afford to this government the means of sending both to Canada and to the United States a very formidable army, which we are not prepared to meet with any regular, well-organized force.”
Gallatin’s words sobered Madison more than any other correspondence he’d received that summer. If he was correct, redcoats by the thousands could target American cities. The numbers were against them. In August of 1813, the British had 75,000 soldiers serving in Europe outside of the British Isles and Ireland. In contrast, they had fewer than 20,000 soldiers scattered in North America, from Bermuda to Nova Scotia. They now had the capacity to increase the number of their soldiers in North America to 40,000, double its previous number.
Madison’s optimism was diminished. After defeating Napoleon, the English were intoxicated by success, puffed up and prideful about their capabilities. They deeply desired to fully gratify that pride by punishing America.
What was the president to do with such threatening news? A day after receiving Gallatin’s dispatches, on June 27, Madison called the cabinet to another meeting. Within the plastered walls of the East Room, they voted once more on whether to strike impressment as a condition for peace. The measure was now unanimous, “agreed to by Monroe, Campbell, Armstrong and Jones; Rush being absent.”
With this vote, Madison had new instructions to send to his peace commissioners. They could abandon impressment as a requirement for peace. Oh, how he needed peace. Now he was facing the worst problem of his administration: a possible invasion by the British somewhere on the East Coast. There was more he needed to do. Much more. But first he needed some time to think.
While Madison contemplated Gallatin’s ominous news, Barney was so happy that he could hardly wait to share the news with Navy Secretary Jones. Colonel Wadsworth had come! Reinforcements had saved them from the enemy blockade!
“This morning at 4 AM, a combined attack of the artillery, marine corps, and flotilla, was made upon the enemy’s two frigates at the mouth of the creek,” Barney wrote to Jones on Sunday morning, June 26.
Colonel Decius Wadsworth of the U.S. Army created a battery on a high bluff that overlooked the Patuxent River to the right and St. Leonard’s Creek to the left. This commanding position stunned Captain Brown, who had replaced Barrie as leader of the British blockade.
“After two hours engagement, they got under way and made sail down the river,” Barney explained of Brown’s decision to move his ships.
Brown figured that Barney would chase him to Point
Patience. Instead, Barney and his men rowed away. “I am moving up the Patuxent,” the commodore wrote to Jones of his decision to head toward Benedict, Maryland.
Though six of Barney’s men were killed and four wounded, the rest had escaped. After swiftly signing his name, Barney handed his message to a militia member, who hurried to Washington City and delivered the good news to Jones.
Barney, however, wasn’t the only commander to receive reinforcements.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Twenty Thousand Reinforcements
“Lord Hill and 15,000 men are said to be coming out from Bordeaux and several regiments from England and Ireland,” Admiral Cockburn read with excitement in a letter from Cochrane, dated July 1, 1814, “by the account I have received from England that a considerable body of troops are under orders for this country.”
Cochrane believed that the combination of regular British soldiers and slave recruits seeking revenge on their masters was enough to conquer the Americans.
Cockburn couldn’t have been happier with Cochrane’s news. After all, fifteen to twenty thousand reinforcements were enough to conquer several cities, much less Washington City’s unprotected hamlet of 8,000.
While he waited for reinforcements, Cockburn deployed the 900 marines and a company of Royal Marine artillery that Cochrane had sent him. He formed two squadrons, one led by Captain Barrie to command attacks along the Potomac and the other by Captain Joseph Nourse to chart the Patuxent River and raid towns along its banks. Then he gave instructions.
“Barney had got above Benedict and that it was useless to endeavor to follow him up this river affording him such facility of retreat to so great a distance from our shipping,” Cockburn wrote to Captain Barrie, noting that Barney was hemmed in again, this time at the head of the Patuxent River in Maryland.
In the meantime, Cockburn would play pirate and visit as many points as he could to distract the enemy. Divert he did. Without opposition his men burned courthouses and homes and seized vast quantities of tobacco in more than fifteen towns.
In a letter to Barrie, he also took a jab at the president: “Mr. Madison must certainly be either in confident expectation of immediate peace, or preparing to abdicate the chair.”
Peace, yes. Abdication? Hardly.
After receiving Gallatin’s warning, Madison took a few days to think. Then he took action. It was time to assert his authority.
He held another cabinet meeting. The date was July 1. This time Washington City was the focus, not Canada. This scholarly president asked for an assessment of the number of forces available to defend the nation’s capital. Drawing from cavalry units, infantry, marines, artillery, and Barney’s flotilla, Armstrong dutifully reported that the estimated number of defenders was 3,500.
Worried that the British could send three times as many men, Madison gave the order for “10,000 militia to be designated and held in readiness. 10,000 Arms and camp equipage to be brought forward for use.”
His cabinet chose sides. Rush, Campbell, and Monroe agreed with Madison, who also appointed General William Winder as commander of the new military district in Washington. Taken as a prisoner of war in Canada in June 1813, Winder had recently returned to America after a prisoner exchange. He was also the nephew of Levin Winder, the Federalist governor of Maryland. The Republican Madison needed the political alliance that Winder’s Federalist family connections brought.
