On the 16th of August, twenty-one sail of the line, under Admiral Cochrane, arrived in Chesapeake Bay, and effected a junction with Cockburn's squadron. The enemy's force was divided into three parts. One division was sent up the Potomac, under Captain Gordon, for the purpose of bombarding Fort Warburton, and opening the way to the city of Washington; and another, under Sir Peter Parker, was dispatched to threaten Baltimore. The main body ascended the Patuxent, apparently with the intention of destroying Commodore Barney's flotilla, which had taken refuge at the head of that river, but with the real intention, as it was soon discovered, of attacking Washington. In prosecution of this plan, the expedition proceeded to Benedict, the head of frigate navigation, and about forty miles southeast of the capital. Benedict, on the west bank of the Patuxent, was reached on the 19th of August; and on the next day, the debarkation of the land forces, under General Ross, was completed. On the 21st, pur

"There were

the expected incursion of the British. no funds; though the city banks proffered a few hun

suing the course of the river, the troops moved to Nottingham, and on the 22d, arrived at Upper Marlborough; a flotilla, consisting of launches and barges, under the command of Admiral Cockburn, ascending the river and keeping pace with them. The day following, the flotilla of Commodore Barney, in obedience to the orders of the secretary of the navy, was blown up by men left for the purpose; the commodore having already joined General Winder with his seamen and marines.

1814.

The force under General Ross numbered not more than four thousand five hundred men, although rumor and sudden fright expanded his army into at least ten thousand men. The advance was slow; for not only did the total absence of resistance suggest the need of precaution against ambuscades, but the soldiers, long cooped up in the ships, were too much fatigued, by the weight of their accoutrements and provisions, to proceed rapidly. Occasionally, a few of the famous riflemen of the backwoods showed themselves to the invading force; who also caught sight of bodies of American soldiery,— now posted strongly on some rising

very few days unconvertible paper,—as, with the fall of Washington, all banks south of New England stopped payments in coin. There were no rifles; not flints enough; American gunpowder was inferior to English; there was not a cannon mounted for the defence of the seat of government; not a regular soldier there; not a fortress, breastwork, or military fortifica

tion of any kind, within twelve miles. The neighbor

ing militia of Maryland and Virginia were worn down

by disastrous and mortifying service, routed and disheartened. The proportion of regular troops, all of them mere recruits, never tried in fire, was like that of coin to paper, in the wretched currency; so small an infusion of precious metal, that there was scarcely any substance to rely upon."

as the British advanced,-now rapidly evacuating some town, as the British entered,-and now envelopped in clouds of dust, as they crossed the line of the British march. Later still, at night, the outposts were conscious of the near approach of small parties of Americans, apparently intent on the capture or death of stragglers; and these casualties were so frequent, in consequence of the heat of the weather, and the pe

CH. XII.]

culiarities of the country and climate, that the halting places were never many miles apart. The inhabitants of both country and towns, panic-stricken, seemed to disappear in mass before the face of the truculent invaders.

1814.

General Winder's force amounted to about three thousand men at this time, the half of whom were militia, who had never seen as yet an engagement. The Baltimore and Annapolis militia had not arrived, and the Virginia detachment was still delayed. Winder's Winder's camp was at Woodyard, about twelve miles from Washington. Early on the morning of Monday, the 22d of August, an advance corps, under Colonel Scott and Major Porter marched on the road to Nottingham, and were, for the first time, brought in sight of the enemy; yet the American commander, though the men were eager for action, would not risk it with raw and undisciplined troops. Thus, General Ross, who had left the shipping with great uneasiness, was allowed, without cavalry, with hardly a piece of cannon, to advance unmolested, through a well-settled country, abounding in defiles, ravines, streams, woods, and the like, of which the Americans took no advantage, but kept retreating without a blow in defence of their homes and firesides. Winder fell back to the Battalion Old Fields, a position about eight miles from Marlborough, and covering Bladensburg, the bridges on the eastern branch of the Potomac, and Fort Warburton.

