by Allan Eckert
The first pitiable remnants of the army began to arrive at Fort Jefferson about dusk, and the influx continued into the night. They were overjoyed to find that Maj. Hamtramck had returned with his regulars, but the elation was short-lived; not only had Hamtramck and his men failed to overtake the deserters, even though he had trailed them most of the way back to Fort Washington, they had not encountered the supply train or reinforcements, and so far as was known there were no supplies or relief on the way.
St. Clair called a council for his surviving field officers, Cols. Darke and Sargent, Majs. Hamtramck, Zeigler and Gaither. Both Darke and Sargent were seriously wounded but expected to recover. The six officers together concluded that the risks were simply too great to attempt to remain and try to hold on until the supplies came, if ever, and that they should leave here as soon as all the stragglers were in.
At the battlefield about this same time, as the dull gray persistent overcast deepened to the color of old lead with the approaching twilight, a new snowfall had begun that was quickly, mercifully, coating the reddened slush with fresh white and covering the ghastly, grotesquely contorted bodies of 832 dead American soldiers and camp-followers.744
At ten P.M., well after darkness had fallen, the army assembled in loose formation, wounded men on packhorses or carried on stretchers by companions, and started the long trek back to Fort Washington. The weight of their wounded was considerable, but not so heavy as the news they were bearing of the worst disaster ever to have befallen Americans at the hands of the Indians.745
Chapter 10
[February 25, 1792—Saturday]
Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s military career was finished.
Much had happened during the eleven weeks that passed since his terrible defeat, not the least of which was a swift and vicious upsurge of attacks in the Ohio River Valley from above Wheeling all the way down to the mouth of the Ohio. Those who had felt that the Kanawha and its tributaries were now relatively safe to settle upon learned the error of such reasoning, and many were killed, while those who had eagerly been establishing themselves on the Ohio side of the river were paying a stiff price for the presumption that they could do so with impunity.
The Indians were taking few prisoners these days. Settlers who had come up missing were, more often than not, found a week or a fortnight or a month later in a decomposed state in some gully or ravine or creek bed within hailing distance of their own cabins. Frontier experience was no criterion for safety. Absalom Craig and Tobias Woods, for example, both were experienced and prudent woodsmen in their forties, and for five years they had run their trapline along Locust Creek, on the Kentucky side of the river 25 miles below Maysville, but late in November their scalpless bodies were discovered, and there was not a frontiersman along the river who did not shudder at the news.
The new ferry established by Thomas G. Lewis on December 9 at Point Pleasant, which crossed both the Ohio River and the mouth of the Kanawha, was kept busy for weeks bringing people and goods back across from Ohio to the Virginia side of the river, but Indians were everywhere on both sides of the river now, and those who ventured away from the forts, even in large groups, were in definite jeopardy.
The long-awaited supplies and reinforcements that were to have reached St. Clair months earlier finally arrived much too late, and Fort Washington was continually being strengthened, as were Fort Hamilton and Fort Jefferson. A young ensign, newly commissioned by President Washington himself as a favor to his family, had arrived at Fort Washington at the head of 80 men not long after St. Clair’s departure on his ill-fated campaign, and he was deeply disappointed in his misfortune at missing such an experience … until the battered remnants of St. Clair’s army began showing up. It made him revise his sense of disappointment but only strengthened his belief that it was on this frontier that his future lay. The son of Benjamin Harrison, his name was William Henry Harrison.
He did, however, participate in the march headed by Col. James Wilkinson in January to return to the site of St. Clair’s defeat and bury the dead—a grisly task that all the mounted men who participated found appalling. Hundreds of bodies and pieces of bodies were scattered all about, and it was a ghastly task to gather up what they could and bury the remains in a laboriously dug common grave. The weather was so severe that many of the men with Wilkinson’s party were badly frostbitten by the time they returned to Fort Washington.
St. Clair, of course, had been generally condemned by practically everyone, not least of all by President George Washington himself, who was first informed of the terrible event early in December. When his private secretary, Tobias Lear, informed him in his office of the staggering defeat and handed him the express dispatches, Washington at first blanched at what Lear had told him and then became all but apoplectic as he hastily read the dispatches. Finished, he slammed them onto his desk and stormed about the office exhibiting an unbridled rage beyond anything Lear had ever before witnessed from the chief executive.
“Right here,” Washington thundered to his secretary, “yes here, on this very spot, I took leave of him. I wished him success and honor. ‘You have your instructions,’ I said, ’from the secretary of war. I had a strict eye to them and will add but one word—beware of a surprise!’ I repeated it—‘Beware of a surprise! You know how the Indians fight us!’ He went off with that, as my last solemn warning thrown into his ears. And yet!—to suffer that army to be cut to pieces, hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise—the very thing I guarded him against! Oh, God! Oh, God, he is worse than a murderer! How can he answer it to his country? The blood of the slain is upon him, the curse of widows and orphans, the curse of Heaven!”
Washington’s tone and manner was so appallingly vehement that it actually frightened Tobias Lear, and more than once the President threw up his hands as he hurled imprecations upon the name of St. Clair. At last, however, his rage abated somewhat, and he sat down on a sofa, looked at his secretary and spoke in a more normal voice.
