“Such Destruction—Such Confusion…”
Thursday, August 25, 1814
The next evening, shivering and exhausted, the president’s wife pounded on the wooden door of a tavern, seeking refuge in an establishment whose angry occupants had denied her entrance just an hour earlier. They were angry because they blamed President Madison for thrusting the United States into the war with England; with him absent, Dolley became the target of their ire. Twilight had arrived and with it the resumption of the furious thunderstorms and hurricane-force winds that had raged all day and turned the dusty roadways into barely passable mud-clogged swamps. Dolley Payne Madison and her companions, drenched, needed food and a warm fire.
Dolley had traveled sixteen miles from Washington in the miserable weather, fleeing just ahead of the rumored onslaught of British soldiers. She’d faced harrowing danger over the past two days. With enemy troops advancing on Washington, she had remained at the White House as long as she could, desperate for James to return from the front lines so they could seek safe harbor together. The president had left three days earlier on horseback to join American militiamen marching to confront British soldiers who longed to capture Madison and destroy the White House. James and Dolley both believed the president’s presence would steel the resolve of the American troops. Before his departure, James had chosen this tavern as a meeting place if Dolley were forced to evacuate the president’s house before his return.
Although James had penned an initial letter to her two days earlier, declaring that American troops were “in high spirits & make a good appearance,” the situation deteriorated rapidly. She received two additional dispatches from James by messenger, each written in pencil; the second she found “alarming, because he desires I should be ready at a moment’s warning to enter my carriage and leave the city; that the enemy seemed stronger than had been reported and that it might happen that they would reach the city, with intention to destroy it.”
She had acted swiftly after that, filling trunks with cabinet papers and other government documents, including her husband’s voluminous notes from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which virtually no American knew existed. She decided that all the trunks should fit into a single carriage and thus made the decision to sacrifice their personal property. Late Tuesday night, she vowed to remain in the White House until James returned and could accompany her. She feared for his safety, not just from British soldiers but from disgruntled Americans angry about the war with the British and now the humiliating invasion of Washington. “I hear of much hostility towards him,” Dolley had written in a letter to her sister. “Disaffection stalks around us.”
With the exception of her steward, John Pierre Sioussat, or “French John,” and a few other White House servants and staff members, Dolley was alone in the White House Tuesday night. “My friends and acquaintances are all gone,” she wrote, and even a contingent of 100 troops left behind to guard her and the house had fled.
At dawn on Wednesday, August 24, 1814, she climbed to the roof of the White House and began looking through her spyglass in every direction, “watching with unwearied anxiety” and searching for James and his fellow riders. To her dismay, she saw instead scores of disorganized American troops, “wandering in all directions, as if there was a lack of arms, or of spirit to fight for their own firesides!” By three o’clock that afternoon, she heard the roar of cannon from the nearby battle, and still, she recounted, “Mr. Madison comes not; may God protect him.” Two dust-covered messengers arrived and begged Dolley to leave, but again she refused, holding out hope that James would return. She oversaw the loading of the wagon with the documents, state silver, and other White House valuables, and sent it on its way to the Bank of Maryland. “Whether it will reach its destination … or fall into the hands of British soldiery, events must determine,” she wrote.
Finally, a close family friend, Major Charles Carroll, arrived and announced that the situation had become too perilous for Dolley to remain at the White House; reluctantly, she acquiesced to his insistence that she vacate the premises. “I must leave this house, or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it, by filling up the road I am directed to take,” she wrote. It was bad enough for the country’s psyche that the chief executive’s house was imperiled by British troops, but Dolley realized the far more deleterious symbolic impact that the president’s captured wife—the woman who would eventually provide the nation with the term “First Lady”—would have on the American will to fight.
She undertook one final task before rushing to the carriage, annoying Carroll with her delays. She ordered servants to remove and secure the full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of General George Washington from the wall. She would not leave it to be mocked and desecrated by the enemy—not Washington, the greatest American hero of all. When it became apparent that unscrewing the large frame would be too time-consuming, Dolley ordered the frame broken and the canvas removed. At about this time, two more friends arrived at the White House to offer help, and Dolley entrusted the painting to them, urging them to conceal it from the British at all costs; they would transport the portrait by wagon across the Potomac to safety.
With her final task completed, Dolley and her small group finally left the White House. French John locked the house and deposited the key with the Russian ambassador, whose nearby house was protected from destruction by his country’s flag.
“When I shall again write to you, or where I shall be tomorrow, I cannot tell!” Dolley had written to her sister.
James Madison would serve as president for another two and a half years, but never again would the Madisons live in the White House.
