Fire on the PatuxentFire on the Patuxent
CAPT. SAMUEL MILLER marched out of the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I Streets in Washington, D.C., on June 12 bound for St. Leonard Town, the small port where the Chesapeake Flotilla lay at anchor. Miller was new to his rank but not new to the Marine Corps. Born on October 12, 1775, in Massachusetts, Miller had been appointed a second lieutenant in the Corps in 1809 at the somewhat advanced age of thirty-two. He reported for duty at the Marine Barracks in Washington, the first permanent post in the Marine Corps, and was appointed adjutant to the Commandant, Lt. Col. Franklin Wharton. He would hold that post, off and on, for nearly a decade. He was promoted to first lieutenant after just nine months in the Corps.1
Marine officers assigned to the Washington Barracks often found themselves detailed to service for the federal government in addition to their duties for the Corps. Company-grade officers served as couriers for diplomatic correspondence and carried bullion, and sometimes even took secret messages to and from senior government officials. Miller spent two years, from 1810 to the beginning of 1812, alternating between his duties as the Commandant’s adjutant and as a diplomatic courier, including nine months in 1811 carrying secret dispatches to France. When the war broke out in June 1812 he was among the senior lieutenants in Washington.2
Miller spent the opening months of the war helping Wharton find enough Marines to serve on board ships, defend Navy yards, and man harbor fortifications. It was not easy. Although Congress authorized the enlargement of both the Regular Army and Navy early in January and again in June 1812, it failed to augment the Marine Corps, leaving Wharton the task of fulfilling ever increasing requests for Marines without having the authority to recruit beyond the Corps’ legislated strength of just 483 enlisted men. It took Congress two years to increase the authorized strength to 2,652, although the Corps never really approached that number.3
On June 10—the same day Barney was battling Barrie—Jones sent Wharton orders to ready “such aid the Marine Corps at headquarters is capable of affording to march to the scene of action.” Jones ordered Wharton to put Miller in command of the company, which was to have “as many officers as necessary and as many Marines as can possibly be spared from duty at this post with all the field pieces that are mounted, together with every company necessary for the detachment to act efficiently as artillery or infantry.”
To Miller, Jones sent explicit orders that his Marines were to “act under the immediate orders of this [Navy] department.” He was to report directly to Commodore Barney “on the best means of protecting the flotilla and annoying the enemy.” The last order would serve to exacerbate the rift between Barney and the Army.4
In those same orders Jones promoted Miller to captain, giving him command of the six lieutenants Wharton had managed to scrape up to help lead the Marine company. Finding Marines, however, was even more difficult than finding officers. The Marines in Washington occupied a somewhat unique position in the Corps—part ceremonial, part sentry, and part sea Marine. According to the official Marine Corps history, “The detachment performing military duty at Headquarters was particularly well-drilled and thoroughly acquainted with the various military ceremonies. It was paraded regularly and ceremoniously mounted guard daily.”5 All that time spent parading left little time for combat drill, and drill was crucial. The Marines acted as both artillery and infantry on land and sea, and their ability to switch seamlessly between the two duties set the Marines apart from their more specialized Army and Navy counterparts. Wharton and Miller assembled 125 enlisted men, 40 of whom were new recruits. Miller was so hard-pressed for men that he tapped into the Marine Corps Band, taking seven musicians to serve as infantrymen.6 For artillery, Miller had two 12-pounder cannon mounted on carriages. On June 12 he set out for Barney’s headquarters.7
Other reinforcements were also moving to aid the flotilla. Col. Henry Carberry, commander of the 36th U.S. Infantry, received orders to march his entire six-hundred-man 2nd Battalion to St. Leonard Town. Carberry’s force was to replace Stuart’s battalion of the same regiment because Stuart had orders to return to his position in St. Mary’s County. Jones convinced Secretary of War Armstrong to release Maj. George Keyser and his 38th U.S. Infantry battalion of raw recruits from the defenses of Baltimore and send them to Barney’s anchorage as well.
