Meanwhile Secretary of State Monroe recounted in a manuscript letter a conversation with Secretary of the Treasury Campbell in which the latter responded to his draft letter to the editor of the National Intelligencer by saying that putting the situation in such dire terms as Monroe had might spoil Campbell’s latest attempt to borrow money from the public. Monroe answered that to be less frank likely would bring down the public ire upon the administration if worse came to worst. Campbell assured Monroe that the British would not attack Washington, and so Monroe decided not to publish his letter.

  Later Monroe wrote, “I have since reflected further on this subject, and am persuaded, that it would be safest to act on the presumption, that the dangers which are possible, will occur. I think I see manifest advantages resulting from it, without any real loss, under any circumstances that may occur.” “The mov’ment on the other side,” he fretted, “is active & vigorous, as we see by the proceedings Eastward. That movment has more effect, in consequence of our inactivity, even before the danger shews itself, and while there is a hope that we possess information of our security not known to the public. Even in this state the govt. shakes to the foundation. Let a strong force land any where, and what will be the effect?” As he reasoned, “We have a great majority of the nation with us. But to give energy to our cause, we must take the passions of the people with us also.”

  The chief Cabinet officer then turned to his policy prescriptions. “In looking to the worst my idea really is that the Congress shod. be conven’d for the purpose of providing more ample funds, preventing the exportation of specie from the country, establishing a national bank, and doing every thing that will give energy to the govt., & success to the war.” If John Taylor and John Randolph could have seen their man now! What would the Frenchmen so enamored of their forthrightly Anglophobe American minister in the 1790s have thought to see the Republican secretary of state in 1814 committing to paper a program absolutely Hamiltonian in its contours? Alexander Hamilton could hardly have wished for a clearer vindication—though one was on the way. Monroe was driven to these conclusions by his estimate that Campbell’s “little supply in view, on which every thing is suspended, is so temporary in its nature as to be comparatively a trifling object.” In other words the Federal Government’s great military weakness had pushed him in wartime to conclusions quite similar to those Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist supporters had reached in time of peace more than twenty years earlier.

  Monroe was not alone in feeling the urgency of the situation. While Armstrong essentially treaded water, Major General Samuel Smith, Madison’s former Senate irritant, pressed Armstrong for more manpower to defend Baltimore. Tidewater Virginians demanded aid in paying troops and funding fortifications in response to occasional British raids—not only to destroy farms and seize supplies, but to help slaves abscond. From New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, urgent requests for administration assistance poured in. Armstrong seems almost to have intended to make a show of nonchalance. One letter to Armstrong containing an urgent request that the Delmarva Peninsula be denominated its own military district was forwarded by him to Madison with the note “Submitted to the President” and returned with Madison’s response, “What is the opinion of the Secretary of War as to the arrangement recommended herein?”12 The secretary’s constant omission to take matters obviously his responsibility in hand not only irked the president, but—more importantly—left the country’s defenses unorganized. Washington’s aldermen and Common Council on July 18th sent Madison a resolution calling “their unprotected & defenceless state from menaced invasion” to his attention, asking him “to take such means for their early & effectual relief as in his judgement sh[ould] seem best.”13 Still Madison left matters to Armstrong, and still Armstrong did more or less nothing. The results would prove disastrous.

  Responsibility ultimately lay with Madison. Not that Armstrong did not deserve blame.

  In late July 1814 British troops came within twenty miles, and Mrs. Madison downplayed the danger. On August 20th, when others came up the Patuxent and disembarked at Benedict, only forty miles away, Madison was surprised the enemy were so near.14 (The British had already decided by this point to attack Washington.15) Secretary of State James Monroe, who had quit William & Mary as a teenage freshman in 1776 to go join the Continental Army, now thirty-eight years later found himself—the national government’s chief Cabinet officer—out scouting the countryside to ascertain the position, strength, and likely objective of the enemy. In a series of notes written every few hours on August 21st and 22nd between Monroe and the president, Monroe said he had sighted the British, denied they numbered three thousand, as Madison had been told, and at last said, “Our troops were on the march to meet them, but in too small a body to engage. General W[inder] proposes to retire, till he can collect them in a body. The enemy are in full march for Washington. Have the materials prepared to destroy the bridges.” Below his signature he added, perhaps thinking what had happened during Jefferson’s gubernatorial administration when a British force under Benedict Arnold took Richmond, “You had better remove the records.”16

