The War Of 1812 And The New West
The spring of 1812 thus found the back country in a turmoil, and it was
with a real sense of relief that the settlers became aware of the
American declaration of war against Great Britain on the 18th of June.
More than once Governor Harrison had asked for authority to raise an
army with which to "scour" the Wabash territory. In the fear that such a
step would drive the redskins into the arms of the British, the War
Department had withheld its consent. Now that the ban was lifted, the
people could expect the necessary measures to be taken for their
defense. In no part of the country was the war more popular; nowhere did
the mass of the able-bodied population show greater eagerness to take
the field.
According to official returns, the Westerners were totally unprepared
for the contest. There were but five garrisoned posts between the Ohio
and the Canadian frontier. Fort Harrison had fifty men, Fort Wayne
eighty-five, Fort Dearborn fifty-three, Fort Mackinac eighty-eight, and
Detroit one hundred and twenty--a total force of fewer than four
hundred. The entire standing army of the United States numbered but
sixty-seven hundred men, and it was obvious that the trans-Alleghany
population would be obliged to carry almost alone the burden of their
own defense. The task would not be easy; for General Brock, commanding
in upper Canada, had at least two thousand regulars and, as soon as
hostilities began, was joined by Tecumseh and many hundred redskins.
While the question of the war was still under debate in Congress,
President Madison made a requisition on Ohio for twelve hundred militia,
and in early summer the Governors of Indiana and Illinois called
hundreds of volunteers into service. Leaving their families as far as
possible under the protection of stockades or of the towns, the patriots
flocked to the mustering-grounds; many, like Cincinnatus of old,
deserted the plough in midfield. Guns and ammunition in sufficient
quantity were lacking; even tents and blankets were often wanting. But
enthusiasm ran high, and only capable leadership was needed to make of
these frontier forces, once they were properly equipped, a formidable
foe.
The story of the leaders and battles of the war in the West has been
told in an earlier volume of this series. ¹ It will be necessary here
merely to call to mind the stages through which this contest passed, as
a preliminary to a glimpse of the conditions under which Westerners
fought and of the new position into which their section of the country
was brought when peace was restored. So far as the regions north of the
Ohio were concerned, the war developed two phases. The first began with
General William Hull's expedition from Ohio against Fort Malden for the
relief of Detroit, and it ended with the humiliating surrender of that
important post, together with the forced abandonment of Forts Dearborn
and Mackinac, so that the Wabash and Maumee became, for all practical
purposes, the country's northern boundary. This was a story of complete
and bitter defeat. The second phase began likewise with a disaster--the
needless loss of a thousand men on the Raisin River, near Detroit. Yet
it succeeded in bringing William Henry Harrison into chief command, and
it ended in Commodore Perry's signal victory on Lake Erie and Harrison's
equally important defeat of the disheartened British land forces on the
banks of the Thames River, north of the Lake. At this Battle of the
Thames perished Tecumseh, who in point of fact was the real force behind
the British campaigns in the West. Tradition describes him on the eve of
the battle telling his comrades that his last day had come, solemnly
stripping off his British uniform before going into battle, and arraying
himself in the fighting costume of his own people.
¹ See The Fight for a Free Sea, by Ralph D. Paine (in The Chronicles of
America).
For two-thirds of the time, the war went badly for the Westerners, and
only at the end did it turn out to be a brilliant success. The reasons
for the dreary succession of disasters are not difficult to discover.
Foremost among them is the character of the troops and officers. The
material from which the regiments were recruited was intrinsically good,
but utterly raw and untrained. The men could shoot well; they had great
powers of endurance; and they were brave. But there the list of their
military virtues ends.
The scheme of military organization relied upon throughout the West was
that of the volunteer militia. In periods of ordinary Indian warfare the
system served its purpose fairly well. Under stern necessity, the
self-willed, independence-loving backwoodsmen could be brought to act
together for a few weeks or months; but they had little systematic
training, and their impatience of restraint prevented the building up of
any real discipline. There were periodic musters for company or
regimental drill. But, as a rule, drill duty was not taken seriously.
