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War of 1812 – Burning Washington, D.C. – Robert Watson
210 Plays1 year ago
Ep 037 – Nonfiction. The War of 1812 was disastrous for the U.S., the lowest moment being the capture and burning of Washington, D.C. Historian Robert Watson talks about his new book, "When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise from the Ashes."
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Transcript
The British Decision on Washington's Fate
00:00:00
Speaker
they set about the task of burning the city. First up, the Capitol, then the White House, then the Treasury, State, and War Departments. They fire those Congreve rockets onto the roof of the Capitol and the White House, but it doesn't burn. So what they do is... Now, a question for their choice to burn the city. Why burn the city instead of capture the city and occupy it? Good. So one idea was to capture the city.
00:00:27
Speaker
One idea was just to destroy for command and control purposes. Another idea is maybe occupy the city. Coburn, the admiral, wants to kill everybody. He wants to burn everything. He wants to inflict destruction, occupy. Ross, however, says a couple of things. Number one, he has 4,500 men once the other 3,000 or so catch up to the army. That's probably not enough to hold a capital city. Two, he has very little artillery.
00:00:56
Speaker
probably not enough to hold the city. Hi, everyone.
Introduction: War Books Podcast
00:01:10
Speaker
This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show Robert Watson for his new book, When Washington Burned.
00:01:25
Speaker
the British invasion of the capital and a nation's rise from the ashes. Robert is a distinguished professor of American history at Lane University and the author and editor of more than 40 books. That's a lot of books. Including George Washington's final battle, the epic struggle to build a capital city and a nation. Robert, how are you doing today?
00:01:49
Speaker
Good, AJ. Pleasure to be on the show and let me thank you for what you do. Military history and history education, those are topics near and dear to my heart. So thank you for spreading the word. Absolutely. Well, yeah, real pleasure to have you on the show today, especially because I love topics that, you know, we get a lot of World War II stuff and especially a lot of Russia and Ukraine right now, which is a very important topic to talk about. But the War of 1812 isn't one.
00:02:18
Speaker
that you're going to be, I think this is the first War of 1812. And also too with the, so it seems like the DC region is an interest of yours.
00:02:33
Speaker
Fun fact, Bladensburg, which of course is where the invasion took place for the British to get to Washington. I almost moved around there. I'm in the DC region right now. I think across from the battlefield, there's maybe some fast food restaurants now. Yeah, there are. I'm glad that you brought up the War of 1812. I've written on the revolution, I've written on the Civil War, and I've written on World War II.
The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict?
00:03:01
Speaker
I think I have one book on each of those.
00:03:03
Speaker
But, you know, the War of 1812, sort of the middle child in a way, you know, be sandwiched between the revolution and the Civil War. And of course, the revolution and Civil War are so larger than life and such a focus, you know, iconic events in American history that we kind of forget or skip the War of 1812. Yet, I think it's one of the most fascinating wars in history. And it's one that Harry Truman called, quote, unquote, the silliest damn war we ever fought.
00:03:34
Speaker
We didn't need to be in it. And of course, it's a war name for one year, fought for two and a half. And when it ended, it was an inglorious tie. So it's almost like the Keystone Cops or Larry Moe and Curly were managing the war. It's just a crazy, bizarre, tragic, but yet triumphal in some ways.
00:03:56
Speaker
conflict. So I'm happy to be able to share it with you and your audience. Well, a question that I like to have everybody start off answering is, in your own words, can you just say, what is your book about?
Exploring the Burning of Washington
00:04:10
Speaker
So the book's about a few things. One, it's about the burning of the capital city. But I want to look at the events before, put it in context. That's the key for history, context, context, context. Why did the British burn it?
00:04:24
Speaker
What motivated them? Why weren't we able to stop it? Then it also explores the actual burning of the capital city. And then it concludes with the fight to rebuild the capital city and imbue the people with a sense of national identity and national pride, which was certainly lacking before. And of course, given the way that most of the battles turned out, not good for us during the wars, it was a real low point in American
00:04:50
Speaker
military history. So we needed this sort of, I guess, triumphal rebuilding of the Capitol to lift up the spirits of the country. Well, with some of the other topics you've written about, some of the other wars, why this one? Why this moment that you chose to write about? So I taught briefly at Georgetown. The publisher of this book is Georgetown University Press. Both my kids were in college in Washington, D.C. I went to college in Virginia.
00:05:19
Speaker
Washington DC is my favorite city in the United States. Love the tree line National Mall. Love the touching memorials and monuments to our heroes and fallen majestic government buildings. But I've always found that people don't know much about the story of how Washington DC came to be the capital. They don't know much about the battles fights and and anything outside of the political intrigues of the city. And
00:05:45
Speaker
As you mentioned earlier with Bladensburg, you know, for instance, I was just in New York City and New York City has some marvelous historical sites. Francis Tavern Museum, which is where George Washington, Hamilton and others ate. But when you're in New York City, these little historic sites are between skyscrapers and busy cars and horns and ambulances. And it kind of takes away, it's not like going to Gettysburg where you're just in the battlefield. Well, Washington, DC, we have all the hustle and bustle of diplomats and tourists.
00:06:16
Speaker
But in between there, there's some fascinating moments of history. So I think this is my third book on Washington DC. So I really wanted to flesh out a bizarre war, an interesting battle.
