John Barth - Letters

Andrew takes a gamble; confesses that he himself has altered Prevost’s instructions; demonstrates on the spot his knack for forgery. He volunteers his opinion that the capital should be seized first and briefly, just long enough to destroy the public buildings, with no discussion of ransom whatever; then a joint land and sea attack should be made on Baltimore, the economically more important target, whose privateering harbor should be destroyed and the rest of the city indemnified. If the Americans do not then sue for peace, the two cities should be garrisoned as a wedge between North and South while campaigns are mounted against New England and New Orleans. He Andrew knows the capital fairly well and is acquainted with several high elected officials, including the President and the secretary of state; he will be happy to serve Cockburn as guide, spy, or whatever.

The gamble pays off: Cockburn is as charmed by the counterfeit as by Andrew’s further proposals for exploiting sectional distrust among the Americans. Compromising documents should be forged, for example, to confirm the rumors that Secretary of War Armstrong has deliberately neglected the defenses of Washington because he wants the capital relocated further north — perhaps in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — to weaken the influence of the Virginia Combine. Letters should be written to Madison by “a spy in Cockburn’s fleet,” warning the President of the attack — and found later in War Department files. A well-timed sequence of false and true reports, from false and true double agents, ought totally to confuse the already divided Americans. Above all, the operation should be decisively executed, to point up as demoralizingly as possible the Yankees’ disorganization. To this end both Admiral Cochrane and General Ross — the one irresolute, the other reputedly overcautious — will need a bit of managing if they are not to spoil the essential audacity of the plan.

That word carries the day: it is audaciousness, exactly, which Prevost & Co. — even Wellington himself! — are short on, and which Cockburn and his friend the prince regent admire even in their adversaries. Old Bonaparte, damn him, has it aplenty; likewise the Yankee Commodore Joshua Barney, whose Baltimore flotilla of scows and barges has effectively hampered Cockburn’s Chesapeake activities this season. He Cockburn fancies himself not altogether without some audaciousness too, and is encouraged to fellow feeling, if not to unreserved trust, by the plain evidence of that trait in our ancestor.

To the audacious man, Andrew ventures further, the settling of old scores is as agreeable as the taking of prizes. He himself has a little grudge against Josh Barney (at whose house in Baltimore their mutual friend Jérôme Bonaparte was introduced to Miss Betsy Patterson) for nearly capturing the St. Lawrence en route to this present conversation. Like the picaroon Joseph Whaland before him, Barney strikes quickly and then runs his shoal-draft boats up into creeks too shallow for his pursuers to follow. Moreover, the fellow has good tactical sense: the current presence of his flotilla in the upper Patuxent argues that he anticipates an attack on Washington. Let him then be hoist with his own petard: along with other diversionary maneuvers, let the main landing force go ashore at Benedict on the Patuxent and strike first at Barney’s boats, which Cockburn’s fleet will prevent from escaping. The Americans thus will be kept from guessing until the last possible moment whether Baltimore, Washington, or Annapolis is to be attacked first (and indeed the target can be changed if unforeseen defenses should arise), or whether Barney’s flotilla is the sole objective.

Cockburn is now clapping Andrew about the shoulders like dear dead Barlow, eager to be on with it. July is running like the tide; Cochrane will have changed his mind seven times since Andrew left Bermuda; the Americans have captured Fort Erie and won so decisively at Chippewa, just above Niagara Falls, that their gray uniforms worn in that engagement have been officially adopted by the military academy at West Point. It is time to move. The St. Lawrence is redispatched to Bermuda with detailed plans for the operation: one small diversionary force to be sent up the Bay to feint at Baltimore and the upper Eastern Shore; another to move up the Potomac and take Fort Washington and Alexandria; the main force to ascend the Patuxent, land at Benedict, march on upriver between Washington and Baltimore — and then swing left to assault the capital. By the time the dispatch boat reaches Bermuda, the convoys from France and the Mediterranean ought to be there too; unless Cochrane in the meanwhile has dreamed up some harebrained alternative, Washington can be theirs by the time of the Perseid meteors in August.

Shall Andrew fetch the plan to Cochrane himself, to insure its effective delivery? Cockburn smiles: Mr. Cook will remain where he is, to insure its accurate delivery. Once the St. Lawrence is safely out of the Chesapeake, he may either begin his campaign of sowing the Eastern Seaboard with doctored letters, or join the Royal Marines in their sporting raids upon the Maryland tobacco crop.

Andrew opts to do a bit of both: on July 27 he drafts an anonymous letter to President Madison, informing him plainly of the British plan (the same classical tactic used by my father in 1941 vis-à-vis Pearl Harbor), and with Cockburn’s approval “smuggles” it ashore to be mailed.

Your enemy have in agitation an attack on the capital of the United States. The manner in which they intend doing it is to take advantage of a fair wind in ascending the Patuxent; and after having ascended it a certain distance, to land their men at once, and make all possible dispatch to the capitol; batter it down, and then return to their vessels immediately…

(Signed) Friend

A few days later he lands with a foraging party from H.M.S. Dauntless near the village of Tobacco Stick (since renamed Madison after the addressee of the foregoing), thinking to make his way to the place where in 1694, having escaped death at the hands of the Bloodsworth Island Ahatchwhoops, his ancestor Ebenezer Cooke was reunited with his twin sister. Andrew wants to review his own position from that perspective, to reassure himself that he really means to aid the destruction of Washington rather than its preservation. His woolgathering separates him from Lieutenant Phipps’s party, who are guided by a liberated slave woman. The tender leaves without him, runs aground in the Little Choptank, and is captured by the local militia, who jail the 18 Britishers and return the black woman to the mercies of her former owner. Andrew must make his way back to the fleet via Bloodsworth Island and a stolen bateau.

He confides to Andrée that Cockburn’s confidence in him is not increased by this episode, and while he does not report any change in his own attitude, he sees that he must do something to reestablish his credibility. Cockburn grants his request to make an intelligence-gathering visit to the capital, charging him specifically to report whether Madison and Monroe have managed to prod Secretary Armstrong into any real measures of defense since the receipt of Andrew’s letter: if not, then either the Americans still doubt that Washington is the target, or they plan not to resist its capture, or their plans mean nothing. If on the other hand real defense measures are at last being taken, their strength must be expertly assessed before Ross and Cochrane’s arrival.

Where are you, Henry?

On August 1, as Andrew’s false true warning is postmarked from New York, Madison’s Peace Commission (now in London) are being depressed by the tremendous joint celebration there of Napoleon’s exile to Elba, the 100th anniversary of the Hanoverian accession, and the 16th of Lord Nelson’s victory on the Nile: in the mock naval battles accompanying the festivities, the “enemy vessels” ignominiously vanquished include a significant number of “American” along with the customary “French.” On August 3, while Andrew broods at Tobacco Stick, Admiral Cochrane’s reinforced Bermuda fleet weighs anchor for the Chesapeake. On the 8th, as Andrew makes his way unchallenged into Washington, the British and American treaty negotiators meet for the first time in the Hotel des Pays-Bas in Ghent, each to confront the other with unacceptable demands, and each hoping that news of fresh successes in the fighting will weaken the other’s bargaining position. Why do you not appear, and we make plans together?