by Mark Zuehlke
Clay’s impassioned admonition failed to sway the senators to either take the path that led to war or to hold to the embargo course. Instead, non-intercourse was adopted. Disgusted, Clay condemned the decision in the Kentucky Gazette. All “our commercial restrictions having in view the coercion of foreign governments to abrogate their edicts, will be abandoned; and our commerce once more left to its fate.”2
Failing to prevail in the Senate, Clay chafed through the rest of the session—convinced that the time had come to move to where real national decisions were made. Next time he came to Washington it would be as a congressman. And with him would be sufficient young men of like mind to force the nation into war. There was growing consensus throughout the western states that an Indian uprising masterminded by British agents was imminent. Clay envisioned little problem in finding the support he needed.
Since Maj. Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the ensuing series of land-grabbing treaties that Indiana governor William Henry Harrison inveigled the Indians into accepting, the plight of the Shawnee and other Ohio country nations had steadily worsened. Hunting grounds lost to the pioneer axe and plough forced tribes to disperse into shrinking groups in order to seek out pockets of territory sufficient to provide for their needs. Starvation was common, influenza ran rampant through the villages, and American whisky traders plying their goods only worsened an already desperate situation.
Non-intercourse unwittingly exacerbated matters by shutting off Indian.’ access to the British traders they largely depended on, for provisions from American sources were always insufficient. A great number of Indians were forced to seek assistance directly from the British holding Fort Malden and Fort St. Joseph. They came to the posts starving, destitute, increasingly discontented with their treatment by the United States.3
Meanwhile in Ohio, Indiana, and the other northwestern territories, many Indians had turned to a new hope that promised to improve their lot: returning to the way that they had lived before the white man came. In 1808, Tecumseh and his younger brother, Lalawéthika (one of the two surviving triplets), created a Shawnee settlement in northern Indiana on the Wabash River, about three miles below the mouth of the Tippecanoe River and one hundred miles east of Fort Wayne. Here Lalawéthika changed his name to Tenskwatawa, meaning “Open Door.” More commonly called the Prophet, Tenskwatawa believed he spoke directly for the Great Spirit.
On the outside, the Prophet little resembled his handsome brother. Slim, of average height, he was sallow-faced with a down-turned mouth that lent his expression a doleful air, furthered by an old injury that had permanently closed his right eye. Until his thirtieth birthday, Lalawéthika had eked out a living as a minor healer and been noted as a lazy, often drunken, fellow. But the winter of 1805 brought particularly cold temperatures and an influenza epidemic that none of his potions or knowledge of bleeding could prevent taking lives. Then, in a life-transforming vision, the Great Spirit revealed that the Indians must repent their sinful life or be denied entry to heaven.
Overnight Lalawéthika repented his ways and demonstrated remarkable ability to capture the hearts and minds of all who heard his preaching. Sitting with eyes closed, face masked in reverence, he spoke eloquently and with hands in constant motion. Set aside whisky, he counselled, cast off evil medicines provided by the whites, cease murdering each other, “never think of war again,” turn no cruel hand against either women or children, take only one wife and to her be true, be never dishonest or commit slander against another.
In a stunning attack on tradition, the Prophet also demanded that each Indian must destroy the medicine bags in which each person kept fetishes that aided connection to personal guardian spirits. Medicine bags, he said, were agents of witchcraft. Henceforth he was the only spiritual guide anyone should look to.
Traditional ceremonies, however, must be revived. Most tellingly, the ways of the white man adopted out of convenience and because of the insistence of the traders were to be rejected. Clothes worn by the whites were to be shunned, muskets, flints, and steel abandoned in favour of the bow and arrow. All animals introduced by whites, save the horse, were to be slaughtered. No more would Indians eat alien food such as pork, chicken, and wheat. They should completely return to the limited horticultural ways of the past and embrace the essential hunting life. All the white man’s efforts to transform Indians into tillers of soil were to be rejected.
White culture, the Prophet said, was the root evil that had caused the Indian slide from grace toward damnation. An apocalyptic reckoning was coming when supernatural means would overthrow the whites and bury all of them alongside those Indians who still sinned. Then the land would be returned and the people would again live in Eden.4
The Prophet’s message inspired the Shawnee and many of their allies. And while his younger brother became the people’s spiritual leader, Tecumseh was their most powerful chief. The two men led their followers to the banks of the Wabash near Tippecanoe in 1808 to found a new home. Called Prophetstown by the whites, the community soon numbered 200. Neatly ordered, bark-sided houses overlooked the river from a height of ground. A prominent council house and medicine lodge stood to the west of this residential area, facing out on a wide expanse of prairie. By the river, in the adjacent bottomland, a hundred-acre plot had been cleared for cultivation. Ranks of canoes were beached alongside the river. Those living in the village were required to adhere to the standards and behaviour that the Prophet decreed.5
By October, the village had a population of about four hundred. But the winter of 1808–09 proved as hard for the Indians there as elsewhere. The cultivated fields failed to yield a fall harvest, the unusually heavy snowpack hampered hunting efforts. Starvation threatened.