Finally there was the local militia. The Calvert County Regiment, officially the 31st Maryland militia, had mobilized, but Barney had a dim view of militia, and the Calvert County men did little to change that view. “Like most other troops of that class, they were to be seen everywhere but just where they were wanted,” Barney said. “Whenever the enemy appeared, they disappeared and their commander was never able to bring them into action. . . . [T]hey rendered no assistance whatever to the flotilla, nor did they even attempt to defend their own houses and plantations from pillage and conflagration.”8
Carberry’s battalion was the first of the reinforcements to arrive at St. Leonard Town, marching into camp on June 14. The colonel chafed at finding himself under Barney’s command and almost immediately began sniping at him. Carberry had neither forgotten nor forgiven Barney’s attempt to entice recruits from the 36th Infantry into flotilla service, and he publicly condemned Barney for entering the creek and bottling up the flotilla. On June 16, without informing Barney, Carberry abruptly withdrew from his camp and moved his men several miles to the rear into the surrounding countryside, claiming they were “much fatigued and worried.”9
The commodore, for his part, had little good to say about Carberry. “His conduct does not please me in more ways than one,” Barney wrote to Jones. “He finds much fault publicly to the Inhabitants about my coming into this creek, he seems to have no disposition to give me real assistance.”10 Carberry’s soldiers, Barney reported, were no better. “The fact is, there is no order or discipline in that corps. The Col. disaffected, the other officers without experience and in two parties, the men under no control, ranging through the country, committing depredations, on the persons and property of the Inhabitants, leaving their camp when they please.”11 He also pilloried Carberry for moving his men, reminding the Army officer that his own flotilla crews had remained at quarters every night while performing active duty every day.
In addition to releasing the two Regular Army battalions, Secretary of War Armstrong also offered the service of Col. Decius Wadsworth, Army Commissary General of Ordnance. Jones embraced Wadsworth’s proposal to drive the British from the mouth of St. Leonard Creek “with a few pieces of cannon.” Wadsworth volunteered to set up a battery of two 18-pounder field guns. Armstrong agreed, augmenting that force with three 4-pounder field guns and a detachment of gunners from the Army Corps of Artillery in Washington under the command of Lt. Thomas Harrison.12
Capt. Robert Barrie, angry and frustrated at his inability to defeat Barney, had decided to once more draw Barney into open water by attacking the local population. “I conceived by destroying some of the tobacco stores, the inhabitants would be induced to urge Commodore Barney to put out and defend their property,” Barrie wrote to Cockburn.13
He began his campaign on June 11, sending Capt. Samuel Carter and 104 Royal Marines plus 30 Colonial Marines to raid tobacco plantations 4 miles up the creek. The British landed at the farm of James Pattison and moved inland. They carried off all the tobacco in Pattison’s storehouses and then torched the entire plantation. Next Carter’s force burned the plantation of John S. Skinner, the purser of Barney’s flotilla. On June 12 Carter and his men went ashore across the Patuxent in St. Mary’s County to purchase livestock, which a local farmer refused to sell them. A force of three hundred militiamen was in the area as well, something Barrie duly noted.14
Barrie decided to make an example of that plantation, and on June 13 he ordered Carter with 140 Royal Marines and 30 Colonial Marines to teach the owner a lesson. The plantation’s overseer, John Platter, son of the sixth governor of Maryland, had castigated the British the previous day for their ruthless destruction of Pattison’s and Skinner’s plantations. Now the British were back, and this time there was no refusing their demand for livestock. The local militia “did not think it prudent to face this force but allowed the tobacco store and three houses which were most excellent military posts, to be burnt without opposition.”15
The success of the raids spurred Barrie to intensify and spread his campaign of terror. He received a boost on June 12 when the 32-gun frigate Narcissus under Capt. John Richard Lumley arrived. Two days later Barrie accompanied his entire landing force up the Patuxent River to the town of Benedict, twelve miles north of St. Leonard Creek. The British found the town deserted. They quietly took possession of the place and found 360 hogsheads of tobacco awaiting shipment. Barrie left a small party to guard the tobacco, which the British loaded onto a captured schooner and their own boats. A company of militia had been stationed at the town, Barrie reported, but they “fled at our approach, leaving muskets, knapsacks and part of their camp equipage behind them.” Barrie added, “They also left a six pounder which was spiked.”16
