BURNING OF WASHINGTON.
While these things were transpiring in the city, the President and his Cabinet were fleeing into Virginia. During the battle of Bladensburg, Mrs. Madison had sat in the Presidential mansion, listening to the roar of cannon in the distance, and anxiously sweeping the road, with her spy-glass, to catch the first approach of her husband, but saw instead, "groups of military, wandering in all directions, as if there was a lack of arms or of spirit, to fight for their own firesides." A carriage stood waiting at the door, filled with plate and other valuables, ready to leave at a moment's warning. The Mayor of the city waited on her, urging her to depart, but she bravely refused, saying she would not stir till she heard from her husband. At length a note from him, in pencil-marks, arrived, bidding her flee. Still delaying, till she could detach a portrait of Washington, by Stuart, from the wall, her friends remonstrated with her. Finding it would take too long to unscrew the painting from the walls, she seized a carving-knife, and cutting the canvas out, hurried away. At Georgetown she met her husband, who, with his Cabinet, in trepidation and alarm, was en route for Virginia. Just as the flames were kindling in the capitol, the President, Mr. Monroe, Mr. Rush, Mr. Mason, and Carroll, were assembled on the shores of the Potomac, where but one little boat could be found to transport them over. Desponding and sad, they were rowed across in the gloom, a part at a time, and mounting their horses, rode hurriedly and sadly away. Mrs. Madison returned towards Georgetown, accompanied by nine troopers, and stopped ten miles and a half from the town. Trembling from the anxiety and fright of the day—separated from her husband, now a fugitive in the darkness—oppressed with fears and gloomy forebodings, she sat down by an open window, and through the tears that streamed from her eyes, gazed forth on the flames of the burning city, and listened with palpitating heart to the muffled shouts and tumult that rose in the distance.
Before daylight, she, with her lady companions, started for a place of rendezvous appointed by her husband, sixteen miles from Georgetown.
The 25th of August dawned gloomily over the smouldering city, and the red sun, as he rolled into view, looked on a scene of devastation and ruin. From their drunken orgies, negroes and soldiers crawled forth to the light of day, roused by the reveille from the hill of the capitol, and the morning gun that sent its echoes through the sultry air.
Rising from his debauch, Cockburn sallied forth to new deeds of shame. The War office, and other public offices, among them the building of the National Intelligencer, were set on fire, and the pillage and riot of the preceding day again sent terror through the city. The gallant admiral seemed refreshed rather than enervated by the plunder, conflagration and debauch of the night that had passed, and brilliant and witty as the day before, "was merry in his grotesque rambles about Washington, mounted on a white, uncurried, long switch-tail brood mare, followed by a black foal, neighing after its dam, in which caricature of horsemanship that harlequin of havoc, paraded the streets, and laughed at the terrified women imploring him not to destroy their homes. "Never fear," said he, "you shall be much safer under my administration than Madison's." "Be sure," said he to those who were destroying the types of the National Intelligencer, "that all the C's are demolished, so that the rascals can no longer abuse my name as they have done."[5]
In the midst of this wanton destruction and barbarian licentiousness, two events occurred calculated to sober even a more brutal man than he. A detachment had been sent to destroy two rope-walks, at a place called Greenleaf's point, a short distance from the city. After they were burned, an officer threw the torch with which the buildings had been lighted, into a dry well near by. But this well had been made for a long time the repository of useless shells, cartridges and gunpowder. The unextinguished torch ignited this subterranean magazine, which exploded with a violence that shook the earth, and sent dismembered bodies and limbs, mingled with fragments of iron, and dust and smoke, heavenward together. When it cleared away, nearly a hundred officers and men were seen strewed around, some killed, others presenting torn, misshapen masses of human flesh. The sad procession, carrying the mutilated and dead back to the city, had scarcely reached it before the heavens became dark as twilight, and that ominous silence which always betokens some dreadful convulsion of nature fell on the earth. The air was still, and the burning dwellings around shed a baleful light over the faces of men, on which sat terror and perplexity. This portentous silence was broken by the rush and roar of a hurricane, that swept with the voice and strength of the sea, over the devastated city. Flashes of lightning rent the gloom, and the thunder rolled and broke in deafening crashes over head. The flames leaped up into fiercer glow, under the strong breath of the tempest; private dwellings that had escaped the incendiary's torch were stripped of their roofs, and the crash of falling, walls and shrieks of terrified men and women fleeing through the streets, imparted still greater terror to the appalling spectacle. The British army, on the Capitol hill, was rent into fragments before it, and scattered as though a magazine had exploded in its midst. Thirty soldiers, besides many of the inhabitants, were overwhelmed in the ruins.
