The History of American Military. Richard W. Stewart
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Arthur St. Clair Charles Willson Peale, 1782
The situation was entirely different in the Northwest. There, federal troops had been occupied chiefly in driving squatters out of the public domain and protecting the Indians’ treaty rights, a duty that neither endeared them to the settlers nor trained them in the art of war. Since the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, settlers had been pouring into the Ohio country and were demanding federal protection. Their demands carried a veiled threat: If the government ignored their plight, they would turn to Spain and England for succor. The federal union could be destroyed in its infancy, or at the very least its future expansion could be forestalled by resurgent European influence in the region.
Tardily and somewhat inadequately, the new government groped for a response to the West’s challenge. In President Washington’s first annual message to Congress, he called for the defense of the frontier against the Indians. Congress responded by raising the authorized strength of regulars to 1,283. Aware that this force was inadequate to protect the entire frontier, Secretary Knox planned to call on the militia to join the regulars in an offensive to chastise the Miami Indian group as a show of force. In June 1790 he ordered General Harmar, in consultation with Arthur St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest Territory, to lead the expedition. Under an authorization given him the preceding fall, St. Clair called on Pennsylvania and Kentucky to send 1,500 militiamen to Harmar at Fort Washington, now Cincinnati. (See Map 13.)
The untrained and undisciplined militia was a weak reed on which to lean in a sustained campaign against the Indians, but Knox knew the militia’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. Depending on the faststriking, mounted militiamen to support the regulars, Knox wanted Harmar to conduct a “rapid and decisive” maneuver, taking advantage of the element of surprise, to find and destroy the Indian forces and their food supplies. But the two-phased operation Harmar and St. Clair concocted bore little resemblance to Knox’s proposed tactics. Harmar planned a long march northward from Fort Washington to the Miami villages concentrated at the headwaters of the Wabash River. A second column under Maj. John Hamtramck would ascend the Wabash from Fort Vincennes, Indiana, destroying villages along the way and finally joining with Harmar’s column after a 150-mile march.
“Mad” Anthony Wayne (1745–1796)
Anthony Wayne achieved fame during the Revolution as an aggressive commander with a fiery temper. After the war, he fell hopelessly in debt. Seeking immunity from prosecution, he ran for Congress and was elected, only to be unseated a few months later due to election irregularities. Down and out, Wayne eagerly grasped at the opportunity to take command of the Army after St. Clair’s defeat. The government made the offer with some trepidation, as Washington believed Wayne was “addicted to the bottle.” Thomas Jefferson considered him to be the type of person who would “run his head against a wall where success was both impossible and useless.” He proved, however, to be the right man for the job.
Anthony Wayne James Shaples, Sr., 1795
The expedition was a complete failure. Hamtramck left Vincennes with 330 regulars and Virginia militia on September 30; but after an eleven-day march, during which a few Indian villages were burned, the militia refused to advance farther. Harmar also set out on September 30. After struggling through the wilderness for more than two weeks with a force of 1,453 men, including 320 regulars, he reached the neighborhood of the principal Indian village near what is now Fort Wayne, Indiana. Instead of pushing on with his entire strength, Harmar on three successive occasions sent forward unsupported detachments of about 200 to 500 militiamen plus fifty or sixty regulars. The undisciplined militia could not be restrained from scattering in search of Indians and plunder. After two of the detachments suffered heavily in brushes with the Indians, Harmar took the rest of his army back to Fort Washington. His conduct was severely criticized; but a court of inquiry, noting the untrained troops with which Harmar had been provided and the lateness of the season, exonerated him.
Secretary Knox’s injunctions for a rapid and decisive maneuver were again ignored when the government decided to send another expedition against the Northwest Indians in 1791. Congress raised the size of the invasion force, adding a second infantry regiment to the Regular Army and authorizing the President to raise a corps of 2,000 men for a term of six months, either by calling for militia or by enlisting volunteers into the service of the United States. The President commissioned Governor St. Clair a major general and placed him in command of the expedition. So slowly did recruiting and the procuring of supplies proceed that St. Clair was unable to set out before September 17; only by calling on the neighboring states for militia was he able to bring his force up to strength. When St. Clair’s force finally marched out of Fort Washington, it consisted of about 600 regulars, almost all the actual infantry strength of the U.S. Army, in addition to about 800 enlisted “levies” and 600 militiamen.
By November 3, St. Clair had advanced about one hundred miles northward from Cincinnati. Most of his force, now numbering about 1,400 effectives, encamped for the night near the headwaters of the Wabash. Neglecting the principle of security, St. Clair had not sent out scouts; just before dawn a horde of about 1,000 Indians fell upon the unsuspecting troops. Untrained, low in morale as a result of inadequate supplies, and led by a general who was suffering from rheumatism, asthma, and “colic,” the army was thrown into confusion by the sudden assault. St. Clair and less than half his force survived unscathed: there were 637 killed and 263 wounded.
The United States was alarmed and outraged over St. Clair’s defeat. Some urged that the government abandon the Indian Wars and accept the British proposal for an Indian buffer state in the Northwest, but Washington well understood the strategic implications of such a scheme and decided instead to mount a third expedition. He appointed Maj. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, the dashing commander of the Pennsylvania Line during the Revolution, to succeed St. Clair. Congress doubled the authorized strength of the Army by providing for three additional regiments, two of which were to be infantry and the other a composite regiment of infantry and light dragoons. It tried to avoid the bad effects of short-term enlistment by adding the new regiments to the Regular Army as a temporary augmentation to be “discharged as soon as the United States shall be at peace with the Indian tribes.” Congress also agreed to Secretary of War Knox’s proposed reorganization of the Army into a “Legion,” a term widely used during the eighteenth century that had come to mean a composite organization of all combat arms under one command. Instead of regiments, the Army was composed of four “sublegions,” each commanded by a brigadier general and consisting of 2 battalions of infantry, 1 battalion of riflemen, 1 troop of dragoons (cavalrymen trained to fight either mounted or dismounted), and 1 company of artillery.
Egotistical, blustery, and cordially disliked by many of his contemporaries, General Wayne nevertheless displayed little of his celebrated madness during the expedition. His operation was skillfully planned. Correcting previous mistakes, he insisted on rigid discipline and strict training; conscious of the welfare of his men, he saw to it that supplies were adequate and equipment satisfactory. These military virtues finally won for the United States its elusive victory.
In the spring of 1793 General Wayne took the Legion down the river to Cincinnati, where he tried to persuade the Indians to submit peacefully. When negotiations broke down, the Legion followed the route that Harmar and St. Clair had taken. Wayne was in even poorer health than St. Clair but more determined. Like St. Clair, he moved slowly and methodically, building a series of forts and blockhouses along his line of march. Despite his efforts to improve morale, he found desertion as serious a problem as had his predecessors.
Battle of Fallen Timbers
Reinforced by mounted militia in July 1794, Wayne led about 3,000 men to within a few miles of Fort Miami, a post the British had recently established on the site of what is now