by Jane Cook
With cannon, the Americans killed a number of redcoats as a British unit advanced over the bridge separating the forces. Angry at the loss of their men on the bridge, the British easily forded the water and scaled the hill to engage in man-to-man combat. Seeing this, the American commander called for a retreat. Most men took the Georgetown Road, which opened the other road, the one leading directly to Washington City and the US Capitol, to the British. After a brief rest, about two hundred redcoats marched to Washington City with Napoleon-like speed in scorching one-hundred-degree temperatures.
The British were in such a hurry to continue their path of destruction that on their way from Bladensburg to Washington “they left their own dead unburied on the fields, and their own wounded as prisoners at the mercy of the very people whose public edifices and private habitations they had been consuming by fire.”
The casualty count was never firm, but historians have guessed that 64 Britons were killed, and 185 were wounded. The American numbers were much lower: 10 to 12 killed; 40 wounded.
The evening of August 24, 1814, the redcoats easily entered the abandoned, defenseless city. Like unbridled buccaneers, they kicked down the doors of the US Capitol, held a mock session of Congress, where Admiral Cockburn plopped into the chair belonging to the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, who was in Ghent with Adams. Cockburn called out to his men, “Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All for it will say aye!” The troops gleefully called out, “Aye!” They piled chairs, desks, and other furniture into mounds, lit torches, thrust them into the piles, and ran out.
Near midnight they approached the President’s House. Finding no one there, Admiral Cockburn and some of the men entered the property. They looted Madison’s hats and shirts and piled up the furniture, including the Grecian chairs that Dolley Madison had chosen for the red oval room, her piano forte and guitar, and other furnishings. Then they ate dinner in the dining room, where Dolley had prepared a meal for forty guests in hopes of entertaining her husband’s cabinet and officers following a victory at Bladensburg. Instead the British feasted on Dolley’s food. Seeing an indented seat cushion at the head of the table, Cockburn took it, saying he hoped that little Jemmy wouldn’t mind. The token would remind him of Mrs. Madison’s “seat.”
Then the redcoats surrounded the President’s House with men standing in front of the windows. They tied oily rags into balls the size of dinner plates and attached them to the ends of four-foot-long poles. They passed a torch, lit the rags, and in unison thrust their fiery weapons into the President’s House, which instantly caught fire.
“The destruction of the capitol, the President’s House, the public offices, and many private houses is contrary to all the usages of civilized nations, and is without example even in the wars that have been waged during the French Revolution,” John wrote, not knowing all the details until much later. In fact Albert Gallatin, who was also with Adams at Ghent, later learned that his private residence in Washington City was completely destroyed.
“The same British officers who boast in their dispatches of having blown up the legislative hall of Congress and the dwelling house of the president, would have been ashamed of the act instead of glorying in it, had it been done in any European city,” Adams declared.
Revenge for the first American war may have been on the minds of the redcoats. To Adams the real tragedy might yet come. The conquerors were heading north. If they succeeded in capturing Baltimore, they could continue to Philadelphia, New York, and finally Boston. All Americans were in danger. The fate of the Union now depended on the success or failure of local communities to defend their own people.
“Boston is still exposed and our property there may share the fate of the capitol. But in the perils of the country I scarcely think it worth a thought what may befall my individual interests. Our children and other relations near Boston are in no danger but that which menaces the whole country.”
Maybe, finally, the fall of Washington would be the catalyst to stir the nation to real action. So he hoped: “If it cannot be produced [rousing the people to action] they are not fit to bear the character of an independent nation, and have nothing better to do than to take the oath of allegiance to the maniac [King George III and the prince regent].”
With the nation’s capital in ruins, the question lingered, was America now conquered? Or would the spirit of independence, the American eagle, rise as a phoenix? As Louisa had witnessed in St. Petersburg, after hearing of the burning of Washington City, many Europeans concluded that America was now conquered. Gone were these so-called United States. Returning were Britain’s prodigal American colonies.
“The news of the destruction of Washington makes much noise here [in St. Petersburg] and they seem to think as you say that all America is destroyed. Everybody looks at me with so much sorrow and compassion that I hate to stir out,” she wrote about how the news affected the diplomats and Russian nobility in St. Petersburg. “You would suppose that we had not a chance left of ever again becoming a nation.”
For five years she had longed to return home and embrace her boys. Now she didn’t have a country to return to. In the days following the news of Washington City’s destruction, her exile seemed permanent. “I felt my exile even more than I had ever done before.”
For a time she avoided attending St. Petersburg’s social events, especially ones where members of the British diplomatic corps were present.
“I trust in God that the day [of] retribution is not far off and that glory which yet awaits us will far, far outweigh the disgrace which has hitherto attended us.”
54
Queen of Hearts
IN EARLY MARCH OF 1815, LOUISA’S CARRIAGE PASSED VERY FEW houses as they traveled on a remote road to Küstrin, a town in the Prussian province of Brandenburg in Germany. Because of heavy rains, the dirt road sometimes became a muddy stream. Suddenly the carriage’s front wheel snapped, jolting to a chaotic stop. One of the drivers jumped down and studied the problem. He gave Louisa the bad news. The wheel was unsalvageable, broken into fragments.
