1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism

Chapter 4 Demographic Strategies and the Defeat of Tecumseh: Moraviantown, Canada, October 1813

h Chapter 4 Demographic Strategies and the Defeat of Tecumseh moraviantown, canada, october 1813 The progress of war can be tracked on a map or tabulated in body counts. When General William Henry Harrison’s troops confronted the British forces of General Henry Proctor on the River Thames in Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) on October 5, 1813, they made good on the promise of Perry’s victory on Lake Erie. They consolidated late September gains made by retaking Detroit from the British and seizing the British Fort at Malden on the opposite bank of the Detroit River. And they eliminated the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, one of the staunchest Indian opponents of the United States. According to American and British formal statements on the war, the body count, while a convenient means of score keeping, was hardly the aim of the conflict. The purpose of any given battle was to take and hold ground. Once that work was done, any survivors of the conflict were to be treated not as prizes but simply as people in need of care. The eventual “parole” and return of prisoners from each side was a routine, even ritual, element in the aftermath of battle.1 General Proctor must have regarded it as an almost mundane matter, when, ten days after the battle, he sent a letter to General Harrison “requesting humane treatment for the prisoners” in the blandest formal terms. But Harrison did not respond in kind. Instead, he chose that moment to rail against the British for “horrible depredations against the peaceful inhabitants of our frontiers.” On November 3, a month after the action, he penned a stirring letter of outrage that spared no literary flourish in accusing the British, in concert with their Indian allies, of violating every possible rule of humane conduct, most especially in the matter of prisoners.2 Demographic Strategies and the Defeat of Tecumseh 119 The centerpiece of General Harrison’s gothic account of atrocities was the story of an expectant mother taken prisoner by British-allied Indians at Cold Creek near Lake Erie the previous spring. Captured “in an advanced state of pregnancy—she was immediately tomahawked, stripped naked, her womb ripped open, and the child taken out!” Despite the more than six hundred British prisoners taken in the Battle of Thames, for Harrison, the story of this single feticide was the casualty that counted most.3 Unlike Europeans and Euro-Americans, Indians regarded the taking of captives as one of the primary rewards of war. Sometimes tortured, sometimes adopted, people taken in battle played important symbolic and practical roles in Indian communities. And whereas Europeans and Euro-Americans claimed that only soldiers could ever be made prisoners of war, Indians deliberately included men and women, adults and children alike among their captives. With the British fighting alongside Indians, two very different approaches to war coincided in ways that the United States portrayed as deeply alarming. Urging the British not to accept aid from their Indian allies, Harrison charged them to “stop that dreadful effusion of innocent blood which proceeds from the employment of those savage monsters.”4 From that day to this, Americans have usually assumed that it is armies that take and hold land. But General Harrison and his Indian antagonists were battling over a deeper truth. The ground is controlled by those who populate it. U.S. tradition said that access to more acreage allowed families to grow larger. But the reverse proposition also applied. The bigger the nation’s population, the more numerous were the claimants available to seize the land through settlement. In an era when inhabitants of the United States sought eagerly to spread their habitations ever westward to the farthest horizon, Indians and Americans alike understood the key relationship between population expansion and territorial extension.5 Despite U.S. claims that women and children had no role to play in battles and should never be taken prisoner by Indians, all antagonists in the era of 1812 understood at some fundamental level that reproduction was a tool of war. Whether the Cold Creek maternal-fetal massacre really occurred—and General Harrison swore in the very last line of his letter, “I pledge myself for the truth of the above statement in relation to the murders committed by Indians”—or whether the story simply echoed the sort of penny-dreadful 120 Chapter 4 atrocity tales Americans had read recreationally for...