Robert Ross burns the White House

A capital is rarely taken by an army that hates it. More often it is taken, briefly and with a certain courtesy, by a professional soldier who has been ordered there from another continent, who arrives at the dinner-hour, and who finds the table already laid. The act is not vengeance. It is the working out of an instruction received in writing, performed by a man whose training will not let him refuse it and whose upbringing will not let him perform it like a brigand. Such a man came up the Pennsylvania Avenue on the evening of the twenty-fourth of August 1814, in the long heavy summer light, at the head of about four thousand infantry. His name was Robert Ross of Rostrevor, of the County Down.

THE MAN FROM ROSTREVOR

He was the son of Major David Ross of the County Down militia, schooled at Trinity College Dublin, in his forty-eighth year and his sixteenth of unbroken active service in the Royal Army. He had carried a sabre-cut from Spain across his jaw; he had crossed the Bidasoa with Wellington; he had been mentioned in dispatches at Orthez and Toulouse. He was, by the judgement of every general officer who had stood near him, a man of the most amiable manners and gentle disposition, but in the field most decided and resolute. The Peninsular war ended in April, and within ten weeks he was at sea with his brigade for the Chesapeake. The instruction from the Admiralty, delivered through Vice-Admiral Cochrane, was that he was to act in concert with the fleet and to destroy and lay waste such towns and districts upon the coast as you may find assailable, in retaliation for the American burning of the public buildings of York the previous spring. The order was confirmed in writing in the week before the column came ashore at Benedict on the Patuxent.

THE BLADENSBURG RACES

On the morning of the twenty-fourth the column met the American militia line at Bladensburg, eight miles north-east of the federal city, on ground the Americans had chosen. The line was numerous, ill-drilled, and badly placed. Ross brought up his light companies, sent the 85th forward at the pace they had used at Salamanca, and broke the centre. The action lasted, by the watches of his own staff, seventeen minutes. It became, through the rest of the war, a long joke in the army: the Bladensburg Races. The road to the capital lay open. Six hours of marching in close heat brought the head of the column to the rise above the Eastern Branch at a little after seven in the evening. The houses on Capitol Hill were shuttered. There was no militia, no constabulary, no deputation, only the rasp of cicadas in the August trees and the smell of a city whose inhabitants had walked out of it in the last six hours.

THE OPEN DOOR

He came down Pennsylvania Avenue at the head of about eighty officers and a covering party. The President's House stood at the western end of the avenue, low and pale and unfortified, the cream stucco of its sandstone walls catching the last of the sun. The front door, by the testimony of his aide Captain Harry Smith of the 95th Rifles, was standing entirely open in the manner of a country house at lunch. No servant on the steps. No-one in the entrance hall. From the basement stair came the smell of fresh bread and of roast beef. Smith, who had eaten at the tables of grandees from Badajoz to Bordeaux, said later that he had never in his life walked into a residence so plainly abandoned in the middle of its own dinner. On the long mahogany table in the State Dining Room forty covers were laid, with claret in decanters, Madeira in stoppered bottles, the ham already carved.

THE HOUR IN THE STATE DINING ROOM

Here the hour dilates. He stood in the doorway of the dining-room with Cockburn at his shoulder, and worked it out as a soldier works out ground. The President was gone, by less than two hours, into Maryland. The Cabinet was gone with him. The dinner on the table had been laid for the President's officers in the expectation of an American victory at Bladensburg that morning, and the expectation had been overtaken by the action of seventeen minutes. The column had not eaten since first light. The order from the Admiral, in writing, was the destruction of the public buildings of the city in retaliation for York. He was, by his own standing instruction to his brigade, not in the practice of burning private houses; but the President's House was the formal residence of the executive officer of the United States, and the formal residence of the executive officer of a country was, by any reading he could make of the order, a public building. Cockburn, beside him, proposed in the bluff naval manner that they sit down to the dinner before they put the torch to the house. He could have refused; an officer of his seniority could always refuse a brother-officer of another service. He did not refuse. He understood, in that doorway, that the dinner and the burning were the same act, and that to eat the one and decline the other, or to decline the one and perform the other, would be to make a piece of theatre out of what was, in the order he carried, a single instruction of war. He gave the nod. The officers came in by the long doors and took their places at the table of the President of the United States, and ate ham and chicken and beef, and drank the claret and the Madeira, and toasted, by Smith's later memoir, Jemmy's health, and a peaceful retirement from his late residence. The dinner lasted forty-five minutes.

