(District Boundary Stone NE7, near the site of the disastrous Battle of Bladensburg, which set the stage for the burning of Washington by the British in 1814).
It is funny how things come around. I feel several circles closing this morning. One has a certain claustrophobic aspect, and another a historical one. Both hark back a dozen years, ones that encompass some dizzying personal highs and lows.
My pal the Argonaut is going to help to close one of the latter, and the former…well, that is back too.
The situation is not nearly as grave as some bad days in the Nation’s Capital. Put aside the political shenanigans, if you can, for just a moment.
The two events I am thinking of both have a martial flavor, since the consequences of military action can be brutal and final in the extreme.
In July of 1864, two forces were racing with urgency toward the capital. The Washington Monument was stalled at half-height; the Capitol Dome was undone. Jubal Early, one of Lee’s last great Lieutenants, was pressing down on the empty forts ringing Washington from the North.
It was a bold move: “Unconditional Surrender” Grant had stripped the city of troops to make a decisive move against Petersburg and Richmond, and only by the skin of his teeth did intelligence tell him he was at real risk of losing the District- and the President- to the bold Confederate move.
(Fort Stevens, fully manned. The fields behind the ramparts are now the remnants of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.)
It was whisker-close, but Grant got his reinforcements to the ramparts at Fort Stevens on a day or so before Early’s Rebels began the assault, and the city was saved.
It did not work out that way the other time the city was threatened by an armed force.
That is one of the other circles that is closing this summer. It takes me back to one of my first quests as a resident of the Old Time District of Columbia, which had been bounded by the Boundary Stones that then included what is now Virginia’s Arlington County. I needed a project to get my mind off the War on Terror, and the parallel war with the Ex.
It was a pretty cool project, or at least much cooler than the one I had to deal with on a personal level. The stones were patient. Their emplacement was a project authorized by Congress under President George Washington, and completed over the course of the sweltering summers and dank winters of 1791-92. Their placement was arguably the first public work of the new Republic. In my journey around the Disctrict to see all the stones- there are 36 of 40 originals still in the ground)-I found myself one sunny morning near stone NE 7. That one is located on the grounds of the Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Ward 5.
The low earthworks of a Civil War redoubt remain near the great flagstaff that waves the National Ensign.
Along the fence in Block 18, 75 feet southwest of Garden Mausoleum near Garden of the Crucifixion, lies SE7, a once-massive chunk of sandstone with the word “Maryland” on the side of the square facing the Free State. The interior side once would have read “Jurisdiction of the United States.”
NE 7 had been in place since 1792, or just about the same time the cornerstone of what we know as the White House was laid with great ceremony. They called it something else then, the President’s Palace or the President’s Mansion, because the original color was that which dominated the new capital.
Which is to say a dark reddish-brown. The color of mud.
It was a morning of revelation at Fort Lincoln. We do not think much of the great invasion of 1812, or the abject humiliation of the young Republic by the haughty and professional marines and sailors or the Royal Navy.
If Grant’s troops saved the capital in the Civil War, President Madison’s did not in the war a half century before. The Royal Navy expeditionary forces advanced from the invasion fleet in the Chesapeake Bay, swatting aside the militia hastily assembled to impede them. Only the Marines and Sailors of Commodore under Commodore Barney emerged from the Battle of Bladensburg with their reputations intact. They also took the highest casualties on the US side – Barney took a musket ball in the thigh and was captured.
The Brits then spent a leisurely day or two burning everything of consequence in the new capital.
There are references to the flight of President Madison from the Presidential Palace in the capital today, mostly focusing on the conduct of the indomitable First lady, Dolly. But for the rest of it? The rout of the militia hastily assembled? Not so much.
The 500 United States Marines on the high ground at the Bladensburg Road, near the NE 7 Boundary Stone of the District have their monument, though, and they are remembered at least in this small place. The Marines were outnumbered. Intelligence was bad. Their Commodore was captured, and the victorious Brits swept past the Boundary Stone with nothing to oppose their sack of the New Rome.
President Madison fled the Capitol and his new house, still unfinished, was put to the torched as the victors drank ale at Mrs. Suter’s new boarding house on Pennsylvania Ave and 15th Street and toasted the flames.
