CHAPTER 29

Decatur House

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Oh, Lord, I’m a dead man!

—Stephen Decatur, March 21, 1820

STEPHEN DECATUR GAZED MOROSELY from the window of the second-floor drawing room of his house onto the leafless trees of Lafayette Square. He was uncharacteristically withdrawn, even brooding, according to the guests at the soiree his unwitting wife had hosted. He had concealed from her and, indeed, from even his closest friends that he had a rendezvous at Bladensburg dueling grounds in Maryland early the next morning. None suspected that by the same time the next day, this greatest of all American naval heroes would be dead.

One year later, or so the legend goes, servants returning to the house spotted the face of Decatur at that window. Rumors of hauntings have been associated with the house ever since.

On March 20, 1978, 157 years after the servants’ report, Vicki Sopher, director of the Decatur House, and a few of her staff, decided to test the legend, according to an article from that year in the Washington Post. Seated in the drawing room, they waited in eerie silence and candlelight for the ghost of Stephen Decatur to appear. It did not. Undeterred, Sopher vowed to try again the following year. If she had any success, I could find no record of it.

There was a second, more rigorous, attempt, a couple of years ago—this time by professional ghosthunters equipped with all the paraphernalia of the trade. Decatur House Assistant Director Katherine Malone-France was present for the investigation, and she informed me that, in spite of the meticulousness of the investigators, they failed to detect any sign of a ghostly presence.

Does this mean that the ghost of Stephen Decatur no longer haunts his home on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.? It is possible, but somehow I doubt it. What both these investigations had in common was that they focused on the drawing room and the events of the evening before the duel. They misread the man, I believe—and failed to take into account his iron will and ruthless ambition. The place to search for Decatur’s ghost is on the ground floor of his home, in the room in which he died. And the time to look is not the evening of March 20, but rather the evening of March 21. That search, I propose, would not find Decatur staring distractedly at the trees of Lafayette Square, but, rather, would find him focused single-mindedly on the object of his ambitions: the White House.

It was with these thoughts in mind, that my wife and I approached the front entrance to the Decatur House on a cold clear afternoon in January 2008. We had just lunched at one of the several good Chinese restaurants in the District’s Chinatown. It was a beautiful day to take in the sights of our nation’s capital, so we decided to walk the several blocks to Pennsylvania Avenue.

I had completed my research into Stephen Decatur, and I had come to understand that his sights had been set much higher than the U.S. Navy. Understanding him, as I now believed I did, I felt it was most appropriate to approach the house from across Lafayette Square with the White House, gleaming now in the bright winter sun, at my back.

As I neared the front of the house that Decatur had built to further his ambitions and peered though the window into the room where he died, I was fully prepared, if not actually expecting, to see his ghostly apparition staring forlornly from that window through the leafless trees of Lafayette Square toward the object of his aspirations. To my chagrin, what I actually viewed was a table saw and workman’s tools: the house was undergoing a thorough renovation, and the room was in total disarray. I was disappointed but still resolved. What ghost could make an appearance in such a setting?

To understand why I, who am actually a skeptic on the subject of ghosts, came to expect Decatur’s presence, the reader must first understand the man and the role of the house that he built. Then it may be possible to see that it is sometimes not the house that is haunted, but the spot on which it rests.

THWARTED AMBITION

“Oh, Lord, I’m a dead man,” Stephen Decatur groaned as he collapsed onto the cold bare earth of the Bladensburg dueling grounds.

His opponent’s pistol ball had torn into his entrails, severing pelvic arteries. Blood soaked his fine wool pants. He would not live to see the next sunrise.

Eight paces away, his opponent, Commodore James Barron, also fell. But Barron was more fortunate. Decatur had aimed low—as indeed Barron had as well—to wound, not to kill, and his ball had struck Barron’s hip bone and ricocheted down his thigh. Barron would always walk with a limp, but he would survive.

The U.S. Navy’s most illustrious commander died that evening. He was only forty-one—killed by a man he had once described as “more than a father.”

The nation mourned. Presidents paid their respects. His famously beautiful wife was inconsolable.

How had this come to pass? How had a man who had accomplished so much, had risen so quickly and was esteemed by so many, come to this end? And why, almost two centuries later, does one expect to see his ghost still haunting the home in which he died? What is the unfinished business that could tether this iron-willed man, this hero of the Barbary Coast and the War of 1812, to this mortal plane? How could this man, so noble in so many ways, become bound (and I would add, justly so) to a continuing earthly purgatory? Those questions are the ones that haunted me and that I will now seek to answer for the reader.