Causes and Context of the War of 1812
00:06:31
Speaker
And you can make the argument that this moment is the single closest moment, I guess, this nation ever came to ceasing to exist, even more so than during the Civil War.
00:06:42
Speaker
because the odds were stacked against the Confederacy. It seemed to be only a matter of time that the Union would logistically, you know, I always say the Union had more men, money and manufacturing at 3M. So, but the British literally invade our capital city, put it to the torch and have an occupying army under one of the greatest generals of the time.
00:07:04
Speaker
And we are scattered to the far winds. So I mean, this is probably as close as we've ever come as a nation to ceasing to exist. Yet, a lot of people don't know the story. So thus, this book and our show today. Well, that's great.
00:07:21
Speaker
Like you said at the beginning of the show, you wanted to provide a lot of context to the burning of the capital city. That's where I'm going to start. So before we get to the actual invasion of Washington,
00:07:36
Speaker
Let's talk about some of the root causes because I actually didn't know. I think most people, would you say most Americans don't actually know what started the War of 1812? True. I have another book on the War of 1812. I try to write on each major war. And when I did the book tour, nobody knew anything. The only place I went where people knew a lot about the causes in the war was when I lectured in Canada.
00:08:00
Speaker
The Canadians know this. The Americans really don't know it. And, you know, part of that, AJ, is because it doesn't make textbooks. And the fact that it doesn't make textbooks, and Lin-Manuel Miranda has not yet written a rap-inspired musical about it. Maybe I'll send you the book. But the fact that it's not in textbooks also ties in with the root causes. So to answer your question, there's many causes of the War of 1812 and the British invasion.
00:08:30
Speaker
I think only one of them is legitimate, and that is the issue of impressment, impressment. So Britain's at war with Napoleon and Europe. And you can make the argument that Napoleon has the greatest army, but Britain has the best navy.
00:08:45
Speaker
So Britain is going to use its navy to try to defeat Napoleon. How? They're going to try to blockade virtually every port in Europe. That means Napoleon can't export, can't import, can't move his troops by water. So it's kind of a chokehold, stranglehold. But in order to do that, in order to blockade every port, the British need a lot of boats and a lot of sailors. Now, England's a wonderful place, but it's a relatively resourced, poor, crowded island.
00:09:15
Speaker
So that means where are they going to get all the wood for the boats? Canada. So Canada becomes very, very important for shipbuilding. Secondly, where are they going to get all the sailors? This is where impressment comes in. What the British did was they would press American sailors into serving His Majesty's Navy. So a British warship would stop an American fishing boat or commercial craft, typically New Englanders. You know, New England sailors are the best in the world.
00:09:45
Speaker
So the British would pull the boats over and a press gang, as it was called, at bayonet point, would drag people off and put them to work on the British ship. We don't have accurate numbers or comprehensive numbers. In this book and another book,
00:10:01
Speaker
did my darndest to try to come up with a number. And I feel pretty good about it. I believe that in the years leading up to this war and an invasion, approximately 12,000 Americans were pressed into serving the British. Now, how does that work? How does that work exactly? So you're at bayonet point and the British are like, you're coming to work on this ship now. Do they just keep them at sea for a few months and then bring them back to England?
00:10:26
Speaker
kept them at sea for months or years. You know, the king had, there's a notion back then, once a British subject, always a British subject. You know, so they didn't see the revolution as legitimate. Also, some British sailors would jump ship into America because, you know, working on a fishing boat, it's a lot more lax. You had a chance of making money. I mean, it was the life of a British
00:10:53
Speaker
sailor or marine on a British warship was brutal and defined by hard work and sheer terror during the battles. So some did jump ship, so the British were trying to get them back, but they just seized Americans, paying that point, and many of them never saw their families again. So what that means is with 12,000
00:11:13
Speaker
Basically, every community in New England lost a son, a brother, a father. So that might be reason for war. There were some others, though. In the election before 1812, the midterm of 1810, some southern conservative war hawks came to power, the Henry Clay's, the John C. Calhoun's, and these people just disrespected the revolutionary generation
00:11:37
Speaker
didn't abide by the rules of Congress. They were sort of like, I don't know, like a Marjorie Taylor Greene approach to being a politician. Very feisty, loud, argumentative. They were beating the drums for war. And they really pushed us into this war we didn't need and weren't ready to fight. Why? There were two really ugly underlying currents, you could say. One, some Southerners wanted to expand slavery.
00:12:03
Speaker
maybe to Canada, maybe to Cuba, to the Southwest, what is today the American Southwest, which we would eventually procure with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in what's known as the Mexican-American War, 1840s. So fighting a war, invading Canada, would be a front, if you will, or cover for expanding slavery. Relatedly, a lot of them wanted to expand west. This is the manifest destiny.
00:12:33
Speaker
You know, God blew wind in our sails and we're destined to conquer the continent. So what a lot of them did, a lot of Southern and frontier war hawks, they wanted to commit genocide against the American Indian, literally eliminating the indigenous population. So a war would be a front for that. So this is why we don't really have
00:12:58
Speaker
this discussion in textbooks. We didn't win. It was a tie. We were the belligerent. We were, you know, we started it. We conducted ourselves horribly. So the direct cause of the invasion in the year 1813 were a year plus into the war. And we've had a five to one or 10 to one advantage on the battlefield. And yet all of our attempted invasions of Canada are pushed back by a few British
00:13:25
Speaker
a few Indian allies, and a few Canadians.
