John Barth - Letters

And the reason for those men’s not returning begins the end of Andrew’s “fable.” This Thursday the 25th is another poaching tidewater August day: stifling heat, enervating humidity, dull haze and angry thunderheads piling up already by noon to westward, where Ross imagines Madison to have regrouped his government and army to drive the invaders out. The demolition party goes to Greenleaf Point, the confluence of the Potomac’s east and west branches; they decide to drown the 150 powder barrels in a well shaft there, not realizing that the water is low; they dump the barrels in; someone adds a cigar, or a torch (it cannot be Andrew; he is back at the post office, writing this letter). The explosion is seismic: the whole city trembles, blocks of buildings are unroofed, windows shatter everywhere; the concussion sickens everyone for half a mile around. Greenleaf Point itself virtually disappears, the demolition squad with it; no one even knows how many men die — one dozen, three. Debris lands on the post office, a mile away. And as the mangled casualties are collected, nature follows with another blow: no mere terrific thundersquall, but a bona fide tornado, a 2 P.M. twister that unroofs the post office after all, sends letters flying, blows men out of the saddle and cannon off their carriages, picks up trees and throws them, tears the masts out of ships — all this with an astonishing deluge of rain, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps that make the Battle of Bladensburg a Guy Fawkes Day picnic. Unprecedented even in the experience of seasoned Marylanders, it quite demoralizes the redcoats still assembling their dead and wounded: they cling to fences, flatten themselves in the lee of the burned-out Capitol, wish themselves in Hell rather than in America.

Andrew is stunned by the first explosion; the second seems to awake him from the daze in which by his own acknowledgment he has witnessed and participated in this “funeral service for his fatherland.” The storm is as brief as it is tremendous: “wash’d clean, blown clean, shaken clean” by it, he quietly advises Ross (not Cockburn) to bluff and stall the surrender delegations from Alexandria and Georgetown, who expect him to negotiate indemnities. American reinforcements must be massing already on the northwest heights of the Potomac; units from Baltimore could still fairly easily cut off their retreat. It is time to go.

Ross is of the same mind. Even Cockburn is weary, his adventure successful beyond his most histrionic imaginings. The officers feign interest in negotiation; they decide in fact, privately, to let Captain Gordon’s Potomac squadron continue up to Alexandria and ransom the town; they impose an 8 P.M. curfew and order campfires lit as usual to signal their continuing presence — and then they march the army by night back out Maryland Avenue, back through Bladensburg (where more wounded are entrusted to Commodore Barney against further exchange of prisoners). With only brief rest stops they march for 48 hours, back through Upper Marlboro and Nottingham, to Benedict and the waiting fleet. Though scores of exhausted stragglers, and not a few deserters taken by the possibilities of life in America, will wander about southern Maryland for days to come — a number of them to be arrested for foraging by Ross and Cockburn’s former host Dr. Beanes, with momentous consequences — the expedition against Washington is over: seven days since they stepped ashore, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn are back on Sir Alexander Cochrane’s flagship, toasting their success. Cockburn wears President Madison’s hat and sits on Dolley’s pillow; Ross frowns and tallies up the casualties; Cochrane considers how quickly they can get back down the Patuxent, and where to go next, and what to do for an encore.

So does our progenitor. His letter, Henry, is shorter by half than this, which is meant for less knowledgeable eyes as well as your own. Andrew merely mentions, for Andrée, what I have rehearsed more amply here. What is to come he treats even more summarily, an anticlimax in his letters as it is in the history of 1814, though it cost him his “life”: the bombardment of Fort McHenry and the abortive attack on Baltimore. (As for the Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent, further anticlimaxes, they are relegated, the former to a postscript, the latter to a parenthesis within that postscript, at the foot of this posthumous letter.)

In his epistle, I remind you, the burning of Washington is but the apocalyptic mise en scène for the final burying of Andrew’s inconsistent and equivocal, but prevailing, animus against the American line of his own descent, an animus that peaked at Tecumseh’s death. After that explosion and tornado on August 25, his head is clear but neutral: the odd emotion of patriotism is still there, but still nascent and tempered; he would not now snatch from the U.S. Navy History’s pen and Fame’s palm (he has conveniently “mislaid” them, to Cockburn’s chagrin; they are in my cottage on Bloodsworth Island; one day they shall be yours), but he would not yet restore them, either.

He has encouraged General Ross to withdraw. Guessing Cockburn’s eagerness to follow up the Washington triumph with a quick and wholesale attack on Baltimore, he casts about now for ways to forestall that move; he is not yet ready to arrange for British defeats, but he is prepared to do what he can to counter further victories. He anticipates, correctly, that when news of the Washington expedition reaches London and Ghent (in early October) the U.S. peace commissioners will incline to accept the British ultimatum that the Indians be restored at least to their prewar boundaries, nullifying Harrison’s defeat of Tecumseh; indeed, they will be relieved that the British are not insisting that the Indians themselves send commissioners to the Hotel des Pays-Bas. As Andrew puts it, he has interred his father; time now to tend the grave and look to a fit memorial, not to drive a stake through the old man’s heart.

He is relieved therefore to find that Cochrane and Ross are already of a mind to leave the Chesapeake for the present. As the fleet works its way down the Patuxent (old Dr. Beanes has been seized and put in irons on the Tonnant for arresting those British stragglers), Cochrane announces that while he has every intention not only to attack but to destroy “that nest of pirates… that most democratic town and… the richest in the union,” whose fleet of privateers has sunk or captured no fewer than 500 British ships since 1812, he will not do it until midautumn, when “the sickly season” in the Chesapeake is past. They will rendezvous off Tangier Island with Captain Parker’s Menelaus and Captain Gordon’s task force from the Potomac; reprovisioned, they will dispatch Admiral Cockburn and the prize tobacco to Bermuda and take the army on up to Rhode Island. Newport once captured, they will rest and wait for reinforcements. Then, when the Americans will have frantically dispersed their forces to defend New York and New England, they will sweep back to destroy Baltimore, maybe Charleston too, and end their campaign at New Orleans. That should wind up the war, even without further successes on the Niagara Frontier.

Andrew is delighted. The trip north will give him time to make his own plans; from Newport it should be easy to slip away to Castines Hundred; perhaps by late October a treaty will be signed. Ross agrees with Cochrane; Admiral Cockburn cannot prevail against them. On September 4 the orders are given: thirteen ships to remain on patrol in the Chesapeake; the main body of warships and transports to re-rendezvous off Rhode Island; Cockburn to join them there after his errand in Bermuda — all this as soon as they are provisioned at Tangier Island. There the fleet anchors, on the 6th. A dispatch boat is sent off to London with Cochrane’s reports of the Washington victory and his plan to move north. Gordon’s ships are still working down the Potomac with their prizes from Alexandria; the Menelaus arrives from up the Bay with Sir Peter Parker in a box, shot by an Eastern Shore militiaman during a diversionary raid. (In London, Byron will merrily set about composing his Elegy.) The army disembarks for the night to camp on a Methodist meeting ground presided over by Joshua Thomas, the “Parson of the Islands.” Next morning early, Admiral Cockburn grumblingly weighs anchor and points the Albion south toward the Virginia Capes.