City Administrator John Moss poses in his office, a few days before the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Bladensburg. U.S. troops ran away from a British advance at the Anacostia River on Aug. 23, 1814, leaving the road to Washington unguarded. The British would burn the White House and U.S. Capitol that night, in revenge for American looting in York (Toronto) a year earlier. Photo: Allen Abel/Postmedia News BLADENSBURG, Maryland — The site of America’s most disgraceful military fiasco – and Canada’s sweetest revenge — is a tranquil little suburb at the height of summer, with ospreys circling above the Anacostia River, kayakers working their way up the lazy stream, and interpretive signs marking the location where, instead of standing firm to protect their infant capital, thousands of U.S. soldiers and militiamen turned tail and ran like sheep.
It happened precisely 200 years ago this week, late in the third year of the War of 1812, or exactly two centuries before I walk into the local post office and inform the clerk that I have come to tour the scene of the inglorious rout.
“The Battle of Bladensburg, yeah!” the attendant, whose name is Joyce Phillips, erupts.
“Why are you cheering?” I ask her. “The Battle of Bladensburg was the most embarrassing day in American history. The British marched on from here to burn the Capitol and the White House!”
“You mean we LOST?” Phillips gasps. “I thought we kicked their butt!”
Bladensburgers are to be forgiven if they try to spin the debacle of August 1814 into a well of civic pride. The town, which abuts the Washington, D.C. border, is home to a number of gritty cement yards, body shops, and Salvadoran pupuserias to go along with a quartet of handsome pre-Revolutionary homes and inns with a “George Washington slept here” pedigree. But the events of August 1814 are best forgotten, at least by the U.S. side.
“It wasn’t called ‘the Bladensburg Races’ for nothing,” admits John (“The Chief”) Moss, the city administrator, as we chat in his office. “This was not a shining day for our military services. But it created the spark that helped galvanize a nation.”
“History is a living thing,” The Chief continues. “It is all around us. The road the British marched on to Washington, we drive it every day.”
By August 1814, U.S. president James Madison’s war of choice had been going on for two years. Repeated American attempts to invade and conquer British Canada – “a mere matter of marching,” in Thomas Jefferson’s infamous words – had been repulsed at Queenston Heights, Amherstburg, Lundy’s Lane, Chateauguay and Crysler’s Farm, but victories on the Great Lakes by the upstart U.S. Navy had evened the ledger. A year earlier, Yankee raiders had torched and looted the future Toronto, then called York, in what a court of inquiry later labelled “disgraceful outrages.” (They also stole the ceremonial mace of the Parliament of Upper Canada, took it back to Washington, and kept it for 122 years.)
Now it was Britain’s turn. At Bladensburg, led by a regiment of freed African-American slaves, the armies of the blind and demented George III fired a few state-of-the-art Congreve rockets at the Yankee lines and the shocked and awed defenders swiftly split. Madison himself stood on the west bank of the Anacostia, watching the disaster through a spyglass, twin pistols strapped to his side, before bolting rather un-presidentially for Virginia.
“We were surrounded by twenty thousand soldiers but they would not engage us the dam (sic) rascals,” wrote a Royal Navy midshipman named Davies to his Mum over ‘ome, summing up the affair.
By nightfall, the British had dashed on to the unfinished Capitol and were firing missiles into the imported (from England) plate-glass sunlights in the roof of the House of Representatives and making a bonfire of the mahogany desks. At the White House, they found the doors unlocked, the State Dining Room set for 40, and goblets brimming with Madeira. After raising toasts to the absconded Madison, the British stole his greatcoats, hats, and ceremonial swords, set fire to the beds and curtains, and watched the palace burn.
York-Toronto had been avenged. Two weeks later in Baltimore, a 25-hour British bombardment of Fort McHenry – the rocket’s red glare, etc. etc. – would fail to dislodge the stalwart Yanks. The War of 1812 would go on until 1815, then sputter out with not an inch of territory gained or lost and both sides claiming victory.
Two hundred years later, both sides still do.
Back on the banks of the Anacostia, notwithstanding the fact that the Battle of Bladensburg, from the American perspective at least, is a day well worth forgetting, the whole shameful episode is to be re-enacted by hundreds of costumed combatants on Aug. 23.
“What do you think is going to happen this time?” I ask the town administrator.
“Well, if I were a betting man,” replies The Chief, “I’d bet on England.”
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