For Honour's Sake (10 page)

The Americans had been squeezing out the Spanish and the French in Louisiana and Florida, and Clay was affronted by Great Britain's resistance to the continuance of this strategy. For the northern states and the adjoining western states and territories the situation was less advantageous for expansion. Here the frontier Indians posed a continued threat to attempts by settlers to secure large tracts of land they claimed as their own. Farther north, the British, widely believed to be fomenting anti-American sentiment among the Indians, clearly had no intention of surrendering the Canadas to American expansionist interests. To the likes of Henry Clay, this situation was not only extremely galling but it posed a direct threat to the nation's security that must be addressed with the same determination and resolve that the federal government had directed toward southern expansion.

W
hen the United States Senate convened in the late winter of 1810 one of the first orders of business was a congressional bill calling on President Thomas Jefferson to scrap his controversial 1807 embargo in favour of the softer non-intercourse policy. Whereas Jefferson's embargo had curtailed all international trade, including that with Canada and the Spanish Empire to the south, non-intercourse excluded only British and French ships from American ports and prohibited importation of goods from either country.

Non-intercourse had previously proven a weak, ineffectual tool, Henry Clay argued before the Senate on February 10. It was incapable of prying from Great Britain the concessions required. Impressment, the orders-in-council, and the continued inciting of frontier Indians would continue unchecked. In the absence of the embargo, the only alternative was war, and he passionately advocated its declaration.

“No man in the nation desires peace more than I …. But I prefer the troubled ocean of war, demanded by the honor and independence of the country, with all its calamities, and desolations, to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.” Harkening back to Albert Gallatin's earlier remonstrance that war would delineate Americans from money-grubbing Hollanders, Clay asked: “Are we to be governed by the low, groveling parsimony of the counting room, and to cast up the actual pence in the drawer before we assert our inestimable rights?” Clay disparaged the claim by anti-war advocates that nothing of value could be won from Britain. “The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust I shall not be deemed
presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet. Is it nothing to the British nation—is it nothing to the pride of her monarch to have the last of the immense North American possessions held by him in the commencement of his reign, wrested from his dominion? Is it nothing to extinguish the torch that lights up savage warfare? Is it nothing to acquire the entire fur trade connected with that country?”
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Either reject the congressional bill and hold the course of non-intercourse, he advised, or plunge into war with Britain.

Clay's impassioned admonition failed to sway the senators to either take the path that led to war or to hold to the embargo course. Instead, non-intercourse was adopted. Disgusted, Clay condemned the decision in the
Kentucky Gazette.
All “our commercial restrictions having in view the coercion of foreign governments to abrogate their edicts, will be abandoned; and our commerce once more left to its fate.”
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Failing to prevail in the Senate, Clay chafed through the rest of the session—convinced that the time had come to move to where real national decisions were made. Next time he came to Washington it would be as a congressman. And with him would be sufficient young men of like mind to force the nation into war. There was growing consensus throughout the western states that an Indian uprising masterminded by British agents was imminent. Clay envisioned little problem in finding the support he needed.

Since Maj. Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the ensuing series of land-grabbing treaties that Indiana governor William Henry Harrison inveigled the Indians into accepting, the plight of the Shawnee and other Ohio country nations had steadily worsened. Hunting grounds lost to the pioneer axe and plough forced tribes to disperse into shrinking groups in order to seek out pockets of territory sufficient to provide for their needs. Starvation was common, influenza ran rampant through the villages, and American whisky traders plying their goods only worsened an already desperate situation.

Non-intercourse unwittingly exacerbated matters by shutting off Indian.' access to the British traders they largely depended on, for provisions from American sources were always insufficient. A great
number of Indians were forced to seek assistance directly from the British holding Fort Malden and Fort St. Joseph. They came to the posts starving, destitute, increasingly discontented with their treatment by the United States.
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Meanwhile in Ohio, Indiana, and the other northwestern territories, many Indians had turned to a new hope that promised to improve their lot: returning to the way that they had lived before the white man came. In 1808, Tecumseh and his younger brother, Lalawéthika (one of the two surviving triplets), created a Shawnee settlement in northern Indiana on the Wabash River, about three miles below the mouth of the Tippecanoe River and one hundred miles east of Fort Wayne. Here Lalawéthika changed his name to Tenskwatawa, meaning “Open Door.” More commonly called the Prophet, Tenskwatawa believed he spoke directly for the Great Spirit.

On the outside, the Prophet little resembled his handsome brother. Slim, of average height, he was sallow-faced with a down-turned mouth that lent his expression a doleful air, furthered by an old injury that had permanently closed his right eye. Until his thirtieth birthday, Lalawéthika had eked out a living as a minor healer and been noted as a lazy, often drunken, fellow. But the winter of 1805 brought particularly cold temperatures and an influenza epidemic that none of his potions or knowledge of bleeding could prevent taking lives. Then, in a life-transforming vision, the Great Spirit revealed that the Indians must repent their sinful life or be denied entry to heaven.

Overnight Lalawéthika repented his ways and demonstrated remarkable ability to capture the hearts and minds of all who heard his preaching. Sitting with eyes closed, face masked in reverence, he spoke eloquently and with hands in constant motion. Set aside whisky, he counselled, cast off evil medicines provided by the whites, cease murdering each other, “never think of war again,” turn no cruel hand against either women or children, take only one wife and to her be true, be never dishonest or commit slander against another.