THE TORCH

At five past eight they rose from the table. Officers went through the ground-floor rooms, gathered table linen, draperies that had not been carried off, papers from the President's office, the small mahogany furniture, into a pile in the centre of each room. Lit torches were laid on the piles. The fires were taking by half past nine. The column then moved east along the avenue. The Senate Chamber and the House of Representatives went up before midnight. The Library of Congress, nine thousand volumes mostly of British and continental literature, went with them; this, by every careful judgement since, was the cultural disaster of the night, and Ross knew it as the shelves caught. The Treasury followed. The Navy Yard had been fired by the Americans themselves on their own withdrawal, to keep the stores from him. By two in the morning the federal city was a single low orange light visible, by the report of farmers on the Maryland shore, from forty miles down the Chesapeake.

THE PORTRAIT

The one thing in the President's House he did not burn, he never knew he had not burned. Earlier that afternoon, in the same dining-room, Mrs Dolley Madison had sat down to the laid table at one o'clock and risen from it at three, having given specific instruction to the French steward Jean-Pierre Sioussat and to her doorkeeper Paul Jennings, an enslaved African-American boy of about fifteen, that the full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of General Washington must on no account be allowed to fall into British hands. The portrait was screwed to the wall. Sioussat, by his own deposition twenty years afterwards, broke the frame off the plaster with an axe; Jennings cut the canvas down to a portable size with the cook's knife. The two men carried the canvas rolled into a farm wagon and out by the Georgetown road two hours before the column came up the avenue. Mrs Madison, writing to her sister Lucy from a way-station in Virginia that night by the light of the burning city behind her, set down only that our kind friend, Mr Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of Gen. Washington is secured. Of all the contents of the State Dining Room in which the British officers had sat to eat their dinner, the portrait on the wall above them was the single object the eighty officers did not, between them, identify as worth removing or worth burning. It was already gone.

NORTH POINT

He marched the column out of Washington at one in the morning of the twenty-sixth, by the Bladensburg road, without molestation. Two weeks later, on the road in from North Point toward Baltimore on the morning of the twelfth of September, riding at the head of the advance guard through close woodland, he was struck in the right arm and chest by a single rifle-ball fired from cover by an American sharpshooter, by tradition one of two young riflemen of Captain Aisquith's company; both were killed in the same volley by his escort. He was lifted from his horse and carried back along the column. He lived about two hours. His last instruction, by the report of his brigade-major, was to his wife Elizabeth at Rostrevor, and was that she should be told he had fallen at the head of his men. He was forty-eight. His body was preserved in a barrel of Jamaica rum, carried to Halifax aboard the Royal Oak, and brought home to County Down. He was buried in the old churchyard at Rostrevor on the twenty-ninth of November 1814.

THE WHITE HOUSE

The federal government re-occupied the burnt city in late September. The Madisons did not return to the President's House; the shell of it stood roofless through the winter rains, and the rebuilding under James Hoban took six years. When at last the sandstone walls were re-rendered, the painters laid on a heavy lime-wash to cover the long smoke-stains that the fire of August had drawn up the front. The building had been pale before; it was paler after. By general usage from that decade onward it was called the White House, and the official designation was set by Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. The Gilbert Stuart of General Washington, returned to the rebuilt house in 1822, hangs to this day in the East Room, the single object in the building that came through the night of the twenty-fourth of August 1814. On the headland at the head of Carlingford Lough, looking south down the County Down coast toward the sea-road by which his body came home, a granite obelisk to Robert Ross of Bladensburg stands above the village of Rostrevor. The local tradition 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 that in the County Down memory the two are not in contradiction. A capital is rarely taken by an army that hates it. The dinner is eaten; the torch is laid; the portrait, which no-one thought to look for, is already on the Georgetown road in a farm wagon, rolled up under a sack of meal.