enclosing fifty acres, where the final stages of its training would take place. Supplying an army in such a remote post created incessant problems. Wayne constantly had to drive the victuallers Elliott and Williams to produce fatter cattle and fresher casks of beef, and the War Department to provide more blankets and blue and buff uniforms, and to deliver promptly the silver dollars needed to pay his men their four dollars a month. But he did not at first connect these difficulties with his second-in- command.
Always sensitive to the smallest insult to his vanity, Wilkinson had been infuriated by Wayne’s refusal of the Christmas invitation. During the early months of 1794, Wilkinson periodically declared himself to be close to resignation. “I am unsettled in my purpose whether I shall join the army or not,” he told Innes, and with still more of a flourish told Brown, “I owe so much to my own feelings and to Professional reputation, that I cannot consent to sacrifice the one, or to hazard the other, under the administration of a weak, corrupt minister or a despotic, Vainglorious, ignorant General.” But in truth, as he recognized himself, he could never quit the army “because I know the profession of arms to be my Fort[e], and I verily believe that the Hour may possibly come when my talents into that line might be of important account to our Country.”
Instead, he devoted himself to encouraging the opposition to Wayne until camp gossip took to labeling the two camps using terms such as “such an Officer is in favor of Wayne— and such a one is in favor of Wilkinson.” The depth of Wilkinson’s hatred could be gauged from an article he sent to a Cincinnati newspaper signed “Army Wretched” that damned Wayne for drunkenness, incompetence, wastefulness, and favoritism toward “his pimps and parasites.” Unfortunately for this attempt to stampede public opinion, General Charles Scott visited Wayne’s command headquarters at Fort Greeneville soon afterward and offered a different perspective on the general’s conduct. “During my stay I found him attending with great Sobriety & extream attention to the Duty of army,” Scott reported to Knox, “he paid the most Unwearied attention to the most minute thing possible
By the spring, Wayne’s supporters had made him aware of Wilkinson’s hostility. Wayne’s suspicions were directed particularly at the failure of the victuallers Elliott and Williams to supply the army with enough food. In Wayne’s view, this was a deliberate attempt to sabotage his preparations for war, and he accused Wilkinson to his face of being “the cause of the fault of the Contractors.” His second- in- command retaliated in his own fashion, as Wayne discovered when a Philadelphia merchant reported that some senators were proposing to impeach the Legion’s commander “at the request of Wilkinson for Pedulation, Speculation, Fraud &c.”
The longer the Legion remained inactive, the more poisonous the conflict became. No army can remain ready for battle—“in the crouch,” to use modern jargon—for long without the aggression beginning to spill over into feuds and quarrels. But for the Legion, the lengthy delay was especially damaging. Even after training was completed, federal negotiators continued their talks with Little Turtle and other Native American leaders in an attempt to arrange a new boundary that would guarantee Indian land rights, but allow settlers to move into the Ohio Valley. In the summer, as though the waiting had undermined their physical health as much as their morale, an epidemic of illness ravaged the troops. “We labor under a universal influenza,” Wilkinson told his friends, “and tertians [fevers], quotidians & intermittents rage beyond anything I have ever seen.”
Yet while there remained a chance of signing a peace treaty with the Six Nations in the north and the western confederation in the northwest, Washington and Knox forbade Wayne to take any aggressive action. Chafing against the restraint, Wayne inched northward, constructing a fort that he named Recovery on the site of St. Clair’s defeat.
Quite suddenly the talks broke down because Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their allies could not bring themselves to yield up the swath of land in the Northwest Territory demanded by U.S. negotiators. In a historic misjudgment, they insisted on maintaining the Ohio River as the border. On June 30, 1794, more than a thousand Shawnee and other warriors under Blue Jacket launched a surprise attack on Fort Recovery, the site where St. Clair’s army had been annihilated. This time the attack failed, but it put an end to negotiations. Immediately Scott and the Kentucky horsemen were summoned to join the regulars, and on July 28 the Legion of the United States at last marched from Fort Greeneville.
