Buoyed by stunning success at Washington, the British pondered their next move. Less than forty miles to the northeast, Baltimore, queen city of the Chesapeake, emitted a siren’s song of invitation. Captain Gordon’s plunder snatched from the docks of Alexandria paled in comparison to the riches lining Baltimore’s waterfront. One had only to look at Washington’s shabby defense to realize that to many it was a national capital in name only. Baltimore, on the other hand—its forty-five thousand residents making it the third largest city in the United States—was the acknowledged commercial hub of the mid-Atlantic states. An attack against Baltimore would be an attack against the American jugular.
In addition to its commercial value, there were also military and political motivations for advancing against Baltimore. Its fine harbor had long provided shelter for oceangoing privateers as well as Commodore Joshua Barney’s flotilla of gunboats. Politically, the city was about as pro-Republican, prowar, and anti-British as was possible. A lightning thrust here would indeed strike deep into the hornet’s nest. “I do not like to contemplate scenes of blood and destruction,” Admiral Cochrane’s fleet captain, Edward Codrington, wrote to his wife, “but my heart is deeply interested in the coercion of these Baltimore heroes, who are perhaps the most inveterate against us of all the Yankees.”1
All these factors made Baltimore a tempting target, but Cochrane’s high command was divided on a course of action. At first blush, Cochrane himself seems to have been inclined to escape the caldron of late-summer heat and concomitant malaria and yellow fever on the Chesapeake and sail to more friendly Rhode Island to regroup. With refreshed troops and suitable reinforcements, he could yet descend upon Baltimore—or perhaps Charleston or Savannah—as he made his way south toward the Gulf Coast later in the fall.
Not surprisingly, Admiral Cockburn, ever the brash swaggerer, was of a different mind. His fleet and General Ross’s troops had just proven themselves the better of the American militia. Their British forces were not only still fit, but also in the immediate vicinity. Why come back later to do a job that might be done more easily now—before the demoralized Americans were given time to assemble regulars. That left General Ross somewhere in the middle between the two naval officers.
One strongly suspects that Ross retreated from the fires of Washington decidedly less enthused over the operation than either Cockburn or Cochrane. Perhaps he even carried with him some measure of embarrassment. This was not the type of warfare Ross had practiced under Wellington in Spain. Indeed, Cochrane reported Ross’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the Royal Navy’s campaign of vengeance shortly after Ross’s troops reembarked at Benedict. Cochrane didn’t doubt that Baltimore “ought to be laid in ashes” at some point. But “if the same opinion holds with His Majesty’s ministers,” Cochrane wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, “some hint ought to be given to General Ross, as he does not seem inclined to visit the sins committed upon His Majesty’s Canadian subjects upon the inhabitants of this state.”2 In other words, the Royal Navy thought that the general who always led in the vanguard of his troops was a little “soft.”
For his part, General Ross was dubious about the military objectives to be gained by attacking Baltimore. Commercial plunder aside, Ross thought that at best a successful campaign against Baltimore would be anticlimatic after the burning of Washington, and at worst, well, the Americans were proving elsewhere that they could fight. What if his force was somehow cut off from Cochrane’s fleet? If that happened, Prevost would not be the only one worrying about another Saratoga.
In short, Ross saw little upside in the venture and a great deal of risk. “May I assure Lord Bathurst you will not attempt Baltimore?” his aide, Captain Harry Smith, asked the general as Smith left with dispatches for England aboard HMS Iphigenia. “You may,” Ross replied decidedly.3 But Cockburn was an arm twister. When unfavorable winds delayed the fleet’s departure for Rhode Island, the continuing debate among the senior staff was finally resolved. On September 7, 1814, Admiral Cochrane made the decision to attack Baltimore—immediately.
Four days later, after Captain Gordon’s Potomac flotilla had rejoined the main fleet, Cochrane’s ships anchored in the wide mouth of the Patapsco River about ten miles from the heart of Baltimore. If Washington had been ill-prepared for an attack, Baltimore was just the opposite. On the day of the “Bladensburg Races,” Baltimore’s town fathers had formed a “Committee of Vigilance and Safety,” which promptly drafted every white male between sixteen and fifty for duty. Elderly men “who are able to carry a firelock and willing to render a last service to their country and posterity” were invited to form their own company. By the time that three American cannon boomed notice of the British fleet’s arrival in the Patapsco, about nine thousand militiamen were assembled in and around the city, busily adding to an elaborate system of earthworks that had been in preparation for over a year. Whereas Washington ran, Baltimore dug.
