The President's House Before the Fire

On the afternoon of August 24, 1814, the household staff of the President's House in Washington went about their work as though the day might still end normally. Dolley Madison had ordered dinner for three o'clock, as usual, and the enslaved and free servants of the house were preparing it. Among them was Paul Jennings, an enslaved teenager of about fifteen, born on the Madisons' Virginia plantation, who many years later wrote down what he saw that day.^[1] The meal was never served to the people it was meant for. A few miles northeast of the city, at the village of Bladensburg, a British force was scattering the Americans sent to stop it, and by midafternoon a messenger had reached the house with word that Dolley Madison must leave at once. British troops arrived at about eleven that night and found the house deserted, its furnishings and food still in place. One officer, James Scott, later remembered that no nectar had ever tasted better than the Madeira he drank "at Madison's expense."^[2] George Robert Gleig, a young officer who took part in the expedition, recalled in a narrative published in 1821 that the soldiers found the dining table laid for a large party and sat down to the meal before setting the building on fire.^[3] The house had been occupied for less than fourteen years.

Almost from the start, the house and the city around it had served as a stage for ideas about what republican government should look like. When Congress assembled in December 1801, Thomas Jefferson broke with the example of George Washington and John Adams, who had delivered their annual messages in person. On December 8 he sent his message to Congress in writing instead. Some historians believe he thought a president addressing the legislature too closely resembled a British monarch opening Parliament, though other explanations have been offered.^[4] Presidents followed his example until Woodrow Wilson revived the spoken address in 1913. A few weeks later, on New Year's Day 1802, a delegation led by the Baptist preacher John Leland formally presented Jefferson with a cheese of more than 1,200 pounds from Cheshire, Massachusetts. It was engraved with a motto Jefferson himself used on his personal seal. Because Jefferson's policy was not to accept gifts in office, he paid Leland $200 for it on January 4.^[5] The same day, he wrote to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, that the First Amendment had built "a wall of separation between Church & State."^[6]

Washington had been created to embody the new republic, but the reality never matched the symbol, and two tensions ran through the next twelve years. Jefferson stripped away monarchical ceremony, yet under the Madisons the same house became the center of an elaborate political society. And a capital meant to express the permanence of the Union remained unfinished, politically dependent, and badly exposed to attack. Both converged on August 24, 1814. The fire tested whether the experiment of a purpose-built capital would survive, and the final answer came not from the British but from Congress, which had to decide, amid the ruins, whether to stay. This is the story of those twelve years.

A Capital on Paper

In the spring of 1802, Washington was a capital more in plan than in fact. The federal government had moved there from Philadelphia at the end of 1800, into a city whose grand avenues existed mostly as surveyors' lines through fields and woods. It was less an established city than a federal outpost set down in a rural landscape, its monumental plan far ahead of the town that was supposed to fill it. The President's House stood more than a mile west of the Capitol along Pennsylvania Avenue, with scattered boardinghouses and taverns in between. The city had no municipal government of its own. Presidentially appointed commissioners handled the sale of lots and the construction of public buildings, but the city had little capacity of its own for paving streets or keeping order.

That changed on May 3, 1802, when Congress passed an act incorporating the City of Washington. The law provided for an elected council but gave the president the power to appoint the mayor each year.^[7] Jefferson acted within a month. On June 3 he wrote to Robert Brent, a local justice of the peace who had married into the family of Notley Young, one of the original owners of the land on which the city was laid out. Jefferson asked whether Brent would accept the appointment and invited him to dine at the President's House two days later. Brent answered the same day. He admitted doubts about his fitness for the work but accepted out of a sense of public duty.^[8] The office carried no salary, and Brent soon wanted out of it. In May 1809 he told the new president, James Madison, that he could not serve again. Madison reappointed him anyway, and he served until 1812, when the office became elective.^[9]

The arrangement showed where power lay. Washington's residents could elect a council, but the man who ran their city served at the pleasure of the president, and the city's economy depended heavily on the federal presence. Growth was steady but modest. The census of 1810 counted 8,208 people in the City of Washington, far fewer than in nearby Baltimore.^[10]

Mr. Jefferson's Household

Jefferson had lived in the President's House since March 1801, and for his first years there he shared it with his private secretary, a young army captain from Virginia named Meriwether Lewis. The great audience room at the east end of the house, today's East Room, was still unfinished, and workmen put up wood-framed partitions of sailcloth at its south end to give Lewis an office and a bedroom. Jefferson wrote to one of his daughters that he and Lewis lived in the enormous house "like two mice in a church."^[11] Lewis left in 1803 to prepare for the western expedition that would make his name.

