Harrison’s anxieties bore a different character. September 23 he wrote to the Secretary of War: “If the fall should be very dry, I will take Detroit before the winter sets in; but if we should have much rain, it will be necessary to wait at the rapids until the Miami of the Lakes is sufficiently frozen to bear the army and its baggage.”[50] The promise was rash. However dry the season might be, the task of marching an army with siege-artillery past Malden to Detroit, and of keeping it supplied from a base two hundred miles distant, with the British commanding the Lake, was one which Harrison had too much sense to attempt. Nothing but disaster could have resulted from it, even if Detroit had been taken. In the actual condition of that territory, no army could be maintained beyond the Maumee River without controlling the Lake. Perhaps Harrison was fortunate that constant rains throughout the month of October brought the army to a halt long before it reached the Maumee. Only the left division of five Kentucky regiments succeeded in getting to the river, and camped in the neighborhood of old Fort Defiance, waiting for the other columns to reach the rapids. There the Kentuckians remained, under the command of General Winchester, without food, clothing, or sufficient shelter, in a state of increasing discontent and threatening mutiny, till the year closed.
Within a month after assuming command Harrison found himself helpless either to advance or to retreat, or to remain in any fixed position. The supplies required for ten thousand troops could not be sent forward by any means then known. October 22 the left column, consisting of the Kentucky regiments and some regulars, was at Defiance on the Maumee; the central column of a thousand Ohio troops under General Tupper was on Hull’s road, a hundred miles from the Maumee, unable to march beyond Urbana, where its supplies were collecting; the right column of Pennsylvanians and Virginians was still farther from the front, slowly approaching the Sandusky River from the southeast, but far out of reach. General Hopkins’s expedition up the Wabash ended in failure, his troops becoming a mere mob, and at last disbanding, leaving their general to follow them home. Harrison himself was riding indefatigably through the mud, from one end to the other of his vast concave line,—now at Defiance, making speeches to pacify Winchester’s Kentuckians; then at Piqua and Urbana with the Ohioans; soon a hundred miles away at the river Huron, east of Sandusky; next at Wooster, Delaware, or Franklinton, afterward Columbus, in the centre of Ohio, looking for his right wing; but always searching for a passable ridge of dry land, on which his supplies could go forward to the Maumee Rapids. The result of his search was given in a letter of October 22, from Franklinton, to the Secretary of War:—
“I am not able to fix any period for the advance of the troops to Detroit. It is pretty evident that it cannot be done upon proper principles until the frost shall become so severe as to enable us to use the rivers and the margin of the Lake for transportation of the baggage and artillery upon the ice. To get them forward through a swampy wilderness of near two hundred miles, in wagons or on packhorses which are to carry their own provisions, is absolutely impossible.”
The obstacle which brought Harrison’s autumn campaign to this sudden close was the vast swamp that extended from the Sandusky River on his right to the Auglaize River on his left, and for the moment barred the passage of his necessary supplies as effectually as though it had been the Andes. Hull had crossed it, cutting a road as he went, and no one had then appreciated his effort; but he had marched with a small force in May and June. Harrison tried to transport supplies, heavy guns, military stores, and all the material for an army of ten thousand men on a long campaign, as the autumn rains set in. On the extreme right, with great effort and expense, a considerable quantity of rations was accumulated on the Sandusky River, to be sent to the Maumee Rapids whenever the frosts should harden the swamps. On the extreme left, desperate efforts were made to carry supplies to Winchester’s army at Defiance by way of the Auglaize and St. Mary’s rivers. Hull’s road was impassable, and for that reason the column of Ohio troops and their supplies were stopped in the neighborhood of Urbana.
