& Washington!

Here Andrew interrupts his narrative to quote a New York Post editorial published some dozen days later: “Certain it is, that when General Ross’ official account of the battle and the capture and destruction of our CAPITOL is published in England, it will hardly be credited by Englishmen. Even here it is still considered a dream.” He goes on to invoke Andrée: Give me the words, Muse to whom these words are all addrest, to tell that dream, your dream come true: Prevost’s revenge for York, ours for Tecumseh!

As if to repersuade himself that his conviction is firm, he reviews the moments when he might have “undream’d the dream”: a forged letter from Madison to Armstrong, say, urging him to “maintain his pretense of indifference & confusion, till the enemy may be cut off from all retreat,” would have alarmed Ross and Cochrane past all of Cockburn’s suasion. A tip to Secretary Monroe, to place sharpshooters at Benedict to pick off Cockburn the moment he steps ashore — the fleet would be altogether demoralized.

Now in the three days’ march from Benedict come new such cruxes. The tidewater August weather is unnerving; hardened veterans of the Peninsular Wars fall out by the dozens as anvil clouds pile up through the afternoon, then huddle awed as a furious American thunderstorm, like nothing they’ve seen in Britain or Spain, shocks their first night’s bivouac in Maryland. A bit of a night ambush on the heels of it, by a hundred or so militiamen painted like Indians, and Ross would have packed his army back to more civilized carnage. On Sunday the 21st, permitted to reconnoiter on his own, Andrew crosses paths with James Monroe himself, alone on horseback, down below their encampment! Frustrated by inaction and discrepant reports, Monroe has persuaded the President to let him leave the State Department, saddle up, and scout the enemy personally — the first and last time a cabinet officer has ever done so — and he has got himself behind the enemy he is trying to locate. Andrew makes no sign, either to warn Monroe or to capture him. By that same Sunday evening Ross is fretful at the slowness of their advance, their distance from the fleet; he has half a mind to forgo even their immediate target, Joshua Barney’s flotilla at Pig Point. Cockburn must be at him incessantly with encouragements, till Ross agrees to give that objective one more day. When Cockburn leaves him on the Monday to lead a little force of attack barges up to Pig Point, Andrew considers telling Ross that Barney has already fused his ships for scuttling and removed their cannons to defend the approaches to Washington. He refrains; the boats are blown; Ross settles down nervously with his army for the night at Upper Marlboro.

Seven miles away, at Long Old Fields, the American defenders are noisily encamped under General Winder, a Baltimore attorney. The threat to Washington is clear now to everyone except the secretary of war, and a bit of defense is beginning confusedly to rally: 3,000 infantry, mostly militia, and above 400 cavalry — of which Ross has none — are strengthened now by Barney’s 500 flotillamen and their artillery. Andrew contemplates the map. An open road shortcuts from Long Old Fields and under Upper Marlboro to the Patuxent: in one hour Winder’s cavalry could cut off the British rear while his infantry move against their left. Even if the attack cannot be sustained, it will move Ross to withdraw, the more readily now that his token objective has been accomplished. Andrew says nothing.

Even so, General Ross is so inclined to retreat that his junior officers secretly send for Cockburn again to give their commander another pep talk. It would be no problem to have the admiral ambuscado’d en route to Dr. Beanes’s house, where Ross is billeted… The fact is, Earl Bathurst’s orders to the general explicitly forbid his engaging in “any extended operations at any distance from the coast”; it is Cockburn’s task, and those ambitious junior officers’, to persuade Ross that Bathurst himself would rescind that order before such an opportunity. For the moment they succeed: Andrew and one of Cockburn’s lieutenants are dispatched on the 23rd back to Cochrane’s flagship at Benedict to report the destruction of Barney’s flotilla, the taking of 13 schooners full of prize tobacco (which the Royal Marines are now sending downriver), and the army’s intention to move on Washington next day.

Here is Andrew’s last, best chance. As apprehensive as General Ross, Admiral Cochrane seizes upon the news. He too has been looking at the map: how easily a modest force of cavalry could cut off the army’s rear and — more alarming! — how easily a few barges, scuttled across the lower Patuxent channel, could bottle up his fleet, make them sitting ducks for artillery mounted on the riverbanks! They have accomplished something, with very small loss; who knows but what Barney’s boats and those tobacco schooners might have been a choice bait to lead them so vulnerably far upriver? He gives Andrew and Lieutenant Scott an emphatic and unambiguous letter for Cockburn, to be eaten if they are in danger of capture and delivered orally should they escape: he and Ross have done enough; they are to return to the fleet at once. Under no circumstances are they to march on to Washington!

The messengers return by different routes, to improve their letter’s chances of delivery: Scott by the main road back to Dr. Beanes’s house in tipper Marlboro; Andrew by that shortcut road towards the Wood Yard and Long Old Fields, where the army will have moved to a new bivouac during the day. Our ancestor is mightily tempted: his and Andrée’s program (he reminds her), at least until Tecumseh’s death, had been to promote stalemate; any youthful relish he might once have taken in spectacles of destruction has been long since sated by the French Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. With Barney’s fleet destroyed, Cochrane can put enough blockading pressure on the U.S. economy to force concession of an Indian free state; it is not necessary to destroy the young capital city. Barney’s men, at least, will stand and fight; this will be no bloodless “cossack hurrah.” And this time Andrew need do nothing on his own initiative: Cochrane’s letter is genuine; Lieutenant Scott will deliver it; he Andrew need only not impede its delivery, or at most confirm it with the news that Secretary Monroe is pressing for an attack on the British rear that same night.

This last he learns from a rapid visit to the city itself (which he enters unchallenged, so ill organized is its defense), together with the news that Winder has rejected that proposal. The general fears it will be the British who attack that night, to nullify his advantage in cavalry and artillery; he has therefore withdrawn his army from Long Old Fields back into the city, where they lie exhausted in the navy yard. There is no order; the place is pitifully exposed; the approach bridges across the east branch of the Potomac have not even been mined; only a few trunkfuls of government records have been packed out of town for safekeeping. There is a token guard at the President’s House, which Andrew approaches without difficulty. He chats with the guards; they cheerfully inform him that Madison has rejected the idea of blowing up the Capitol before it falls to the British: it will “stir the country more,” he has decided, if the enemy themselves destroy it. Incredibly, through a window of the house he catches sight of James and Dolley Madison themselves! Someone is gesticulating at the little man, who wearily shakes his head. Dolley, turning a wineglass in her fingers, seems to be directing servants; with her free hand she briefly touches her husband’s shoulder. People come and go with messages, advice.

The streets are empty. Andrew rides out of town about midnight with a defense party dispatched at last to burn the Potomac bridges. They tell him that a slave revolt is rumored to be in progress throughout Maryland and Virginia; that the British have armed 2,000 blacks with specific instructions to rape all white females regardless of age and station; that the non-defense of Washington is New England’s revenge on Madison for sending up southern generals to lose the Canadian campaign, which if successful would have added more non-slaveholding states to the Union. Holding his peace, Andrew passes with them through the sentries at the river. Except for a force of militia at Bladensburg, the northeastern approach to the city, there are no American troops beyond those sentries. So far from fearing capture in the five-mile ride back to the British camp, Andrew suffers from loneliness on the vacant country road, where “nothing stirr’d save the owls, and their prey.” Nevertheless, the night is sweet after the oppressive afternoon; he takes his time. As he finds Ross’s and Cockburn’s quarters, about 3:00 A.M., he sees a glow behind him from the burning bridges.