00:13:28
Speaker
I mean, this is embarrassing, it's horrendous. And it should be noted, it should be noted too that this is something I thought was interesting is these war hawks that you've been talking about, they actually wanted to capture Canada and make Canada part of the U.S., correct? Yup. This is something I hadn't heard
American Aggression and British Retaliation
00:13:48
Speaker
before. Yeah, they wanted to seize, in fact, you're not only right about it, but they were hell bent. They wanted to seize all of Canada and do it at gunpoint.
00:13:58
Speaker
So we march all these armies, ironically, the same war hawks, usually southern frontier folks, the same war hawks that pushed us into the war that wanted to spread slavery, that wanted to invade Canada. Then they voted against most of the military budgets to build warships, to arm our soldiers. Tragically, some of these units, when they went into Canada and the weather turned cold, they didn't have adequate coats and clothing because those same war hawks cut the budget.
00:14:26
Speaker
You know, I don't know, horrendous. So 1813, we're frustrated. We've failed every time. Tensions from President James Madison on through the military. There's pressure to win. So we finally find a good general. We had a bunch of cowardly and incompetent generals that President Madison should have fired, but he didn't. We finally find a good general. He's like a Lewis and Clark explorer. He's a big, tough, honorable guy.
00:14:56
Speaker
Zebulon Pike, that's where Pike's Peak comes from. So Zebulon Pike sails with a flotilla of warships across the Great Lakes. And in 1813, we're gonna hit the Canadian capital, which was then York. They called it Upper Canada, York. Today, Toronto, it's Toronto today. So we sail in and we make quick work of the British there. There's a fort called Fort York,
00:15:25
Speaker
It's a small garrison. York is not Toronto today. It's just a small town. And Zebulon Pike makes quick work of it. So he brings out some prisoners. He's sitting down with them, talking to the prisoners, saying, if you surrender, I will spare the town, spare the fort, give you good terms. And Zebulon Pike is a gentleman. He's a good general. So he can be believed. As he's interrogating them, a cannonball from one of the warships
00:15:54
Speaker
goes into the fort and hits the arms depot, the powder area. And there's a massive explosion. Many people said it was the largest explosion they'd ever heard. It knocks the walls of the fort back. It knocks over the trees. More men are killed in the explosion on both sides than during the fighting. Many are rendered deaf because of the concussion blast. And it sends a rock hurtling through the air as if launched by a trebuchet or catapult.
00:16:24
Speaker
An American surgeon on scene said it was the size of a harpsichord. And the rock flies through the air and lands on Zebulon Pike's head, squishes him flat as a pancake. With Zebulon Pike dead and all the frustration building, the American soldiers went nuts. We acted like Vikings.
00:16:45
Speaker
marauding, pillaging. We put women, children, and the elderly out of their homes into the forest, and we burned the Canadian capital, including private homes to the ground. So, yeah, so some British said, well, we won't forget that. So that's really one of the root causes of what we're going to talk about coming up. Yeah.
00:17:09
Speaker
And so after this happens, there are a lot of missteps that the Americans make leading up to the invasion.
Leadership Failures in the War of 1812
00:17:20
Speaker
Talking about just the military leadership on the American side, how does the military leadership evolve, and what are some of those missteps that they're making? Well, good. I'm glad you brought that up. In fact, we would need a 20-hour program to discuss all the missteps. It was extraordinary.
00:17:39
Speaker
Jefferson was our third president, 1801 to 1809, then Madison, our fourth president. Jefferson and Madison, neither one had served in uniform during the revolution or subsequent. They both cut the military budget. They were both sort of the less government ideology type politicians, and they both saw a large standing army as a threat to liberty. So they gutted the military budget.
00:18:06
Speaker
Jefferson and Madison were also guilty of doing what a lot of politicians do now, political appointments to the victor go the spoils. So they hired incompetent political allies. We all know that it matters who's in office and who's running this. So they picked a guy to be the secretary of war. We now say secretary of defense. His name was John Armstrong. Armstrong was grotesquely incompetent.
00:18:34
Speaker
should never have been in that position, but Madison putting there and then didn't remove him until, you know, way too late. The general they picked to oversee this was a general named Winder, W-I-N-D-E-R. Winder was not only incompetent, but he was a coward. He spends a good part of this conflict hiding from the British on the run. In fact, as the British were marching to a different city,
00:18:59
Speaker
General Winder shows up and his advice to everybody was run. He told everybody to flee, to run. Civilians, military, and himself. So one of the mistakes was Madison and Jefferson cutting the budget. A second mistake was hiring incompetent political cronies, not firing. And a third mistake was the two people running the defense of Washington. We could literally not have picked two worse people. If you flipped a coin, you would have had better people in office. It's hard to imagine.
00:19:28
Speaker
just a sheer level of incompetence and cowardice from Armstrong and Winder. Now, what are the size of the battles that are taking place around this time? How many people are involved on both sides?
00:19:41
Speaker
So the battles during the War of 1812 are not like the Civil War. You know, if you take Gettysburg, you have maybe 80,000 Union soldiers under Meade, meaning maybe 70,000 Confederates under Lee. The battles in the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s in Europe involved tens, if not 100,000 people. The War of 1812 typically has battles of about 1,000 versus 500.
00:20:09
Speaker
or skirmishes, so they tend to be small affairs. The big fight leading to the invasion of Washington, which occurred at Bladensburg, as you correctly noted at the outset, the Americans muster about 6,500 militiamen. The British are marching with 4,500, but only about 1,000 to 1,500 men in advance arrive there.