“The evening was setting in, and they advised that one of the two should go to a small place that we had passed on the road, and get some conveyance for me; as the road was in such a state, it was impossible to walk.”
Seeing no other option, Louisa agreed. They waited and waited for what seemed like a thousand hours before one of the drivers returned with “a miserable common cart, into which we got.”
Baptiste led them to the last hut they passed. The shack had two rooms and a blacksmith shop.
“One woman made her appearance: dirty, ugly, and ill natured; and there were two or three very surly, ill-looking men.”
The men’s tongues were as salty with insults as their fingers were stained with soot from the blacksmith’s shop. Just as she had the night they became lost in the forest, Louisa allowed the intimidating Baptiste to take charge. Explaining their broken wheel, he asked for a vehicle to transport Louisa, Charles, and Madame Babet to the nearest town.
“They answered doggedly that they could do no such thing, but that if we chose to stay there, they could make a wheel, so that we could go on in the morning.”
What to do? Just as John had consulted with the captain of the Horace on their voyage to St. Petersburg years earlier, so Louisa now asked her two servants their opinion. The three of them devised a plan. They would spend the night at the shack, which had one available room. Because both servants were armed, they could split up, with one keeping watch at her chamber door and the other sleeping in the coach.
“According to this plan, I had my little boy’s bed brought in [from the carriage], and while he slept soundly, my woman and I sat up, neither of us feeling very secure in the [dis]agreeable nest into which we had fallen.”
Baptiste’s terse nature now worked in Louisa’s favor. No one tried to enter her chamber. Although she lost a night’s sleep, she didn’t lose any of her valuables—or her life, for that matter. The wheel
was ready the next morning, and they left immediately.
“As I always had provisions in the carriage, we made out to eat something before we started, and at the next stage we took our coffee—Our wheel was very clumsy, and not painted, but it answered all the purpose to carry us through the famous road, which had been begun by Bonaparte from Küstrin.”
Once again nature became their worst enemy on the road. Mud slowed their progress, but eventually they reached Küstrin’s fortress, which was about fifty miles east of Berlin. Napoleon’s troops had burned the town on their retreat to Paris. House upon house “bore the mutilating stamp of war.”
They found tolerable lodgings, but were not allowed to sightsee at the fortress, which was famous for imprisoning Prussia’s king the previous century. Even though the French had torched this town, the local inhabitants held a far different opinion of the Grande Armée than Louisa expected.
“To my utter astonishment, I heard nothing but the praises of the gallantry of Napoleon, and his officers, and great regret at the damage done to this beautiful fortress.”
She quickly discovered the reason: economics. In spite of their burnt houses, the people blamed the Cossacks for the terrible road conditions. Napoleon had ordered a new road to be built in Küstrin, but when the Russians drove him away, they sabotaged construction for the grand road.
“The Cossacks! The dire Cossacks! were the perpetual theme, and the cheeks of the women blanched at the very name.”
While in Ghent, Adams thought about the destruction that towns across Prussia and other places had experienced. “There is scarcely a metropolis in Europe that has not been taken in the course of the last twenty years. There is not a single instance in all that time of public buildings like those being destroyed,” John had written to Louisa in early October 1814.
Because Napoleon had shattered so much of Europe, perhaps the British thought they could get away with burning Washington City. Adams wondered whether Washington’s destruction would eventually backfire on the British.
“The army of Napoleon did indeed blow up the Kremlin at Moscow, but that was a fortified castle, and even this act has ever been and ever will be stigmatized as one of the most infamous of his deeds.”
Many French newspapers described the burning of Washington as “atrocious.” This description forced London newspaper editors to defend their military’s actions by recalling “the most execrable barbarities of the French revolutionary fury.”
Louisa, too, had detected that the British diplomats in St. Petersburg were having trouble defending the burning of the US Capitol and the President’s House. “It is said that the destruction of our little capitol has produced such a sensation here that his little lordship [the British ambassador to Russia] has more than once been under the necessity of retiring from the soirées in which it has formed the topic of conversation.”
Adams kept his wife informed of the latest developments as he received them. The British also took the city of Alexandria, Virginia. Armstrong had failed to take the simple action of ordering militia to build earthen works to block the roads to Washington City from invasion. After President Madison confronted him, General Armstrong resigned.
“Armstrong defends himself as much as he defended Washington,” Adams wryly wrote.
John made another keen political observation, one that might affect his fortunes. Madison appointed Monroe to replace Armstrong as secretary of war. This meant that the coveted position of secretary of state was likely vacant. Perhaps Adams’s request for a recall might result in an honorable opportunity for him after all.
In the meantime his political fortune was directly tied to success in Ghent. Failure to get a treaty, and a good one, would prevent him from taking any other diplomatic post, much less the role of secretary of state. Worse, the war would continue, and America could be annexed by Britain.
