So does our progenitor. His letter, Henry, is shorter by half than this, which is meant for less knowledgeable eyes as well as your own. Andrew merely mentions, for Andrée, what I have rehearsed more amply here. What is to come he treats even more summarily, an anticlimax in his letters as it is in the history of 1814, though it cost him his “life”: the bombardment of Fort McHenry and the abortive attack on Baltimore. (As for the Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent, further anticlimaxes, they are relegated, the former to a postscript, the latter to a parenthesis within that postscript, at the foot of this posthumous letter.)

In his epistle, I remind you, the burning of Washington is but the apocalyptic mise en scène for the final burying of Andrew’s inconsistent and equivocal, but prevailing, animus against the American line of his own descent, an animus that peaked at Tecumseh’s death. After that explosion and tornado on August 25, his head is clear but neutral: the odd emotion of patriotism is still there, but still nascent and tempered; he would not now snatch from the U.S. Navy History’s pen and Fame’s palm (he has conveniently “mislaid” them, to Cockburn’s chagrin; they are in my cottage on Bloodsworth Island; one day they shall be yours), but he would not yet restore them, either.

He has encouraged General Ross to withdraw. Guessing Cockburn’s eagerness to follow up the Washington triumph with a quick and wholesale attack on Baltimore, he casts about now for ways to forestall that move; he is not yet ready to arrange for British defeats, but he is prepared to do what he can to counter further victories. He anticipates, correctly, that when news of the Washington expedition reaches London and Ghent (in early October) the U.S. peace commissioners will incline to accept the British ultimatum that the Indians be restored at least to their prewar boundaries, nullifying Harrison’s defeat of Tecumseh; indeed, they will be relieved that the British are not insisting that the Indians themselves send commissioners to the Hotel des Pays-Bas. As Andrew puts it, he has interred his father; time now to tend the grave and look to a fit memorial, not to drive a stake through the old man’s heart.

He is relieved therefore to find that Cochrane and Ross are already of a mind to leave the Chesapeake for the present. As the fleet works its way down the Patuxent (old Dr. Beanes has been seized and put in irons on the Tonnant for arresting those British stragglers), Cochrane announces that while he has every intention not only to attack but to destroy “that nest of pirates… that most democratic town and… the richest in the union,” whose fleet of privateers has sunk or captured no fewer than 500 British ships since 1812, he will not do it until midautumn, when “the sickly season” in the Chesapeake is past. They will rendezvous off Tangier Island with Captain Parker’s Menelaus and Captain Gordon’s task force from the Potomac; reprovisioned, they will dispatch Admiral Cockburn and the prize tobacco to Bermuda and take the army on up to Rhode Island. Newport once captured, they will rest and wait for reinforcements. Then, when the Americans will have frantically dispersed their forces to defend New York and New England, they will sweep back to destroy Baltimore, maybe Charleston too, and end their campaign at New Orleans. That should wind up the war, even without further successes on the Niagara Frontier.

Andrew is delighted. The trip north will give him time to make his own plans; from Newport it should be easy to slip away to Castines Hundred; perhaps by late October a treaty will be signed. Ross agrees with Cochrane; Admiral Cockburn cannot prevail against them. On September 4 the orders are given: thirteen ships to remain on patrol in the Chesapeake; the main body of warships and transports to re-rendezvous off Rhode Island; Cockburn to join them there after his errand in Bermuda — all this as soon as they are provisioned at Tangier Island. There the fleet anchors, on the 6th. A dispatch boat is sent off to London with Cochrane’s reports of the Washington victory and his plan to move north. Gordon’s ships are still working down the Potomac with their prizes from Alexandria; the Menelaus arrives from up the Bay with Sir Peter Parker in a box, shot by an Eastern Shore militiaman during a diversionary raid. (In London, Byron will merrily set about composing his Elegy.) The army disembarks for the night to camp on a Methodist meeting ground presided over by Joshua Thomas, the “Parson of the Islands.” Next morning early, Admiral Cockburn grumblingly weighs anchor and points the Albion south toward the Virginia Capes.

