The Battle of Bladensburg, also known as the Bladensburg Races, took place on August 24, 1814, during the Chesapeake campaign of the War of 1812 at Bladensburg, Maryland. It has been described as "the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms". A British force of army regulars and Royal Marines routed a combined U.S. force of Regular Army and state militia troops. The American defeat resulted in the British capture and burning of the national capital of Washington, the only time that the city has fallen to a foreign invader.
Background
British plans
For the first two years of the War of 1812 (1812–1815), the British had been preoccupied with the war against Napoleon and his French Empire (France) in Europe. However, warships of the Royal Navy led by Rear Admiral George Cockburn, second in command of the North American Station, controlled the Chesapeake Bay from early 1813 onwards and had captured large numbers of U.S. trading vessels. They occupied Tangier Island off the coast of Virginia, establishing Fort Albion as an anchorage and staging area. As many as 1,200 British soldiers would be stationed there.
Raiding parties had destroyed foundries and batteries and sacked several small towns, but lack of troops restricted Cockburn to mounting small-scale raids, the largest of which was the Battle of Craney Island, in the Hampton Roads harbor near Norfolk, Virginia, which involved 2,000 men of the British Army and the Royal Marines. Although Cockburn withdrew from the Chesapeake Bay late in 1813, his sailors had taken soundings and even placed buoys to mark channels and sandbars, in preparation for a renewed campaign in 1814.
By April 1814, Napoleon had been defeated and was exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, and large numbers of British ships and troops were now free to be used to prosecute the former backwater war with the United States. As part of the measures taken to prosecute the war more vigorously, Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren was replaced as commander in chief of the North American Station by Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, who was a more active and experienced officer who often expressed his rancour with the United States.
Most of the newly available troops went to the continental colonies of British North America where Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost (who was Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the Provinces of Upper-Canada, Lower-Canada, Nova-Scotia, and New-Brunswick, and their several Dependencies, Vice-Admiral of the same, Lieutenant-General and Commander of all His Majesty’s Forces in the said Provinces of Lower Canada and Upper-Canada, Nova-Scotia and New-Brunswick, and their several Dependencies, and in the islands of Newfoundland, Prince Edward, Cape Breton and the Bermudas, &c. &c. &c.') was preparing to lead an invasion into New York from the Canadas, heading for Lake Champlain and the upper Hudson River. However, the Earl of Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, dispatched a brigade of 2,500 soldiers, mainly veterans from the Duke of Wellington's army, and commanded by Major General Robert Ross, to the Imperial fortress of Bermuda, from where a blockade of the U.S. coast and even the occupation of some coastal islands had been overseen throughout the war. Ross' brigade arrived there aboard HMS Royal Oak, three frigates, three sloops and ten other vessels. The intention was for this force to carry out raids on the Atlantic Seaboard to "effect a diversion on the coasts of the United States of America in favor [sic] of the army employed in the defence of Upper and Lower Canada".
United States plans and preparations
Meanwhile, Albert Gallatin, President James Madison's nominated commissioner for negotiations with the British government, sent news from Europe of Napoleon's abdication and the apparent hardening of British attitudes towards the United States. On 1 July 1814, Madison summoned his cabinet to discuss the increased threat to the United States' Atlantic coast, including Washington, although the Secretary of War, John Armstrong, insisted that the British would not attack Washington, since it was strategically unimportant. He felt the most likely target would be the city of Baltimore, which offered more commercial targets and plunder than Washington. Armstrong was half right; the British would launch attacks against both Baltimore and Washington.
Nevertheless, on 2 July, Madison designated the area around Washington and Baltimore as the United States Army's Tenth Military District and, without consulting Armstrong, appointed Brigadier General William H. Winder as its commander. Winder was the nephew of Levin Winder, Federalist Governor of Maryland. He had practiced law in Baltimore before being commissioned as a colonel in 1812 and had only recently been exchanged after having been captured at the Battle of Stoney Creek in July 1813. On 5 July, he and Armstrong conferred. Winder suggested calling up some militia in advance of any attack, but Armstrong insisted that militia could best be used on the spur of the moment. Winder spent a month visiting the forts and settlements in his new command. Armstrong did not provide him with any staff, and despite his fears that the British could launch an attack against almost any point with very little warning, Winder did not order any field fortifications to be constructed, nor make any other preparations.
Campaign
British moves
Although Major General Ross commanded the British troops in the Chesapeake Bay, the point of attack was to be decided by Vice Admiral Cochrane, who had concentrated four ships of the line, twenty frigates and sloops of war and twenty transports carrying Ross's troops at Tangier Island. Rear Admiral Cockburn, Cochrane's second in command, favoured a quick attack on Washington, but Ross was not eager. His men had been confined aboard their transports for nearly three months, and he lacked cavalry, artillery, and transport. Ross was also wary of the U.S. Chesapeake Bay Flotilla (three gunboats and ten gun-armed barges) lurking in the Patuxent River. His first objective had to be the capture or destruction of the U.S. flotilla.
