page_title: Robert Ross (British Army officer)
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Ross (British Army officer) / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Robert Ross Monument
context_page_description: Major-General Robert Ross was an Irish officer in the British Army who served in the Napoleonic Wars and its minor theatre in North America, War of 1812.
  Ross joined the British Army in 1789. He served as an officer in several battles during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1809, he was sent to serve in the Peninsular War. He was wounded in the neck at the Battle of Orthez in France on February 27, 1814.
  Upon returning to duty later that year, Ross was made a major general and sent to North America, where he took command of a British force designated to attack the United States capital of Washington D.C. during the War of 1812. Ross's professional soldiers quickly defeated a poorly organized American militia at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, and that evening proceeded to enter Washington. The British Army burned many important U.S. Government buildings, including the White House and the Capitol, demoralizing and greatly damaging the American war effort. Ross then led a British invasion north up the Chesapeake Bay towards the city of Baltimore which culminated in the Battle of Baltimore that September.
context_section_description: He is commemorated by a 99-foot granite obelisk near the shoreline of Carlingford Lough in the Ross home village of Rostrevor, County Down in Northern Ireland, as well as by a monument in St Paul's Cathedral in London, England. 
  The inscription on the monument reads:
  By the beginning of the Troubles in the 1960s, the monument in Rostrevor - now located in a predominantly Roman Catholic region - was largely neglected and overgrown by brambles; this may have contributed to its avoiding the same fate as Nelson's Pillar in Dublin, which was reportedly blown up by the IRA in 1966. After the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Newry and Mourne District Council, though largely Irish republican, agreed to refurbish the monument as part of Rostrevor's history, and it was reopened in 2008.
  Neither General Ross nor his immediate descendants were knighted or received a title of nobility. However, his descendants were given an augmentation of honour to the Ross armorial bearings (namely, a second crest in which an arm is seen grasping the 15 stars and 15 stripes on a broken staff) and the family name was changed to the victory title "Ross-of-Bladensburg", which was granted to his widow.
  In honour of the history of Washington, D.C., there is also a portrait of Ross in the U. S. Capitol's rotunda and several illustrations in various War of 1812 historical sites in the Baltimore area, including a Monument near the site off Old North Point Road where he supposedly was shot. Additional details and exhibits have been preserved in various Baltimore historical institutions, such as the Star Spangled Banner Flag House (also known recently as the Flag House and Star-Spangled Banner Museum) and the National Park Service site of Fort McHenry's visitor center exhibits and in the local Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society museum in Dundalk, Maryland.
  Traditionally the two snipers/riflemen "Wells and McComas" (of the unit of Aisquith's Sharpshooters")  were buried  in a local churchyard mourned  by their fellow soldiers and citizens of the Town, but later in the 1850s were exhumed and reburied after elaborate processions and funerals in a monumental tomb in Ashland  Square, off of Orleans Street and North Gay Street in the Jonestown/Old Town neighborhood of East Baltimore.  City streets were also named for them in South Baltimore.
caption: Robert Ross Monument, Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland
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