Numbers of men failed to report; and those who came were likely to give
most of their time to horse-races, wrestling-matches, shooting
contests--not to mention drinking and brawling--which turned the
occasion into mere merrymaking or disorder. The men brought few guns,
and when drills were actually held these soldiers in the making
contented themselves with parading with cornstalks over their shoulders.
"Cornstalk drill" thus became a frontier epithet of derision. It goes
without saying that these troops were poorly officered. The captains and
colonels were chosen by the men, frequently with more regard for their
political affiliations or their general standing in the community than
for their capacity as military commanders; nor were the higher officers,
appointed by the chief executive of territory, state, or nation, more
likely to be chosen with a view to their military fitness.
So it came about, as Roosevelt has said, that the frontier people of the
second generation "had no military training whatever, and though they
possessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from
it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of
practising self-restraint or obeying orders longer than they saw fit." ¹
When the War of 1812 began, these backwoods troops were pitted against
British regulars who were powerfully supported by Indian allies. The
officers of these untrained American troops were, like Hull, pompous,
broken-down, political incapables; while to the men themselves may
fairly be applied Amos Kendall's disgusted characterization of a
Kentucky muster: "The soldiers are under no more restraint than a herd
of swine. Reasoning, remonstrating, threatening, and ridiculing their
officers, they show their sense of equality and their total want of
subordination." Not until the very last of the war, when under
Harrison's direction capable and experienced officers drilled them into
real soldiers, did these backwoods stalwarts become an effective
fighting force.
¹ Winning of the West, vol. IV. p. 246.
There were also shortcomings of another sort. None was more exasperating
or costly than the lack of means of transportation. Even in Ohio, the
oldest and most settled portion of the Northwest, roads were few and
poor; elsewhere there were practically none of any kind. But the regions
in which the war was carried on were far too sparsely populated to be
able to furnish the supplies, even the foodstuffs, needed by the troops;
and materials of every sort had to be transported from the East, by
river, lake, and wilderness trail. Up and down the great unbroken
stretches between the Ohio and the Lakes moved the floundering supply
trains in the vain effort to keep up with the armies, or to reach camps
or forts in time to avert starvation or disaster. Pack-horses waded
knee-deep in mud; wagons were dragged through mire up to their hubs;
even empty vehicles sometimes became so embedded that they had to be
abandoned, the drivers being glad to get off with their horses alive.
Many times a quartermaster, taking advantage of a frost, would send off
a convoy of provisions, only to hear of its being swamped by a thaw
before reaching its destination. One of the tragedies of the war was the
suffering of the troops while waiting for supplies of clothing, tents,
medicines, and food which were stuck in swamps or frozen up in rivers or
lakes.
Beset with pleurisy, pneumonia, and rheumatism in winter, with fevers in
summer, and subject to attack by the Indians at all times, these
frontier soldiers led an existence of exceptional hardship. Only the
knowledge that they were fighting for their freedom and their homes held
them to their task. An interesting sidelight on the conditions under
which their work was done is contained in the following extract from a
letter written by a volunteer in 1814:
On the second day of our march a courier arrived from General Harrison,
ordering the artillery to advance with all possible speed. This was
rendered totally impossible by the snow which took place, it being a
complete swamp nearly all day. On the evening of the same day news
arrived that General Harrison had retreated to Portage River, eighteen
miles in the rear of the encampment at the rapids. As many men as could
be spared determined to proceed immediately to re-enforce him.... At two
o'clock the next morning our tents were struck, and in half an hour we
were on the road. I will candidly confess that on that day I regretted
being a soldier. On that day we marched thirty miles under an incessant
rain; and I am afraid you will doubt my veracity when I tell you that in
eight miles of the best of the road, it took us over the knees, and
often to the middle. The Black Swamp would have been considered
impassable by all but men determined to surmount every difficulty to
accomplish the object of their march. In this swamp you lose sight of
terra firma altogether--the water was about six inches deep on the ice,
which was very rotten, often breaking through to the depth of four or
five feet. The same night we encamped on very wet ground, but the driest
that could be found, the rain still continuing. It was with difficulty
we could raise fires; we had no tents; our clothes were wet, no axes,
nothing to cook with, and very little to eat. A brigade of pack-horses
being near us, we procured from them some flour, killed a hog (there
were plenty of them along the road); our bread was baked in the ashes,
and our pork we broiled on the coals--a sweeter meal I never partook of.
