St. Clair's defeat

This lithograph of Little Turtle is reputedly based upon a lost portrait by Gilbert Stuart that was destroyed when the British burned Washington in 1814.[13]

The Native American forces did not have a formal command structure,[14] and the overall planning and leadership has been a source of debate. Both Blue Jacket and Little Turtle later claimed to have been in overall command of the united forces.[15] John Norton claimed that when the battle began, the Shawnee took the lead.[16] Little Turtle is often credited for the victory, but this may have been due to the influence of his son-in-law, William Wells, who later served with the United States as an Indian agent and interpreter.[17]

The different nations were grouped by similar language groups in a crescent-shaped formation at the start of the battle. Little Turtle of the Miamis, Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, with Buckongahelas and Captain Pipe[18] of the Lenape formed the center.[16] Egushawa was among the leaders of the Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe units to the left. Tarhe and Simon Girty were among the leaders of the Wyandot, Mingo, and Cherokee units that formed the right horn of the crescent.[14]

The United States command structure was as follows:[9]

U.S. Army – Major General Arthur St. Clair

• 1st Infantry Regiment – Major Jean François Hamtramck (only part of the regiment under Captain Thomas Doyle was engaged)
• 2nd Infantry Regiment – Major Jonathan Hart †
• Artillery Battalion – Major William Ferguson †

U.S. levies – Major General Richard Butler †

• 1st Levy Regiment – Lieutenant Colonel William Darke
• 2nd Levy Regiment – Lieutenant Colonel George Gibson

Kentucky militia – Lieutenant Colonel William Oldham †

Map of St. Clair's encampment and retreat (north on bottom)[20]

St. Clair's defeat. a-Butler's Battalion, c-Clarke's Battalion, d-Patterson's Battalion, e-Faulkner's Rifle Company, h-Gaither's Battalion, j-Beddinger's Battalion, crosses indicate the "enemy", z-"troops retreating" (north on right)[23]

Illustration from Theodore Roosevelt's article on St. Clair's defeat, featured in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February 1896.[20]

On the evening of 3 November, St. Clair's force established a camp on a high hill near the present-day location of Fort Recovery, Ohio, near the headwaters of the Wabash River. A native force of around 1,000 warriors, led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, established a large crescent surrounding the camp.[24] They waited in the woods until dawn, when the men stacked their weapons and paraded to their morning meals.[21] Adjutant General Winthrop Sargent had just reprimanded the militia for failing to conduct reconnaissance patrols when the natives struck, surprising the Americans and overrunning their ground.

The center, consisting of the Miami, Shawnee, and Lenape, first attacked the militia,[25] who fled across the Wabash and up the hill to the main camp without their weapons. The regulars immediately broke their musket stacks, formed battle lines, and fired a volley into the natives, forcing them back.[26] The left and right wings of the Native American formation flanked the regulars and closed in on the main camp, meeting on the far side.[27] Within 30 minutes, the 1,400 warriors had completely encircled the U.S. camp.[28] The U.S. muskets and artillery were poor quality and had little effect on the Native warriors behind their cover.[29] Meanwhile, St. Clair's artillery was stationed on a nearby bluff and was wheeling into position when the gun crews were killed by native marksmen, and the survivors were forced to spike their guns.

Women and children who accompanied the army sought refuge among the supply wagons.[30] Some militia tried to join them but were forced back into battle by the women. Darke ordered his battalion to fix bayonets and charge the central native position. Little Turtle's forces gave way and retreated to the woods, only to encircle Darke's battalion and destroy it.[31] The bayonet charge was tried numerous times with similar results, and the U.S. forces eventually collapsed in disorder. St. Clair had three horses shot out from under him as he tried unsuccessfully to rally his men.

Several survivors of St. Clair's Defeat wrote vivid accounts of their experiences during that terrible battle. The governing Boards of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County published a pamphlet [St. Clair's defeat : Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive/ St. Clair's Defeat 1791], one of a historical series. The three accounts were published in 1847, 1864 and 1851, respectively.

