The Native Americans never had any doubt about the significance of what happened at the battle that became known as Fallen Timbers. “We were driven by the sharp ends of the guns of the Long Knives, and we threw away our guns and fought with our knives and tomahawks,” a Shawnee chief confessed. “But the Great Spirit was in the clouds, and weeping over the folly of his red children [because they] refused to smoke in the lodge of the great chief, Chenoten [Wayne].” Wayne, the victorious commander, made it equally clear in his report that “the enemy are . . . at length taught to dread—& our soldiery to believe— in the Bayonet.” Reporting his own casualties of thirty- three killed and one hundred wounded, Wayne estimated the enemy losses at “more than double” his own. But to James Wilkinson and others who examined the result more closely, the issue seemed less clear-cut.
Describing the battle to his most important ally in Congress, John Brown, now a senator for Kentucky, Wilkinson doubted the enemy had more than nine hundred troops and jeered at Wayne’s claims to have faced as many as two thousand. He criticized the Legion’s inability to force the British out of Fort Miami, blaming Wayne’s decision to leave the heavy artillery behind so that he only had a “little popgun Howitzer” to threaten its defenses. “We are Victorious & triumphant where ever we go,” Wilkinson declared in his best sarcastic tone. “We have been all the way to the British Post, we have beat thousands of Indians in a pitched Battle, we have commanded the British officer to abandon his Post, we have pillaged his gardens, insulted his flag, which we left flying, & yesterday got back to this place [Fort Deposit].”
Some of these were valid criticisms—modern estimates of casualties, for example, suggest the United States lost forty-six killed and dead of wounds against fewer than forty Indian deaths—but they led to a profoundly damaging conclusion. Wilkinson convinced himself that the western confederation had not really been defeated, and that another campaign would be necessary “should the Savages determine to prosecute the War & at this moment I see nothing to contradict the Idea of the prosecution.” All that had been achieved, in his view, was an immensely expensive punishment raid involving a few casualties, some destroyed villages, and many burned fields —“We have in truth done nothing which might not have been better done by 1500 mounted Volunteers in 30 days.”
His failure to appreciate the strategic impact of the battle had a long-lasting influence. Throughout his subsequent career as the senior military authority in four successive administrations, Wilkinson remained convinced that large forces of regular soldiers were an unnecessary luxury on the frontier. Militia and volunteers, he assured his political masters, could be just as effective.
In reality, Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers, demonstrating as it did the overwhelming armed might of the United States, combined with the construction of a chain of forts from the Ohio to the Great Lakes, changed the thinking of a generation of Native Americans. Leaders such as Little Turtle of the Miami, Cornplanter of the Seneca, Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, and even the volatile Oneida Red Jacket accepted the pragmatic consequence that their people had to find some accommodation to the inevitability of U.S. expansion.
So long as those Native Americans who remembered Fallen Timbers exerted influence, George Washington’s successors could build on the inclusive Indian policy that he and Knox had established. But one vital ingredient was the existence of an army large enough to overawe the native occupants of the land and restrain the movement of settlers who wanted to expand into their territory. The failure of Washington’s policy of assimilation was due not least to the activities of James Wilkinson.
14
THE BATTLE FOR COMMAND
VICTORY SHOULD HAVE DRAINED the poison from the Legion. In a generous report on the battle to Knox, General Wayne praised the entire force for the “spirit & promptitude” with which it obeyed orders. Having commended all his troops, he singled out a few “whose rank and situation placed their conduct in a very conspicuous point of view, and which I observe with pleasure, and the most lively gratitude. Among whom I beg leave to mention Brigadier General Wilkinson and Colonel Hamtramck, the commandants of the right and left wings of the Legion, whose brave example inspired the troops.”
