One of the most pivotal moments in American history is all but forgotten.

It was a day in 1814 that threatened the survival of our nation.

This is the focus of Robert Watson's latest book, "When Washington Burned."

I am Ann Bocock, and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Robert Watson is an award-winning author, professor, and historian.

He's published over 40 books.

The latest is "When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise From the Ashes."

Welcome, it's nice to see you again.

Thanks, Ann.

Always enjoy your show, and it's always a pleasure to be here.

These are your words from the book.

"Few other moments in the history of our nation were as potentially ruinous and consequentially..." And explain that to me.

You gotta elaborate on this.

No question.

Even considering World War II or the Civil War, I think this is the single moment where America came the closest to ceasing to exist.

August 20, the evening of August 24th, 1814, a strong British army led by a great British commander.

They've occupied Washington, they've burned the city.

The United States government and military are on the run.

They're disorganized.

We were a fledgling, rather young nation to begin with.

And the British were thinking about recolonizing us.

So when you look at that, and if you replay it 10 times, I'm guessing seven, eight, nine out of those 10, we cease to exist, but we got it right, managed to endure.

Let's go back a little bit and see what preceded this, because at the time, the British Army had, it was the Napoleonic Wars, which they sailed through and did that.

So now, what?

They want to focus, turn their attention to America?

Yeah, so what happened is in the early 1800s, you're correct, Britain is involved in the Napoleonic Wars.

And this is an existential threat to Europe.

I mean, Napoleon arguably has the strongest, best army in Europe, and he's hellbent on continental conquest.

So the British have their hands full.

Meanwhile, starting in 1812, the Americans decide they want to invade Canada.

And Britain is controlling much of Canada.

Britain really doesn't have the army to spare because they're involved with Napoleon.

But by 1814, they've captured the emperor.

He's imprisoned, and now they can turn their attentions to America.

So one of the reasons people don't know a lot about this is we don't like to put it in textbooks.

We don't like to talk about it because we were the belligerents.

We started it, we misbehaved.

We behaved like Vikings coming ashore, pillaging.

And that's not a moment to be really proud of.

It is in fact, an undeniable part of our history, however.

So Britain decides by 1814, with Napoleon out of the way, they send a massive expeditionary force, an armada of warships, seasoned veterans who beat Napoleon, and one of their greatest generals, and they're coming to the United States to teach us a lesson.

So yeah, it doesn't look good.

It is such an interesting story.

And I want to look at some of these key figures.

And I'd like to look at the players because some of their actions contributed and some of their inactions also contributed.

Let's start with the American side.

We have the Secretary of War, John Armstrong, and William Winder, who, I don't think you, if I'm reading correctly, I don't think you were a fan of either one of these guys.

Not at all.

Not at all.

What we all know is that elections matter, appointments matter.

If a president appoints the right people or wrong people.

And we've had good and bad throughout our history, but it's hard to think of worse appointments than Armstrong and Winder.

First off, they were incompetent.

Secondly, they were cowards.

The British are sailing to the United States, and we have diplomatic reports from Europe saying they're on their way.

The British land in the eastern shore of Maryland, and there's an Admiral named Cockburn, who's not only skilled, but he's ferocious.

And he's sailing around the Tidewater region, the Potomac to Chesapeake, just arbitrarily bombing communities, hitting civilian targets, burning villages.

And all along, President James Madison says to the Secretary of War, "Do something, prepare."

He says, "Oh, they won't invade.

They won't do anything."

They already are.

And then when they attack, he disappears.

Winder is another political appointment.

Should never have been the general in charge.

He's incompetent.

And when they're attacking, he basically runs, he flees.

Then he goes to Baltimore and runs from there as well.

So the leaders are on the run.

That's not leading from the front.

So as a result, we're almost leaderless during this war, and it almost causes us to cease to exist as a nation.

So my feelings were right, you didn't like either one of these guys.

Not at all.

Not at all.

And they deserve to be called out in history.

Yeah, no question.

On the British side, you just mentioned Cockburn.

He and Ross couldn't have been more different in their temperament.

And if you would go just a little bit into that, they were fascinating to learn about.

Yeah, I'm glad you're asking all these questions, Ann.

