by Mark Zuehlke
This process of frontier settlement, soon followed by settler displacement and reclamation by a true agrarian class, fuelled America’s rapid territorial expansion. Inevitably, each westward push brought the frontiersman up hard against those peoples already dwelling within the forests that lay just over the hill or across the river from the recently settled territory. Disease and war had decimated the Indian peoples of the eastern seaboard. When the expansion inland reached the Appalachians, white settlers faced a better-organized and more determined foe—the many Indian nations who lived there and had formed a series of loosely organized confederacies. Most had been heavily involved in the French-Indian wars, had gone on to fight for one side or the other during the wars fought by France and Britain on North American soil, and had engaged in a series of conflicts with the Americans from the moment the first shots of the revolution of 1776 were fired.
Between 1784 and 1789, American representatives attempted to legitimize the pioneer incursions into the Ohio by imposing four treaties on the Indians who were being forcibly displaced. None of these documents were signed by Shawnee chiefs. Instead, chiefs from other native tribes, such as the Iroquois, who lacked historic claim to the land, accepted cash and guarantees of the security of their own territories in exchange for great swaths of the Ohio. The Shawnee denounced these treaties even as the white pioneers quickly moved beyond the boundary that each had set as the limit of American expansion. As the ink was drying on the parchment of these worthless documents, the fighting continued. Treaties or not, slowly and inexorably the Shawnee and other Indian nations living west of the Appalachians were forced to cede more ground to the settler.’ relentless advance.
Among their number the Shawnee counted a warrior with a reputation for courage and wisdom that increased with each passing year. Tecumseh, which in his own language meant “Shooting Star,” stood five-foot-ten at a time when most whites rarely exceeded five-six. The straightness of his bearing added to the impression that here stood a man of great height. Powerfully and athletically built, uncommonly handsome, articulate, and keenly intelligent, Tecumseh engendered both respect and fear in the hearts of the Americans he met. Likely born in March 1768 at Old Piqua on the banks of western Ohio’s Mad River, he was the fifth child in a family that would eventually number nine, including triplets. Although one of the triplets died soon after birth, the rest of the family survived infanthood.
Tecumseh and his siblings enjoyed no idyllic upbringing in an Edenic wilderness. When Tecumseh was six, his father was mortally wounded during an attack on a Virginian stockade at Point Pleasant on the Ohio River. The family’s eldest son, Chiksika, although only fourteen, assumed responsibility for feeding the other children. In 1779, after a particularly ruthless band of Kentuckians commanded by Col. John Bowman attacked one of the Mad River settlements and was only narrowly driven off by the Shawnee warriors, one thousand men, women, and children fled down the Ohio Valley to take refuge in southeastern Missouri. Among the refugees was Tecumseh’s mother, taking only her second daughter with her. Aided by the eldest sister, who was now married, Chiksika assumed full responsibility for raising the others. In 1788, however, he died leading a raid on the outpost of Buchanan’s Station in east Tennessee. The twenty-year-old Tecumseh was close by, for he had taken up the warrior’s way in 1782—at the same age that Chiksika had sat at the side of his dying father and sworn to care for his siblings. Tecumseh had revered both his elder brother and the greatly embellished memory of his father passed down to him by Chiksika. There could be no peace between the Shawnee and the whites, Chiksika had counselled the young man, until the Ohio was scourged of the invaders.2Tecumseh held that counsel close in his heart after his brother’s death, committing himself to the path of war. But the Shawnee hold on the Ohio was being pried loose with each pioneer advance, inevitably supported by the American Long Knives, as the Indians called the cavalry. Tecumseh was twenty-six when the decisive battle at the rapids of the Miami River on August 20, 1794, ended Indian hopes of preserving control over any of the Ohio.3
“The proximity of the [Shawnee] towns to the Ohio River—the great highway of emigration to the west—and the facility with which the infant settlements in Kentucky could be reached, rendered this warlike tribe an annoying and dangerous neighbour,” complained one American contemporary.4 In 1794, the American government decided to end that threat forever and dispatched an army under command of Maj. Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne to gain control of the area.