When we went to sleep it was on two logs laid close to each other, to
keep our bodies from the damp ground. Good God! What a pliant being is
man in adversity. ¹
¹ Dawson, William H. Harrison, p. 369.
The principal theater of war was the Great Lakes and the lands adjacent
to them. Prior to the campaign which culminated in Jackson's victory at
New Orleans after peace had been signed, the Mississippi Valley had been
untrodden by British soldiery. The contest, none the less, came close
home to the backwoods populations. Scores of able-bodied men from every
important community saw months or years of toilsome service; many failed
to return to their homes, or else returned crippled, weakened, or
stricken with fatal diseases; crops were neglected, or had only such
care as could be given them by old men and boys; trade languished;
Indian depredations wrought further ruin to life and property and kept
the people continually in alarm. Until 1814, reports of successive
defeats, in both the East and West, had a depressing influence and led
to solemn speculation as to whether the back country stood in danger of
falling again under British dominion.
It was, therefore, with a very great sense of relief that the West heard
in 1815 that peace had been concluded. At a stroke both the British
menace and the danger from the Indians were removed; for although the
redskins were still numerous and discontented, their spirit of
resistance was broken. Never again was there a general uprising against
the whites; never again did the Northwest witness even a local Indian
war of any degree of seriousness save Black Hawk's Rebellion in 1832.
Tecumseh manifestly realized before he made his last stand at the Thames
that the cause of his people was forever lost.
For several years the unsettled conditions on the frontiers had
restrained any general migration thither from the seaboard States. But
within a few months after the proclamation of peace the tide again set
westward, and with an unprecedented force. Men who had suffered in their
property or other interests from the war turned to Indiana and Illinois
as a promising field in which to rebuild their fortunes. The rapid
extinction of Indian titles opened up vast tracts of desirable land, and
the conditions of purchase were made so easy that any man of ordinary
industry and integrity could meet them. Speculators and promoters
industriously advertised the advantages of localities in which they were
interested, boomed new towns, and even loaned money to ambitious
emigrants.
The upshot was that the population of Indiana grew from twenty-five
thousand in 1810 to seventy thousand in 1816, when the State was
admitted to the Union. Illinois filled with equal rapidity, and attained
statehood only two years later. Then the tide swept irresistibly
westward across the Mississippi into the great regions which had been
acquired from France in 1803. As late as 1812 the Territory of Missouri,
comprising all of the Louisiana Purchase north of the present State of
Louisiana, had a population of only twenty-two thousand, including many
French and Spanish settlers and traders. But in 1818 it had a population
of more than sixty thousand, and was asking Congress for legislation
under which the most densely inhabited portion should be set off as the
State of Missouri. Thus the Old Northwest was not merely losing its
frontier character and taking its place in the nation on a footing with
the seaboard sections; it was also serving as the open gateway to a
newer, vaster, and in some respects richer American back country.
In the main, southern Indiana and Illinois--as well as the
trans-Mississippi territory--drew from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia,
and the remoter South. North of the latitude of Indianapolis and St.
Louis the lines of migration led chiefly from New England, New York, and
Pennsylvania. But many of the settlers came, immediately or after only a
brief interval, from Europe. The decade following the close of the war
was a time of unprecedented emigration from England, Scotland, Ireland,
and Germany to the United States; and while many of the newcomers found
homes in the eastern States, where they in a measure offset the
depopulation caused by the westward exodus, a very large proportion
pressed on across the mountains in quest of the cheap lands in the
undeveloped interior. During these years the western country was
repeatedly visited by European travelers with a view to ascertaining its
resources, markets, and other attractions for settlers; and emigration
thither was powerfully stimulated by the writings of these observers, as
well as by the activities of sundry founders of agricultural colonies.