Decatur first burst onto the consciousness of his nation in 1804. It was a young nation and much in need of heroes. America was fed up with having her merchant ships preyed upon by the piratical Barbary States of the North African Coast. Rather than continue the ignominious practice of paying tribute, President Thomas Jefferson ordered the construction of warships that would sail to the shores of Tripoli and teach the pirates a lesson. Young Lieutenant Stephen Decatur sailed with that expedition.

Things quickly became complicated.

One of the newly minted American warships, the U.S. Navy frigate Philadelphia, through a combination of misfortune and bad judgment on the parts of her officers, had ran aground on a sandbar while pursuing a smaller Tripolitan craft. She was subsequently captured, along with her crew, by the Pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli. His men succeeded in floating Philadelphia off the sandbar and sailed her into Tripoli harbor. Unfortunately for the U.S. Navy, the captured American frigate was now the most powerful ship in the Tripolitan fleet—and she was protecting the pasha from the very Americans who had sailed her to the Barbary Coast to chastise him!

Fortunately for Decatur, however, the decision of Philadephia’s commander to surrender her set the stage for the dashing young officer’s leap to glory. Decatur was given the mission of destroying Philadelphia. His stratagem was a combination of cunning and daring, and employed a captured Barbary ketch, rechristened Intrepid, so as not to alarm the Tripolitans. The Americans on deck were disguised as Maltese sailors, and below, crammed into the narrow confines of the hold, were seventy determined seaman and marines.

In what Horatio Nelson, England’s greatest naval commander, called “the most bold and daring act of the age,” Decatur was able to close on the unsuspecting Philadelphia. His crew scrambled aboard, quickly subdued the Tripolitan crew, and put Philadelphia to the torch. As Intrepid pulled away from the flaming vessel, the Americans looked back at a floating inferno that was drifting toward the pasha’s castle. Her former commander, looking down from his place of confinement, watched with undoubtedly mixed emotions as she exploded dramatically at the very foot of the castle walls.

At home, Decatur was a hero. He was promoted to captain over lieutenants more senior to him, generating envy and resentment among his peers—sentiments that would haunt him throughout his career. Later, he would even be placed in command over the unfortunate commander who had surrendered Philadelphia to the Tripolitans, Captain William Bainbridge. This would have fatal repercussions for Decatur. Bainbridge, by providing this opportunity for heroism, was instrumental in launching Decatur’s career—and was later a major player in bringing it to an end.

Decatur’s career prospered, launched as it had been by his exploits against the Barbary Pirates and reinforced by subsequent achievements during the War of 1812, and was driven by an ambition that was at times ruthless. By 1820—the year of his death—Decatur was an influential member of the Board of Naval Commissioners in Washington, D.C. It was in this role that he came into final and fatal conflict with his former friend and mentor, Commodore James Barron.

In spite of being a capable naval officer, history will remember Barron not just for having fatally wounded Decatur, but also for having surrendered the U.S. frigate Chesapeake to the British ship Leopard in 1807. The incident was over four British deserters who had allegedly joined the American Navy and were thought by the British to be serving on the American ship. As Chesapeake had barely put up resistance, Commodore Barron was brought before a naval court martial. Decatur had the unfortunate duty of serving as a member of the board that found Barron guilty of one of the four charges brought against him, that he had neglected, “on the probability of an engagement, to clear his ship for action.” His punishment: “Suspension from all commands without pay or official emoluments of any kind for the term of five years.”

The end of that term found Barron in Copenhagen as the captain of an American merchant ship. The War of 1812 was raging and he was unable to immediately return to resume his service with the Navy; for reasons that remain somewhat unclear, Barron did not succeed in reaching Washington until early in 1819 to apply in person for an appointment to active service. He was referred to the Board of Naval Commissioners, of which Stephen Decatur was a member.

Decatur did not support Barron’s return to active service. Barron’s delay in returning to the United States was key to Decatur’s position—but also quite possibly, was a more personal matter, a perceived and probably unintended slight from years past that Decatur could not bring himself to forgive. Historians surmise that it involved an unfortunate comment that Barron made concerning Decatur’s wife, Susan Marbury, then his fiancée, who was one-eighth African-American. Whether that was the object of Barron’s comment we will probably never know, but whatever it was, it poisoned their relationship thereafter.

In any event, lengthy correspondence ensued. Decatur, who was more concerned with his own aspirations than with Barron’s, could not bring himself to give Barron what he craved possibly even more than reinstatement in the Navy—the restoration of Decatur’s friendship and respect. The exchange, probably unintentionally on Decatur’s part, only served to further provoke and humiliate Barron, which ultimately drove him to challenging Decatur to a duel. The result was a tragic and unnecessary end to what had once been a warm friendship.

