Clan Ross · 1814
Robert Ross burns the White House
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 President Madison and the Cabinet had withdrawn into Maryland the previous afternoon.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.
It is a quarter past seven on the evening of the twenty-fourth of August 1814, on the lawn of the President's House, in the federal city of Washington in the District of Columbia, in the long heavy summer light. He is forty-seven years old. He is Major-General Robert Ross of Rostrevor in County Down, son of Major David Ross of the County Down militia, schooled at Trinity College Dublin, in his sixteenth year of unbroken active service in the Royal Army, in command of about four thousand British and Hessian troops who, six hours ago, broke the American militia line at Bladensburg outside the city in an action that lasted seventeen minutes (a lengthy joke in the army through the rest of the war: the Bladensburg Races).
The President's House on the lawn ahead of him is open. The front door is, by the testimony of his aide Captain Harry Smith of the 95th Rifles, standing entirely open in the manner of a country house at lunch. There is no servant on the steps. There is, when the column comes up through the gate, no-one in the entrance hall. There is, by Smith's later memoir, the smell of fresh bread and roast beef coming up from the basement.
He thinks: the President is gone. The Cabinet is gone. The household has been gone less than two hours.
He thinks: the dinner laid in the State Dining Room is, by the look of it, a victory dinner laid for the President's officers in expectation of a successful action at Bladensburg this morning.
He thinks: the column has not eaten since first light. The men can sit down at the President's table.
He thinks: the destruction of the public buildings of this city is the instruction of the Admiral, in retaliation for the burning of the public buildings at York. The order has been confirmed in writing this week.
He thinks: I am not in the practice of burning private houses. The President's House is the formal residence of the executive officer of the country. The President's House is a public building.
He goes up the steps and into the entrance hall. Captain Smith and Admiral Sir George Cockburn (the naval officer of the campaign) come up behind him. Cockburn proposes, by Smith's memoir, that they sit down to the laid dinner. The eighty British officers of the column come into the State Dining Room and sit at the table. The dinner is fully laid: ham, chicken, beef, claret, Madeira, the standard table-service of the President's House. They eat for forty-five minutes.
By eight in the evening the column has finished. Cockburn proposes the burning of the building. Ross agrees. Officers carry table linen, papers from the President's office, draperies (the East Room is by tradition the room from which the curtains and the carpet had been taken by Mrs Madison's household three hours earlier; the curtains are not on the windows when the British arrive), small mahogany furniture, into the centre of each ground-floor room. Lit torches are placed on the piles. The fires are taking by half past nine. The column withdraws to the Capitol, where the same process is performed on the Senate Chamber, the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress (the destruction of the Library, by every careful judgment, was the cultural disaster of the action; nine thousand volumes, mostly of British and continental literature, were lost). The Treasury and the Washington Navy Yard followed.
Mrs Madison, in the President's House at lunchtime that day, had given specific instructions to her doorkeeper Paul Jennings (an enslaved African-American then aged about fifteen) and to the French steward Jean-Pierre Sioussat that the eight-foot Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington in the State Dining Room must be saved. The portrait was screwed to the wall. Sioussat, by his own deposition twenty years later, broke the frame off the wall with an axe and took the canvas out of the frame. Jennings cut the canvas down to a portable size with the cook's knife. The two men carried the canvas out of the house and into a wagon at three in the afternoon, two hours before the British column arrived. The portrait, by the tradition of the National Park Service that runs the President's House today, hangs in the East Room of the building (rebuilt 1817–1822) where it has hung since 1822. It is the only object in the building that survived the burning of 1814.
Robert Ross marched the column out of Washington at one in the morning of the twenty-sixth of August. The capital was empty. The federal government re-occupied the burnt city in late September. The President's House had been so seriously damaged that the Madisons did not return; the rebuilding under James Hoban took six years. The painted exterior, which had been white before 1814, was painted white again over the smoke-stains; the building has been called the White House by general usage since (the official designation was set by Theodore Roosevelt by Executive Order in 1901). Ross himself rode south with the army to Baltimore and was killed on the twelfth of September 1814 at the action of North Point, on the eastern approach to the city, by a single American rifle-shot from a sharpshooter in a tree. He was forty-seven. His body was preserved in a barrel of rum and shipped home by way of Halifax to be buried at Rostrevor in County Down on the twenty-ninth of November 1814. The grave-stone is in the family plot at Rostrevor; a stone obelisk to him stands on the headland at the head of Carlingford Lough, looking south. The local tradition of County Down holds that the man who walked into the President's House and ate the dinner before he burned it was a Down man and a gentleman, and the two are not in contradiction in the County Down memory.