In short, Harrison, who had in 1812 commanded ten thousand militia, seemed to think double the number necessary for 1813, besides regular troops and a fleet.
President Madison and two successive Secretaries of War had allowed themselves, for fear of displeasing Kentucky, to give Harrison carte blanche,[94] which Harrison had used without other limit than that of the entire resources of the West. The time at last came when such management must be stopped, and Secretary Armstrong, naturally impatient under the load of Eustis’s and Monroe’s failures, quickly decided to stop it. Harrison’s letter of February 11, announcing his failure, reached the Department March 1. March 5 the secretary wrote to Harrison ordering him to maintain a threatening attitude, but altering the mode of warfare. Henceforward the army was to be made subordinate,—the navy was to take the lead; and until the middle of May, when the fleet on Lake Erie should be constructed, Harrison was to maintain a strict defensive, and to protect the line of the Maumee with six regular regiments, only three of which had been yet partly raised.
Meanwhile, Harrison had but a few hundred regulars and some Pennsylvania and Virginia militia,—perhaps five hundred men in all,—to hold Fort Meigs, and mere squads of militia to guard eight other posts which had cost the government some millions of dollars. These five hundred troops, whose service was mostly near its end, he left at Fort Meigs, and in the middle of March he set out for Chillicothe and Cincinnati. Greatly annoyed at the summary manner in which Armstrong had put an end to his campaigning, he protested only against the inadequacy of his force for the defence required of it, and insisted on a temporary reinforcement of militia to garrison the fortress that had cost him so much effort to construct at the Maumee Rapids.
Then the value of General Proctor to his enemy became immense. Between January 22, when he attacked Winchester, and the end of April, when he moved on Fort Meigs, Proctor molested in no way the weak and isolated American garrisons. With hundreds of scouts and backwoodsmen at his command, he had not the energy or the knowledge to profit by his opponents’ exposed and defenceless condition. He allowed Major Wood to make Fort Meigs capable of standing a siege; he let Harrison, unmolested, pass a month away from his command; he looked on while the Virginia militia marched home, leaving only a handful of sickly men, under a major of artillery, to defend the unfinished fort; he made no attempt to waylay Harrison, who returned with reinforcements by way of the Auglaize River; and not until Harrison had enjoyed all the time necessary to prepare for attack, did Proctor disturb him.
Harrison, expecting an assault, hurried back from Cincinnati to Fort Meigs with some three hundred men, leaving a brigade of Kentucky militia to follow him. April 12 he reached the fort, but not till April 28 did Proctor appear at the mouth of the Maumee, with about five hundred regulars and nearly as many militia,—nine hundred and eighty-three whites, all told, and twelve hundred Indians under Tecumthe and other chiefs.[95] Besides this large force, he brought two twenty-four pound guns with other artillery from Detroit, and two gunboats supported the land-battery. While the guns were placed in position on the north bank of the river, the Indians crossed and surrounded the fort on the south. May 1 the batteries opened, and during four days kept up a heavy fire. Proctor, like Harrison, moved in the wilderness as though he were conducting a campaign on the Rhine; he liked regular modes of warfare, and with a force almost wholly irregular, after allowing Fort Meigs to be built, he besieged it as though he could take it by battering its earthen ramparts. Untaught by his losses at the river Raisin, he gave once more advantage to the Kentucky rifle; and with every opportunity of destroying the reinforcement which he knew to be near, he allowed himself to be surprised by it.
The Kentucky brigade of twelve hundred men, under Brigadier-General Green Clay, had descended the Auglaize River in boats, and arrived at Defiance May 3, where they learned that Fort Meigs was invested. So neglectful of his advantages was Proctor that he not only failed to prevent General Clay from advancing, but failed to prevent communication between the besieged fort and the relief-column, so that Harrison was able to arrange a general attack on the investing lines, and came near driving the British force back to Malden with the loss of all its artillery and baggage. At about nine o’clock on the morning of May 5, Clay’s brigade descended the rapids, and eight hundred and sixty-six men under Colonel William Dudley,[96] landing on the north side of the river, surprised and took possession of the British batteries, which were entirely unsupported. Had Clay’s whole force been on the ground, and had it been vigorously pushed forward, the small British division which held the north bank must have abandoned all its positions; but Dudley’s men were under no discipline, and though ready to advance were in no hurry to retreat, even when ordered. Three companies of the British Forty-first, and some of the Canadian militia soon gathered together; and although these could hardly have been half the number of Dudley’s force,[97] yet with Tecumthe and a body of Indians they attacked the batteries, drove the Kentuckians out, dispersed them, and either captured or massacred the whole body, under the eyes of Harrison and Fort Meigs.