Cochrane dispatched two forces to make diversions. The frigate HMS Menelaus and some small craft threatened a raid on Baltimore, while two frigates and some bomb ketches and a rocket vessel ascended the Potomac River, an expedition that resulted in the successful Raid on Alexandria. His main body proceeded into the Patuxent. Ross's troops landed at Benedict on 19 August, and began marching upstream the following day, while Cockburn proceeded up the river with ships' boats and small craft. By 21 August, Ross had reached Nottingham, and Commodore Joshua Barney was forced to destroy the gunboats and other sailing craft of the Chesapeake Bay Flotilla the next day, and retreat overland towards Washington.
From Nottingham, Ross continued up the Patuxent to Upper Marlboro, from where he could threaten to advance on either Washington or Baltimore, confusing the Americans. He might have taken the capital almost unopposed had he advanced on August 23, but instead he rested his men and organised his force. On the night of 23–24 August, at the urging of Rear Admiral Cockburn and some of the British Army officers under his own command, Ross decided to risk an attack on Washington. He had four infantry battalions, a battalion of Royal Marines, a force of around 100 African-American Colonial Marines of the Corps of Colonial Marines, which was composed of locally recruited black refugees from slavery, a Congreve rocket detachment from the Royal Marines battalion, a similar rocket detachment commanded by Captain Deacon of the Royal Artillery, 50 Royal Sappers and Miners, 100 gunners from the Navy and 275 sailors to carry supplies. His force totaled 4,370 men, with one 6-pounder gun, two 3-pounder guns and sixty rocket projectiles each weighing 12 pounds. Rear Admiral Cockburn accompanied this force.
Ross had a choice of two routes by which he could advance: from the south via Woodyard or from the east via Bladensburg. The former route would involve finding a way across an unfordable part of the Eastern Branch of the Potomac (now called the Anacostia River) if the U.S. destroyed the bridge on the route. In the morning of 24 August, Ross made a feint on the southern route, before suddenly swerving northwards towards Bladensburg.
U.S. moves
In Washington, Brigadier General Winder could call in theory upon 15,000 militia, but he actually had only 120 dragoons and 300 other regulars, plus 1,500 poorly trained and under-equipped militiamen at his immediate disposal. On 20 August, Winder ordered this force to advance south towards Long Old Fields and Woodyard (off modern Route 5) to confront the British forces at Upper Marlboro. After a brief clash with Ross's leading units on 22 August, Winder ordered a hasty retreat to the Long Old Fields. He feared that the British might make a surprise night attack, in which the British would hold the advantage in organisation and discipline while Winder's own advantage in artillery would count for little. Winder had been captured in just such a night attack at Stoney Creek the year before.
Although he rode with the forces directly challenging the British invaders, Winder realized that Bladensburg was the key to Washington's defence. Bladensburg commanded the roads to Baltimore and Annapolis, along which reinforcements were moving to join him. The town also lay on one of the only two routes available for the British to advance on Washington, in fact the preferred route because the Eastern Branch was easy to ford there. On 20 August, Winder had ordered Brigadier General Tobias Stansbury to move from Baltimore to Bladensburg, "take the best position in advance of Bladensburg ... and should he be attacked, to resist as long as possible".
On 22 August, Stansbury deployed his force on Lowndes Hill, where he hastily dug earthworks for artillery emplacements. The road from Annapolis crossed the hill, and the road from Upper Marlboro ran to its south and west. Furthermore, the roads to Washington, Georgetown, and Baltimore all intersected between it and Bladensburg. From this position, Stansbury dominated the approaches available to the British while controlling the lines of communication.
At 2:30 a.m. on August 23, Stansbury received a message from Winder, informing him that he had withdrawn across the Eastern Branch and he intended to fire the lower bridge. Surprised, Stansbury was seized by an irrational fear that his right flank could be turned. Instead of strengthening his commanding position, he immediately decamped and marched his exhausted troops across Bladensburg bridge, which he did not burn, to a brickyard 1.5 miles (2.4 km) further on. He had thus thrown away almost every tactical advantage available to him.
Meanwhile, in Washington, every government department was hastily packing its records and evacuating them to Maryland or Virginia, in requisitioned or hired carts or river boats.
Battle
U.S. dispositions
Winder now had at least 1,000 regulars from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps, plus about 7,000 less than dependable militia and volunteers from the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. Official reports of his strength range from 5,000 to 9,000 men. Winder's report to the Secretary of War stated that he was able "By the most active and harassing movement of the troops to interpose before the enemy at Bladensburg about 5,000." Ross, the British commander, estimated the American force at between 8,000 and 9,000 men, with 300–400 cavalry. From other contemporary sources, the forces available for the defense of Washington probably numbered about 7,170, of which 6,370 were at Bladensburg.
Stansbury's force consisted of the 1st (Ragan's), 2nd (Schutz's), and 5th (Sterrett's) regiments of Maryland Militia, three companies of volunteer riflemen commanded by Major William Pinkney (a former United States Attorney General), and two companies of Baltimore artillery, with six 6-pounder guns. Ragan's and Schutz's regiments were hastily organised amalgamations of companies, all without uniforms. Sterrett's 5th Maryland Regiment was a "Dandy" regiment of uniformed volunteers.