Fabulous Potomac Passage

In August 1814, a British amphibious force of some 1,500 marched into Washington, burned the Congress House and the President’s Mansion, and camped for the night on Capitol Hill. The entire British invasion force —4,500 strong—had landed at Benedict, Maryland, on the Patuxent River and had marched upwards of 50 miles in five days through heat that frequently started the day at 98 degrees. They won a battle the afternoon of 24 August against 5,400 hastily gathered American militia and regulars, and left their exhausted, wounded, and dead companions at Bladensburg, outside the city.

Vice Admiral Alexander Forrester Inglis Cochrane, who supervised the Washington invasion from Benedict, had been sent to America with his Admiralty’s explicit instructions to chastise severely a nation that, as one naval leader put it, “had declared war against us when our hands were full in Europe and who, by their maritime successes, had astonished themselves as much as they had surprised us.”

Leading the invaders, Major General Robert Ross—the “model of an Irish gentleman”—commanded veteran troops of Wellington’s Peninsula operations against Napoleon; Rear Admiral George Cockburn—arrogant and ruthless—commanded seamen and marines whom he had sedulously taught, in marauding “frolics” up and down the Chesapeake Bay during the past 18 months, as he put it, “to scare the militia.”

At the same time that Admiral Cochrane thrust overland at Washington, he feinted with a few ships toward Baltimore. He also sent a squadron of seven warships 100 miles up the Potomac River toward the American capital on a water thrust as amazing as the Ross-Cockburn overland march. This almost incredible river voyage was aimed at an inland objective 180 miles from the open ocean off the Virginia capes.

Captain James Alexander Gordon led the Potomac expedition. Not yet 30 years old, lie had lost a leg in Adriatic fighting. His command comprised: the frigate Sea Horse, 38 guns, Captain Gordon; the frigate Euryalus, 36 guns, Captain Charles Napier, second-in- command; the bomb vessels Aetna, Devastation, and Meteor; the rocket ship Erebus; and the dispatch boat Anna Maria.

The squadron’s complement totaled 1,004, later described by Captain Napier as “ships’ companies by no means fit to cope with the picked men of America.”¹ Many of the officers and seamen had arrived in the Chesapeake only days earlier, shipped on 2 June from the Mediterranean with no home leave after long tours of war duty.

Disappointed, subject to debilitating seaborne sicknesses on their tedious sail to the United States via Bermuda, these men faced the 100-mile passage up the winding, shoalfilled Potomac using charts “from several draughts made by the most Experienced Navigators, chiefly from those of Anthony Smith, Pilot of St. Mary’s.”

Sailing directions on one such 1776 chart pointed out that, above the Wicomico River, “there are many shoals called Kettle Bottoms; none of the pilots know exactly where they lie.” Earlier, a British frigate had abandoned efforts to effect an upriver passage; the American frigate President, had come downriver once—in 42 days—her 44 guns taken out and loaded into small boats so that she could float over the sand and mud banks.

And, as if the natural barriers were not formidable enough, the Americans had erected a fort 12 miles below Washington.

Gordon entered the Potomac on 17 August, the same day that the main British squadron entered the Patuxent. The second day brought him to the Kettle Bottoms, which Captain Napier saw as “oyster banks of various dimensions, some not larger than a boat, with passages between them.” Keeping the Virginia shore aboard, the Sea Horse led the squadron in a light wind, with several boats ahead sounding.

“As long as the soundings were good,” records Captain Napier, “no apprehension was entertained. Being aware of the smallness of the obstructions, it appeared impossible, if the ship ahead found a passage, that those astern could not be brought up. We were, however, mistaken. The Euryalus opened the ball and struck or, rather, was suddenly brought up—for nothing was felt, and the lead gave us plenty of water.”

Anchoring, the frigate sent boats and hawsers to pull her off. No one could tell where she hung. She had plenty of water astern, ahead, and all around, but she would not move.

“A diver went down,” Captain Napier reports, “and found, to the astonishment of all on board, that an oyster bank not bigger than a boat was under the bilge. The boats had missed it with the lead, and the Sea Horse had passed perhaps by a few feet on one side.” After hard heaving, the frigate floated.

