Winthrop Sargent had been hit three times by gunshot and was to carry two musket balls in his hips for the rest of his life, yet he had kept in the thick of the battle the whole time.
As, too, had General St. Clair, who came through bearing no sign of it except that eight musket balls passed through his coat and hat. So exhausted and in such pain was he that he could barely sit straight, let alone stand. He had been hoisted onto the back of a comparably exhausted packhorse that could move no faster than a walk, and so the general had no choice but to follow at the rear of the desperate march. He, too, saw the whole scene as a total disaster. But then what could be done?
Having fought in and survived a battle lasting nearly four hours, having had little or nothing to eat since the night before, many of them suffering from wounds, the men moved on, hour after hour, mile after mile for twenty-nine miles to reach Fort Jefferson just after dark, only to find no supplies of food or medicine at hand, which left no choice but to keep going.
Those of the wounded or others unable to go on were lodged as comfortably as possible within the fort. “Accordingly,” recorded Ebenezer Denny, “we set out a little after ten and continued our route [through the night] until within an hour of daylight, then halted and waited for day and until the rear came up.
Moved on again about nine o’clock; the morning of the 5th we met the convoy [from Fort Hamilton]. Stopped [to provide] a sufficiency to subsist us to Fort Hamilton; sent the remainder on to [Fort] Jefferson under an additional escort of a captain and sixty men; proceeded, and at first water [creek] halted, partly cooked and ate for the first time since the night preceding the action. At one o’clock moved on, and continued our route until nine at night, when we halted and made fires within fifteen miles of Fort Hamilton. Marched again just before day [November 6], the General soon after rode on to the fort [Washington]. Troops reached [there] in the afternoon.
The battered, pitiful soldiers found little room awaiting them in the barracks. Told to set up camp nearby, they found themselves provided with almost nothing in the way of tents or food. So they moved in to the village of Cincinnati. “Every house in this town is filled with drunken soldiers and there seems one continued scene of confusion,” reported Winthrop Sargent.
For days wounded soldiers kept staggering into camp, some in horrid condition. One was without his scalp, his skull crushed in two places by a tomahawk. General St. Clair was being housed within Fort Washington, so weak and exhausted he would not leave his room for two weeks.
St. Clair’s Defeat, as the battle came to be known, had been a total disaster, worse than any suffered by the American army during the entire Revolution, and the greatest defeat of an army at the hands of natives until then, including Braddock’s Defeat.
According to the count tabulated by Ebenezer Denny, the army losses numbered 623 dead, including 39 officers. In addition an estimated 200 others, men, women, and children, were killed. In all only three women survived. This made a total of 1,094 dead and wounded or well over half of the 1,400 Americans present at the scene.
The Indians lost no more than 21 dead and 40 wounded.
They had also acquired from the soldiers’ abandoned encampment some 1,200 muskets, 163 axes, eight cannon, baggage wagons, and a mountain of camp equipment.
Exhausted and distraught as he was, Major Denny tried to determine in his mind why the massive effort had gone so wrong, and kept coming back to the warnings that General Harmar, with all his experience with failure, had voiced at the start. On November 9, in the privacy of his journal, Denny wrote at length on the matter and while never fixing the blame on General St. Clair by name, clearly he saw it as a case of repeated bad judgment and bad decisions made one after another from the beginning.
Well before the St. Clair campaign got under way, General Harmar had seen “with what material the bulk of the army was composed,” and that with such recruits defeat was inevitable.
Men collected from the streets and prisons of the cities, hurried out into the enemy’s country, and with the officers commanding them, totally unacquainted with the business in which they were engaged; it was utterly impossible they could be otherwise. Besides, not any one department was sufficiently prepared; both quarter-master and contractors [were] extremely deficient. It was a matter of astonishment to [Harmar] that the commanding general [St. Clair], who was acknowledged to be perfectly competent, should think of hazarding, with such people, and under such circumstances, his reputation and life, and the lives of so many others, knowing, too, as both did, the enemy with whom he was going to contend, an enemy brought up from infancy to war, and perhaps superior to an equal number of the best men that could be taken against them.
For one officer only did Denny voice praise and that was Winthrop Sargent, the Revolutionary officer, who remained “constantly on the alert,” and “took upon himself the burden of everything.”
But, he wrote, there was one further, most important matter that if not entirely neglected, should have had far more serious attention. “This was a knowledge of the collected force and situation of the enemy; of this we were perfectly ignorant.”
What was left of the miserable army remained encamped in front of Fort Washington. There were days and nights of cold rain, then snow. Such officers as were sufficiently capable were busy making payrolls and preparing for their men’s discharge as quickly as possible.
An official dispatch reporting the defeat had gone off to Secretary Knox from General St. Clair, but whether it had been received was unknown.
After another week it was decided that someone who had been through the ordeal had to take the news in person to President Washington. The choice for this unpleasant task was Major Denny, and on the evening of November 19, carrying a copy of the earlier dispatch to Secretary Knox, he departed on board a fourteen-oar barge back up the Ohio.
