Even the literal cornerstones of Washington were riddled with bureaucracy

Les Standiford’s latest work, Washington Burning, goes on sale May 6, 2008.

(Courtesy of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.)

Les Standiford’s latest work, “Washington Burning” (Crown, May 2008) is the story of Pierre L’Enfant’s battle with Congress, the founding fathers, and the residents of Washington to keep a city true to itself and its nation in a time where nothing, not even a budding democracy, was certain. —CS

The War of 1812 was a ragged conflict, crippled in the States by a lack of resolve among the decidedly less-than-united former colonies, and in Britain by a parliament and populace weary from fending off the relentless advances of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was full of indecisive battles, bloody Indian raids on frontier outposts, and desultory interference, on the part of the British, with American shipping interests. During the summer of 1814, there were reports of a significant massing of British naval forces off the Maryland shores, but there had been regular depredations up and down that part of the American coastline, and most conjectured that the target would be the port of Baltimore.

Certainly, little thought was given to Washington. The unfortified city had next to no commercial trading, and its tactical value was nil. Not much was changed from the days when Abigail Adams described the area as “romantic . . . but a wilderness.”When Congress was out of session, the place became a ghost town, and there was still the occasional proposal being floated around Congress to move the seat of government back to Philadelphia.

But on the morning of August 24, 1814, pandemonium erupted when an elite force of British infantrymen was discovered to be marching on Washington City with the intent of teaching the upstart Americans a lesson in “hard war” and reducing their capital to ashes.

History is silent as to the exact whereabouts that day of L’Enfant, whose influence and circumstances had considerably diminished. “In Washington, though not living on the streets, I hope,” offers the noted historian and L’Enfant biographer Kenneth R. Bowling. L’Enfant had refused to leave the city that shunned him, frequenting its streets in eccentric garb, trailed by a faithful hound. Whatever his feelings as British troops poured across the ill-defended bridge at Bladensburg, astonishment could not have been among them, however. If he had overheard Secretary of War John Armstrong dismiss the designs of the British for “this sheep walk,” L’Enfant would have very heatedly begged to differ. Had he still held the ear of the commander-in-chief and his advisers, the magnitude of the disaster might not have been so great.

The design of Pierre L’Enfant, the French-born architect and landscaper, became the basis for modern Washington, D.C.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

L’Enfant still keeps watch over his city, though the vigil is a symbolic one. His resting place—moved from a Maryland pasture nearly a century after his death—sits here, atop the highest point in Arlington National Cemetery, a hundred yards or so uphill from the grave of John F. Kennedy and in the shadow of the formidable Arlington House, once the residence of Robert E. Lee and taken by the Union during the Civil War.

Even by the cruel standards of Washington summers, the late-August day was shaping up as a scorcher. By noon the temperature was nearing 100 degrees and the humidity nearly matched it. It was weather that sapped energy, frayed tempers, and threatened to tip the already desperate mood of the populace—which had never expected that war would come so close to the American capital—into full-fledged panic. The president had already fled Washington, and the commanders of three separate military defense teams struggled to bring their forces into a tenable position at the northeastern fringes of a rapidly emptying city. As they scrambled about, an invading army headed by two of the world’s most feared military leaders—one a cool tactician, the other a brutal master of force—advanced steadily from their beachhead on Chesapeake Bay. It was no dream, no drill, no fanciful scenario from the pages of a doomsday novel. An ill-prepared and fractured army, crippled by partisan wrangling over whether a need for military preparedness truly existed, was the only obstacle to the obliteration of the seat of the world’s premier experiment in democratic rule. Last-minute efforts to mount a defense proved futile. Communication between the president—driven to ground somewhere in the tangled forests of Virginia or Maryland—and U.S. commanding general William Winder had broken down, and the only forces with significant combat experience (fewer than two thousand) were routed when the invaders loosed a barrage of experimental rockets upon their positions. By midnight, all U.S. forces were in full retreat, and their commanders—save for one able captain of privateers—were discredited and disgraced.

The Capitol Building was destroyed, and with it the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court.The U.S.Treasury lay in ashes. Also in ruins were the War Department and the State Department and the Navy Yard. The nation’s capital lay lit by the flames of its own demise.

As for the ultimate symbol of the city, the president’s home: “We found a supper there all ready,” one of the invading officers reported, “which many of us speedily consumed . . . and drank some very good wine also.” After they had eaten the president’s dinner and upended the table where they had sat, they set a torch to that building and, as it burned, stumbled out into the Washington night, drunk not only with wine but also with the ease with which they had routed the American defenders.

The devastation of the new capital city was as much a shock to the young nation as it was an outrage. Few had seen it coming, but then that is the very aim of terrorist operations. As for the roots of the assault, however, the perspective of history suggests that the thirty years that had passed since the end of the Revolutionary War constituted a temporary pause in battle between the two sides rather than a cessation and a new beginning.

Reprinted from Washington Burning by Les Standiford. ©2008. Published by The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.