I don't really have much to add to the volume of commentary on today, when the turning of the year brings us to the day when the great voice of civil rights was stilled.Except this; at the time he was killed, Dr. King had moved on. He was fighting then not just for civil rights, but for civil justice. And, specifically, for the idea that the rich and powerful nation he was born to was called to do more than merely build highways and float aircraft carriers. That as an American citizen he, and all of us, should be able to find and do a good day's work for a good day's pay.
Without having to fear death or injury. Without regard to what we looked like, or the color of our skin, or what we have for genitalia, or where (or if) we worship, or whom we love.
And it occurs to me; that's a truly wonderful, truly revolutionary idea.
What if one of the bedrock principles of this country; of our government, of our society, of our commerce and industry, was that anyone who wanted to work could work?Think about it. We commonly accept - in fact, it's an article of faith amongst most Americans and among the political Right as a body - that there are and always will be people in this country who cannot find a job. Not don't want a job; who desperately, fiercely want to work but cannot get hired.
And I'll tell you; I've been unemployed. I've had friends who lost their jobs. My wife is, at present, looking grimly for a job (in a field in which she is terrific and would be an asset to anyone who hired her, and that's not bias talking). and no one - no one - I know or knew wants to be unemployed.
And yet all around me I get the sense that outside a handful of people there seems to be this vast...indifference at best, and often angry hostility at worst to the notion that there's something wrong with the country, with the system, with the economy when these people are out of work.
The fault is assumed to be the person's; they're out of work because...they're just fucking lazy, or stupid, or shiftless. They won't move, they won't adapt, they won't do this or they won't do that. if they really wanted they could find a job that would pay them enough to live like a 21st Century American (meaning not in a shelter, or under a bridge, or in a warren five-to-a-bed, or eating fucking cat food).
To which I would simply say; bullshit.I've never known anyone who wouldn't try and fly across the Columbia River by flapping their arms if they could land a decent job at a decent wage. Why does this seem like such a damn deadly difficult thing for many Americans to recognize?So maybe today is as good a day as any to wonder; what would our nation be like if one of the most important things on our domestic agenda was finding good work; hard, satisfying, decently-paying work, for every American who wanted it?
Wabash (or "St. Clair's Defeat") 4 NOV 1791Forces Engaged:United States - the force that fell in on the morning of 3 NOV 1791 reported a total of 52 officers and 868 enlisted men out of an original establishment of roughly 2,000 recorded two months earlier.
How they got there, and in what condition, is a huge part of the story of the ensuing disaster.
The expedition from Fort Washington had originally consisted of two three-battalion regiments of U.S. regular infantry, the 1st and 2nd U.S. Infantry, and five more batallions in two "regiments" of federal troops formed from six-month conscripts, the 1st and 2nd "Levy Regiments". All of these units were severely understrength as a result of poor pay, poor service conditions, poor leadership, or a combination of all three.The assigned strength of the St. Clair expedition is reported to have been roughly 600 regulars, 800 "levies" or conscripts, and 600 Pennsylvania and Kentucky militiamen in late summer 1791.
So assuming that the regulars probably suffered marginally less from desertion and illness at the time of the attack on 4 NOV 1791 the regular troops led by MG St. Clair probably consisted of no more than about 300-350 all ranks.
Below this the organizations are hard to discern, and this is made more perplexing by the early U.S. custom of designating individual battalions by the commander's name rather than by a numerical position in the regiment ("1st Battalion, 1st U.S. Infantry"). At the time of the Battle of the Wabash we know that the 2nd U.S. Infantry had been reduced to a "detachment" or probably less than 50 troops. There appear to have been the remnants of the five named levy infantry battalions as well; Butler's, Clarke's (or possibly Darke's), Patterson's, Gaither's, and Beddington's.
How strong these "battalions" were I was unable to determine, but it seems likely that, since between the regulars and the conscripts the U.S. regulars numbered around 400-500 and the regulars were reduced to nearly cadre strength these levy "battalions" would have been about 80-100, the size of a modern U.S. infantry company.
At the time the U.S. Army had only a single field artillery unit, the U.S. Artillery. This organization was represented at the Wabash by two companies (what today we would call batteries): Ford’s, organized around four 6lb cannons, and Bradford’s, with four 3lb cannons. The total number of artillerymen probably numbered no more than 100, about the size of a modern U.S. FA battery.
Roughly 300 local militia were organized into seven companies (1 Pennsylvania, 6 Kentucky). About half of these were poorly-trained, musket-armed infantry culled from local unemployed, volunteer townsmen, and the occasional bought substitute. The better grade of militiamen were rifle-armed frontiersmen due to their familiarity with the forest, their weapons, and the frontier warfare. Among these are listed 60 riflemen noted in the PA company, and about 150 in the KY companies.
Roughly one company of U.S. dragoons were assigned to the force as cavalry. The dragoons of 1791 retained little of their original use as mounted infantry, being instead used largely as scouts, flank, and rear security. In the wooded terrain of southern Ohio they would have had little value as shock cavalry.