Tecumseh was unaware of the troubles plaguing the settlement. He spent the winter in Ohio recruiting more followers among disaffected young warriors of the Wyandot and Seneca. While the Prophet prayed and preached, Tecumseh tirelessly built a new confederacy.6 Yet even though Tecumseh avowed repeatedly that he sought only peace, and that he also generally abided by the tenets preached by his brother, the warrior never set aside the musket. He was also disinclined to await some supernaturally inspired apocalypse that would rid the land of whites. Peace would come, he believed, only through strength. To build this strength, he tracked relentlessly across the northwest—pushing, prodding, cajoling, threatening when necessary, to win the other chiefs over to the cause.
Despite his diplomatic skills, Tecumseh’s efforts yielded only limited results until Harrison advanced his most ambitious land grab with the Treaty of Fort Wayne, concluded on September 30, 1809. Assembling a group of friendly chiefs cultivated among the Miami, Potawatomi, and Delaware, Harrison had them sign over three million acres to the United States in exchange for a greater annuity and more trade goods. That the Potawatomi had never resided in the land in question and the other tribal chiefs had only dubious authority to agree to such a deal bothered Harrison not a jot. Harrison used the fact that President James Madison had only just been inaugurated that March to present this treaty as distinct from the string of earlier treaties he had masterminded. “This is the first request that your new Father has ever made of you and it will be the last, he wants no more of your land.”7
The treaty enraged Tecumseh. With the Prophet at his side, he threatened to execute the chiefs as traitors, but there was nothing either preacher or warrior could do to reverse the treaty. Tecumseh, however, warned that any whites attempting to survey or settle the new land—comprising as it did all the lower Wabash River territory and being where many of those people earlier driven out of the Ohio now dwelt—would do so at risk of their lives.
Outrage spread through the tribes, and with the coming of the first spring grasses that provided feed for their horses, warriors by the hundreds rode into Prophetstown. Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Delaware, and Miami—mostly disenchanted young warriors—arrived. In late May about 240 men from the Sac and Fox nations offer
ed their support before carrying on to Upper Canada, where they hoped to receive provisions from the British. Tecumseh believed they would, for the only thing that had enabled the people of Prophetstown to survive the winter had been several pack trains of food that British officials had sent south to assist them.8
When Harrison learned of these supply shipments and the growing Indian anger over the Fort Wayne treaty, he saw sure evidence of a British conspiracy. On July 4, 1810, he wrote a long letter to Madison’s secretary of war, William Eustis. “The treaties made by me last fall, were concluded upon principles as liberal toward the Indians as my knowledge of the views and opinions of the government would allow…. But, sir, the President may rest assured, that the complaints of injury, with regard to the sale of lands, is a mere pretense, suggested to the prophet by British partisans and emissaries.”
He claimed on good authority that “a Miami chief” returning from a visit to a British trade post, “after having received the accustomed donation of goods, was thus addressed by Elliott, the British agent: ‘My son, keep your eyes fixed on me—my tomahawk is now up—be you ready, but do not strike till I give the signal.’ ”9
Harrison was not alone in this belief. Until 1810 most Kentuckians paid only scant attention to the reported interactions between British and Canadian authorities and the Indians. But as Tecumseh’s confederacy grew toward fruition, whites living near the frontier felt increasingly uneasy, and even those who, like Clay, lived in secure western communities like Lexington believed they faced a “serious Indian menace.” The Kentucky Gazette opined on September 11, 1810: “We have always been of opinion that the confederacy which has been formed by the Prophet, was the effect of British intrigue; and we have never doubted that the secret agents of that power, which are known to exist in every part of America, but particularly in the Indian country, gave it all the confidence in their power.”10
Two months earlier, citizens from Knox County had descended on Vincennes, Indiana, to deliver a resolution to Harrison that demanded the destruction of Prophetstown. As the village was only 150 miles up the Wabash from the territorial capital, they claimed it constituted a clear and present danger to the settlers. Prophetstown and the confederacy it embodied, they said, “is a British scheme, and … the agents of that power are constantly exciting the Indians to hostilities against the United States.” Another resolution, forwarded by residents of St. Clair, Illinois, called “the seditious village … the great nursery of hostile Indians and traitorous British Indian traders.”
The Kentucky Gazette railed: “From the friendly course pursued by Mr. Jefferson, towards our red neighbors, and which has been followed by Mr. Madison, we had supposed the Indians would never more treat us otherwise than as brethren. But we have been mistaken—British intrigue and British gold, it seems, has greater influence with them of late than American justice and benevolence …. We have in our possession information which proves beyond doubt, the late disturbances to be owing to the too successful intrigues of British emissaries.”11Tellingly, the evidence of British intriguing was never produced.
