Perhaps you heard that there was a little break-in at the US Capitol Building (for the love, "capital" is the city, it's the "Capitol Building") this week that has caused a slight kerfuffle around the, well, the world. We're not talking about that today, because this web site tends not to deal with the current century. Today we're talking about the last time that such a direct assault on the seat of American government.
Do not get me wrong: I know that the attacks on Oklahoma City, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, among others were far more devastating than what happened on Wednesday at the Capitol, but those attacks were not directly on the buildings that house the American government (though it appears the White House was a possible target of Flight 93). However, let's talk about Washington in 1814.
The War of 1812...it wasn't going so well for the Americans.
[As a quick aside, the purpose of this here blog is to do deep-dives on the rhyming couplets of history, but by no means a comprehensive re-telling. Ideally, something you read here catches your fancy and you go read further about it. I'm a history teacher. I get, like, eight hours of class time to teach World War II. But maybe you read something here that you want to go further into, and that's where you hit up your library or whichever way do some investigating on your own.]
Having been a country for about 30 years, the United States was ready for some respect, and they weren't really getting it from Great Britain. That's what's important (to me) to remember about the War of 1812: respect, and the United States feeling like they deserved it. How was the US being disrespected?
Great Britain was trying to deal with Napoleon. They needed sailors. And so they "impressed them," and not in, like, an "Anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'" sense of impressing them. Impressment was a thing that Great Britain did between 1793 and 1812 in which the British Navy would board merchant vessels and essentially force/kidnap sailors to serve the Crown, mainly to beef up their efforts to defeat Napoleon. Lest we think the British improper for this practice, they did say that they could only kidnap a sailor for five years, and then they couldn't do it again. So there's that. The British impressed over 15,000 American sailors in the aforementioned timespan.
The British were also violating maritime laws bargained by the Treaty of Paris (1783) and further clarified by Jay's Treaty (1794). They were also encouraging Native Americans to fight back against the United States (and one can easily see why the Native Americans would do so). All of these ingredients combined together were seen by some members of Congress as the equivalent of taking their own hands and slapping their own face with them and saying, "Stop hitting yourself, innit?"
Who were these Congressmen? They were known as the War Hawks, and this is where I feel as though we should instead look at the War of 1812 like a massive duel between the United States and Great Britain. The War Hawks were led by men like Kentucky's Henry Clay, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, and Tennessee's Solomon Felix Grundy. Well, if you're a Southern/Western gentleman and feel as though you have been disrespected and/or your honor has been attacked, what do you do? You challenge them to a duel, a duel that the War Hawks referred to as the "second war for independence." It's worth mentioning that this was bitterly opposed by the Federalist set of Congress, who valued trade with Great Britain. It's interesting to me that while it was New England who advocated for the Revolution over the hems/haws of the Southern colonies, it was the Southerners (and now-Westerners) who were agitating for Round Two over the objections of New England.
Anyhow, despite not having much in the way of a standing army (thanks to the Anti-Federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson, who saw a standing military as the greatest threat to a government) the Americans were feeling their oats and were all, "Yeah, let's go take Canada. How hard can THAT be? Look at it. It's so Canadian!"* The United States tried to invade Canada and it went...extremely poorly. Every single attempt was repelled. As it turned out, much to the surprise of the Americans, a lot of former colonists went to Canada to stay under British rule, and weren't terribly interested in being Americans.
*paraphrasing
Now we get to the point of the post. The British were able to turn their attention to the United States in 1814, once Napoleon abdicated the throne. It starts with the Chesapeake Campaign, which was a diversionary invasion to take American attention away from Canada. On August 19, 1814 the British landed on Maryland's Patuxent River and Secretary of War John Armstrong, who wasn't exactly the best at his job in this country's history, didn't think the British would attack Washington because it simply wasn't of all that much strategic, military, or economic importance, especially what with the much more "valuable" Baltimore just, I mean, *right there*. Still, military leadership thought Baltimore was the target. Armstrong:
They would not come with such a fleet without meaning to strike somewhere. But they certainly will not come [to Washington]! What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the place, Sir. That is of so much more consequence.
