When washington burned

The adjacent Treasury building was also burned, although much to their disappointment, the British found no money inside. As they camped that night on Capitol Hill, the glow from the fires could be seen as far away as Baltimore. More destruction occurred the following day, when the British torched what remained of the Washington Navy Yard and the Treasury building, along with the brick home of the State, War and Navy departments.

They also smashed the presses of a newspaper Cockburn disliked and desecrated a monument dedicated to veterans of the First Barbary War. Lastly, they headed to an arsenal two miles south of the Capitol.

But as they were destroying the gunpowder there, an accidental explosion killed at least a dozen British soldiers and injured many more.

That evening, right after a violent thunderstorm, the British withdrew from the city rather than face a potential counterattack, retracing their steps to the fleet at Benedict. A few days later, the British diversionary force on the Potomac forced the surrender of Alexandria, Virginia then part of Washington , and seized a large quantity of provisions there.

Within a couple of weeks, however, the British had squandered their momentum, losing important battles at Lake Champlain and Baltimore. Their negotiators dropped a demand for a Native American buffer state between the United States and Canada, and on December 24, , the two sides signed a peace treaty in which they agreed to return all conquered land to each other. With the British no longer a threat, reconstruction then began on the Capitol and White House. Start your free trial today.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. It was not until the British began their campaign in the Chesapeake Bay when the British began implementing new strategies to try and win the war. In August of , the British began raiding the eastern shores of the United States in an attempt to dampen morale and the will to fight in the states.

Britain wanted to invade the southern regions of the United States to move American forces away from Canadian territory.

The British chose to assault two cities: Washington, D. They chose Washington due to its lack of defenses and easy access from the Chesapeake Bay, and Baltimore due to its importance in ship manufacturing and trade in the Baltimore Harbor.

On August 24 th , , the Battle of Bladensburg took place outside of Washington, resulting in an embarrassing American defeat. Later that August 24 th evening, British soldiers moved on Washington holding bitter resentment for the American burning of the Canadian capital of York present-day Toronto in When entering Washington, the British and Canadian soldiers had unfettered access to the capital and began burning the city.

Government officials were forced to flee the city. Before leaving, Dolley Madison had a portrait of President George Washington, and many other irreplaceable artifacts from the founding of the nation secured. Dolley had the artifacts taken for safe keeping from the flames. However, Cockburn instructed his men to not destroy private residences, and they even spared the Patent Office due to the head administrator convincing the British that inside the building contained private property.

The administrator argued that if the inventions within the Patent Office were burned that it would be a loss to humanity. The following day on August 25 th , a storm rolled into Washington and put out the fires. Unfortunately, during the storm, a tornado erupted and tore through the city. While the British had spared the private residences, the tornado did not express such mercy to private residences and destroyed some in the city.

The heavily timbered Library of Congress, stacked with about three thousand volumes of rare books, burned to oblivion. The foot-long room had a foot-high flat ceiling, which, if vaulted, might have served as a firebreak.

There was something incongruous about the devastation and havoc behind them and the quiet ahead, as one hundred British troops advanced silently in two orderly columns down Pennsylvania Avenue, between double rows of stately Lombardy poplar trees. Along the route, just over a mile long, the British commanders stopped several times to assure anxious residents that they lives and private property would safe so long as they did no take up arms against the occupying forces.

These were no glib promises made on the spur of the moment. General Ross even detailed a Scottish officer, Major Norman Pringle, to command a company specifically to protect private property along Pennsylvania Avenue.

They would perform so honorably that Americans would remember them respectfully for years afterward. As they approached the southeast junction of Fifteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the British ringed the low brick boardinghouse run for the past two months by the widow Barbara Suter.

In their brief encounter she was horrified to learn from Ross that one of his spies had duped her a few days earlier when she had taken him for a British deserter and fed him against the advice of one of her permanent residents, the postmaster general.

As he left, General Ross told her to prepare a meal for later that night when he would return with a number of officers. Roger Chew Weightman, a young bookseller, recently married, was made to accompany the invaders into the mansion where Admiral George Cockburn teased him with mischievous relish. When Cockburn told him to select a memento of the visit, Weightman chose an item of value, only to be told by the admiral that everything of value would be destroyed and the he must instead select a worthless souvenir.

The vandals were tired, thirsty, and famished. It was almost midnight and the end of an exhausting day that had begun with a seven-hour forced march from near Upper Marlboro, through miles of woods, thickets, and brush until they reached Bladensburg, where they had fought a running battle with Americans in heat so fierce that eighteen invaders dropped dead from exhaustion. And then they had marched another six miles to Washington.

One of the Britons toasted the health of their Prince Regent. Sailors hurried up the stairs and into the more numerous rooms above, where they snatched souvenirs and clothing. But already there were signs of looting by local thieves who had broken in earlier.

Drawers were opened and their contents strewn around haphazardly. Whatever was not carried off by the British would perish in the fire. The other is a small wooden medicine chest in the downstairs Map Room. Both were taken out of the mansion in dramatic circumstances before the British burned the building. She insisted on staying to save the portrait of the first president, which then hung on the west wall of the large dining room.

At this calamitous moment two New Yorkers entered the room and asked if there was anything they could do to help. One of the men, a ship owner named Jacob Barker, was a close friend of the Madisons, and, like Dolley, a Quaker. His companion was Robert DePeyster.

At that moment French John entered the room, and seeing the potential for irreparable damage to the painting, ordered Jennings to stop. French John gave the canvas to Barker, who started to roll it up until stopped by the Frenchman for fear the paint would crack. Barker and DePeyster then escorted the portrait in a wagon through Georgetown into the countryside, where they left it with a farmer they lodged with overnight.

A few weeks later Barker retrieved it and gave it back to Dolley Madison. The medicine chest, small enough to be carried off in one hand, was returned to the White House years later, in , by Archibald Kains, a Canadian, who wrote a cover letter to President Franklin D.

After threatening to set fire to the building, the robber moved to the home of a second victim as a neighbor sped to British headquarters on Capitol Hill to sound the alarm. Two British officers galloped down Pennsylvania Avenue and entered the home of a third victim as he was being robbed. What happened next was witnessed by a Washingtonian. You have turned thief and are disgracing your country! Infuriated, the officer clenched his fist and punched the soldier so hard that he staggered and his hat fell off.

It was found to contain silk shawls and other valuables. When he saw this the officer whacked the thief with the butt of his pistol and threatened to shoot him on the spot unless he set off immediately for British headquarters. He was put on his stolen horse and escorted up to Capitol Hill. On the way he tried to escape but his luck had run out. He was paraded at headquarters and then shot dead. Two other British thieves caught by their own men were each given one hundred lashes.

They came and went within fifteen minutes. Local residents then went gleefully wild in an orgy of theft at the unprotected Navy Yard. They swarmed into houses and scurried from cellars to attics snatching anything that could carried away, even ripping fixtures off the walls and tearing locks out of doors.

After a night and a day of torching nearly all of the public buildings, and even a few private businesses, including ropewalks, which sent billowing clouds of choking black smoke over the capital, the British withdrew to their ships, afraid that their path of retreat might by blocked by American troops.

The occupation of Washington by British troops lasted about twenty-six hours, but evidence of their vandalism survives to this day. Some of the blocks of Virginia sandstone that make up the original walls of the White House are clearly defaced with black scorch marks.

They are the indelible strains from the fires of Next Native Americans and the White House. Native Americans hold a significant place in White House history. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples, including the Nacotchtank and The collection of fine art at the White House has evolved and grown over time.