The squadron weighed anchor and proceeded with great caution—behind several boats rowed abreast of each other, with leads. Despite this care, the Sea Horse grounded on a sand bank. With the tide flooding, Gordon anticipated no difficulty in getting her off without lightening her. But she stuck.

“A strict examination,” Captain Napier reveals, “showed that, though the tide was apparently running up, the water was diminishing. Not until it had flowed several hours was there any perceptible increase of depth.”

With her ship’s water started and a great part of her provisions and eight or ten guns hoisted out into the small boats, she floated. The next day, her crew got in her provisions and guns, sounded the channel, and prepared to warp in event of a foul wind.

Several other vessels also went aground, but got off with more ease and on 19 August, the squadron weighed anchor with a favorable breeze and cleared the Kettle Bottoms before dark without serious difficulty. Each ship picked her way to the best of her commander’s individual judgment, all grounding occasionally, but getting off more easily than had the Sea Horse.

With the wind foul on the morning of 20 August, the signal was made to warp. As Captain Napier describes this backbreaking work, each ship divided her boats into two divisions—one using the stream anchor, the other the kedge. The first division laid out the stream and bent all hawsers to it. As the deck crew warped the ship ahead, the second division coiled in the hawsers and laid out the kedge.

“It was so arranged,” Captain Napier explains, “that the end should be on board as the other anchor became short, stay or peak. When the tide was favourable and the wind light, we warped by hand; with the ebb and wind strong, the hawsers were brought to the capstan.”

Operations began at daylight. Carried on without interruption until dark, they lasted five days—during which time the squadron warped upwards of 50 miles!

Gordon anchored off Maryland Point on the fifth day, 24 August, the day Ross and Cockburn completed their overland thrust and burned Washington.

“The reflection of the fire on the heavens,” Captain Napier reports, “was plainly seen from the ships.”

Believing that the flames marked British withdrawal after the capture and invasion of Washington—attainment of Admiral Cochrane’s objective—the Potomac squadron decided, nevertheless, to proceed on its own.

“The enemy gave us no trouble,” says Captain Napier, “either with fire vessels or with light troops who might have been stationed in such a manner on both banks of the river as to have rendered the laying out of anchors totally impossible. But considering we were several hundred miles in the interior of an enemy’s country, the utmost precaution was necessary to provide against any unforeseen attack.”

At night, hammocks never were piped down; the British rowed guard boats in every direction.

“The strictest discipline was observed in the guard boats: no landing or plundering was permitted—the numerous flocks of geese swam undisturbed in the river—the bullocks and sheep browsed unmolested—the poultry yards were respected, and any act that might irritate the inhabitants was most sedulously avoided.” When a single boat did land in the night, looking for livestock, an American farmer shot and wounded one of the British seamen, “which served as a salutary example to the rest.”

Captain Napier landed with a flag of truce during the day of 24 August, at the first agreeable-looking residence he had seen on the river banks. The countryside was thickly wooded and few habitations were visible. The owner, Captain Napier later wrote, had two daughters “rather homely and as uncouth as [the farmer] himself. They ‘guessed’ we would not go farther than Maryland Point, as the water was shoal; seemed to know and care very little about what was going on; offered us a glass of peach brandy, and hoped the ‘Britishers’ would not carry off their Negroes, which appeared to be their only apprehension.”

Weighing anchor early on 25 August, the squadron beat up Maryland Reach in about the same amount of water—or less—than the frigates drew, sometimes dragging through soft bottom. A little after noon, a northwest squall made up.

“We had heard much of the violence of these gusts, but always concluded them exaggerated. We were not quite so cautious as we ought to have been,” Captain Napier confesses. But he took in top-gallant sails, mainsail, jib, and spanker.

“The squall thickened at a short distance,” he goes on, “roaring in a most awful manner, and appearing like a tremendous surf. No time was to be lost. Everything was clued up at the moment it reached us. Nevertheless we were nearly on our beam ends.

“A couple of anchors were let go and, as we swung to the wind, the bowsprit rose right up. This slackened the stays and away went the heads of all three top-masts; this saved the fore-mast which, in another moment, would have fallen. The bowsprit, being relieved, sunk back to its place but broke completely through.”

The entire squadron suffered: two of the seven ships lay four or five miles lower down the river: the Sea Horse sprung her mizzenmast; the “Meteor, lying on a bank, was fairly blown over it and brought up in deep water.” Captain Napier left his frigate’s wreckage as it lay, and piped to dinner.