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and was joined the next evening by the fifth Baltimore regiment, under Colonel Sterrett, and a rifle battalion under Major Pinkney, in all about twenty-two hundred men. Monroe, the secretary of state, who had been active in giving his advice and assistance to Winder, reached Stansbury's quarters about midnight, and informing him of the advance of the enemy on General Winder, advised him to fall on the rear of the British immediately; but Stansbury, with his troops fatigued by their recent march, declined doing this, and remained during the night at his post. Determining to move towards Washington, having heard of Winder's retreat, Stansbury, before day, crossed the bridge over the eastern branch of the Potomac, and after securing his rear, halted for a few hours. Early in the morning, he again moved forward, with the view of taking possession of some ground for defence, when orders were received from General Winder to give battle to the enemy at Bladensburg, in case they came that way. Looking upon his tired and raw troops, and con sidering the number of the enemy, two or three times as great as his own, Stansbury and his officers resolved that it was impossible for them to make head against the invaders; but receiving peremptory orders to meet the enemy at Bladensburg, Stansbury had no alternative, and prepared as best he could, for what was before him.

VOL III.-32

navy, and attorney-general. Contradictory rumors, and, in general, great alarm prevailed there, and made it a scene of disquiet and disorder, almost surpassing imagination to conceive. "Such," says Ingersoll, "was the laxity of discipline, insubordination, and turbulence, probably unavoidable in a heterogeneous assemblage on a sudden, of citizens armed and unarmed, that an old officer present described the camp as open as a race-field, and noisy as a fair; the militia and sailors, boisterous with mirth or quarrels, the countersign given so loudly by the sentinels, that it might be heard fifty yards."

1814.

On the 23d of August, the British, falling in with a strong body of Americans, practised a rather stale trick upon them, they wheeled off from the main road, and took the direction of Alexandria. Yet the bait took, General Winder abandoned the strong position he had seized on the main road, harassed his troops by a needless march towards that town, and discovered his mistake only time enough to occupy the heights of Bladensburg, just before the enemy came in sight, on the following day. Before this unwise retreat was undertaken, the president reviewed above three thousand men,.in Winder's camp, in the hope of raising in the breasts of the disheartened soldiers, a courageous animation which he did not himself appear to possess. New bands of militia and volunteers joined subsequently; but not in such numbers as was expected or hoped for; and the entire force under Winder did not at any time much exceed five thousand men.

Leaving Winder posted in three lines,

on the rising ground above Bladensburg, with twenty-six guns commanding the only bridge by which the narrow ravine and stream in his front could be crossed, we may notice, in passing, the conduct of the executive and the heads of departments. Every man appears to have been willing to contribute whatever he had, towards making a general and an army. Monroe rode over to the field early in the day, and counselled the loan of General Armstrong to the perplexed commander at Bladensburg; the secretary of the treasury, whom the state of the finances had plunged into a state of profound depression, lent his duelling pistols to the president. Madison and his staff of civilians, hearing of the approach of the enemy, and desirous of affording his countenance to General Winder and his men, were very near riding into the ranks of the British, by mistake. He soon found out that he could do little to aid, and at the first onset he returned to Washington, having, after consulting his cabinet officers grouped round him on horseback, released the brave Joshua Barney from the task of blowing up some bridges, and having sent him and his jolly tars with their guns into line, in order to do something for the credit of the American name.

Though excessively fatigued with the heat and oppressiveness of the weather, the British, when commanded to advance, pushed into the village, which the Americans had neglected to occupy. After a short reconnaissance, during which the column sheltered itself from the fire of the American guns behind the houses, they

1814.

CH. XII.]

made a dash at the narrow bridge, where they suffered severely both from the artillery and from Pinkney's riflemen. Covered in their attack by volleys of rockets, they wheeled off to the right and left of the road, and quickly cleared the thicket of the American skirmishers, who, falling back with precipitation upon the first line, threw it into disorder, before it had fired a shot. In a period of time almost incredibly short, and when the British had scarcely shown themselves, the whole of that line, being ordered to retreat by General Winder, gave way, and fled in the utmost confusion.*

For a while, the second line not only stood their ground, but drove back the enemy—who, lightening themselves by throwing away their knapsacks, extended their ranks so as to show an

equal front with the Americans-almost to the wooded bank of the river. But now the second brigade of the British had crossed, and having formed, was advancing to the charge in firm array; threatened thus, and their left flank, being turned, the whole American line wavered, and then broke, and rushed from the field in total and indiscriminate flight. Barney and his sailors alone offered any resistance. They were employed as gunners, and not only did they serve their guns with a

* Colonel Williams's recently published "History of the Invasion and Capture of Washington," enters into details more fully than we can possibly do: his volume is a well timed contribution to existing works on the subject, and we have little doubt that, in the main, he is right in supposing that the troops have been unduly censured for what took place, and made to bear the blame which rightly belonged elsewhere.

