There will be great joy in the United States on account of the destruction of all their public and national records, as the people may now invent a fabulous origin…

The destruction itself, reports Andrew, from the moment of that gavel rap in Cockburn’s congress, has seemed to him to move from the historical plane to the fabulous. Like one “whose father’s certain death releases one at last to love him,” Andrew feels the stirrings of a strange new emotion.

But first one must see that father truly and completely buried, and so he not only follows Ross and Cockburn through the balance of the night’s destruction, and the next day’s, but finds finally “a fit chiaroscuro” in the contrast of their manners, “apt as Don Quixote and his ribald squire.” It is getting on to midnight. From Mrs. Suter’s tavern the trio ride to their final errand of the evening, another of Cockburn’s inspirations, which Ross reluctantly assents to: private property or not, the Admiral vows he will not sleep until he burns the offices of the National Intelligencer, which for two years has been abusing him in its columns. The general goes along to make sure that no other private buildings are damaged or further mischief made; Andrew to see “the funeral rites” through to the end and confirm his sense of the increasing fabulousness of the occasion.

They locate Joe Gales’s Intelligencer building between 6th and 7th streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, and by the light of the still-blazing Capitol read the lead story of its morning edition, fetched out by the soldiers who break down the door: The city is safe; there is no danger from the British. Just at midnight another thunderstorm breaks theatrically upon them. Cockburn yields to the entreaties of two neighbor ladies not to burn the building, lest their houses catch fire as well. It is too wet now for burning anyhow; he will wreck the place in the morning. He commandeers a red tunic and musket from one of the 3rd Brigade troopers, bids Andrew take them, and orders him to stand watch at the Intelligencer till they return at dawn. Cook has been witness long enough; time to earn his pay.

The officers retire then for the night: the 3rd Brigade to Capitol Hill, the others to encampments outside the District. For the next several hours, Henry — till Cockburn eagerly goes to’t again at 5:30 next morning — Andrew Burlingame Cook IV is in sole charge of the capital of the United States!

When not pacing his beat, he employs the time to begin drafting the record of these events thus far, which will not be redrafted, dated, and posted till nearly a year later. His sence of “fabulosity” does not diminish, even though (perhaps because) he verges on exhaustion. As in a dream he watches Cockburn’s men destroy the newspaper office, piing the type into Pennsylvania Avenue and wrecking the presses. The admiral himself, with Andrew’s help, destroys all the uppercase C’s, “so that Gales can defame me no further,” and thenceforth calls himself “the Scourge of the C’s.” While fresh troops from the 1st Brigade reignite the Treasury Building (extinguished by last night’s storm) and burn the State, War, and Navy Department Building, Cook and Cockburn make a tour of the ruined navy yard: confronting there the allegorical Tripoli Monument (to American naval victories off the Barbary Coast), Andrew is dispatched to snatch the bronze pen from the hand of History and the palm from the hand of Fame. Back in the city he hears General Ross declare that he would not have burned the President’s House if Mrs. Madison had taken sanctuary there, nor the Capitol building had he known it to have housed the Congressional Library: “No, sir,” Ross declares emphatically: “I make war against neither letters nor ladies.”

The post office is scheduled to go next, but inasmuch as the superintendent of patents argues that the building also houses the patent models, which are private property, and Andrew adds ironically that by the same reasoning all the letters in the post office are private too, the burning is postponed till the officer in charge can get a ruling from Cockburn, still enjoying himself down at the Intelligencer. Meanwhile he and his squad have another mission: to destroy the powder magazine at Greenleaf Point, which the Yankees have forgot. Since that officer and his men will never return, the P.O. is spared: most of the letters are eventually delivered (Andrew wished he had got this one posted in time), and the Congress, upon its return in September, has one building large enough to enable it to sit in Washington rather than in Lancaster, Pa. (the second choice), where once established it would very possibly have stayed.

And the reason for those men’s not returning begins the end of Andrew’s “fable.” This Thursday the 25th is another poaching tidewater August day: stifling heat, enervating humidity, dull haze and angry thunderheads piling up already by noon to westward, where Ross imagines Madison to have regrouped his government and army to drive the invaders out. The demolition party goes to Greenleaf Point, the confluence of the Potomac’s east and west branches; they decide to drown the 150 powder barrels in a well shaft there, not realizing that the water is low; they dump the barrels in; someone adds a cigar, or a torch (it cannot be Andrew; he is back at the post office, writing this letter). The explosion is seismic: the whole city trembles, blocks of buildings are unroofed, windows shatter everywhere; the concussion sickens everyone for half a mile around. Greenleaf Point itself virtually disappears, the demolition squad with it; no one even knows how many men die — one dozen, three. Debris lands on the post office, a mile away. And as the mangled casualties are collected, nature follows with another blow: no mere terrific thundersquall, but a bona fide tornado, a 2 P.M. twister that unroofs the post office after all, sends letters flying, blows men out of the saddle and cannon off their carriages, picks up trees and throws them, tears the masts out of ships — all this with an astonishing deluge of rain, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps that make the Battle of Bladensburg a Guy Fawkes Day picnic. Unprecedented even in the experience of seasoned Marylanders, it quite demoralizes the redcoats still assembling their dead and wounded: they cling to fences, flatten themselves in the lee of the burned-out Capitol, wish themselves in Hell rather than in America.

Andrew is stunned by the first explosion; the second seems to awake him from the daze in which by his own acknowledgment he has witnessed and participated in this “funeral service for his fatherland.” The storm is as brief as it is tremendous: “wash’d clean, blown clean, shaken clean” by it, he quietly advises Ross (not Cockburn) to bluff and stall the surrender delegations from Alexandria and Georgetown, who expect him to negotiate indemnities. American reinforcements must be massing already on the northwest heights of the Potomac; units from Baltimore could still fairly easily cut off their retreat. It is time to go.

Ross is of the same mind. Even Cockburn is weary, his adventure successful beyond his most histrionic imaginings. The officers feign interest in negotiation; they decide in fact, privately, to let Captain Gordon’s Potomac squadron continue up to Alexandria and ransom the town; they impose an 8 P.M. curfew and order campfires lit as usual to signal their continuing presence — and then they march the army by night back out Maryland Avenue, back through Bladensburg (where more wounded are entrusted to Commodore Barney against further exchange of prisoners). With only brief rest stops they march for 48 hours, back through Upper Marlboro and Nottingham, to Benedict and the waiting fleet. Though scores of exhausted stragglers, and not a few deserters taken by the possibilities of life in America, will wander about southern Maryland for days to come — a number of them to be arrested for foraging by Ross and Cockburn’s former host Dr. Beanes, with momentous consequences — the expedition against Washington is over: seven days since they stepped ashore, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn are back on Sir Alexander Cochrane’s flagship, toasting their success. Cockburn wears President Madison’s hat and sits on Dolley’s pillow; Ross frowns and tallies up the casualties; Cochrane considers how quickly they can get back down the Patuxent, and where to go next, and what to do for an encore.