Jefferson used the house to reject the ceremony of European monarchies. He usually entertained about a dozen guests at a time, used a round table to discourage any sense of rank, and kept servants out of the room during the meal so that talk could flow freely.^[12] He did away with formal toasts, and under the practice that became known as "pell-mell," guests went in to dinner as they happened to arrive rather than in order of precedence. Jefferson put the principle in writing, declaring that at public ceremonies foreign ministers and their families would take their places with other guests, without any order of rank. The British minister Anthony Merry, who arrived in late 1803, presented himself for his first audience in full diplomatic uniform and was received by a president in "slippers down at the heels." Merry took it as an insult to himself and his king.^[13] Denied his accustomed precedence at dinner, he withdrew from official society, but Jefferson did not give way. In society, he insisted, all were equal, regardless of nationality, title, or office.^[14]

Slavery was an ordinary, legal part of life in the capital. The District had been carved from Maryland and Virginia, both slaveholding states, and the census of 1800 counted 3,244 enslaved people within it.^[15] Jefferson and Madison, like much of Virginia's governing class, were slaveholders. The institution was not beyond debate even then: in March 1807 Jefferson signed the law ending the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States as of January 1, 1808.^[16]

To run the house, Jefferson combined hired French staff with servants brought from Monticello. He engaged the chef Honoré Julien and the maître d'hôtel Étienne Lemaire, and in the fall of 1802 he brought a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Edith Hern Fossett, to train under Julien in the President's House kitchen. Her sister-in-law, Frances Gillette Hern, known as Fanny, joined her in 1806. The free staff drew wages; the two young women received a customary gratuity of two dollars a month. Working at an open hearth, they turned out French-style meals for parties of ten to fourteen people and stayed until Jefferson left office in 1809.^[17] Guests said that such dinners had never before been given in the President's House.

Jefferson's private life reached the newspapers in his second year in office. On September 1, 1802, the Richmond Recorder published an article by the journalist James Thomson Callender under the title "The President, Again." Callender claimed that the president had for many years kept one of his own slaves, a woman named Sally, as his concubine, and that her eldest son resembled the president himself.^[18] Callender had once been one of the Republicans' most useful partisan writers and had been jailed under the Sedition Act for attacking the Federalists. When Jefferson did not reward him with an office such as the postmastership of Richmond, he felt betrayed and turned on his former patron.^[19] Jefferson was at Monticello when the story broke, and no written response from him to the charge has been found.^[20]

Federalist papers repeated the story for the rest of his presidency, and historians debated it for nearly two centuries. A 1998 DNA study linked the Jefferson male line to a descendant of Sally Hemings's youngest son, Eston,^[21] and in 2000 a committee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded that Jefferson was very likely the father of her children, a finding another committee disputed.^[22] Genomic research announced in September 2026 added considerably stronger evidence,^[23] though its scientific paper had not completed peer review when the results were released.^[24]

Latrobe and the Public Buildings

While Jefferson set the tone inside the house, he also tried to give the capital buildings that were worthy of its ambitions. In March 1803 he hired the English-born architect and engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe as Surveyor of the Public Buildings. His principal task was the Capitol's south wing, for the House of Representatives, but he was also responsible for work at the President's House and the Navy Yard.

At the President's House, Latrobe repaired a badly leaking roof, installed a grand staircase, solved a drainage problem, built water closets, landscaped the grounds, and worked with Jefferson on classical east and west colonnades, from which the present wings of the White House descend.^[25] The work involved constant negotiation with a president who had strong architectural opinions of his own. In May 1805 Latrobe complained to the clerk of works, John Lenthall, that Jefferson's fondness for old French architecture books was cramping his designs. Jefferson opened one of Latrobe's letters to Lenthall by mistake, and explained that he had stopped reading when he saw whom it was meant for.^[26] The Capitol absorbed most of his energy. The south wing was completed in 1807, and Latrobe then began reconstructing the interior of the older north wing. After 1810, Congress withheld further construction funds, and by July 1811 Latrobe's employment had ended. He would return in 1815 to rebuild the Capitol after the British burned it.^[27] When war came, the Capitol consisted only of its two wings, connected by a wooden walkway across the space intended for the central building. The capital's public buildings increasingly projected permanence while the city around them remained unfinished.

Mrs. Madison's Drawing Rooms

James Madison succeeded Jefferson in March 1809. Jefferson had made the house republican by stripping away royal ceremony. Dolley Madison made it republican in a different way, by opening it to the political society of the capital. Jefferson, a widower, had often relied on his daughters to act as hostess. Now the house had a mistress of its own. Finding it furnished with worn pieces from earlier administrations, Dolley Madison engaged Latrobe to refurbish the principal rooms of the state floor, and he designed furniture specifically for the large oval room at the center of the south side.^[28] For that room she preferred bold red velvet draperies, and Latrobe produced a suite of Grecian-inspired chairs and sofas with crimson cushions.^[29]

On May 31, 1809, she held the first of the weekly Wednesday evening receptions known as her "drawing rooms," and the finished oval room was ready for the president's New Year's Day reception in 1810.^[30] The historian Catherine Allgor has argued that in a young capital with little established society and few formal channels for political business, the social world that women like Dolley Madison built became an essential part of how the government actually worked.^[31] Members of Congress, cabinet officers, and diplomats met on neutral ground in her rooms, and her hospitality built goodwill for her husband's administration. The house was also where Madison conducted the business of a growing nation. On October 27, 1810, after American settlers in Spanish West Florida had rebelled against Spanish rule, he signed a proclamation in Washington ordering the United States to take possession of the territory between the Mississippi and Perdido Rivers.