“Captain Gordon thought the game up,” he relates, “but he was assured we should be refitted before the other ships joined.”

At half-past one, Captain Napier called all hands. They cleared the wreckage, hoisted the bowsprit on board, made a new one out of a topmast, and made and fitted new cross- trees and trestletrees.

“Although we did not work after dark,” he reports, “next day at one o’clock we were all a-taut, and weighed as the two sternmost vessels passed. It was calm and the boats, manned with marines, towed the ship as the seamen were setting up the rigging.”

With the wind fair on the morning of 26 August, the British made all sail up the river “which now assumed a more pleasing aspect.” At 5:00 p.m., Mount Vernon opened to their view and “showed us, for the first time since we entered the Potomac, a gentleman’s residence.” Lowering their foretopsails in salute, they passed with their bands playing Washington’s march. Then, on the river’s opposite side, “Fort Washington appeared to our anxious eyes.”

Since July of 1813, citizens of Washington (12 miles above the fort) and of Alexandria (six miles above) generally had considered Fort Warburton, built in 1808 and renamed Fort Washington in 1813, to be “in a state of perfect defence.”

To the anxious British eyes, however, “it was considered assailable.” At the foot of a steep acclivity, it encompassed two 32- pounders and eight 24-pounders, a beach battery of five 18-pounders, a rear battery of two 12-pound and six 6-pound field-pieces, and a two-story octagonal brick blockhouse that held two 12-pounders—but this martello tower, “calculated against musketry only, could have been knocked down by a 12- pounder.”

Anchoring his squadron a little before sunset, just outside the Fort’s gun-shot range, Gordon sent bomb vessels to positions where they could cover the frigates in the next day’s projected daylight attack. The bomb vessels threw a few preparatory shells, upon which, as Captain Napier records, “the garrison, to our great surprise, retreated from the Fort. A short time after, Fort Washington was blown up—which left the capital of America and the populous town of Alexandria open to the squadron without the loss of a man.”

The night before the British invaded the Capital, defending General William Henry Winder had ordered Fort Washington’s commanding officer—Captain Samuel T. Dyson—to blow the Fort up and retire across the river with his 60-man garrison in the event of “being taken in the rear of the fort by the enemy.”

Captain Dyson later declared he had information that 6,000 enemy marched on the Fort to co-operate with Gordon’s squadron. Historian Benson J. Lossing declares that “Dyson either misunderstood Winder’s order or was scared. He blew up and abandoned the Fort without firing a gun” leaving the British, as Captain Napier pictures their astonishment, “at a loss to account for such an extraordinary step. The position was good, and its capture would have cost us at least fifty men and more.”

At daylight on 27 August, the British moored under the Fort and completed its destruction. Captain Napier wrote: “The guns were spiked by the enemy: we otherwise mutilated them and destroyed the carriages.”

Past the sole military obstacle to their invasion thrust, the British received a deputation from Alexandria, which had come to capitulate.

“But Captain Gordon declined entering into any arrangements till the squadron arrived before Alexandria,” says Captain Napier. “The channel was buoyed and, next morning the 27th, we anchored abreast of the town.”

At this moment, Ross and Cockburn having long since evacuated Washington, had almost rejoined their ships at Benedict. And the American administration had returned to the Capital with plans to gird up the national loins for action in order to restore the humiliated country’s pride. Already President James Madison, Secretary of the Navy William Jones, and the newly-appointed Secretary for War, James Monroe, were eyeing the isolated enemy squadron.

Nevertheless, with 1,000 men in seven vessels, Gordon took Alexandria—and continued to hold it for five days.

During this time, he exacted from the town’s 7,000 citizens the kind of tribute which Ross and Cockburn had hoped to seize in Washington. He forced the undefended Alexandrians—whose local militia had left to help fight Ross and Cockburn at Bladensburg and had not yet returned—to give up all naval and ordnance stores, to deliver all shipping and merchandise of every description, and to supply all ships’ needs at market prices paid by bills on the British government. Gordon exacted the tribute with a smile.

When local tradesmen went on board his ships to seek compensation for flour and other produce, his officers “oiled the hinges of friendship” with wine.

