It is unfortunate that the War of 1812 is understudied, for it furnishes us modernly with a great many lessons on the consequences of unpreparedness and military ineptitude in defense of one’s homeland.  While the Americans scored some notable naval victories during the war, the land campaign remains a dreary record of defeat and flight, relieved only by Andrew Jackson’s impressive, but strategically inconsequential, victory at New Orleans two weeks after the treaty concluding the conflict had been signed at Ghent. 

The defensive capabilities of the young United States were for many years hamstrung by an official attitude of indifference towards military readiness.  Thomas Jefferson, among many others, was suspicious of standing armies, believing them to be a potential threat to liberty.  The Americans also believed that the Atlantic Ocean, and the expansive lands of the North American continent, would shield them from the depredations of European powers.  In this they were gravely mistaken.  The War of 1812 would expose the absurdity of Jefferson’s prejudice against standing armies. It would prove that the Atlantic was no obstacle to a determined, well-equipped adversary, and that citizen militias were no match for a professionally trained regular army. These bitter lessons the Americans would soon learn. In 1814, Washington D.C. was sacked and burned; President James Madison was humiliatingly forced to flee for his life after nearly having been captured by the British in the hours before the Battle of Bladensburg.    

But the incompetence and unpreparedness of the American army were not the only reasons for America’s troubles.  The British were gifted with two supremely competent and aggressive commanders:  Admiral Sir George Cockburn (pronounced “Coburn” by the British), and Major General Robert Ross.  Cockburn in particular deserves special note.  An original and imaginative military thinker, he was far ahead of his time in understanding the importance of breaking an adversary’s will to fight through psychological means.  He had a contemptuous view of the fighting abilities of the Americans, whom he derisively referred to as “Johnathans” (a reference to John Bull’s misguided younger brother), but this dismissive attitude never clouded his judgment.  As Cockburn saw things, if the Americans wanted war, then he was determined to show them what war really meant. 

Before 1814, Cockburn and his raiding parties had terrorized the towns inside Chesapeake Bay.  He would land parties of marines, plunder local habitations, and then put them to the torch.  But it must be said that he was not without a certain sense of gallantry; the entreaties of a suffering man, or of a beautiful local woman, could usually be relied on to evoke Cockburn’s sympathetic mercy.  He soon realized that little potential resistance stood between him and Washington.  The psychological effect of capturing and burning the American capital, he reasoned, might induce the recalcitrant Americans to make peace on British terms.  Surprisingly, Cockburn’s bold plans were not at first endorsed by his cautious superiors, who feared that such an expedition would expose the British Army to counterattack.  But Cockburn’s intelligence sources were sound; he knew what he was facing, and he was not impressed. 

Equally formidable was General Robert Ross.  Like many of British officers of the War of 1812, he was a hardened veteran of the Napoleonic War and the Peninsular Campaign.  When Napoleon was finally defeated in 1814, the British were able to turn their full attentions to the war in America; and the results were, for the Americans at least, nothing short of disastrous.  By 1814, the British had substantial naval and ground forces operating in the United States, with very little standing in their way.  One of the few American heroes of the land campaign was Joshua Barney, whose Revolutionary War exploits we have recounted here in another place.  He was in many ways a maverick naval commander, and had earned the respect of Cockburn, which was something not easily attained.  When war broke out in 1812, he had through his connections with the government managed to persuade Madison to form a makeshift flotilla to protect Chesapeake Bay from enemy raiding.  This motley assortment of gun barges and boats, called the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, met only with limited success; it could not compete with the British Navy, nor could it stop Cockburn from landing troops for a march on Washington.  Nevertheless, Barney and his men fought bravely with the scant resources available to them. 

