1812: The Rivers of War (31 page)

There were six guns, all told. On either side of the twelve-pounders, Barney’s sailors were wrestling into position four other cannons that Sam had been able to round up from retreating troops who had chosen to join him. None of them were bigger than six-pounders, true, and there were but two of those. But what was probably more important was that the pair of six-pounders had been in the possession of some more stray sailors from Commodore Barney’s unit. Stubborn—and still furious over the debacle at Bladensburg—the sailors had insisted on saving their guns and hauling them all the way back to Washington.

They’d be put to good use now, and there were finally enough of Barney’s sailors in Sam’s impromptu army that he could be confident his artillery would be handled with professional skill. With a battery of six guns, protected by the hastily erected but solid fortifications, the American force holding the Capitol could inflict some real damage on the enemy.

Sam would catch hell for those fortifications, in a day or two. Breastworks required wood, brick, or shaped stone to form suitable berms for the artillery, even if most of the material was dirt.

The only such substances ready-made in the area were the fittings of the Capitol itself.

For the most part, the men had been able to use wood planks taken from the covered walkway that ran between the buildings,
once they tore it down, or the timber used for the flooring of the public galleries. It was amazing, really, how quickly that many men could tear something down, when they put their minds to it.

Still, for much of the underlying frame of the breastwork that would be shielding the twelve-pounder on the north, near the Senate building, they’d had to use the broken-up mahogany desks and chairs of the senators themselves.

But that was just furniture, when all was said and done. The real trouble would come from the House of Representatives. Sam was as sure of it as he was of the sunrise.

Alas, before Sam or Driscol noticed them doing it, some enthusiasts had taken it upon themselves to tear down the eastern entrance doors and add their heavy wooden substance to the breastworks.

“Oh, splendid!” Driscol had snarled at them, pointing an accusing finger at the now-gaping holes of the doorways. “In the olden days, enemies were required to use battering rams. Nowadays, we have cretins to do their work for them.”

Abashed, the guilty soldiery avoided his glare. After a moment, Driscol snorted.

“Well, it’s done. Now—”

His stubby finger was still pointed at the House, like a small cannon.

“Go in there and find something we can use to replace the doors. Something that will—ah, never mind. The Lord only knows what you’d come up with.
I’ll
find it. Just follow me.”

Find something, he did. And such was Driscol’s grim and certain purpose that not even Sam dared to object.

One door of the House was now blocked by the great stone frieze which had once hung over the statue of
Liberty
. Only a portion of the bald eagle depicted on that frieze could be seen from the outside, since the eagle’s wings spanned a good twelve feet—and it took a dozen men to shove it aside whenever someone actually needed to use the door.

The
Liberty
itself had done to block the other door. Once the mob of soldierly fortifiers had put it in place, of course, the door had become effectively impassable. The marble statue was bigger than life-size, what with
Liberty
herself seated on a pedestal, her left hand holding a cap of liberty and her right a scroll representing the Constitution.

It was a foregone conclusion that if Sam survived this battle, he’d catch merry hell.

“I heard the sculptor worked on it for years,” Sam had heard one of the soldiers say to another, as they manhandled the great thing into the doorway. “They say he was coughing up blood at the end, from the consumption that killed him.”

“I can believe it,” grunted another. “I’m like to be coughing up blood myself, soon enough, just from moving the blasted thing.”

Oh, merry hell indeed. But it still beat giving up the Capitol without a fight.

Shortly before eight o’clock of the evening, the British army arrived and took up position about half a mile to the east of the Capitol. By then, the sun was starting to set, but the enemy forces were easily visible. There were great flames rising from the nearby Navy Yard, which added their own light to the scene. The nation’s premier naval arsenal and shipbuilding facilities had been set afire by its so-called defenders, long before the enemy arrived. By now, the place was a raging inferno.

That had been done by orders from above, apparently.

Houston damned General Winder yet again.

Just as the sun was going down, a British officer and two soldiers appeared on the ground east of the Capitol. The officer was waving a white flag and the soldiers were carrying a man on a stretcher. Sam sent one of Ball’s gunners out to provide them with assurances of a safe conduct.