The architect of Baltimore’s civilian defense was Samuel Smith, a major general of the Maryland militia and one of the state’s United States senators. Born in 1752 to one of Baltimore’s well-established merchant families, Smith counted military experience going back to the early days of the Revolution and political experience dating from his first election to the House of Representatives in 1792. At sixty-two, Smith had a depth of experience and was not about to be pushed around by anyone—British or American. Thus, when William Winder came galloping into town, fresh from his rout at Bladensburg and waving his regular army commission as a brigadier general, volunteer Major General Smith said thanks, but no thanks. Smith didn’t care who young Winder’s uncle was or what his regular army rank. He stoutly, and shrewdly, refused to relinquish his command. In fact, Governor Levin Winder seems to have agreed with Smith’s decision and proceeded to move the remainder of the state’s militia to Baltimore with far greater haste than he had done to Washington.4
Central to Baltimore’s watery defenses was Fort McHenry. Named for John Adams’s secretary of war, the fort had been built in the 1790s as part of a system of coastal defenses. Typical of fortifications of that era, it was constructed of masonry and dirt fill in the shape of a five-pointed star, with five bastions overlooking an outer perimeter. Fort McHenry sat at the tip of a stubby peninsula dividing the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River and Baltimore’s secluded inner harbor from the western or Ferry Branch of the river. With a three-gun battery opposite the fort at Lazaretto on the eastern bank of the Northwest Branch and smaller Fort Covington and another six-gun battery located about a mile west of McHenry, any invading force sailing directly into the upper Patapsco was apt to receive a warm welcome.
Admiral Cochrane knew this, but also knew that an even greater defense was the shallow depth of the river that precluded his larger vessels from sailing right up to the fortifications. Accordingly, Cochrane disembarked Ross and some four thousand soldiers at North Point at the mouth of the Patapsco. Ross was ordered to advance on Baltimore via land from the east while Cochrane’s shallower draft vessels shadowed their movements from the Patapsco, much as they had done a few weeks before on the Patuxent en route to Washington. Once again, Admiral Cockburn insisted on accompanying Ross and his troops.
Left in the care of the main British fleet was a small American ship, the Minden, which had sailed from Baltimore the week before under a flag of truce to seek an audience with Admiral Cochrane. Aboard the Minden were a Georgetown lawyer named Francis Scott Key and Baltimore lawyer John S. Skinner, the latter an agent of the American government appointed to negotiate prisoner exchanges. Skinner’s present objective was the release of a sixty-five-year-old country doctor named William Beanes.
At first glance, Beanes appeared to be an unlikely prisoner. Born in Prince Georges County, Maryland, of Scottish immigrants, Beanes practiced medicine and farmed, eventually becoming one of the county’s major landowners and most respected citizens. When General Ross and Admiral Cockburn marched through Upper Marlborough en route to Washington, they found the town largely deserted except for the home of Dr. Beanes. The good doctor offered the British officers the use of his house on the night of August 22. Both Ross and Cockburn departed the following morning thinking that the gracious gentleman who still spoke with a Scottish brogue and freely espoused his Federalist leanings was something of a friend to His Majesty’s cause.
Beanes was hardly that. After the British column passed through Upper Marlborough again four days later on its retreat back to the fleet, Beanes helped detain six stragglers as prisoners of war. But the British were not quite gone. Early the next morning a mounted detachment of British troops appeared at the Beanes home, unceremoniously hauled Beanes and two houseguests out of bed, and hustled all three off to the British fleet at Benedict, a ride that left the aged Beanes jostled at the very least. According to the Baltimore Federal Gazette, their captors left word in Upper Marlborough that unless the six British prisoners were released, the British would return and burn the town. The release was promptly arranged. Subsequently, Beanes’s houseguests, fellow physician Dr. William Hill and Philip Weems, neither of whom appear to have taken any role in the capture of the British soldiers, were released as well. Dr. Beanes, however, was a different matter.