Previously, the Americans had conducted only raiding parties that savagely fell upon one or two Shawnee villages, burned them to the ground, and slaughtered as many inhabitants as they could before withdrawing in the confident assumption that this would warn the Indians off the advancing pioneer settlements. The strategy had proven less than successful, for often the Shawnee stubbornly refused to flee. Instead, they withdrew, regrouped, and then filtered back to continue the struggle.
This time Wayne was going to secure the Ohio once and for all. Leading an army of 3,500, grandly named the Legion of the United States, Wayne marched into the Ohio country that spring. His force consisted of 1,500 notoriously ruthless mounted Kentucky volunteers, a large contingent of infantry, and several artillery pieces. The advance proceeded slowly, Wayne pausing regularly to construct another in a string of forts that by August had pierced ninety miles into the heart of the Ohio from Fort Washington (Cincinnati) to Fort Recovery (in present-day Mercer County, Ohio). Badly outnumbered, the Shawnee grudgingly withdrew before the lumbering American force. They abandoned one village after another, until finally falling back to the British-held Fort Miami, named after the adjacent river. Here the warriors turned to face the enemy, sending their women and children to Swan Creek, where they were confident that the British would protect and supply them while the warriors engaged the Americans. Until recently Fort Miami had been virtually abandoned and falling into decay, but having learned that Wayne was assembling an army for a summer campaign into the Ohio, the governor of Canada, Lord Dorchester (previously Gen. Guy Carleton), had sent a party of engineers protected by a small force of regular infantry to reconstruct and garrison the post to assert Britain’s territorial rights.5
The Shawnee had assembled one of the largest war parties in recent history, about 1,500 strong and composed not only of their own but also of warriors from the Ottawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot nations. In command was the Shawnee war chief, Blue Jacket, who had been leading his people into combat for decades.
Although the British declared themselves neutral, several coureur de bois traders and fifty-two English-Canadian volunteers from Upper Canada working on the fort decided to join the warrior ranks, for sentiments were strong among the Canadians living on the frontiers that America was about to align itself with France and invade both Canada and the frontier Indian country. Tensions between Canada and the United States were at their highest point since the failed American invasions of the Revolutionary War. Matters had been further worsened when, in a “bellicose speech” at Quebec on February 10, 1794, Lord Dorchester told an Indian gathering that war between Great Britain and the United States was imminent and they should revive the old confederacies to enable them to resist American aggression.6
The Shawnee needed no encouragement on this front, for it was obvious they could resist Wayne’s army only by mustering an alliance such as they rallied at the Miami River. For his part, the newly arrived lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, Gen. John Graves Simcoe, considered the Legion of the United States an invasion force engaged in an act of war against his Indian allies. He sought authorization from Dorchester to lead a small force of British regulars to cut Wayne’s supply lines back to Fort Washington in order to force the American general to either surrender or starve in the wilderness.7 It was a bold plan conceived too late, so that the troops had not yet even begun to gather before Wayne met the Indians on the Miami River.
After some initial skirmishes on August 18 and 19, Blue Jacket ordered his
warriors to establish a defensive position four miles up the Miami from the British fort on the river’s northwestern bank. Believing American resolve weak and that Wayne was not yet near the battleground, no haste was made to get into position on the morning of August 20. Many warriors were still visiting the civilian encampment at Swan Creek or the small Indian settlement adjacent to the British fort when Wayne’s troops attacked. No more than five hundred warriors, including the Canadian volunteers, faced them. The Canadians took up a position on the right alongside a force of Wyandot while an equal number of Shawnee, including Tecumseh, met the Americans on the left. Outnumbered, the Indian force was quickly driven back from the riverbank and routed to the fort. Here they sought shelter inside the stockade. The British commander, Maj. William Campbell, refused to open the gate, fearing that Wayne would retaliate by overrunning his small garrison and spark an international incident. “I cannot let you in! You are painted too much, my children!” he cried down from the stockade ramparts.8
The warriors managed to escape anyway when Wayne diverted his attention to Fort Miami and demanded Campbell surrender the fort. The major steadfastly refused; outnumbered or not, he would fight if forced. Wayne’s men circled the fort menacingly for a while before withdrawing to the other side of the river.9 In the brief melee upstream and the ensuing pursuit, his army had lost 44 killed and another 89 wounded in exchange for 40 dead Indians.10 This casualty rate was sufficient to give him pause. He was also wary of the potential for trouble between America and Britain if he attempted to bypass or capture Fort Miami.
