Admiral Sir George Cockburn.
Admiral Sir George Cockburn. Marylanders could not have dreamed up a worse enemy. The way his name is invoked even today on Maryland’s Eastern Shore says something about the man. Although he pronounced his name “Co’burn,” Marylanders then and now have disdainfully dubbed him “Cock-burn.” As one 21st century observer put it, “he was just plain cocky.”
He was the man Chesapeake Bay residents hated so much that they put a price of $1,000 on his head. The closest comparison that might be made to Cockburn is General Sherman, who put the state of Georgia to the torch during the Civil War. The South had Sherman; the Chesapeake Bay had Cockburn. No one ever collected the reward and Cockburn eventually went on to a long and distinguished career in the Royal Navy.
Born in 1772, Cockburn was descended from Scottish lords. He went to sea at age nine. The young Cockburn caught the attention of the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson, who praised the boy’s ability.
Cockburn remains such an interesting character. Even Marylanders would have to admit that he was a highly capable commander and brilliant strategist, just the sort of man Americans wished they had on their side in 1812. He understood the advantages of a hit-and-run amphibious campaign and never let himself be bogged down by extended land operations. The furthest he got from his ships while in the Chesapeake region was likely during the attack on Washington, where he rather famously sat down in the empty White House and enjoyed the dinner that had been set out for President Madison.
It is true that Cockburn allowed excesses and brutality. A witness described how British forces under Cockburn ransacked the local church, built in 1736, in the village of Chaptico in St. Mary’s County: “I passed through Chaptico shortly after the enemy had left it, and I am sorry to say that their conduct would have disgraced cannibals. . . Will you believe me when I tell you that the sunken graves were converted into barbecue holes? The remaining glass of the church windows broken, the communion table used as a dinner table, and then broken into pieces. Bad as the above may appear, it dwindles into insignificance when compared to what follows: the vault was entered and the remains of the dead disturbed.”
These outrages were nothing compared to what happened in Hampton, Virginia, on June 24, 1813. Cockburn’s sailors and a force of marines quickly captured the town and occupied it until June 27. The admiral let his men run wild. French soldiers fighting for the British looted homes and raped women. Prisoners were executed out of hand. The cemetery of the Episcopal Church was used as a slaughterhouse for stolen cattle. Anger at what the British had done was so great that “Remember Hampton” became the battle cry of the local militia. Widespread news of the atrocities helped unite Americans against the invaders.
What struck me the most about Cockburn was that after reading several books about the War of 1812, I could not find a single one of his contemporaries who had a positive comment about the man other than to acknowledge his military skills. He may have been a capable naval officer, but many who knew him complained about his overbearing personality.
Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Napier, a respected career British army officer who was with Cockburn at Hampton, remarked, “Cockburn’s confidence in his luck is the very thing to be feared; it is worse than 1,000 yankees.” In addition, Napier did not enjoy carrying out the campaign of terror against Chesapeake Bay residents, claiming, “Strong is my dislike to what is perhaps a necessary part of our job; namely, plundering and ruining the peasantry.”
British author C.S. Forester, famed for creating the Horatio Hornblower character that was the hero of several novels about the Royal Navy, made an astute observation about Cockburn’s inability to fathom Americans in his book, “The Age of Fighting Sail.” Forester wrote, “He was an able and active officer, but he displayed complete ignorance of the people he was fighting if he expected a Maryland farmer to part with his herd in exchange for bills redeemable in London at some vague future date.”
Cockburn also underestimated the Americans and seemed unable to understand why they put up a fight when resistance was futile. He punished the civilian population mercilessly whenever they took up arms against the British. The admiral explained that he ordered homes in Havre de Grace burned, “to cause the proprietors (who had deserted them and formed part of the militia who had fled to the woods) to understand and feel what they were liable to bring upon themselves by building batteries and acting toward us with so much useless rancor.”
Americans and Cockburn’s fellow British officers were not the only ones who found the admiral to be insufferable. In 1815, Cockburn was ordered to escort Napoleon Bonaparte on the voyage to his island exile on St. Helena. Briefly, he acted as the former emperor’s jailer. The emperor described Cockburn as “capricious, choleric, vain and overbearing.” Cockburn never let Napoleon forget who ruled St. Helena. The admiral wrote in his journal, “It is clear he is still inclined to act the sovereign occasionally, but I cannot allow it.”
Cockburn served as governor of St. Helena in 1815 and 1816, then was promoted to junior lord of the admiralty. He became first sea lord in 1841 and admiral of the fleet in 1851. He died at age eighty-one on Aug. 19, 1853, just a few days short of what would have been the thirty-ninth anniversary of the burning of Washington.
Leading the British forces on the Chesapeake Bay was Admiral Sir George Cockburn. In many respects he was the perfect man to head up this campaign of terror. Cockburn had nothing but disdain for Americans and consequently he was often cruel. At other times he acted with kindness, apparently motivated by a warped sense of chivalry. Cockburn’s behavior toward civilians was erratic, but he was a clever and highly capable military commander.
Any description of George Cockburn’s role in the War of 1812 is incomplete without mentioning his service as commander of the British expedition that met with disaster attempting to capture the Gosport Navy Yard in what is now Portsmouth, Virginia. American defenders at Craney Island repulsed Cockburn’s forces with heavy casualties in one of the most lopsided American victories of the war, comprable in some ways to the Battle of New Orleans. The defeat at Craney Island on June 22 likely contributed to the vengeful mood of His Majesty’s forces when they attacked Hampton several days later, though the immediate trigger for French brutality there was the recent killing of several French soldiers who were trying to surrender.
Thank you for calling attention to Cockburn’s role in this debacle. Again and again, his forces seemed to overwhelm the local militia on the Chesapeake Bay. This sounds like a rare exception.