“Take the Best Care of the Books and Papers…”
Monday, August 22, 1814
Secretary of State James Monroe had seen enough and knew what was coming next. The only question was whether it was too late for him or anyone else to stop it.
For nearly three days, accompanied by a contingent of twenty-five cavalrymen and with the blessings of the president, James Madison, Monroe had scouted the Maryland countryside on horseback, seeking to determine the strength of the British force that had come ashore at Benedict and the number of enemy ships that had entered Chesapeake Bay. More than two years after the United States had declared war against Great Britain, the enemy was bearing down on the nation’s capital.
Initially, Monroe sought to survey the scene from atop a hill nearly three miles from Benedict; from there he could see British ships in the Patuxent River. But lacking a spyglass, he could not get an accurate count from that distance. “We shall take better views in the course of the evening, and should any thing be seen, material, I will advise you of it,” he had written to Madison a day earlier. He felt compelled to share with Madison the rumors and conjecture that were swirling: that the British were “still debarking their troops, the number of which I have not obtained any satisfactory information of,” and, “that Washington is their object.” But at that point, Monroe, who was an experienced military man and Madison’s eyes and ears in the field, would not engage in speculation, willing only to say, “of this I can form no opinion at this time.”
The situation changed quickly the next day. Monroe received word that an American artillery unit, transporting cannon on barges, had slipped further upstream, and “that it is probable that a [British] force by land and water had been sent against the flotilla.” In response, Monroe directed his men toward Nottingham, about fifteen miles upstream, where the American cannon were sheltered. Horseback riding was hard, hot, and dusty. The late-August Maryland heat and humidity were stifling—it was the hottest summer in memory. Monroe’s small group arrived in Nottingham before the British, and at first, Monroe spotted only a moderate number of British barges transporting troops. “The enemy are now within four hundred yards of the shore,” he wrote in a note to Brigadier General William Winder. “There are but three barges at hand and the force in view is not considerable. If you send five or six hundred men, if you could not save the town, you may, perhaps, cut off their retreat.”
Before he could complete his note, Monroe realized his mistake—he had spoken too soon and vastly underestimated the size of the British flotilla. “P.S.,” he scribbled, “ten or twelve more barges in view. There are but two muskets in town and a few scattering militia.”
And then, by five o’clock that afternoon, Monroe added: “Thirty or forty barges are in view.”
The British were landing in huge numbers and marching into Nottingham virtually unopposed.
* * *
IF JAMES MONROE HAD been his adversary in 1787 and 1788 over the Bill of Rights, President Madison had come to appreciate his secretary of state’s considerable talents. He was, in fact, the ideal person to handle the reconnaissance Madison needed so desperately.
After the fight over the Constitution, the two Virginians had patched up their relations and become close friends. At six feet tall, Monroe towered over the diminutive president, and some observers had taken to calling them “Big Jim” and “Little Jim.” Monroe, age fifty-six, brought a wealth of experience in politics and the military. After losing the election to Madison to sit in the first national House of Representatives, the current secretary of state had served as a U.S. senator, as governor of Virginia, twice as a minister to France—including under President Jefferson to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase—and as an envoy to both Britain and Spain. Monroe had distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War, fighting in several important battles, including Trenton, Monmouth, and Brandywine. He had crossed the Delaware with Washington, and at the Battle of Trenton he suffered a near fatal wound to his shoulder when he was struck by a cannonball.
Madison appreciated Monroe’s considerable overseas experience and diplomatic skills, which was why he selected him as secretary of state in 1811. During the current crisis, however, it was Monroe’s military background—and his knowledge of the British—that earned Madison’s confidence.
With such a deep background, Monroe knew exactly what information Madison needed, both for military and political reasons, and how and when to report it. The president had received a great deal of criticism for involving the United States in this latest war, and both Madison and Monroe were well aware that the young country entered the conflict woefully undermanned and underprepared. Now more than ever, the president and the country needed accurate intelligence; hence Monroe’s initial caution in his early dispatches.
By this morning, though, caution and hesitation were no longer options. Monroe estimated that 6,000 British troops had landed and they were encountering limited resistance from, at most, 2,200 disorganized and inexperienced American soldiers. There was now no doubt about the destination of the invading force; Monroe could now verify that the conjecture had been accurate, though Madison’s own secretary of war had scoffed at the rumors for weeks. “The enemy are in full march for Washington,” Monroe wrote in a dispatch to President Madison. “Have the materials prepared to destroy the bridges.”
