Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/283

 inflicted chastisement in a manner to convey, in the fullest sense, the terror of the British arms, the Americans themselves could not withhold from him the meed of praise for the temper and moderation with which he executed the task assigned to him.’ Lord Bathurst wrote to Wellington (27 Sept.): ‘The conduct of Major-general Ross does credit to your grace's school.’ Goulburn, one of the commissioners who were treating for peace at Ghent, wrote (21 Oct.): ‘We owed the acceptance of our article respecting the Indians to the capture of Washington; and if we had either burnt Baltimore or held Plattsburg, I believe we should have had peace on the terms you have sent to us in a month at latest.’ Lord Liverpool (on the same date) wrote to Castlereagh regretting that more troops had not been placed under Ross, instead of being sent to Canada, adding: ‘The capture and destruction of Washington has not united the Americans; quite the contrary. We have gained more credit with them by saving private property than we have lost by the destruction of their public works and buildings.’ The actual damage done, as assessed by a committee of congress, was less than a million dollars.

Combined operations have too often failed from friction between the naval and military commanders; but in Ross, the admiral (Sir A. Cochrane) said, ‘are blended those qualities so essential to promote success where co-operation between the two services becomes necessary.’ Rear-admiral (afterwards Sir George) Cockburn, who was with him when he fell, wrote: ‘Our country has lost in him one of its best and bravest soldiers, and those who knew him, as I did, a friend most honoured and beloved.’

His services and death were referred to in the speech from the throne at the opening of parliament (8 Nov.), and a public monument in St. Paul's was voted for him. It is placed above the entrance to the crypt. A monument was also raised to him at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where his body was buried on 29 Sept. At Rosstrevor, his home, his old regiment, the 20th, put up a memorial to him in the parish church, and in 1826 a granite obelisk, one hundred feet high, was erected by the officers of the Chesapeake force and the gentry of county Down, ‘as a tribute to his private worth and a record of his military exploits.’

A portrait of Ross presented to the 20th regiment by his aide-de-camp, afterwards General Falls, has been reproduced as a frontispiece to Smyth's history of the regiment.

A royal warrant, dated 25 Aug. 1815, after setting forth his services at Maida, in Spain, and in America, granting fresh armorial bearings, ordained that his widow and descendants might henceforward be called Ross of Bladensburg ‘as a memorial of his loyalty, ability, and valour.’

Ross married, in London, on 2 Dec. 1802, Elizabeth, daughter of W. Glascock, and had several children, of whom two sons and one daughter survived infancy. His wife nursed him at St. Jean de Luz after his wound at Orthes, making her way over snowy mountains from Bilbao. When he went to America three months afterwards he promised her that it should be his last campaign. She died 12 May 1845.

[Gent. Mag. 1814, ii. 483; United Service Journal, 1829, p. 414; Cole's Peninsular Generals; Smyth's History of the Twentieth Regiment; Steevens's Reminiscences of my Military Life; Bunbury's Narratives of some Passages in the Great War, pp. 8, 152, 247, 435; Gleig's Washington and New Orleans; James's Military Occurrences of the late War between Great Britain and the United States; Ingraham's Sketch of the Events which preceded the capture of Washington; Wellington Despatches, x. 338, 582; Wellington Supplementary Series, viii. 370, 693, ix. 85, 137, 292, 366; Castlereagh Correspondence, x. 138, &c.; Burke's Landed Gentry; and information furnished by Major Ross of Bladensburg, C.B.] 

ROSS, ROBERT DALRYMPLE (1828–1887), speaker of the South Australian House of Assembly, born in 1828 at St. Vincent, West Indies, on one of his father's estates, was son of John Pemberton Ross, speaker of the House of Assembly at St. Vincent, by his wife, only daughter of Alexander Anderson [q. v.], the botanist. He was educated in England, and eventually entered the commissariat department of the army as a temporary clerk in May 1855, joining the Turkish contingent in the Crimea. On 1 April 1856 he was confirmed in the department, and at the close of the war he was thanked for his services and received the Turkish medal. Shortly afterwards he volunteered for service on the west coast of Africa, and was senior commissariat officer at Cape Coast Castle from August 1856 to October 1859, becoming deputy assistant commissary-general on 17 Sept. 1858. During this period he sat as a member of the legislative council for the Gold Coast Colony, and for a short time acted as colonial secretary; in the latter capacity he took the lead in putting down a serious rising of the natives. In 1860 he went on active service to China, and served through the war of that year.

In January 1862 he was ordered to South