This is, great interviewer.

Because a good book is always about an interesting protagonist or antagonist.

I mean, think about it.

Every novel, movie, opera, whatever you like, it's about an interesting person.

And you can't find a more interesting cast of colorful characters than this story.

So in a way it was, it almost wrote itself.

So yeah, Cockburn is vicious.

He's tough.

He's still angry.

He's an admiral.

Old money, aristocracy, a line of admirals and generals.

He's still angry that the British lost the Revolutionary War, and he wants to punish us.

He's willing to go after civilians.

Men, women, children, the elderly.

He wants to ruin.

He wants to lay waste to America.

He'd like to recolonize America.

So that's his view.

Fortunately for us, his superior was Robert Ross, who was younger, from Irish, self-made man.

Ross is dashing, charismatic, but he's honorable.

Now, he's a tough general, and wants to do business toward us.

But Ross at least wants to conduct this operation according to the conventions of acceptable warfare, only targeting military targets, public targets, not private targets.

So you have these two yin and yang going back and forth.

Ultimately, in the end, they both get their way.

Cockburn gets to burn Washington, but Ross spares civilian targets, and then abandons the city rather than trying to recolonize.

So it's 1814.

And what I am reading in the book is that we were one, unprepared or underprepared.

And two, the military was really underfunded.

[Robert] Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Was it that, as one of them, it couldn't happen here?

It's all the above.

So this is a war we never should have fought.

The war of 1812.

It's a misnomer.

It's a war named for one year, but fought for two and a half.

My hero, Harry Truman, called it "the silliest damned war we ever fought."

It's as if the Keystone Cops ran the war.

So basically, we get into the war because of some southern war hawks, who want to commit genocide toward the American Indian, which is the most despicable cause.

They wanna expand slavery, the most despicable cause.

Again, this is not a, we don't like to put it in the textbooks.

There are some other causes for the war.

But the same southern war hawks that beat the drums for war and pushed the reluctant President Madison in the war, then voted down the budget to prepare for the war.

They killed the budget to fund our soldiers.

A lot of the soldiers marched into Canada, American soldiers marched into Canada.

They don't have adequate winter clothing or food.

They starve.

They freeze to death.

And the same southern hawks that got us into war don't wanna fund the military.

Many of them never served in uniform, as seems to always be the case.

But so yeah, utterly unprepared.

We had a standing army when the war broke out of about 7,000 men, maybe five serviceable ships.

So we were in no position.

And we're gonna tangle with the British?

One of the world's great militaries and greatest Navy.

So one mistake after another, and it almost cost us.

The whole point behind it was in 1813, we marched on the Canadian capital of York, which is today, Toronto.

And we sail an army across the Great Lakes, and we're gonna sack the Canadian capital.

Now in 1812, the first year of the war, we go basically oh for seven in battles.

Seven American armies get beaten by a handful of Canadian back woodsmen, a few Indian allies, and basically one British officer.

I mean, this is embarrassing.

So in 1813, we're frustrated.

Incompetence runs the day.

We finally find a decent general.

He's sort of like Clark from Lewis and Clark.

He's an adventurer and explorer.

He finds a peak in Colorado that bears his name, Zebulon Pike.

And Pike's a big tough guy and a good general.

And he lays waste very quickly to the fort in York.

But when he's doing that, a cannonball hits the powder supply in the fort, ignites this, and then a terrible explosion, blows the walls of the fort out, levels trees, kills more men in the explosion than in the battle.

Any man not killed is deaf.

And it sends a boulder flying through the air as if launched by a catapult, and it lands on Zebulon Pike's head and squishes him flat as a pancake.

With Zebulon Pike dead, the American army, frustrated, hungry, underfunded, they had been losing.

They go on a rampage and we pillage York, and burn the Canadian capital.

So the British and the Canadians remember that we burned their capital first.

So a year later, it's gonna be retribution.

Not a pretty story.

Not at all.

I love your dedication.

You dedicate the book to Stephen Pleasonton and the other clerks.

And their story to me is the heart of the book.

I agree, I agree.

Their bravery and their common sense.

And tell me about them.

Yeah, I'm not just saying this for a fact, but thanks.