The British left town in good order before the startled Americans could respond. Things proceeded at a more leisurely pace in those days.
I am withdrawing from the city at an even more stately pace. Don’t take this as whining, please. It is not that- it is a leap I am taking that makes complete sense, the conclusion having been arrived at in sober and deliberate manner.
The trade I have plied this last decade in Washington has brought me around full circle. Broke, desperate and freshly out of uniform, I had my challenges, but the war in Afghanistan was new, and looked successful. Iraq was only a gleam in the eyes of the NeoCons, and who could have guessed the wild ride of the coming decade?
As the Iraq war began to die down, I could see what was coming for the industry that had grown up to support the era of conflict. They say that an able seaman looks to the wind, and trims the sails accordingly. If what I saw coming, came, the only thing I could think of was to downsize and prepare to live on much more modest means, trading time for cash.
The plan, as I conceived it last year, was something like this:
The little unit I reconstructed was coming on the market. It has a patio on the first floor, an expansive public space that multiplies the sometimes oppressive amount of square feet, is adjacent to the abodes of my pals in the Ornamental Concrete International Union, and is just feet from the entrance to the pool.
It is re-done to my exacting specifications. The kitchen walls were blown out, granite countertops installed, and the famous Murphy bed could be folded up into a sliding bookcase that was a wonder when I completed the installation, making the bedroom disappear into the wall. The rest of the physical plant was upgraded from the 1964 baseline horror with which I started.
The convector AC/heating unit was replaced, plantation shutters installed, the bathroom upgraded and closet reworked with cool and intricate cubbies and hanging spaces.
Small, but elegant. It was a great plan. I had a handshake deal with the woman to whom I had sold a few years ago, and then lurched on to refurbish the much larger two-bedroom, two bath unit up on the fourth deck, high above the pool.
It was a great place. Cluttered, perhaps, with the detritus of my life and that of my parents as all their crap devolving a generation in the time-stream. But I shrugged and got on with complying with my young Realtor’s imperious demands, and that of his relentlessly tasteful Staging Lady.
I liked the place once they were done with it. In fact, I liked it better than I had ever liked living in it before. The transformation from my baroque jumble to a less-is-more look reinvigorated my senses, and when the place sold, lickety-split, I was taken aback.
The change in the market had been accompanied by other issues. The woman who was going to sell me back the little gem of a unit got shafted by the bank. Her change in circumstances meant the lenders no longer trusted her to make payments on a retirement place, and she was stuck. No place to go.
I felt sorry for her. That is the way of the financial world these days. I let her out of the hand-shake deal, only to find myself in the same dilemma: where was I to go, once the deal was concluded only weeks hence, and I had to be out of the place I own? It is madness to try to commute from the country- that much I have learned about this town. A lily-pad in town is necessary for sanity.
I did not have the same options that the British had, which was to parade down the Bladensburg Pike, banners waving and re-embark on the invasion fleet. Were that a possibility, damn.
I consulted urgently with Rhonda at the front desk, who knows all things. We ran down the list of available rentals in the building, since I have no stomach to leave all of my ersatz family at Willow and Big Pink just yet. The ones I liked were just off the market. What was left was a couple unadorned efficiencies, identical to the one I rented with such relief a month after 9/11.
Bare bones, no balcony, and painfully small. Just as it was, more than a decade ago. Much has changed, and much is the same. Thank God the farm beckons from bucolic Culpeper.
Oh well. As the President is going to discover with al Qaida and its affiliates, the enemy gets a vote in whether the wars are over, or not. We will see about that. I got a note from the Argonaut, who is interested in finding that last elusive Stone of the District- SE 9, the one on the Potomac riverbank in the shade of the big overpass that requires a team to identify and assault.
We are going to complete that in the next couple weeks, and that circle will be complete.
I guess we will see about the other ones, won’t we?
I am hoping Mick and the Rolling Oldsters are right. Sometimes, you get what you need.
(The United States Capitol in ruins after the British invasion, circa 1814. Image Library of Congress.)
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com