Read Online A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans by Michael Farquhar - Free Book Online Page B

country abandoned to its horrible fate,” as navy clerk Mordecai Booth later wrote. The navy yard was already in flames, preemptively torched by U.S. officials who did not want its rich supplies to fall into enemy hands. With a veneer of civility that barely concealed their relish in laying waste to the American capital, the British assured those few residents remaining in the city that private property would be respected. Public buildings, on the other hand, were most assuredly to be destroyed. They started with the Capitol.
    The magnificent structure rising high above the city still in its infancy was the pride of the new Republic. Enormous care and expense had been lavished on its design, construction, and artistic detailing—from the ancient Virginia freestone hauled in from an island on Aquia Creek to the crimson silk curtains, fluted Corinthian columns, and the fine marble statue of Liberty sitting on a pedestal in the House chamber. Now a great fire roared through both wings of the building, consuming not only the House and Senate chambers but also the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court, which were then housed at the Capitol. It was, Mordecai Booth wrote, a sight “so repugnant to my feelings, so dishonorable, so degrading to the American character, and at the same time so awful.”
    With the U.S. Capitol now an inferno lighting up the night sky over Washington, the British marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House. They hoped to capture President Madison, but found the mansion empty. A table was still set for the evening, evidence of how quickly the building had been abandoned, and food and drink were abundant. The vandals gorged themselves. “Never was nectar more grateful to the palates of the gods than the crystal goblets of Madeira and water I quaffed off at Mr. Madison’s expense,” Captain James Scott, a British officer, wrote in his memoir. After eating and drinking their fill, the soldiers ransacked the exquisitely appointed home, snatching souvenirs and setting small blazes. Soon the entire structure was engulfed, joined later by the Treasury Building next door. With all the fires that had been set, the eerie orange and red glow of the capital’s skyline could be seen as far away as Baltimore. “You never saw a drawing room so brilliantly lighted as the whole city was that night,” one witness wrote. “Few thought of going to bed—they spent the night in gazing on the fires and lamenting the disgrace of the city.”
    The destructive fury of the invaders had not been sated by the next morning, even as the city’s finest buildings lay in smoldering ruin. The pillage continued throughout the day. Though Georgetown and Foxall’s Foundry were not attacked as Stephen Pleasonton had feared, the State Department from where he had rescued the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution was put to the torch, along with the War Department that adjoined it on the west side of the President’s House. As the British rampage continued, American onlookers seethed. “If General Washington had been alive, you would not have gotten into this city so easily,” one shouted at Admiral George Cockburn, who led the invasion. “No, sir,” Cockburn replied haughtily. “If General Washington had been president, we should never have thought of coming here.”
    Twenty-four hours after storming the city, Cockburn and his army marched out. The goal of humiliating the upstart Americans by destroying their capital had been achieved. Returning residents were then confronted with the wreckage of their city. “I cannot tell you what I felt on re-entering it,” First Lady Dolley Madison wrote to a friend. “Such destruction—such confusion.” Richard Rush, a friend of Madison’s, called it “the most magnificent and melancholy ruin you ever beheld.”
    Many in Congress argued that the cost of