Books with title Washington Is Burning

Fifteen-year-old Paul Jennings looked out the window of the President's House. America was at war with Britain, and British soldiers were marching toward Washington. Terrified people were fleeing the city. But Paul was not going to join them yet. He was a slave who belonged to President Madison and his wife, Dolley. Dolley did not want to leave until her husband returned from the battlefront. Paul stayed by her side, helping her pack up official papers and belongings. Finally, they could wait no longer. But there was one more treasure they had to save. Were they too late?

In 1814, British troops invaded and burned Washington; the White House still bears scorch and soot marks on its foundation stones. Until the British tried to obliterate it, many Americans remained violently opposed to the idea of Washington as the nation's capital. It was only after the British lesson in “hard war,” designed to terrorize Americans, that the city became a locus of unity and national pride. The dramatic story of how Washington, D.C., rose from a wilderness is a vital chapter in American history, filled with intrigue and outsized characters -- from Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the eccentric, passionate, difficult architect who fell in love with his adopted country, to George Washington, who struggled to balance L'Enfant's enthusiasm for his brilliant design with the strident opposition of fiscal conservatives such as Thomas Jefferson. Their conflicts mirror the struggles of a fledgling nation to form a kind of government the world had not yet known, prefiguring similar battles fought in Congress today. Utterly absorbing and scrupulously researched, Washington Burning offers a fresh perspective on the birth of not just a city but a nation.