The British campaign against Washington came as retaliation during the War of 1812, partly in response to American forces burning the Parliament buildings in York, the capital of Upper Canada, in 1813. On August 24, 1814, after defeating American militia at the Battle of Bladensburg, British troops under Major General Robert Ross marched into Washington virtually unopposed. The soldiers systematically set fire to the Capitol, the Treasury, the War Office, the President's House, and the Arsenal. Even the bridge over the Potomac was destroyed. The Americans themselves had already torched the Washington Navy Yard, founded by Thomas Jefferson, to keep stores and ammunition from British hands, along with the nearly completed warships USS Columbia and USS Argus. The total destruction was estimated at 365,000 pounds sterling. Only a handful of structures survived, among them the Patent Office, saved through the personal appeals of William Thornton, the former Architect of the Capitol.

Less than four days after the fires began, nature intervened with astonishing force. A sudden, violent thunderstorm, possibly a hurricane, hammered the capital and extinguished the flames. The storm spawned a tornado that tore through the center of Washington along Constitution Avenue, lifting two cannons and hurling them several yards before killing both British soldiers and American civilians. The tempest battered British ships in the harbor so badly that the troops returned to their vessels and withdrew. Meanwhile, at Greenleaf's Point, where the fort later known as Fort McNair stood, British soldiers attempted to dispose of 150 abandoned barrels of gunpowder by dropping them into a well. The powder ignited, killing as many as thirty men in a catastrophic explosion. Between the storm and the blast, the British occupation ended almost as suddenly as it had begun.

News of the burning provoked shock on both sides of the Atlantic. American newspapers, even those representing the antiwar Federalists, condemned the destruction as needless vandalism. Leaders across continental Europe, where capital cities had been repeatedly occupied during the Napoleonic Wars but always spared deliberate destruction, denounced the act. The Annual Register declared the burning had "brought a heavy censure on the British character." In Parliament, MP Samuel Whitbread ridiculed the government for "making much of the taking of a few buildings in a non-strategic swamp, as though it had captured Paris." British public opinion, however, largely saw the burnings as justified payback for American incursions into Canada. Sir George Prevost wrote that "the proud capital at Washington has experienced a similar fate" as a just retribution for the destruction of York.

Congress reconvened three and a half weeks later in the cramped Post and Patent Office building at Blodgett's Hotel, one of the few structures large enough to hold all members. A fierce debate erupted over whether to relocate the capital to Philadelphia or another northern city, but Southern congressmen resisted moving it above the Mason-Dixon line. On September 21, the House voted 83 to 54 to keep the capital in Washington. Local property owners, led by Daniel Carroll of Duddington, funded the construction of the Old Brick Capitol in just five months at a cost of $25,000. The Capitol itself took twelve years to rebuild. Architect Benjamin Latrobe was rehired and requested 60,000 feet of boards, 500 tons of stone, and 1,000 barrels of lime. Charles Bulfinch completed the renovations by 1826. The decision to rebuild in place transformed a moment of national humiliation into a statement of defiance.

The burning of Washington reverberates across more than two centuries of American memory. In 2009, President Barack Obama held a ceremony at the White House honoring Paul Jennings, an enslaved man in the Madison household, for his role in saving Gilbert Stuart's iconic portrait of George Washington from the flames. A dozen of Jennings' descendants visited the White House to see the painting their ancestor helped rescue. The event surfaced again unexpectedly in 2018, when during heated trade negotiations Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked how the United States could justify tariffs as a national security issue. President Donald Trump retorted, "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?" Poets and songwriters have drawn on the episode too, from Lydia Sigourney's 1815 poem "The Conflagration at Washington" to Bob Dylan's "Narrow Way." The story endures because it captures something essential about the fragility and resilience of the American experiment.