Whether Armstrong asserted his weight in the cabinet by expressing his displeasure that day is not known. Did he cast a look of contempt or keep his reserve in check?
Madison likely detected something in Armstrong’s demeanor, because he didn’t stop there. The next day, July 2, he took another step to strengthen compliance with his orders. As if giving instructions to a student, he sent Armstrong a memorandum. “The secretary of war will digest and report to the president corresponding precautionary means of defense” for Washington City and “the other more important and exposed places along the Atlantic frontier; particularly Boston, New York, Wilmington, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans.”
He also ordered Armstrong to distribute and report on “a circular communication to the governors of the several states” to determine “adequate portions of their militia.” He wanted “them in the best readiness for actual service in cases of emergency.”
Was the president’s accountability of Armstrong robust? Yes. Would it work? Possibly. One thing was certain. Madison’s prior deference to his advisors was giving way to assertive executive decision-making.
Van Ness was also highly concerned about the news from Europe. Armstrong had given him some false hope the previous month when he called up the district militia at sightings of the enemy along the Potomac. No sooner had the war secretary called up the militia than he dismissed them, a measure Van Ness strongly opposed. Much good could come of keeping them on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in a rotating system. Thinking the idea too costly, Armstrong sent them home instead.
After hearing rumors about the cabinet’s decision to create a new military district, Van Ness took his concerns to Monroe. Was it “the intention of the government to abandon and sacrifice the district or not?”
Before Monroe could fully answer, Van Ness added, “If it were so, it would be well for us, at least, to know it.”
As far as Monroe was concerned, “Every inch of ground about it [the city] was determined to be contested, and the last drop of blood to be spilt in its defense.” Monroe, who held the rank of colonel, continued, “It was decided . . . to form a camp of regular troops, say between 2- and 3,000, at a central position.”
Van Ness couldn’t have been happier. This was the plan he had put forward many times to Armstrong, and also, in limited opportunities, to the president. He believed that “together with the local troops, [they] would constitute an adequate defense for the surrounding points, to either of which they might be promptly and conveniently drawn.”
How Van Ness hoped these men would come soon! As much as he loved the militia, they needed the discipline and experience of a troop of regular U.S. soldiers.
Though Armstrong felt that those who wanted the federal government to build batteries and other fortifications below Fort Washington near Alexandria on the Potomac had good intentions, he also thought they were misplaced. He believed that “a small work would be unavailing, and that, to erect one of sufficient size and strength, was impracticable, for want of money.”
No matter how much money Van Ness and bankers offered to pay from their own pockets, they just didn’t understand. Where they took pride in the crude capital city, Armstrong saw a rustic town of little value.
He later reflected: “To put Washington . . . by means of fortifications, would, from physical causes, among which is the remoteness from each other of the several points to be defended, have exhausted the treasury.”
Now Madison had joined their chorus. The president had the ineptitude to choose General Winder, who was younger than many of the militia he would command, for the leader of a new military district in Washington. Armstrong was reluctant to spend money by calling up the militia to defend the district. Wasn’t Washington relatively safe because it wasn’t a military post or a military objective of great importance?
Besides, as Armstrong saw it, locals and their knife-tipped muskets would be sufficient defense. He wrote, “Bayonets are known to form the most efficient barriers; and that’s there was no reason, in this case, to doubt beforehand the willingness of the country to defend it.”
Strategy topped Armstrong’s mind as he read General Winder’s latest letter, dated July 9. Armstrong had agreed to call up the local militia to comply with the president’s order. But now Winder, like Van Ness, had the expensive idea to call them up for large blocks of time. Winder thought that the militia “should be called out for one, two or three months.”
Armstrong disagreed. He believed “that the most advantageous mode of using the militia was upon the spur of the
occasion, and bring them to fight as soon as called out.” After all, it was costly to call up the militia and fruitless to do so too soon.
Now Winder recommended that 4,000 men be placed around the regions. “Should Washington, Baltimore, or Annapolis, be their object, what possible chance will there be collecting a force, after the arrival of the enemy, to interpose between them in either of those places?” Winder asked.
He concluded that sufficient numbers of militia “could not be warned and run together, even as a disorderly crowd, without arms, ammunition, or organization, before the enemy would have already given his blow.”
What to do? Armstrong had Madison’s approval of this notion, of calling up the militia only as needed. He knew that the president had written the governor of Virginia as recently as June to explain that the task was to discover the objectives of the enemy, then apply resources and militia accordingly.
Armstrong wrote Winder on July 12. He instructed him to call for militia only “in case of actual or minutes to invasion of the district.” He wanted to avoid unnecessary calls. The number of militia should correlate to the emergency—“her proportion the call to the exigency.”
By July 17, 1814, Cockburn had concluded that “it is quite impossible for any country to be in a more unfit state for war than this now is.”
While aboard the Albion off Jerome’s Point in the Patuxent River, which ran through Maryland from the Chesapeake Bay, he boasted to Cochrane about the region’s demise. “I can only say the whole of the country around here (excepting a few of the towns most exposed like Norfolk etcetera) is in as defenseless or indeed in a more defenseless state than it was at the commencement of the war.”
The Burning of the White House Page 17