Letters (100 page)

Sing of wee scholarly Madison’s kissing Dolley farewell that Wednesday morning, buckling on the brace of big dueling pistols given him by his treasury secretary (who has quit and left town in disgust), riding bravely out to Bladensburg, right through the center of his troops drawn up for battle… and almost into the British columns assembling just below the rise! Sing of the heat of that August forenoon: temperature and humidity both in the high 90’s, and the redcoats dropping already of heat exhaustion as they quickstep to Bladensburg. Half a canto then to the confusion and contradiction among the Americans, now some 6,000 strong as new units rush in at last from Annapolis, from Baltimore, and opposing an attack force of no more than 1,500 British. But those are Wellington’s Invincibles, the Scourge of Spain, under clear and unified command, where these are farmers, watermen, tradesmen, ordered here by General Winder, there by General Stansbury, elsewhere by Secretary Monroe, elsewhere again by Francis Scott Key, the Georgetown lawyer who wanders up now full of advice for Winder, his fellow attorney. Some units are in the others’ line of fire; many do not know that the rest are there, and think themselves alone against Ross’s regulars; many have disapproved of the war from its outset, or believe it intentionally mismanaged; most have never seen combat before.

Half a canto therefore—and no more, and not without sympathy—to the “Bladensburg Races.” The battle is joined; men begin to die. Unbelievably, the Americans have not blown the Bladensburg bridge; it must be seized at once. For the last time, Ross wavers—homespun militia or not, it seems to him a
very
large number of Yankees over there, defending after all their own capital city—and for the fifth, sixth, seventh time Cockburn cries Attack, attack. Between artillery blasts from the American earthworks the British race across the bridge and take cover; lacking artillery themselves, they open up on the Americans’ second line of defense with Congreve rockets fetched in from the fleet. Marvelously inaccurate but fearsome to behold, the Congreves fall among the soldiers, the horses, the crowds of spectators come out from Washington and Georgetown to see the show. The rockets are easily and quickly launched, from a simple tube; flight follows flight of them, sputtering and shrieking, as the bright British bayonets move toward the front line—and suddenly all is panic. Horses whinny and bolt, onlookers scream and run; the whole center breaks, and the left, and the right, and the second line, not a quarter hour after the first redcoat crosses the bridge. Cannon are left behind unspiked, muskets thrown away; the swift trample the slow; Madison’s party is swept back in the general rout. General Ross looks astonished: the battle has not yet properly commenced, and the Americans run, run, run for their lives. Some will not stop till they reach Virginia, or western Maryland. Everyone runs!

Almost everyone. For who are these rolling in like an alexandrine at the canto’s end, kedging forward against the shameful tide? Jérôme Bonaparte’s old comrade Joshua Barney, with his stranded flotillamen and the 12- and 18-pounders from their scuttled ships! All morning they have ransacked the navy yard for mules and ammunition; the sailors themselves are harnessed to the guns, which they hurriedly place now across the turnpike almost at the District of Columbia line.
They
know how to aim (no deck so steady as terra firma);
they
know how to stand and fire (no place to retreat to on a boat, till your officers decide to turn the thing around). Now whole companies of British die, who had survived the horrors Goya drew. Ross’s advance is stopped; Barney’s marines even mount a brief but successful charge against the King’s Own Regiment, driving them back with bayonets and cutlasses and cries of “Board ’em, boys!”—but there is no President’s Own behind them to follow up with a counterattack.

The flotillamen withdraw to their guns, hold on aggressively yet awhile against the regrouping, readvancing, reencircling British. They begin to die now in numbers themselves; they cling to their line for yet another salvo and another, even when their ammunition wagons (driven by scared civilians under contract) desert them. Under Winder’s orders then, reinforced at last by Barney’s own, they spike their guns and go, leaderless. For (also at his own orders) they must leave their wounded commodore behind. Barney has taken a musket ball in the hip, and concealed the wound till he falls. He will die of it after the war, en route to settle in Kentucky like Odysseus wandering inland from the sea. Now he is discovered by his old adversary Admiral Cockburn, who has suspected all along where such accurate resistance came from. “I knew it was the flotillamen!” he cries to Ross. The general pays his respects and forthwith paroles his wounded enemy. The two old sailors congratulate each other on the most effective fighting of the day (those rockets were Cockburn’s idea); the admiral orders the commodore fetched back to Bladensburg for medical care and release, then rejoins Ross to pursue the battle.