After three hours of fighting, St. Clair called together the remaining officers and, faced with total annihilation, decided to attempt one last bayonet charge to get through the native line and escape. Supplies and wounded were left in the camp. As before, Little Turtle's army allowed the bayonets to pass through, but this time the men ran for Fort Jefferson.[32] Ebenezer Denny wrote that the fastest ran, leaving the slow and wounded behind.[33]

A Pennsylvania detachment under Major John Clark provided the rearguard for the retreat. When Clark was wounded, however, the detachment fled.[34] With no organized defense against the pursuing Native Americans, the retreat quickly turned into a rout. "It was, in fact, a flight," St. Clair described a few days later in a letter to Secretary of War Knox.[34] St. Clair later wrote that the route was littered with discarded firelocks, cartridge boxes, and uniforms, as the fleeing army discarded any items that slowed them down.[34] In desperation, one cook known as "Red-headed Nance" even abandoned her baby.[34] Another account tells a similar story, where a baby abandoned in the snow by a fleeing mother was found and adopted by pursuing Native Americans.[35]

Private Stephen Littell became lost in the woods and accidentally returned to the abandoned camp. He reported that the Native Americans were all gone, in pursuit of the fleeing army. The remaining wounded begged him to kill them before the Native Americans returned.[34] The American Indians continued their pursuit, killing those who fell to the rear of the retreat. After they had gone about four miles, they returned to loot the camp. Hiding beneath a tree, Littell reported that they ate the abandoned food, divided the spoils, and killed the wounded.[36]

The head of the retreat reached Fort Jefferson that evening, a distance of nearly 30 miles (48 km) in one day. With inadequate space and no food, it was decided that those who could must continue to Fort Hamilton, another 45 miles (72 km) away.[36] The wounded were left at Fort Jefferson with little or no food.[37] Those on horseback reached Fort Hamilton the next morning, followed by those who marched on foot.[36]

St. Clair sent a supply convoy and a hundred soldiers under Major David Ziegler from Fort Washington on 11 November.[38] They arrived at Fort Jefferson and found 116 survivors eating "horse flesh and green hides".[39] Charles Scott organized a relief party of Kentucky militia, but it disbanded at Fort Washington in late November with no action taken. Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson assumed command of the Second Regiment in January 1792 and led a supply convoy to Fort Jefferson. The detachment attempted to bury the dead and collect the missing cannons, but the task was beyond it, with "upwards of six hundred bodies" at the battle site and at least 78 bodies along the road.[40] The exact number of wounded is not known, but it has been reported that execution fires burned for several days after the battle.[32]

The casualty rate was the highest percentage ever suffered by a United States Army unit and included St. Clair's second in command, Richard Butler. Of the 52 officers engaged, 39 were killed and 7 wounded; around 88% of all officers had become casualties. The American casualty rate among the soldiers was 97 percent, including 632 of 920 killed (69%) and 264 wounded. Nearly all of the 200 camp followers were slaughtered, for a total of 832 Americans killed. Due to its relatively small size at the time, approximately one-quarter of the entire U.S. Army had been destroyed in one day.[41] Only 24 of the 920 officers and men engaged came out of it unscathed. The survivors included Benjamin Van Cleve and his uncle Robert Benham; Van Cleve was one of the few who were unharmed. Native casualties were about 61, with at least 21 killed.[42]

So many people died on site that when 300 soldiers from the Legion of the United States returned to the site in late 1793, they identified the site by the unburied human remains. The detachment had to move bones to make space for their beds.[43][44] The Legion buried remains in a mass grave.[45] Sixty years after the battle, in September 1851, the town organized Bone Burying Day to inter the remains of bones discovered at that location.[46] Historian William Hogeland calls the Native American victory "the high-water mark in resistance to white expansion. No comparable Indian victory would follow."[47]

The confederacy reveled in their triumph and war trophies, but most members of the force returned to their respective towns after the victory. The 1791 harvest had been insufficient in the region, and the warriors needed to hunt for winter food stores.[48] A grand council was held on the banks of the Ottawa River to determine whether to continue the war against the United States or negotiate peace from a strong position. Some believed the United States could not continue the war after losing so many soldiers.[49] The council delayed the final decision until a new grand council could be held the following year.[48] Both Little Turtle and Blue Jacket claimed to have been in overall command of the native forces at the victory, causing resentment between the two men and their followers.[15]

The British, surprised and delighted at the success of the Natives they had been supporting and arming for years, stepped up their plans to create a pro-British Indian barrier state that would be closed to further settlement and encompass what was then known as the Northwest Territory.[50] The plans were developed in Canada, but in 1794 the government in London reversed course and decided it was necessary to gain American favor since a major war had broken out with France. London put the barrier state idea on hold and opened friendly negotiations with the Americans, leading to the Jay Treaty of 1794. One provision was that the British acceded to American demands to remove their forts from American territory in Michigan and Wisconsin. The British, however, maintained their forts in Ontario, from which they supplied munitions to the Natives living in the United States.[51]

