Who won the Battle of Bladensburg?
The British won. On 24 August 1814, about five miles from the Capitol, Major General Robert Ross's veterans crossed the Eastern Branch at Bladensburg, Maryland, and routed a larger American army of mostly militia under William Winder. Only Joshua Barney's sailors and Marines held for long. That evening the British entered Washington and burned it.1
On a hot August afternoon in 1814 a British army that had marched through Maryland for five days without a real fight came down to a narrow bridge at Bladensburg. On the hills beyond it stood the army that was supposed to save the American capital, with the President of the United States riding among the troops. A few hours later that army had scattered, and by nightfall the Capitol was burning.2
The National Park Service calls 24 August the darkest day of the war for the United States, and the day was soon mocked in the press as the “Bladensburg Races”. Yet the British did not find it easy: their own officers wrote that the American guns cut down whole files at the bridge, and the British army's historian Fortescue later judged the attack badly managed.3
This page follows both sides: Ross and Admiral Cockburn, who turned a raid on a gunboat flotilla into a march on Washington; Winder, Monroe and Madison, who had weeks of warning and almost no army; and Commodore Barney's flotillamen and Marines, who stood after everyone else had gone. For the wider war see our guide to the War of 1812 and the military history of the United States.4
Why was the Battle of Bladensburg fought?
By the spring of 1814 the war in Europe was over. Napoleon had abdicated, and Britain could send veteran regiments from Wellington's army across the Atlantic. One small force went to Major General Robert Ross, an Irish-born brigade commander who had been badly wounded at Orthez that February, for a descent on the American coast.5
The campaign was meant as a diversion in favor of the army defending Canada, not a conquest: Ross was not to hold any district permanently. But the naval commander, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, had just received word from Canada of an American raid that burned private property on the north shore of Lake Erie, and he ordered his squadrons to retaliate in kind against towns on the coast.6
The British case for that retaliation rested on York, the capital of Upper Canada, which American troops had plundered and burned in April 1813, and on Newark, burned when the Americans abandoned Fort George that December. Fortescue wrote that Washington was chosen for “a first salutary lesson”, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer told Parliament the expedition was meant to retaliate for outrages on the frontiers.7
Why did the British march on Washington?
The army landed at Benedict on the Patuxent River on 19 August, about 4,000 to 4,500 men in three brigades: Colonel William Thornton's Light Brigade around the 85th Light Infantry, Colonel Arthur Brooke's 4th and 44th Foot, and a third brigade of the 21st Fusiliers and Royal Marines. They had almost no cavalry and only three light guns, but they carried Congreve rockets.8
The first target was Commodore Joshua Barney's flotilla of armed barges, bottled up in the Patuxent. On 22 August, with British boats closing in, Barney's men blew up their own vessels; British reports counted sixteen of the seventeen destroyed and one captured. Barney had already marched most of his crews toward Washington.9
With the flotilla gone, the expedition's stated object was done. Rear Admiral George Cockburn, who had raided the Chesapeake shores for a year, urged the hesitant Ross to push on to the capital. Ross's own dispatch thanked Cockburn as the officer “who suggested the attack upon Washington”; having found the defenders weak, he wrote, he judged the attempt worth making.10
Ross put the American army at eight or nine thousand men, and Gleig heard the Americans claim nine thousand, twice the British force. But for five days the British had marched through settled country without meeting real resistance, and Adams later compared the advance to the stories of Cortez and De Soto.11
Why was Washington so poorly defended?
The American government had warning for months, but its leaders doubted the British would bother with Washington; Secretary of War John Armstrong thought Baltimore the real prize. On 2 July a new military district was created around the capital and given to Brigadier General William H. Winder, chosen partly because his uncle Levin Winder was the governor of Maryland.12
On paper Winder could call on ninety-three thousand militia from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. In practice few came: Winder wrote that only about 1,700 were in the field when the British fleet reached the mouth of the Potomac, and Fortescue counted no more than three thousand by 22 August. He had no staff, no fortifications and no line of defense laid out between Annapolis and the city.13
Winder spent the days of the British advance riding between his scattered detachments. He watched Ross march past him on 22 August without attacking, and on the evening of the 23rd, fearing a night attack, he pulled his troops back across the Eastern Branch to the Navy Yard and had the lower bridges destroyed. That left the road through Bladensburg, where the river could be crossed and forded, as the only way into the city.14
How did the armies reach Bladensburg?