Throughout the months of October and November Harrison’s army stood still, scattered over the State of Ohio, while wagons and packhorses wallowed in mud toward the Maumee Rapids. None arrived. Sometimes the wagons were abandoned in the mud; sometimes the packhorses broke down; sometimes the rivers were too low for boats; then they froze and stopped water-transport. Universal confusion, want of oversight and organization, added to physical difficulties, gave play to laziness, incapacity, and dishonesty. No bills of lading were used; no accounts were kept with the wagoners; and the teams were valued so high, on coming into service, that the owners were willing to destroy them for the price to be received.[51] The waste of government funds was appalling, for nothing short of a million rations at the Maumee Rapids could serve Harrison’s objects, and after two months of effort not a ration had been carried within fifty miles of the spot. In Winchester’s camp at Defiance the men were always on half rations, except when they had none at all. During the greater part of December they had no flour, but lived on poor beef and hickory roots. Typhus swept them away by scores; their numbers were reduced to about one thousand. The exact force which Harrison had in the field was matter of conjecture, for he sent no return of any description to the adjutant-general’s office.[52] The Government gave him carte blanche, and he used it.[53] Chaos and misconduct reigned in every department, while he, floundering through the mud along his line of two hundred miles front, sought in vain for a road.
For the train of errors and disasters in the northwest Secretary Eustis was chiefly responsible, and his resignation, Dec. 3, 1812, left the campaign in this hopeless condition. From Dec. 3, 1812, until Jan. 13, 1813, Monroe acted as Secretary of War; and to him Harrison next wrote from Delaware, December 12, a letter which not only disheartened the Government, but was calculated to create a prejudice against the writer in the mind of any Secretary of War who was not invincibly prejudiced in his favor.[54]
“If there were not some important political reason,” said Harrison, “urging the recovery of the Michigan Territory and the capture of Malden as soon as those objects can possibly be effected, and that to accomplish them a few weeks sooner expense was to be disregarded, I should not hesitate to say that if a small proportion of the sums which will be expended in the quartermaster’s department in the active prosecution of the campaign during the winter was devoted to obtaining the command of Lake Erie, the wishes of the Government, in their utmost extent, could be accomplished without difficulty in the months of April and May. Malden, Detroit, and Mackinaw would fall in rapid succession. On the contrary, all that I can certainly promise to accomplish during the winter, unless the strait should afford us a passage on the ice, is to recover Detroit. I must further observe that no military man would think of retaining Detroit, Malden being in possession of the enemy, unless his army was at least twice as strong as the disposable force of the enemy. An army advancing to Detroit along a line of operation passing so near the principal force of the enemy as to allow them access to it whenever they think proper, must be covered by another army more considerable than the disposable force of the enemy. I mention this circumstance to show that the attack ought not to be directed against Detroit, but against Malden; and that it depends upon the ice affording a safe passage across the strait, whether I shall be able to proceed in this way or not. Detroit is not tenable. Were I to take it without having it in my power to occupy the opposite shore, I should be under the necessity of hiding the army in the adjacent swamp to preserve it from the effects of the shot and shells which the enemy would throw with impunity from the opposite shore. This result is so obvious to every man who has the least military information, that it appears to me as extraordinary as any other part of General Hull’s conduct that he should choose to defend Detroit rather than attack Malden.”
Hull could have asked no better apology for his surrender. Harrison did not know that the insubordination and refusal of the Ohio colonels to evacuate Detroit had forced Hull to remain there; but that Detroit was not tenable came at last to the surface as a self-evident truth of the campaign,—which Hull had always seen, and which Harrison himself announced almost as clearly in August as in December, but which he ignored in the interval.
“If it should be asked,” he continued, “why these statements were not made sooner,—I answer that although I was always sensible that there were great difficulties to be encountered in the accomplishment of the wishes of the President in relation to the recovery of Detroit and the conquest of the adjacent part of Upper Canada in the manner proposed, I did not make sufficient allowance for the imbecility and inexperience of the public agents and the villany of the contractors. I am still, however, very far from believing that the original plan is impracticable. I believe on the contrary that it can be effected.”
The excuse did not satisfy the Cabinet, who thought they saw that Harrison wished to throw upon Government the responsibility for a military failure fatal to himself. Perhaps a simpler motive guided Harrison, who from the first never had known precisely what to do, or had seen any clear path to success. He wrote, January 4, from Franklinton,—