Letters полностью

The old man seen to, Andrew makes his way back into Washington, wishing as fervently as ever in his life that he could spit out “this Father business” once and for all and be… himself! By the blaze of Robert Sewall’s house he rides down Maryland Avenue to the Capitol, its windows shot out, its great doors battered open. He contemplates the imminent destruction, not merely of Corinthian columns and marble walls, but of the infant Library of Congress upstairs and the Supreme Court’s law library below; of the records, the files, the archives of the young republic. He passes through the lobby to the House chamber, his head full of the slogans of the American and French revolutions, together with the ideals of the Magna Carta, of English Common Law and parliamentary procedure. Why are these destroying these? Futile as the gesture would have been, when he sees Admiral Cockburn in the Speaker’s chair and hears him call to his rocket-wielding troopers for the question, the nay comes near to bursting from him…

But then it strikes Andrew that the official incumbent of that chair is the man perhaps most singly responsible for the war: Henry Clay, the archhawk of Kentucky, at that moment in Ghent with the peace commissioners to make sure that no Indian Free State is let into the treaty, and brandishing in token of his belligerence a razor-strop made from the skin of Tecumseh. “Aye!” our forefather shouts before the rest, who chorus affirmation. It is exactly ten o’clock. The motion carries; Cockburn raps the gavel; rockets are fired into the piled-up combustibles; the party retires from the blaze and moves down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House and the Treasury Building. Over his shoulder, as he moves on with them, Andrew sees the Capitol of the United States in flames.

Now the men are weary. All but the indefatigable Cockburn complete the night’s work methodically, with little horseplay. If Ross has been less than resolute or brilliant as an attacker, he is an admirable executor of this occupation, for which he has no taste. There are no rapes, no molestations of civilians, no systematic pillaging of private property. Even the looting of the public buildings he keeps to the souvenir level, and he frowningly detaches himself from Cockburn’s high jinks. At the President’s House they find dinner laid out for forty: as Cockburn’s men fall upon the cold meats and Madeira, and the admiral toasts the health of “Jemmy Madison and the prince regent,” and steals “Jemmy’s love letters” from a desk drawer and a cushion from Mrs. Madison’s chair to remind him “of Dolley’s sweet arse,” Ross quietly gives orders to fire the place and move on. The officers retire to Mrs. Suter’s tavern on 15th Street for a late supper; Ross’s frown darkens when the admiral rides roaring in upon the white mule he has been pleased to bestride all day. Such displays Ross regards as dangerous to good discipline and unbefitting the dignity of such events as the destruction of capital cities.

Andrew agrees, though in the contrast of humors between the general and the admiral he sees a paradigm of his own mixed feelings, and he is mindful of the resolve and bold imagination that entitle Cockburn to his present entertainment. Since the firing of the Capitol, Andrew’s heart is still. He quotes here an ironic editorial comment from a British newspaper printed weeks later, when the news reaches London:

There will be great joy in the United States on account of the destruction of all their public and national records, as the people may now invent a fabulous origin…

The destruction itself, reports Andrew, from the moment of that gavel rap in Cockburn’s congress, has seemed to him to move from the historical plane to the fabulous. Like one “whose father’s certain death releases one at last to love him,” Andrew feels the stirrings of a strange new emotion.

But first one must see that father truly and completely buried, and so he not only follows Ross and Cockburn through the balance of the night’s destruction, and the next day’s, but finds finally “a fit chiaroscuro” in the contrast of their manners, “apt as Don Quixote and his ribald squire.” It is getting on to midnight. From Mrs. Suter’s tavern the trio ride to their final errand of the evening, another of Cockburn’s inspirations, which Ross reluctantly assents to: private property or not, the Admiral vows he will not sleep until he burns the offices of the National Intelligencer, which for two years has been abusing him in its columns. The general goes along to make sure that no other private buildings are damaged or further mischief made; Andrew to see “the funeral rites” through to the end and confirm his sense of the increasing fabulousness of the occasion.