That the fort on the Miami River, 60 miles below Detroit, was clearly not on ground that Great Britain had legitimate claim to was lost on neither the Americans nor the British. But it fit within a series of forts manned by the British at the end of the Revolutionary War that stood either on American soil or in territory that neither country had legitimate claim to. Fort Miami fell within the latter category, but its being regarrisoned by the British and its role in frustrating Wayne’s intent to deliver a punishing defeat to the Indians sparked an immediate crisis between the two countries. Chief Justice John Jay was dispatched from Washington to London and there, on November 19, 1794, Jay’s Treaty was signed. It called for Britain to surrender the disputed western posts by June 1, 1796, and also relaxed some outstanding issues regarding restrictions the British had imposed on American trade with the West and East Indies. The treaty had the effect of temporarily lessening tensions between the two countries, but it also satisfied neither side. From Upper Canada, Simcoe and his officers anxiously monitored the American expansion westward but could offer the Indians nothing beyond moral encouragement.
Disheartened by their defeat at what became known as Fallen Timbers, and realizing the redcoats would not resist further American advances, Shawnee resistance crumbled. On August 3, 1795, most of the nation’s chiefs, led by a dispirited Blue Jacket, accepted the terms of the Treaty of Greenville as offered to them by a stone-faced Wayne. The American demanded, and the Shawnee duly surrendered, the southern, central, and eastern sections of Ohio, approximately two-thirds of the present state, and several strategically important positions within their territory such as Fort Wayne and Fort Defiance. Tellingly, Tecumseh, now a minor chieftain, refused to attend the peace talks at Fort Greenville and politely rebuffed Blue Jacket when the chieftain tracked him down at a summer hunting camp to explain why he had accepted the American terms.11 The fifty-year resistance to American expansion was at an end, Blue Jacket said, and all the battles and the deaths had been for nothing. Tecumseh did not agree with the old warrior. This treaty would not likely last longer than those before, he said. Tecumseh knew the American thirst for land was insatiable, and soon the frontier settlers would again bay for access to more Indian territory.
Although the terms of the Treaty of Greenville prevailed for several years, Tecumseh divined that American expansionism would be little restrained by its terms. True enough, a stampede descended on Ohio, and by 1800 this territory was on the way to statehood. That same year the United States government declared the country beyond the western border of Ohio over to the Mississippi River to be Indiana Territory. Already this area was home to about six thousand whites, concentrated at Vincennes and nearby farms straggling along the shores of the Wabash, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia rivers. Twenty-seven-year-old Virginian William Henry Harrison became Indiana’s first governor. Closely aligned to western land speculators and their powerful lobby group in Washington, Harrison was eager to open the area to white settlement and help his supporters line their pockets. Having fought beside Wayne at Fallen Timbers, he believed that Indians and whites could not live side by side unless the former abandoned their way of life and adopted that of the pioneers. Alternatively the Indians must sell their lands in Indiana and move west of the Mississippi. There they could live as they wished until America expanded to that side of the river.
