President Madison, who had been at Bladensburg personally superintending the placing of our troops, hastened southward when the rout began, and took refuge among the hills of northern Virginia. There he was presently joined by his wife, and both remained in seclusion till they received word that the British had marched away. This message was preceded by the news that the President’s House had been burned, with all its contents except a few portable articles which could be gathered and put out of harm’s reach at an hour’s notice. The property destroyed with absolute wantonness in various parts of the city aggregated in value between two and three million dollars--a heavy loss for a government which was just managing to stagger along with its legitimate burdens, and in a capital that could barely be kept from collapse under the most favoring conditions. It is not wonderful that the British press was almost a unit in condemning Cockburn’s vandalism, the London _Statesman_ saying: “Willingly would we throw a veil of oblivion over the transactions at Washington; the Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America!” And the _Annual Register_: “The extent of the devastation practised by the victors brought a heavy censure upon the British character, not only in America, but on the Continent of Europe.” The restoration of the President’s House alone, including the repainting of its outside surface to remove the scars of the fire, consumed four years, in the course of which President Madison made way for his successor, Monroe, and the building had fastened to it, from its freshened color, the title it has worn in popular speech from that day to this.
It was a sorry-looking Washington to which the Madisons came back. Blackened ruins were everywhere; placards posted here and there denounced the President as the author of the city’s misfortunes; mournful streams of women, children, old men, and
[Illustration: _George Washington Tavern, Bladensburg_]
shamefaced stragglers from the defensive force, trickled in from the woods in the suburban country where they had been hiding since the battle; the streets were strewn with the wreckage of a cyclone which had swept the valley almost simultaneously with the hostile troops, unroofing houses, uprooting trees, demolishing chimneys, and generally supplementing the disasters of warfare. Indeed, almost the only potentiality of evil that had not come to pass was an uprising of the slaves, which had been widely feared, as some of the restless spirits among them had been overheard counseling their fellows to join the British in looting the city and then make a break for freedom. The Madisons, after a brief visit with friends, rented the Octagon house at the corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street, now the headquarters of the American Institute of Architects. It was here that President Madison signed the treaty of Ghent, binding Great Britain and the United States to a peace which has remained for a whole century unbroken. Here, too, Dolly Madison held her republican court, the most famous since Martha Washington’s in New York, and far eclipsing that in splendor.