On the morning of 24 August Ross turned north toward Bladensburg, about twelve miles from his camp. The heat was severe, and Gleig, a lieutenant of the 85th, wrote that the banks of the road were covered with stragglers who could go no further. Around noon the dust of the American army came into view.15
Only at about ten in the morning did Winder learn for certain where the British were going. Then the whole American apparatus streamed toward Bladensburg: Walter Smith's District of Columbia brigade, the regulars, Barney's sailors, first posted to guard the bridge at the Navy Yard and then given leave to follow, and the President and most of his cabinet on horseback.16
Riding ahead of their own troops, the President and his party nearly crossed the bridge into the British advance before a local volunteer warned them that the enemy was already entering the town.17
How were the American lines arranged?
The Maryland brigade of Brigadier General Tobias Stansbury had arrived from Baltimore a day or two earlier and taken the high ground west of the river. Its two artillery companies stood in an earthwork about 350 yards from the bridge, with Major William Pinkney's riflemen in the brush along the bank.18
Sent ahead by Madison and Winder to help post the troops, Secretary of State James Monroe, who held no command, moved Stansbury's infantry regiments without telling him. They ended up a quarter of a mile behind the guns and riflemen they were meant to support, in full view of the enemy. Stansbury, Hadel wrote, called the order “an outrage” that could only end in disaster.19
Winder formed his rear line on the hills about a mile behind the bridge, where Smith's brigade, the regulars and Major George Peter's battery took the left of the Washington road. Barney arrived at the last minute and put his heavy guns in the road itself, with his flotillamen and Captain Samuel Miller's Marines beside them. The National Park Service notes that the lines were placed where they could not support one another, and the Army's official history that Winder never told Smith, Barney or Beall what he expected of them.20
What happened at the Battle of Bladensburg?
The British Light Brigade arrived first, and Ross did not wait for the rest. Gleig wrote that the order to halt was countermanded and the column pushed straight for the bridge at the double. The two guns commanding the road swept almost a whole company away with their first discharge, and Pinkney's riflemen fired into the column from the bank.21
The light infantry got across the bridge, spread out to right and left and drove off the riflemen, while the rocket parties fired over the river. Thornton then pushed on against Stansbury's line without waiting for support. The Americans counterattacked and drove the British back to the thickets along the river, as Gleig and Lossing both record; Lossing and the Army's official history credit Sterett's Fifth Maryland.22
The second British brigade turned the battle. The 44th Foot forded the stream above the bridge and came in on the American left, while the 4th pressed its right. Rockets passing just over the heads of Schutz's and Ragan's regiments set them running, and when Winder ordered the Fifth Maryland back to avoid being surrounded, its retreat too dissolved into flight.23
The fugitives did not fall back on the third line. Most fled west along the roads toward Georgetown and Montgomery Court House, and much of the cavalry went with them. Madison, who had told Monroe and Armstrong it was time to leave military movements to the military men, rode back toward the city at about two o'clock.24
Who was Joshua Barney and how did he fight at Bladensburg?
Joshua Barney, a Baltimore sea captain who had fought in the Revolution, commanded the Chesapeake Flotilla. At Bladensburg he had about 400 flotillamen, among them free and enslaved Black sailors, and roughly 100 to 120 Marines, with two 18-pounders in the road and three 12-pounders on its flank.25
When Thornton's column came up the road, Barney held his fire and then cleared the road with an 18-pounder. Two more attempts were thrown back, and when the British moved into the field on his right, Miller's Marines and the sailors acting as infantry met them with the 12-pounders. Fortescue writes that by this time Thornton, both field officers and nine other officers of the 85th had fallen.26
Barney's right rested on a hill held by Colonel William Beall's Maryland militia. When the British turned it, Beall's men fired a few ineffective rounds and broke. With his ammunition wagons gone, his officers down and the enemy firing from behind, Barney, badly wounded in the thigh, ordered a retreat and was taken prisoner where he lay.27
His opponents admired him. Gleig wrote that the sailors served their guns with a quickness that astonished the attackers and stood until some were bayoneted with fuses in their hands. Ross paroled Barney on the field and had his wound dressed. Barney never fully recovered and died in Pittsburgh in December 1818.28
How many soldiers died at Bladensburg?
