Child of the Revolution

Booraem V Hendrik

Description

Indian wars in early Ohio as seen through the eyes of a future presidentThe American Revolution gave birth to a nation, forever changed the course of political thought, and shattered and transformed the lives of the citizens of the new republic. An iconic figure of the Old Northwest, governor, Indian fighter, general in the War of 1812, and ultimately president, William Henry Harrison was one such citizen. The son of a rich Virginia planter, Harrison saw his family mansion burned and his relatives scattered. In the war's aftermath, he rejected his inherited beliefs about slavery, religion, and authority, and made an idealistic commitment to serve the United States.This led him to the United States Army, which at the time was a sorry collection of drunks and derelicts who were about to be reorganized in the face of a serious conflict with the Indian nations of the Ohio valley. Author Hendrik Booraem follows Harrison as Gen. Anthony Wayne attempted to rebuild the army into a fighting force, first in Pittsburgh, then in Cincinnati and the forests of the Northwest. A voracious reader of history and the classics, Harrison became fascinated with the archaeology and ethnology of the region, even as his military service led to a dramatic showdown with the British army, which had secretly been aiding the Indians.By age 21, Harrison had achieved almost everything he had set his heart on-adventure, recognition, intellectual stimulation, and even a small measure of power. He was the youngest man to put his name to the Treaty of Greenville, which ended Indian control over Ohio lands and opened the way for development and statehood. He even won a bride: Anna Symmes, the Eastern-educated daughter of pioneer landowner John Cleves Symmes. When Congress voted to downsize the army, 25-year-old Harrison, now a family man, fumbled for a second career.Drawing on a variety of primary documents, Booraem re-creates military life as Lieutenant Harrison experienced it-a life of duels, discipline, rivalries, hardships, baffling encounters with the natives and social relations between officers and men, military and civilians, and men and women.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 21 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612776439
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A  Child of the Wil R liam e Henry v Harri o son l and u His W t orl i d, 17 o 73 – 17 n 98

H E N D R I K B O O R A E M V

A Child of the Revolution

A Child of the Revolution

William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773–1798

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Hendrik Booraem V

The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio

For R. D. B.

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© 2012 by The Kent State University Press A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012013501 ISBN 978-1-60635-115-4 Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Booraem, Hendrik, 1939– A child of the revolution : William Henry Harrison and his world, 1773– 1798 / Hendrik Booraem V. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60635-115-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)∞ 1. Harrison, William Henry, 1773–1841—Childhood and youth. 2. Harrison, William Henry, 1773–1841—Career in the military. 3. United States. Army—Military life—History—18th century. 4. United States—History—1783–1815. 5. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title. e392.b69 2012 973.3092—dc23 [B] 2012013501

12 13 14 15 16

5 4 3 2 1

Contents

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 Preface vii  Abbreviations xi 1. An Ardent Ambition to Become a Soldier 1 2. An Education Manqué 15 3. Friend of Human Liberty 29 4. The Grand Gesture 39 5. Parallel Lives 47 6. Introduction to the Ohio Country 61 7. Aftermath of a Disaster 73 8. The First Regiment 80 9. Cincinnati 88 10. Anthony Wayne Takes Over 97 11. Legionville and a Trip East 106 12. The March into the Woods 116 13. Nerves 126 14. Toward a Showdown 135 15. Consummation 143 16. The End of the Dream 152  Afterword 166  Notes 169  Bibliography 225  Index 243

A child of the Revolution, my attachment to liberty was imbibed in my earliest youth. —Harrison to Luther Bradish, 20 February 1836

’Twas in truth an hour Of universal ferment; mildest men Were agitated; and commotions, strife Of passion and opinion, filled the walls Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds. The soil of common life was at that time Too hot to tread upon. —Wordsworth,The Prelude

But man in general was not born to remain in a state of childhood; nature marks a time when he emerges from infancy, and this critical moment, though short, is attended with a long train of consequences. . . . As the roaring of the sea precedes the tempest, so the murmur of rising passions portends this stormy revolution. —Rousseau,Emile