I do a lot of media, I've done several thousand.

But you always pick out the right points of the book.

So I mean that.

Thank you.

As an author, Thank you.

This is one of my babies, right?

Yeah, I'm a huge Stephen Pleasonton fan, and I dedicated the book to him and was happy to write about this because he's one of the great American heroes and nobody knows who he is.

His name was essentially lost to history.

There's one likeness of him.

There's an old black and white image from him later in life.

So he's kind of enigmatic.

He's a young clerk in the capital.

And at the time, the Library of Congress was in the capital.

This is long before we built it.

Because there wasn't a Library of Congress building.

Basically, no.

So, what happens is the British are marching toward Washington.

Six miles east of Washington is a town in Maryland called Bladensburg.

There's a river that runs across it.

So the British are gonna have to cross one bridge, the river.

So it's a natural place where we can defend and try to stop the British.

So basically every government clerk is handed a musket, 10 musket balls and conscripted and sent to Bladensburg, including young Pleasonton.

He's early twenties.

Pleasonton says to his commanding officer, whose name is Colonel Magruder.

He says, "I'm leaving and going back to the capital."

Magruder says, "Well, then you'll be court-martialed."

He says, "Court martial, because I'm going back."

He and Magruder are fighting.

He's driving Magruder nuts.

Magruder is ready to court martialing.

And right when he is, there's a report the British are seen, they're coming.

So this powerful British army is on the way.

Magruder has bigger fish to fry.

So he just forgets about Pleasonton.

Pleasonton runs six miles back to Washington.

Why is he in a race?

He gets back to Washington.

He realizes no one has secured the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, personal artifacts from George Washington are national treasures.

Pleasonton knows the British are coming.

And they routed our army in Bladensburg, embarrassingly.

In fact, historians don't call it the Battle of Bladensburg.

We call it the Bladensburg Races, 'cause our army ran so fast.

So he knows he's got only hours.

And he's running around the capital trying to decide, one young guy, trying to decide, what do we save from the fires?

And what should we let the conflagration consume?

So what a heady decision.

He's racing around.

And then he has another problem.

There's no horses and wagons.

'Cause everybody fled the capital.

So how does he get it out of harm's way?

At the 11th hour, the British are marching.

And so it's an irresistible story of Pleasonton.

How he managed to, and certainly he couldn't get everything.

No, He had to pick, what, there were things locked in drawers.

He didn't have the keys to those.

Bingo.

But he makes these what, linen sacks?

Yeah.

I think it is, and hides these.

Yeah.

Takes it to a barn somewhere, Yeah, in Virginia.

In Virginia.

Yeah.

And these priceless documents are sitting here.

Yep, yep, yep.

Until after, till it stops, but.. Yep.

So he's, The foresight was amazing.

Amazing.

So, it's one of those "what ifs."

What if we lost this document, but not this document?

One of the things he didn't get, as you said, there was kind of the secret book of the government that listed all the Congressional business and all the things.

Anyways, the librarian of Congress had it locked in his desk.

He was Colonel Magruder's brother, actually.

And he was a coward.

And he was in, what is today, West Virginia, like a spa and a hot bath.

He ran.

So Pleasonton wanted to get that.

But as he's running around getting everything, he runs out of time and the desk was locked.

Now he should have just busted it.

Exactly.

But he was out of time.

But he doesn't wanna just throw these priceless documents in a wagon.

So he makes the linen sacks, on the fly.

He goes running around Washington, trying to find a horse and a wagon.

Everybody had fled the city, so he finds basically one of these two-wheeled oxcarts and a cow.

He hooks it up.

Can you imagine the frustration of how slow Betsy the cow was?

Doopy, doopy, walking back to Washington.

He loads everything on.

And as he's leaving that evening at 8:00 at night, there's two roads in and out of Washington at the time, Maryland Avenue.

He looks at the other road and sees a huge cloud of dust.

It's the boots from thousands of British soldiers marching, their boots kicking up the dust.

So literally at the 11th hour.

Then the wheel falls off the wagon.

Fortunately, unlike me, he's very handy and crafty.

He finds a blacksmith shop and the blacksmith had run, so he just steals what he needs.