AS THE SECONDMOST SE NIOR OFFICER, Brigadier General James Wilkinson had command of the right wing. It gave him a close-up position from which to criticize Wayne. He duly carped at the decision to leave the biggest cannons behind and, more insistently, at the slowness of the advance— twelve careful miles a day, always surrounded by a swarm of cavalry and riflemen, and halting well before nightfall so that entrenchments and fortifications could be put in place. Instead of following the St. Marys River westward, out into the open prairie where centers of Indian population were situated, Wayne struck due north, still keeping to rough territory so that the army had to force its way through “Thickets almost impervious,” one of his men complained, “thru Marassies [morasses], Defiles & beds of Nettles more than waist high & miles in length.” This unexpected maneuver, made possible by the absence of heavy artillery, wrong-footed the western confederation’s army and put the Legion between Blue Jacket and supplies he expected from the British in Fort Miami, a newly constructed outpost, close to present Toledo, Ohio.
When the Legion at last emerged from the undergrowth, they found themselves on the banks of the Maumee River, which flows northward into Lake Erie. Even Wilkinson, who had spent the previous days offering Wayne unsought advice on where they might be, was overwhelmed by the pristine beauty of the open countryside before them. “The River meandering in various directions thro a natural meadow in high cultivation & of great extent,” he wrote John Brown, “this meadow bounded by noble eminences, crowned with lofty timber on either side, with Indian Villages, scattered along the Eastern [bank] & the British flag [flying] upon the Western Bank; after a dreary Journey of more than 200 miles from the Ohio, thro an uncultivated Wilderness, [the scene] fills the mind with the most Interesting Emotions, and affords the most pleasing recreation to the Eye.”
Once more, Wayne ignored his second-in- command’s advice to make a rapid move against Blue Jacket and instead spent days erecting yet another armed camp, Fort Deposit, where the army stored its tents and wagons. With his soldiers refreshed and unburdened, Wayne then marched northeast along the Maumee River towards the wooded hillside from which Fort Miami dominated the valley. On August 19, the Legion’s scouts found the Indians’ abandoned camp. Again Wilkinson and other senior officers urged immediate pursuit and attack, the kind of rapid maneuver that the Legion was designed for, but again Wayne chose the safer option of setting up camp.
The delay allowed Blue Jacket to assemble a force of about thirteen hundred men, strengthened by some sixty Canadian militia, and to take up position between the Legion and Fort Miami with their center in a clearing in the wood where a cyclone had torn up the trees. Here, late on the morning of August 20, 1794, cautiously advancing in two columns behind a double screen of sharpshooters and light infantry, the Legion met the enemy they had spent eighteen months training to fight.
The outlying skirmishers were halted by a volley of shots and, minutes later, were driven back by a charge from the Indian position. Immediately Wilkinson formed the right wing of the First and Third Sub- Legions numbering about one thousand men into line. Taking cover, the attackers began firing from a range of 160 yards at the nearest troops, Wilkinson’s right wing. The two forces were packed into broken, boggy ground between the Maumee River on Wilkinson’s right, forest in front, and low hills covered in heavy undergrowth on the American left. As the entire Legion extended in line, Wayne ordered forward the cavalry at the rear of his force, the regular dragoons under Captain Robert Mis Campbell behind Wilkinson on the right, and Scott’s Kentucky volunteers on the left.
With drifts of musket smoke creating a heavy haze, and retreating riflemen hurrying back into the infantry lines while advancing cavalry came forward at speed, the Legion’s training paid its dividend. Instead of confusion, the line on the right wing opened to let Campbell’s horsemen gallop through, then reformed so that when Wilkinson gave the order to charge, the the broken defenders had no time to reform. Closest to the enemy, Wilkinson’s men became the front line of attack following up the cavalry to send the Indians’ left flank into headlong retreat.
From the clearing of torn- up trees that provided a defensive strongpoint, a counterattack under Little Turtle was launched against the Second and Fourth Sub- Legions on the left wing and in severe fighting threatened to turn them back. Here casualties were heaviest, and modern researchers have found the area most thickly strewn with spent buckshot and musket balls. But Little Turtle’s men were first outflanked by Wilkinson’s troops, then faced counterattack from the Legion’s left wing. In a maneuver practiced endlessly beforehand, the Second and Fourth Sub- Legions delivered a close-range volley and at once stormed toward the position in a roaring bayonet charge. The survivors fled, melting into the woodland so that the Kentucky horsemen, slowed by heavy undergrowth, never caught up, although the regular cavalry operating in open country along the riverbank pursued the enemy for two miles.