In a stunning attack on tradition, the Prophet also demanded that each Indian must destroy the medicine bags in which each person kept fetishes that aided connection to personal guardian spirits. Medicine
bags, he said, were agents of witchcraft. Henceforth he was the only spiritual guide anyone should look to.

Traditional ceremonies, however, must be revived. Most tellingly, the ways of the white man adopted out of convenience and because of the insistence of the traders were to be rejected. Clothes worn by the whites were to be shunned, muskets, flints, and steel abandoned in favour of the bow and arrow. All animals introduced by whites, save the horse, were to be slaughtered. No more would Indians eat alien food such as pork, chicken, and wheat. They should completely return to the limited horticultural ways of the past and embrace the essential hunting life. All the white man's efforts to transform Indians into tillers of soil were to be rejected.

White culture, the Prophet said, was the root evil that had caused the Indian slide from grace toward damnation. An apocalyptic reckoning was coming when supernatural means would overthrow the whites and bury all of them alongside those Indians who still sinned. Then the land would be returned and the people would again live in Eden.
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The Prophet's message inspired the Shawnee and many of their allies. And while his younger brother became the people's spiritual leader, Tecumseh was their most powerful chief. The two men led their followers to the banks of the Wabash near Tippecanoe in 1808 to found a new home. Called Prophetstown by the whites, the community soon numbered 200. Neatly ordered, bark-sided houses overlooked the river from a height of ground. A prominent council house and medicine lodge stood to the west of this residential area, facing out on a wide expanse of prairie. By the river, in the adjacent bottomland, a hundred-acre plot had been cleared for cultivation. Ranks of canoes were beached alongside the river. Those living in the village were required to adhere to the standards and behaviour that the Prophet decreed.
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By October, the village had a population of about four hundred. But the winter of 1808–09 proved as hard for the Indians there as elsewhere. The cultivated fields failed to yield a fall harvest, the unusually heavy snowpack hampered hunting efforts. Starvation threatened.

Tecumseh was unaware of the troubles plaguing the settlement. He spent the winter in Ohio recruiting more followers among disaffected
young warriors of the Wyandot and Seneca. While the Prophet prayed and preached, Tecumseh tirelessly built a new confederacy.
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Yet even though Tecumseh avowed repeatedly that he sought only peace, and that he also generally abided by the tenets preached by his brother, the warrior never set aside the musket. He was also disinclined to await some supernaturally inspired apocalypse that would rid the land of whites. Peace would come, he believed, only through strength. To build this strength, he tracked relentlessly across the northwest—pushing, prodding, cajoling, threatening when necessary, to win the other chiefs over to the cause.

Despite his diplomatic skills, Tecumseh's efforts yielded only limited results until Harrison advanced his most ambitious land grab with the Treaty of Fort Wayne, concluded on September 30, 1809. Assembling a group of friendly chiefs cultivated among the Miami, Potawatomi, and Delaware, Harrison had them sign over three million acres to the United States in exchange for a greater annuity and more trade goods. That the Potawatomi had never resided in the land in question and the other tribal chiefs had only dubious authority to agree to such a deal bothered Harrison not a jot. Harrison used the fact that President James Madison had only just been inaugurated that March to present this treaty as distinct from the string of earlier treaties he had masterminded. “This is the first request that your new Father has ever made of you and it will be the last, he wants no more of your land.”
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The treaty enraged Tecumseh. With the Prophet at his side, he threatened to execute the chiefs as traitors, but there was nothing either preacher or warrior could do to reverse the treaty. Tecumseh, however, warned that any whites attempting to survey or settle the new land—comprising as it did all the lower Wabash River territory and being where many of those people earlier driven out of the Ohio now dwelt—would do so at risk of their lives.

Outrage spread through the tribes, and with the coming of the first spring grasses that provided feed for their horses, warriors by the hundreds rode into Prophetstown. Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Delaware, and Miami—mostly disenchanted young warriors—arrived. In late May about 240 men from the Sac and Fox nations offered their support
before carrying on to Upper Canada, where they hoped to receive provisions from the British. Tecumseh believed they would, for the only thing that had enabled the people of Prophetstown to survive the winter had been several pack trains of food that British officials had sent south to assist them.
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When Harrison learned of these supply shipments and the growing Indian anger over the Fort Wayne treaty, he saw sure evidence of a British conspiracy. On July 4, 1810, he wrote a long letter to Madison's secretary of war, William Eustis. “The treaties made by me last fall, were concluded upon principles as liberal toward the Indians as my knowledge of the views and opinions of the government would allow…. But, sir, the President may rest assured, that the complaints of injury, with regard to the sale of lands, is a mere pretense, suggested to the prophet by British partisans and emissaries.”

He claimed on good authority that “a Miami chief” returning from a visit to a British trade post, “after having received the accustomed donation of goods, was thus addressed by Elliott, the British agent: ‘My son, keep your eyes fixed on me—my tomahawk is now up—be you ready, but do not strike till I give the signal.' ”
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Harrison was not alone in this belief. Until 1810 most Kentuckians paid only scant attention to the reported interactions between British and Canadian authorities and the Indians. But as Tecumseh's confederacy grew toward fruition, whites living near the frontier felt increasingly uneasy, and even those who, like Clay, lived in secure western communities like Lexington believed they faced a “serious Indian menace.” The
Kentucky Gazette
opined on September 11, 1810: “We have always been of opinion that the confederacy which has been formed by the Prophet, was the effect of British intrigue; and we have never doubted that the secret agents of that power, which are known to exist in every part of America, but particularly in the Indian country, gave it all the confidence in their power.”
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