The Madisons' household staff mixed paid employees and enslaved servants. Paul Jennings, born into slavery at Montpelier in 1799, served James Madison as a personal attendant. Looking back half a century later, Jennings called Madison "one of the best men that ever lived" and wrote that he never saw Madison strike any of the more than one hundred people he enslaved, nor allow an overseer to do so. Jennings remained enslaved until after Madison's death, when he bought his freedom from Dolley Madison with $120 advanced by Daniel Webster.^[32] John Freeman, a footman who had served in the President's House under Jefferson, remained part of the household, and several paid employees were French immigrants, among them the doorkeeper Jean Pierre Sioussat.^[33]

The War Comes Up the Chesapeake

After the United States declared war on Great Britain in June 1812, the fighting stayed far from the capital for two years. That began to change in April 1813, when Rear Admiral George Cockburn began a campaign of lightning raids around the Chesapeake Bay. Still, Britain's main strength remained tied up in Europe fighting Napoleon.

The strategic balance around Washington shifted in the spring of 1814. At the end of March, word arrived that allied armies had invaded France, raising the prospect of Napoleon's defeat. Since December 1813 an American embargo had kept the country's ships in port, a measure that had grown unpopular at home. On March 31 Madison abruptly asked Congress to loosen the restrictions, and the House and Senate voted for repeal within two weeks.^[34] Madison signed it on April 14. Two days later he signed a law authorizing four captains and twelve lieutenants for a flotilla of gunboats to contest the shallow waters of the Chesapeake with the Royal Navy.^[35]

Britain was preparing for a new phase of the war. On April 2, from Bermuda, Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane issued a proclamation addressed to Americans who wished to leave the United States, and it was aimed squarely at the enslaved. It offered them service in the British army or navy, or passage as free settlers to British territory in North America or the West Indies. Men who escaped to British ships formed a unit called the Colonial Marines, which fought alongside British forces in the Chesapeake that summer.^[36] When Madison learned of the proclamation in May, he took it as a sign of deep British hostility toward the Southern states.^[37]

On May 9, 1814, news reached Washington that Napoleon had abdicated. Britain was now free to send veteran troops and more ships to America, turning a distant coastal threat into a possible attack on the capital. Madison understood the danger. On May 20, writing from Montpelier, he warned his secretary of war, John Armstrong, to prepare for the worst the enemy could do, adding that "the Seat of Govt. can not fail to be a favorite" target.^[38] Armstrong did not agree. He insisted that the British would go after Baltimore, a rich port and a base for privateers, rather than a small capital of little military value.^[39]

On July 1, 1814, Madison called an emergency cabinet meeting at the President's House to discuss the defense of the city. He brought a written estimate of the forces that would be needed,^[40] and the cabinet agreed that the president should ask Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland to hold thousands of militia ready to march. Madison then placed Washington, Baltimore, and the surrounding region in a new Tenth Military District under Brigadier General William Winder. Maryland's governor, Levin Winder, was the general's uncle, but Baltimore, Annapolis, and the Maryland shore were as exposed as the capital, and he was reluctant to send his militia away to defend Washington.^[41]

In July British raiders struck the town of St. Leonard and Leonardtown, Maryland, without meeting resistance. On July 18, Washington's mayor, James Blake, and the city council petitioned Madison to protest the lack of work on the city's defenses. According to the White House Historical Association, on July 28 an angry crowd gathered outside the President's House and warned that they would not let the president and his family flee the city. By the beginning of August, the capital's defenses remained fragmented and incomplete. The city lacked an effective system of outposts and messengers to track British movements, and little had been done to obstruct the roads and bridges leading into it.^[42]

The Night of August 24

The British expedition arrived in mid-August. On August 19, a force of about 4,370 men under Major General Robert Ross landed at Benedict, Maryland, on the Patuxent River, roughly fifty miles southeast of the capital. Cockburn had persuaded Ross and Cochrane, now the naval commander, to strike Washington first.^[43] On August 22, Commodore Joshua Barney destroyed the small American gunboat flotilla that had been trapped in the Patuxent to keep it out of British hands, and Secretary of State James Monroe, scouting the enemy's movements, sent Madison a note warning that the British were marching on Washington and advising him to "remoove the records."^[44]