"These favorable accounts," wrote Adlard Welby, an Englishman who made a
tour of inspection through the West in 1819, "aided by a period of real
privation and discontent in Europe, caused emigration to increase
ten-fold; and though various reports of unfavorable nature soon
circulated, and many who had emigrated actually returned to their native
land in disgust, yet still the trading vessels were filled with
passengers of all ages and descriptions, full of hope, looking forward
to the West as to a land of liberty and delight--a land flowing with
milk and honey--a second land of Canaan." ¹
¹ Thwaites, Early Western Travels, vol. XII, p. 148.
After the dangers from the Indians were overcome, the main obstacle to
western development was the lack of means of easy and cheap
transportation. The settler found it difficult to reach the region which
he had selected for his home. Eastern supplies of salt, iron, hardware,
and fabrics and foodstuffs could be obtained only at great expense. The
fast-increasing products of the western farms--maize, wheat, meats,
livestock--could be marketed only at a cost which left a slender margin
of profit. The experiences of the late war had already proved the need
of highways as auxiliaries of national defense. It required a month to
carry goods from Baltimore to central Ohio. None the less, even before
the War of 1812, hundreds of transportation companies were running
four-horse freight wagons between the eastern and western States; and in
1820 more than three thousand wagons--practically all carrying western
products--passed back and forth between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh,
transporting merchandise valued at eighteen million dollars.
Small wonder that western producer and eastern dealer alike became
interested in internal improvements; or that under the double stimulus
of private and public enterprise Indian trails fast gave way to rough
pioneer roadways, and they to carefully planned and durable turnpikes.
Long before the War of 1812, Jefferson, Gallatin, Clay, and other
statesmen had conceived of a great highway, or series of highways,
connecting the seaboard with the interior as the surest and best means
of promoting national unity and strength; and, in the act of Congress of
1802 admitting the State of Ohio, a promising beginning had been made by
setting aside five per cent of the money received from the sale of
public lands in the State for the building of roads extending eastward
to the navigable waters of Atlantic streams. In 1808 Secretary Gallatin
had presented to Congress a report calling for an outlay on internal
improvements of two million dollars of federal money a year for ten
years; and in 1811 the Government had entered upon the greatest
undertaking of its kind in the history of the country.
This enterprise was the building of the magnificent highway known to the
law as the Cumberland Road, but familiar to uncounted emigrants,
travelers, and traders--and deeply embedded in the traditions of the
Middle States and the West--as the National Road. Starting at
Cumberland, Maryland, this great artery of commerce and travel was
pushed slowly through the Alleghanies, even in the dark days of the war,
and by 1818 it was open for traffic as far west as Wheeling. The method
of construction was that which had lately been devised by John McAdam in
England, and involved spreading crushed limestone over a carefully
prepared road-bed in three layers, traffic being permitted for a time
over each layer in succession. This "macadamized" surface was curved to
permit drainage, and extra precautions were taken in localities where
spring freshets were likely to cause damage.
Controversy raged over proposals to extend the road to the farthest
West, to provide its upkeep by a system of tolls, and to build similar
highways farther north and south. But for a time constitutional and
legal difficulties were swept aside and construction continued. Columbus
was reached in 1833, Indianapolis about 1840; and the roadway was graded
to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, and marked out to Jefferson
City, Missouri, although it was never completed to the last-mentioned
point by federal authority. When one reads that the original cost of
construction mounted to $10,000 a mile in central Pennsylvania, and even
$13,000 a mile in the neighborhood of Wheeling, one's suspicion is
aroused that public contracts were not less dubious a hundred years ago
than they have been known to be in our own time.
The National Road has long since lost its importance as the great
connecting link of East and West. But in its day, especially before
1860, it was a teeming thoroughfare. Its course was lined with
hospitable farmhouses and was dotted with fast-growing villages and
towns. Some of the latter which once were nationally famed were left
high and dry by later shifts of the lines of traffic, and have quite
disappeared from the map. Throughout the spring and summer months there
was a steady westward stream of emigrants; hardly a day failed to bring
before the observer's eye the creaking canvas-covered wagon of the
homeseeker. Singly and in companies they went, ever toward the promised
land. Wagon-trains of merchandise from the eastern markets toiled
patiently along the way. Speculators, peddlers, and sightseers added to
the procession, and in hundreds of farmhouses the women-folk and
children gathered in interested groups by the evening fire to hear the
chance visitor talk politics or war and retail with equal facility the
gossip of the next township and that of Washington or New York. Great
stage-coach lines--the National Road Stage Company, the Ohio National
Stage Company, and others--advertised the advantages of their services
and sought patronage with all the ingenuity of the modern railroad.