The British official return listed 64 killed and 185 wounded, 249 in all, most of them in the 85th and the 4th Foot, with Thornton and other senior officers of the 85th among the wounded. Gleig, himself slightly wounded, claimed more than 500 casualties, and the Army Center of Military History puts the British loss at close to three hundred.29
American losses were light because so few men stayed to fight. The House committee of 1814 reported the surgeon's estimate of 10 to 12 killed and about 30 wounded; Winder thought 30 to 40 killed and 50 to 60 wounded. The British took about 120 prisoners and ten guns.30
What happened after the battle?
After resting about two hours, Ross led his freshest brigade into Washington, reaching it around eight in the evening. Shots from a house near the Capitol killed Ross's horse, and he had the house burned. That night his troops set fire to the Capitol, the President's House, the Treasury and other public buildings, while the Americans themselves burned the Navy Yard and the ships in it.31
Dolley Madison had already left the President's House with what she could save, and the President crossed into Virginia that evening. The next morning Cockburn had the office of the National Intelligencer, a newspaper that had abused him, wrecked. Heavy rain and then a violent storm on 25 August helped put the fires out.32
The British did not stay. On the night of 25 August they slipped away, left their badly wounded at Bladensburg in American care, and re-embarked at Benedict by 30 August. Three weeks later they attacked Baltimore, where Ross was killed at North Point on 12 September and Fort McHenry held: see our page on Fort McHenry.33
Why did the British win at Bladensburg?
Historians on both sides blame American command more than American soldiers. Hadel argued in 1906 that the blunders were so appalling that they robbed the victors of any credit; Adams wrote that the force would have been sufficient had it had a commander. Monroe's interference, Winder's late arrival and the gaps between the lines all contributed.34
The British were not flawless either. Fortescue judged the action ill-managed by Ross, who sent his brigades in piecemeal and risked defeat in detail; Gleig admitted the Light Brigade's “rash impetuosity”. What decided the day was the contrast between veteran regulars who kept advancing under fire and raw militia who broke under rockets.35
Armstrong resigned within days, and at Baltimore Samuel Smith, not Winder, kept command for the next round. Strategically the raid changed little: the Army's official history calls it a propaganda coup that failed to disrupt the government. In London the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, took a rosier view: he wrote that the capture of Washington had not united the Americans, “quite the contrary”, and regretted that Ross had not been given more troops.36
What were the "Bladensburg Races"?
The phrase appeared in an October 1814 newspaper and by early 1815 was the title of a popular satirical poem about the President's flight. The University of Maryland Libraries' exhibition on the battle notes that antiwar editors used it to blame Madison's administration, and that the humiliation faded after the British were repulsed at Baltimore three weeks later.37
Later memory has looked harder at who fought. Some of the British Light Brigade were Colonial Marines, men who had escaped slavery in the Chesapeake, and the British return lists the colonial company's dead and wounded. On the American side, Black sailors served in Barney's flotilla.38
Where was the Battle of Bladensburg fought?
The fighting took place at and west of Bladensburg, a small river port in Prince George's County, Maryland, where the road from Baltimore crossed the Eastern Branch of the Potomac, today's Anacostia River. The town lies about five or six miles northeast of the Capitol.39
Ross watched the American lines from Lowndes Hill behind Bostwick House, then the home of the British agent for prisoners of war. Ross is commemorated by an obelisk at his home in Rostrevor, County Down, and a monument in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he is buried.40
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