Both Ross and Cockburn appear to have taken Beanes’s conduct in the soldiers’ capture as personal affronts. They now saw his prior hospitality as deceitful at best, treasonable at worst should his Scottish accent disprove his claim of Maryland birth and make him a British subject. Consequently, Beanes was detained aboard the British fleet with no apparent chance of release. Fearful that the doctor might be bound for Halifax or Bermuda to stand charges of goodness knows what, his neighbors in Prince Georges County quickly rallied to his defense. They did what some people still do; they called in a Washington lawyer.
Francis Scott Key was well connected. He had been practicing law in Georgetown since 1802. His older sister was married to one of Dr. Beanes’s most affluent patients, and it was her husband, Richard E. West of Woodyard, who rode to Georgetown to ask Key’s assistance. Key promised to do what he could and set off for Baltimore to meet up with John Skinner. En route, Key stopped in Washington and Bladensburg and shrewdly obtained letters from wounded British soldiers recuperating in makeshift hospitals there that attested to the good treatment they were receiving from their American captors.
When the Minden finally pulled alongside Admiral Cochrane’s flagship, HMS Tonnant, a week later, the two lawyers were treated cordially by the admiral and invited to dine with him and Cockburn and Ross. But the cordiality turned cool when the purpose of their visit focused on Dr. Beanes. Cockburn went into one of his rages and was inclined to deny the lawyers access to Beanes even for the purpose of delivering soap and fresh underwear. Ross was of an equal mind until Key played his trump card. Ross read several of the letters from his wounded soldiers, turned moody, and then gradually softened. Only based on his appreciation for the care of his men, the general said, would he acquiesce in the doctor’s release. Dr. Beanes was the army’s prisoner, and over Cockburn’s objections, the army would release him, but not until it had finished its business at Baltimore.5
So, as Ross disembarked with his men at North Point at 3:00 A.M. on September 12, Key and Skinner were reunited with Dr. Beanes aboard the Minden and left under the guns of Cochrane’s main fleet. At first, Ross’s fourteen-mile march to the city resembled the British advance on Washington. General Samuel Smith, for all his preparations, had been certain that the British attack would come by water and had dug his breastworks accordingly. But there were early signs that this advance would be different. “The Americans had at last adopted an expedient which, if carried to its proper length,” Ensign George Robert Gleig of the Eighty-fifth Foot reported, “might have entirely stopped our progress. In most of the woods they had felled trees, and thrown them across the road; but as these abattis were without defenders, we experienced no other inconvenience than what arose from loss of time….”6
By 8:00 A.M., however, the first brigade of Ross’s advancing column met with more than inconvenience. Between Bear Creek and the Back River, where the North Point peninsula was only about a mile wide, Smith spread out more than three thousand Baltimore militia under the command of Brigadier General John Stricker. Just in advance of this American line, Ross and Cockburn stopped for breakfast at the Gorsuch farm. When asked by their reluctant host if they would be returning for supper, legend has Ross replying, “No, I’ll eat in Baltimore tonight—or in hell.”7 A short time later, a hail of musket fire poured into the British column from the nearby wood.
Ross quickly surmised that they had stumbled onto more than just a handful of militia. Leaving Cockburn with the first brigade, Ross himself galloped back down the road to hurry the advance of the rest of his column. As he did so, a lone shot rang out from the trees surrounding the road. The general who always led by example was struck by a bullet that passed through his right arm and into his chest. Reports vary as to who was with Ross when he fell and how long he may have lain in the road. Various accounts have him falling into the arms of an aide, lying alone until found by approaching troops, ordering up his second in command, and/or breathing his last words about his wife.
