flames the Departments of State and War, and private buildings. But nature, as if protesting against the outrage, came to the rescue with a cyclone that drove the enemy to seek shelter.
Panic seized the combatants. On the Washington side, General Ross, perceiving Americans on the Virginia shore, set fire to the great bridge spanning the Potomac. On the Virginia side, Americans, believing the British were about to cross, simultaneously applied the torch. While the two sheets of flame rushed together, the British army left the ruined capital.
Sentiment in England was divided over the destruction of Washington. "Willingly," said the London Statesman, "would we throw a veil of oblivion over the transactions of our buccaneers at Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America."
Other British authorities justified the ruin as a reprisal for the burning and destruction of York, the capital of Upper Canada, though that unwarranted act was the work of soldiers acting without authority, and had been generally condemned in America and publicly disavowed by General Dearborn, who commanded the expedition.