But the battle is done. British casualties, most of them from Barney’s naval gunnery, are twice those of the Americans, who are not present to be killed. Catching up with them is out of the question; it is an oven of an afternoon. “The victors were too weary,” Cockburn reports later, “the vanquished too swift,” for evening out the casualties. The redcoats rest. As the sun goes down a fresh party is brought forward to enter the city, which Ross expects to be better defended by a regrouped American army.

But the invaders march down Maryland Avenue unopposed toward the Capitol. Not only have the defenders fled; they have looted as they flew: had Dolley Madison not seen to it that George Washington’s portrait was evacuated from the President’s House, it would as likely have fallen to American looters as to British, as did Madison’s dueling pistols. The President’s butler has packed a few last valuables, left the front-door key at the Russian ministry, and gone in search of his employers. Save for one volley from Robert Sewall’s house on Maryland Avenue and 2nd Street N.E., there is no resistance whatever. Sewall’s house is quickly fired with rockets. A few blacks stand about to watch; there are no other Washingtonians in evidence. In vain, as the building burns, Ross orders drumrolls to call for a parley; he is still more inclined to indemnify than to burn. There is no one to reply. No interim authority has been delegated, no orders have been given, no provisions made. Admiral Cockburn is delighted: nothing for it now but to proceed with their business!

But, Muse, before you sing the sack of Washington, say: Can you see, from the heights of Helicon, where is our ancestor all this while, my son’s and mine? For this
Marylandiad
is no history book, but the epic of Andrew Cook at the midpoint of his life. He was up all night: has he slept through the day’s most epical set piece? Was he lost in the confusion of battle like Stendhal’s Fabrizio at Waterloo? It is past eight; that glare in the east is the Washington Navy Yard, fired by its retreating commandant; those explosions are the fort at Greenleaf Point, ditto. Now it is nine: British demolition teams have broken into the Capitol, chopped its woodwork into kindling, piled up chairs and tables in the Senate and the House, added buckets of rocket powder; Cockburn has seated himself in the place of the Speaker of the House, gaveled for order, and put the mocking question to his men: Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?

Where is A. B. Cook IV?

Why, Henry, there he is, there in the doorway, just entered from the lobby, his throat so full of a heartfelt, self-surprising
nay
that he can scarcely keep it in! Like Madison, whose near-blundering into British hands he has earlier observed from across the lines of battle, Andrew has been a mere spectator of the Bladensburg debacle. He has not been impressed with Ross’s generalship: after so much prodding and vacillation, the man in Andrew’s opinion made a foolish and bloody decision to attack frontally across that bridge (no doubt in his surprise to find it intact). He could as easily have forded the river upstream and fallen on the Americans’ flank while Cockburn fired his Congreves into their front; British casualties needn’t have been so high. Nevertheless, Andrew has felt personal shame at the panic and rout of the American militia, and contrariwise such admiration for Josh Barney’s resistance that with Cockburn’s permission he has accompanied the wounded commodore back to the Bladensburg tavern pressed into service as a field hospital. It is Andrew who, when Barney complains that Ross’s soldiers don’t know how to bear a stretcher properly, finds four willing sailors from the rocket squad to relieve them, and suggests they soothe their patient en route with fo’c’sle chanteys.

It is not simply Barney’s physical courage that Andrew is moved by, but his particular brand of patriotism: complex, at times self-interested (it was Barney’s vanity, piqued by the promotions of others before himself, that led him earlier to resign his commission in the U.S. Navy for one in the French), but strong and unambiguous where it matters—by contrast, say, with the contemptible soullessness of Secretary Armstrong, or his own confusions, equivocations, blunderings. In this, Barney seems to Andrew a rougher-cast version of Joel Barlow; indeed, they could pass for brothers both in appearance and under the skin. When the commodore thanks him for his attentions and asks whether he hasn’t seen him somewhere before—perhaps in William Patterson’s house a dozen years ago?—Andrew fakes a cockney accent and denies it.

