Washington [457]
At the end of that September, Harmar led his men on an expedition against the Wabash Indians northwest of the Ohio River. By mid-November, with the fate of the operation wrapped in mysterious silence, Washington girded for bad news and confessed to Knox his forebodings of a “disgraceful termination” to the expedition. Always moralistic about alcohol problems, he reserved harsh words for General Harmar. “I expected little from the moment I heard he was a drunkard,” he told
Knox.49 Washington’s worries about the expedition were prescient: Harmar’s men suffered a stunning defeat at a Miami Indian village near the present-day city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The dreadful performance of American troops—they killed two hundred Indians but suffered an equal number of casualties—only reinforced Washington and Knox’s long-standing prejudice against militia. Nonetheless, a military court of inquiry vindicated Harmar, labeling his conduct “irreproachable.”50
Washington always tried to be evenhanded in dealing with the Indians. He hoped that they would abandon their itinerant hunting life and adapt to fixed agricultural communities in the manner of Anglo-Saxon settlers. He never advocated outright confiscation of their land or the forcible removal of tribes, and he berated American settlers who abused Indians, admitting that he held out no hope for pacific relations with the Indians as long as “frontier settlers entertain the opinion that there is not the same crime (or indeed no crime at all) in killing an Indian as in killing a white man.”51 When addressing Seneca chiefs that December, he conceded provocations by American settlers: “The murders that have been committed upon some of your people by the bad white men, I sincerely lament and reprobate, and I earnestly hope that the real murderers will be secured and punished as they deserve.”52 Nevertheless Indians saw only a pattern of steady encroachment and unrelenting westward advancement by white settlers that threatened their traditional way of life. In the end, Washington’s hope of “civilizing” the Indians by converting them to agriculture and Christianity was destined to fail.
It was only a matter of time before Washington and Knox got authority to raise a new regiment and mount a major reprisal against the Indians. Arthur St. Clair, elevated to a major general, was to lead fourteen hundred troops to the Miami village with an unsparing mandate: “Seek the enemy and endeavor by all possible means to strike them with great severity.”53 Born in Scotland, trained as a physician, St. Clair was a seasoned officer who had fought in the French and Indian War. Patriotic if a bit pompous, he had turned in a mixed record during the Revolutionary War but performed well enough that Washington valued him as a soldier in “high repute.”54 For his 1791 expedition, St. Clair led a threadbare, inexperienced army described by one officer as “badly clothed, badly paid, and badly fed.”55 As this force dragged brass field pieces through the wilderness, it was depleted by illness and desertion. St. Clair, suffering from agonizing gout, had to be borne aloft