The British spent June 15 in Benedict before moving out the following day. A raiding party of sixty Royal Marines crossed the river into Calvert County and descended on the plantation of Benjamin Mackall, a local militia officer. The marines burned the house, which had stood on the shore of the Patuxent at Hallowing Point since 1635, and then pushed farther upriver to the tobacco port of Lower Marlboro, where Barrie expected to find more tobacco and other valuables. For good measure, he wrote to Cockburn, “as Marlborough is near the Seat of Government, I thought an attack on the town would be a sad annoyance to the enemy and oblige the regulars and militia to try their strength with us.”17
Barrie and his troops arrived in Lower Marlboro around 6 p.m. The inhabitants and militia fled on seeing the approaching British force, giving Barrie uncontested control of the town. Barrie let his men run wild, and they plundered with abandon. “They opened all the feather beds they could find, broke the doors and windows out and so tore the houses to pieces inside as to render them of very little value,” reported an inhabitant.18 Small detachments of British marines pushed into the countryside where they “stole with impunity from a widow lady, thirteen slaves and done considerable damage by the destruction of furniture, etc., at other places.”19
British troops spread outward from Lower Marlboro, pillaging plantations and burning storehouses. “Tobacco, slaves, farm stock of all kinds and household furniture, became the objects of their daily enterprises, and possession of them in large quantities was the reward of their honorable achievements,” one account derisively described Barrie’s raids. “What they could not conveniently carry away, they destroyed by burning.”20
The British left Lower Marlboro on June 17 and continued to burn their way along the river. They destroyed two large tobacco warehouses at Magruder’s Landing, a mile below and opposite the Prince George’s County side of the river from Lower Marlboro, as well as Coles Landing in St. Mary’s County. Only once did any of the raiders report seeing defenders, and even then the few shots directed at the British failed to do anything except bring on a retaliatory attack. Other than those few shots, the British enjoyed an uncontested trip back to Benedict, where Barrie found the Jaseur waiting to escort the entire force back to the area around St. Leonard Creek.21 Upon arriving at his original station, Barrie received orders from Cockburn to take the Dragon north to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a long-overdue overhaul. He turned command of the blockade over to Capt. Thomas Brown of the Loire, who continued to bottle up the flotilla with his ship and the Narcissus.22
The British raids caused panic up and down the Patuxent. Residents on both sides of the river fled, taking with them everything they could carry. Groups appeared in St. Leonard Town asking Barney to do something about the British depredations, but there was little the commodore could do. Each day, Barney looked for the opportunity to strike the British. On June 16, while Barrie was burning farms, Barney took a handful of barges downstream and ambushed a British barge foraging for freshwater. Waiting until the last moment to open fire, Barney’s barges completely surprised the British. “She then discovered us but our round shot was very near destroying her,” Barney reported. “I saw two oars cut off and was told, two men fell overboard, or jumped over. Several bodies of dead men have floated onshore in the creek and river.”23
Barney received more reinforcements that same day when Miller and his company of Marines arrived, greatly fatigued from a tougher-than-expected march. After leaving Washington on June 12, the company first marched toward Queen Anne Town on the Patuxent River in Prince George’s County, but a massive rainstorm turned the roads into a quagmire. After stopping overnight, the Marines spent the next day wading through water as roads flooded along their route, covering fifteen miles before they finally halted at a mill in Anne Arundel County, north of Barney’s position. On June 14 the Marines set out again, using double horse teams to pull their cannon and wagons. Miller’s force slogged for two days through twenty miles of ankle- and sometimes knee-deep mud, finally reaching St. Leonard on the afternoon of June 16. Miller allowed his men to rest while he reported to Barney.24