So roughly 600-700 musket- or rifle-armed heavy infantry, 100 artillerymen with 8 (4 light, 4 medium) cannon, and 100 cavalrymen; 900 to 1,000 or so all arms under MG Arthur St. Clair.Western (or "Miami") Confederacy - Roughly 1,000 to 1,400 light infantry organized (to the best of our knowledge) as follows:
Left Wing: Ottawa (150) under (Egushwa) Ojibwe (150) (Wapacomegat) Pottawatomi (100) (Mad Sturgeon)
Center: Miami (100) (Little Turtle) Shawnee (300) (Blue Jacket, Black Hoof, Black Fish, CPT Johnny) Delawares (300) (Buckongahelas, CPT Pipe, Big Cat)
Right Wing: Wyandot (200) (Tashe, Roundhead) Mingo - now the Seneca-Cayuga of the Iroguois Confederacy (75) (Girty) Cherokee (25) (J. Ward)
The subunits of these tribal organizations would have varied between a single group for the smaller nations up to multiple 20-30 man bands grouped into 80-100 man elements under the overall leaders Weyapiersenwah (Blue Jacket) of the Shawnee, Buckongahelas of the Delaware, and Mihšihkinaahkwa (Little Turtle) of the Miami.
The Campaign: Among the causes of the American Revolution twenty years earlier "kill the redskins" tends to get less press than "taxation without representation" but was as if not more crucial and forms the backstory behind this month's battle.
Because many of the events that led to the breakup of Great Britain and her American colonies - the quartering of British troops, those un-represented taxes, the Intolerable Acts, the tea tax and the tea party of legend - related directly to the immense difference in opinion regarding the native inhabitants of the North American continent between the British colonists and their government officers back in Blighty.
As far as about 95% of the American settlers were concerned the natives, whatever tribe, sex, nature, or calling, were a form of two-legged vermin; dangerous, unpredictable, shiftless, nasty, and troublesome. What the Americans wanted from the natives was more of their land and less of them. By whatever means necessary.
Which is not to make our American ancestors some sort of Nazis. They wanted the native peoples gone and weren't particularly picky about the means. But revisionist history to the contrary there does not ever seem to have been any sort of American Endlösung for the natives.Typically what happened was that the white population expanded into native lands through a sort of personal Brownian motion beginning with a handful of frontier ruffians headed out for pelts and general cussedness. These guys, usually single, usually distasteful of settled life, were perfectly happy to take on native ways (and native women) when offered, or fight with them (since many of the native cultures saw fighting as tribal cultures often have, a mixture of entertainment for the young men, venture capitalism, and social ritual) when not.
But these frontier tales drew landless men, or desperate families, or just the excess of the settled lands to the east. And the immense tragedy of the white settlement was that, in general, all of these people shared the common belief that the natives didn't really "own" the land they lived on the way a white man would have.
So they simply took it.
And, not surprisingly, the natives tried to take it back.
The natives were "right", if you want to consider the right-and-wrong purely based on seniority. They had squatter's rights. But the entire business has gone long past right and wrong, and, truth to tell, it would be beyond hypocritical for me to sit here, the grandson of Scots and Englishmen, in Portland, Oregon and revile my predecessors for their greed. They won, for their and my good, and the natives lost, for their and their descendents' woes.
Vae victus, woe to the vanquished, the Roman historian Livy wrote, and who should have known better than the Romans who made so much woe in their day? Before our modern sensibilities it was just business as usual for two tough, strong, dominating peoples who wanted the same piece of real estate.
The British government, on the other hand, was pretty sick and tired of funding and fighting the wars their colonial proxies ginned up with the local aborigines. They wanted a source of natural resources and a market for British finished goods, and didn't need land west of the Appalachians for that. So when the Americans kept pissing off the natives His Majesty's Government got fairly shirty and decided to charge them for the expense.
The original Teabaggers didn't like those taxes any better than their latter-day Laz-e-boy Libertarians, and so the tea went in the harbor, the port of Boston was closed, the shot heard 'round the world was fired, and sixteen years later MG St. Clair was dispatched to subdue another group of those pesky redsticks, because the success of the Revolution meant that woe was coming to the Ohio Valley as sure as the sunrise.
Before the Curtain: Beaver Wars
So I don't end up making this another of the "noble savage" or "Lo, the poor Indian" stories, let's step back over a century to the original Northwest Wars, the savaging of the Ohio area by the Iroquois to remind ourselves that the Noble Red Man could be just as rapacious as the white invaders...
Because beginning in the early Seventeenth Century and continuing for some fifty to seventy years the Iroquois Confederacy began a series of conflicts that had the effect of battering the original residents of the "old northwest" - what are today the western parts of the state of Pennsylvania and the states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.These wars are not well known simply because white people were involved only as passersby. But so far as we can tell the Iroquois destroyed almost all the Algonquin culture in the western Great Lakes region - the Hurons and their allies - drove the Shawnee out of western Pennsylvania, and ramped all across the northwest, driving the Siouan tribes out to the Great Plains, and spending most of the mid-Seventeenth Century exchanging raids with the Anishininaabeg Confederacy of the Miami, Shawnee, Illinois, and Pottawatomi.
