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towns along the Chesapeake Bay, were eager to escape the coming onslaught. The dusty roads leading out of the capital were filling with citizens carting out their most valued possessions, while the few government workers not serving in the local militia struggled at the same time to save what they could of the young Republic’s most vital records and irreplaceable treasures.
    It was in this atmosphere of escalating fear and tension that Pleasonton, a State Department clerk, went to work saving the Declaration and the Constitution from destruction. The War of 1812 was essentially a second declaration of independence, this time from British interference in U.S. trade and sovereignty, and Pleasonton ensured that these unique parchments of American principle would not become spoils of war—even if the nation’s capital did. He was acting on instructions from his boss, Secretary of State James Monroe, who was out scouting British positions. Observing the enemy’s advances and fearful of what lay ahead, Monroe sent a courier back to the department asking that someone attend to the safety of the historic books and papers kept there.
    The task fell to Pleasonton. After purchasing quantities of coarse, durable linen, the clerk ordered the material made into book bags. He then gently packed the scrolled documents and prepared to haul them to safety. Before leaving the State Department, however, Pleasonton encountered Secretary of War John Armstrong, an officious character who had been stubbornly insisting for weeks that the British posed no threat to the capital. Just a month earlier, in fact, Armstrong had berated William Winder, the head of Washington’s militia, for expressing concerns over enemy reinforcements sailing up the Chesapeake Bay.
    â€œBy God,” Armstrong bellowed, “they would not come with such a fleet without meaning to strike somewhere. But they will not come here! What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the place, sir. That is of so much more consequence.”
    The secretary of war had apparently not changed his opinion when he came across Pleasonton going about his task; he rebuked the clerk for being unnecessarily alarmed about the threat to the capital. “He did not think the British were serious in their intentions of coming to Washington,” Pleasonton later wrote to Winder. “I replied that we were under a different belief, and let their intentions be what they might, it was the part of prudence to preserve the valuable papers of the Revolutionary Government.”
    After taking leave of Armstrong, Pleasonton ordered all the valuable papers he had collected sent two miles up the Potomac River to an abandoned gristmill on the banks of Virginia. But he was still uneasy. The mill was just across the river from Henry Foxall’s Foundry, a munitions factory that had been supplying the nation’s cannons and other heavy armaments throughout the War of 1812. If the British did attack Washington, Pleasonton reasoned, surely they would target the foundry that was less than a mile away from Georgetown. It would be only a matter of loose lips or deliberate treachery for the British to then discover the priceless hoard hidden at the mill. Determined to avoid this possibility, Pleasonton later reloaded the cargo onto several carts and took it farther inland, to Leesburg, Virginia. There the linen bags were locked in an empty house, the keys for which were given to the town sheriff. “Being fatigued with the ride, and securing the papers,” Pleasonton wrote, “I retired early to bed.”
    Washington burned as he slept.
    Earlier on that day of August 24, British forces had routed the Americans at the Battle of Bladensburg just outside Washington, scattering the city’s defenders with a blizzard of heavy artillery and panic-inducing Congreve rockets. When they stormed the capital that same evening, the invaders found “the metropolis of our