The outcome of the fight was that the British commanders, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn, with six thousand men, drove the Americans back and swept down upon the city, spreading ruin in their track. Ross had his horse killed under him by a shot from a private house he was passing and kept more in the background thereafter, but Cockburn was active in the work of devastation. Tradition describes him as mounting the Speaker’s dais in the Hall of Representatives, calling a burlesque session of Congress to order, and putting the question: “Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All in favor will say, ‘Aye’!” There was a roar of “Ayes” from the men, who at once set going a mammoth bonfire of written records and volumes from the library of Congress, and soon the whole Capitol was wrapped in flames. Thence the party proceeded to the other public buildings, burning whatever was recognizable as the property of the Government. Their progress was nearly everywhere unopposed, the clerks in charge having gathered up such books and papers as they could carry away, and transported them to the most convenient hiding-places.
The first break in this program occurred at the Patent Office, which was under the superintendency of Doctor William Thornton, himself of English birth. A neighbor having warned him at his home that his office was in danger, he mounted his horse and galloped to the spot, where he arrived just in time to see a squad of soldiers training a field-piece upon the building. Leaping from the saddle and dramatically covering the muzzle of the gun with his body, he reminded the artillerists that the inventions they purposed destroying were monuments of human progress which belonged to the whole civilized world, and denounced such vandalism as a disgrace to the British uniform. His boldness had its effect, and the Patent Office was spared. Another check came, in the form of an accident of poetic justice, at Greenleaf’s Point, the present site of the Army War College. This place had been used as an arsenal by the defenders of the city, who, before deserting it, had secreted all their surplus gunpowder in a dry well in the midst of the grounds. A body of British troops undertook to destroy the American cannon they found there by firing one gun directly into another, when a fragment of burning wadding was blown into the well, causing an explosion that killed twelve and wounded more than thirty of the party.