1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism

Chapter 5 Liberty, Slavery, and the Burning of the Capital: Washington, D.C., August 1814

h Chapter 5 Liberty, Slavery, and the Burning of the Capital washington, d.c., august 1814 Philadelphia physician Jesse Torrey traveled to Washington, D.C., in December 1815 to witness history. Torrey had arrived at the seat of the national government in time to observe the start of a new session of Congress. He wished to see firsthand the determined endurance of a nation literally rising from the ashes. Fifteen months earlier, in August 1814, the British had burned the Capitol, the president’s house, and most other major government buildings to cinders. The legislators who gathered in the District of Columbia on the day of Torrey’s visit were governing in the aftermath of a foreign conquest . Yet the opening of Congress was not the event that arrested Torrey’s attention. As Torrey paused before the Capitol to take in the devastating sight of the once “beautiful white freestone” building reduced to a charred hulk, he faced another nightmare vision. In front of the ruin, iron chains clanking, a file of enslaved people shuffled toward the auction block.1 Describing the scene in his book A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States, Torrey drew a direct connection between the destruction of the Capitol building by fire and the human devastation of the slave trade. He demanded of his readers: “would it be superstitious to presume, that the Sovereign Father of all nations, permitted the perpetration of this apparently execrable transaction, as a fiery, though salutary signal of his displeasure at the conduct of his Columbian children, in erecting and idolizing this splendid . . . temple of freedom, and at the same time oppressing with the yoke of captivity and toilsome bondage twelve or fifteen hundred thousand of their Liberty, Slavery, and the Burning of the Capital 169 African brethren . . . making merchandize of their blood, and dragging their bodies with iron chains, even under its towering walls?” (Figure 14).2 The British burning of the Capitol was an “execrable transaction.” Selling Africans and African Americans into bondage under the “towering walls” of a building better known as a “temple of freedom” was something worse: a sin so grievous God willed the destruction of the false temple. For Torrey, the answer to his rhetorical question was clear. God most certainly had ordained the ruination of the Capitol as a “signal of displeasure at the conduct of his Columbian children” because he condemned U.S. hypocrisy. If the War of 1812 pitched the United States against the United Kingdom in a battle to claim status as the true land of liberty, then the republic lost significant moral ground to the monarchy whenever anyone raised the issue of slavery. Britain could boast that its powerful navy had forced an end to the Atlantic slave trade, while the United States could only admit that it still allowed a flourishing domestic market in slave labor. Yet Torrey’s analysis did Figure 14. Torrey’s engraving vividly linked the burning of Washington (the roofless Capitol is shown with flames pouring out of the tops of the windows) with the practice of slave trading in the capital. Note the presence of little children in the coffle of enslaved people in chains, a visual representation of Torrey’s rhetorical stress on the theme of family rupture. “View of the Capitol of the United States after the Conflagration in 1814,” frontispiece, A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: J. Biorden, 1817), Collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia. 170 Chapter 5 not represent anything like an American consensus. While Torrey believed that the United States endangered liberty by its inconsistency on the crucial issue of slavery, there were plenty of Americans who stood ready to invert Torrey ’s argument exactly. Critics of Britain accused that nation of base hypocrisy for impressing U.S. sailors into the Royal Navy even as it bragged of safeguarding the freedom of the seas.3 Ironically, both war boosters and antislavery activists relied on the same set of emotional symbols to make their respective arguments. Each dwelled on the tragedy of family love menaced by violent military action, of private lives destroyed by bad public policy. Torrey devoted many pages of his Portraiture of Domestic Slavery to painting individual African American victims of slavery, case studies that featured husbands and wives torn asunder by slave traders, parents and children lost to each other in separate sales. Yet those who...