“This must not go beyond this room.” He had then paused, steeped in thought for a long while as Lear stood waiting. When he finally spoke again, it was in a very low voice. “General St. Clair shall have justice,” he said. “I looked hastily through the dispatches—saw the whole disaster, but not the particulars. I will hear him without prejudice; he shall have full justice!”746
Washington immediately sent orders for St. Clair to come to Philadelphia and appear before a congressional committee for a formal inquiry into the cause of the defeat. St. Clair did so, placing Fort Washington under command of David Zeigler, who had just been promoted to the rank of major. A few weeks later, however, Maj. Zeigler, too, was ordered to appear and testify, leaving Fort Washington in command of Lt. Col. James Wilkinson, the bitter foe of George Rogers Clark.
Even while the congressional committee was holding its hearings, Wilkinson took what steps he could to improve the security of the Ohio frontier. Even though his promotion to command of Fort Washington, instead of just command of the Second United States Regiment, was an upward step in his career, Wilkinson was disappointed that he had not immediately been named to command the Western Department of the Army.747 He hoped to prove himself worthy of that post by the actions he was now taking. It was his belief that one of St. Clair’s failings was that he had marched too far between each of the posts he had been erecting. Fort Hamilton and Fort Jefferson were still standing, but the two were 44 miles apart. Wilkinson now sent out Maj. John Gano, an engineer who had been with St. Clair at the defeat, with a strong force to construct a new fort at about the midway point between the two. Ens. William Henry Harrison of the Tenth Regiment was among the officers chosen to accompany Maj. Gano. The new fort was quickly erected and named Fort St. Clair.748
Throughout the east the public, now fully aware of the proportions of the great military disaster, was screaming for the hide of St. Clair, accusing him of cowardice, bungling and worse. George Washington, however, for all his initial rage, knew his old frien
d better than that and wanted the whole story of the cause of that defeat publicly told so the governor-general’s name could be cleared of blame. The congressional committee’s chairman was Virginia’s James Giles, and he handled it fairly and well, with scores of witnesses testifying to what had occurred and impartial deliberations held in light of the testimony gathered.
Tempers flared during the hearings, and at one point Maj. David Zeigler, testifying on behalf of St. Clair, became so thoroughly disgusted and irked at the way his own character and that of Gen. St. Clair were impugned, as well as the general attitude of many congressmen toward the military, that he resigned his commission. Hardly less angry was Secretary of War Knox, who believed himself and his department severely injured by the hearing. He sent a harsh letter to Congress in which he declared the committee had done him an injustice. Endeavoring to be as fair as possible, the committee listened to Gen. Knox’s statements and explanations, reconsidered the testimony accumulated and then today reaffirmed its first report, holding Knox and his War Department largely responsible for St. Clair’s defeat.
The outcome of it all was a thorough report by the congressional committee stating that St. Clair had conducted his campaign with skill and great personal bravery and that the defeat was chiefly owing to the want of discipline in the militia and the negligence of the War Department, whose duty it had been to procure and forward the reinforcements, provisions and military supplies necessary for the expedition. They added that the army had been weakened by short allowances and desertion and by the fact that its finest fighting unit had been sent under Maj. Hamtramck in pursuit of the deserters. St. Clair, they added, against a force greatly superior to his own in numbers, with his own army in a state of panic, nevertheless had held the battlefield for an uninterrupted conflict of great intensity lasting over three hours, and that he had not ordered a retreat until the field was covered with the bodies of his men and further efforts were unavailing. Even then, the general had himself been last to leave the ground when the retreat was ordered. Finally, it was noted that “General Arthur Saint Clair still retains the undiminished esteem and good opinion of President Washington” and that, despite the prevailing public mood of condemnation and detestation, Gen. St. Clair “was not justly liable to much censure, if any.”
It was an honorable acquittal of St. Clair but, exonerated or not, the damage had been done. Whoever again would follow into battle a man who had led his army into the worst defeat in the country’s history? Though St. Clair would continue as governor of the Northwest Territory, he resigned his commission and would no longer command the military.
The question presently facing President George Washington was a knotty one: Who now should he name to take command of the United States Army and bring the savage tribes to their knees?
[June 1, 1792—Friday]
There were few causes for joy in Kentucky since St. Clair’s defeat, what with the sharp increase in attacks by the Indians and the resultant deaths, captures, burnings and horse thefts, but today was a distinct exception.
After more than seven years of effort, the news was exploding all across the Kentucky frontier: The cords that had so long bound this area to Virginia had finally been severed. Today Kentucky was admitted into the Union as the fifteenth of the United States.749
[June 18, 1792—Monday]
Col. David Shepherd listened closely as Capt. Samuel Brady outlined his plan for a spying mission against the Wyandot towns deep in the Ohio country. Even under the best of circumstances, what Brady was proposing would have been highly dangerous. With the present dangerous situation that had been prevailing ever since St. Clair’s defeat, it bordered on the suicidal.