  Meanwhile Winder agreed with Armstrong that it was unclear whether the British would attack Washington or Baltimore. He too failed to prepare Washington for attack—so much so that on August 22nd, Sérurier wrote to Talleyrand that the highest officials of the American government remained uncertain whether Washington would be attacked. As the Madison historian J. C. A. Stagg explains:

  Before August 20, Winder had made no serious attempts to obstruct the gradual British advance by felling trees, destroying bridges, or harassing the enemy’s flanks, and he was now accordingly compelled to improvise a desperate last-minute defense—the very thing that in early July he had declared he should avoid. He issued some final calls for volunteers, and, by the morning of August 24, he had been able to assemble a mixed force of regulars, volunteers, navy yard workers, artillerists, and militia from the District and Maryland. Altogether his forces totaled nearly 7,000 men, which numerically gave him an advantage over the British commanders, whose troops amounted to 4,500. These forces were arranged haphazardly on the field at Bladensburg by their commanders as they arrived.17

  The American forces stood arrayed in three lines on the bank of the Potomac: the third line too distant to support the first two, of which Monroe (without authority to do so) redeployed the second line so that it was not in position to support the first. A Maryland militia general noticed Monroe’s mistake, but thinking Monroe acted with Winder’s authority, he did not countermand it. “The president and other civilian officials,” Donald R. Hickey observes, “arrived on the scene just before the battle began and were on the verge of crossing the bridge into the approaching British columns when they were warned off by a War Department clerk who was serving as a volunteer scout.”18

  As James Scott, aide-de-camp to Royal Navy Rear Admiral George Cockburn, recalled the scene, “about noon we arrived at the heights above Bladensburg [a Maryland town less than ten miles from Washington], from which the whole American army were discovered drawn up strongly posted in two lines on the opposite side of the river, and their artillery so placed as to enfilade the bridge which we were obliged to cross before we could come to close quarters with them.” In other words the American force had the defensive, on ground it had chosen, against a force inferior in numbers and to whom the ground was unfamiliar. “In addition to the heavy artillery on the upper height,” Scott continued, “a block-house and field-pieces on the lower range defended the passage across.”19

  The American artillery, according to Scott, had spent “some hours the previous day” finding the range, so that when the British foot made its way to the bridge, “the American artillery now opened out upon the advanced guard, and caused a fearful destruction among our brave fellows.…” Seeing the Brits fall back, the Americans let loose “a deafening round of cheers … along their lines.” Eventually, however, the British 85th Regiment, Colonel William Thornton commanding, headed out onto the bridge. A heavy fire of grapeshot, musket fire, and small shot commenced, the colonel’s horse dying under him, yet he led on and his men followed. When the two forces met, the American “first line soon gave way at the point of the British bayonet, and retired in great confusion on their second; the action became general throughout the line.”

  As Scott tells the tale, the Congreve rockets the British fired into the American lines “create[ed] a fearful gap” in the American ranks, “and a much more fearful panic in the immediate vicinity.”20 Eventually “[o]ur gallant fellows had … got on the flanks of the enemy, and advancing in front at the same time with the bayonet, a general rout took place, the enemy abandoning great part of their artillery, every one appearing to think only of his own safety.”

  Soon after, Scott continues, “I stumbled upon an American officer among the bushes, close to their principal battery. He was severely wounded in the leg, and requested me to remain by him, announcing himself as Commodore Barney. I assured him,” the captor says, “that he had nothing to fear in his state from our people, as he himself was, no doubt, aware.” Barney apparently had offered an unknown British enlisted man “his watch and a well-lined purse” for safe passage, but the man had refused the offer: the Commodore’s wounds would suffice. Still harder for Barney to believe was the British admiral’s offer of parole to Barney and all the American officers with him. Commodore Barney’s written account of these events to Navy Secretary William Jones tracked James Scott’s in all of its essential features.

