[543] On the state of the army at this time see McMaster, History of the People of the United States, III, chap, xxiii; Adams, op. cit., VI, chap, xiv; Babcock, op. cit., chap. v.
The main reliance of the Americans must obviously be the militia. Fighting within their own boundaries, under competent officers of their own choosing, and in their own way, they were capable of excellent, and at times even brilliant service; Bennington, King's Mountain, and New Orleans are sufficient evidence of this. But for prolonged service in a national and offensive war they were of very little account. In subservience to impulse and impatience of discipline they rivaled the Indian himself. Said Amos Kendall, after witnessing a temporary muster in Kentucky in the summer of 1814: "The soldiers are under no more restraint than a herd of swine. Reasoning, remonstrating, threatening, and ridiculing their officers, they show their sense of equality, and their total want of subordination."[544] Even so popular and experienced a frontiersman as Harrison, leading the citizens of his own territory in defense of their own homes, found great difficulty in controlling the militia in the short Tippecanoe campaign. His biographer repeats with evident pride that he relied upon his persuasive eloquence, rather than his authority, to prevent a general desertion.[545]
[544] Quoted in Babcock, op. cit., 79-80.
[545] Dawson, Harrison, 230-31.
Equally typical of the volunteer militia of this period was the action of the Ohioans on receipt of the news, in the summer of 1812, that Fort Wayne was in imminent danger from the Indians. Their ardor to serve was such that "every road to the frontiers was crowded with unsolicited volunteers."[546] Yet this zeal, praiseworthy as it was in itself, only resulted in the consumption of the provisions which by General Hull's orders had been accumulated at the outposts for his use. When Harrison was finally ready to start upon the expedition for the relief of Fort Wayne he paraded his troops, "read several articles of war, prescribing the duty of soldiers, and explained the necessity for such regulations," and gave those who were unwilling to submit to them an opportunity to withdraw from the force. The enthusiasm of the troops was such that only one man availed himself of this opportunity; and he was conveyed astride a rail by his disgusted associates to the banks of the Big Miami, "in the waters of which they absolved him from the obligations of courage and patriotism." Yet not all of Harrison's eloquence sufficed ten days later to prevent the Ohio militia from abandoning his army in a body and returning to their homes with the campaign but half completed.[547]
[546] Ibid., 288.
[547] McAfee, History of the Late War in the Western Country, 128.
However excellent the quality of the rank and file may have been, it still would have availed little in the absence of competent leaders. The painful experience of the government in the early years of the Civil War has burned this lesson deeply into the consciousness of the American people. Though the War of 1812 was waged on a far smaller scale, the lack of competent generals in the earlier years is even more painfully apparent. The officers appointed by the President to command the army in 1812 have been well described as "old, vain, respectable, and incapable."[548] Of the two major generals and five brigadiers the youngest was fifty-five years of age, and the average age was fifty-nine. Most of them were veterans of the Revolutionary War, and only one had ever commanded a regiment in the face of an enemy.
[548] McMaster, United States, III, 546.
The general plan proposed by Dearborn for the campaign provided for a main expedition against Montreal by way of Lake Champlain, flanked by invasions of Canada from Detroit, Niagara, and Sackett's Harbor. Such a plan vigorously pushed with proper forces would have compelled the British forces to stand strictly on the defensive, the Indians would have had no encouragement to rise, and the northwestern frontier might have been spared the horrors of the warfare that soon broke upon it. But while a force was sent to Detroit under Hull to begin the campaign in that quarter, elsewhere hostilities lagged. Hull's campaign, therefore, on the issue of which hung the fate of the Northwest, may receive our undivided attention.