Through seven treaties of dubious legality negotiated between 1802 and 1805, Harrison coerced eleven tribes, including the Shawnee, into surrendering title to all of present-day southern Indiana, much of what would eventually become Wisconsin and Missouri, and the majority of Illinois. In exchange Harrison agreed that the United States Treasury would ante up on average two cents an acre. On the surface Harrison portrayed himself as a mild-mannered, congenial fellow. But in his dealings with the chiefs, he never hesitated to resort to bribery or threats. Often, if a chief refused to sign the new treaty Harrison presented, he withheld previously guaranteed annuities. Should one tribe have greater claim to the land in question but be unwilling to treat with him, Harrison simply found a chief from another nation willing to exchange land that was not his own for the governor’s coin. Before discussions began, Harrison was always careful to offer the chiefs good amounts of liquor to get them feeling sufficiently “mellow.”12
While Governor Harrison was brokering his deals, the federal government was pulling off a coup that would double America’s size, extending its dominion to the eastern flanks of the Rocky Mountains with one grand stroke of a pen. President Thomas Jefferson had clearly articulated the hope in 1801 that the United States must eventually encompass the continent or even the entire hemisphere. It “is impossible,” he said, “not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern, continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms and by similar laws.”13
But Jefferson never believed he would live to see this. He envisioned America instead as remaining a “medium-sized agrarian republic” that would grow only by the kinds of leaps and bounds the likes of Harrison were masterminding on the frontier.14 By 1801, however, those fitful expansions had brought the leading wave of American settlers hard up against the wilderness of the Louisiana Territory, which was the rightful possession of the Spanish Empire. This vast territory extended finger-width-wide from the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans north along the western bank of the Mississippi until, breaking free of the boundary of the part of Spanish Mexico Americans would come to call Texas, it thrust northward in a rapidly ballooning bulge to the headwaters of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers high in the Rockies, and eastward almost to the southwestern border of Upper Canada.
Despite Spain’s complete neglect of these holdings, colonial authorities in New Orleans were gravely concerned by reports that American pioneers were beginning to illegally cross the Mississippi into their territory. But, given neither the will nor the military means to contest this undeclared invasion, the Spanish could do little to stem the tide. Their only real recourse, and the one that most concerned President Jefferson, was to threaten to cancel the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo, which permitted commercial traffic out of the western states to pass through New Orleans.
The Americans had been squeezing out the Spanish and the French in Louisiana and Florida, and Clay was affronted by Great Britain’s resistance to the continuance of this strategy. For
the northern states and the adjoining western states and territories the situation was less advantageous for expansion. Here the frontier Indians posed a continued threat to attempts by settlers to secure large tracts of land they claimed as their own. Farther north, the British, widely believed to be fomenting anti-American sentiment among the Indians, clearly had no intention of surrendering the Canadas to American expansionist interests. To the likes of Henry Clay, this situation was not only extremely galling but it posed a direct threat to the nation’s security that must be addressed with the same determination and resolve that the federal government had directed toward southern expansion.
FIVE
British Intrigue
FALL 1811
When the United States Senate convened in the late winter of 1810 one of the first orders of business was a congressional bill calling on President Thomas Jefferson to scrap his controversial 1807 embargo in favour of the softer non-intercourse policy. Whereas Jefferson’s embargo had curtailed all international trade, including that with Canada and the Spanish Empire to the south, non-intercourse excluded only British and French ships from American ports and prohibited importation of goods from either country.
Non-intercourse had previously proven a weak, ineffectual tool, Henry Clay argued before the Senate on February 10. It was incapable of prying from Great Britain the concessions required. Impressment, the orders-in-council, and the continued inciting of frontier Indians would continue unchecked. In the absence of the embargo, the only alternative was war, and he passionately advocated its declaration.
“No man in the nation desires peace more than I …. But I prefer the troubled ocean of war, demanded by the honor and independence of the country, with all its calamities, and desolations, to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.” Harkening back to Albert Gallatin’s earlier remonstrance that war would delineate Americans from money-grubbing Hollanders, Clay asked: “Are we to be governed by the low, groveling parsimony of the counting room, and to cast up the actual pence in the drawer before we assert our inestimable rights?” Clay disparaged the claim by anti-war advocates that nothing of value could be won from Britain. “The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet. Is it nothing to the British nation—is it nothing to the pride of her monarch to have the last of the immense North American possessions held by him in the commencement of his reign, wrested from his dominion? Is it nothing to extinguish the torch that lights up savage warfare? Is it nothing to acquire the entire fur trade connected with that country?”1Either reject the congressional bill and hold the course of non-intercourse, he advised, or plunge into war with Britain.