00:20:34
Speaker
So this is about, let's say, maybe 1500 versus 6500. And that was one of the bigger battles in that theater of the war. So a much, much, much smaller scale. And speaking of the Napoleonic Wars, talk about, as we get closer to the invasion, talk about what's going through the calculation of the British mines leading up to August of 1814.
The British Invasion Plans
00:21:00
Speaker
As I said a moment ago, in 1812 and 1813, these are small battles, a couple hundred or a couple thousand at most. And we have, as I said, a five to 10 to one advantage numerically on the battlefield, yet we basically lose everything, almost. Now, the British kind of put up with these pesky Americans trying to invade British Canada. Why? Because they've got their hands full in Europe. That's the existential threat. Napoleon is a much greater threat
00:21:28
Speaker
and I mean a much more worthy foe. So by 1814, when the little emperor is finally imprisoned, sent off to an island, now the British can turn their attention to the Americans. So what happens? We're in trouble. The summer of 1814, the entire complexion of this war changes. The British set sail with tens of thousands of soldiers
00:21:55
Speaker
perhaps the largest expeditionary force to leave British waters at the time. And these are the soldiers that beat Napoleon. So they are battle hardened veterans, the best of the best with an armada of ships. And they're planning a three pronged invasion of the United States. Number one, coming down from the North from Canada. They're gonna hit at around Lake Champlain. So let's say the New York Vermont area and drive down
00:22:25
Speaker
from the north. A second prong is going to hit New Orleans in our underbelly and then go up the Mississippi River. So one from the north, one from the south. And the third prong is going to hit us right in the gut, the Chesapeake. So they're going to land in the Chesapeake, targets like Washington and Baltimore. So the British are, they mean business. They've put up with us harassing them for two years. They put up with us killing their soldiers, putting civilians out into the streets, so to speak.
00:22:54
Speaker
burning their capital, now they're coming. So this is what I said earlier. This marks an existential moment where America almost ceases to exist. A second war for independence, if you will. So the prong that lands at the Chesapeake in the summer of 1814, it's led by two impressive officers. One is General Robert Ross.
00:23:18
Speaker
Ross is a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. He's smart. He's brave. He's experienced. He's a gentleman. I mean, he's an excellent general. The other one is an admiral named Coburn, spelled C-O-C-K-B-U-R-N, but it was pronounced Coburn. Coburn is sort of the opposite of Ross. He's an experienced admiral, but he is nasty. He's mean. He's vicious. He wants to take it to civilians. Spare no prisoners kind of a thing.
00:23:47
Speaker
So they've got these yin and yang. But both these guys are veterans. And they land with warships and supplies in the Chesapeake. And they have about 4,500 troops. This is a mixture of regular soldiers, as well as some sailors, as well as Marines. Now, that's not a big army. The armies were smaller back then. We have less men. And these are battle hardened veterans that beat Napoleon under two great commanders. So we're in trouble.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, well, then let's talk about invasion day then. Actually, before we talk about the invasion, I'm curious, how did Americans feel about the war? In the summer of 1814, you've had a lot of bungles, a lot of things happen that the British are knocking on the front door of America. How are most Americans feeling, say, on August 1st of 1814? Good question.
00:24:47
Speaker
So one is anxiety, two is panic. You know, we didn't have public opinion polls back then, which is perhaps a good thing. I think 1933 was when the first opinion poll and a presidential approval was taken and you have a Gallup organization. So during the revolution in the War of 1812, historians are still trying to figure out public sentiment. Fortunately, there's a lot of letters written in newspapers, so we get a sense
00:25:13
Speaker
Back during the revolution, for example, historians talk about what we call the Adam's third. John Adams once writes a letter where he says, you know, about a third of the country favored independence. About a third were loyalists or royalists. They were pro-crown. And the other third had no idea what was going on. So maybe that's like today. Some things don't change. What you find is in New England, a lot of New Englanders did not favor the war.
00:25:41
Speaker
They realized it was Southerners who wanted to kill Indians, expand slavery, and the Wort invade Canada. A lot of New Englanders were trading with the British and the Canadians. And the border was open, and it was a friendly border, much as it is today. A lot of Canadians and Brits moved into New England, and a lot of New Englanders moved there. So there were families across the border. So New Englanders opposed this. In fact, New Englanders even had a convention
00:26:09
Speaker
to consider seceding from the Union because they were so tired of Confederate, or Southern Warhawks, I'm sorry, sort of running the shell. So other people were in a full-fledged panic during the summer of 1814. So if you ask about August 1, people living in a Chesapeake Potomac area were just in a full panic. Why? Because before General Robert Ross and all these soldiers arrived,
00:26:35
Speaker
Admiral Coburn arrived early, and he has some warships. And what does he do that summer? He prowls the Chesapeake, randomly bombing villages, burning villages, attacking people. He's just conducting a war of terror, if you will, and harassment. Newspapers are covering it. Newspapers have declared Coburn to be public enemy number one.
00:27:02
Speaker
In fact, later when he invades and goes into Washington, one of his priorities, to give you an idea of what a stubborn SOB he could be, is he wants to burn the local newspaper, but before he does, he tells his soldiers, remove every letter C from the printing press, because I won't have my name dragged through the mud anymore. So Coburn's public enemy number one, so he is just itching to do the next step, to go the next step, so he's waiting for Ross.
