Unshackling America by Willard Sterne Randall

Author:Willard Sterne Randall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

ELEVEN

“Father, Listen to Your Children”

On the northwestern frontier, 1813 began as the previous year had ended: with an unnecessary American defeat hard on the heels of even more bungling in Washington, D.C. With the Great Lakes, all of Michigan and the northern Ohio frontier settlements exposed to British and Indian raids by the surrenders of Detroit and Chicago, Secretary of War Eustis needed to appoint a dynamic new commander of all forces in the Old Northwest to replace Hull and calm the terrified frontier. Instead, he appointed a Tennessee planter, James Winchester, who had never served above the rank of captain in the Revolution. As brigadier general in the regular army, he would be superseded by the popular veteran military governor, William Henry Harrison. Winchester was to have raised 1,200 militia and marched to reinforce Hull in Detroit, but he arrived there too late. By this time, the alarmed Kentucky legislature, at the bidding of Clay, had appointed Harrison major general and commander of the Kentucky militia.

When Winchester eventually arrived at Fort Wayne, the officers he found there faced a conundrum: could a regular army brigadier general outrank a militia major general? After mulling the question with his staff officers, Harrison yielded to Winchester, but not before he had appealed over Secretary of War Eustis’s head to President Madison. Winchester remained in command only six days before a letter came from Madison, turning over the command to Harrison.

Building up a huge army, Harrison ordered massive amounts of supplies—one order was for 1 million rations—and paid prices far above market rates, if nothing else reviving the region’s economy and making the war popular. But he was literally stuck in mud and short on supplies, which were maddeningly slow to arrive, the sodden, unpaved roads impassable for artillery and supply wagons. Harrison was about to furlough his men to their warm homes until spring when news of the American rout at Queenston Heights reached Washington. Eustis fired off fresh orders: Harrison was to keep his forces intact, no matter the conditions. By Christmas, up to three hundred men had become seriously ill, as Private Elias Darnell wrote in his diary, from being “exposed to the cold ground and deprived of every nourishment.… The camp has become a loathsome place.”1

At last convinced that he was ready to unleash a counteroffensive to sweep the Indians from the region and to retake Detroit, Harrison turned over his left flank to Winchester and ordered him to march to Fort Defiance (present-day Defiance, Ohio), secure it and await further orders. But, disregarding Harrison’s command, Winchester moved his camp several times in the next three months as winter and disease, including typhoid fever, worsened. Finally in late December Winchester received clothing and two days’ rations, along with fresh orders to rendezvous with Harrison’s main force at the Miami River rapids. On Christmas Day, as the weather turned bitter cold and a heavy snow fell, Winchester and his men marched off. On the third day, he received countermanding orders from Harrison to turn back.

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