A chance occurrence, however, might have “put the town in a blaze,” as Captain Napier relates.

An enterprising [American] midshipman thought it would be fine fun to carry off an officer; and . . . dashed into the town on horseback . . . came boldly down to the boats, and seized a midshipman by the collar. The fellow was strong, and attempted to get him on his horse. The youngster, quite astonished, kicked and squalled most lustily; and after being dragged a hundred yards, the American was obliged to drop his brother officer. This operation . . . created a considerable alarm; the men retreated to the boats, and prepared their carronades, and were with difficulty prevented from firing. This occurrence soon found its way to the mayor, who came off in great alarm for the town. Captain Gordon, with great good humour, admitted his apology, and treated it ... as a midshipman’s spree; but recommended that proper precautions should be taken as a repetition . . . might lead to the destruction of the town.

Along with an appreciation for such clean naval sport, Gordon had a determination to make his sweaty upriver labors pay off. Inexorably, he “weighed, caulked, and masted” 21 prizes which the Alexandrians had scuttled earlier. On board these he put, as he himself reported, “from 15,000 to 18,000 barrels of flour, 800 hogsheads of tobacco, 150 bales of cotton, with a quantity of sugar and other commodities . . . by the 31st of August.” While contrary winds delayed his departure with this booty, he kept a weather eye on Washington. But no troops arrived from the Capital to annoy him. From Chesapeake Bay, however, came fellow Captain Henry L. Baker, who sailed the 18-gun brig Fairy to Alexandria with hurry-home messages from apprehensive Admiral Cochrane. En route, Captain Baker informed Gordon that he had seen Americans cutting down trees and building batteries—obviously they intended to contest the British squadron’s downriver passage with its prizes.

Navy Secretary Jones (a sea captain and Philadelphia ship owner) and senior Navy Commodore John Rodgers (who had fired the war’s first shot with his own hand in the flagship President) had worked out the strategy against Gordon’s expedition. They were going to do what General Winder’s militia had not succeeded in doing to the Ross-Cockburn invasion thrust—dispute Gordon’s homeward passage. Their plans called for the use of fire ships and two hastily erected batteries.

Commodore Rodgers himself improvised the fire ships at the Washington Navy Yard and, with 650 picked seamen and marines, took them down to Alexandria to attack the British squadron from the rear. The first battery went up at the “White House,” below Mount Vernon on the Virginia shore, under command of Captain David Porter, who had captured the first British vessel in the war and had sailed on to fame in the frigate Essex. The second battery went up at Indian Head, on the Maryland shore some ten miles below the White House battery, under the command of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry famous for his great fleet victory on Lake Erie.

The trio gave Gordon and his 21 prizes a bad time, and, to add to their troubles, the British had to endure foul winds and continual groundings.

With the Devastation hung up on a shoal shortly after leaving Alexandria, Gordon had to anchor his squadron a few miles 'above Fort Washington to give the bomb ship protection. Whereupon, Commodore Rodgers floated three ignited fire ships downstream toward the British. But wind failed; Gordon’s small boats towed the American fire ships away and chased the Commodore’s five accompanying barges back up the Potomac.

On 2 September, Gordon sent the bomb vessel Meteor, a gunboat, a mortar boat, and the brig Fairy down on Captain Porter’s White House battery. Standing out of battery range, they opened fire with shells.

Fighting with him under a white flag blazoned with “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” Captain Porter had some 500 seamen and marines, three 18-pounders, and two 12- pounders. To counsel him, he had War Secretary James Monroe, an American Revolutionary soldier. To support his naval arms, he had General John P. Hungerford’s regiment of Virginia militia and General Robert Young’s Alexandria militiamen. Together, these sailors and soldiers kept Gordon’s squadron busy for four days.

To fire effectively on the Meteor the first day, Captain Porter moved one of his 18- pounders a mile to an advanced point with no other effect, he informed Secretary Jones, “than to accustom the militia to the danger.”

On the second day, 3 September, the bomb vessel Aetna and the rocket ship Erebus dropped downriver to spray the battery with a fire of shot, shells, and rockets, which they continued through the night. While he waited for heavier cannons to arrive from Washington, Captain Porter made do with his five long guns and the five 4-pound and 6-pound field pieces of Captain George Griffith’s Alexandria artillery. He built a furnace for heating shot.