Shepherd could not argue with Capt. Brady’s logic that such a mission would not only provide them with extremely important intelligence, it might well light a fire under a government that was seemingly doing very little to aid settlers on the frontier; a situation on the upper Ohio, as well as everywhere else in the Ohio Valley, that had become desperate, even fairly close to Pittsburgh, Washington and Wheeling. Over recent months scores of settlers had been killed in boldly vicious hit-and-run attacks, with numerous cabins burned, dozens of horses stolen and an unprecedented number of women and children killed or taken captive. Those attacks were occurring in such profusion lately, and with such impunity, that a growing conviction had taken root among the border people that the United States government, now responsible for the protection of the settlers on the frontier, was intending to do very little to fulfill its obligations and resolve the situation.
In full sympathy with their plight and feeling much as they did, Brady had just finished telling Shepherd that unless it could reliably be shown that a major assault was actually in the offing against Fort Pitt or one of the other government installations, chances were that little was going to be done to alleviate the present situation. Brady felt strongly that the Indians were preparing for just such an offensive, and his proposal was that he go deep into their territory to seek confirmation of it.
“Even if I, personally, approved of what you have in mind, Sam,” the colonel said, “I simply couldn’t let you mount a big expedition when we need every man we have—and more!—to protect our people right here.”
“I don’t intend to mount a big expedition, Colonel,” Brady objected. “Just myself and a couple of others for mutual protection and, if we’re hit, for maybe one of us to get through to you with whatever intelligence we’ve found.”
“You really think you can pull it off?” Shepherd asked.
“Dave, we both know that if anyone can, I’m the one.” There was no bravado in the response, merely a statement of fact, which Shepherd acknowledged with a nod.
“Who would you take with you? And how long would you be gone?”
“Two of my Rangers—Johnny Wetzel and John Williamson. They’re good men, dependable and sharp. We’ll be back—at least one of us, if not all—by the end of a month.”
Shepherd nodded again. “Then do it.”
Brady grinned and started out, but he stopped at the door as Col. Shepherd spoke again. “Do me a favor, Sam. Try to keep your scalp intact.”
[June 23, 1792—Saturday]
President George Washington had no easy time of it in his efforts to appoint a successor to Arthur St. Clair as the new military commander in the west as well as commanding officer of the entire United States Army. The Congress had now appropriated funds for a new campaign to be carried out against the western tribes should the present peace overtures fail, but Washington had no desire to fit out an army of the same type that had already failed twice—an army of undisciplined militia. What was needed was an army gathered and trained in the strictest military discipline by an officer well skilled in matters military.
Washington had put a lot of thought into the list he had drawn up of 20 names of officers who might qualify for the position. This list, when presented to his Cabinet for comment, was quickly whittled away for a variety of reasons. Some, such as Maj. Gen. John Sullivan, who had so brilliantly executed the campaign against the Iroquois in 1779, were either now too old or too infirm to undertake such a huge responsibility. Others were drinkers, or they were unskilled when it came to Indian fighting, or their politics were not what was desired. Finally, there were those who simply declined. At last only one remained, and he was not considered any prize.
The individual in question had commanded a Pennsylvania battalion during the Revolution and had risen to the rank of brigadier general through his services, rendered successively at the battles of Brandywine, Paoli, Monmouth, Valley Forge, Stony Point and finally Yorktown. Though he had never been honored previously with an independent command of his own, he had proven himself to be a man of the type George Washington was actively seeking: a man who believed in strict discipline among the troops and who had shown himself to be prudent and dependable under all circumstances, as well as being somewhat of a thinker with a good grasp of military strategy. On the negative s
ide of the ledger, he was a drinker, though not to excess, a womanizer in moderation, a man with a generally irritable disposition who did not get along particularly well with fellow officers, a man excessively vain, a man who, like St. Clair, was overweight and suffered chronically from gout.
The officer in question had retired from the military at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, and his record as a businessman following the Revolution was not at all inspiring. He had made faulty business ventures in Pennsylvania that left him facing destitution and then had purchased a plantation in Georgia. He had moved there, only to very quickly go bankrupt. With creditors hounding him, he turned to politics and won the Georgia race for a seat in the United States House of Representatives, only to have that election overturned because of unproven charges of fraud. Yet, with the need for a commander imperative and the better choices now gone, George Washington had resignedly given in to acceptance of this individual, albeit so uncertainly that he wrote to a friend that he was “never more embarrassed making any appointment” and only hoped that “time, reflection, good advice and, above all, a due sense of the importance of the trust which is committed to him will correct his foibles, or cast a shade over them.”
Bestowing upon him the rank of major general and placing him in command of the United States Army with instructions to immediately begin raising his army at Fort Pitt, President George Washington had, this past April, named as the successor to Arthur St. Clair, a man who had previously won such unflattering sobriquets as Mad Anthony and Dandy Tony—Anthony Wayne.750
Though President Washington had his own misgivings about naming Anthony Wayne to the top military post of the United States, some in the capital considered him the best choice the President could possibly have made. Among those—and greatly worried about the appointment—was George Hammond, British minister to the United States, who immediately wrote to the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, Gen. John Graves Simcoe: