Clan Ross

On the early evening of the twenty-fourth of August 1814, six hours after the rout of the American forces at the action of Bladensburg outside Washington, a column of about four thousand British infantry under Major-General Robert Ross of Rostrevor in County Down, in his forty-eighth year, marched into the unevacuated capital of the United States. The American executive offices, the Capitol, the Washington Navy Yard, the Treasury and the President's House (not yet called the White House) were systematically fired through the next twenty-four hours, in deliberate retaliation for the American burning of the public buildings of York (modern Toronto) on the twenty-seventh of April 1813 in the previous campaign of the war. President Madison and the Cabinet had withdrawn into Maryland the previous afternoon. First Lady Dolley Madison, in the President's House at lunchtime, was eating a meal that had been laid for the Cabinet's victory dinner; she sent word to the household to gather the silver, the crimson velvet curtains of the East Room, and the eight-foot full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from the State Dining Room (her urgent instruction was that the portrait must not be allowed to fall into British hands), and left the house at three in the afternoon. The British column entered at twenty past seven. The portrait, by the tradition of the household, was the only thing the British did not burn. They ate the laid table-meal at five past eight. They put torches to the building at half past nine. Robert Ross was killed two weeks later by an American sniper at the action at North Point, outside Baltimore, on the twelfth of September.

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