Fleeing before this same hurricane, Mrs. Madison approached the tavern designated by the President as the place where he would meet her, but was refused admittance by the terrified women within, who had also fled thither, because she was the wife of the man who had involved them in those horrors of war, made still more terrible by the visitation of God. He, in thus turning day into night, had evinced his displeasure, and foretold his judgments; and not until an entrance was forced by the men, would they allow her a shelter from the storm. There her husband, the fugitive President of the republic, drenched with rain, hungry and exhausted, joined her in the evening. Provided with nothing but a cold lunch, he retired to his miserable couch, not knowing what tidings the morning would bring him.
In the mean time General Ross, chagrined at the part he had been compelled to play—filled with self-reproaches at the wanton destruction of a public library, was anxious and unquiet at the non-arrival of the boats that had accompanied him to Alexandria. In constant fear of an uprising of the people of the country, he was eager to get back to the ships. As soon therefore as night set in, he resolved to commence his retreat. To prevent pursuit, an order was issued prohibiting the appearance of a single inhabitant in the street after eight o'clock. At nine, in dead silence, and with quick step, as though stealing on a sleeping foe, the advance column took up its march and passed unnoticed out of the city. The camp fires on the hill of the capitol were kept blazing, and piled with fuel sufficient to preserve them bright till near morning, in order to convey the impression that the army was still there, and at a late hour the rear column followed after, and silently and rapidly traversed the road to Bladensburg. Not a word was spoken, not a man allowed to step out of his place. Arriving on the ground which had been occupied by other brigades, they found it deserted, but the fires were still blazing as though the encampment had not been broken up. Approaching the field of Bladensburg, they saw in the white moonbeams the whiter corpses of the unburied dead, who had been stripped of their clothing and now lay scattered around on the green slope and banks of the stream where they had fallen. The hot August rain and sun had already begun to act on the mutilated flesh, and a horrible stench loaded the midnight air. Stopping there for an hour, to enable the soldiers to hunt up their knapsacks thrown aside the day before, Ross again hurried them forward, and kept them at the top of their speed all night. If the column paused for a moment, the road was instantly filled with soldiers fast asleep. Men were constantly straggling away, or falling into slumbers, from which even the sword could with difficulty prick them, and the army threatened to be disorganized. It therefore became necessary to halt, and the order to do so had scarcely passed down the line before every man was sound asleep, and the entire army in five minutes resembled a heap of dead bodies on a field of battle. Resting here under the burning sun until midday, Ross then resumed his march and reached Marlborough at night, and the next day proceeded leisurely back to the ships.
The raid had been successful—Washington was sacked. Two millions of property had been destroyed—the capitol, with its library—the President's house—the Treasury and War, Post offices, and other public edifices, burned to the ground, together with five private dwellings, thirteen more being pillaged. These, with the destruction of the office of the National Intelligencer, two rope-walks, and a bridge over the Potomac, constituted the achievements of this redoubtable army of invasion.
The English press, which had teemed with accounts of Napoleon's barbarity, and the English heart, which had heaved with noble indignation against the man who could rob the galleries of conquered provinces to adorn those of Paris, had no word of condemnation or expression of anger for this wanton outrage, but on the contrary, laudations innumerable. Napoleon had marched into almost every capital of Europe without destroying a library or work of art, or firing a dwelling. With his victorious armies he had entered city after city, and yet no Vandalism marred his conquest. The palaces of kings, who had perjured themselves again and again to secure his downfall, had never been touched, and yet he was denounced as a robber and proclaimed to the world a modern Attila. But an English army, warring against a nation that spoke the same language, and was descended from the same ancestors, could enter a city that had made no defence—had not exasperated the conquerors by forcing them to a long siege or desperate assault, and, without provocation, burn down a public library, the unoffending capitol and presidential mansion, state offices, and even private dwellings. Incredible as this act appears, the greater marvel is how the English nation could exult over it. An American victory tarnished by such barbarity and meanness, would overwhelm the authors of it in eternal disgrace. And yet, a popular so-called historian of England, in narrating this transaction, says it was "one of the most brilliant expeditions ever carried into execution by any nation." An army of some four thousand regulars put to flight five or six thousand raw militia, and, with the loss of a few hundred men, marched into a small unfortified town, occupied as the capital of the United States, and like a band of robbers, set fire to the public Library, Arsenal, Treasury, War office, President's house, two rope-walks and a bridge; and such an affair the historian of Lodi, Marengo, Austerlitz, and Waterloo,—of the terrible conflicts of the peninsular, and the sublime sea-fights of Aboukir and Trafalgar, calls "one of the most brilliant expeditions carried into execution by any nation."