John Barth - Letters

The old man seen to, Andrew makes his way back into Washington, wishing as fervently as ever in his life that he could spit out “this Father business” once and for all and be… himself! By the blaze of Robert Sewall’s house he rides down Maryland Avenue to the Capitol, its windows shot out, its great doors battered open. He contemplates the imminent destruction, not merely of Corinthian columns and marble walls, but of the infant Library of Congress upstairs and the Supreme Court’s law library below; of the records, the files, the archives of the young republic. He passes through the lobby to the House chamber, his head full of the slogans of the American and French revolutions, together with the ideals of the Magna Carta, of English Common Law and parliamentary procedure. Why are these destroying these? Futile as the gesture would have been, when he sees Admiral Cockburn in the Speaker’s chair and hears him call to his rocket-wielding troopers for the question, the nay comes near to bursting from him…

But then it strikes Andrew that the official incumbent of that chair is the man perhaps most singly responsible for the war: Henry Clay, the archhawk of Kentucky, at that moment in Ghent with the peace commissioners to make sure that no Indian Free State is let into the treaty, and brandishing in token of his belligerence a razor-strop made from the skin of Tecumseh. “Aye!” our forefather shouts before the rest, who chorus affirmation. It is exactly ten o’clock. The motion carries; Cockburn raps the gavel; rockets are fired into the piled-up combustibles; the party retires from the blaze and moves down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House and the Treasury Building. Over his shoulder, as he moves on with them, Andrew sees the Capitol of the United States in flames.

Now the men are weary. All but the indefatigable Cockburn complete the night’s work methodically, with little horseplay. If Ross has been less than resolute or brilliant as an attacker, he is an admirable executor of this occupation, for which he has no taste. There are no rapes, no molestations of civilians, no systematic pillaging of private property. Even the looting of the public buildings he keeps to the souvenir level, and he frowningly detaches himself from Cockburn’s high jinks. At the President’s House they find dinner laid out for forty: as Cockburn’s men fall upon the cold meats and Madeira, and the admiral toasts the health of “Jemmy Madison and the prince regent,” and steals “Jemmy’s love letters” from a desk drawer and a cushion from Mrs. Madison’s chair to remind him “of Dolley’s sweet arse,” Ross quietly gives orders to fire the place and move on. The officers retire to Mrs. Suter’s tavern on 15th Street for a late supper; Ross’s frown darkens when the admiral rides roaring in upon the white mule he has been pleased to bestride all day. Such displays Ross regards as dangerous to good discipline and unbefitting the dignity of such events as the destruction of capital cities.

Andrew agrees, though in the contrast of humors between the general and the admiral he sees a paradigm of his own mixed feelings, and he is mindful of the resolve and bold imagination that entitle Cockburn to his present entertainment. Since the firing of the Capitol, Andrew’s heart is still. He quotes here an ironic editorial comment from a British newspaper printed weeks later, when the news reaches London:

There will be great joy in the United States on account of the destruction of all their public and national records, as the people may now invent a fabulous origin…

The destruction itself, reports Andrew, from the moment of that gavel rap in Cockburn’s congress, has seemed to him to move from the historical plane to the fabulous. Like one “whose father’s certain death releases one at last to love him,” Andrew feels the stirrings of a strange new emotion.

But first one must see that father truly and completely buried, and so he not only follows Ross and Cockburn through the balance of the night’s destruction, and the next day’s, but finds finally “a fit chiaroscuro” in the contrast of their manners, “apt as Don Quixote and his ribald squire.” It is getting on to midnight. From Mrs. Suter’s tavern the trio ride to their final errand of the evening, another of Cockburn’s inspirations, which Ross reluctantly assents to: private property or not, the Admiral vows he will not sleep until he burns the offices of the National Intelligencer, which for two years has been abusing him in its columns. The general goes along to make sure that no other private buildings are damaged or further mischief made; Andrew to see “the funeral rites” through to the end and confirm his sense of the increasing fabulousness of the occasion.

They locate Joe Gales’s Intelligencer building between 6th and 7th streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, and by the light of the still-blazing Capitol read the lead story of its morning edition, fetched out by the soldiers who break down the door: The city is safe; there is no danger from the British. Just at midnight another thunderstorm breaks theatrically upon them. Cockburn yields to the entreaties of two neighbor ladies not to burn the building, lest their houses catch fire as well. It is too wet now for burning anyhow; he will wreck the place in the morning. He commandeers a red tunic and musket from one of the 3rd Brigade troopers, bids Andrew take them, and orders him to stand watch at the Intelligencer till they return at dawn. Cook has been witness long enough; time to earn his pay.

The officers retire then for the night: the 3rd Brigade to Capitol Hill, the others to encampments outside the District. For the next several hours, Henry — till Cockburn eagerly goes to’t again at 5:30 next morning — Andrew Burlingame Cook IV is in sole charge of the capital of the United States!

When not pacing his beat, he employs the time to begin drafting the record of these events thus far, which will not be redrafted, dated, and posted till nearly a year later. His sence of “fabulosity” does not diminish, even though (perhaps because) he verges on exhaustion. As in a dream he watches Cockburn’s men destroy the newspaper office, piing the type into Pennsylvania Avenue and wrecking the presses. The admiral himself, with Andrew’s help, destroys all the uppercase C’s, “so that Gales can defame me no further,” and thenceforth calls himself “the Scourge of the C’s.” While fresh troops from the 1st Brigade reignite the Treasury Building (extinguished by last night’s storm) and burn the State, War, and Navy Department Building, Cook and Cockburn make a tour of the ruined navy yard: confronting there the allegorical Tripoli Monument (to American naval victories off the Barbary Coast), Andrew is dispatched to snatch the bronze pen from the hand of History and the palm from the hand of Fame. Back in the city he hears General Ross declare that he would not have burned the President’s House if Mrs. Madison had taken sanctuary there, nor the Capitol building had he known it to have housed the Congressional Library: “No, sir,” Ross declares emphatically: “I make war against neither letters nor ladies.”

The post office is scheduled to go next, but inasmuch as the superintendent of patents argues that the building also houses the patent models, which are private property, and Andrew adds ironically that by the same reasoning all the letters in the post office are private too, the burning is postponed till the officer in charge can get a ruling from Cockburn, still enjoying himself down at the Intelligencer. Meanwhile he and his squad have another mission: to destroy the powder magazine at Greenleaf Point, which the Yankees have forgot. Since that officer and his men will never return, the P.O. is spared: most of the letters are eventually delivered (Andrew wished he had got this one posted in time), and the Congress, upon its return in September, has one building large enough to enable it to sit in Washington rather than in Lancaster, Pa. (the second choice), where once established it would very possibly have stayed.