e was one of the earlier Presidents of the republic.
But it is that period of his career which least entitles him to be
remembered with gratitude and respect by his countrymen.

Its crowning humiliation came with the capture of Washington in August,
1814, when the British admiral, Cockburn, entered the Hall of
Representatives, at the head of a band of followers, and springing into
the speaker's chair shouted: "Shall this harbor of Yankee Democracy be
burned? All for it will say, Aye!" Early in the war Madison had written
to Jefferson, "We do not apprehend invasion by land,"--the one thing, it
would seem, that a commander-in-chief should have apprehended, whose
single aim was the invasion and conquest of the enemy's territory. His
devotion to this one purpose, to the exclusion of any other idea of
either offense or defense, and in spite of continued failure, was almost
an infatuation. Within a year of that expression of confidence to Mr.
Jefferson the whole coast was blockaded from the eastern end of Long
Island Sound to the mouth of the Mississippi. For a year before
Washington was taken, the shores of Chesapeake Bay were harassed and
raided and devastated by a blockading force, till the people were
reduced almost to the condition of a conquered country. Two months
before the British commanders, Ross and Cockburn, went up the Potomac,
Mr. Gallatin, who was then in London, had informed the President that
the fleet was to be reinforced for that very purpose; but neither he nor
Congress took any effective measures to meet a danger so imminent. Their
eyes were fixed with a far-off gaze across the Northern border, while
only five hundred regular troops, a body of untrained militia who had
never heard the whistle of a bullet, and a few gunboats on the Potomac,
guarded the national capital against a British fleet, a thousand
marines, and thirty-five hundred men from Wellington's best regiments.
The President fleeing in one direction with the secretary of war, the
secretary of state, and the general in command; Mrs. Madison fleeing in
another, with her reticule filled with silver spoons snatched up in
haste as she left the White House;[15] behind them all as they fled, the
horizon red with the blaze of the largest navy yard in the country and
of all the public buildings, but one, of the capital,--these incidents
are an amazing commentary on the early assertion that invasion was not
to be apprehended.

The end of this wretched