All this fervour suited Harrison well, for he planned a military operation to wipe out the village the whites were beginning to call Tippecanoe. The possibility that such an attack might provoke war with Britain was even welcome. “The people of this Territory and Kentucky are extremely pressing in offers of their service for an expedition into the Indian Country. Any number of men might be obtained for this purpose or for a march into Canada.” Harrison declared that vast numbers of Indians were returning from British trading posts laden with rifles, fuses, powder, and lead. “And that the language and measures of the Indians indicate nothing but war.”12
In reality, Tecumseh was keeping his people in check, for the time was not yet ripe for military action. The confederacy could not act alone. But the warrior chief believed war between Great Britain and America was inevitable and that then the confederacy could act and possibly succeed. Until then he urged the warriors to bide their time and chastened those who carried out small running raids against frontier settlers during the summer of 1811. Tecumseh knew the actions of these renegades could well provide the excuse that Harrison needed.
Not that Harrison needed the excuses of others. He manufactured his own quite capably. As the Twelfth Congress started assembling that November in Washington for a new session and its members openly talked of war, Harrison closed upon Tippecanoe with a force of about one thousand regulars and militia. From intelligence reports, Harrison knew that Tecumseh had recently departed on a winter-long tour to build support for the confederacy among the Creek to the south. “I hope,” Harrison wrote to Eustis on the eve of his march, “before his return that that part of the fabrick, which he considered complete will be demolished and even its foundation rooted up.”13 Harrison intended to destroy Tippecanoe and kill or scatter its residents.
On November 6, the Americans cut through a series of swamps and dense thickets to reach a plateau overlooking the village from a distance of about a mile. Harrison sent a message to the Prophet that he was willing to talk, but a deserter from the American camp warned that this was a deception; the plan was to attack Tippecanoe in the morning. The warriors with the Prophet decided that they had no recourse but to try to seize the advantage by assaulting Harrison’s camp that night. Only about 500 strong, they could never hope to fend off the Americans if they were allowed to move against the village in full battle order. The Prophet sought the counsel of the spirits and reported not only that the Americans would be surprised but that their gunpowder would turn to sand. For added measure, the Indians would be rendered bulletproof.
Heavy cloud cover cloaked the warrior advance on the camp in inky darkness, but just as the order for the attack was imminent a sentry fired a shot in alarm. With a scream of defiance the warriors rushed the camp, sending the sentries reeling toward its centre, where the Americans formed a defensive line. Although the American formation buckled several times, forcing a short withdrawal to regroup, the Indians were unable to break it completely. Finally, as the first glimmer of dawn tinged the eastern skyline, Harrison saw that he outnumbered the Indians and ordered a counterattack on both flanks. Caught in the open, the warriors were quickly routed, falling back to the village. After two and a half hours Harrison’s men had won the field. The butcher’s bill was staggering for the Americans. Harrison counted 68 of his men dead and 120 wounded—almost one-fifth of his entire force. Although defeated, the Indians had fared better. Estimates ranged from 20 to 50 killed.
Having taken such a hard battering, the Americans failed to assault the village. Fearing a renewed attack, they threw up fortifications and hunkered in their shelter for the next two days except for brief sorties out onto the field to scalp the Indian corpses left behind. Some fixed these grisly trophies to their gun muzzles. As darkness fell on November 8, a patrol probed the village and found it deserted save a wounded warrior and an old woman both accidentally left behind during the withdrawal. Harrison ordered the village plundered of anything useful to the Indians such as pots and utensils, seized what corn stocks could be used by his men, and then burned the village to the ground. He made sure that the granary, vital to winter survival, was torched. The next day, the Americans loaded their many wounded on wagons and trailed slowly away from the blackened, smouldering ruins of Prophetstown.14
When Tecumseh returned to the village in the early spring of 1812, he later recalled, standing “upon the ashes of my own home … there I summoned the spirits of the braves who had fallen in their vain attempts to protect their homes from the grasping invader, and as I snuffed up the smell of their blood from the ground I swore once more eternal hatred—the hatred of an avenger.”15
Even though Harrison had marched against Prophetstown with the clear intent to annihilate it, Americans in the west and many congressmen in Washington were quick to declare the night attack on his camp clear evidence of Indian treachery. Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson, commander of the T
ennessee militia and a man who never hesitated to slaughter an Indian whenever possible, wrote to congratulate Harrison on the action. But, he said, the “blood of our murdered countrymen must be avenged. I do hope that Government will see that it is necessary to act efficiently and that this hostile band which must be excited to war by the secret agents of Great Britain must be destroyed.”16
The Battle of Tippecanoe became a rallying cry for the pro-war movement. Preposterous accounts were published in newspapers and pamphlets that elevated each fallen soldier or militaman into a heroic martyr who surrendered life in order to protect innocent American settlers from being murdered in their homes by savage Indians. In Kentucky, the legislature passed a resolution blaming Great Britain for “inciting the savages … to murder the inhabitants of our defenceless frontiers—furnishing them with arms and ammunition … to attack our forces; to the loss of a number of our brave men.”17 In the House, Tennessee’s Felix Grundy declared that America must “drive the British from our Continent.” Doing so would ensure that “they will no longer have an opportunity of intriguing with our Indian neighbors, and setting on the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and children. That nation will lose her Canadian trade, and, by having no resting place in this country, her means of annoying us will be diminished.”18