August 24, 1814—In a day of terror and destruction that would not be repeated in the nation’s capital until September 11, 2001, British troops easily defeated an American force at the Battle of Bladensburg, then reached Washington, D.C., putting the torch to the White House, the Capitol, and other federal buildings.
Only a violent storm that was the worst in memory—a hurricane, actually, that blew the roofs off houses—finally tamped down the fires.
Despite what some historians think about responsibility for the burning of Washington (e.g., Henry Adams, claiming that the two British commanders, “alone among military officers, during more than twenty years of war, considered their duty to involve personal incendiarism”), the real crime lay in lack of preparedness, fostered by an American administration that went to war believing it would be a cinch to make Canada an American state, that staffed its highest military ranks with superannuated veterans of a conflict nearly 40 years before, and that passed on the opportunity to fortify Washington while it still had the chance.
In the Maryland town of Bladensburg, James Madison, wielding two borrowed dueling pistols, became the only American President to personally command troops in battle while he was in office. But with a weak voice and a stature that made him the shortest Chief Executive in our history, the image he presented, I’m afraid, would have sparked more ridicule than Michael Dukakis in a tank.
When the day was over, Madison groaned: “I could never have believed that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force had I not seen the events of this day.”
Yet the President had nobody but himself and his Democratic-Republican Party to blame. They had believed you could fight the world’s greatest navy with not much more than riverine gunboats, and that militia called together with barely a moment’s notice would stand against exhaustively trained professional troops.
Most of all, Madison had only to look in the mirror to glimpse the man responsible for disastrous personnel decisions that made the Bladensburg defeat and the grand DC fire inevitable.
The most disastrous appointment was John Armstrong, a Revolutionary War veteran who became Secretary of War. Indolence hadn’t proved fatal in Armstrong’s prior stints as U.S. Senator from New York and minister to France, but in his new job, that weakness—combined with a refusal to believe that the British would strike Washington rather than Baltimore—proved catastrophic.
Further hampering the cabinet officer was his fraught relationship to James Monroe, the Secretary of State. Monroe would not have minded at all assuming a military post that would have given him even greater renown than his rank of colonel during the American Revolution. But Armstrong would have none of it, and Monroe would, when the opportunity presented itself, force Armstrong’s ouster.
From August 19 through the 23rd, the British expeditionary force, having landed on the Chesapeake Bay, took their sweet time (a summer heat wave was on) heading toward Washington. Armstrong’s adamant insistence to Madison for the last several weeks that the nation’s capital need not be strengthened left the city wide-open and vulnerable.
If Madison didn’t particularly distinguish himself, either in planning or personal command, then the First Lady, Dolley Madison, did—or at least the public did, judging by the popularity she enjoyed for rescuing Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington before she fled the White House.
More recently, the possibility has emerged that even this feather in the Madisons’ cap was not quite what happened at the time. It depends on who you believe—Dolley or a family slave who adored his master but resented the First Lady for breaking a promise to free him.
The slave, Paul Jennings, would, in a 19-page memoir, claim that the story that made Dolley beloved with the American people was false:
“She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susè [Jean-Pierre Sioussat] (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it [the Washington portrait] down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of.”
For a long time, historians tended to side with Dolley rather than her slave, for three reasons: a) his account had the distinct tone of sour grapes; b) while Dolley was white, her slave was an African-American and, in the racist view of the time, not worth taking into account; and c) Dolley’s account, a letter to a sister, was written contemporaneously, while Jennings’ was written in old age, when memories tend to be less reliable.
Though the first of these reasons remains intact, the second has come under heavy attack since the civil-rights era. Even the third is now at issue. It turns out that Dolley didn’t write the latter after all at the time of the fire, but instead copied out the message 20 years later. The letter is also far less chatty than her usual style, perhaps because she expected it would reach a wide audience.
