The 1814 British Burning and the Black Soldiers Who Took Freedom

On August twenty-fourth, eighteen fourteen, British forces marched into Washington and put the capital to fire. Admiral George Cockburn had dinner in the White House before ordering it torched. The Capitol burned. The Treasury burned. The War Department burned. The city that George Washington had spent his presidency building was occupied and gutted by a foreign army in a single day. It is the only time in American history that a foreign power has captured and burned the nation's capital.

That is the story in the standard textbooks. Here is the part that rarely appears in the same paragraph.

For more than a year before the burning of Washington, Admiral Cockburn had been conducting a campaign along the Chesapeake Bay that was as much a slave-liberation operation as a military one. He had issued a proclamation offering freedom to any enslaved person who could reach British lines and was willing to serve. Thousands came. Across the eighteen fourteen campaign, historians have estimated that more than three thousand enslaved Black men, women, and children from Maryland and Virginia escaped bondage by following the British forces or reaching their ships.

Two hundred to three hundred of them followed the British columns into Washington on the day of the burning. They walked out of Maryland and Virginia alongside the army that was burning the capital of the republic that enslaved them. The British Colonial Marines, a unit of formerly enslaved Black soldiers recruited by Cockburn, fought in the Chesapeake campaign. Some of them were in Washington that night.

After the war, Britain refused American demands to return these people. Most were settled in Nova Scotia, Bermuda, and Trinidad. The White House Historical Association documents this history. It rarely appears in the tours.