The fall of Washington City initially gave the British the advantage at Ghent. Though much of Europe was appalled by the barbarism, Parliament was blind to their country’s falling status. Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, secretly expressed their strategy this way: “The forces under Sir Alexander Cochrane and General Ross were most actively employed upon the coast of the United States, creating the greatest degree of alarm and rendering the government very unpopular.”
He was correct. Americans blamed Madison for the destruction of their capital. One female innkeeper was so angry when she learned that Dolley Madison was taking refuge at her hotel, she threw her out and cursed at her.
Dolley had been queen of hearts in America. Her courage that day at the President’s House made her a legend. After learning at 3:00 p.m. that US forces had failed to hold back the British at Bladensburg, Dolley fled the President’s House. Before she left, however, she made a crucial decision. She asked her servants to remove Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington from the dining room wall before the British arrived. The portrait was a national treasure, a gift from Congress for the opening of the President’s House in 1800. She could not bear the idea of redcoats looting the house, taking the portrait, and then later parading Washington’s painting through the streets of London to prove their conquest of America. She received credit for saving the portrait.
Sacrificing most of her wardrobe, Dolley packed all the president’s cabinet papers, and possibly her husband’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, into one of the few remaining wagons in town. Once those were secure at another location, she fled with other Americans to roads leading to the countryside. Taking refuge at several places over the next few days and disguising herself with a farmer’s shawl, she waited until a messenger from her husband told her it was safe to return to Washington. A hurricane had driven out the redcoats.
Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, correctly guessed that James Madison immediately became an unpopular president. Though unknown at the time, Dolley’s heroism later made her a gem.
The prime minister believed the demise of Washington would be a game changer for the peace negotiations. At worst, the news would force the US commissioners to accept the new, lower boundary line proposed by the British to enlarge Canada and diminish the United States. At best, they would capitulate and hand the entire nation back to England, where they belonged.
“We may hope, therefore, that if the American government should prove themselves so unreasonable as to reject our proposals as they have been now modified,” Liverpool wrote, “they will not long be permitted to administer the affairs of the country, particularly as their military efforts have in no way corresponded with the high tone in which they attempt to negotiate.”
After news of the burning of Washington reached them in Ghent, the British commissioners issued a fifteen-page reply to their American counterparts.
John shared his frustration in a letter to Louisa: “It must indeed have been for some of my own sins or for those of my country, that I have been placed here to treat with the injustice and insolence of Britain, under a succession of such news as every breeze is wafting from America.”
Louisa, too, bewailed the thought of America being conquered: “The nature of our government, and the habits of the people, place us in a situation of such entire dependence on our own individual exertions, our persons, our children, our property are also so completely at stake.” She put her faith in patriotism. Just as Alexander showed, she hoped that “we just might hold up our heads and defy the brutality of our enemies.”
America needed a fleet of phoenixes to rise from the ashes and save the country.
“We left Küstrin to pursue our journey.”
As Louisa returned to the road in March 1815, she hoped the remaining fifty miles to Berlin would be uneventful, slowed only by the routine of showing passports at border posts. When they neared a particular spot, the drivers suddenly stopped.
“One of the postilions pointed out to us the small house, where that most lovely and interesting Queen Louisa of Prussia had stayed with her sick baby on their re
treat from Berlin, after the French had taken possession of that city.”
While the driver told the story of the queen’s daring escape from Berlin, Louisa began to cry over the woman’s flight. Hearing of the queen’s ill infant understandably resurrected memories of Louisa’s daughter, whose grave she would never see again.
Queen Louisa had been the most influential woman in Prussia. She had supported, even insisted that her husband, Friederich Wilhelm III, declare war on Napoleon in 1806. When Bonaparte’s army decimated the Prussians, it was Queen Louisa who pleaded with the French emperor at the Peace of Tilsit to remember her people. She begged him to have mercy on the Prussians, calling upon her titles of wife and mother, not queen, as the basis for demanding humane treatment.
Saying she was an admirable queen and one of the most interesting women he had ever met, Bonaparte was impressed with her. Just as some Americans thought of Dolley Madison as the queen of hearts, so the Prussians embraced their Louisa as the queen of hearts. Though she died in 1810 at age thirty-four of a pulmonary embolism, she still reigned as the sentimental people’s queen of Prussia.
“My heart thrilled with emotion for the sufferings of one, whom I had so dearly loved, and I could not refrain from tears at the recital of her sufferings,” Louisa reflected.
As they entered Berlin in March 1815, she thought about Queen Louisa and others she had known as she beheld the city where she had lived fourteen years earlier as a newlywed with John. “Memory; how ineffably beautiful is thy power! Years had elapsed; affliction had assailed the heart, with its keenest pangs of carking grief; disappointment had thrown its mingled hues of fear and care,” she noted.
The past flooded her mind as she arrived at the hotel: “The carriage needed repairs, and our clumsy wheel to be painted, and Berlin was attractive to me—my poor and beloved George having been born there.”