Only six months before, Elizabeth Ross had ridden over the snowy mountains of the Pyrenees from Bilbao, Spain, to St. Jean de Luz, France, to nurse her husband after he was severely wounded at Orthes. Upon departing for America, Ross promised her that it would be his last campaign. It was. Elizabeth Ross outlived her husband by more than thirty years, taking little comfort that a royal warrant had decreed that she and her descendants be henceforth known as Ross of Bladensburg.8
Admiral Cockburn hurried to Ross’s side as he lay dying. Differences in personal temperament and interservice rivalries aside, Ross and Cockburn had worked extremely well together in a war that had seen army and navy on both sides thwart each other as much as the enemy. Now that cooperation waned. “Our country has lost in him one of its best and bravest soldiers,” avowed Cockburn, “and those who knew him, as I did, a friend most honoured and beloved.”9 After the battle, Ensign Gleig would pen a junior officer’s assessment: “The death of General Ross seemed to have disorganized the whole plan of proceedings, and the fleet and army rested idle, like a watch without its main spring.”10
Command of the column now devolved upon Colonel Arthur Brooke, and by midmorning Brooke ordered his eight artillery pieces to pound the American line. Admiral Cockburn rode up and down the British line on a white charger, conspicuous in his gold-braided hat. It was almost as if he was daring the Americans to hit him. Grieving for their fallen general, the British troops were nonetheless able to joke about Cockburn’s presence, warning each other to stay “out of the admiral’s way because he drew so much fire. ‘Look out my lads! Here is the admiral coming! You’ll have it directly!’”11
As the British infantry advanced, Stricker’s militia fell back to second and third lines of defense, but unlike Bladensburg, their withdrawal was orderly and the third line held. By nightfall the British had won the field of battle, but at a stiff cost. And they were not much closer to entering Baltimore itself than they had been after Ross’s breakfast boast. In addition to hundreds of casualties on both sides, two American sharpshooters, one of whom likely fired the fatal bullet that struck Ross, were dead. Other American sharpshooters were given no quarter. The British did not fight from trees.12
Admiral Cochrane, too, grieved Ross’s death, but knew that something had to be done quickly to support Brooke. At dawn on the following morning, September 13, the admiral dispatched five bomb ketches capable of hurling two-hundred-pound mortar shells four thousand yards and the rocket vessel HMS Erebus to take up station less than three miles below Fort McHenry. His hope was to reduce the fort and outflank the American position on the peninsula, opening the way into the city for Brooke. The larger British ships, hampered by their deeper drafts, waited down the river.
Fort McHenry’s commander was thirty-four-year-old Major George Armistead. A Virginia native, Armistead came from a long family tradition of military service and had made the army his career, transferring to the artillery after a stint with the infantry. He was with Winfield Scott at the capture of Fort George before his appointment to command Fort McHenry early in 1814. Aside from his professional concerns at the moment, Armistead was filled with plenty of personal anxiety. His wife, Louisa, was due to deliver their first child any day and had taken refuge with family in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “I wished to God you had not been compelled to leave Baltimore,” Armistead wrote her two days before Ross landed at North Point. “I dreamed last night that you had presented me with a fine son. God grant it may be so and all well.”13
High above Fort McHenry an American flag stood out in the morning light. By any standard, it was a huge ensign. Thirty feet tall and forty-two feet wide, the flag boasted fifteen five-pointed stars arranged in five staggered rows of three stars each on a blue field set on fifteen stripes of alternating red and white. The fifteen stars and stripes were for the original thirteen states and the additions of Vermont and Kentucky. The newer states to join the Union—Tennessee, Ohio, and as recently as 1812, Louisiana—were not yet accorded the honor of a star. (In 1818, Congress authorized a flag with thirteen stripes and one star for each state to be added on the Fourth of July following its admission.) Legend has it that Armistead, or perhaps the fort’s prior commander, asked Mrs. Mary Young Pickersgill, a flagmaker for Baltimore’s merchant fleet, to sew a flag so big that the British would have no trouble finding the fort. She did so with the aid of her thirteen-year-old daughter, Caroline, working by candlelight in a nearby brewery in order to spread out the voluminous yards of cloth.14
Now the British had indeed found Armistead, and despite his twenty cannon at Fort McHenry and the flanking batteries at Lazaretto and Covington, there was little that Armistead could do to answer the hail of British mortars and rockets that pounded his positions throughout the day on September 13. It was a matter of simple math. The range of the British mortars was four thousand yards; the range of his cannon was two thousand yards. All through the day and into the night of September 13, the British ships kept up their bombardment.
Downstream aboard the anchored Minden, Francis Scott Key, John Skinner, and the soon-to-be free Dr. William Beanes could only pace the deck and wonder what havoc this bombardment was wreaking. Only the sight of Mary Pickersgill’s huge flag waving above the harbor gave some assurance that the fort had not fallen, that Baltimore was secure. Then, darkness fell. But the bombardment continued. The contrails of the Congreve rockets from the Erebus glared red across the sky. The mortars, with their fuses timed to explode above the fort and rain shrapnel and destruction upon it, appeared as giant fireworks—bombs bursting in the night sky.