The old man seen to, Andrew makes his way back into Washington, wishing as fervently as ever in his life that he could spit out “this
Father
business” once and for all and be…
himself!
By the blaze of Robert Sewall’s house he rides down Maryland Avenue to the Capitol, its windows shot out, its great doors battered open. He contemplates the imminent destruction, not merely of Corinthian columns and marble walls, but of the infant Library of Congress upstairs and the Supreme Court’s law library below; of the records, the files, the archives of the young republic. He passes through the lobby to the House chamber, his head full of the slogans of the American and French revolutions, together with the ideals of the Magna Carta, of English Common Law and parliamentary procedure. Why are these destroying these? Futile as the gesture would have been, when he sees Admiral Cockburn in the Speaker’s chair and hears him call to his rocket-wielding troopers for the question, the
nay
comes near to bursting from him…

But then it strikes Andrew that the
official
incumbent of that chair is the man perhaps most singly responsible for the war: Henry Clay, the archhawk of Kentucky, at that moment in Ghent with the peace commissioners to make sure that no Indian Free State is let into the treaty, and brandishing in token of his belligerence a razor-strop made from the skin of Tecumseh.
“Aye!”
our forefather shouts before the rest, who chorus affirmation. It is exactly ten o’clock. The motion carries; Cockburn raps the gavel; rockets are fired into the piled-up combustibles; the party retires from the blaze and moves down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House and the Treasury Building. Over his shoulder, as he moves on with them, Andrew sees the Capitol of the United States in flames.

Now the men are weary. All but the indefatigable Cockburn complete the night’s work methodically, with little horseplay. If Ross has been less than resolute or brilliant as an attacker, he is an admirable executor of this occupation, for which he has no taste. There are no rapes, no molestations of civilians, no systematic pillaging of private property. Even the looting of the public buildings he keeps to the souvenir level, and he frowningly detaches himself from Cockburn’s high jinks. At the President’s House they find dinner laid out for forty: as Cockburn’s men fall upon the cold meats and Madeira, and the admiral toasts the health of “Jemmy Madison and the prince regent,” and steals “Jemmy’s love letters” from a desk drawer and a cushion from Mrs. Madison’s chair to remind him “of Dolley’s sweet arse,” Ross quietly gives orders to fire the place and move on. The officers retire to Mrs. Suter’s tavern on 15th Street for a late supper; Ross’s frown darkens when the admiral rides roaring in upon the white mule he has been pleased to bestride all day. Such displays Ross regards as dangerous to good discipline and unbefitting the dignity of such events as the destruction of capital cities.

Andrew agrees, though in the contrast of humors between the general and the admiral he sees a paradigm of his own mixed feelings, and he is mindful of the resolve and bold imagination that entitle Cockburn to his present entertainment. Since the firing of the Capitol, Andrew’s heart is still. He quotes here an ironic editorial comment from a British newspaper printed weeks later, when the news reaches London:

The destruction itself, reports Andrew, from the moment of that gavel rap in Cockburn’s congress, has seemed to him to move from the historical plane to the fabulous. Like one “whose father’s certain death releases one at last to love him,” Andrew feels the stirrings of a strange new emotion.

But first one must see that father truly and completely buried, and so he not only follows Ross and Cockburn through the balance of the night’s destruction, and the next day’s, but finds finally “a fit chiaroscuro” in the contrast of their manners, “apt as Don Quixote and his ribald squire.” It is getting on to midnight. From Mrs. Suter’s tavern the trio ride to their final errand of the evening, another of Cockburn’s inspirations, which Ross reluctantly assents to: private property or not, the Admiral vows he will not sleep until he burns the offices of the
National Intelligencer,
which for two years has been abusing him in its columns. The general goes along to make sure that no other private buildings are damaged or further mischief made; Andrew to see “the funeral rites” through to the end and confirm his sense of the increasing fabulousness of the occasion.

They locate Joe Gales’s
Intelligencer
building between 6th and 7th streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, and by the light of the still-blazing Capitol read the lead story of its morning edition, fetched out by the soldiers who break down the door: The city is safe; there is no danger from the British. Just at midnight another thunderstorm breaks theatrically upon them. Cockburn yields to the entreaties of two neighbor ladies not to burn the building, lest their houses catch fire as well. It is too wet now for burning anyhow; he will wreck the place in the morning. He commandeers a red tunic and musket from one of the 3rd Brigade troopers, bids Andrew take them, and orders him to stand watch at the
Intelligencer
till they return at dawn. Cook has been witness long enough; time to earn his pay.