00:27:32
Speaker
So by August 1, people are very familiar with Coburn, scared to death, and almost every community has been attacked by Coburn. People are evacuating. It's an alarming situation. Yet, President James Madison twiddles his fingers, his thumbs. Armstrong, the Secretary of War, announces to the cabinet and the public, the British will never invade. And General Winder, the general in charge, is basically hiding.
00:28:00
Speaker
So despite all the warning signs, it's shocking to me how little we did to prepare for this. Well, let's talk about then the invasion. Walk us through the day of the invasion, how events unfolded and how the British ended up in Washington, D.C.
The British Advance on Washington
00:28:18
Speaker
So they land in Eastern Tidewater region of Maryland and they're marching. They have two targets in mind, Ross and Coburn, Washington and Baltimore.
00:28:28
Speaker
Baltimore is the more enticing target actually. Washington's a small city, not the city it is today. Virtually no military, small population. The only advantage of hitting Washington is you could perhaps neutralize command and control. And that's important. Baltimore on the other hand is a big city. Fort McHenry has one of the largest stockpiles of weapons. Baltimore has a lot of sailors and they're harassing the British as privateers. This is like a government sanctioned pirate.
00:28:57
Speaker
So they're marching and they have two targets. General Ross orders his army only three days of rations, because we're going to go quick. We're moving fast and we're going to live off the land. That region of the country, the fields are full of produce. There's apples hanging from the trees. People in the region fled so quickly. There's still cows. In fact, a lot of the horses the British use, they just took them from farms that were unoccupied.
00:29:26
Speaker
You know, there's chickens, there's, you know, fields of corn. So the British are going to live off the land and march fast. So they're marching and they decide that there's no sign of the Americans. In fact, Ross says there's no way the Americans are this incompetent and this cowardly. It's got to be a trap. So they're worried. When an invading army is coming, you fell trees, you know, you're not trees over across the road.
00:29:51
Speaker
You harass the enemy lines. You attack their supply lines. You put picket lines out front. You send mounted soldiers. We did none of that. We were actually worth that incompetent. Yeah, we were literally that bad. So Ross is like, hmm. But Ross and Coburn decide to go to Washington. On their way to Washington, they arrive at Bladensburg, August 24th, 1814. Now, I love the D.C. area, my favorite.
00:30:20
Speaker
But, and I'm talking to you today from South Florida, I think in the summers DC is even hotter and more humid than South Florida. Not a good time to come to the city. You won't argue with it. Now the British are marching in wool uniforms in August and they're used to London's weather. So men are literally falling along the side of the road. Men are sitting on the side of the road suffering heat strokes.
00:30:46
Speaker
Ross rushes to Bladensburg with between 1,000 and 1,500 men. The problem is when he arrives in Bladensburg, there's a river and there's one bridge over to the road. Now, you know that a bridge then makes a choke point, a killing zone. You know, a very few men could hold off an entire army at a bridge. You just open fire into the bridge. The Americans finally, General Winder does something. Secretary of War Armstrong, still saying the British will never invade.
00:31:16
Speaker
Madison can't make a decision. Winder assembles militia units from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. He cobbles together maybe 6,500 men and he places them on the Washington side of the Bladensburg River and Bridge. Bladensburg is maybe six miles east. So Ross has to cross the bridge then take the road directly into Washington. So Ross's army should be in trouble. However,
00:31:43
Speaker
Ross with his field glasses looks across and he says to his officers, the Americans aren't wearing uniforms. This is militia. He said their lines are bad. They're not taking the high ground. They haven't placed the artillery in front of the bridge. They're not loading grape shot. They're loading cannonballs. Grape shot is like a giant shotgun blast. I mean, imagine putting nails and stones and whatever you have.
00:32:08
Speaker
in a couple canons, and as the British are crossing the bridge, kaboom, that's the end of it. Ross is looking around saying the Americans have no idea what they're doing. So what he does is he fires congrove rockets. This is like a fireworks show. They don't really do much damage, but they instill fear because people didn't know what that was. So he lights congrove rockets, boom, boom, boom, a little fireworks show. The British start across the bridge,
00:32:36
Speaker
and the American army largely drops their guns and runs like hell. More people are injured in running than are injured in the battle. The road goes to a gate. The gate opens up and it road forks into three leading to Washington Georgetown elsewhere. President Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe are behind the army. They are almost trampled to death.
00:33:01
Speaker
The president comes close to being severely wounded or killed in this crazed, chaotic rush. Ross can't believe it. There's only a few things that save our army. One, Ross wrote that the Americans ran too fast. In fact, historians don't call it the Battle of Bladensburg. We call it the Bladensburg races. Ross said that the Americans ran like sheep before wolves and dogs. Secondly, it was too hot and humid.
00:33:30
Speaker
Ross said we needed to drink water. But thirdly, we had one act of heroism. There was a Commodore named Joshua Barney, a great American hero. And Barney was worried about all these British warships in the Chesapeake and Potomac. We don't have enough warships. Secretary of War Armstrong can't make a decision. Madison can't make a decision. So Barney creates his flying flotilla. Barney's barges. He gets a couple of barges.