Perhaps, as Jennings indicated, Dolley did not take down the portrait herself. There seems no reason to think, however, that she didn't direct that it be properly disposed of. She certainly possessed more foresight than her husband and his commanders on the same day.
Only a violent storm that was the worst in memory—a hurricane, actually, that blew the roofs off houses—finally tamped down the fires.
Despite what some historians think about responsibility for the burning of Washington (e.g., Henry Adams, claiming that the two British commanders, “alone among military officers, during more than twenty years of war, considered their duty to involve personal incendiarism”), the real crime lay in lack of preparedness, fostered by an American administration that went to war believing it would be a cinch to make Canada an American state, that staffed its highest military ranks with superannuated veterans of a conflict nearly 40 years before, and that passed on the opportunity to fortify Washington while it still had the chance.
In the Maryland town of Bladensburg, James Madison, wielding two borrowed dueling pistols, became the only American President to personally command troops in battle while he was in office. But with a weak voice and a stature that made him the shortest Chief Executive in our history, the image he presented, I’m afraid, would have sparked more ridicule than Michael Dukakis in a tank.
When the day was over, Madison groaned: “I could never have believed that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force had I not seen the events of this day.”
Yet the President had nobody but himself and his Democratic-Republican Party to blame. They had believed you could fight the world’s greatest navy with not much more than riverine gunboats, and that militia called together with barely a moment’s notice would stand against exhaustively trained professional troops.
Most of all, Madison had only to look in the mirror to glimpse the man responsible for disastrous personnel decisions that made the Bladensburg defeat and the grand DC fire inevitable.
The most disastrous appointment was John Armstrong, a Revolutionary War veteran who became Secretary of War. Indolence hadn’t proved fatal in Armstrong’s prior stints as U.S. Senator from New York and minister to France, but in his new job, that weakness—combined with a refusal to believe that the British would strike Washington rather than Baltimore—proved catastrophic.
Further hampering the cabinet officer was his fraught relationship to James Monroe, the Secretary of State. Monroe would not have minded at all assuming a military post that would have given him even greater renown than his rank of colonel during the American Revolution. But Armstrong would have none of it, and Monroe would, when the opportunity presented itself, force Armstrong’s ouster.
From August 19 through the 23rd, the British expeditionary force, having landed on the Chesapeake Bay, took their sweet time (a summer heat wave was on) heading toward Washington. Armstrong’s adamant insistence to Madison for the last several weeks that the nation’s capital need not be strengthened left the city wide-open and vulnerable.
If Madison didn’t particularly distinguish himself, either in planning or personal command, then the First Lady, Dolley Madison, did—or at least the public did, judging by the popularity she enjoyed for rescuing Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington before she fled the White House.
More recently, the possibility has emerged that even this feather in the Madisons’ cap was not quite what happened at the time. It depends on who you believe—Dolley or a family slave who adored his master but resented the First Lady for breaking a promise to free him.
The slave, Paul Jennings, would, in a 19-page memoir, claim that the story that made Dolley beloved with the American people was false:
“She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susè [Jean-Pierre Sioussat] (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it [the Washington portrait] down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of.”
For a long time, historians tended to side with Dolley rather than her slave, for three reasons: a) his account had the distinct tone of sour grapes; b) while Dolley was white, her slave was an African-American and, in the racist view of the time, not worth taking into account; and c) Dolley’s account, a letter to a sister, was written contemporaneously, while Jennings’ was written in old age, when memories tend to be less reliable.
Though the first of these reasons remains intact, the second has come under heavy attack since the civil-rights era. Even the third is now at issue. It turns out that Dolley didn’t write the latter after all at the time of the fire, but instead copied out the message 20 years later. The letter is also far less chatty than her usual style, perhaps because she expected it would reach a wide audience.
Perhaps, as Jennings indicated, Dolley did not take down the portrait herself. There seems no reason to think, however, that she didn't direct that it be properly disposed of. She certainly possessed more foresight than her husband and his commanders on the same day.
