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80 a child of the revolution chapter eight The First Regiment t The officers of Harrison’s regiment, the First, were every bit as dissolute as Harrison’s Virginia acquaintance had painted them and proud of it: red-faced and loud-voiced, they were a tight-knit group of men in their thirties and forties, most of whom shared a rough haughtiness and a large appetite for whiskey. Their backgrounds varied widely. Zeigler was a stolid professional who had begun his career in the Imperial Russian Army; Captain Erkuries Beatty was a well-educated, ingratiating Jerseyman, seldom sober; Captain Ballard Smith a drunken, uproarious Virginian. A few had had some education; others could hardly write their own names. However, they had good reason for being close-knit: they had been serving together in the West since 1783. All the senior officers had served in the Revolution, and every junior had been either a noncommissioned officer or a cadet with the regiment before moving up to officer rank. More recently , for five or six winters past, most of them had shared the isolation of rude log forts on the frontier, indulged by such generals as Harmar, who himself had an “unfortunate propensity to drink.”1 The lucky chance that had kept them out of the Indian ambush of 4 November 1791 (they had been escorting a supply train to protect it from attack by deserters) had left them, Harrison noted, “unbroken, well clothed & equipt, & in a high state of discipline” compared with the rest of the army. Once the wounded and dying were cleared out of the fort, therefore, the officers of the First Regiment were looking forward to passing the winter in the same hard-drinking routine they were used 80 Booraem text.indb 80 5/22/12 1:53 PM the first regiment 81 to. They faced only one minor irritant: their new recruit, Ensign Harrison , whom they regarded with unconcealed distaste. The newcomer’s appearance and habits set him distinctly apart. Smooth-faced, dark-haired, and delicate in build, he looked even younger than his eighteen years. His long horse face and earnest brown eyes did nothing to lessen the impression of boyishness. He drank moderately and was not a gambler. His eager speech and enthusiasm for reading (he had brought the large edition of Blair’s Lectures and Cicero’s Orations all the way from Philadelphia) suggested the literary Easterner, out of place in a half-savage country. In tastes, habits, and background, he was the greatest possible contrast to Ensign Hastings Marks, the other Virginian who had recently joined the regiment, only a couple of months before. Marks, a connection of Secretary of State Jefferson in his late twenties, had led a “very irregular life” in Albemarle County and had been eased by his family into the Western army. A heavy drinker who talked big, Marks fitted right in with the First and won commendations from the officers. Over the next three years, rancor developed between Marks and Harrison that may have begun as early as January, with “some hints being thrown out of a dispute in rank” over whose commission was the earlier in date. (Harrison’s was, by two months.)2 To cap it off, Harrison had moved into a slot the regimental officers had been reserving for someone else—the son of their senior captain, a respected, rather overbearing Connecticut Yankee named David Strong, one of the few generally sober officers at the fort. They had sent Elijah Strong’s name in to Philadelphia, and instead of him had been sent this slight, bouncy young planter’s son, so ignorant of military matters that he had to have obtained the appointment through some kind of political pull—“coming in through the Cabin window,” as it was known in the Navy. (Marks was equally ignorant, but in his case his senior officers overlooked that deficiency.) Led by Strong and his intimates, the whole group was outraged. They expected Harrison to fold under the pressures of Western duty and to resign, but to speed the process, they resolved to make Army life as difficult for him as possible.3 It is not hard to imagine how they did so. Superiors gave him more than his share of dirty and tedious assignments, such as late-night guard duty in the still, icy air of midwinter. No doubt they capitalized fully on his mistakes as a novice, and managed as often as possible, out on the hard-packed earth...

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