LOST GROUND REGAINED
General William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe and the Governor
of Indiana Territory, whose capital was at Vincennes on the Wabash,
possessed the experience and the instincts of a soldier. He had foreseen
that Hull, unless he received support, must either abandon Detroit or be
hopelessly hemmed in. The task of defending the western border was
ardently undertaken by the States of Kentucky and Ohio. They believed in
the war and were ready to aid it with the men and resources of a
vigorous population of almost a million. When the word came that Hull
was in desperate straits, Harrison hastened to organize a relief
expedition. Before he could move, Detroit had fallen. But a high tide of
enthusiasm swept him on toward an attempt to recover the lost empire.
The Federal Government approved his plans and commissioned him as
commander of the Northwestern army of ten thousand men.
In the early autumn of 1812, General Harrison launched his ambitious and
imposing campaign, by which three separate bodies of troops were to
advance and converge within striking distance of Detroit, while a fourth
was to invade and destroy the nests of Indians on the Wabash and
Illinois rivers. An active British force might have attacked and
defeated these isolated columns one by one, for they were beyond
supporting distance of each other; but Brock now needed his regulars for
the defense of the Niagara frontier. The scattered American army,
including brigades from Virginia and Pennsylvania, was too strong to be
checked by Indian forays, but it had not reckoned with the obstacles of
an unfriendly wilderness and climate. In October, no more than a month
after the bugles had sounded the advance, the campaign was halted,
demoralized and darkly uncertain. A vast swamp stretched as a barrier
across the route and heavy rains made it impassable.
Hull had crossed the same swamp with his small force in the favorable
summer season, but Harrison was unable to transport the food and war
material needed by his ten thousand men. A million rations were
required at the goal of the Maumee Rapids, and yet after two months of
heartbreaking endeavor not a pound of provisions had been carried within
fifty miles of this place. Wagons and pack-trains floundered in the mud
and were abandoned. The rivers froze and thwarted the use of flotillas
of scows. Winter closed down, and the American army was forlornly mired
and blockaded along two hundred miles of front. The troops at Fort
Defiance ate roots and bark. Typhus broke out among them, and they died
like flies. For the failure to supply the army, the War Department was
largely responsible, and Secretary Eustis very properly resigned in
December. This removed one glaring incompetent from the list but it
failed to improve Harrison's situation.
It was not until the severe frosts of January, 1813, fettered the swamps
that Harrison was able to extricate his troops and forward supplies to
the shore of Lake Erie for an offensive against Amherstburg. First in
motion was the left wing of thirteen hundred Kentucky militia and
regulars under General Winchester. This officer was an elderly planter
who, like Hull, had worn a uniform in the Revolution. He had no great
aptitude for war and was held in low esteem by the Kentuckians of his
command--hungry, mutinous, and disgusted men, who were counting the days
before their enlistments should expire. The commonplace Winchester was
no leader to hold them in hand and spur their jaded determination.
While they were building storehouses and log defenses, within
dangerously easy distance of the British post at Amherstburg, the
tempting message came that the settlement of Frenchtown, on the Raisin,
thirty miles away and within the British lines, was held by only two
companies of Canadian militia. Here was an opportunity for a dashing
adventure, and Winchester ordered half his total force to march and
destroy this detachment of the enemy. The troops accordingly set out,
drove home a brisk assault, cleared Frenchtown of its defenders, and
held their ground awaiting orders.
Winchester then realized that he had leaped before he looked. He had
seriously weakened his own force while the column at Frenchtown was in
peril from two thousand hostile troops and Indians only eighteen miles
beyond the river Raisin. The Kentuckians left with him decided matters
for themselves. They insisted on marching to the support of their
comrades at Frenchtown. Meanwhile General Harrison had learned of this
fatuous division of strength and was hastening to the base at the falls
of the Maumee. There he found only three hundred men. All the others had
gone with Winchester to reinforce the men at Frenchtown. It was too late
to summon troops from other points, and Harrison waited with forebodings
of disaster.
News reached him after two days. The Americans at the Raisin had
suffered not only a defeat but a massacre. Nearly four hundred were
killed in battle or in flight. Those who survived were prisoners. No
more than thirty had escaped of a force one thousand strong. The enemy
had won this extraordinary success with five hundred white troops and
about the same number of Indians, led by Colonel Procter, whom Brock had
placed in command of the fort at Amherstburg. Procter's name is infamous
in the annals of the war. The worst traditions of Indian atrocity,
uncontrolled and even encouraged, cluster about his memory. He was later
promoted in rank instead of being degraded, a costly blunder which
England came to regret and at last redeemed. A notoriously incompetent
officer, on this one occasion of the battle of the Raisin he acted with
decision and took advantage of the American blunder.
The conduct of General Winchester after his arrival at Frenchtown is
inexplicable. He did nothing to prepare his force for action even on
learning that the British were advancing from Amherstburg. A report of
the disaster, after recording that no patrols or pickets were ordered
out during the night, goes on:
The troops were permitted to select, each for himself, such
quarters on the west side of the river as might please him best,
whilst the general took his quarters on the east side--not the
least regard being paid to defense, order, regularity, or system in
the posting of the different corps.... Destitute of artillery, or
engineers, of men who had ever heard or seen the least of an enemy;
and with but a very inadequate supply of ammunition--how he ever
could have entertained the most distant hope of success, or what
right he had to presume to claim it, is to me one of the strangest
things in the world.
At dawn, on the 21st of January, the British and Indians, having crossed
the frozen Detroit River the day before, formed within musket shot of
the American lines and opened the attack with a battery of
three-pounders. They might have rushed the camp with bayonet and
tomahawk and killed most of the defenders asleep, but the cannonade
alarmed the Kentuckians and they took cover behind a picket fence, using
their long rifles so expertly that they killed or wounded a hundred and
eighty-five of the British regulars, who thereupon had to abandon their
artillery. Meanwhile, the American regular force, caught on open ground,
was flanked and driven toward the river, carrying a militia regiment
with it. Panic spread among these unfortunate men and they fled through
the deep snow, Winchester among them, while six hundred whooping Indians
slew and scalped them without mercy as they ran.
But behind the picket fence the Kentuckians still squinted along the
barrels of their rifles and hammered home more bullets and patches.
Three hundred and eighty-four of them, they showed a spirit that made
their conduct the bright, heroic episode of that black day. Forgotten
are their mutinies, their profane disregard of the Articles of War,
their jeers at generals and such. They finished in style and covered the
multitude of their sins. Unclothed, unfed, uncared for, dirty, and
wretched, they proved themselves worthy to be called American soldiers.
They fought until there was no more ammunition, until they were
surrounded by a thousand of the enemy, and then they honorably
surrendered.
The brutal Procter, aware that the Indians would commit hideous
outrages if left unrestrained, nevertheless returned to Amherstburg with
his troops and his prisoners, leaving the American wounded to their
fate. That night the savages came back to Frenchtown and massacred those
hurt and helpless men, thirty in number.
This unhappy incident of the campaign, not so much a battle as a
catastrophe, delayed Harrison's operations. His failures had shaken
popular confidence, and at the end of this dismal winter, after six
months of disappointments in which ten thousand men had accomplished
nothing, he was compelled to report to the Secretary of War:
Amongst the reasons which make it necessary to employ a large
force, I am sorry to mention the dismay and disinclination to the
service which appears to prevail in the western country; numbers
must give that confidence which ought to be produced by conscious
valor and intrepidity, which never existed in any army in a
superior degree than amongst the greater part of the militia which
were with me through the winter. The new drafts from this State
[Ohio] are entirely of another character and are not to be depended
upon. I have no doubt, however, that a sufficient number of good
men can be procured, and should they be allowed to serve on
horseback, Kentucky would furnish some regiments that would not be
inferior to those that fought at the river Raisin; and these were,
in my opinion, superior to any militia that ever took the field in
modern times.
There was to be no immediate renewal of action between Procter and
Harrison. Each seemed to have conceived so much respect for the forces
of the other that they proceeded to increase the distance between them
as rapidly as possible. Fearing to be overtaken and greatly outnumbered,
the British leader retreated to Canada while the American leader was in
a state of mind no less uneasy. Harrison promptly set fire to his
storehouses and supplies at the Maumee Rapids, his advanced base near
Lake Erie. Thus all this labor and exertion and expense vanished in
smoke while, in the set diction of war, he retired some fifteen miles.
In such a vast hurry were the adversaries to be quit of each other that
a day and a half after the fight at Frenchtown they were sixty miles
apart. Harrison remained a fortnight on this back trail and collected
two thousand of his troops, with whom he returned to the ruins of his
foremost post and undertook the task all over again.
The defensive works which he now built were called Fort Meigs. For the
time there was no more talk of invading Canada. The service of the
Kentucky and Ohio militia was expiring, and these seasoned regiments
were melting away like snow. Presently Fort Meigs was left with no more
than five hundred war-worn men to hold out against British operations
afloat and ashore. Luckily Procter had expended his energies at
Frenchtown and seemed inclined to repose, for he made no effort to
attack the few weak garrisons which guarded the American territory near
at hand. From January until April he neglected his opportunities while
more American militia marched homeward, while Harrison was absent, while
Fort Meigs was unfinished.
At length the British offensive was organized, and a thousand white
soldiers and as many Indians, led by Tecumseh, sallied out of
Amherstburg with a naval force of two gunboats. Heavy guns were dragged
from Detroit to batter down the log walls, for it was the intention to
surround and besiege Fort Meigs in the manner taught by the military
science of Europe. Meanwhile Harrison had come back from a recruiting
mission; and a new brigade of Kentucky militia, twelve hundred strong,
under Brigadier General Green Clay, was to follow in boats down the
Auglaize and Maumee rivers. Procter's guns were already pounding the
walls of Fort Meigs on the 5th of May when eight hundred troops of this
fresh American force arrived within striking distance. They dashed upon
the British batteries and took them with the bayonet in a wild,
impetuous charge. It was then their business promptly to reform and
protect themselves, but through lack of training they failed to obey
orders and were off hunting the enemy, every man for himself. In the
meantime three companies of British regulars and some volunteers took
advantage of the confusion, summoned the Indians, and let loose a
vicious counter-attack.
Within sight of General Harrison and the garrison of Fort Meigs, these
bold Kentuckians were presently driven from the captured guns,
scattered, and shot down or taken prisoner. Only a hundred and seventy
of them got away, and they lost even their boats and supplies. The
British loss was no more than fifty in killed and wounded. Again Procter
inflamed the hatred and contempt of his American foes because forty of
his prisoners were tomahawked while guarded by British soldiers. He made
no effort to save them and it was the intervention of Tecumseh, the
Indian leader, which averted the massacre of the whole body of five
hundred prisoners.
Across the river, Colonel John Miller, of the American regular
infantry, had attempted a gallant sortie from the fort and had taken a
battery but this sally had no great effect on the issue of the
engagement. Harrison had lost almost a thousand men, half his fighting
force, and was again shut up within the barricades and blockhouses of
Fort Meigs. Procter continued the siege only four days longer, for his
Indian allies then grew tired of it and faded into the forest. He was
not reluctant to accept this excuse for withdrawing. His own militia
were drifting away, his regulars were suffering from illness and
exposure, and Fort Meigs itself was a harder nut to crack than he had
anticipated. Procter therefore withdrew to Amherstburg and made no more
trouble until June, when he sent raiding parties into Ohio and created
panic among the isolated settlements.
Harrison had become convinced that his campaign must be a defensive one
only, until a strong American naval force could be mustered on Lake
Erie. He moved his headquarters to Upper Sandusky and Cleveland and
concluded to mark time while Perry's fleet was building. The outlook was
somber, however, for his thin line of garrisons and his supply bases.
They were threatened in all directions, but he was most concerned for
the important depot which he had established at Upper Sandusky, no more
than thirty miles from any British landing force which should decide to
cross Lake Erie. The place had no fortifications; it was held by a few
hundred green recruits; and the only obstacle to a hostile ascent of the
Sandusky River was a little stockade near its mouth, called Fort
Stephenson.
For the Americans to lose the accumulation of stores and munitions which
was almost the only result of a year's campaign would have been a fatal
blow. Harrison was greatly disturbed to hear that Tecumseh had gathered
his warriors and was following the trail that led to Upper Sandusky and
that Procter was moving coastwise with his troops in a flotilla under
oars and sail. Harrison was, or believed himself to be, in grave danger
of confronting a plight similar to that of William Hull, beset in front,
in flank, in rear. His first thought was to evacuate the stockade of
Fort Stephenson and to concentrate his force, although this would leave
the Sandusky River open for a British advance from the shore of Lake
Erie.
An order was sent to young Major Croghan, who held Fort Stephenson with
one hundred and sixty men, to burn the buildings and retreat as fast as
possible up the river or along the shore of Lake Erie. This officer, a
Kentuckian not yet twenty-one years old, who honored the regiment to
which he belonged, deliberately disobeyed his commander. By so doing he
sounded a ringing note which was like the call of trumpets amidst the
failures, the cloudy uncertainties, the lack of virile leadership, that
had strewn the path of the war. In writing he sent this reply back to
General William Henry Harrison: "We have determined to maintain this
place, and by Heaven, we will."
It was a turning point, in a way, presaging more hopeful events, a
warning that youth must be served and that the doddering oldsters were
to give place to those who could stand up under the stern and exacting
tests of warfare. Such rash ardor was not according to precedent.
Harrison promptly relieved the impetuous Croghan of his command and sent
a colonel to replace him. But Croghan argued the point so eloquently
that the stockade was restored to him next day and he won his chance to
do or die. Harrison consolingly informed him that he was to retreat if
attacked by British troops "but that to attempt to retire in the face of
an Indian force would be vain."
Major Croghan blithely prepared to do anything else than retreat, while
General Harrison stayed ten miles away to plan a battle against
Tecumseh's Indians if they should happen to come in his direction. On
the 1st of August, Croghan's scouts informed him that the woods swarmed
with Indians and that British boats were pushing up the river. Procter
was on the scene again, and no sooner had his four hundred regulars
found a landing place than a curt demand for surrender came to Major
Croghan. The British howitzers peppered the stockade as soon as the
refusal was delivered, but they failed to shake the spirit of the
dauntless hundred and sixty American defenders. On the following day,
the 2d of August, Procter stupidly repeated his error of a direct
assault upon sheltered riflemen, which had cost him heavily at the
Raisin and at Fort Meigs. He ordered his redcoats to carry Fort
Stephenson. Again and again they marched forward until all the officers
had been shot down and a fifth of the force was dead or wounded.
American valor and marksmanship had proved themselves in the face of
heavy odds. At sunset the beaten British were flocking into their boats,
and Procter was again on his way to Amherstburg. His excuse for the
trouncing laid the blame on the Indians:
The troops, after the artillery had been used for some hours,
attacked two faces and, impossibilities being attempted, failed.
The fort, from which the severest fire I ever saw was maintained
during the attack, was well defended. The troops displayed the
greatest bravery, the much greater part of whom reached the fort
and made every effort to enter; but the Indians who had proposed
the assault and, had it not been assented to, would have ever
stigmatized the British character, scarcely came into fire before
they ran out of its reach. A more than adequate sacrifice having
been made to Indian opinion, I drew off the brave assailants.
The sound of Croghan's guns was heard in General Harrison's camp at
Seneca, ten miles up the river. Harrison had nothing to say but this:
"The blood be upon his own head. I wash my hands of it." This was a
misguided speech which the country received with marked disfavor while
it acclaimed young Croghan as the sterling hero of the western campaign.
He could be also a loyal as well as a successful subordinate, for he
ably defended Harrison against the indignation which menaced his station
as commander of the army. The new Secretary of War, John Armstrong,
ironically referred to Procter and Harrison as being always in terror of
each other, the one actually flying from his supposed pursuer after his
fiasco at Fort Stephenson, the other waiting only for the arrival of
Croghan at Seneca to begin a camp conflagration and flight to Upper
Sandusky.
The reconquest of Michigan and the Northwest depended now on the
American navy. Harrison wisely halted his inglorious operations by land
until the ships and sailors were ready to cooperate. Because the British
sway on the Great Lakes was unchallenged, the general situation of the
enemy was immensely better than it had been at the beginning of the
campaign. During a year of war the United States had steadily lost in
men, in territory, in prestige, and this in spite of the fact that the
opposing forces across the Canadian border were much smaller.
That the men of the American navy would be prompt to maintain the
traditions of the service was indicated in a small way by an incident of
the previous year on Lake Erie. In September, 1812, Lieutenant Jesse D.
Elliott had been sent to Buffalo to find a site for building naval
vessels. A few weeks later he was fitting out several purchased
schooners behind Squaw Island. Suddenly there came sailing in from
Amherstburg and anchored off Fort Erie two British armed brigs, the
_Detroit_ which had been surrendered by Hull, and the _Caledonia_ which
had helped to subdue the American garrison at Mackinac. Elliott had no
ships ready for action, but he was not to be daunted by such an
obstacle. It so happened that ninety Yankee seamen had been sent across
country from New York by Captain Isaac Chauncey. These worthy tars had
trudged the distance on foot, a matter of five hundred miles, with their
canvas bags on their backs, and they rolled into port at noon, in the
nick of time to serve Elliott's purpose. They were indubitably tired,
but he gave them not a moment for rest. A ration of meat and bread and a
stiff tot of grog, and they turned to and manned the boats which were to
cut out the two British brigs when darkness fell.
Elliott scraped together fifty soldiers and, filling two cutters with
his amphibious company, he stole out of Buffalo and pulled toward Fort
Erie. At one o'clock in the morning of the 9th of October they were
alongside the pair of enemy brigs and together the bluejackets and the
infantry tumbled over the bulwarks with cutlass, pistols, and boarding
pike. In ten minutes both vessels were captured and under sail for the
American shore. The _Caledonia_ was safely beached at Black Rock, where
Elliott was building his little navy yard. The wind, however, was so
light that the _Detroit_ was swept downward by the river current and had
to anchor under the fire of British batteries. These she fought with her
guns until all her powder was shot away. Then she cut her cable, hoisted
sail again, and took the bottom on Squaw Island, where both British and
American guns had the range of her. Elliott had to abandon her and set
fire to the hull, but he afterward recovered her ordnance.
What Elliott had in mind shows the temper of this ready naval officer.
"A strong inducement," he wrote, "was that with these two vessels and
those I have purchased, I should be able to meet the remainder of the
British force on the Upper Lakes." The loss of the _Detroit_ somewhat
disappointed this ambitious scheme but the success of the audacious
adventure foreshadowed later and larger exploits with far-reaching
results. Isaac Brock, the British general in Canada, had the genius to
comprehend the meaning of this naval exploit. "This event is
particularly unfortunate," he wrote, "and may reduce us to incalculable
distress. The enemy is making every exertion to gain a naval superiority
on both lakes; which, if they accomplish, I do not see how we can retain
the country." And to Procter, his commander at Detroit, he disclosed
the meaning of the naval loss as it affected the fortunes of the western
campaign: "This will reduce us to great distress. You will have the
goodness to state the expedients you possess to enable us to replace, as
far as possible, the heavy loss we have suffered in the _Detroit_."
But another year was required to teach the American Government the
lesson that a few small vessels roughly pegged together of planks sawn
from the forest, with a few hundred seamen and guns, might be far more
decisive than the random operations of fifty thousand troops. This
lesson, however, was at last learnt; and so, in the summer of 1813,
General William Henry Harrison waited at Seneca on the Sandusky River
until he received, on the 10th of September, the deathless despatch of
Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry: "We have met the enemy and they are
ours." The navy had at last cleared the way for the army.
Expeditiously forty-five hundred infantry were embarked and set ashore
only three miles from the coveted fort at Amherstburg. A mounted
regiment of a thousand Kentuckians, raised for frontier defense by
Richard M. Johnson, moved along the road to Detroit. Harrison was about
to square accounts with Procter, who had no stomach for a stubborn
defense. Tecumseh, still loyal to the British cause, summoned
thirty-five hundred of his warriors to the royal standard to stem this
American invasion. They expected that Procter would offer a courageous
resistance, for he had also almost a thousand hard-bitted British
troops, seasoned by a year's fighting. But Procter's sun had set and
disgrace was about to overtake him. To Tecumseh, a chieftain who had
waged war because of the wrongs suffered by his own people, the thought
of flight in this crisis was cowardly and intolerable. When Procter
announced that he proposed to seek refuge in retreat, Tecumseh told him
to his face that he was like a fat dog which had carried its tail erect
and now that it was frightened dropped its tail between its legs and
ran. The English might scamper as far as they liked but the Indians
would remain to meet the American invaders.
It was a helter-skelter exodus from Amherstburg and Detroit. All
property that could not be moved was burned or destroyed, and Procter
set out for Moraviantown, on the Thames River, seventy miles along the
road to Lake Ontario. Harrison, amazed at this behavior, reported:
"Nothing but infatuation could have governed General Proctor's conduct.
The day I landed below Malden [Amherstburg] he had at his disposal
upward of three thousand Indian warriors; his regular force reinforced
by the militia of the district would have made his number nearly equal
to my aggregate, which on the day of landing did not exceed forty-five
hundred.... His inferior officers say that his conduct has been a series
of continued blunders."
Procter had put a week behind him before Harrison set out from
Amherstburg in pursuit, but the British column was hampered in flight by
the women and children of the deserted posts, the sick and wounded, the
wagon trains, the stores, and baggage. The organization had gone to
pieces because of the demoralizing example set by its leader. A hundred
miles of wilderness lay between the fugitives and a place of refuge.
Overtaken on the Thames River, they were given no choice. It was fight
or surrender. Ahead of the American infantry brigades moved Johnson's
mounted Kentuckians, armed with muskets, rifles, knives, and tomahawks,
and led by a resourceful and enterprising soldier. Procter was compelled
to form his lines of battle across the road on the north bank of the
Thames or permit this formidable American cavalry to trample his
straggling ranks under hoof. Tecumseh's Indians, stationed in a swamp,
covered his right flank and the river covered his left. Harrison came
upon the enemy early in the afternoon of the 5th of October and formed
his line of battle. The action was carried on in a manner "not
sanctioned by anything that I had seen or heard of," said Harrison
afterwards. This first American victory of the war on land was, indeed,
quite irregular and unconventional. It was won by Johnson's mounted
riflemen, who divided and charged both the redcoats in front and the
Indians in the swamp. One detachment galloped through the first and
second lines of the British infantry while the other drove the Indians
into the American left wing and smashed them utterly. Tecumseh was among
the slain. It was all over in one hour and twenty minutes. Harrison's
foot soldiers had no chance to close with the enemy. The Americans lost
only fifteen killed and thirty wounded, and they took about five hundred
prisoners and all Procter's artillery, muskets, baggage, and stores.
Not only was the Northwest Territory thus regained for the United States
but the power of the Indian alliance was broken. Most of the hostile
tribes now abandoned the British cause. Tecumseh's confederacy of Indian
nations fell to pieces with the death of its leader. The British army
of Upper Canada, shattered and unable to receive reinforcements from
overseas, no longer menaced Michigan and the western front of the
American line. General Harrison returned to Detroit at his leisure, and
the volunteers and militia marched homeward, for no more than two
regular brigades were needed to protect all this vast area. The struggle
for its possession was a closed episode. In this quarter, however, the
war cry "On to Canada!" was no longer heard. The United States was
satisfied to recover what it had lost with Hull's surrender and to rid
itself of the peril of invasion and the horrors of Indian massacres
along its wilderness frontiers. Of the men prominent in the struggle,
Procter suffered official disgrace at the hands of his own Government
and William Henry Harrison became a President of the United States.
[Illustration: _OLIVER HAZARD PERRY AT THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE_
Painting by J.W. Jarvis. In the City Hall, New York, owned by the
Corporation.]
[Illustration: _ISAAC CHAUNCEY_
Painting in the Comptroller's Office, City Hall, New York, owned by the
Corporation.]