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General Winder took post at Bladensburg, a few miles from Washington. His batteries commanded the only bridge across the East Potomac. Ross determined to storm the bridge in two columns. Not for a moment did the war-bronzed veterans of the Peninsular war hesitate.
This occurred while the regiment occupied a camp about three miles from Washington, on the Bladensburg road, which we named Sussex, in honor of Sussex county, New York, our colonel's native county. As the number of horses furnished us at this time was not sufficient to mount the whole command, the number received by each company was proportioned to the maximum roll of its men.
Thinking that Alexandria, and not Washington, was threatened, the American General abandoned a strong position, which he had seized on the main road, harassed his troops by a needless march towards that town; and discovered his mistake only time enough to occupy the heights of Bladensburg a very few minutes before we came in sight.
His father was that General William H. Winder, whose poltroonery at Bladensburg, in 1814, nullified the resistance of the gallant Commodore Barney, and gave Washington to the British. The father was a coward and an incompetent; the son, always cautiously distant from the scene of hostilities, was the tormentor of those whom the fortunes of war, and the arms of brave men threw into his hands.
They were opposed by raw militia, and the few sailors and marines under Barney. The former fled with promptitude at the very first fire, but the sailors and marines fought gallantly. The fighting was sharpest at Bladensburg; and here Barney's blue-jackets won praise from everybody, even from the enemy whose advance they disputed.
Fernando and his riflemen were sent to Bladensburg at midnight, and on the morning of August 24, 1814, a small scouting party sent down the road came back reporting that the British army was on the advance. Fernando with his riflemen went to meet the enemy and hold them in check as long as possible. About ten o'clock, they came in sight of the advance of the enemy.
The artillery, again, of which they had twenty pieces in the field, was thus arranged on the high road, and commanding the bridge, stood two heavy guns; and four more, two on each side of the road, swept partly in the same direction, and partly down the whole of the slope into the streets of Bladensburg.
There were frequent "affairs of honor" notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.
That night the pipers wailed Lochaber no more for the mangled dead of the MacGregors, the MacLeans, and the MacDonalds who lay in windrows with their faces to the foe. This was no Bladensburg holiday, and the despised Americans were paying off many an old score.
The defeat, however, was absolute, and the army which had been collected for the defence of Washington was scattered beyond the possibility of, at least, an immediate reunion; and as the distance from Bladensburg to that city does not exceed four miles, there appeared to be no further obstacle in the way to prevent its immediate capture.
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