In yet another postscript he added: “You had better remove the records.”
James Monroe arguably contributed as much as anyone to the founding of America and the development of the early republic. And perhaps because of all he did as soldier, senator, secretary of state, and president, few people know of this six-word postscript—of his crucial role in preserving America’s founding documents.
* * *
THE WAR OF 1812, a conflict that some historians call the second war for American independence, started officially when President James Madison signed the declaration of war against England on June 18, 1812. But tensions between the two countries had been simmering for years.
From the U.S. perspective, Americans had resented British condescension almost from the beginning of the nineteenth century, expressed in the years leading up to the war by seizing U.S. sailors and forcing them to serve in the British Navy—known as “impressments”—and encouraging Indian tribes to attack settlers in the American interior. In his request to Congress for the declaration of war, Madison objected to the “crying enormity” of impressment; the “avidity of British cruisers” as they harassed American ships in American territorial waters, and recent blockades by the British that violated the “neutral rights of the United States.” Such actions, Madison said, resulted in a “spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped on our country.” James Monroe, during his tenure in England, had tried unsuccessfully to convince the British to cease impressments.
Madison also cited the role of Great Britain in “the warfare just renewed by the savages” in the Northwest Territory, blaming English provocateurs for Indian unrest. Matters came to a head when William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, called for the further expansion of white settlements and had been opposed mainly by Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief. Federal troops pushed the Indians back at a bloody battle on the Tippecanoe River in November 1811, but the Shawnee and other tribes continued attacks on white settlements. Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee decried the Indian violence, exclaiming that the “blood of murdered heroes must be revenged.” There was little doubt, he added, that “this Hostile band, which must be excited to war by the secret agents of Great Britain, must be destroyed.”
From the British point of view, the War of 1812 began as almost an annoyance and was a direct result of England’s total war against Napoleon and the French Empire, its most detested and powerful rival. Britain had established numerous economic blockades to defeat France and was furious when American merchant ships—citing neutrality—attempted to breach the blockade and deliver merchandise. The British introduced new laws—Orders in Council—to block the trading between the United States and France and used the laws to carry out impressment against American sailors. The United States was further caught in the Anglo-French crossfire when France announced that it would seize any British cargo found on American ships, retaliatory action that the United States blamed squarely on British aggression on the high seas. Napoleon seemed intent on provoking a war between the United States and England to ease the pressure on his own forces. Even though the French Navy had seized many American ships, Napoleon promised to cease the high-seas action if the United States imposed trade restrictions against the British. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the United States: “Never since the battle of Lexington have I seen the country in such a state of exasperation.”
With every transgression that Americans perceived as bullying from Old World powers, U.S. defiance heightened, no place more than in the halls of Congress. Bold young lawmakers from the west and south, such as Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, not only inspired other members with their oratorical skills; they also infused Congress with a sense of “impetuous nationalism,” in the words of historian Anthony Pitch. They had been born after the Declaration of Independence and raised in a free and sovereign nation. “What was tolerable for older Americans would be insufferable for the young war hawks,” Pitch wrote. “War … was the only honorable course for a people claiming to be free and independent.”
Not everyone agreed. Many Americans, especially from the New England states, believed war would be madness, that fighting the British would result in devastating seaport blockades that would cripple maritime economies. Their fears would be realized: by 1814, the U.S. economy had collapsed, and while nationalism and anti-British sentiments remained strong, opponents of the war blamed Madison for the country’s economic woes.
* * *
IN SHEER GEOGRAPHICAL SCOPE, the War of 1812 covered thousands of square miles, engulfing land and sea, from Canada—once in the war, the British goal was to prevent the United States from taking any part of Canada—to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Great Lakes to the Potomac, from Detroit and other western outposts to Washington. The participants in the struggle included some of American history’s legendary names and its next generation of presidents: Dolley and James Madison, Monroe, Tecumseh, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor. The U.S. Navy came of age during this war, and the country’s East Coast–centered economic and demographic power shifted westward.