Dolley Madison spent August 23 packing cabinet papers into trunks. In a letter to one of her sisters, she wrote that she was ready to leave at a moment's warning but was determined not to go until she saw her husband safe.^[45] That letter poses a problem for historians, because the original does not survive. Its text comes from excerpts she later shared with the writer Margaret Bayard Smith, and its dramatic tone has led researchers at Montpelier to caution that the surviving text may have been polished after the fact. Even the sister to whom it was addressed is named differently in different sources.^[46]

On the morning of August 24, Madison rode out to the army and reached Bladensburg about noon. The battle that followed was a rout. The American defenders, mostly militia with smaller contingents of regulars and Joshua Barney's sailors and marines, gave way before a British force of roughly 4,500, and the Royal Marines' Congreve rockets, though inaccurate, spread disorder through the American lines. When defeat was clear, Madison sent James Smith, a free Black servant, back to the President's House to tell Mrs. Madison to leave. Smith arrived about three o'clock. When Madison himself reached the house about an hour later, his wife was gone. He declined food, took a glass of wine, and left the city.^[47]

The most famous episode of the afternoon is also one of the most disputed. Before leaving, Dolley Madison insisted that the full-length portrait of George Washington in the dining room be saved. Stories soon circulated that she had cut the canvas from its frame with her own hands. Paul Jennings, writing many years later, rejected that story, saying she had no time for it, and credited Sioussat and the gardener with taking the picture down. Other accounts differ over who first proposed the rescue and who removed the painting.^[48] The portrait itself provides important physical evidence. It shows no sign of having been cut from its stretcher, a detail consistent with Dolley Madison's own statement that she ordered the frame broken and the canvas taken out.^[49] Jennings also recalled that John Freeman, by then the Madisons' butler, drove off in a carriage with his wife and child and a feather bed lashed on behind, and that apart from part of the silver and the portrait of Washington, that bed was all the furniture saved. Jennings had been sent to fetch a carriage from a stable on Fourteenth Street.^[50]

The British set fire to the President's House, the Capitol, and other public buildings that night. The blaze destroyed Latrobe's state rooms along with every piece of furniture bought for presidential use since 1789,^[51] and by morning the President's House was a roofless shell.^[52] The next afternoon a violent storm, including a tornado, swept through the city, and heavy rain doused the fires. The British withdrew soon afterward.

Four Walls

The British occupation lasted barely a day, and Madison was back in the city by August 27.^[53] Less than three weeks later the same British force was turned back at Baltimore. Ross was killed at North Point on September 12, and when a twenty-five-hour bombardment failed to subdue Fort McHenry, the British withdrew on September 14, ending their Chesapeake campaign.

The fire was not the final test. The Madisons never returned to the President's House, but they did not abandon the capital. On September 8 they moved into the Octagon, a private house a few blocks away, and on September 21 Dolley Madison held her first Wednesday reception there. Before long the crowds at the Octagon resembled those that had filled the President's House.^[54] When Congress reconvened on September 19, it met in cramped quarters in the former Blodgett's Hotel, then home to the Patent Office and the only public building to have survived the attack. On September 26 the city of Philadelphia offered to house Congress.^[55] That day in the House, Representative Jonathan Fisk of New York proposed a committee to consider moving the government somewhere safer and more convenient.^[56]

The debate that followed exposed the political weakness that had shadowed the capital since its founding. It was strongly sectional. Many northern members favored moving the government to Philadelphia or another established northern city, while southern members generally defended Washington. Washington's own residents, whose businesses and investments depended on the federal presence, had the most to lose, and they raised $25,000 to put up a temporary building where Congress could meet.^[57] In October, by nine votes, 83 to 74, the House rejected the bill for the government's temporary removal, and Congress instead passed a separate bill providing for the rebuilding of Washington.^[58] James Hoban, who had designed the original President's House, was ordered to rebuild it as it had been, and the work was finished in 1817. The war itself ended in a draw rather than a victory for either side. Negotiators signed a peace treaty at Ghent on Christmas Eve 1814 that restored the prewar boundaries. The Senate approved it unanimously on February 16, 1815, and Madison signed it at the Octagon.^[59]

Seen from 1814, the twelve years after Jefferson offered Robert Brent the mayoralty look less like the steady rise of a capital than a long, uncertain experiment. Washington acquired a city government, an architect for its public buildings, a fashionable society, and a president's house that had become a symbol in its own right. It did not acquire the population, the wealth, or the defenses that would have made it safe, and the fire exposed all of that at once. The British could burn the symbols of the government, but they could not determine where the American government would sit. That decision belonged to Congress, and by nine votes, in a borrowed hotel, it chose to keep the experiment going. The dinner laid on the afternoon of August 24 was set for guests who never came. The house that burned that night was rebuilt on the same site for the presidents who came after.