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Updated: June 1, 2025
A few residents formed themselves into a vigilance committee. The late Mr. J. A. Macartney passed through to visit his property, Bladensburg Station, and seeing how things were, wrote to the Home Secretary asking for police protection. My teams had now arrived with the building material, and carpenters were put on to erect the hotel.
But for this there was no help; and it now only remained to make the best arrangements for their comfort, and to secure for them, as far as could be done, civil treatment from the Americans. It chanced that, among other prisoners taken at Bladensburg, was Commodore Barney, an American officer of much gallantry and high sense of honour.
In Bladensburg the brigade halted for an hour, while those men who had thrown away their knapsacks endeavoured to recover them. During this interval I strolled up to a house which had been converted into an hospital, and paid a hasty visit to the wounded.
Bladensburg ought not to have been left unoccupied. The most open village, if resolutely defended, will cost many men before it falls; whereas Bladensburg, being composed of substantial brick houses, might have been maintained for hours against all our efforts. In the next place, they displayed great want of military knowledge in the disposition of both their infantry and artillery.
She brought with her Colonel Thornton, Lieut. Colonel Wood, with the rest of the officers and men who had been left behind at Bladensburg, and, being under the guidance of Commodore Barney, that gentleman was enabled to discharge his trust even to the very letter. It may readily be supposed that the meeting between friends thus restored to each other was very agreeable.
The extracts of letters, which you will see in our paper of this day, are from General Washington, President Huntington, and our Delegates in Congress to me. That from Bladensburg is from a particular acquaintance of mine, whose credit cannot be doubted. The distress we are experiencing from want of leather to make shoes, is great.
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.
Perhaps, too, he commenced she attack at Bladensburg with a degree of precipitancy which hindered him from, taking advantage of an open ford, and compelled him to expose his troops to the fire of the enemy's artillery whilst crossing a narrow bridge in a single column.
Uncertain whether Washington City or Fort Washington was the destination of the enemy, Winder left a force at Bladensburg about four miles from the capitol, and with other troops watched the highways leading in other directions, while he hastened to the city to inform the president that the enemy were camped in ten miles of the capitol. Neither President Madison nor his cabinet slept that night.
In Washington he occasionally turned an honest penny by jockey-riding in the races on the old track of Bladensburg, and eventually he became one of a squad of ten or twelve expert horsemen employed by the Government in carrying urgent long-distance messages.
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