The war also featured some of the greatest battles in American history, including the September 1814 British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor that inspired an emotional Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Just a few months later, Major General Andrew Jackson would launch a spectacular and decisive victory at the Battle of New Orleans, thwarting a British effort to capture the city and separate Louisiana from the rest of the United States.
No event, however, angered Americans and steeled their resolve more than the devastating British attack on Washington in August 1814. Starting on August 24, British troops set fire to much of the city, including the White House and the Capitol building, forcing President Madison and his wife, Dolley, to flee, and instilling fear in Washington residents that the republic itself was in jeopardy.
* * *
WHEN WAR BROKE OUT, Madison—our first wartime American president—faced the daunting task of battling a powerful Royal Navy and British regulars who were seeking to avenge England’s defeat in the American Revolution and destroy the fledging nation just a few decades into its existence.
In early 1813, American forces invaded the British territory of Canada and won a major battle at York—present-day Toronto. After winning the battle, and in retaliation for an explosion ignited by retreating British troops, U.S. troops plundered the city, looting tea, sugar, whiskey, and other goods and torching several buildings, including the provincial parliament building—along with the records housed there—a courthouse, a library, and the governor’s residence. What was a major military victory for the Americans was marred by the looting and burning.
The British didn’t forget.
By 1814, England had won several key battles against Napoleon (the French emperor would face his ultimate defeat in June 1815 at Waterloo). As a result, thousands of British soldiers were freed up and redeployed against the United States.
The British move against the American capital would be the ultimate revenge for York, though it surprised many in the American command structure. Madison had received an anonymous letter from an American sympathizer aboard a British ship warning him that English troops planned to lay waste to Washington. Calling himself “A friend to the United States of America,” the seaman, who claimed he had been captured by the enemy and “compelled against his will to fight” onboard a British vessel, warned that “your enemy have in agitation an attack on the Capital of the United States.” The British intended to land their men, move quickly to Washington, “batter it down and then return to their vessels immediately.” They planned to employ upwards of 7,000 men in the attack. The letter writer implored Madison to take his warning seriously. “You had better be prepared for such an event,” he said. “Do not repose under a too fallacious belief of security; for by so doing, you may fall into the hands of your enemy.”
The president found the anonymous warning credible—and indeed, it would prove to be remarkable for the accuracy with which it outlined the British plans. He turned it over to Brigadier General William H. Winder, who commanded the military district that included Washington and Maryland. But most of Madison’s military strategists gave the letter minimal credence and employed only cursory precautions to protect Washington. Most in the military command structure saw little in the way of strategic importance in the bleak, swampy city. The secretary of war, John Armstrong, was adamant in his refusal to believe that Washington was at risk. “They certainly will not come here!” he declared in a letter to the head of the District of Columbia militia. “What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the place, Sir. That is of so much more consequence.” Nearly blinded by his stubbornness, Armstrong seems never to have considered the symbolic importance of the nation’s capital.
But the British certainly did. Baltimore—with its thriving port and providing a gateway to Washington and the interior—was on England’s target list, but so was Washington, which the British viewed as the most valuable of symbolic prizes. The British commander in chief of the North American station, Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, believed an attack on the U.S. capital would give the Americans “a complete drubbing.” Such a gambit would do far more than avenge the American excesses at York. If British troops could capture and occupy the city, it would embarrass the United States; if they could imprison President Madison in chains, it would humiliate all Americans; and if they could destroy America’s most precious governing documents, the nation of laws would be perceived as impotent.
The experiment would be over. Chaos and anarchy would reign and the young country would be brought to its knees—perhaps to disintegrate entirely, perhaps forever.
* * *
NOW, ON AUGUST 22 AND 23, Washingtonians scrambled frantically to flee the nation’s capital ahead of the impending arrival of the British. Word had spread quickly that the largely unprotected city was the next target of enemy troops fast-marching from Maryland. Residents loaded their belongings on carts and wagons, saddled horses, or simply escaped town on foot over hot, dusty dirt roads, leaving their belongings to be collected by slaves or abandoning them altogether. The pandemonium soon resulted in clogged egress roads from Washington; many other refugees poured into the wooded countryside, preferring to take their chances in the wild rather than risk encountering enemy troops on the roads.