  Scott’s account of the Battle of Bladensburg ends with his observation that “[i]t seems that the President, ‘whose martial appearance gladdened every countenance and encouraged every heart,’ was on the field at the commencement of the action, but on the first shot had hastened back to Washington.…” A more direct American appraisal held that “Not all the allurements of fame, not all the obligations of duty, nor the solemn invocations of honour, could excite a spark of courage ******** [sic] and at the very first shot the trembling coward with a faltering voice exclaimed, ‘Come, General Armstrong, come, Colonel Munro, let us go, and leave it to the commanding General.’”

  The one component of the American force that had something good to say for its performance at Bladensburg was the small force of sailors under Barney. After the rout—which can be at least partly explained by unawareness on the part of the Maryland militia units in the first two American lines of Barney’s men’s arrival21—got under way, Barney positioned his men with their cannons to intercept the advancing British “just outside the District line.”22 In his soldiers’ flight Winder made no attempt to command Barney, who as a Navy Department officer technically did not have to answer to him. With four hundred men these sailors would obstruct four thousand. As Barney told it:

  At length the enemy made his appearance on the main road in force and in front of my battery, and on seeing us made a halt. I reserved our fire. In a few minutes the enemy again advanced, when I ordered an eighteen-pounder to be fired, which completely cleared the road; shortly after, a second and a third attempt was made by the enemy to come forward, but all were destroyed. They then crossed over into an open field, and attempted to flank our right. He was met there by three twelve-pounders, the marines under Captain Miller, and my men acting as infantry, and again was totally cut up. By this time not a vestige of the American army remained, except a body of five or six hundred posted on a height on my right, from which I expected much support from their fine situation.

  Though disappointed, Barney’s unit cannot have been much surprised when the vestige of the American army on its right fled, clearing the way for the British to flank his sailors and silence their guns. He commanded his subordinate officers to leave him wounded where he was—which is where the British found him. As in the case of Scott in the north, so here at the boundary of the District of Columbia. Barney had left the impression that things could have turned out differently if the Americans’ able men had been in command. The British commander’s official report said two hundred fifty of his fifteen hundred involved in the battle had been killed or wounded, but Lieutenant George Gleig of the Eighty-fifth, himself wounded on the field, doubled both of these numbers. Astoundingly the Americans abandoned the field and the route into their capital with it after losing only twenty-six killed and fifty-one wounded.23 Not for nothing have the events that day in Maryland been known ever since as the “Bladensburg Races.” For more than a generation Republicans had insisted little money or effort needed to be expended in maintaining America’s defenses. The reckoning had come.

  44

  That night the British camped in sight of the U.S. Capitol. Fired upon from Gallatin’s old house, General Ross ordered that it be burned. (Gallatin’s partisan opponents could have found something poetic in this.) Ross then ordered the Capitol burned, after which he and Cockburn led a detachment to give the White House the same treatment. More than two centuries later, smoke stains are still in evidence inside the presidential mansion. On their arrival the British found “the place settings on the dinner table for the still-cooking meal.”1

  As the Madisons’ slave Paul Jennings recounted events leading up to the invaders’ arrival at the president’s house, “I [had] set the table myself, and brought up the ale, cider, and wine, and placed them in the cooler.” In the general pandemonium in the capital, Dolley Madison insisted that the White House not be vacated. Jennings recalled, “James Smith, a free colored man who had accompanied Mr. Madison to Bladensburg, galloped up to the house, waving his hat, and cried out, ‘Clear out, clear out! General Armstrong had ordered a retreat!’ All then was confusion.” Mrs. Madison directed servants, Paul Jennings among them, to save the famous full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of General Washington from within the house. “Jennings held the ladder,” the editor of his memoir tells us, “and, after the enormous portrait, ninety-five inches high, had been freed from its frame, was undoubtedly one of the ‘two colored boys’ who helped a pair of ‘gentlemen of New York’ load the stretched canvas onto the cart they had managed to procure … [to be] ferried away to the safety of a barn in rural Maryland.”2

