[1] Upon returning to duty later that year, Ross was made a major general and sent to North America, as commander of "all British forces on the East Coast".

In August 1814, he reached Benedict, Maryland and continued on, leading the professional soldiers who quickly defeated a poorly organized American militia at the Battle of Bladensburg on 24 August; that evening, he led his troops into Washington D.C.[1] During his command of the Burning of Washington many important U.S. Government buildings, including the White House and the Capitol were damaged, demoralizing and greatly damaging the American war effort.

He was seriously wounded in the left side of his neck at the Battle of Orthez, on 27 February 1814, and had just returned to service when he was given command of an expeditionary force to attack the United States.

Under Ross' direction, his troops set fire to the city's public buildings, including the White House and the United States Capitol.

In Ross's home village of Rostrevor, County Down in Northern Ireland, he is commemorated by a 99-foot granite obelisk near the shoreline of Carlingford Lough.

[18] The latter is described by a book about Ross as: "Britannia is represented weeping over the tomb of the departed warrior, over which an, American flag is being deposited by a figure of Valour, while Fame descends with a wreath of laurels to crown the hero’s head".

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.

However, his descendants were given an augmentation of honour to the Ross armorial bearings (namely, the addition of a chief to the shield and a second crest, both depicting an arm grasping the old American flag 15 stars and 15 stripes (Star-Spangled Banner (flag) of 1795-1818) on a broken staff, along with the additional motto of "Bladensburg") and the family name was changed to the victory title "Ross-of-Bladensburg", which was granted to his widow.

[21][22][23] In honour of the Federal City and national capital's history of Washington, D.C., there is also a portrait of the infamous General Ross in the United States Capitol's central rotunda, along with a small art decorative vignette near a corridor ceiling portraying the Burning of Washington and exhibits in the recently constructed underground visitors' center on the Capitol's east front.

Along with several illustrations / exhibits in various War of 1812 historical sites / museums in the Baltimore metropolitan area, including a stone obelisk monument near the site off Old North Point Road in southeastern Baltimore County, erected in memory of Aquila Randall who was also killed here (dedicated in 1817 by fellow soldiers and officers of his Maryland Militia regiment), and where General Ross supposedly was shot.

One of the leading physicians then residing in 1814 Washington paid tribute to Ross’s ‘consummate modesty and politeness’.Local lore indicates that the two snipers/riflemen Daniel Wells and Henry McComas (of the unit of Aisquith's Sharpshooters") were first buried in a local churchyard mourned by their fellow militia soldiers and citizens of the Town, but forty years later in the 1850s were exhumed and reburied after elaborate processions and funerals in a monumental tomb with a stone obelisk in what was known then as Ashland Square.