News of the defeat reached the eastern states by late November. A French resident learned of the battle from Native Americans and shared the news at Vincennes. From there, a traveler headed east sent word to Virginia Governor Henry Lee, along with an alarm from Charles Scott.[52]

Major Ebenezer Denny carried St. Clair's official report to Philadelphia. Knox escorted Denny to President Washington on 20 December.[52] Washington was outraged when he received news of the defeat.[53] After cursing St. Clair, he told Tobias Lear, "General St. Clair shall have justice. I looked hastily through the dispatches, saw the whole disaster but not all the particulars."[54] St. Clair left Wilkinson in charge of Fort Washington[54] and arrived in Philadelphia in January 1792 to report on what had happened. Blaming Quartermaster General Samuel Hodgdon, as well as the War Department, St. Clair asked for a court-martial to gain exoneration and planned to resign his commission after winning it. Washington, however, denied him the court-martial and forced St. Clair's immediate resignation.

The House of Representatives began investigating the disaster. It was the first Congressional Special Committee investigation[20] as well as the first investigation of the executive branch. As part of the proceedings, the House committee in charge of the investigation sought certain documents from the War Department. Knox brought that matter to Washington's attention, and because of the significant issues of separation of powers involved, the president summoned a meeting of all of his department heads. It was one of the first meetings of all of the officials together and may be considered the beginning of the United States Cabinet.[55] Washington established, in principle, the position that the executive branch should refuse to divulge any papers or materials that the public good required it to keep secret and that at any rate, it was not to provide any originals. That is the earliest appearance of the doctrine of executive privilege,[56] which later became a major separation of powers issue.

The final committee report sided largely with St. Clair by finding that Knox, Hodgdon, and other War Department officials had done a poor job of raising, equipping, and supplying St. Clair's expedition.[57] However, Congress voted against a motion to consider the committee's findings and issued no final report. St. Clair expressed disappointment that his reputation was not officially cleared.[58]

Within weeks of learning of the disaster, Washington wrote, "We are involved in actual war!"[59] Following up on his 1783 "Sentiments on a Peace Establishment",[60] he urged Congress to raise an army capable of conducting a successful offense against the American Indian confederacy, which it did in March 1792 by establishing additional army regiments (the Legion of the United States), adding three-year enlistments, and increasing military pay.[45][53] That May, it also passed two Militia Acts. The first empowered the president to call out the militias of the several states. The second required free, able-bodied white male citizens of the various states between the ages of 18 and 45 to enroll in the militia of the state in which they resided. Washington would use the authority to call out the militia in 1794 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.[61]

General Richard Butler had many friends among the Seneca people, who mourned his death.[62] A Seneca delegation led by Cornplanter visited General Wayne in 1793,[63] and Seneca Chief Big Tree joined Wayne's Legion. In early 1794, when it appeared there would be an end to hostilities, Big Tree committed suicide.[62]

In December 1793, the Legion of the United States built Fort Recovery at the battlefield site and spent the following months reinforcing the structure and searching for the abandoned artillery from St. Clair's defeat. On 30 June to 1 July 1794, the Legion successfully defended the fort from a Native American attack. The following month, the Legion won a decisive victory in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The next year, the United States and the Northwestern Confederacy negotiated the Treaty of Greenville, which used Fort Recovery as a reference point for the boundary between American and Native settlements.[64] The treaty is considered to be the conclusion to the Northwest Indian War.

A story was published years after the defeat of St Clair about a skeleton of a Captain Roger Vanderberg and his diary that were supposedly found inside a tree in Miami County, Ohio. However, no one of that name was a casualty of the 1791 battle. The story originated in 1864 from a Scottish novel.[66]

A folk ballad, "St. Clair's Defeat" (or "Sinclair's Defeat"), was published in the 19th century[67] and was popular in the 1800s.[68] It may have been based on the earlier Crawford's Defeat by the Indians. Music historian Anne Grimes[69] cites Recollections of Persons and Places in the West by Henry M. Brackenridge, 1834, in which Brackenridge recalled hearing the song from its author, a blind poet named Dennis Loughey, at a racetrack in Pittsburgh around 1800.[70][71] It was collected as a folksong in Mary O. Eddy's 1939 book Ballads and Songs from Ohio.[72] It was recorded by Grimes on her 1957 album, Ohio State Ballads[73] and by Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp on their 1960 album Gibson & Camp at the Gate of Horn. It was also recorded as "St. Claire's Defeat" by the folk revival group the Modern Folk Quartet in 1964[74] and by Apollo's Fire in 2004.[75]

St. Clair's defeat is, along with the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, a likely source for the name of the fife and drum duet "Hell on the Wabash."[76]