“Upon the arrival of Colonel Wadsworth, on June 24th, a consultation was held between him and the Commodore, to which Captain Miller of the Marines was invited; it was decided by these officers, that a battery and furnace should be erected on the commanding height near the mouth of the creek, upon which the colonel’s two eighteen-pounders should be placed, and that, on the 26th before daylight, a simultaneous attack should be made by the flotilla and battery upon the blockading ships. The Commodore placed one of his best officers, Mr. Groghegan (a sailing-master), and twenty picked men, under the command of Colonel Wadsworth, for the purpose of working his two guns.
MAP OF CHESAPEAKE BAY, to Illustrate the Taking of WASHINGTON by the British, August 14, 1814.
“On the evening of the 25th, after dark, the Commodore moved with his flotilla down the creek, and at early dawn of the 26th they were gratified and cheered by the sound of the guns from the opening battery on the height. The barges now seemed to fly under the rapid strokes of the oar, and in a few minutes reached the mouth of the creek, where they assumed the line of battle, and opened fire upon the moored ships. Their position was eminently critical and hazardous, but this in the view of the gallant souls on board only rendered it the more honorable. They were within four hundred yards of the enemy; and the mouth of the creek was so narrow as to admit no more than eight barges abreast. The men were wholly unprotected by any species of bulwark, and the grape- and canister-shot of the enemy, which were poured upon them in ceaseless showers, kept the water around them in a continual foam. It was a scene to appall the inexperienced and the faint-hearted; but there were few of these among the daring spirits of the flotilla. In this situation, the firing was kept up on all sides for nearly an hour. The Commodore was then surprised and mortified to observe that not a single shot from the battery fell with assisting effect, and that the whole fire of the enemy was directed against his boats. Shortly afterward the battery, from which so much had been expected, became silent altogether, and the barges were hauled off as a matter of consequent necessity. Three of our barges, under the respective commands of Sailing-masters Worthington, Kiddall, and Sellars, suffered very much in the action, and ten of their men were killed and wounded.
“A few minutes after the flotilla had retired, it was perceived that the enemy’s frigates were in motion, and in a little time the whole blockading squadron got under way and stood down the river. One of the frigates, it was observed, had four pumps constantly at work. This movement on the part of the enemy spoke pretty plainly their opinion of “Barney’s flotilla;” it was very evident that they had seen quite as much of him as they desired to see. The way being thus unexpectedly opened to him, the Commodore immediately left the creek, and moved up the Patuxent River.
“On the night after the engagement the flotilla was anchored opposite the town of Benedict, on the Patuxent. As they were moving up the river, Captain Miller of the Marines went on board the Commodore’s boat, and gave him the first information he had received from the ineffective battery. It appears that Mr. Groghegan, on the evening of the 25th, waited upon Colonel Wadsworth, to receive instructions as to the place where the two guns were to be stationed; the colonel replied to his inquiry in these words: “As you are to command and fight them, place them where you please!” The officer immediately set to work with his men, and began to construct his battery on the summit of the hill which completely commanded the ships. He continued at work all night and had nearly finished his platform when, about 1 A.M., Colonel Wadsworth came upon the ground, and after examining the work, declared “that his guns should not be put there—that they would be too much exposed to the enemy!” Having given this as his only argument, he ordered a platform to be made in the rear of the summit. As there could be no disputing his orders, he was obeyed, of course, and the consequence was, that the guns, being placed on the declivity, must either be fired directly into the hill, or be elevated, after the manner of bombs, so high in the air as to preclude the possibility of all aim, and rendered them utterly useless. At the very first fire, the guns recoiled half way down the hill, and in this situation they continued to be fired in the air, at random, until the colonel gave orders to have them spiked and abandoned.”
The Flag of Fort McHenry—After the British Attack in 1814.
From a photograph at the Naval Academy, Annapolis.
The above quotations are from Mary Barney’s “Memoir of Commodore Barney.” The British were driven away for the time, but they returned in August, having determined to attack the American capital. Under orders from Washington Captain Barney burned his fleet, and with his men, some four hundred in number, joined the army assembled to defend the capital. They made the best fight of any body of men there when the final fight came, and Barney received a wound from which he never fully recovered, although he lived several years longer. The new forty-four-gun frigate Columbia and the sloop-of-war Argus were burned on the stocks when Washington was taken by the British, besides the old condemned Boston and a lot of ship timber and naval stores. This was, of course, an entirely legitimate destruction. Had the gun-boats been one-half as efficient as their advocates supposed they were, Washington would not have been captured.