The Night the British Burned Washington

On the evening of August twenty-fourth, eighteen fourteen, Rear Admiral George Cockburn rode a horse through the streets of Washington and found the President's House empty. The American government had fled that morning. He and Major General Robert Ross entered the dining room and found the table still set for forty guests, supper prepared for an American celebration that had been abandoned mid-preparation when the news came that the British forces had broken through at Bladensburg.

Cockburn's force ate what was on the table. Then they set fire to the room.

By midnight, the Capitol was burning. The Library of Congress, housed in the Capitol at the time, was destroyed, approximately three thousand volumes reduced to ash. The Patent Office was spared after its superintendent, William Thornton, persuaded the British not to burn it. The Treasury was set alight. Dolley Madison had removed a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and several boxes of presidential papers before leaving the White House, an act of preservation that became one of the more famous stories of the war.

The fires burned through the night. Rain the following day helped quench them, aided by a tornado that struck the city on August twenty-fifth and reportedly killed British soldiers and overturned cannons before continuing east.

Washington was the only national capital in what is now the United States ever to be occupied and burned by a foreign power. The British did not attempt to hold it. Their strategic goal had been to pressure American peace negotiators at Ghent, not to establish a garrison. They were in the city for roughly twenty-six hours.

Congress convened in a post office and later in a temporary brick building known as the Brick Capitol while reconstruction proceeded. The Capitol was rebuilt by eighteen twenty-six. The White House, its sandstone exterior scorched to the stone, was painted white. It had, informally, been called the White House before, and the name stuck over time.