In the deep snow escape was impossible. Nearly a hundred Kentuckians fell almost side by side, and were scalped. Among these was Colonel Allen. General Winchester and Colonel Lewis were so fortunate as to fall into the hands of the chief Round Head, who first stripped them and then took them to Proctor, who had for the time withdrawn his forces and ceased firing. By Proctor’s advice, General Winchester sent an order to the men within the picket-fence to surrender.
By eight o’clock all resistance had ceased except from three hundred and eighty-four Kentuckians who remained within the picket-fence, under the command of Major Madison of the Rifle regiment. Surrounded by a thousand enemies, they had no chance of escape. Their ammunition was nearly exhausted; retreat was impossible; they could choose only between surrender and massacre, and they surrendered.[84] The British officers looked at them with curiosity, as they came within the British line.
“Their appearance,” said Major Richardson,[85] “was miserable to the last degree. They had the air of men to whom cleanliness was a virtue unknown, and their squalid bodies were covered by habiliments that had evidently undergone every change of season, and were arrived at the last stage of repair.... It was the depth of winter; but scarcely an individual was in possession of a great coat or cloak, and few of them wore garments of wool of any description. They still retained their summer dress, consisting of cotton stuff of various colors shaped into frocks, and descending to the knee. Their trowsers were of the same material. They were covered with slouched hats, worn bare by constant use, beneath which their long hair fell matted and uncombed over their cheeks; and these, together with the dirty blankets wrapped round their loins to protect them against the inclemency of the season, and fastened by broad leathern belts, into which were thrust axes and knives of an enormous length, gave them an air of wildness and savageness which in Italy would have caused them to pass for brigands of the Apennines. The only distinction between the garb of the officer and that of the soldier was that the one, in addition to his sword, carried a short rifle instead of a long one, while a dagger, often curiously worked and of some value, supplied the place of the knife.”
This description gave a lifelike idea of what Harrison justly thought the best material in the world for soldiery, had it been properly handled. Men who for four months had suffered every hardship, and were still unclothed, unfed, uncared for, and sacrificed to military incompetence, but hardened to cold, fatigue, and danger, had no reason to be ashamed of their misfortunes or of their squalor. Fortunately about five hundred were saved as prisoners, and thirty or forty escaped to the rapids; the rest, four hundred in number, were killed in battle, or massacred afterward.
Had Proctor acted with energy, he might have advanced to the rapids, and there have captured Harrison with his remaining force of nine hundred men, his artillery train and stores. Even with the utmost celerity Harrison could hardly have escaped, if an active pursuit had been made by Indians through the swamp which he had with extreme difficulty crossed two days before,[86] and in the heavy rain which followed the battle;[87] but Proctor had no wish for fighting. So far from thinking of attack, he thought only of escaping it, and hurried back to Malden at noon the same day, leaving the wounded prisoners behind without a guard. Nothing excused such conduct, for Proctor knew the fate to which he was exposing his prisoners. That night the Indians, drunk with whiskey and mad with their grievances and losses, returned to Frenchtown and massacred the wounded. About thirty perished, some apparently burned. Fortunately for the United States the glamour of Proctor’s victory hid his true character, and he was made a major-general,—the most favorable event of the war for the American armies he was to meet, and one which cost Great Britain even more in pride than in power.
CHAPTER V.
If Proctor was afraid of Harrison, with more military reason Harrison was afraid of Proctor; and while the British colonel, deserting his wounded prisoners, hurried from the field of battle, and felt himself in danger until the next day he was again entrenched at Malden, at the same moment Harrison, burning the post at the Maumee Rapids and destroying such stores as were collected there, hastened back to the Portage or Carrying River some fifteen miles in the rear. Within thirty-six hours after the battle, the two enemies were sixty miles apart. At the Portage River Harrison remained a week, until he had collected a force of two thousand men. With these he returned to the rapids February 1, and began to construct a regularly fortified camp on the south bank of the river. Fort Meigs, as it was called, did credit to the skill of Major Wood, the engineer officer who constructed it; but such a fortress seemed rather intended for defence than for the conquest of Canada.
In fact, Harrison had succeeded only in making the most considerable failure that had thus far marked the progress of the war; but while the public was still assuming treason and cowardice in William Hull, who had been sent with fifteen hundred men to hold Detroit and conquer Canada, and had been left unsupported to face destruction,—the same public admitted the excuses of Harrison, who with ten thousand men, unlimited means, and active support at Niagara, after four months of effort, failed even to pass the Maumee River except with a detachment so badly managed that only thirty-three men in a thousand escaped. This was the crowning misfortune which wrung from Gallatin the complaint that a “real incapacity” for war existed in the government itself, and must inevitably exhaust its resources without good result; but although it drove Gallatin to Europe, it left Harrison on the Maumee. Harrison would not take on himself the disgrace of admitting his inability to recapture Detroit, and the President would not, without his express admission, order him to desist. As Armstrong afterward explained:[88] “The Cabinet, not inexpert at deciphering military diplomacy, and peculiarly shy of incurring any responsibility it could avoid, determined, with perhaps less of patriotism than of prudence, to leave the question of continuing the winter campaign exclusively with the General.” The General, not inclined to sink into obscurity or to admit failure, set himself to a third campaign as hopeless as either of its predecessors. Ordering all the troops in his rear to join him, making a body of four thousand men, he fixed February 11 as the day for his advance on Malden, not expecting to reduce that place, but merely to raid it.[89] When the day arrived, the roads had again become impassable, the ice was no longer safe; and Harrison, “with much reluctance and mortification,”[90] was reduced to write from the Maumee Rapids to the Secretary of War that the campaign must cease.
Thus the Western movement, likened by Henry Clay to a tenth-century crusade, ended in failure. The Government would have been in a better position had it never sent a man to the Maumee, but merely built a few sloops at Cleveland. The entire result of six months’ immense effort was confined to raids into the Indian country; and even these were costly beyond proportion to their results. When the militia of Kentucky and Ohio, which had been mustered in August for six months’ service, returned to their homes in February, 1813, not only had they failed to reoccupy a foot of the ground abandoned by Hull, but they left Harrison almost alone at Fort Meigs, trembling lest the enemy should descend on his rear and destroy his supplies, or force him back to protect them.[91] He had accumulated artillery, ammunition, and stores at the Maumee Rapids, in a fortress which itself required a garrison of two thousand men and from which he could neither fall back, as he thought the wiser course,[92] nor remain with safety exposed to an active enemy. He called for more militia from Kentucky and Ohio, but the people no longer felt enthusiasm for war.
“I am sorry to mention,” reported Harrison, March 17,[93] “the dismay and disinclination to the service which appear to prevail in the Western country; numbers must give that confidence which ought to be produced by conscious valor and intrepidity, which never existed in any army in a superior degree than amongst the greater part of the militia who were with me through the winter. The new drafts from this State [Ohio] are entirely of another character, and are not to be depended on.”