When the gunner got back, the British lagging behind due to their burden, he was practically hopping with glee.

“It’s Commodore Barney!” he shouted. “It’s the commodore!”

Sure enough. The two British soldiers carried him up to the breastworks and deposited the stretcher on the ground. Then made a hurried exit. The officer didn’t leave, however, until he’d taken a little time to examine the newly-erected fortifications. From what Sam could tell from his expression, the officer—a captain, if Sam was interpreting the insignia properly—seemed both surprised and concerned by what he saw.

The commodore was gravely injured, from the wound in his thigh he’d received during his valiant stand at Bladensburg. But he was still conscious, and lucid.

Even cheery, once he saw the preparations that were in progress.

Several of the artillerymen picked up the stretcher and carried Commodore Barney into the central chamber of the House of Representatives. There, they lowered him gently onto one of the settees that had been brought into the chamber. Following Driscol’s suggestion, Sam had designated the central chambers of both buildings to be the areas where the wounded would be taken. Fortunately, the enthusiasts hadn’t initially thought to include upholstered furniture in the breastworks—and by the time they did think of it, Driscol was there to stop them.

“How did you convince them to let you go, sir?” asked Charles Ball.

Weakly, but actually smiling, Barney shook his head. “There was no need for me to convince anyone, Charles. After having one of their surgeons treat my wound, the British volunteered to let me go. General Ross and Admiral Cockburn themselves came to visit me. Very fine gentlemen, I must say! General Ross was especially effusive with his praise for our gallant stand at Bladensburg.”

Ball and the small crowd of artillerymen swelled with pride. But out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Driscol scowling. The Scots-Irish lieutenant, clearly enough, thought the phrase “very fine gentlemen” fit English generals and admirals about as well as it would the devil himself. Driscol, unlike Sam—but very much like Andrew Jackson—positively hated the English.

“Oh, yes,” Barney continued. “We chatted a bit, and then General Ross told me he was giving me parole, and I was at liberty to go either to Washington or to Baltimore. I chose Washington, and Captain Wainwright—another very fine gentleman—volunteered to see to it.”

The commodore looked away from the little mob of his admiring artillerymen and brought Sam under his eyes.

“But enough of that! Who are you, Captain? And am I right in assuming that you intend to defend the Capitol?”

Sam took the questions in reverse order. “Uh, yes, sir. We do, indeed, plan to defend the Capitol. I’m Captain Sam Houston, from the Thirty-ninth U.S. Infantry. I’m on detached duty here in Washington, at the orders of General Andrew Jackson. Just arrived in the city this morning, as it happens.”

Sam hesitated then, but only for a second. With another man, he might have left it at that. But Joshua Barney—his reputation
even more than his clear and inquisitive gaze—required a full and honest answer. As a young naval officer, the commodore had been one of the new republic’s heroes during the war for independence. Now in his fifties, his conduct during the current war had shown that the decades had not taken a toll on his spirit. So Sam continued.

“My rank as captain hasn’t been approved yet, though, by the War Department.”

“But it was approved by General Jackson. That should be good enough, I think.” The commodore’s shrewd eyes moved to Driscol. “And you, sir?”

“Lieutenant Patrick Driscol. I’m from General Brown’s Army of the Niagara. General Scott’s First Brigade.” He lifted his left stump. “Lost this at the Chippewa, and I was in Baltimore recuperating when the word came of the British landing.”

“So, naturally, you hurried down to join the fight.” Barney lowered his head to the cushion, closing his eyes. For all his good spirits, the commodore was obviously still very weak. “God help a nation which can produce such splendid junior officers—and such a sorry lot of generals.”

Both Sam and Driscol cleared their throats simultaneously. Still without opening his eyes, Barney smiled. “Oh, please, gentlemen. You can be certain that I exempt Generals Jackson, Brown, and Scott from that blanket condemnation. But, alas, they are elsewhere. Here we are blessed with such as General William Winder—and that arrogant ass Armstrong. Perhaps the only secretary of war one can imagine who would neglect the defenses of his own capital city.”

