“When I was directed to take the command in the latter end of September, I thought it possible by great exertions to effect the objects of the campaign before the setting in of winter.... The experience of a few days was sufficient to convince me that the supplies of provisions could not be procured for our autumnal advance; and even if this difficulty was removed, another of equal magnitude existed in the want of artillery. There remained then no alternative but to prepare for a winter campaign.”
According to this account he had seen early in October that advance was impossible, yet he wasted millions of money and many of his best troops in attempting it. Winter had come, and he was pledged to a winter campaign as impracticable as the autumn campaign had proved to be. Without the control of the Lake, any army beyond the Maumee must starve or surrender. The government had already paid a vast price in money and men in order to obtain this knowledge; yet Harrison proposed a winter campaign, with full persuasion of its uselessness.
December 20 he sent orders[55] to Winchester to descend the Maumee River from Defiance to the rapids, there to prepare sleds for an expedition against Malden, to be made by a choice detachment when the whole army should concentrate at the rapids. Early in January, the ground being at last frozen, provisions in large quantities were hurried to the Maumee River. Artillery was sent forward. The Pennsylvania and Virginia brigades moved to the Sandusky River, making an effective force of fifteen hundred men at that point. The whole effective force on the frontier amounted to six thousand three hundred infantry.[56] Harrison intended to move his headquarters forward from the Sandusky, and to reach the Maumee Rapids January 20, to which point he supposed General Winchester already in motion from Defiance.[57]
This was the situation January 12; and although Harrison hinted in his reports of January 4 and 8 that his winter campaign would probably fail,[58] he showed the intention of advancing at least as far as the strait opposite Malden, about thirty-five miles beyond the Maumee. This he might venture without much danger; and if he reached that point, supposing the straits to be frozen, the enemy to show little sign of resistance, and the weather to favor, he might attack Malden. Hull had been expected to take Malden with twelve or fourteen hundred men, with an open river behind him, a British fleet on his flank, fifty miles of road to cover, and supplies for only a few days at Detroit; but Harrison with six thousand men, the river frozen and the British fleet frozen in it, a secure base, with a million rations close in his rear, and no Isaac Brock in his front, still spoke with extreme doubt of his prospects, and said that “most of the well-informed men who knew the character of the country”[59] expected a suspension of operations for the winter.
Aware that from a military point of view no land-campaign could, except by accident, effect any result proportionate to its cost, Harrison had placed himself at the head of a popular movement so strong that he would have met the fate of Hull and Alexander Smyth, had he not made at least a demonstration against an enemy whose face he had not yet seen. Forced by his own pledges and the public discontent to enter on an unmilitary campaign, he was anxious to risk as little as possible where he could hardly expect to gain anything; and he would probably have contented himself with his first scheme of a coup-de-main against Malden or Detroit, without attempting to hold either place, had not his subordinate, General Winchester, rescued him from an awkward position by a blunder that relieved Harrison of further responsibility.
Brigadier-General Winchester was a planter of Tennessee, sixty-one years old, and formerly an officer in the Revolutionary War. Though outranking Harrison, he had allowed himself to be set aside by what he thought intrigue,[60] and consented to conduct the left wing of the force under Harrison’s command. Winchester was not a favorite with his Kentucky militia-men, who had no choice in electing him to their command. Their term of service was to expire in February; they had been imprisoned since September in a wilderness at Defiance,—hungry, cold, sick, and mutinous, able to find no enemy willing to fight them, and disgusted with idleness. No sooner was the ground frozen and the general movement of concentration possible, than Winchester’s command by common consent, under Harrison’s orders, broke up their camp near Defiance and marched to the rapids, where Hull’s road crossed the Maumee. There they arrived January 10, as Harrison expected. They fortified themselves on the north bank, and waited for the arrival of Harrison, who intended to join them January 20.
Winchester’s force included three regiments of Kentucky militia, numbering nine hundred effectives,[61] and the Seventeenth United States Infantry, numbering three hundred men, also Kentuckians. Altogether he had under his command at the rapids about thirteen hundred men,[62]—a force barely sufficient to hold the exposed position it had taken on the north bank of the river. The three Kentucky militia regiments were soon to go home. The other columns were not yet within supporting distance. If Colonel Proctor, who commanded at Malden, were capable of imitating Brock’s enterprise, he would hardly throw away an opportunity, which might never recur, to strike a blow at the Kentuckians, and by defeating them to drive Harrison’s army behind the Sandusky River. Every military motive warned Winchester not to divide, detach, or expose his troops without caution. He was himself a detachment, and he had no support nearer than the Sandusky.
While the troops were busily engaged in building a store-house and throwing up log-works in an injudicious and untenable position,[63] two Frenchmen came into camp, begging protection for the inhabitants of Frenchtown on the river Raisin, thirty miles in front, and within the British lines. Thirty-three families, or about one hundred and fifty persons, were resident at Frenchtown, and the place was held by a few Canadian militia, supposed to consist of two companies, with about as many Indians,—in all, some three hundred men.[64] This force might easily be destroyed, and the loss to the British would be serious. Winchester’s troops became eager to dash at them. A council of war decided, January 16, without a voice in remonstrance, that the movement should be made. The most ardent supporter of the adventure was Col. John Allen of the Kentucky Rifle regiment; but no one offered opposition, and Winchester agreed to the council’s opinion.[65]
The next morning, Jan. 17, 1813, Col. William Lewis, of the Fifth Kentucky militia, started for the river Raisin, with four hundred and fifty men.[66] A few hours afterward he was followed by Colonel Allen with one hundred and ten men. No reports told what regiments were taken, or where they were at any moment stationed; but Lewis and Allen probably led twelve companies, drawn from four Kentucky regiments,—the Seventeenth United States Infantry, recruited in Kentucky, commanded by Col. Samuel Wells; the Kentucky Rifles, Col. John Allen; the First Kentucky Infantry; and Colonel Lewis’s regiment, the Fifth Kentucky Infantry,—in all, six hundred and sixty men, representing the flower of Kentucky.
They marched on the ice, along the shore of Maumee Bay and Lake Erie, until nightfall, when they camped, and at two o’clock the next afternoon, January 18, reached without meeting resistance the houses on the south bank of the river Raisin. The north bank was occupied, according to British authority,[67] by fifty Canadian militia and two hundred Indians. The British force opened fire with a three-pound howitzer. The action began at three o’clock and lasted till dark, when the enemy after an obstinate resistance was driven about two miles into the woods with inconsiderable loss.[68] The action was sharp, and cost the Americans not less than twelve killed and fifty-five wounded, reducing their effective number to six hundred.