When Britain Burned the White House, by Peter Snow – review

Peter Snow explains that he decided to look into this extraordinary story when he realised how few people knew about it, and was inspired to write a book by the wealth and quality of eyewitness accounts from both sides. The result is superb. When Britain Burned the White House is an exemplary work of history — lucid, witty and humane, with terrific pace, and so even-handed that it will surely be received as well in America as here.

Annoyed by what he regarded as the excesses of the British empire — its fight with Napoleon interfered with America’s trade, it was in the habit of pressing American citizens into the Royal Navy, and it supported the Indian tribes who stood in the way of American settlers — President James Madison had declared war in June 1812. American forces had tried to seize parts of Canada, and in the spring of 1813 had burned York (Toronto), reducing its parliament buildings to ashes.

For the British the war was a tedious and debilitating sideshow, and after Napoleon’s exile in the spring of 1814 Lord Liverpool resolved to land a decisive blow. On the morning of 17 August the watchman at Point Lookout, at the mouth of the Potomac River on Chesapeake Bay, awoke to the sight of some 50 British warships. They were there to give ‘Jonathan’ — as the British called the revolutionary soldiers of the War of Independence — ‘a good drubbing’, and intent on ‘insulting’ the American capital.

Washington, some 80 miles upriver, was then little more than a village in a swamp, albeit with such monumental buildings as the Capitol and the White House, which was usually called the President’s House, and was largely staffed by slaves — a sore point.