Taverns and roadhouses of which no trace remains today offered
entertainment at any figure, and of almost any character, that the
customer desired. Eastward flowed a steady stream of wagon-trains of
flour, tobacco, and pork, with great droves of cattle and hogs to be
fattened for the Philadelphia or Baltimore markets.
At almost precisely the same time that the first shovelful of earth was
turned for the Cumberland Road, people dwelling on the banks of the
upper Ohio were startled by the spectacle of a large boat moving
majestically down stream entirely devoid of sail, oar, pole, or any
other visible means of propulsion or control. This object of wonderment
was the New Orleans, the first steamboat to be launched on western
waters.
The conquest of the steamboat was speedy and complete. Already in 1819
there were sixty-three such craft on the Ohio, and in 1834--when the
total shipping tonnage of the Atlantic seaboard was 76,064, and of the
British Empire 82,696--the tonnage afloat on the Ohio and Mississippi
was 126,278. Vessels regularly ascended the navigable tributaries of the
greater streams in quest of cargoes, and while craft of other sorts did
not disappear, the great and growing commerce of the river was
revolutionized.
In the upbuilding of steamboat navigation the thriving, bustling,
boastful spirit of the West found ample play. Steamboat owners vied with
one another in adorning their vessels with bowsprits, figureheads, and
all manner of tinseled decorations, and in providing elegant
accommodations for passengers; engineers and pilots gloried in speed
records and challenged one another to races which ended in some of the
most shocking steamboat disasters known to history. The unconscious
bombast of an anonymous Cincinnati writer in Timothy Flint's Western
Monthly Review in 1827 gives us the real flavor of the steamboat
business on the threshold of the Jacksonian era:
An Atlantic cit, who talks of us under the name of backwoodsmen, would
not believe, that such fairy structures of oriental gorgeousness and
splendor as the Washington, the Florida, the Walk in the Water, The Lady
of the Lake, etc., etc., had ever existed in the imaginative brain of a
romancer, much less, that they were actually in existence, rushing down
the Mississippi, as on the wings of the wind, or plowing up between the
forests, and walking against the mighty current "as things of life,"
bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, everything real,
and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos, and
stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and love-making,
and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred
fellows, who have seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor
gun-powder. A steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest
villages of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little
Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in
the minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery.... Cincinnati will soon be the centre of the "celestial empire,"
as the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms, the
seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the opulent
southern planters will take their families, their dogs and parrots,
through a world of forests, from New Orleans to New York, giving us a
call by the way. When they are more acquainted with us, their voyage
will often terminate here. ¹
¹ Vol. I, p. 25 (May, 1827).
The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by no
means restricted to steamboats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and
money-making. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the most
familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider, with his
Bible and saddlebags; and no community was so remote, or so hardened, as
not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of religious zeal by the crude
but terrifying eloquence of the revivalist. For education, likewise,
there was a growing regard. Nowhere did the devotion of the Western
people to the twin ideas of democracy and enlightenment find nobler
expression than in the clause of the Indiana constitution of 1816 making
it the duty of the Legislature to provide for "a general system of
education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a
state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to
all." This principle found general application throughout the Northwest.
By 1830 common schools existed wherever population was sufficient to
warrant the expense; academies and other secondary schools were
springing up in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and many lesser
places; state universities existed in Ohio and Indiana; and Baptists,
Methodists, and Presbyterians had begun to dot the country with small
colleges. Literature developed slowly. But newspapers appeared almost
before there were readers; and that the new society was by no means
without cultural, and even æsthetic, aspiration is indicated by the
long-continued rivalry of Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, to be
known as "the Athens of the West."