Throughout 4 and 5 September, the White House garrison took Gordon’s pounding, while naval gunners and militia artillerists cut up the British rocket ship. When several 32-pounders and two mortars arrived from the Navy Department—without carriages, but with ammunition—Captain Porter hoped “that we should speedily be put in a proper state for annoying the enemy.”

With the Devastation still trying to warp off the shoal, Commodore Rodgers sent out four barges and a lighter with 60 musketarmed seamen on the night of 4 September. But the Fairy's boats forced the Americans ashore, wounded nine, and withdrew. Next morning, when the American barges went out again, Commodore Rodgers set another fire ship adrift. But the enemy went unharmed, and the British boats forced the barges to retreat.

With the Devastation clear of the shoal, Commodore Rodgers’ rear-guard harassment ended. Ready on the morning of 6 September to move the squadron and prizes, Gordon in the Sea Horse and Captain Napier in the Euryalus led the entire squadron into action.

Captain Porter prepared to meet them with hot shot and infantrymen fighting without entrenchments. Overmatched against two frigates, a brig, three bomb vessels, a rocket ship, and armed ships’ boats, he suggested that General Hungerford’s soldiers take a safe position in the woods on nearby heights. But resourceful Gordon shifted ballast, listed his ships, and elevated his guns to reach the Virginia heights.

After an hour and a quarter, the frigates went to work on the battery, anchoring within musket-shot range and pouring their fire into the makeshift fort. Joining the frigates, the bomb ships loaded their mortars with musket balls and sprayed the battery and neighboring woods.

Despite this iron rain, Captain Porter’s guns and the Virginians’ rifles—one company on his left at the waterside and one company on his right—did considerable damage to the decks of the British ships.

“The Americans are generally excellent shots,” admitted Captain Napier, who took a ball in his neck. He declared that “it was quite impossible to dislodge the numerous body of sharpshooters who were under cover of the trees and did considerable execution through the ports.”

British gunners shot well, too. One ball split a battery gun to the touch-hole, a second shattered the wheel of another.

“The fire of grape and shells was incessant for more than two hours,” according to an American militiaman in the action, “the riflemen . . . down at the water’s edge aiming at the decks and rigging as long as a man was to be seen on either.”

But American marksmanship failed to stop the British squadron’s downriver drive. The Fairy convoyed the prizes outside the fighting vessels. Frigates and bombs finally silenced the battery. The American loss: 12 killed, 17 wounded.

“We calculated all was over for that day,” reports Captain Napier. “We were mistaken. The Fairy and prizes were observed to anchor a few miles further down, having discovered fresh batteries.”

The British now faced Commodore Perry’s barely-finished Indian Head battery, on a high ridge of hills. The Commodore had about 500 seamen and marines, supported by troops which, in the battle of Bladensburg, had received orders to pull back when they had just begun to fight.

Still smarting—officers and men alike—at their defeat outside Washington, these militiamen proceeded to use muskets, rifles, and 6-pound field pieces “in the handsomest manner.” Under Major George Peter, they kept up a destructive fire on the rocket ship Erebus, which grounded as it attempted to pass the battery.

The British anticipated a considerable interruption to their progress, believing they saw “from fourteen to eighteen guns mounted in this new position.”

But when the squadron weighed anchor the next morning, the Sea Horse leading and the Euryalus bringing up the rear, “we were agreeably surprised at being able to pass quietly.” The Americans, Gordon later learned, had expended all available powder and shot the night before!

Commodore Perry had one man wounded. As the squadron slogged its tortuous way toward the Chesapeake with no further harassment except a two-day grounding by Captain Napier’s Euryalus, Admiral Cochrane pushed 20 miles into the Potomac to bring Gordon out if necessary—British vessels going up and down “by night as well as by day without pilots, each taking care of the other, as the colliers do in going up the Swin.” Gordon led his seven warships and 21 loaded Alexandrian prizes safely into the Bay on 9 September. His 200-mile expedition had lasted 23 days. “The hammocks were only down twice; each ship was ashore at least twenty times.”

And the total cost of this performance “almost unparalleled in the annals of naval warfare”? Seven were killed, 35 wounded, and there were five desertions at Alexandria.