Sam wasn’t sure if that was outright insubordination on the commodore’s part. Normally, of course, for an officer to publicly ridicule his superior authorities would be considered so. But Barney was in the navy, and thus fell under the command of Secretary of the Navy William Jones, not Armstrong. And he hadn’t said anything sarcastic about President Madison.

Not that Sam cared, anyway.

“Be that as it may, sir, we still propose to defend the Capitol, whatever it takes.”

Barney’s eyes opened, staring at the domed roof of the chamber far above. His gaze moved from one to another of the multitude of square plateglass sunlights.

“The roof’s pinewood, but it’s clad in sheet-iron. Not many
people know that.” His eyes moved to the semicircular interior walls of the chamber and the fluted Corinthian columns above them. “Those are decorative, but the outer walls are worthy of the pharaohs. You may not be such a lunatic as you think, Captain Houston.”

The commodore closed his eyes again. “Lunatic or not, however, you have my blessing. I’ll not have the enemy come into the capital without bleeding on the way. I believe I am the senior officer present?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. I’m too badly injured to participate in the fight personally—nor could I do so in good conscience in any event, given the terms of my parole. But my wound gives me an honorable way to remain here, so long as I take up no arms myself. And, in the meantime”—here he spoke loudly enough to be heard by any of the several hundred soldiers and sailors who had crowded their way into the chamber—“you have my full confidence and authority, Captain Houston. Do the best you can.”

“Good God!” Rear Admiral George Cockburn exclaimed gaily, as he peered through his telescope. “Your captain was quite right. They
do
have a statue perched in one of the doorways. Great ugly thing, too.” He lowered the telescope, chuckling. “One must grant this much to Cousin Jonathan—he certainly has a flair for the dramatic.”

General Robert Ross wasn’t going to let the matter slide so easily as all that. “And was Captain Wainwright also correct in his
other
observations?”

He already knew the answer to the question, since Ross possessed his own telescope. But the question served to remind Admiral
Cockburn that the task which Cockburn had so breezily assured everyone would be as easy as a London promenade was proving more difficult by the moment—and, from Ross’s viewpoint, it was bad enough already.

Since Cockburn’s only response was a twist of the lips, Ross plowed on.

“It’s all very well, Admiral Cockburn, to make sneering jests about Cousin Jonathan’s capacity for headlong and panicky flight. But it wasn’t your sailors who paid the butcher’s bill at Bladensburg. It was
my
men—and the bill was disturbingly steep.”

“We won handily, didn’t we?”

Ross restrained his temper. “Oh, to be sure, all the historians will say so, when this is all over and done. A decisive victory, indeed. But historians don’t pay butcher’s bills either. Resounding victory or not, the fact remains that the American casualties at Bladensburg were light, and the casualties of my infantry brigades were anything but.”

Cockburn avoided the general’s hard gaze. Annoyed still more, Ross pressed home his point.

“It might be true that Cousin Jonathan is prone to panic—though there’s always the hammering Riall took recently on the Niagara to prove that needn’t be so. But American infantrymen are also liable to be remarkably good shots, for the few rounds they manage to fire before running away. And whatever the shortcomings of American infantry—do I need to tell an
admiral
this much?—we’ve been continually surprised since the war began at the professional level of American artillery. If the enemy infantry is often feckless, the artillery almost never is. Commodore Barney’s men proved it once again at Bladensburg. They were as staunch as they were deadly, too. At the end, some of them had to be bayoneted with the fuses still in their hands.”

What is it about sailors
, Ross wondered,
that seems to make it necessary for them to keep learning the same lessons, over and over again?
Did the citrus juice in the drinking water pickle their brains?

By now, one would think, they would have learned how perilous it was to underestimate American gunnery. Mighty the British navy might be, compared to the tiny upstart rival that Cousin Jonathan had put to sea in the war. Still, in engagement
after engagement, the Americans had demonstrated that their gunnery, if nothing else, was consistently superior to British.