This affair, though little less fatal to the Americans than that of the river Raisin, was much less dearly bought by the British. Five hundred prisoners fell into Proctor’s hands; two or three hundred more of the Kentucky brigade, including “the weak and obstinate but brave”[98] Dudley himself, must have been either killed in battle or massacred after surrender;[99] only one hundred and seventy escaped; the boats with the baggage were captured; while the whole British loss on the north side of the river hardly exceeded fifty killed and wounded. A bitter feeling against Proctor was caused by the massacre of some forty American prisoners while under a British guard, and also, as was alleged, under the eyes of General Proctor, who did not interpose, although a soldier of the Forty-first was murdered in trying to protect them. Probably all the prisoners would have been massacred had Tecumthe not ridden up at full speed, tomahawk in hand, and threatened to kill the first Indian who defied his authority.[100]
On the south side Harrison had better fortune, and Colonel John Miller of the Nineteenth U. S. Infantry by a sortie gallantly captured a battery, with some forty prisoners; but neither on the north nor on the south did the fighting of May 5 decide any immediate military result. Besides losing on the north bank half the reinforcement brought by General Green Clay, Harrison had lost in the siege and in the sorties on the south bank nearly three hundred men in killed and wounded.[101] If the numbers loosely reported in the American accounts were correct, the siege cost Harrison one thousand men, or fully half his entire force, including his reinforcements. After the fighting of May 5, he withdrew once more into the fort; the British batteries reopened fire, and the siege went on. No further attempt was made to trouble the enemy in open field. Harrison felt himself too weak for further ventures; yet never had his chance of a great success been so fair.
Proctor’s siege of Fort Meigs was already a failure. Not only had the fort proved stronger than he expected, but the weather was bad; his troops were without shelter; dysentery and loss in battle rapidly weakened them; half his militia went home, and, what was fatal to further action, his Indians could not be held together. Within three days after the battle of May 5, the twelve hundred Indians collected by Tecumthe’s influence and exertions in the northwest territory dispersed, leaving only Tecumthe himself and a score of other warriors in the British camp.[102] Proctor had no choice but to retire as rapidly as possible, and May 9 embarked his artillery and left his encampment without interference from Harrison, who looked on as a spectator while the movement was effected.
From that time until the middle of July Proctor remained quiet. Harrison moved his headquarters to Upper Sandusky and to Cleveland, and began to prepare for advance under cover of a naval force; but he was not allowed to rest, even though Proctor might have preferred repose. Proctor’s position was difficult. Told by Sir George Prevost[103] that he must capture what supplies he needed from the Americans, and must seek them at Erie and Cleveland, since Lower Canada could spare neither food nor transport, he was compelled to look for support to the American magazines. He was issuing ten thousand rations a day to the Indian families at Malden, and his resources were near an end.[104] Leaving Malden with either three hundred and ninety-one regulars, or about five hundred regulars and militia, and by one British account nearly a thousand Indians, by another between three and four thousand,[105] Proctor returned by water to the Maumee Rapids July 20, and tried to draw the garrison of Fort Meigs into an ambush. The attempt failed. General Green Clay, who was in command, had learned caution, and imposed it on his troops. Proctor then found that his Indians were leaving him and returning to Detroit and Amherstburg. To occupy them, Proctor took again to his boats and coasted the Lake shore as far as the Sandusky River, while the Indians who chose to accompany him made their way by land. August 1 the expedition effected a landing at the mouth of the Sandusky, and scattered panic into the heart of Ohio.