* * *
THE BAND OF MORE than 150 jubilant and rowdy British soldiers found the White House unguarded. Ever thorough, they ransacked the house from cellar to attic, smashing windows and piling furniture in the center of various rooms. Outside, they methodically soaked rags in oil, draped them on poles, set them alight, and proceeded to throw them through the openings where windows had once been. Within minutes, the White House was consumed in flames and the night sky was aglow with smoky orange light. “I shall never forget the destructive majesty of the flames as the torches were applied to the beds, curtains, etc.,” reported Captain Harry Smith, junior adjutant to Major General Robert Ross. “Our sailors were artists at the work.” What was artistry to the British was horrifying to Washingtonians. Resident Margaret Bayard Smith, describing the White House as being “wrapt in flames and smoke,” related her reaction and that of her companions: “The spectators stood in awful silence, the city was light and the heavens redden’d with the blaze!”
Within hours, the president’s house was a gutted ruin, the walls “still white except for great licks of soot that scarred the sockets that had been windows.” An architect’s report later despaired that the White House had “suffered immensely, particularly in the superstructure of the external walls,” and predicted that “any means taken to prevent this Building from receiving further injury by the weather, would be ultimately useless.” British soldiers also spotted an abandoned coach outside the White House. “The soldiers amused themselves by knocking this coach to pieces with the but-ends [sic] of their muskets,” noted a report by one British lieutenant. Another soldier took President Madison’s “fine dress sword” from the White House.
But the British didn’t stop there. They moved next to the twin buildings of the Capitol—the Senate to the north and the House to the south. The central part of the Capitol was not built; the two wings were linked by a covered hundred-foot-long wooden walkway. British troops lit bonfires inside the Capitol, fueled by piles of furniture and gunpowder, which destroyed artwork and burned so intensely that more than one hundred panes of plate glass skylights melted and the outer stone columns fell off the building. The Library of Congress—and its more than 3,000 volumes of rare books—was consumed by fire.
To add to the fiery spectacle, the Americans had set ablaze their own nearby navy yard to prevent the British from capturing it—the secretary of the navy would later report this order “was not issued without serious deliberation and great pain”—and in the process had destroyed ships and ignited vast ammunition stores, sending flames roaring high into the night sky. “It would be difficult to conceive of a finer spectacle than that which presented itself,” noted Lieutenant G. R. Gleig, who was with the British forces at the nearby Battle of Bladensburg. “The sky was brilliantly illuminated by the different conflagrations; and a dark red light was thrown upon the road, sufficient to permit each man to view distinctly his comrade’s face.”
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY, AS Dolley and her bedraggled entourage ventured through the countryside toward the tavern, with the hope of rendezvousing with the president, the British continued their destruction, burning the Treasury building, the structure that housed the State and War departments, and several other public buildings.
Then, as if by providence, torrential rains and fierce winds roared through Washington and the surrounding area; one report called it “the most tremendous hurricane ever remembered by the inhabitants.” Roofs of houses were torn away and “carried up into the air like sheets of paper, while the rain which accompanied it was like the rushing of a mighty cataract rather than the dropping of a shower.” The raging winds destroyed other buildings, burying civilian inhabitants and American soldiers beneath the ruins. In the midst of the chaos, a powder magazine exploded, killing nearly a hundred British soldiers. Mercifully, the disaster and the severe weather caused most of the redcoats to retreat from Washington and regroup.
Occupants of the tavern finally admitted Dolley, and that night she watched lightning crackle against a black sky, split trees in the distance, and illuminate the faces of her exhausted companions. After hours of anxious waiting, Dolley saw President Madison and his friends ride up on horseback; the sixty-three-year-old president had been in the saddle for the better part of four days. Marveling at her husband’s stamina, Dolley urged him to sleep. As midnight approached, a breathless courier arrived and warned the tavern occupants that a contingent of enemy soldiers had discovered a clue to the president’s hiding place and were on their way to capture him. The Americans relocated Madison to a miserable hovel deep in the woods behind the tavern, where, with the storm still exploding around him, as “the boughs moaned and sobbed,” he spent the remainder of the night. All the while confined to his cramped and cold shed, the president of the United States expected “at any moment, to hear the tread of the British soldiers as they passed, or perhaps halted and searched for the coveted prisoner.”
* * *
AFTER DAYBREAK, WORD REACHED the tavern that the British had evacuated Washington, and James Madison returned to the capital, insisting that Dolley remain in Virginia until the city was safe. On August 28, she rejoined her husband and visited the charred White House. Smoke still rose from the ashes and the blackened timber and walls; a despondent Dolley, “sick at heart,” was forced to turn away from the painful sight. For several days, friends reported that she was tearful and morose. When her friend visited her, she found Dolley “much depressed. She could scarcely speak without tears.”
President Madison was not faring much better. As he toured Washington, inspecting the devastation, he not only saw a White House in ruins but a devastated Capitol building—particularly the House of Representatives—punctuated by the collapse of the magnificent domed roof into the cellar, where it lay smoldering from the searing fire. In addition, homes around the government buildings had been looted and destroyed, and the carcasses of dead horses were strewn around the city. Madison would later condemn the British troops for the wanton destruction and their failure to spare “those monuments of the arts and models of taste with which our country had enriched and embellished its infant metropolis.” For now, though, one witness described the president as “miserably shattered and woebegone. In short, he looks heartbroken.”
