Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

The Meanings of the Wars for the Great Lakes

— 373 — TheMeaningsoftheWarsfortheGreatLakes A n d r e w R . L . C a y t o n Neither American popular culture nor American history has attached much significance to the Wars for the Great Lakes. While their importance seems obvious to scholars who devote themselves to studying various aspects of the long and episodic struggles among Indians, French, British, and Americans, most people ignore them. Even historians tend to view the wars as a series of raids and uprisings, which lead a self-contained life of their own. At best, general accounts of American History between 1754 and 1815 treat events in the Great Lakes area as precipitating factors in more important events in what Northwest Territory Governor Arthur St. Clair once called “the Atlantic country.”1 To read the history of the United States in the 1790s is to learn that the military endeavors of the United States mattered less than those of Great Britain and France. The great men of the early American republic were, and so the historians who study them are, more interested in European diplomacy than they are in frontier squabbles.2 Take, as an example, the reception in the “Atlantic country” of the news of the encounter between several hundred American troops under the command of St. Clair and a coalition of several hundred Indians more or less under the leadership of the Miami Little Turtle and the Shawnee Blue Jacket, on the morning of 4 November 1791. There is no need to recount the details of the battle or describe the hysteria A n d r e w R . L . C ay t o n — 374 — that news of the outcome provoked in the Ohio Valley. Americans named the battle “St. Clair’s Defeat,” thereby depriving Indians of the mantle of victory and placing responsibility for the debacle squarely on the shoulders of the incompetent commanding general. What might be better called the Battle of the Wabash was one of the most complete military humiliations ever suffered by American armed forces. In terms of casualties, which numbered about two-thirds out of a force of 1,400, it was the greatest victory of Indians over a U.S. Army—ever.3 Wrote Lieutenant Ebenezer Denny: “The land was literally covered with the dead.”4 Reports of the disaster provoked what Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson called a “great sensation” in Philadelphia, the capital of the new republican empire.5 The excitement did not last long, however. President George Washington may or may not have lost his temper—but only in private and only for half an hour.6 In the rapidly expanding public world of newspapers, congressional debates, and private correspondence, prominent Americans discussed congressional apportionment, the creation of a Post Office, the future of Haiti, and the fate of Louis XVI with greater fervor than they devoted to the protection of the western frontiers. In retrospect, the lack of attention paid to the engagement is remarkable. News of “St. Clair’s Defeat” passed through Philadelphia like a nasty summer thunderstorm, leaving people shaken but otherwise undisturbed. The reasons for this response may be obvious. The Ohio Country was far from Philadelphia. Everyone assumed that the Americans would eventually defeat the Indians; time and numbers were on their side. Besides, they believed that the real villains were the British, who were playing Svengali to the “savages.” Within four years a reorganized American army would defeat the Indians, expose the fragility of their ties with the British, and force Indian leaders to surrender their claims to much of what became the state of Ohio, thereby ending their insistence on the Ohio River as a border. St. Clair’s Defeat slowly faded into relative oblivion, its fate a not unrepresentative example of the fate of most of the events in these wars. t h e s i g n i f i c a n c e o f t h e w a r s f o r t h e g r e a t l a k e s The general obscurity of the Great Lakes Wars is ironic because these military actions were among the most decisive in the history of North America. Between The United State s a n d th e C on te st for L a ke s Er ie and Ontario, 1812–1815 — 375 — the 1750s and the 1810s, the area was the cockpit of...