[525] In a speech delivered at a council of the tribes at Massassinway on the Wabash, in May, 1812, Tecumseh disclaimed responsibility for the fight of Tippecanoe, referring to it as "the unfortunate transaction that took place between the white people and a few of our young men at our village." He stated that the trouble between his followers and Governor Harrison had been settled, and further that had he been at home there would have been no bloodshed (Dawson, Harrison, 266-67).
Finally after long debate the country blundered hesitantly and half-heartedly into the War of 1812. The people of New England were so bitterly opposed to this step, and to the party in power, as to give rise to suspicion of their loyalty to the Union. The middle and southern states were, on the whole, favorably disposed toward the war. But in no other section were the people as eager for war to begin as in the West. Here, on the frontier, the traditional enmity toward England was comparatively untouched by the commercial advantages which committed New England to a policy of peace. Revival of commerce had little effect upon the West with its desultory cultivation and crude and inadequate means of transportation, but the spirit of expansion was strong and the greed for land was unappeased. To this sentiment was added the belief, firmly held by the westerner, that the British were primarily responsible for the insecurity of the frontier. In part this was justified by the facts of the situation, but not to the extent which the American frontiersmen believed it was. Whether well founded or not, the belief filled them with resentment toward the British and rendered them keen for war. "I cannot but notice," wrote Surgeon Van Voorhis from Fort Dearborn in October, 1811, in a letter to a friend, "the villainy practiced in the Indian country by British agents and traders; you hear of it at a distance, but we near the scene of action are sensible of it. They labor by every unprincipled means to instigate the Savages against the Americans, to inculcate the idea that we intend to drive the Indians beyond the Mississippi, and that in every purchase of land the Government defrauds them; and their united efforts aim too at the destruction of every trading house and the prevention of the extension of our frontier. Never till a prohibition of the entrance of all foreigners, and especially British subjects, into the Indian Country takes place, will we enjoy a lasting peace with the credulous, deluded, and cannibal savages."[526]
[526] Van Voorhis, Ancestry of Major Wm. Roe Van Voorhis, 144-45.
The West looked forward to war, not only as a solution of the Indian problem, but also as the means of securing Canada. Yet greater danger threatened the Northwest, in the event of war, than any other portion of the United States. Of the territories Michigan was the most defenseless and exposed to attack. There were in all ten settlements scattered over a wide extent of country, the distance between the closest of them being thirty miles and that between the two extremes over ten times as great.[527] The entire population, counting British, French, Americans, negroes, and the troops of the garrison at Detroit, was less than five thousand, four-fifths of them being of French-Canadian descent. The chief source of danger arose, however, from the exposed situation of the settlements, rather than from lack of numbers. Ordinarily the frontier was the extreme line of white occupation and was backed by settlements whose population became denser in proportion to their distance from it. Michigan, however, presented the phenomenon of a double frontier, open on one side to the British and on the other to the savages; furthermore the settlements were so scattered as to render effectual co-operation between them in case of attack out of the question.
[527] Memorial of the inhabitants of Michigan Territory to the President and Congress, December 8 and 10, 1811, in American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 780-82; Michigan Pioneer Collections, XV, 61-63.
Separated from even the southernmost of the Michigan settlements by a wide extent of wilderness, which contained the stronghold of the budding Indian confederacy, were the white settlements of Indiana. They had a population of about thirty thousand, clustered principally in two groups, the one around Vincennes, the other on the Ohio opposite Louisville, with one hundred miles of wilderness between them.[528] From the Wabash to the Illinois and Kankakee, stretching far to the southward, was the great wedge of lands still held by the Indian tribes. Beginning with the old French town of Vincennes, then Harrison's headquarters, the line of the frontier followed the Wabash River nearly fifty miles to Fort Harrison, opposite the present city of Terre Haute. Extending north from Fort Harrison to the Michigan settlements and westward to the Mississippi were the Indian villages and hunting-grounds. The principal settlements of Illinois were still, as in the old French days, clustered along its lower Mississippi border. A line drawn from Vincennes to the mouth of Rock River on the Mississippi would have had south of it practically all of them. The total white population of the territory was probably less than half that of Indiana.
[528] Henry Adams, History of the United States, VI, 68.
To protect this extensive northwestern frontier the United States had, in the early part of 1812, some half-dozen feeble garrisons, with an average strength of about seventy-five men. At Detroit, the largest and most important military station in the Northwest, were ninety-four men;[529] at Mackinac, three hundred miles away, were seventy-nine; at the opposite end of Lake Michigan and about an equal distance from both Mackinac and Detroit was Fort Dearborn with a garrison of fifty-five men; at Fort Wayne and at Fort Harrison, the new stockade on the Wabash, were about as many. All of these were one-company posts except Detroit, which had two companies. The fortifications had not been designed for, nor were they expected to be capable of, defense against the forces of a civilized nation. They were supposed to possess sufficient strength to withstand an attack by Indians alone, and, providing the supply of provisions held out, this expectation would ordinarily have been realized. Even so, however, they could do nothing toward defending the scattered settlements against the attacks of the Indians, and the sequel showed that the garrisons were not even able to defend themselves. Mackinac surrendered without resistance to a combined force of Indians and Canadian traders; Fort Dearborn was abandoned, and the garrison was destroyed while seeking to escape; and Fort Wayne was saved from impending capture only by the approach of a large force of militia under General Harrison.
[529] American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 781.
Against this frontier could be launched, in the event of an Indian war alone, several thousand warriors.[530] If war were joined with Great Britain at the same time, it was believed by both sides, and with good reason, that several thousand men employed in the Indian trade and in sympathy with the British would co-operate in the attack on the American frontier.[531] Potentially the Americans possessed in the population of Ohio and Kentucky resources vastly greater than those their opponents could bring to bear on the Northwest; and in the end the superiority of population made itself manifest in the triumph of the American cause in this region. But this triumph came only after more than a year of fighting, during the greater part of which the Americans met with disaster after disaster. For the immediate present the northwestern frontier was practically undefended while in the traders and Indians the British possessed a force immediately available for action which constituted to all intents and purposes a formidable standing army.