Little did he know that the British were all, "Why not both!?" It was pretty clear when five days later, on August 24, the British arrived at Bladensburg, Maryland, about seven miles northeast of the White House. The British wanted to take out the symbolic importance of Washington, D.C. As the British crossed the Anacostia River, the militia quickly set up three lines of defense. Madison borrowed some pistols and rode out to watch the battle, but not before almost riding directly into the hands of the British. While the Americans outnumbered the British, the British were superior in tactics and, you know, general military expertise. "Commanded" by Brigadier General William H. Winder, the first line of defense quickly retreated into the second, gumming up the strategic works and causing confusion within the American ranks. Winder would actually be court-martialed for his "leadership" at Bladensburg and, though he was acquitted, Winder was demoted.
The third line of defense was led by Commodore Joshua Barney. Barney looked at the War of 1812 like it was a reputation rehabilitation mission. He joined the cause for American independence at the age of 16. In 1794 the United States revived its military to deal with threats from Great Britain, France, and [squints] Algeria and appointed six new commanders for the new frigates commissioned by the government. Barney placed fourth out of six, appealed to be third, was denied, and then turned down the commission and went and fought for France. This would prove to be disastrous to Barney when the United States and France kinda-sorta got into a war in the late 1790s and the press started to refer to Barney in the same breath as Benedict Arnold, which is decidedly what one is not looking for. When the War of 1812 broke out, Barney quickly saw it as his opportunity to save his reputation.
Barney's third line held up more admirably than Winder's first two, delaying the British long enough to allow President James Madison to tell First Lady Dolley Madison to save as many possessions as she could before fleeing. Barney got shot in the thigh and was captured by the British, who released him on the spot in honor of his bravery. British Rear Admiral George Cockburn said of Barney and his men, "They have given us the only fighting we have had." With Barney wounded, the British broke through towards Washington. Madison was unimpressed by his fleeing defense, reportedly saying, "I could never have believed that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day."
With no defenses available, the Commandant of the Washington Navy Yard Thomas Tingey, set fire to the Navy Yard's vessels and supplies rather than let them fall into British hands. Senior administration officials fled into the countryside. James Madison and his Secretary of State James Monroe were nearly captured, and spent the night of August 26 at the home of Caleb and Henrietta Bentley in Brookeville, Maryland, giving Brookeville the eternal nickname of "U.S. Capital For A Day."
Meanwhile, the British had free rein in the nation's capital which...wasn't that impressive of a city. Washington hadn't even been the capital of the United States for 25 years at this point. A British soldier wrote of the city:
It possesses no leading features, by catching which I might hope to convey to a person who has not seen it, something like an accurate notion of the whole. It...is, I believe, still in its infancy, few of the streets being finished, and many containing not more than three or four houses, at wide intervals from each other...Like other infant towns, Washington is but little ornamented with fine buildings; except the Senate-house, I really know of none worthy to be noticed.
Sending a message to the apparently-one nice building in the city was appropriate to the British, who set fire to everything they could. While the Capitol dome hadn't yet been built, the original chamber of the House of Representatives was thought to be "the most beautiful room in America," according to the historian emeritus for the Architect of the Capitol. It was fireproof, except - and this is a pretty massive "except" - the ceiling, which was wooden. Catch the roof - with 100 skylights - on fire, and it'll collapse and destroy everything, which is, of course, what happened. William Allen:
The heat was intense. The glass in the skylights melted, became molten, and fell down in large chunks.
A 24-year old Senate clerk named Lewis Machen, assisted by Tobias Simpson, a Black messenger, commandeered a wagon and began loading Senate records onto the wagon as the fire raged in the Capitol building. Machen and Simpson didn't save all of the records, but they did save a large number of important ones. Unfortunately for the Capitol Building, the wooden floors and the remaining records and books served simply as kindling, especially the Senate side of the building. Machen and Simpson, after a hilariously arduous journey that included a wagon wheel flying off and the wagon itself just turning over resulting in hours of gathering the spewed papers, delivered the papers they were able to save to Madison at Brookeville.