Afterward Miller examined the ground and decided to place his company and three 12-pounder field guns on a high hill to the east of the flotilla anchorage, and had his men erect a breastwork there for the cannon. First Lt. Benjamin Richardson said the arrival of the Marines and Miller’s choice of position pleased Barney, who commented on the “very appropriate” placement of their three artillery pieces as well as the demeanor of the Marines, which was in stark contrast to that of Carberry’s Regular Army contingent.25
The Marines remained in their position for a few days until Miller learned the British were sending in one or two boats to raid local farms at the mouth of the creek. He decided to attempt to ambush one of the raiding parties and selected eighty men and five officers to punish the British. Miller led his party on an overnight march to a point just east of the entrance to St. Leonard Creek. There the Marines waited, watching as the British ships in the Patuxent maintained the blockade. After several hours Miller saw at least one enemy landing party come ashore, but the British never ventured from their landing site. Miller waited most of the day before moving his men back to camp under the cover of darkness.26
The Marines’ arrival, welcome as it was to the commodore, exacerbated an already difficult logistical situation for Barney. His purser, John Skinner, had to buy supplies from as far away as Baltimore and find a way to transport them to the anchorage. On June 20 Barney wrote to Jones, “I have been obliged to take the wagons of the Marine Corps to send for provisions to South River [thirty miles north of St. Leonard Town] where it seems Mr. Skinner has received some from Baltimore. I am under the necessity of furnishing the Marines with rations; we are much at a loss for some person to purchase articles and procure supplies, the wagons want money advanced to them, and horses to ride express, I am not provided with money for that purpose.”27
Jones, however, had worries other than how to feed the flotilla. In the days following the June 10 battle the Navy secretary had been enthusiastic about the role the barges could play in the Chesapeake. On June 13 he wrote to Barney, “As no force that he can bring against you in Boats can endanger the flotilla, so long as the Banks of the Creek are protected by our Military, the position appears to me as favorable as any in which we may expect to attack him. I shall be mistaken if ultimately he is not made to suffer extremely for his temerity.”28 Within a week, however, Jones was concerned about the future of Barney’s “flying squadron.” Barrie’s total control of the Patuxent and his ability to strike at will convinced Jones that Barney’s position was precarious. “Should they continue the blockade of the flotilla, without any further attempt with their present force,” he wrote Barney, “it will be with a design to await the arrival of an additional force from the coast, with which they may attack some other point, while you are locked up.”
Jones’ solution was mobility, of a sort. “I am satisfied that the whole of the barges may be transported [overland] from the head of St. Leonard’s Creek to the [Chesapeake] Bay with great facility. I believe the distance is not more than four miles, and I am told the road is tolerably good and free from any serious impediment,” he wrote to the commodore. Jones actually believed the sailors could strip the barges of all equipment and bolt wheels to the bottom of each vessel. “One of the large barges stripped of every moveable article will not weigh more than six tons—about the weight of a cable for a 44[-gun frigate],” he told Barney. “Two pair of dray wheels with a stout bolster and a chock to fit the bottom and raise it clear of the wheels would carry a Barge. There are plenty of oxen I am told, and in different places you have manual force to assist.”29
The idea stunned Barney, who expected and continued to plan for a breakout from his anchorage. He never envisioned moving his entire squadron overland to escape from the Royal Navy, and he immediately saw numerous flaws in the idea. “There is nothing to prevent the enemy’s ships from laying near the shore, so that we should not be able to launch, arm, and get away our barges after they are transported, for if we place artillery to cover us from the shipping, we cannot defend the blockade,” the commodore wrote to Jones. “I am well convinced that in four hours after we begin to prepare for transportation, the enemy will be informed of our intentions, by the people of this district, who are all disaffected.”30 Despite his misgivings, Barney began trying to procure wheels, blocks, and animals. He had Maj. William Barney price the equipment necessary for hauling the barges from St. Leonard Creek to the Chesapeake.