  The great artwork survived the British, but the sun did not rise on the White House the next morning. Nor did the nearby Navy Yard and naval vessels survive the night. As Henry Adams scornfully notes, “Before midnight the flames of three great conflagrations made the whole country light, and from the distant hills of Maryland and Virginia the flying President and Cabinet caught glimpses of the ruin their incompetence had caused.” No doubt Adams would have been more outraged had he known that Cockburn had first eaten the meal Jennings had laid out, then taken “the cushion of Dolley’s chair, about which he ‘added pleasantries too vulgar … to repeat.’”3 The French minister, who had watched Madison mount his horse and ride out of town,4 sent an emissary to ask a British officer that his residence, Virginia planter John Tayloe’s famous Octagon building near the White House, be spared, and his wish was granted. The only government building spared by the marauding Redcoats was the U.S. Patent Office. Besides the Capitol and White House, the buildings housing the Cabinet departments went up in flames too. Adams summarizes their exploit by saying, “Ross and Cockburn alone among military officers, during more than twenty years of war, considered their duty to involve personal incendiarism. At the time and subsequently various motives were attributed to them,—such as the duty of retaliation,—none of which was alleged by either of them.…” Though lamenting that those officers seemed to have “assumed as a matter of course that the American government stood beyond the pale of civilization,” he concluded that “in truth a government which showed so little capacity to defend its capital, could hardly wonder at whatever treatment it received.” Fortunately a violent two-hour storm broke just then, so that the fires were put out without doing all of the damage they might have.5

  These events led President Madison at last to take a step he seemingly had wanted to take months before: fire Secretary of War John Armstrong. Characteristically Madison took time to write long memoranda of his interactions with the secretary of war dated August 24th and August 29th. When read in combination with Monroe’s memorandum of the events of August 24th to 28th, they tell a dreary tale.6

  As Madison recounted the events of August 24th, he that morning received an urgent note from General Winder for Armstrong, who was not present. Accordingly, the president read the message and forwarded it to Armstrong.7 Seeing that Winder requested (in the president’s words) “the speediest Counsel,” Madison then rushed to Winder’s headquarters on horseback. Monroe, the attorney general, and the secretary of the navy soon arrived. Monroe, it was agreed, should head to Bladensburg. (Rushing to the battlefield, Monroe found that General Tobias Stansbury had disposed his men for battle. Monroe repositioned the infantry so that they were “both exposed and unable to support the artillery and rifle units posted in front of them, with deleterious consequences for the battle.”)8

  Winder was on his way, Barney about to follow with his men, when Armstrong arrived. “On Genl. Armstrong’s coming into the room,” Madison said, “he was informed of the certain march of the Enemy for Bladensburg, and of what had passed before his arrival; and he was asked whether he had any arrangement or advice to offer in the emergency. He said that he had not, adding that as the battle would be between Militia & regular troops, the former would be beaten.” Campbell, the secretary of the treasury, who boarded in the same house as Armstrong, confided in the president that he thought Armstrong’s reserve could be explained by the fact that Armstrong thought Madison’s having assigned command of the forces in Washington meant that he, the secretary of war, should not interfere. (We may note in light of the damage Monroe’s interference wrought on the disposition of the American forces at Bladensburg that Armstrong’s inclination made sense. The Cabinet politicians’ legal superiority to the military officers did not reflect a congressional decision that they, not the generals, should command troops in the field.) Yet when Campbell conveyed to Madison his belief that the emergency situation meant that Armstrong’s expertise ought to be employed, Madison “told him I could scarcely conceive it possible that Genl. Armstrong could have so misconstrued his functions and duty as Secretary of War” and added that any “suggestions or advice from him to Genl Winder would be duly attended to.”