Preface

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Of the two subjects in this book’s subtitle,William Henry Harrison and His World, 1773–1798, theworldis the dominant one—the exciting world of the new United States after the fighting had stopped, stirring with high ideals and noble dreams but also with disruptive social and political currents of all kinds, a world in which men and women cher- ished distant goals while struggling to keep their own lives afloat. The balance could hardly be otherwise: Harrison was a boy or very young man in these years, not yet influencing the world but instead being in- fluenced by it. In 1798, the end of the period examined, Harrison was only twenty-five years old and, like most twenty-five-year-olds, in many ways a product of his time.  Harrison the man would become a recognizable figure in American history, and not just for the laughable shortness of his thirty-two-day presidential term. His name was significant in Jacksonian politics, perhaps more for what he represented than for who he was, and he became one of the few generally successful military leaders in the War of 1812. Robert M. Owens has recently made the case for Harrison as a central figure in establishing U.S. policy toward Native Americans and their land. But all these roles are tangential to the subject of this book, Harrison’s journey to maturity in a changing world.  This journey would have been illuminating even if it had been per- formed by someone with a less conspicuous future, uniting as it does so many theaters of the period: the crumbling world of the great Virginia

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planters after the Revolution, Philadelphia and the nascent federal gov- ernment, the Indians of the Ohio Valley and the settlers and soldiers who sought to displace them. Major actors of the time—George Washington, Anthony Wayne, Benjamin Rush, James Wilkinson, Little Turtle—met Harrison and actively influenced his life. Complex changes in letters, science, and religion in these years—roughly speaking, the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic era—had major effects on the development of Harrison’s intellectual interests and aspirations. In these pages, then, the reader can expect to find a great deal about Harrison’s world and less about the young man himself—but the focus will remain always on the building of his character and aspirations, an examination that will, I hope, go some distance toward addressing frontier historian Reginald Horsman’s admonition to his colleagues that 1 “an attempt needs to be made to understand Harrison the man.”  Information about Harrison’s earliest years, before he received his officer’s commission at eighteen, is meager compared to that existing for the other American presidents about whom I have written, and for that reason the early chapters of this study differ from those in my biographies of James Garfield, Calvin Coolidge, and Andrew Jackson. Instead of tak- ing a straight chronological approach, they consider the central questions about this period in his life—the nature of presidential autobiography, family relations, educational patterns, and manners, medicine, slavery, and religion in the Virginia of the 1780s and 1790s. Then, building on this examination, they try to tease out inferences and implications from the scanty documents relating to Harrison himself. After chapter 5, the writing shifts to simple narrative; the same themes are present, but they are assimilated into the narrative structure.  Just as information is scanty about Harrison’s early years, so, too, are certain details of life on the frontier at the end of the eighteenth century. Of special note is the dearth of specific detail about the various Indian tribes Harrison encountered. The range and number of tribes were rarely reflected in contemporary accounts; most officials and settlers did not differentiate among them, but instead simply called them “Indians” in their reports or recollections. Therefore, although I provide the names of the specific tribes and individuals where they are available, often I could only follow my sources and use the generic termIndian.  No matter how authoritative this or any book may look, it is noth- ing more than the latest stage in an ongoing process—in this case, the

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process of understanding Harrison as a young man. Inevitably, time will uncover pertinent facts that I omitted because I was unaware of them and will expose errors of fact or interpretation in the material I have included. I shall be grateful to any reader who can produce additional source material bearing on Harrison’s early life, or point out an error of fact or interpretation in the work as it now stands.

Despite this book’s narrow focus, completing it has taken a long time, and the list of helpers is correspondingly long. In the early stages, the librarians at the State University of New York College at Purchase and the Aiken-Bamberg-Barnwell-Edgefield Regional Library in South Carolina provided invaluable aid in obtaining interlibrary loan materials, the life blood of a historian; in later years, that role was taken on by the library staff at Bucks County Community College. The rich collections of the Firestone Library at Princeton University and the David Library of the American Revolution at Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, were central to the rewriting of the original version.  Of the many historical institutions that have provided materials and assistance for this project, the Cincinnati Historical Society deserves special mention; its staff helped not only through correspondence and in person, but also by giving space for an earlier version of chapters through 11 in the fall 1987 issue of its quarterly publication,Queen City History, under the title “William Henry Harrison Comes to Cincinnati” (vol. 45, no. 3). Other collections that gave me access to their manuscripts were Colonial Williamsburg; the Butler Library, Columbia University; the Connecticut State Library; the Eggleston Library at Hampden-Sydney College; the Indiana Historical Society; the Lilly Library at Indiana Uni- versity; the Library of Congress; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the New-York Historical Society; the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia; the Virginia Histori- cal Society; and the Virginia State Library. Mr. Malcolm Jamieson of Berkeley Plantation also supplied valuable information.  From the many individuals who helped with different avatars of this work, five deserve special thanks. I learned basic research skills and high standards from David Donald at Johns Hopkins. Bill Harris, a fellow stu- dent of Donald’s, read an early attempt and gave helpful advice. Richard