Dr. Beanes was beside himself. He kept asking his companions over and over again, “Can you see the flag? Is the flag still there?”
Occasionally Key could get enough of a glimpse through a telescope to assure the doctor that the flag was indeed still there. But then the American guns in the fort opened fire. Admiral Cochrane was trying an end run, rowing troops in the darkness past the fort to attack Fort Covington and the western batteries in an attempt to outflank it. Meanwhile, Brooke was supposed to advance against Stricker’s last line of defense to the east. Armistead’s batteries fired away at the British rowboats and then fell silent. Had the British forces been repelled, or had the fort fallen?
Once again, Dr. Beanes asked his anguished question: “Was the flag still there?” Finally, as the early light of dawn tinged the eastern sky, Key was able to answer in the affirmative. What so proudly they had hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming was indeed still there. Beanes and Skinner were jubilant. Key took out an envelope and scribbled a few lines. Two days later, back in an American Baltimore, Key elaborated on his verse.
O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.15
Fort McHenry had held. Major Armistead’s troops had suffered only four killed and twenty-four wounded. Soon news would come from Gettysburg that the major was the father of a healthy newborn—a girl. George Armistead would die young four years later, but his family would have cause to focus on Gettysburg again a generation hence. His nephew, Lewis Armistead, would die there at the head of his troops during Pickett’s Charge on a hot day in July 1863.
Meanwhile, as Cochrane’s forces failed to reduce Fort McHenry, Colonel Brooke’s attempt to force Stricker’s line had also failed—stillborn in the rainy early hours of September 14. Cochrane had warned Brooke not to storm the American earthworks unless he was certain of carrying them. With Cochrane’s promise of the full support of the navy from the Patapsco side appearing dimmer and dimmer as night edged toward dawn, Brooke reconsidered the odds. “Under these circumstances,” Brooke reported to Cochrane, “and keeping in view your Lordship’s instructions, it was agreed between the Vice-Admiral [Cockburn] and myself that the capture of the town would not have been a sufficient equivalent to the loss which might probably be sustained in storming the heights.”16
Two days before, some four hundred miles to the north, General Sir George Prevost, with three times the force arrayed against his opponents, had come to the same conclusion. Like Ross departing Washington, Brooke left his campfires burning brightly and slipped quietly away to return to Cochrane’s fleet. The British campaign against the Chesapeake was over. The next day, under favorable winds, the British fleet began its departure from the bay. Admiral Cochrane sailed for Halifax; cocky Cockburn headed for Bermuda; the bulk of the troop transports marked time until mid-October when they sailed for Jamaica to await a grand rendezvous and Cochrane’s next thrust along the Gulf Coast.
In their wake, the British left mostly bitterness. Rabid Republican Hezekiah Niles of the Niles’ Weekly Register went so far as to propose that a monument be erected at the spot where Ross fell, emblazoned with the following inscription. “By the Just Disposition of the Almighty near this Spot was Slain, September 12, 1814, the Leader of a Host of Barbarians who destroyed the Capitol of the United States…and devoted the Populous City of Baltimore to rape, robbery, and conflagration.”17 It didn’t happen quite that way, of course, and if anyone deserved the sentiment, it was Admiral Cockburn and not the deceased Ross.
Other words were more enduring. Joseph H. Nicholson was instrumental in publishing Francis Scott Key’s poem in the form of a handbill entitled “The Defense of Fort McHenry.” It was so well received that it was republished by a newspaper in Frederick, Maryland, under the title “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then, barely a month after the event, the words were sung publicly for the first time to the tune of an old English drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.”18
Over the years “The Star-Spangled Banner” gained in popularity, until in 1931 Congress finally declared it America’s national anthem. Every schoolchild learned its first verse. Those who looked beyond the familiar words to the anthem’s second verse may have never known that the “dread silence” of Armistead’s guns for so long had been due to their short range.
On the shore dimly seen thro’ the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?19
And those who made it to the fourth verse and knew the war’s history may have thought Francis Scott Key patriotically prophetic, but pragmatically premature when he declared:
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land,
Praise the Pow’r that made and preserved us a nation!20
The war was still far from won.