Months later, Dolley Madison wrote of her return to Washington: “I cannot tell you what I felt on re-entering [the city]—such destruction—such confusion. The [British] fleet full in view and in the act of robbing Alexandria!”
But because of her quick thinking and resourcefulness, Dolley had rescued one particularly priceless document, her husband’s still unpublished notes from the Constitutional Convention, a gift that she would one day place “before Congress and the World.”
Like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the only surviving written account of the highly secretive Constitutional Convention was safe for now.
* * *
DESPITE THE BRITISH EVACUATION of Washington after the storm, Americans were not celebrating. Rumors were spreading that the enemy was preparing for a second invasion to finish what they had started—to reduce the city to rubble. For now, Stephen Pleasonton—who returned to Washington on August 26—and James Monroe decided they would keep the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the other important state papers hidden in the Virginia farmhouse.
The documents would remain there for three weeks, returning to Washington only when the British fleet finally departed the waters of the Chesapeake after the Battle of Baltimore in mid-September. In the interim, Pleasonton made several trips to Leesburg to sift through the linen sacks and find “particular papers to which the Secretary of State had occasion to refer in the course of his correspondence.” With its capital burned, with its most important governing documents stored in an abandoned farmhouse, the business of the United States carried on.
Stephen Pleasonton would one day go on to become superintendent of lighthouses, a position he would hold for more than thirty years. Without a doubt, though, Pleasonton’s most valuable contribution to the United States was his almost single-handed rescue and subsequent protection of the original engrossed copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. His initial decision to save these documents, his defiance of Secretary Armstrong’s rebuke, his quick thinking to remove the documents from Washington and then to relocate them to the abandoned farmhouse in Leesburg—these stand as his immemorial legacy of the preservation of America’s heritage.
In one way, at least, Pleasonton’s patriotic actions were not surprising; indeed, such resourcefulness and honor ran in his family. Pleasonton was the grandnephew of Delaware’s Caesar Rodney, whose grueling midnight ride nearly forty years earlier, in the face of great physical peril, allowed him to cast the crucial vote in favor of American independence on July 2, 1776.
* * *
THE DESTRUCTION OF WASHINGTON left physical, emotional, and symbolic scars on the young nation. As one historian described it, America, “proud of its bold beginnings, had been humbled, and a profound vision would be required to lead the nation back from the abyss.” Washington residents were furious, at the British, yes, but also with Madison initially, and later with Secretary Armstrong. Monroe termed the anger “a tempest of dissatisfaction at the late events here, [which] rages with great fever.” Margaret Bayard Smith described the scene in the nation’s capital as “gloomy” and added: “I do not suppose Government will ever return to Washington.”
But the devastation wrought by the British on Washington also galvanized the citizens of the young country. By September of 1814, more than 15,000 volunteers marched into Baltimore to repel the British, while Fort McHenry withstood bombardment from the enemy flotilla. Francis Scott Key, a Georgetown lawyer, observed the battle from a British hostage ship in Baltimore harbor; the “rockets’ red glare” and the “bombs bursting in air” inspired Key to write the lines to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which would become America’s national anthem.
In the fall of 1814, Congress crowded into one of the few surviving public buildings, the Patent Office (now the National Museum of American Art), and debated whether the capital should be moved someplace else, perhaps inland, to a location “with greater security and less inconvenience.” One New York congressman suggested it be moved closer to Wall Street so government could be nearer its creditors. New Englanders also wanted the capital relocated. Those who favored relocation not only sought a place that could be more easily defended; they believed suitable accommodations already existed that would save the country untold dollars in renovations and rebuilding. Congressmen who supported remaining in Washington argued on more defiant symbolic grounds. “I would rather sit under canvas in the city than remove one mile out of it to a palace,” declared Samuel Farrow of South Carolina. Or, as Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina warned: “If the seat of government is once set on wheels, there is no saying where it will stop.”
In the end, by a narrow vote, the emotional and steadfast arguments against moving won the day. Congress voted that the U.S. capital would remain in Washington. After the Treaty of Ghent ended the war in early 1815, rebuilding began in earnest. As part of the restoration effort, Congress agreed to an offer from Thomas Jefferson to purchase the former president’s extensive library collection to replace the volumes destroyed in the 1814 fire; Jefferson’s volumes would form the core holdings of the new Library of Congress. Across its landscape, Washington rose from the ashes, and the most visible symbol of national unity and resilience—the restored White House—made its public debut on New Year’s Day in 1818. Its first occupant would be the new president, James Monroe, who, as secretary of state, had issued the warning to secure the nation’s records as the British approached Washington.
With its second war for independence over and its capital rebuilt, with its government intact and its most important national records and documents preserved, America faced the early nineteenth century with a newfound sense of purpose, pride, and respect for its accumulated sacrifice and its stirring four decades of history.