Nothing Wayne could say, however, would deflect Wilkinson from his campaign to displace his commanding officer. Writing to Brown, he contrived to take the equality of praise in Wayne’s report as a calculated insult, insisting that the right wing had played a more important role and been led by a more dashing commander than the left. He also alleged, falsely, that it had suffered more casualties. Wayne, he declared, knew nothing of what had happened on the right, and his ignorance was typical of his “feeble & improvident” leadership through the entire campaign. “Yet the specious name of Victory & the gloss of misrepresentation, will doubtless gild the Character of our Chief. For my own I am content, conscious as I am, that I have in several instances partially saved my country, and . . . extorted applause from my most bitter enemy, and the most finished scoundrel on Earth.”
This outburst was followed by more savage attacks in other letters to his Kentucky friends. Writing to Innes, he repeated the allegations of incompetence: “The whole operation presents us a tissue of improvidence, disarray, precipitancy, Error & Ignorance.” Victory was due simply to the inferior numbers and “injudicious Conduct of the enemy.” To underline the message, he wrote Innes again in December describing Wayne as “a liar, a drunkard, a Fool, the associate of the lowest order of Society, & the companion of their vices, of desperate Fortune, my rancorous enemy, a coward, a Hypocrite, and the contempt of every man of sense and virtue.”
There was something mad about such a tirade—and jealousy at Wayne’s growing reputation undoubtedly gave an edge to the fury. Henry Knox assumed Wilkinson’s enmity arose from lack of self-confidence. Even before Fallen Timbers, Knox had received two letters from Wilkinson demanding a court of inquiry into Wayne’s incompetence, but had chosen not to reply because the complaint “appears to me . . . to be more the effect of nice [sensitive] feelings than any palpable cause.” When Knox finally responded in December, he first sent a private letter asking Wilkinson to give up the quarrel, and assuring him that Wayne had not criticized him, that Charles Scott would not be promoted to command over him, that he was not being investigated as the cause of dissension in the army, and ending, “You must rest assured that your military reputation stands as well as you could desire.” In the formal letter that followed, Wilkinson was promised that if he made his complaint more precise and legal in tone, the president would consider it and decide “what steps he ought to take.” Knox, in short, did not take seriously the cries of Wilkinson’s wounded ego.
Yet, wise and tolerant though he was, the war secretary missed the almost chesslike shrewdness behind Wilkinson’s paranoid outbursts. The unrelenting belittlement of the Legion and its commander, publicized both in the press and through friends such as Senator John Brown, had a political context.
In Congress, opponents of Washington’s Federalist administration, led by James Madison in Philadelphia but orchestrated by Thomas Jefferson in Monticello, had focused on the expense of the Legion—an annual military budget of $155,500 in 1790 had risen to $1,130,000—and were demanding that its size be reduced by two thirds. By diminishing Wayne’s achievement, Wilkinson strengthened the anti-Federalists in their belief that a large standing army was an unjustified extravagance. It also served his personal ambition. Military regulations would not allow a major general to command a force the size of a brigade. Consequently, a reduced army would force Wayne into retirement, leaving Brigadier General James Wilkinson in command.
With Congress due to debate the size of the army in February 1795, his timing could not have been better. Desperate to keep the quarrel private, Washington’s administration could neither reprimand him for insubordination nor refuse his request for an inquiry into Wayne’s incompetence. Knox’s demand that he present his charges in specific, legal form was an attempt to play for time. But, having acknowledged them formally, Knox also felt obliged to pass on a copy of Wilkinson’s allegations to Wayne. Aided by the flukiest of chances, Knox thereby saved the Legion and came close to exposing Spain’s chief agent in the United States.
UNTIL KNOX’SLETTER was delivered to Fort Greeneville in January 1795, Wayne had no inkling that his second- in-command was plotting against him. The realization that this “vile invidious man” had been creating divisions in the Legion while pretending to treat his commander with “attention, politeness & delicacy” outraged him. In an incandescent reply to Knox, Wayne angrily dismissed Wilkinson’s charges: “They are as unexpected as they are groundless, and as false as they are base and insidious; and had I not known the real character and disposition of the man, I should have considered the whole as the idle Phantom of a disturbed immagination [
