Washington [458]
On November 4, 1791, right before sunrise, St. Clair and his men were camped near the Miami village when up to fifteen hundred Indians pounced in a surprise attack. Hurling aside artillery and baggage, the Americans fled in a panic-stricken rout. All discipline broke down amid the general slaughter, and gruesome stories of butchery filtered back from the wilderness. As one soldier related, “I saw a Capt. Smith just after he was scalped, setting on his backside, his head smoking like a chimney.”56 The heart of General Richard Butler was supposedly sliced into pieces and distributed to the victorious tribes. In a ghoulish warning to stay off their land, the Indians stuffed the mouths of some victims with soil. St. Clair’s troops suffered shocking casualties—900 out of 1,400 men—versus only 150 Indians.
According to an account based on an 1816 talk with Tobias Lear, the dreadful tidings arrived in Philadelphia on December 9, in the middle of one of Martha Washington’s demure Friday-evening receptions. After knocking at the president’s door, the courier informed Lear that he had dispatches to deliver directly to Washington. After being pulled from the reception, the president was closeted for a time with this unusual messenger and read St. Clair’s description of “as warm and unfortunate an action as almost any that has been fought.”57 When he returned to the reception, he apologized to his guests but revealed nothing of the extraordinary news. Instead, he went dutifully through his social paces, conversing with each lady in attendance. With extraordinary self-control, Washington allowed nothing in his demeanor to hint at the pent-up rage churning inside him. When the guests were gone, Washington and Lear sat alone by the parlor fire, and Washington blew up in tremendous wrath, throwing up his hands in agitation, scarcely able to contain his emotions. The editors of the George Washington papers note that the story “contains some credible details” but also point out that by the date in question “unofficial reports of the defeat already were circulating in Philadelphia.” 58 At a later cabinet meeting, Washington, reaching back to his early frontier experience, faulted St. Clair for failing to keep “his army in such a position always as to be able to display them in a line behind trees in the Ind[ia]n manner at any moment.”59
In early January the first news reports of the disaster cast St. Clair in a heroic light. In February the tenor abruptly changed when Colonel William Darke published an anonymous diatribe against Washington for having dispatched a woefully infirm general, bedridden and propped up with pillows, into battle: “That the executive should commit the reputation of the government . . . to a man who, from the situation of his health, was under the necessity of traveling on a bier, seems to have been an oversight as unexpected as it has been severely censured. A general, enwrapped ten-fold in flannel robes, unable to walk alone, placed on his car, bolstered on all sides with pillows and medicines, and thus moving on to attack the most active enemy in the world was . . . a very tragicomical appearance indeed.”60 Congressman William B. Grove labeled the St. Clair defeat “the most complete victory ever known in this country obtained by Indians.”61
When Knox submitted a request to Congress for an expanded army and a new assault on the refractory Indians, several congressmen took advantage of it to condemn administration policy. One critic rebuked the administration for “preparing to squander away money by millions” and contended that nobody, “except those who are in the secrets of the Cabinet, knows for what reason the war has been thus carried on for three years.”62 In general, Washington did not dignify such criticisms with responses, but he asked Knox to draw up a document that could also be published as a broadside—a distinct departure showing a new sensitivity to