And then, Henry, at midmorning the whole fleet makes sail, not for Block Island and Newport, but back up the Bay, toward Baltimore!

Andrew declares himself as baffled by this sudden change of plan as all chroniclers of the period have been since. It cannot have been Cockburn’s doing: he and the Albion must be sent after and signaled to return. Some have speculated, faute de mieux, that the Menelaus fetched back, along with her dead young captain, irresistible intelligence of the city’s vulnerability and accurate soundings of the Patapsco River up to Baltimore Harbor. Others, that Joshua Thomas’s famous sermon to the troops on the morning of September 7, warning them that their attack on Baltimore was destined to fail, actually reinterested Ross and Cochrane in that project! We have seen how cautious a general Ross is, how fickle an admiral Cochrane: one can even suppose that the very dispatching of their withdrawal plans to London, and of Cockburn to Bermuda, inclined them afterwards to do what they’d just decided not to do.

And there is another explanation, which Andrew ventures but, in the nature of the case, cannot be sure of. It is that the three commanding officers had secretly agreed from the first, upon their return to the fleet after burning Washington, to move directly upon Baltimore, and that the unusually elaborate feint down the Bay was calculated to deceive not only the defenders of that city but spies aboard the fleet itself. No one is named by name; no one is clapped into irons to join Dr. Beanes in the Tonnant’s brig or hanged from the yardarms. But it is as if (writes Andrew) his alteration of heart has writ itself upon his brow. He finds himself politely excluded from strategy discussions. To his remark that Cockburn will be particularly chagrined to miss the show if the dispatch boat fails to overtake him, the officers only smile — and by noon the Albion is back in view.

That same afternoon the Tonnant is met by the frigate Hebrus carrying a truce party of Marylanders come to negotiate for the release of Dr. Beanes: the U.S. prisoner-exchange agent John Skinner and that lawyer whom we last saw at the Bladensburg Races, Francis Scott Key. They are given immediate audience with Ross and Cochrane, the more cordial because they’ve brought letters from the British wounded left under Joshua Barney’s supervision; they are told at once that though Beanes will be released to them in reward for the kind treatment of those wounded, the three Americans must remain with the fleet until after the attack on Baltimore, lest they spoil the surprise. The Tonnant being overcrowded with senior officers, Key and Skinner are then transferred, as a civilized joke, to the frigate Surprize, and Andrew Cook (without explanation) is transferred with them. Indeed it is from Key, whom he quickly befriends on the basis of a common admiration for Joel Barlow’s non-epical verse, that Andrew learns for certain that their target is not Annapolis or Alexandria — whence Captain Gordon’s task force has yet to return — but Baltimore.

Our forefather’s words here are at once candid and equivocal. I described myself, he writes, as an American agent who, to remain useful to my country and avoid being hang’d, had on occasion to be useful to the British as well. Whose pretence to Cochrane & Co. was necessarily just the reverse. Whose true feelings about the war were mixt enough to have carry’d off this role successfully for a time; but who now was fallen into the distrust, not only of “John Bull” & “Brother Jonathan,” but of myself. Key rather shares these sentiments: he regards the war as an atrocious mistake, Baltimore as a particularly barbarous town; he is disposed to admire the British officers as gentlemen of culture. But with a few exceptions he has found them as offensively ignorant and scornful of Americans as the Americans are of them; the scores of desertions from the British rank and file — desertions from the “winning” to the “losing” side! — have shown him the appealing face of democracy’s vulgar coin; and the destruction of Washington touched chords of patriotism he has not felt since 1805, when he was moved to write a song in honor of Stephen Decatur’s naval triumphs at Tripoli. The defacing of the navy’s monument to that occasion has particularly incensed him: did Andrew know that the invaders went so far as to snatch the pen from History’s hand, the palm from Fame’s?