The Americans’ final attempt to stop the British entry into Washington culminated in the Battle of Bladensburg, which took place a short distance from the capital.  It must be said that a contributing factor in America’s dismal performance before and after the battle was the poor quality of President Madison’s war cabinet.  Unlike President Lincoln fifty years later in the American Civil War, who benefitted tremendously from the competence of cabinet ministers such as Salmon Chase, William Seward, and Gideon Welles, Madison was literally on his own.  He himself was not versed in military affairs.  He was a brave man, but entirely clueless about how to conduct a military campaign.  Madison’s secretary of war, John Armstrong, was both distrusted and incompetent; the commander of American forces at Bladensburg, William Winder, was also inept.  He was court-martialed after Bladensburg, and only barely acquitted.  By contrast, the British conducted an adroit campaign of maneuver before the actual battle took place; Cockburn and Ross kept the Americans perplexed and off-balance with multiple feints, marches and counter-marches, and diversions.   

The Battle of Bladensburg itself ended as a complete loss for the United States.  Casualties on both sides were very light by today’s standards.  There were 65 dead from the British side, with some of these dying of heat stroke rather than enemy action; about 23 men were killed on the American side.  But it was how the defeat unfolded that made it such a disgraceful episode.  The American militia actually fled in disorder through the streets of Washington; the scene was so shameful that someone later christened it the “Bladensburg Races.”  The only redeeming anecdote, I think, is to be found in the fate of Commodore Joshua Barney, which we will now relate.

Barney, as usual, fought with ferocity at Bladensburg.  At some point during the battle a musket-ball crashed into his thigh; he became incapacitated and lay prostrate on the field of battle (he would die of complications from this wound many decades later).  He was approached by an officer from Admiral Cockburn’s flagship named Captain Wainwright.  Wainwright at first did not know who Barney was, but once he discovered the fallen foe’s identity, he fetched Admiral Cockburn and General Ross.  What happened next is a wonderful bit of chivalry, of which we find so many examples in the annals of nineteenth century warfare.  Barney’s memoirs of 1832, dictated to his wife and written in the third person, state as follows:

They [Ross and Cockburn] both accosted the prisoner in the most polite and respectful terms, offering immediate assistance, and the attendance of their surgeon.  After a little, General Ross, who no doubt felt as he spoke, said “I am really very glad to see you, Commodore!” to which the Commodore replied, with equal sincerity of feeling:  “I am sorry I cannot return you the compliment, General!”  Ross smiled, and turning to the Admiral, remarked, “I told you it was the Flotilla men!”…After some further conversation between these two Commanders in a lower tone, General Ross turned again to the prisoner and said, “Commodore Barney, you are paroled, where do you wish to be conveyed?”  His wound had in the meantime been dressed by a British surgeon, and he requested to be conveyed to Bladensburg. The General immediately ordered a sergeant’s guard to attend with a litter, and Captain Wainwright was directed by the Admiral to accompany it, and see that every attention was paid to the Commodore.  He was still very weak, and the motion of the litter excited such intense pain in his wound, that he was unable to restrain the expression of it in his countenance.

General Ross graciously allowed Barney to be “paroled,” that is, released on his honor as a gentleman, so that he would not have to suffer the indignity of being a prisoner.  There then occurred a remarkable incident which so moved the combat-hardened British sailors who witnessed it, that many of them were reduced to tears.  Barney’s memoirs describe the scene:

Just as this change of [Barney’s stretcher] carriers had been affected, one of his wounded men, who had been taken prisoner, and whose arm was hanging only by a small piece of the skin by his side, as he passed near [Barney’s] litter stopped, knelt by the side of his commander, and seizing one of his hands with the only arm he had, kissed it repeatedly with great apparent affection and burst into tears.  The effect of this action upon the British sailors was electric—they began to wipe their eyes, and blow their noses, in concert, and one of them at length broke out with, “Well, damn my eyes!  If he wasn’t a kind commander, that chap wouldn’t ha done that!

Today the Battle of Bladensburg stands as a stark reminder of the consequences of unpreparedness and incompetence.  Oceans are no longer a protective barrier, if indeed they ever were in the first place.  Armies cannot be treated as outing-clubs; they must be staffed, and professionally maintained, by men willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.  Those who neglect the obligation to build and preserve effective fighting forces can expect that their negligence will bear, in due course and with complete certainty, a thoroughly rotten harvest.    

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Read more about the exploits of great commanders and generals in the new translation of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders.