CHAPTER 16
Major General Anthony Wayne to the Rescue
Not many people had seen President George Washington lose his temper. His self-control was, by this time, legendary. But when he lost it, the unfortunate few witnesses never forgot the explosion. One of the most historic detonations occurred on December 9, 1791, when a messenger from Secretary of War Henry Knox arrived at the president’s Philadelphia mansion while Washington was entertaining guests at dinner. His secretary, Tobias Lear, hurried into the dining room and whispered that there was news from the west.
The president excused himself and rushed to a nearby parlor to glance at a dispatch from the commander of the western army, Major General Arthur St. Clair. The previous day, a newspaper had reported a rumor that the army had been mauled in a clash with hostile Indians. Within minutes Washington returned to the table, where he chatted agreeably with his guests until they departed.
Lear followed Washington into the parlor and asked if he was needed for any immediate task. The slight, affable secretary found a man he had never seen before. The president’s face was red, his eyes wild. His long arms flailed the air. “IT’S ALL OVER!” he roared. “St. Clair’s defeated—ROUTED! The officers nearly all KILLED! I told him when I took leave of him—Beware of SURPRISE! He went off with that as MY LAST SOLEMN WARNING! Yet he let his army be cut to pieces—HACKED—BUTCHERED—TOMAHAWKED—by SURPRISE—the very thing I warned him against! The blood of the slain is upon him—the curse of widows and orphans—THE CURSE OF HEAVEN!”
For another five minutes, Washington damned General St. Clair in language that Lear had never heard before in his genteel young life. He had spent most of the Revolutionary War years at Harvard. The horrified Lear feared the nation’s fifty-nine-year-old chief executive would topple to the floor in a fatal fit of apoplexy.
Breathing in rasps, Washington flung himself on a nearby sofa. When he spoke again, his voice was calm and measured. “This must not go beyond this room. General St. Clair shall have justice. I will hear him without prejudice.”1
Already Washington was thinking beyond General St. Clair, whose military career was over. The president had realized that the disaster could be a blessing in a very unpleasant disguise. Even before Washington became president in 1789, the fledging United States had been fighting an Indian war in the western territory that it had unexpectedly acquired from the British in the treaty of peace that ended the War for Independence.
George III’s spokesmen in Canada demonstrated their continuing enmity by refusing to evacuate the forts they had built in the wilderness we now call the Midwest and Congress called the Northwest Territory. His majesty’s spokesmen also urged their agents and traders to do their utmost to encourage the Indians to attack the American settlers swarming into the region from the overpopulated states to the east.
The result was a drumbeat of brutal massacres in which Indian war parties slaughtered an estimated 1,500 American men, women, and children. Settlers in Kentucky screamed for vengeance and often retaliated against tribes that were trying to remain at peace with the white man. President Washington sent envoys who attempted to negotiate a peaceful cession of some of the Indians’ lands. But the Miamis, Shawnees, and other more warlike tribes evaded or violated these agreements.
To the president’s profound frustration, the United States did not have an army to add muscle to his diplomacy. Few Americans know that the Revolutionary War ended in almost mindless antagonism between the regular army and Congress—a dislike that soon took deep roots in the American psyche.2
Not even President Washington’s enormous prestige—he was elected unanimously—could alter the new Congress’s prejudice against a regular army. The politicians refused to recruit more than the single regiment created in 1784. Militia could supply any additional men needed, paid by the day. This reliance on amateurs must have made ex-general Washington wonder if he had been elected president of Never-Never Land. As he had repeatedly told Congress throughout the Revolution, militia specialized in running for the rear the moment they saw British bayonets coming at them. Without a trained army to look the enemy in the face, they would continue to run.
In 1790, America’s one-regiment regular army, reinforced by over 1,000 militia, had launched a punitive attack on a cluster of Miami villages from which the whites believed many war parties emanated. About one hundred warriors had ambushed the advance guard. The panicked militia abandoned the regulars in headlong flight. Another surprise attack mauled a second American detachment the following day. The army stumbled back to its base at Fort Washington, near present-day Cincinnati, demoralized and humiliated. The tall, hard-eyed Miami war chief who had commanded the Indians, Me-she-kin-no-quah, known to the white men as Little Turtle, became a hero to the Indians of the Northwest.
A grim president and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, resolved to try again. This time they persuaded Congress to authorize a second regular regiment. They also negotiated permission to raise 2,000 “levies” for six months’ service. These soldiers would be considered regulars even though they were closer to militia. To command this second army they chose former major general Arthur St. Clair, one of the first officers who had responded to Washington’s insistence on the crucial importance of a trained regular army. St. Clair had, readers will recall, surrendered the bastion of Ticonderoga rather than defend it with a relative handful of Continentals. For this decision, St. Clair had suffered eighteen months of sneers and obloquy from Bunker Hillist New England soldiers and their anti–regular army allies in Congress.
Ideologues in Congress had undermined President Washington’s attempt to create a new regular army. Late in 1790 they reduced the regulars’ pay and for an entire year did not bother to send them a single penny. As a result, less than 10 percent of the men whose enlistments expired that year signed up again. When General St. Clair reached Fort Washington, he found the First Regiment had dwindled to 299 men. Recruiting for the new second regiment faltered disastrously, leaving the regulars 50 percent below their authorized strength. St. Clair’s six-month levies were barely trained, forcing him to call out 1,160 militia.
Meanwhile, the Indians gathered a 1,500-warrior army under the leadership of Little Turtle. At dawn on November 4, 1791, the war chief attacked. The militia and the six-month levies fled, and the American campground became a scene of indescribable slaughter. An appalling sixty-four officers and 807 enlisted men were killed or wounded, with even more horrendous casualties among the packhorse drivers and other civilians. General St. Clair had joined the fugitives on one of the few surviving horses.
PRESIDENT WASHINGTON informed Congress and the newspapers that the country was now embroiled in a full-scale war, with the future of the United States at stake. Were we going to let the British and their Indian allies confine America to a strip of states along the Atlantic seaboard? The chastened politicians suspended their paranoia and gave the president the soldiers he wanted. There would be four regular regiments, with men enlisted for three years’ service, plus a squadron of cavalry. As a sop to a still vocal minority of regular army haters in Congress, Secretary of War Knox decided the new force would be called the Legion of the United States rather than the United States Army.
Washington and Knox studied a list of revolutionary commanders and chose Anthony Wayne of Pennsylvania to command this new entity. The president still remembered with pride and pleasure Wayne’s 1779 midnight assault on the British Hudson River fort, Stony Point. Wayne had also demonstrated other leadership skills. In 1782, with only a few hundred regulars, he had wrested control of Georgia from a much larger British army.
Wayne instantly accepted the president’s offer. He was floundering in a morass of debt and impending bankruptcy due to an ill-fated attempt to prosper as a rice grower on a plantation the grateful Georgians had given him for his 1782 liberation of their state. Wasting no time, Wayne headed for Pittsburgh. Told that his army would await him there, he discovered on arriving a grand total of forty morose recruits. It took another ten months for the Legion of the United States to reach 1,200 men. Low pay and the prospect of confronting the tomahawk wielders who had slaughtered St. Clair’s army did not attract the best and brightest. Like the Continentals before them, Wayne’s recruits were almost all poor, landless, and frequently illiterate.3
WAYNE WENT to work on turning this collection of fugitive farm boys and urban drifters into serious soldiers. Back in Philadelphia Knox and Washington had found it necessary to mollify another vocal minority of congressmen who still thought diplomacy could persuade the Indians to cede land to importunate settlers. The president forbade Wayne to launch any offensive operations while envoys conferred with various tribes and tried to convene a “grand council” at which the two sides would resolve their irreconcilable differences. The British did their utmost to stall and otherwise derail this meeting.4
MEANWHILE, MAJOR General Wayne was making clear to his recruits that his “Mad Anthony” nickname was a misnomer. He was a professional soldier with very high standards of military performance. His men soon learned this meant unremitting discipline. Within five weeks in the fall of 1792, he executed seven deserters. Anyone found sleeping on duty or revealing “an intention to desert” got one hundred lashes. Anyone on parade in a soiled uniform got twenty lashes. He cashiered drunk and disorderly officers with equal ruthlessness.
The new general moved the army some twenty-two miles into the wilderness to escape the taverns and swarming prostitutes of Pittsburgh, at this time a raw frontier town. He christened their camp Legionville and resumed his training routine with new intensity. The men spent dozens of hours firing at targets “waist band high,” using a cartridge that contained one ball and three heavy buckshot instead of the standard single ball—a combination Wayne thought would be far more effective in fighting Indians in the forest. He also redesigned their muskets, enabling the men to load and fire more rapidly.
To nerve his tyro soldiers for the shock and terror of combat, Wayne sent part of the army into the woods with orders to imitate Indians. They stripped off their shirts and painted their bodies and faces. The remainder of the army launched an attack. The pseudo-Indians whooped and howled and fired blank cartridges, producing a very realistic version of the tumult of battle. The attackers blasted back at them, roaring defiance.
In the spring of 1793, Secretary of War Knox ordered Wayne to bring his men into the disputed Northwest Territory by boat. At Cincinnati, a cheering crowd of over 1,000 lined the bank of the Ohio River, greeting them as saviors. The Indians, especially the warlike Miamis, were not pleased with the proximity of Wayne’s soldiers. They accused the United States of speaking “with a double tongue.”5
While diplomacy continued, Wayne asked the governor of Kentucky to call out 1,500 mounted militia. The Kentuckians replied that their militia insisted on the right to act independently of Wayne’s command. Kentucky had recently become the fourteenth state, and as followers of Thomas Jefferson and his new Democratic-Republican Party, they had no great affection for federal power.
An infuriated Wayne pointed out that Kentucky’s militia were in the pay of the United States and would obey his orders or else. In an eloquent letter, he warned them that he was fighting not a few Indian tribes but “a hydra”—a widespread confederation that hoped to build a chain “around the frontiers of America.” The Kentuckians grudgingly agreed to obey the general.
Meanwhile the army’s contractors failed to deliver more than a third of the promised provisions. Wayne accused them of trying to sabotage the legion in league with antiregular ideologues in Congress. In the spring of 1793, news from Europe added another complication: war had broken out between Great Britain and Revolutionary France. British officials in Canada became even more determined to retain the loyalty of the Indians, in case the Americans attacked the “fourteenth colony” on behalf of their former ally.
The Indians responded to British backstairs encouragement by announcing that they would tolerate no Americans north of the Ohio River. The American negotiators told them this demand was unacceptable. Thousands of Americans already lived on these lands, sold by the US government in good faith based on previous treaties with individual tribes. For a while it looked as if a climactic battle would erupt at any moment.
Wayne marched his army forty miles north from Cincinnati to the American outpost at Fort Jefferson. Six miles farther along, the road ended in an impassable wilderness. Here Wayne decided to build a winter camp and stand his ground, despite being in the heart of the territory the Indians claimed would remain forever theirs. His soldiers built a fort that enclosed fifty acres, with huts for the men and roomy quarters for the officers. Wayne called it Fort Greeneville, in honor of his best friend in the Continental Army, General Nathanael Greene, who had died after a brief illness in 1786.
DURING THE winter, Wayne discovered he had another problem. His army’s second in command, Brigadier General James Wilkinson, had been in charge at Fort Jefferson and several other outposts in the Northwest Territory. A born liar and intriguer, Wilkinson wanted Wayne’s job. We now know he was on the payroll of the Spanish government as “Agent 13” and hoped to make a fortune by persuading Kentucky to declare its independence, backed by the gold that poured into Spanish coffers from the mines of Mexico.
For the moment, getting rid of Wayne was Wilkinson’s immediate goal. Suddenly newspapers in the east blossomed with stories portraying Wayne as corrupt, cruel, incompetent, and stupid. Antiregular congressmen gleefully fanned the flames. But President Washington kept his temper under tight control and soon had pro-administration papers printing no-holds-barred rebuttals.
Wayne remained strangely reluctant to see Wilkinson and a group of officers around the brigadier as the source of these smears. Further belying his “Mad Anthony” nickname, he decided the best answer to his enemies was victory. By this time the Indians were artfully playing the diplomacy game directly with him. Envoys from various tribes claimed they wanted peace. If Wayne brushed the negotiators aside and attacked, they would use his intransigence to turn out every warrior in sight.
Instead, while insisting to the Indians that he was willing to parley, Wayne marched eight companies twenty miles north to the battlefield where General St. Clair’s army had been slaughtered in 1792. The area was littered with the bones of the unburied dead. After interring the remains in a mass grave with suitable military honors, Wayne ordered his men to build another bastion, which he named Fort Recovery. With the help of a few men captured in the battle who had later escaped, he found the cannons St. Clair had abandoned and the Indians had buried, hoping to use them another day. Wayne installed the big guns on the walls of Fort Recovery—an added touch of defiance that he made sure the Indians heard about.
THE INDIANS listened to Canadian governor Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, the former general who had deftly defended the colony against the Americans’ 1775 invasion—and presided over the final British withdrawal from New York at the close of the Revolution. Dorchester told the Indians that he expected war between Britain and America to begin within a year. If they remained loyal to their benevolent “father,” George III, they would regain all the land they had lost since 1783. The British would scour the Americans from every foot of ground west of the mountains. To prove his sincerity, Dorchester ordered another Revolutionary War veteran, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, former colonel of the Queen’s Rangers, to build a fort on the Maumee River, well within American territory, and call it Fort Miami, in honor of the tribe led by Little Turtle.6
THE EMBOLDENED Indians decided to strike at Fort Recovery. On June 30, 1794, Little Turtle led an estimated 1,700 warriors through the forest. One British officer called it the most formidable Indian army in history. They launched the assault with a classic ambush. They caught a 360-horse pack train leaving the fort after bringing badly needed supplies and annihilated it, killing a third of the soldiers in its one-hundred-man escort.
Whirling bloody scalps, the screaming warriors charged the two-story fort. It was the first test of General Wayne’s eighteen months of training and discipline. His troops greeted the Indians with musket blasts of buck and ball fired through loopholes. Cannons flung grape shot into their ranks. The stunned warriors took cover behind tree stumps and fired back for several hours. Recognizing that the fort was impregnable, they abandoned their siege the following day.7
The impact on the fragile Indian confederacy was devastating. More than six hundred warriors had come from the Great Lakes tribes, lured by British agents. They blamed the Miamis and Shawnees for the mismanaged attack and went home. Meanwhile, an exultant General Wayne hailed the victory. He informed Secretary of War Knox that his army would advance on the main Miami villages as soon as the 1,500 mounted volunteers from Kentucky joined his ranks.
On July 29, 1794, in blazing summer heat, the army began its advance. Ignoring pleas from his aides to be careful, Wayne frequently rode with the advance guard. Each day they camped well before sundown and built fortifications against a surprise attack. On August 2, after an advance of about forty miles, Wayne paused to build another fort where he could store supplies. The men felled huge trees and sawed them into logs.
At around 3:00 P.M. on August 3, Wayne retired to his tent to escape the burning sun. As he rested, a gigantic beech tree crashed into the tent, smashing an empty cot next to Wayne and badly bruising the general. His aides immediately suspected the friends of General Wilkinson were at work. Some historians, including this one, are inclined to agree with them. But Wayne dismissed the attempted assassination as an unfortunate accident.
BACK IN Pittsburgh, the legion faced a new threat to its existence. To finance the army and other federal expenses, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton had persuaded Congress to pass a tax on whiskey. This “excise” had infuriated not a few people in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere along the frontier. Making whiskey was a main source of revenue for many small farmers. On July 15, 1794, a huge riot erupted. A mob burned the house and barn of John Neville, the federal tax collector for the district, and fought a pitched battle with a squad of soldiers ordered to defend the premises.
The rioters talked wildly of seceding from the United States. Several proposed asking for help from the British in Canada. At a huge meeting outside Pittsburgh, a man wearing the uniform of a major general gave a rousing speech, predicting they were about to form a new independent nation in the West. President Washington issued a proclamation condemning the rebellion and called out 13,000 militia to suppress it.8
There was no longer much doubt that the future of the United States depended on the success of General Wayne’s army. Resuming its march, the legion crunched forward, building a good road as it progressed. On August 8 the men reached one of their objectives, the Miami settlement of Grand Glaize, which had hundreds of cabins in fertile fields full of growing corn, beans, and other crops.
To Wayne’s surprise, the Indians had abandoned this prize without a fight. They fled so swiftly that one chief left $859 in a trunk for a lucky soldier to find. Wayne called the Glaize “the grand emporium of the hostile Indians of the West” and began building another fortification, which he called Fort Defiance. Meanwhile his soldiers filled their knapsacks and wagons with fresh produce and trampled the rest underfoot. The cabins they burned, leaving a virtual wasteland.
The Indians’ retreat signaled a growing disarray in their ranks. In late July Little Turtle had gone to Detroit and tried to extract an explicit pledge of military support from the British. He wanted infantry and cannons. Instead he got only vague promises. After the news of Wayne’s destruction of Grand Glaize, the British rushed two companies of regulars to Fort Miami, plus additional cannons and one hundred barrels of food for the swarming refugees from Grand Glaize, who were close to starvation.
The Indians convened a grand council at which Little Turtle amazed everyone by urging peace negotiations. The war chiefs of the Shawnees, Ottawas, and other tribes dismissed him scornfully. Little Turtle resigned command of the army to Blue Jacket, a six-foot-two Shawnee leader known for his fancy clothes and hatred of white men. He had 1,300 warriors ready to follow him, plus a 70-man company of Canadian militia who would paint their faces and fight as Indians.
ON AUGUST 20, a day of rain showers and oppressive heat, Wayne’s army moved up the Maumee River valley toward Fort Miami, laboring across deep ravines and through thick woods. They marched in two columns, with a heavily armed battalion of picked troops as an advance guard and cavalry on both flanks. Wayne was still determined that they would not be taken by surprise. The general was in agony from an attack of gout, but he thrust the pain aside and rode at the front of the left column.
Ahead, muskets barked, followed by a volley. Messengers came racing back to report they were facing the Indian army. The warriors had chosen to fight in a part of the forest that had been struck by a tornado, leaving hundreds of felled trees in a gigantic tangle. The site already had a name, Fallen Timbers. To the Indians it seemed heaven-sent as a place that cavalry could not charge and that infantry would find difficult to penetrate in a compact mass, wielding the weapon the Indians feared, the bayonet.
The opening volley killed the two leaders of the advance guard, and the rest of the Americans began falling back, firing as they retreated, not a few turning to run. It had all the appearances of another triumphant ambush, and Ottawas and Potawatomis in the center of the Indian line charged from their tangled timber defense line, expecting a harvest of scalps. They collided with the main body of Wayne’s army and found themselves fighting in tall grass and open forest, where American marksmanship took a stunning toll.
“Charge the damned rascals with the bayonet!” Wayne roared, and his men obeyed with alacrity. On the right, where General Wilkinson was in command, the Indians took one look at the oncoming “long knives” and ran. On the left, the Canadian militia met the charge with “a most heavy fire” until a company of mounted Kentucky militia hit them from the flank. The entire enemy line, whites and Indians, broke in disorder. Some fled across open ground, and Wayne’s Kentucky horsemen ruthlessly rode them down.
An Ottawa war chief mounted a rock and began exhorting his men to make a stand. In midsentence, he toppled to the ground. One of Wayne’s riflemen had put a bullet through his heart. Other war chiefs also fell, trying to rally their men. Little Turtle was carried from the field, streaming blood, and flung across the back of a horse that would take him to Fort Miami.
The British bastion now became the Indians’ last hope. They would find refuge there with their English brothers and perhaps fight the long knives another day. To their dismay, when they reached the fort, they found the gates shut and British soldiers on the ramparts waving them away.
At that moment the central illusion that had fueled the Indians’ defiance came crashing to the ground. They could only keep fleeing north as a routed rabble. Within an hour, the battle of Fallen Timbers was over. American casualties were thirty-three dead and about one hundred wounded. The Indian losses were thought to be about forty, but the humiliation of the rout and the collapse of the British-Indian alliance transcended numbers.
TWO MONTHS later, President Washington’s militia army marched into western Pennsylvania to stamp out what has become known as the Whiskey Rebellion. A defeat of Anthony Wayne’s army at Fallen Timbers might well have encouraged the British to ship these rebels guns and ammunition. Instead, the king’s men glumly watched from Canada while the cowed leaders surrendered to the federal government’s display of overwhelming force.
At Fort Greeneville the following July, General Wayne negotiated a treaty with the Indians that opened the Northwest Territory—the future states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota—to massive American settlement. Not so coincidentally, in London negotiations with President Washington’s special representative, John Jay, the British government agreed to evacuate all its forts on American territory. It became more and more apparent that Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers was a crucial turning point in American history. In the context of this book it was also the last battle of the Continental Army (disguised as the Legion of the United States) in the War for Independence. In the person of Major General Anthony Wayne, the principles of a strategy for victory in revolutionary warfare conceived by General George Washington were applied one last time—with victorious results.
The victories of Fallen Timbers and the militia army that disarmed the Whiskey Rebellion impressed some members of Congress. They proposed a resolution to send their thanks to Major General Wayne. But many other congressmen clung to their antiregular antagonism, declaring it would be inappropriate for the virtuous Congress of the United States to thank a major general of the regular American army. President Washington, not in the least surprised by this reaction, calmly informed the legislators that he, the president of the United States, would thank General Wayne. This worked an almost magical change on the naysayers. They realized the totality of Wayne’s victory would make them look foolish. Soon the resolution passed unanimously.9
Meanwhile, the war that raged in Europe between Napoleonic France and Great Britain and her allies convinced even the most hostile antiregular politicians that some kind of trained force was necessary for the nation’s security and peace of mind. While the opposition party now grouped around Jefferson still vocally opposed a standing army in Congress, some of its leaders were already saying the opposite privately. Henry Dearborn, who would become President Jefferson’s secretary of war, admitted, “This country should abandon any idea of depending on militia to prosecute a war.”
In 1796, with steady pressure from President Washington, who firmly reiterated the need for a small peacetime army, Congress abolished the Legion of the United States and passed an “Act to Ascertain and Fix the Military Establishment.” Soon Washington’s secretary of war, James McHenry, changed the four legions into regiments and reassigned officers to their new units. The force acquired a name that would become familiar to generations of Americans: the United States Army. This change pleased no one more than America’s Fabius, the creator of the strategy of victory, George Washington.10