[Ann] Right.

Fixes the wagon.

And basically for 24 hours, lumbers down the road.

As you correctly noted, leaves it in a barn, goes to a boarding house, and sleeps for basically a day and a night, and leaves it there for weeks.

The nation's treasures.

No one knows.

It's not under, it's not guarded.

No one knows where it is.

And once, weeks later, he feels it's safe.

Then he goes back and rescues it.

So what a story, right?

It is an incredible, Yeah.

Story.

The Constitution.

And it's the Constitution, Yeah.

The Declaration of Independence.

We have to talk about James Madison.

[Robert] Yeah.

He's the president.

He was one of the founders.

Now he's president during this terrible time in our history.

And I'm reading your book and I'm thinking, "Ah!"

Uh huh.

I'm feeling mixed reviews, I agree.

For someone that I should be, have such esteem for.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm mixed on Madison too.

Thank you.

I'm with you.

Thanks for picking up on that.

I have the great pleasure, honor.

I think this is one of the most exciting things I do.

But I'm one of that small handful of historians that they ask every two or three years to rank the Presidents.

CSPAN, White House Historical Association.

I actually didn't know that was something that we did.

Yeah, we do.

There's a couple of us.

And they're household names.

So I feel honored to be in the company.

But I always argue to bring Madison down in the rankings.

As a framer, as a founding father, as a Father of the Constitution, Aplus.

Have to give him a grade.

As a president, eh, C. Not so good.

He was weak, he got pushed into the war.

Madison is unprepared.

But as Harry Truman said, "The buck stops with him."

It was his responsibility.

He should have fired all those incompetent people he appointed.

Madison's not prepared.

He almost dies at the Battle of Bladensburg.

He's there with the Army and a Secretary of State, James Monroe, who would be the next president.

When the army runs, his horse is spooked.

He's thrown from his horse and almost trampled to death.

So he's almost dead.

He's out in the field, leaving the White House alone and vulnerable.

The only one back at the White House, Dolley Madison.

My friend, Dolley Madison.

We have to talk about Dolley.

I fell in love with Dolley Madison, Me too.

In the fourth grade.

Okay.

Now, I read your book and I'm thinking, "Okay, so maybe everything I learned in grade school wasn't exactly true.

How she saved the portrait of George Washington."

However, I still love her.

Yeah, me too, me too.

Dolley was the hostess with the mostest in the history of the White House.

And we've had some impressive First Ladies.

Dolley's one of the best.

And was enormously popular.

We did not have public opinion polls back then, but if we did, she might've been the most popular First Lady ever.

And I'm a huge Eleanor Roosevelt fan.

So Dolley's back there with two teenage enslaved folks, a boy and a girl.

French John, who was the usher.

And James Madison sends a rider back, telling Dolley to get out.

He left a colonel and 100 men surrounding the White House.

Dolley looks out the window and they all run.

And she's yelling, she's furious.

She even writes to a woman, saying, "The only one left in the city are a couple of women."

She said, "But if we had enough cannons, the ladies and I would defend."

So Dolley's tough.

She sends the rider back with a note, and the note survives.

I've reprinted it in the book.

She says, "I refuse to abandon my post."

Yeah.

She stays at the White House.

At the 11th hour, she climbs to the top of the White House with a spy glass, sort of like a pirate thing.

And she looks and sees the British coming.

And she also looks around the city and everybody's running.

It's tumbleweeds, it's chaos.

Nobody's there.

So only then does she agree to leave, but not before saving the artifacts of the White House, including the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.

Now it turns out it was a copy, but she didn't know that.

She thought she was saving the original.

She wouldn't even let him cut it out of the painting.

They had to break the frame, and she wouldn't even let him roll it up.

She had him lay it flat on the wagon.

And she runs around collecting everything.

Only then does she leave in the wagon with the artifacts from the White House, thus risking her life to save our history.

So yeah, Dolley.

Yeah, definitely a big Dolley fan.

Who doesn't love Dolley Madison?

Oh yeah, I love Dolley.

Plus she introduced ice cream to the country under Jefferson's presidency, and I'm an ice cream nut, so..

The White House is burning, the capital is burning, Washington is burning.

