“I took a hack after dinner to visit Nath’l Maxwell, and although he lives near the center of the great city, yet such was the state of the roads that I considered my life in danger. The distance on straight lines does not exceed half a mile, but I had to ride up and down very steep hills, with frightful gullies on almost every side.” And the simplicity of life at the capital then is reflected in his statement that after finishing his letters one night he was afraid to go out to post them lest he lose his way in the dark, though he knew that the mail would close at five in the morning. “After I had got comfortably into bed,” he continued, “a watchman came past my window bawling out, ‘Past one o’clock, and a very stormy night,’ on which I sprang out of bed and called to him to take my letters to the post-office, which he consented to do. I accordingly wrapped them in a sheet of paper to protect them from the wet, and threw them out of the chamber window to him.”
The declaration of war against Great Britain in June, 1812, for which the country at large held President Madison chiefly responsible, and which reduced considerably such measure of popularity as he still retained, did not produce much effect on the pulses of the stagnant city. The first hostilities occurred in the north and on the sea; and, although the enemy threatened Washington for more than a year, Madison and most of his advisers regarded an attack as highly improbable. When, however, it became known in 1814 that a large body of Wellington’s veterans were setting sail from England, under convoy of a powerful fleet, for the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, every one suddenly awoke to the impending peril. It was then too late. Thanks to the misjudgment of General Armstrong, Secretary of War, or General Winder, who was in charge of military affairs in the District, midsummer found the enemy in Maryland, but the city still without an efficient defensive force, or ammunition or provisions to equip one properly. Hurried efforts brought together a first line of thirty-one hundred men, all raw recruits except six hundred sailors and a couple of hundred soldiers. A second line, almost equal in number, was formed, mostly of militia, and disposed for use as a home guard. At Bladensburg, Maryland, five miles north of Washington, the decisive battle occurred on the twenty-fourth of August, from which the seamen led by Captain Joshua Barney were the only contingent that emerged with extraordinary credit; but they did so well that a grateful community has not yet raised a monument to them or their leader. The battlefield was close enough to the old George Washington tavern, of which Mr. Hornby gives us an intimate glimpse, for the occupants to hear the rattle of musketry and see the cannon-smoke from the upper windows.