House clerk J. T. Frost, desperate to save important papers, ordered three messengers to scour the countryside looking for wagons to serve as transport. But they were too late—most of the carts and wagons had already been procured and most were piled up with personal belongings. Frost’s messengers returned with a single cart and four oxen, apparently purchased from a man who lived several miles outside of Washington. They loaded many House papers into the cart and drove nearly ten miles from Washington, but still they were frustrated. Frost believed he could have saved all the House documents, and even the volumes in the Library of Congress, if only he had a sufficient number of wagons.
Senate clerks John McDonald and Lewis Machen also acted quickly in the midst of what Machen called “doubt, confusion, and dismay” all around them. They were able to get their hands on a single wagon by threatening the owner with impoundment if he did not turn it over voluntarily. McDonald and Machen then loaded the most important Senate documents onto the wagon, including what Machen said later was the only copy of the Senate’s quarter-century of executive history and secret positions and troop strengths of all American military forces. One broken wagon wheel later, followed by an accident in which their transport overturned, the two men made their way safely to Montgomery County, Maryland, out of the path of the advancing British. More than twenty years later, when recalling the swift decision to relocate the Senate documents without a directive from a superior, Machen pondered the consequences of inaction: “What would have been the feelings of every intelligent individual … had the Executive History of the Senate for a period of twenty-five years been blotted forever from the knowledge and memory of man?”
The House and Senate documents that the clerks were able to save were valuable to Congress and to America’s national record to that point.
But it was State Department senior office clerk Stephen Pleasonton, resisting protests from a cabinet official who believed the British threat to Washington was exaggerated, who led the effort to evacuate documents far more critical to America’s past, present, and future.
* * *
WHEN A MOUNTED SCOUT arrived at the secretary of state’s office with Monroe’s warning about the impending British arrival, Pleasonton sprang into action. The rider advised him and the other department clerks “to take the best care of the books and papers of the office which might be in our power.” Monroe wanted the nation’s precious national documents and records secured quickly.
Pleasonton, who had worked as a government clerk in Washington since the capital city was organized in 1800, wasted little time. He and a few of his fellow clerks hurried out to purchase coarse linen fabric, which they cut up and fashioned into large bags. Into the makeshift sacks they stuffed the founding documents: the original signed and engrossed copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the papers of the Continental Congress—including the still unpublished secret journals—international treaties, and the correspondence of George Washington, including his famous letter resigning his commission at the end of the Revolutionary War.
As they worked in a passageway between the War Department and the State Department, John Armstrong, the secretary of war, passed them on the way to his office; still in denial about the danger of the situation, he scolded Pleasonton and the other clerks for raising “unnecessary alarm.” In Pleasonton’s words, “he did not think the British were serious in their intentions of coming to Washington.” Undeterred, Pleasonton, a mere clerk, stood his ground against the cabinet official. “I replied that we were under a different belief, and let them [the British] be what they might, it was the part of prudence to preserve the valuable papers of the Revolutionary Government,” he recalled years after the fact.
When the bags containing the documents were loaded onto carts, Pleasonton and the clerks crossed the Potomac by the Chain Bridge and stopped at an abandoned Virginia grist mill about two miles “above Georgetown,” where they unloaded the wagons and hid the papers. But Pleasonton had second thoughts the next morning when he realized the mill was close to a large foundry that manufactured cannon and shot, and would almost certainly be targeted by the British. Not only could an explosion and conflagration at the foundry possibly spread to the mill and consume the documents, but “some evil disposed person”—a traitor or spy—could lead the British to the hiding place. Finding such treasures together in one group would exceed the enemy’s wildest expectations.
On the morning of August 24—the date the British would arrive in Washington—Pleasonton reloaded the precious cargo and set out again, visiting several farmhouses in the Virginia countryside to procure wagons. This time, he drove the teams thirty-five miles inland to Leesburg, where, according to his account, he found an empty house. Inside he “safely placed” the bags of documents, “locked the door,” and turned the keys over to the “Rev. Mr. Littlejohn,” one of the collectors of internal revenue—essentially the country sheriff. Pleasonton and Littlejohn then parted ways, leaving the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the other irreplaceable American documents stored in a small abandoned farmhouse in Virginia, while every American in the area awaited Washington’s fate.
Wearied by his efforts, Pleasonton checked into a nearby inn on the evening of August 24 and went to bed early.