How do you think this changed the trajectory for the country?

Oh, in many ways.

There was a lot of interest in moving the capital out of Washington.

It's not the great city that it is today.

I think we have the most remarkable capital in the world.

It was a backwater.

In fact, I read the diary of one ambassador, who was stationed in Washington.

He said, "Fortunately I was in Turkey first, or Istanbul."

And he made fun of other places around the world.

"Fortunately, I've been to less developed countries, so I can survive in Washington."

This is the kind of nonsense.

But after it was burned, everyone wanted to move the capital.

But Dolley said, "We're gonna rebuild."

She hosted parties, she rallied support, and she made it sort of an issue like, "Are we gonna let the British burn our capital and get away with it?

No, we're gonna rebuild and build a better capital."

And we did.

So the city stayed.

They built a better capital.

Benjamin Latrobe and all these great architects were hired.

It took years.

We were bankrupt, but they stayed with it.

That fact that we survived, we rebuilt the capital, really imbued Americans with a sense of national pride that we were lacking.

For example, if you were to take a time machine, and go back to the late 1700s, and if you were to meet Thomas Jefferson and ask him about his country or nation, he would say, "Virginia."

So we lacked that sense of identity.

The fact that we endured and rebuilt this imbued us with the sense of national identity.

We also, if you look at old letters, they used to write "these," THESE, plural.

"These united States."

Small letter U.

Capital letter S. "These states."

After this, people were so proud, they would write "the," singular.

Capital letter U now, "The United States."

So this more than most anything, at that time period, really created a sense of American national identity and pride.

I cannot read any of your books and not say the same thing.

"How come I didn't know this before?

And why wasn't I taught this?"

So, during this research, was there anything that actually surprised you?

Oh yeah.

So I guess my sweet spot is to try to find the story behind the story, or uncover the history that is missing.

And there's still more we don't know about history than we do know, so there's a lot to be done.

And I feel like I have a pretty good handle on history.

I've spent three and a half decades with it.

But there's still stuff that always surprises me.

For example, I knew that some folks saved artifacts from Washington, but I didn't know the full Stephen Pleasonton story.

And I didn't know that he risked a court martial, and that he prepared those linen sacks.

And so a lot of the details I didn't know.

I didn't know.

I knew that there was cowardice and incompetence in the Madison administration, but I had no idea just how grotesquely bad it was.

And there were a couple of other heroes besides Pleasonton and Dolley.

There was a Naval Commodore named Joshua Barney, and others who, I don't think their story is well enough known.

And he almost died.

He risked his life to slow the British down, to try to give us time to get everything out of Washington.

So there was, yeah, there's a number of heroes there that I think deserve their day in the limelight.

And I'm hoping that the book gives them a little bit of it.

Oh, I think so.

This was such a monumental event in our history.

Why is it that it has been overlooked?

Yeah, I think it's the single most important day in American history.

Absolutely.

All right, that's a lot.

No, I stand behind it.

Because we came this close to ceasing to exist.

I think there's a number of reasons.

One, it was within the war of 1812, and that war's sandwiched between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

And everybody writes about those.

So it's like the adopted stepchild, I guess you could say.

Nobody wants to study that war.

Secondly, we were the belligerent, we misbehaved.

And it's difficult to know that we were trying to commit genocide against first Americans, and that we wanted to expand slavery across the continent.

So for those reasons, we don't like to, textbooks don't like to talk about it.

Politicians don't like to talk about it.

And thirdly, just the grotesque incompetence.

It's hard to think that we couldn't stop this army and that we were unprepared for them, and we let 'em burn our capital.

And what did our army and the generals do?

They ran.

They dropped their guns and ran.

So there's so many difficult and disturbing pieces to this.

I think we prefer to think of Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg or George Washington crossing the Delaware, or those Minutemen beating the British at Concord.

Those are inspiring.

This is a difficult and complicated story.

Too often, whether it's the media or academia or anybody, we like simple stories.

And there's some great heroism in this book.

But boy, is there more than a fair share of tragedy.

So for all those reasons.

The book is "When Washington Burned."

This has been such a treat for me.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

I'm Ann Bocock.

Please join me on the next "Between the Covers."