00:33:58
Speaker
gets the sailors to row and puts one cannon on them. What they do is they hide in the shallows, the tidewater. Then they rush out and fire at the British warships and quick paddle back. The British warships can't get into the shallows. So it's like a nest of hornets harassing a big bear and Barney's harassing the British. Now, Admiral Coburn should have just ignored him and focused on the mission, but Coburn's such a hothead, he's trying to fight Barney. Eventually,
00:34:27
Speaker
He finds Barney's barges and blows them all up. But what Barney and his men do, Barney orders them to take a couple cannons off. They drag the cannons for miles, his sailors and Marines, many of them African-American. They drag them for miles to Bladensburg. And Barney arrives in Bladensburg as the battle's unfolding. Barney realizes that there's strategic ground. So he grabs the high ground
00:34:56
Speaker
overlooking the road leading back into Washington. As the American army runs by him, Barney would later write that he was just livid with the cowardice. He's screaming to get back and fight. Fortunately, Barney's sailors and Marines basically fought to the last man. They fight doggedly. Barney's shot multiple times. His men are dropping like flies. He continues to fight. They fight.
00:35:21
Speaker
When the battle ends, both General Ross and Admiral Coburn went to see Barney and they honored him by having their medics take care of him and they freed him rather than arrest him as a POW. They were so inspired by his heroism. So Barney slowed the British down long enough that our men could get away and we could begin to evacuate the capital city.
The Burning of Washington
00:35:46
Speaker
From there, the British take the road into the city
00:35:49
Speaker
Maryland Avenue, for any of your listeners that know Washington, they arrive around sunset on August 24th, and they're in the capital city, and there's no resistance. General Ross, again, announces to his officers, and I use the diaries and war reports of Ross's two aide-de-camps and Admiral Coburn's two aide-de-camps. So all four were well-educated, impressive folks who gave us a detail
00:36:18
Speaker
minute by minute account. They said Ross arrives in the city and is still thinking it's got to be a trap. How could the Americans be this incompetent and cowardly? Only Barney fought. So Ross is worried, but they set about the task of burning the city. First up, the Capitol, then the White House, then the Treasury, State, and War Departments. They fire those Congreve rockets onto the roof of the Capitol and the White House, but it doesn't burn.
00:36:44
Speaker
So what the question for for their choice to burn the city, why burn the city instead of capture the city and occupy it? Good. So one idea was to capture the city. One idea was just to destroy for command and control purposes. Another idea is maybe occupy the city. Coburn, the admiral, wants to kill everybody. He wants to burn everything. He wants to inflict destruction, occupy. Ross, however, says a couple of things. Number one,
00:37:13
Speaker
He has 4,500 men once the other 3,000 or so catch up to the army. That's probably not enough to hold a capital city. Two, he has very little artillery. Probably not enough to hold the city. So Ross says, what we can do is we can go in and instill fear. We can neutralize command and control, instill fear. The Americans are licking their wounds. So this could be the deciding factor to make the Americans surrender.
00:37:43
Speaker
The British win the war, we reconquer and colonize. So he thought that could be the case. He's also concerned about holding the city. He, to the last minute, thinks it's a trap. He said the Americans have got to be coming with everything they have. So he wants to get in and get out fast. So that's the direct answer to it.
00:38:05
Speaker
That's interesting because you talked about at the Battle of Bladensburg how they wanted to shoot rockets into the air to scare people and then they wanted to burn Washington to instill fear. That seems to be a major tactic of the British Army at this time. Absolutely. They knew that the Americans were divided politically. They knew this was a small population spread across the vast frontier.
00:38:31
Speaker
They knew that we didn't have the system of roads or communication. Very primitive, very rudimentary. They knew that we weren't ready for this war and we couldn't. We bungled every battle in 1812 and 1813. So they figured if they could scare us, unnervous, and they knew that the New Englanders were tired of this, that they could have favorable terms and call this a day, maybe reoccupy.
00:38:57
Speaker
So yeah, fear was definitely one of the components. What they end up doing, the Congreve rockets won't ignite. So they go in the White House and Capitol. They use the wooden door frames, books, chairs, desks. They pile them up and they pour the fuel from the Congreve rockets on it and light them on fire. That night turns out to be about the windiest night anybody had ever experienced in their lives. So the wind whips this into a roaring bonfire
00:39:27
Speaker
and it spreads, and before you know it, the government buildings are engulfed in flames. So they're just burning the Capitol and the White House, but it's not like they're going around to every home and throwing a torch in or anything. It's just the weather is just blowing. Unlike us, Ross announced, if you don't fire, if you are respectful, we won't burn your civilian homes.
00:39:53
Speaker
They only destroyed perhaps two civilian homes, and it was a result of people in those homes fired at Ross. So Coburn sent his Marines in and sailors in to burn them. A few other facilities caught fire, but because of the winds. And we burned our Navy Yard in Washington because it's filled with tons of, you know, wood and tar and nails and sails and ships.
00:40:21
Speaker
So we didn't want the British to get us, so we burned our own Navy yard. But yeah, they did spare civilian sites, but they torched the public buildings, burned them all night, August 24th, 1840. Now, if you were going to give a percentage, you had mentioned that Washington is a pretty small city at this time, a percentage of the city that was destroyed from fire on that night, what percentage would you give?
00:40:47
Speaker
Maybe a quarter, maybe a quarter. And that would be all the public buildings, public structures. There was a Fort, Fort Warburton, which they called Fort Washington. That was destroyed. There was an arms depot. That was destroyed. The cabinet buildings were destroyed. So maybe a quarter of it. Population, maybe 8,000 or so. So it's a small place. And what saved the city was a freakish storm kicked up, perhaps around midnight. And the rains put out the fires.