Looking back on the fight and the events leading up to it, many, including Decatur’s wife, concluded that it was the duelists’ seconds who set events on their unwavering course and prevented any last-minute reconciliation. Decatur’s second was none other than William Bainbridge, the unfortunate commander who had lost Philadelphia to the Tripolitans. In spite of a surface amicability, there was no love lost between Bainbridge and Decatur: Bainbridge had never overcome his jealousy and loss of self-esteem. As luck would have it, Barron’s second also harbored issues. He was Jesse Elliot, a sworn enemy of Decatur’s close friend, Oliver Hazard Perry.

The conditions that Bainbridge had arranged with Elliot were not those that Decatur had requested—and they made bloodshed inevitable. The weapons were pistols, the distance a mere eight paces. The opponents stood face-to-face.

“I shall give the order quickly,” Bainbridge stated. “Present, one, two, three. You are neither to fire before the word one, nor after the word three.”

“What could have induced you to do this act?” Decatur asked of Barron, as they both lay on the chill March ground.

Finally, now that it was too late, Decatur was appreciating the import of his indifferent words and choices that had seemed far less weighty at the time—at least to him but not, of course, to Barron. We can only surmise whether Decatur, in the brief time left to him, would also reexamine the role the duplicitous seconds had played in ensuring this bloody outcome.

As the opponents fell, both seconds, indifferent to the welfare of the combatants, vanished. Decatur was taken home by friends, to a loving wife who had no idea where he had gone when he had walked out of their house that cold morning. She only knew that when she awoke, he was gone. They brought him to a room to the left of the domed entrance hall, the room where he signed his will and then, a few hours later, died.

Behind Decatur’s success was more than good fortune, more than audacity, and more than courage, although he had all three in abundance. What drove him was a reckless quest for glory that was rooted in a sometimes ruthless ambition.

Where this ambition was taking him can be seen in the location he chose for his house: Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. It also can be seen in its design. Decatur used much of the fortune in prize money that he won during the War of 1812 to construct a home that would be, in his words, “suitable for foreign ministers and impressive entertainments.” He selected as his architect none other than Benjamin Latrobe, the man who had designed the U.S. Capitol.

This house became a center of Washington social life, where the dashing Decatur and his alluring wife entertained the capital’s elite. In return, they were frequent guests of the Monroes at the White House.

That Decatur had aspirations of being more than just a guest in the White House is not attested to by his correspondence or other documentation. It has to be found in his actions and his relationships. But what else would one expect of the resourceful naval officer who had so successfully duped the Tripolitan prize crew on Philadelphia?

Could it be, in the leisure that death had provided, that Decatur looked back on the events leading up to the duel and could see how he and Barron—for whom he surely still harbored some affection—had been cleverly maneuvered into a duel by seconds who had no love for either of them? It is certainly easy to see how Decatur, cheated as he was of a possibly even more illustrious future, including, quite possibly, the highest office of the land, might not be able to just let go and move on. One need only think of the ambitious political candidates of our own era to get a sense of what it must have meant to Decatur, harboring his presidential dreams, to be cut off from life literally within sight of the White House—and then to die in a room whose sole window looked out at the object of his ambitions.

My wife and I entered the house from the rear, the main entrance now being closed. There was a docent sitting at a desk near the door, and I wasted little time in engaging her on the subject of ghosts. In what I have since come to learn would be a pattern, especially at the more established sites which are controlled by foundations or boards of governors, she referred me to Assistant Director Katherine Malone-France.

It was some weeks, however, before I succeeded in reaching Ms. Malone-France. She was rushed but, somewhat to my surprise, quite pleasant and forthcoming. She revealed to me her participation in the investigation a couple years previously and how it had yielded no indication of any other-worldly presence. She also told me that she had never received a credible report of ghostlike activity from her staff.

How is it then that stories persist of hauntings at the Decatur House, if not by Decatur himself then by his bereaved wife or even a denizen of the slave quarters behind the house? Are the stories groundless or were the investigations flawed? Did they fail to take into account the true nature of the man? Has the focus been on the wrong place and the wrong time?

I, for one, can see him plainly in my mind’s eye, staring forlornly from his death-room toward the home he so desperately yearned for: the White House. I will return to the Decatur House some cold March evening, when the renovations in that room have been completed and the lights of the White House can be seen through the leafless trees of Lafayette Square—and Decatur, I believe, will be there.