Though Marietta and vicinity had suffered no attack by the Indians, there had been cause for considerable, unrelieved tension and misery for many, including a return of smallpox and scarlet fever, which carried off fifteen to twenty children. Jonathan Devol and his wife as one example, had suffered the loss of three of their children.
When Major Denny brought the news of St. Clair’s Defeat to Marietta, during a stop there, so alarmed were many there was talk of evacuating the settlement. But, as said, “these evil forebodings began to subside, and by the calm deportment and resolute counsel of the more influential and experienced men, a better spirit prevailed.”
Foremost and most important of such men was, most obviously, Rufus Putnam, who several days afterward was to write at length to Washington about the state of conditions in Marietta, but make no mention of St. Clair’s Defeat, fully conscious, as he would have been, that the first word to the president had to come from Denny. But even absent of any mention of the massive defeat of the army, it was a powerful expression of what was also being experienced day after day by many on the Ohio frontier. The letter was dated December 26, 1791.
“When I consider the multiplicity of business which necessarily engages your attention, it is with great reluctance I address you on the affairs of the people settled in this quarter,” he began.
After describing the improvements of the local fortifications that had been established, he went on to list the numerous murders committed by Indians in the near vicinity since the massacre at Big Bottom. Was it not to be feared, he asked, that “the enemy’s late success” would bring on more bloodshed?
People were leaving daily.
Our numbers are few and daily decreasing. Some families and many young men have left us already, and more are going, because they can get employ[ment]. Nor are we able to prevent them. All resources by which we retained them the last year are at an end, and we are scarcely able to subsist ourselves and families, much less to pay men for labor or military service. So, that unless we can be assured of government protection, self-preservation dictates the propriety of getting away as soon as possible.
He
then proceeded with what was clearly a sore subject.
“But however surprising for you to hear and painful for me to relate, these people think they have very little hope from Governor St. Clair. They believe that both the Governor and Mr. Sargent have, for some reason or other, conceived a prejudice against them.” More than this, however, he did not express, except to say that for all the recruits stationed at Pittsburgh and Wheeling, “indeed all stations on the Ohio” of any consequence, only Marietta had received no protection of any kind.
“I do not wish to entertain groundless jealousies nor frighten myself with imaginary evils; but it must be allowed that a black cloud hangs over us, and God only knows when, or on what devoted spot it may break.”
IV.
As Denny was to learn on arrival in Philadelphia, the earlier dispatch had already reached Knox, who wasted no time sending it by courier to the president’s residence, where the president was entertaining guests at a private Sunday dinner and wished not to be disturbed. But the president’s private secretary, Tobias Lear, entered the room and whispered in the president’s ear, whereupon Washington excused himself, left the table, and after reading the dispatch, rejoined the gathering as though nothing had happened.
Only later would Tobias Lear recount how, after the guests had left, Washington paced up and down the room, then exploded in a fury.
“It’s all over,” he said. “St. Clair’s defeated—routed; the officers nearly all killed. . . . Here,” he continued, his anger growing, “on this very spot I took leave of him. . . . You have your instructions, I said, from the secretary of War. I . . . will add but one word—beware of surprise! You know how the Indians fight us. . . . He went off with that as my last warning. . . .
And yet, to suffer that army to be cut to pieces, hacked, butchered, tomahawked by a surprise—the very thing I guarded him against! Oh God, Oh God, he is worse than a murderer. How can he answer it to his country! The blood of the slain is upon him, the curse of widows and orphans, the curse of Heaven!
Tobias Lear had never heard such an outburst of rage, at the end of which Washington collapsed on a sofa and sat silent. Then, his voice softened, he told Lear, “This must not go beyond this room. General St. Clair shall have justice. . . . I will receive him without displeasure. I will hear him without prejudice; he shall have full justice.”
During his journey from Cincinnati, Ebenezer Denny tried to banish from his mind, as much as that was possible, every idea of the slaughter and defeat of the army. To talk at all on the subject was an “unpleasant task” for him. At Pittsburgh old friends there seemed to view him as having escaped from the dead.
Meanwhile, word of what happened spread rapidly throughout the east and public rage kept mounting. As early as December 10, the New York Gazette of the United States carried a letter from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on the Ohio, reporting news of “our army being totally defeated and 600 privates killed.” The Philadelphia National Gazette, the Boston Columbian Centinal, and the Massachusetts Spy all carried reports of “dreadful carnage” and chaos. Some of what appeared was inaccurate. The Gazette of the United States, on December 17, described General St. Clair lying ill of the gout the whole time the battle raged and how his guards, “by dint of the bayonet had prevented the Indians getting into his tent to butcher him.”
The horror and alarm over the news felt by people in all walks of life was powerfully expressed in a letter written December 18 by Abigail Adams, wife of the vice president, to an old family friend back in Boston.