00:41:17
Speaker
More British soldiers were injured in that storm than in the battle. They described trees and homes being blown over. The officers, the aid to camps, suggest that one or two tornadoes touch down. Now, if you're living in London, you've never seen a tornado. You've never seen the kind of tropical storms we get in Washington and we get down here where I am in South Florida.
00:41:44
Speaker
So the British were unnerved by this. They described one officer on a horse was trying to bark commands for everybody to take cover, and he and the horse went flying, you know, like the witch in Wizard of Oz or something. So there was one soldier, and one of the officers wrote this down, that the soldier was, I guess, a conspiracy theorist and very unnerved, and he was feeling terrible, and so was the one officer
00:42:12
Speaker
You know, they were like, you know, the barbarians that destroyed the library of Alexandria. Why would we destroy the city? And when the one or two tornadoes touched down, this one soldier is running around screaming his head off saying, it's not a tornado, it's the finger of George Washington coming down from heaven. So the British are unnerved. It's hot, it's humid. They think it's a trap. They don't have enough men. The storm's hellacious. So Ross then packs up the army.
00:42:42
Speaker
and under cover of darkness, they rush out of the city. Now, you do write that there are some, you write about Dolly Madison, if you want to call her a hero of this night. What is Dolly Madison's role in this story? Good. Yeah, so I identify three heroes that I just fell for while doing my research. One was Joshua Barney, who
00:43:08
Speaker
the tough sailor who put up a stingy defense at Bladensburg. Two was Dolly Madison, the first lady. So Dolly is back at the White House with two teenage enslaved people and a butler named French John. And James Madison sends, he has a Colonel and 100 men surround the White House to protect her. Dolly looks out the window and they run. She's livid. She writes a letter to her half sister saying,
00:43:37
Speaker
The only ones left in the city are a couple of women. She said, if the ladies and I had enough cannons, we'd run one out of every window of the White House and defend it. So Madison sends a rider back. He's worried Dolly is going to get burned, captured, killed. He sends a rider back to fetch Dolly and get her out of the White House. Dolly sends the rider back with a note. She stays. She says, quote unquote, I refuse to abandon my post. So Dolly has the bigger cajones than the generals. At the 11th hour,
00:44:07
Speaker
She writes that she climbed to the top of the building, and the letter still survives. And she said she looked out with what she called a spyglass of some sort of pirate thing. And she saw everybody fleeing, and she saw a giant dust cloud. That's from thousands of British boots marching on a dirt road, headed into the city. Only then does she order that we save the artifacts, including the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, that massive painting. So she gathers.
00:44:36
Speaker
She won't even let them cut it out of the frame. They have to break the frame. She won't even let them roll it up. They have to lie it flat. She saves artifacts. They pile it on a wagon. And she skedaddles at the 11th hour, saving items from the White House. So Dolly rendered history a great service, risking her life. She's then riding around enemy territory while the city's being invaded at night without military protection. She can't find her husband.
00:45:05
Speaker
What a brave, brave woman. The other hero, the third hero, his name's been lost to history. His name's Stephen Pleasanton. And I actually dedicate the book to him. Pleasanton was a 20-something low-level clerk at the Capitol. So he worked at the Capitol, and the Library of Congress was in the Capitol. The building wasn't built yet. So he was a clerk in the Library of Congress and Capitol. He was drafted, along with every other eligible man,
00:45:34
Speaker
to go to Bladensburg and hold off the British. When he's there, he drives his superior officer, Colonel Magruder nuts. Pleasanton says, I'm leaving and going back to the Capitol. Magruder says, well, then you'll be court-martialed. Pleasanton just doesn't stop harassing him. Magruder is so sick of Pleasanton. He says, leave, get out of my sight. So Pleasanton rushes back to the Capitol. Why? He saves the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights,
00:46:05
Speaker
He's running around the building with moments to spare, having to decide what do I save? What do I not save? What a decision. What from history should be saved and what shouldn't? It's like one of those drinking games at night with our nerdy history friends, right? Now he can't get a wagon or a horse because everybody fled the city.
00:46:26
Speaker
He runs outside the city and finds one of these like two-wheeled wooden ox carts and a cow. So he hooks it up. Imagine how frustratingly slow. And he loads up that with everything. And he heads out of the city hours before the British Army. He also saw the big cloud of dust kicked up. So just moments before the British Army hits the city, he heads out with our national treasures. He takes them to the Potomac and hides them in a foundry.
00:46:55
Speaker
Then he realizes the British will probably burn that foundry because you could make cannons with it. So he puts everything back on, rides all night the next day and puts it in a barn in Virginia. And there it sits for weeks. Finally satisfied weeks later that the British were gone, Pleasanton, who never tells anyone, goes back and it brings back our treasures to the city. I'm happy to say he lived through the war. I'm unhappy to say that he spent his life as a low level clerk
00:47:23
Speaker
asking for promotions, and Congress never promoted this guy that saved our national treasure. So he toils in obscurity and as large as he could have forgotten. Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that story because that's almost cinematic, the way that you describe it. Do we know where that barn was? Is there some kind of plaque or marker?
00:47:46
Speaker
We know where the barn was, and we know it's in a little town in Northern Virginia. Today, there's nothing there. The barn's gone. There's a marker at Bladensburg. And there's information at the White House Historical Society, the US Capitol Historical Society, both wonderful organizations. They have information on the burning of it. And when the buildings were renovated, you could see the burn marks in the fabric of the stone of the building.
