George Cockburn

London's National Maritime Museum owns a portrait of Sir George Cockburn (1772–1853) as painted by John James Halls in 1817. Admiral Cockburn poses confidently in his Royal Navy uniform, one hand on his hip, the other resting on the butt of his sword, but the most striking feature of the painting is its background. Admiral Cockburn is taking his ease in front of a city in flames. The sky behind him is black with smoke. The great occasion memorialized by this painting is perhaps Cockburn's greatest achievement in a long and successful naval career. The city burning behind him is Washington D.C.

The War of 1812 is, I have found, a war remembered very differently by the nations who fought in it. As a schoolboy, I was taught that America had never lost a war, and my later college courses in American history put the 1812 conflict down as a rather inconclusive draw. When I lived in Canada, I found that Canadians remembered the War of 1812 as a great victory of British North America against American aggression. In Britain, the War of 1812 is such a minor footnote that to have a conversation about it, I often have to remind my British friends that it happened at all. For Britain, 1803 to 1815 is memorable as the era of the Napoleonic and Peninsular Wars, and war with France had been happening more or less continually since 1793. A conflict with America in that time was a minor event, and Britain devoted scant resources to prosecuting the war at the time and devotes little classroom time to teaching about it.

The truth is that America was never very united in fighting this war, and waged it largely with militia forces who were less and less effective the farther they were sent from home. New England kept trading with the British and even sold provisions to British forces in Canada. The Canadian forces were also mostly militias, but were defending their own territory against invasion and more than held their own. The Americans failed in most of their military objectives, signed a peace treaty in which neither side achieved any territorial concessions or policy changes, and had their greatest victory (at New Orleans) after the peace treaty had been concluded.

I think that all three perspectives are reasonable. The U.S. didn't clearly lose this war, but they surely did not win it. The forces of Upper Canada, Lower Canada, and other provinces won their part in the war. And to Britain, the war was an insignificant inconvenience.

The British Navy overall was vastly superior to the American one, but had more serious opposition to contend with in Europe. When the modest British forces in North America did want to make a point, they succeeded. The blockade of the Chesapeake Bay, with the eventual raid on Washington, was the best example of this. Among the buildings set ablaze was the White House, where Dolley Madison, the first lady, famously stayed behind to rescue a full-length portrait of George Washington. She was among the very last people to leave the executive mansion before Cockburn and his forces arrived.

Much of Cockburn's biography makes for rather dry reading: When and where he served, dates of promotion, and only a few accomplishments of interest to a storyteller like me. Besides burning Washington D.C., he conveyed Napoleon to his imprisonment on St. Helena and was governor of that island for a time. At the end of his naval career, he entered politics as an MP in the House of Commons. None of this tells us very much about the man's character.

There are two anecdotes, though, that make me feel that I might be able to take his measure. One is an event that he might not even have been present at. During the burning of Washington, one of the institutions that went up in flames was the Library of Congress. But at the Patent Office, Superintendent of Patents William Thornton stayed behind to plead his case with the British officers. He convinced them that patents were of such value to the world that it would be a pity to burn them to punish one nation. The Patent Office was spared. Was Cockburn there to make this call? Even if he were not, his command was such that his junior officers felt confident about coming to such a reasonable decision.

More significantly, Cockburn showed that he knew how to be reasonable even in the case of being personally insulted. The National Intelligencer was a Washington newspaper that had written many negative articles about Cockburn, branding him “The Ruffian.” An officer of His Majesty's Navy, a ruffian! Cockburn entered the newspaper's building with the intention of burning it down. However, he was met by a delegation of women from the neighborhood, who were afraid that if the newspaper building burned, their homes would catch fire as well. So Cockburn, an officer and a gentleman, ordered that instead of being burned, the National Intelligencer building was to be knocked down brick by brick. And to ensure that no further insults to his character would follow any time soon, Cockburn ordered that the typesetter's trays were to be scoured for every instance of the letter C. These were destroyed, and it would be a long time before the paper could again print the name Cockburn.

Admiral Cockburn rests in the smallest of the three catacombs of Kensal Green Cemetery, under the colonnade. The free-standing colonnade is falling into ruin, with weeds growing from its stone roof and the concrete of its walls crumbling so badly that memorial markers hung on the walls to honor the dead have fallen off and shattered. The structure is such a hazard that it is surrounded by a fence to keep away the curious, so that the colonnade has become, sadly, one of the shabbier neighborhoods of the cemetery.