Les Standiford - Washington Burning: How a Frenchmans Vision for Our Nations Capital Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army

Contents

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
LEW AND RHODA AND COCOA

Authors Note

THE SEED FOR this book was planted in my mind in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, as I listened to so many around me wonder aloud how such atrocities could take place in this country. That is when I found myself remembering a long-ago tour of the White House, where a solemn tour guide pointed to a soot-stained and scorched cellar archway, and related to a group of surprised and suddenly attentive schoolboys how their capital was once invaded and destroyed by a terror-bent foreign army.

That memory led me to begin reading about the British assault on Washington during the War of 1812, not with a book of my own in mind, but with a desire to answer the very questions that friends, pundits, and politicians posed in the wake of September 11: How could such things happen here? What might anyone hope to gain? What endures in the wake of such tragedy? Tugging on those threads of history soon led to quite a heap of yarn.

As I read, I was reminded that before there could be a Washington to burn, there had to be a Washington built, and before it was built, men had to want to build it, particularly when there were any number of cities already in existence that could be used as a capitaland on and onand before long I became a prisoner of the story of how a city that today so many take for granted had come to be. It is a story that I have spent considerable time unravelinga story that I ultimately felt compelled to pass along.

In the end, I came to see the efforts of Washington, LEnfant, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe to build, defend, and rebuild Washington, D.C., in its fledgling years as a microcosm for the building of the nation itself, the first in a never-ending series of internal struggles to preserve our nation and its way of government, prefiguring conflict and political platform-buildinghawks versus doves, states-righters versus tax-and-spenders, red-staters versus bluethat plague and inspire us to this day. Furthermore, I found it ironic and instructive that although many of those Britishers who meant to lay waste to Washington had the same surnames and basic religious affiliations as the Presbyterian and Methodist Smiths and Nicholsons and Stuarts with whom they traded musket fire, their intentions had much in common with the men who flew planes into buildings on September 11. For me, it is a reminder that terrorism is not the province of any nation or sect. Or, to put it in the words of the immortal Pogo, We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Nor was my reading without its more delightful elements. It struck me as equally ironic and instructive, given the general Francophobia of our day, that the man who believed most passionately in the city under attack was French. Maddening, self-absorbed, out of touch, and brilliant, P. Charles LEnfant became for me as intriguing and powerful a presence as the legendary generals and statesmen of his day. Auden says that poetry makes nothing happen, but in essence, LEnfant was a poet, and, as I hope this account will bear out, he as much as anyone made Washington, D.C., happen.

The final irony to touch upon is that it took the burning of Washington by the British to end the controversy as to whether the upstart city should stand as this nations capital. Until that time, opinion on the matter was so divided that the Union nearly broke apart at its outset. The city that burns so brightly in the modern political and symbolic firmament was in fact born of its own demise.

Given the amount and quality of scholarship devoted to the founding of this country, I have not aimed to unearth a welter of unreported details but rather to offer a fresh appreciation of this dramatic story. And, because I came to the writing life as a maker of novels, the dictum that all stories spring from character guided me as I went about the telling of this factual one. My hope is that readers will be as intrigued by the parallels between past and present, and as taken by these individuals and their relationships, as I have been.

MIAMI, FLORIDA
2007

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of Americathat a district of territory not exceeding ten miles square, to be located as hereafter directed on the River Potowmackand the same is hereby accepted for the permanent Seat of the Government of the United States.

RESIDENCE ACT OF 1790

As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poets pen turns them to shapes, and gives airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM

PART ONE

Idea of Order

Sentinel

T HE VANTAGE POINT FOR THIS SURVEILLANCE IS ATOP a hill 571 feet above sea level, looking east from Virginia across the broad Potomac River toward the capital city of the United States. The view, shaded by a dense overhang of trees, is as striking as it is strategic. In the far distance, the dome of the Capitol Building gleams in the late afternoon sun, commanding all the storied monuments that dot the verdant landscape in between. From this spot, Washington looks anything but the locus of world-politik, not at all the picture of an ever-roiling center of intrigue. It looks almost peaceful.

Just across the river below is the Doric assemblage of the Lincoln Memorial, anchoring one end of the Reflecting Pool. At the other end is the giant stone obeliskonce the worlds tallest buildingthat pays tribute to the founder of the city. On a line thirty degrees or so to the south of the Reflecting Pool is the memorial to the author of the Declaration of Independence, and at an equal angle to the north, just beyond the Federal Reserve Building, is the White House, flanked on the west by the Executive Office Building and on the east by the U.S. Treasury.

One could walk the boundary of this diamond-shaped territory in a little more than an hour: two-thirds of a mile from the Lincoln Memorial northeastward to the White House; a mile or so southeast along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol; a matching leg southwest to the Jefferson Memorial; and a final three-quarters-of-a-mile march back to Lincoln, whose impassive visage has gazed down upon a great range of human activity, from the I have a dream oration of Martin Luther King and the massive antiVietnam War demonstrations that filled the Mall, to Michael Rennie as a space invader taking a lesson in democracy from a child actor in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Within the bounds of that trek is virtually every structure of significance to the republic for which they standin addition to those named are the Smithsonian Castle, the National Archives, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery, the Museum of Natural History, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the House and Senate office buildings, and on and on.

It is, by any standards, the ultimate destinationfor aspirants, admirers, and enemies alike. Over the years, assassins have plied their trade there, as have cause-driven bombers and lunatics of every stripe. By many accounts, the infamous fourth plane of September 11, 2001, had set its sights on the Capitol or the White House, before the heroic efforts of the passengers brought it to the ground in rural Pennsylvania.

Such assaults, varied as they have been in nature and motivation, are united in one way: their perpetrators have been drawn to that stretch of territory as inevitably as lightning snaps from roiling storm clouds to the aluminum capstone atop George Washingtons 555-foot monument. The various attacks might have had practical intent and woeful consequences for individuals, but they were in essence symbolic actions, meant to strike against an entire nation. In short, they were acts of terrorism.