00:48:15
Speaker
But yeah, sadly this is lost. This barn's long gone, but yeah, a little barn in a little town. He met a man in the town. It's one of these places, you know, population 32 or something like that, you know, really small. There was a man there who was the town, he was the sheriff, the mayor, and the preacher. Very nice. So yeah, to give you an idea how small it was, he was the one that owned the barn. So he's the one that took care of this,
00:48:45
Speaker
And to think that if this one clerk had been court-martialed, had he not been as thoughtful and brave, we would have lost a good deal of our founding treasures. Well, let's talk about the aftermath of the burning of the city because things don't, you know, things are looking pretty grim right now, but you write that America ends up emerging stronger from after this happens and when the war ends.
Rebuilding and National Unity
00:49:14
Speaker
Talk about the aftermath of the burning and then talk about how this war comes to a conclusion. Yeah. So Washington, DC was never a popular site. The only three large cities at the founding that could have served as a capital would be Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Those are the only three that had the infrastructure, the size, the ports, and so forth.
00:49:38
Speaker
But so Washington was never a popular choice. It became the capital largely because George Washington got what George Washington wanted. And the general had this outsized vision for a great city, a grand city, you know, worthy of Rome, you know, of Athens, of antiquity. And he wanted it near his house on the shores of the Potomac.
00:49:59
Speaker
And he hired a megalomaniac talented architect named Pierre Charles L'Enfant to design it. And sure enough, Washington built a city. So as the city is burned, there was literally a vote in Congress. Now Congress being as bureaucratic as it was, technically the vote was should we have a vote to move the city. So the vote was basically a tie. So that's how tight this was, how close it was. People wanted to move it back to Philadelphia or elsewhere.
00:50:29
Speaker
And of course, every state, every city wanted their city to host it. So it was a bitter fight from Congress. Fortunately, Dolly Madison and James Madison dug their heels in. Dolly hosted huge social events to whip up support, build support to keep the city in Washington. And lo and behold, against all odds, we rebuilt the city. And you know, it's interesting. I read a lot of historic documents, as you do. And what I always noted was,
00:50:58
Speaker
Before the War of 1812, when people wrote about the United States, many of them wrote these, plural, United small letter U, states capital letter S, noun. These United States. After the War of 1812, it was the singular United capital U, United States, the noun. So the fact that we endure, we win in Baltimore,
00:51:27
Speaker
against all odds when Ross and Coburn, Ross is killed there, try to annihilate Baltimore and Fort McHenry. Francis Scott Key, the poet and lawyer writes, puts quill to parchment, writes, oh, say can you see, as he's watching the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, those were concrete rockets, in the hope that at Fort McHenry, our flag would still be there, and she was. And then the British go to New Orleans, and Andrew Jackson and 3,000 frontiersmen whoop
00:51:56
Speaker
over 11,000 British regulars and one of the most lopsided defeats in history. Ross is dead, the British are licking their wounds and they call it a day. Peace is signed in Ghent on Christmas Eve, 1814. So the war was so horrendous for us, but Americans celebrated that ending. And therefore it sort of imbued us with a sense of national pride and unity. They rebuilt the Capitol and they began to say, yeah, the British burned it, but couldn't take it.
00:52:26
Speaker
So all of a sudden Washington DC becomes a popular site. So we end on a positive note, even if the war was an inglorious tie, and everything kind of went back to the way it was before the war. Wonderful. Well, Robert, this has been a terrific discussion here. Lastly, my question for you is, what are you hoping that readers take away when they read your book?
00:52:54
Speaker
Big fan of Washington, DC. And I hope people appreciate its fascinating history. I also hope that people appreciate just how precarious the footing was for this fledgling republic. I was appalled during January 6th.
Historical Parallels and Reflections
00:53:14
Speaker
Both my kids went to college in the city. I live there. I love Washington. The Capitol is the most amazing building in this country.
00:53:24
Speaker
It's our temple of liberty. And the fact that people were busting windows, defecating in it, stealing things, calling themselves patriots, politicians supporting this kind of vigilantism, I was disgusted by it. And I'm a very easygoing guy. I was an ex-division one college football player. So my first reaction when I saw them in the footage
00:53:49
Speaker
is I literally grabbed the baseball bat out of my garage and I said to my son, I'm going to fly to Washington. You know, I got to defend the building. I was just so I decided instead I'd write a book about it. So I want people to realize that, you know, the capital has been under in harm's way before.
00:54:08
Speaker
and we should celebrate this magnificent building, and it should be a symbol of unity, not the kind of ugly divisiveness. And if we could come out as a united country after the British invading it and seizing it, my goodness, how come we can't do that after a bunch of fools claiming to be patriots attacked the capital just recently? So that's what I hope people take away from this. Wow, that is a wonderful,
00:54:37
Speaker
way to end this interview. And I'm glad you wrote the book instead of taking a baseball bat to Washington, D.C. Well, everybody, Robert Watson, when Washington burned the British invasion of the Capitol in a nation's rise from the ashes, go check it out from your library. Go buy a copy. What an interesting story that we don't know enough about. And Robert, thank you so much for your time today.
00:55:03
Speaker
Thank you, AJ. And again, it's an honor to be on your show and thank you for what you do to keep history of military history alive. Thank you. Thank you very much.