General Hull was tried by court-martial on charges of treason, cowardice, and neglect of duty. He was convicted on the last two charges and sentenced to be shot, with a recommendation to the mercy of the President. The verdict was approved by Madison, but he remitted the execution of the sentence because of the old man's services in the Revolution. Guilty though he was, an angry and humiliated people also made him the scapegoat for the sins of neglect and omission of which their Government stood convicted. In the testimony offered at his trial there was a touch, rude, vivid, and very human, to portray him in the final hours of the tragic episode at Detroit. Spurned by his officers, he sat on the ground with his back against the rampart while "he apparently unconsciously filled his mouth with tobacco, putting in quid after quid more than he generally did; the spittle colored with tobacco juice ran from his mouth on his neckcloth, beard, cravat, and vest."
Later events in the Northwest Territory showed that the British successes in that region were gained chiefly because of an unworthy alliance with the Indian tribes, whose barbarous methods of warfare stained the records of those who employed them. "Not more than seven or eight hundred British soldiers ever crossed the Detroit River," says Henry Adams, "but the United States raised fully twenty thousand men and spent at least five million dollars and many lives in expelling them. The Indians alone made this outlay necessary. The campaign of Tippecanoe, the surrender of Detroit and Mackinaw, the massacres at Fort Dearborn, the river Raisin, and Fort Meigs, the murders along the frontier, and the campaign of 1813 were the prices paid for the Indian lands in the Wabash Valley."
Before the story shifts to the other fields of the war, it seems logical to follow to its finally successful result the bloody, wasteful struggle for the recovery of the lost territory. This operation required large armies and long campaigns, together with the naval supremacy of Lake Erie, won in the next year by Oliver Hazard Perry, before the fugitive British forces fell back from the charred ruins of Detroit and Amherstburg and were soundly beaten at the battle of the Thames—the one decisive, clean-cut American victory of the war on the Canadian frontier. These events showed that far too much had been expected of General William Hull, who comprehended his difficulties but made no attempt to batter a way through them, forgetting that to die and win is always better than to live and fail.
CHAPTER II
LOST GROUND REGAINED
General William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe and the Governor of Indiana Territory, whose capital was at Vincennes on the Wabash, possessed the experience and the instincts of a soldier. He had foreseen that Hull, unless he received support, must either abandon Detroit or be hopelessly hemmed in. The task of defending the western border was ardently undertaken by the States of Kentucky and Ohio. They believed in the war and were ready to aid it with the men and resources of a vigorous population of almost a million. When the word came that Hull was in desperate straits, Harrison hastened to organize a relief expedition. Before he could move, Detroit had fallen. But a high tide of enthusiasm swept him on toward an attempt to recover the lost empire. The Federal Government approved his plans and commissioned him as commander of the Northwestern army of ten thousand men.
In the early autumn of 1812, General Harrison launched his ambitious and imposing campaign, by which three separate bodies of troops were to advance and converge within striking distance of Detroit, while a fourth was to invade and destroy the nests of Indians on the Wabash and Illinois rivers. An active British force might have attacked and defeated these isolated columns one by one, for they were beyond supporting distance of each other; but Brock now needed his regulars for the defense of the Niagara frontier. The scattered American army, including brigades from Virginia and Pennsylvania, was too strong to be checked by Indian forays, but it had not reckoned with the obstacles of an unfriendly wilderness and climate. In October, no more than a month after the bugles had sounded the advance, the campaign was halted, demoralized and darkly uncertain. A vast swamp stretched as a barrier across the route and heavy rains made it impassable.
Hull had crossed the same swamp with his small force in the favorable summer season, but Harrison was unable to transport the food and war material needed by his ten thousand men. A million rations were required at the goal of the Maumee Rapids, and yet after two months of heartbreaking endeavor not a pound of provisions had been carried within fifty miles of this place. Wagons and pack-trains floundered in the mud and were abandoned. The rivers froze and thwarted the use of flotillas of scows. Winter closed down, and the American army was forlornly mired and blockaded along two hundred miles of front. The troops at Fort Defiance ate roots and bark. Typhus broke out among them, and they died like flies. For the failure to supply the army, the War Department was largely responsible, and Secretary Eustis very properly resigned in December. This removed one glaring incompetent from the list but it failed to improve Harrison's situation.