He wasn't the only one thinking of preserving the past in the face of an uncertain future: Senior State Department clerk Stephen Pleasonton put the original Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, and George Washington's correspondence in some linen bags and personally escorted them 35 miles to the northwest, to Leesburg, Virginia.
The British moved on to the Presidential Mansion (it wasn't known as the White House until 1901) and set fire to it, but not before eating the dinner that had been prepared for Madison and 40 other people - which is just massively disrespectful. The British burned the Library of Congress and pretty much every government building they could find, including the State Department, Treasury Department, and War Department. You could see the glow of the fire from Baltimore, 40-ish miles away.
The British mostly left the few private residences in the city alone. While the British had a (mostly) no-looting policy, one British soldier took Madison's traveling medicine chest. This chest passed to a British soldier, which descended through his family until it was returned to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939.
The following morning, with the fires still burning in Washington, the British searched the city for other stuff to burn. They found an ammunition store but, after a little accident with some gunpowder barrels that resulted in the death of 30 British soldiers, decided to bounce, fires still raging behind them. And then? A miracle. A massive thunderstorm complete with a tornado hit Washington in early afternoon of August 25. The National Weather Service said that the strong tornado struck northwest Washington and downtown and did "major structural damage to the residential section of the city," noting that more British soldiers were killed by flying debris than by American guns. The aforementioned British soldier, Robert Glieg, wrote:
Of the prodigious force of the wind it is impossible for you to form any conception. Roofs of houses were torn off by it, and whisked into the air like sheets of paper, while the rain which accompanied it resembled the rushing of a mighty cataract rather than the dropping of a shower...[it was] the most appalling effect I had ever, or probably shall ever witness.
Two British cannons were picked up and spun around in the most intense part of the afternoon. The roof of the General Post Office was ripped off. Houses were wrenched off of their foundations, and trees were uprooted all of the city. Thirty Americans were killed in the storm, which lasted for over two hours, dropping such an immense amount of rain that it put the fires out. However, it also created enough confusion to allow the British to slink off towards Baltimore.
When Washingtonians woke up the next morning they found the city smoldering, houses destroyed by the storm, the army was nowhere to be found, no one knew where President Madison or his cabinet was, and the Union Jack flew over the capital. That's a rough day.
Madison wrote on September 1, 1814 complaining that the British operations in Washington were Extremely Bullcrap, given that peace talks had already been offered by the British when they sacked Washington:
Whereas, these proceedings and declared purposes, which exhibit a deliberate disregard of the principles of humanity, and the rules of civilized warfare, and which must give to the existing war a character of extended devastation and barbarism, at the very moment of negociacions [sic] for peace, invited by the enemy himself, leave no prospect of safety to any thing within the reach of his predatory and incendiary operations, but in a manly and universal determination to chastise and expel the invader.
It took three years to rebuild the Presidential Mansion, an undertaking led by the Irish-American James Hoban. We don't know all that much about Hoban's life as his papers were destroyed, ironically, in a fire in the 1880s. James Monroe was able to live there beginning in 1817. Thomas Jefferson sold his book collection to the government to restock the Library of Congress.
James Madison's Congress met on September 19, 1814 at Blodgett's Hotel, at Eighth Street and E Street NW, which also housed the Patent Office. An impressively-quick-thinking superintendent said the building contained patent models from inventors, which qualified the building as private property. This was good enough for the British, who left the building alone. Congress would meet there until they adjourned in March 1815 and approved Madison borrowing money to rebuild the damaged buildings on their existing sites.
There was only one (non-storm) casualty of the British assault on Washington: John Lewis, George Washington's grand-nephew. Lewis and his brother had been impressed into the service of the Royal Navy and had only just been released, so he was ready to kick some heads. Lewis saw a group of British soldiers, hopped on his horse with his sword drawn and, after shouting "a volley of epithets" at the British began to attempt to remove some British heads from their respective bodies when he was shot and killed.
So, yeah. This week in American history was pretty wild.