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quickness and precision which astonished their assailants, but they stood till some of them were actually bayonetted, with fusees in their hands; nor was it till the gallant Barney was wounded and taken, and they saw themselves deserted on all sides by the soldiers, that they quitted the field.

Not more than fifty of the Americans were killed, or wounded, upon this memorable occasion; the rest fled in a state of terror and delirium; "the only death on the retreat was said to be that of a captain of the regular army, of approved courage, who, taken with the contagion of unanimous panic, ran with the crowd till he fell, fainted, and expired." The loss on the part of the English was some seven or eight hundred killed, wounded, and missing; including several officers of rank and distinction. The Americans left ten of their guns in the hands of the victors. None of their artillery, except that which the sailors worked, was fired more than twice or thrice. The British were able to bring only one of their guns into action. The conquerors in this extraordinary engagement, (which lasted from one till four o'clock in the afternoon of the 24th of August,) unprovided with cavalry, and completely exhausted with heat and toil, were unable to pursue the flying Americans. Rest was so indispensable to them, that they laid down and slept upon the field of battle; nor could they resume the march till after some two hours' sleep, when, in the cool of the evening, they set out towards Washington.

1814.

The few efforts made by General Winder to methodize the rout, and

convert it into a retreat, were but partially successful. About two thousand well-armed men-including a Virginia regiment, which, though it came up the preceding evening, could not get supplied with flints, until the last gun was discharged on their side in the battle were kept together, and halted for a moment about two miles from Washington. "But General Winder," says Ingersoll, "deemed it prudent to order them to fall back, from the position they occupied and reluctantly left, to another nearer the city; where he contemplated making a stand. Arrived and halted there, however, he ordered them again to retire to the capitol, where they were finally to await the enemy. There General Armstrong suggested throwing them into the two wings of that stone, strong building;" but Winder rejected the proposal with some warmth, and Monroe coincided with him in opinion. "The capitol, he feared, might prove a cul-de-sac, from which there would be no escape; the only safety was to rally on the Heights of Georgetown, beyond Washington. For the seventh time that day, a retreat, therefore, was once more commanded. In anguish and with loud execrations, some of them in tears, the city troops, with the rest, for the last time turned their backs on the enemy, then fast asleep on the parched earth not more than cannon shot from the capital. To desert their homes, families, and dwellings; to march degraded by their forsaken wives and children, leaving all they had or cherished to the barbarities of an enraged and inhuman invader, was insupportable. Both at their first or

1814.

der to retreat toward the capitol, and their last to retreat from it, and march beyond the city, insubordinate protests, oaths, tears, and bitter complaints broke forth. To preserve order in ranks so demoralized and degraded, was impossible. Broken, scattered, licentious, and tumultuous, they wandered along the central, solitary avenue, which is the great entry of Washington; when arrived at Georgetown, were a mere mob, from whom it was preposterous to suppose that an army could be organized, to make a stand there; and, in nearly as great disorder as the runagates, who preceded them across the fields, without venturing into the city, the remnant of disgraced freemen reached Tenlytown in utter mortification; there to be disturbed and alarmed nearly all night by the conflagration, as they had reason to believe, of every house in Washington, whose lurid flames, with the detonation from the navy yard, were the shocking sights and sounds of all the surrounding country, filled with fugitives of both sexes, all ages, and thousands of them men of courage, sleeping on their arms. Broken, scattered, and disgusted, most wended their way to Montgomery court house, fifteen miles from Georgetown, where their unquestionably brave, but ill-starred and ill-advised commander, stung with poignant sorrow, deplored that he had not at Nottingham, at the old fields at Bladensburg, at Washington, somewhere, if not everywhere, less scrupulous of bloodshed, by freer expenditure of that of his fellow-citizens and neighbors, saved the capital of his country from profanation, and its na