Jones continued to badger the commodore about moving the flotilla, although he seemed to back off the immediacy of the idea. On June 18 he wrote Barney, “The plan of transporting the barges overland to the Bay, was not suggested without a view to the possible difficulties you have stated, but my local knowledge was not sufficiently distinct to determine the nature and degree of the obstacles. It is for you to determine the practicability of rearming and equipping the Barges on the Bay side in the face of the enemy. If his heavy ships can approach the beach within a point blank shot, I should deem it impracticable.”31
As the days ticked by, Jones became more and more convinced that each passing hour sealed the fate of the flotilla, even hinting to Barney that scuttling the barges was preferable to the flotilla either remaining blockaded or, worse, being captured or destroyed by the British. “The enemy appears to attach great importance to the blockade of the flotilla, and their agent has been heard to say, that if you had double your force, the blockade would not be raised,” he wrote Barney. “Should the enemy increase his force in the Bay, it may be necessary ultimately to secure your flotilla if practicable, and transfer your men to the barges at Baltimore and this place, and endeavor to raise the blockade outside.”32
Barney refused to contemplate abandoning or destroying his barges. Using information he gleaned from six deserters from the Narcissus, he told Jones he believed he could in fact run the now-diminished blockade. He informed the Navy secretary that any attempt to haul the flotilla overland would mean the loss of four of his vessels—the two Navy gunboats, the Lookout Boat, and his flagship, the Scorpion.33 The commodore also reported problems in assembling the necessary equipment, tools, and draft animals to move the barges. On June 20, finally convinced that the plan would not work, Jones gave Barney a drastic order: “These considerations have induced the determination to destroy effectually the whole of the flotilla under your command, after stripping them of every moveable article, which you will transport as soon and as conveniently as possible to Baltimore for the equipment of other barges.”34
Barney protested as strongly as he could. “I acknowledge the justness of the reasoning, and the precaution in your orders, but I feel a depression of Spirits on the occasion, indescribable,” the commodore wrote. “I must be cautious in mentioning to my officers and men the final result, they are in high spirits and anxious to meet the enemy, who we look on as defeated and beaten, I shall break the matter to them as we progress.” Barney had one final argument to change Jones’ mind. The British, he told Jones, were off on one of their raids with the St. Lawrence, Erie, Jaseur, and most of their ships’ boats. That left just two frigates—the Narcissus and the Loire—near the mouth of the creek. If he could establish land batteries that could engage the frigates, the commodore believed he could break out.35 Secretary of War Armstrong had sent just the man for the job—Col. Decius Wadsworth. If anyone could set up land batteries that could drive off the British, it was the Army commissary general of ordnance. The argument worked. On June 20 Jones sent a short note to Barney: “You will suspend the execution of my order.”36
Barney immediately set to work restoring the cannon, masts, rudders, and other equipment on the barges while he waited for Wadsworth to arrive. The company of Washington Artillery, with three 12-pounder guns, had already marched into camp, but Wadsworth, with his heavier 18-pounder cannon and trains, was taking much longer. As Barney waited, the actions of the company of U.S. Marines continued to impress him.
From the moment he arrived, Miller consulted with Barney on his movements, campsite, and supply situation, even though he was under no obligation to do so. The Marine captain’s willingness to confer and coordinate with Barney was a stark contrast to Carberry, who treated Barney as an antagonist. Miller was in something of an odd position. His orders, direct from Jones, said he was to report solely to the Navy Department, meaning the secretary. As such, his command was completely independent of Barney, Carberry, and even Wadsworth. His somewhat ambiguous position pointed out the unusual position of the Marine Corps. At sea, the Marines fell under the command of the Navy. On land, however, it was unclear just where the Marines fit in. The Army wanted jurisdiction over the Marine Corps in land operations, but the Army was under the War Department while the Marines were part of the Navy Department, both cabinet-level departments. The question of which department the Marines reported to continued to be an issue and would cause problems later in the campaign.37