The sad and dreadful havoc of our army at the westward cast a gloom over us all. Some of the best officers who remained to us after the Peace have fallen here. All our Boston youths who were officers are amongst the slain. . . . Not even Braddock’s defeat is said to have caused such a slaughter. A poor gouty, infirmed general, always unsuccessful, a miserable banditry of undisciplined troops—an excellent choir of officers—who I am told went out like lambs to the slaughter, having no prospect of conquering—I apprehend much uneasiness will ensue.
Arriving in Philadelphia late in the day on December 19, after more than a month of extremely difficult travel through rain and snow nearly the whole way, Denny reported immediately to the secretary of war. The next morning he was received by the president with “attention and kindness,” and following a breakfast with the president and his family, he and Washington talked at length in privacy.
To what extent and in what detail he talked of all he had seen and knew remains unknown, but doubtless he reported a great deal, including the full death toll of the massacre and retreat, he being the one who made the count. In the earlier dispatch St. Clair had mentioned by name only five of the officers killed, and said nothing of the 593 enlisted men, about whom Denny was obliged to report and no doubt did all that was known.
General St. Clair did not arrive in Philadelphia until two months later, and was received by Washington with the same degree of courtesy and respect that Denny had been given. Formally resigning his command, St. Clair asked for an investigation by Congress into the cause of his defeat, and this led to the first congressional investigation in American history.
Ebenezer Denny returned to Pittsburgh, where he had a number of friends and which he saw as a city with a future. He resigned from the service and would go on to a highly successful banking career in Pittsburgh and was to become the city’s first mayor.
St. Clair would eventually be exonerated from blame for what happened by Washington and by a committee of the House of Representatives, which praised his bravery under fire. He was also to remain the governor of the territory.
But the horrors and disgrace of St. Clair’s Defeat were not forgotten. Nor would the fact that the military situation even before the campaign got under way was hopeless. One bad decision by St. Clair as commander followed another, starting with that of proceeding with the campaign in the first place. Far better it would have been to have abandoned the whole thing, just as he had once abandoned Fort Ticonderoga.
Then, too, the timing had been off. It all got going too late in the year, and no one, it would appear, including Washington and Knox, seemed capable of learning from the disastrous experience of General Harmar.
On the morning of February 1, 1792, Winthrop Sargent rode by horseback with a small detachment of soldiers combining a burial party to the scene of the slaughter. As he wrote, the memory of the disaster that filled his mind bore no resemblance to the scene before him.
The whole “melancholy theater” was covered with twenty inches of snow, yet with every tread of the horses’ hooves dead bodies were exposed to view, “mutilated, mangled and butchered with the most savage barbarity; and, indeed, there seems to have been left no act of indecent cruelty or torture which was not practiced on the occasion, to the women as well as the men.”
Looking over the lay of the ground, he thought, it, as an encampment, very strong and certainly defensible had it been held by regular troops. However, the dense woods, thick bushes, and old logs in such abundance close by were exactly the ideal cover for an Indian attack.
What struck him most, riding around the line, was the amazing effect of the enemy’s fire. “Every twig and bush seems to be cut down, and the saplings and larger trees marked with the utmost profusion of their shot.”
Removing the bodies proved extremely slow and difficult. It was not just that they were buried in deep snow and had to be uncovered but were frozen hard down to the ground and would break to pieces when being torn loose. The solemn task and rendering last rites would require more than a day.
V.
Wasting no time in taking what were considered the steps necessary to carry on the campaign against the Indians, President Washington used the “unfortunate affair” of St. Clair’s Defeat to press Congress into increasing the size of the army as well as military pay, a program that would cost the government more than a million dollars, a colossal sum. And this time the necessary preparations and training were to be gone about in th
e right way. The one great still unanswered question was who would take command?
Also in Philadelphia at this time were the Reverend Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam, too, who had come as representatives of the Ohio Company to lobby Congress for an additional land grant and a reduction in land prices, as a way of compensating for the economic fallback the company was suffering because of the Indian Wars. Most encouraging had been the reception they received from many members of Congress and in particular from Vice President John Adams.
On the evening of March 4, 1792, Cutler was invited to dine with Adams and his family at their home on Bush Hill, overlooking the Schuylkill River.
“When I came to his house I found that Mrs. Adams was dangerously sick with a fever,” Cutler wrote to his wife, Mary. “He told me he refused all invitations to dine abroad, and that he received no formal company at home, but very politely desired me to come and take a family dinner with him every day while I was in the city . . . in short, to make his house my home.”
The day following Cutler called again at the Adams home to inquire after Mrs. Adams, and wound up spending the next several hours “closeted” with the vice president, talking about Ohio Company issues and more.
As he reported to his wife, “It gave me much pleasure that I had this favorable opportunity to mention to him General Putnam as a proper officer to command the force to be raised and sent against the Indians. He is much dissatisfied with the conduct of St. Clair, and highly approves of the command being given to Putnam.”
Adams then encouraged Cutler, at earliest opportunity, to converse with General Knox, as well as members of the Senate and House about Putnam.
It seems to have been an especially active day for Cutler, who later ran into General St. Clair, whom he described as “now hearty and well,” and, from some of what he said, seemed to presume he would continue in command.
The Pioneers Page 12
