The Capture and Burning of Washington: Capitol and Ross's

Up to this time the conduct of the British had been in accordance with the rules of modern warfare. Now they abandoned them, and on entering the national capital they performed deeds worthy only of barbarians. In a proclamation issued by the President on the 1st of September he submitted the following indictment: "They wantonly destroyed the public edifices, having no relation in their structure to operations of war, nor used at the time for military annoyance; some of these edifices being also costly monuments of taste and of the arts, and others depositories of the public archives, not only precious to the nation as the memorials of its origin and its early transactions, but interesting to all nations as contributions to the general stock of historical instruction and political science." Let us briefly examine the testimony of history.

When Ross was assured of complete victory, he halted his army a short time on the field of battle, and then, with the fresh Third Brigade, which had not been in the conflict, he crossed the Eastern Branch Bridge. Assured of the retreat of the Americans beyond Georgetown, Ross left the main body a mile and a half from the Capitol, and entered the town, then containing about nine hundred buildings. He came to destroy the public property there. It was an errand, it is said, not at all coincident with his taste or habits, and what was done by him appears to have been performed as humanely as the orders of his superiors would allow. When, on his arrival in the Chesapeake, he had been informed by Admiral Cochrane that he (the admiral) had been urged by Sir George Prevost, the Governor-General of Canada (who was not satisfied with the terrible devastation of the Niagara frontier at the close of 1813), to retaliate in kind upon the Americans for the destruction of the government buildings at York and the village of Newark, he demurred, saying that they had carried on the war on the Peninsula and in France with a very different spirit, and that he could not sanction the destruction of public or private property, with the exception of military structures and warlike stores. "It was not," says one of Ross's surviving aides, Sir Duncan McDougall, in a letter to the author in 1861, "until he was warmly pressed that he consented to destroy the Capitol and President's house, for the purpose of preventing a repetition of the uncivilized proceedings of the troops of the United States." Fortunately for Ross's sensibility, there was a titled incendiary at hand in the person of Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who delighted in such inhuman work, and who literally became his torch-bearer.

The bulk of the invaders, having crossed the Eastern Branch, halted upon the plain between the Capital and the site of the Congressional Burying-Ground, when General Ross, accompanied by Cockburn and a guard of two hundred men, rode into the city at eight o'clock in the evening. They were fired upon from behind the house of Robert Sewell, near the Capitol, by a single musket, and the horse on which the general was riding was killed. Mr. Sewell's house was immediately destroyed. The same fate awaited the materials in the office of the National Intelligencer, the government organ, whose strictures on the brutality of Cockburn had filled that marauder with hot anger. These, and some houses on Capitol Hill, a large rope-walk, and a tavern, comprised the bulk of private property destroyed, thanks to the restraining power of General Ross. Several houses and stores were also plundered. The unfinished Capitol, in which was the library of Congress, the President's house, a mile distant, the Treasury buildings, the Arsenal, and barracks for almost three thousand troops, were soon in flames, whose light was plainly seen in Baltimore, about forty miles northward. In the course of a few hours nothing of the superb Capitol and the Presidential mansion was left but their smoke-blackened walls. Of the public buildings only the Patent Office was saved.

All the glory that the British had won on the battlefield was lost in this barbarian conflagration. "Willingly," said the London Statesman newspaper, "would we throw a veil of oblivion over our transactions at Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America." The British Annual Register for 1814 denounced the proceedings as a "return to the times of barbarism." "It cannot be concealed," the writer continued, "that the extent of devastation practised by the victors brought a heavy censure upon the British character, not only in America, but on the continent of Europe." Continental writers and speakers condemned the act in unmeasured terms; and yet the government of England, which had seldom represented the sentiments of the people, caused the Tower guns to be fired in honor of Ross's victory, thanked the actors through Parliament, decreed a monument to that general in Westminster Abbey at his death, and, making additions to his armorial bearings, authorized his descendants forever to style themselves "Ross of Bladensburg"!