The effect was to drive out the tribes living in the Ohio region; raid and counter-raid made existence in what became the no-man's-land of the Old Northwest too precarious. The Iroquois remained in notional "control" of the area but only as a resource area (their "hunting ground") as differentiated from a dwelling place.As I said, we know very little about these wars, but they sound as desperate and bloody as any in North American history. In the end the Iroquois made the strategic error of siding with Britain against her former colony. When the United States emerged from its colonial nascence the Iroquois in turn were forced to give up their lands, die, or become just another American - their power as a nation was broken.
Act I, Tragedy and Farce: The Northwest Territories
But the Ohio territory was in flux; claimed by five U.S. states including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, while the native claimants included many of the former Anishininaabeg Confederacy including the Miami, the Shawnee, the Delaware and the actual residents, mostly former Iroquoian tribes such as the Mingo.
While the British had "given" control of the Northwest to the United States it had no way of enforcing this on the native nations, and, in fact, British troops remained in forts along the Great Lakes, formally until the conclusion of the Jay Treaty negotiated in 1794, and informally until militarily destroyed during the War of 1812.
The new U.S. government, though, took the word for the deed. The U.S. government, then as now, was deep in debt and hoped to reduce this deficit by selling off this "free land", regardless of who the Shawnee thought really owned it.
Congress passed a "Land Ordinance of 1785" that encouraged the Wall Street of their day, the western land-speculators, to buy up vast tracts, survey them, and sell them to gullible rubes hardy settlers. Already white farmers from marginal lands in Connecticut were already flooding into the "Western Reserve", actually the southern shore of Lake Erie in what is today northeastern Ohio.In the "Northwest Ordinance" of 1787 the Confederation Congress showed that it had perfected the tragicomic song-and-dance routine that both whites and reds grew to know painfully well over the next century. On the one hand it claimed to be the Great White Father; the Ordinance gave Indians U.S. legal title to "enjoy whatever lands they lived on".
But the Ordinance also encouraged the white folks to settle north of the Ohio, and expedited land claims for those who wanted their forty acres and their mule. Not surprisingly these frontrunners often met their manifest destiny at the sharp end of a Shawnee or Mingo belt axe or bullet, and the Ohio story of raid and counter-raid, killing and revenge killing continued.
Act II: Westward, Ho!, or, Damn the Redskins, Full Speed Ahead! Oops!
Lots of individuals and groups enjoyed making trouble in the region.
To the north the Brits kept a hand in, selling guns and ammo to the tribes and encouraging them to take a whack at the encroaching Yankees. To the south land speculators and Indian-haters wanted to see more Indians being made into good Indians. The native tribes wanted to be left alone on their lands, the settlers wanted the land they felt that the redskins were wasting. The result was a bloody mess from Yorktown until the autumn of 1786 when one BG Logan led a U.S. expedition against the Shawnee towns along the Mad River. His force of U.S. infantry and Kentucky militia did the usual burning and killing, in this case largely of women, children and older men "home guard"...since the Shawnee soldiers were themselves out killing, raping, and burning in Kentucky!
The Logan raid just added to the furor. For the next five years something like 1,500 U.S. citizens of Kentucky or travelers on the Ohio were killed. American raids into native territories probably killed as many during that time.By 1790 the new administration of George Washington had had enough. Washington directed his Secretary of War, Knox to organize an offensive into central Ohio to what would be later called "pacify" the Miami and Shawnee (meaning, obviously, to kill as many as possible and to drive the rest north and west).
The War Department set about doing what it was named for.
BG Josiah Harmar was instructed to assemble about 1,500 troops near modern Fort Wayne, Indiana in the autumn of 1790. Harmar, who was by the accounts of his surviving officers either drunk, incompetent, or both, got his troops in place and then managed to commit this already-small force in penny packets against the Shawnee, who defeated the U.S. troops in a series of engagements during October, 1790, including the "Battle of Heller's Corner", "Hartshorn's Defeat" and the gruesomely named "Battle of the Pumpkin Fields" (supposedly because the steam from the scalped Yankee skulls made the natives think of freshly-cooked gourds scenting the autumn air).
Harmer lost about 130 troops and was forced back to his logistical base by the onset of winter.
Act III: The Madness of President George
As both former army commander and President of the young nation George Washington was honked off with Harmer and the failure of his command. He said "my mind... is prepared for the worst; that is, for expence without honor or profit." He demanded another offensive against the tribes the following summer. Congress raised a 2nd Regiment of regulars but then proceeded to display the sort of fiscal foresight and prudence that Congress has made legendary by cutting the troopers' pay and laying off troops already serving, reducing the establishment of the 1st U.S. Infantry to under 300. As a result the new unit managed to pull about half their authorized strength and the boys of the First were pretty pissed off.
And the First U.S. Infantry weren't all that happy to begin with - they'd been badly mishandled during Harmar's fiasco and the boys weren't exactly raring to go have another whack at the redsticks. The militia was the usual shambles as an organization (thought individual militiamen might have been good fighters) and the "levies" were a bloody mess. Discipline was slack, and between supply and management problems many of the troops who fell into the firing lines on 4 NOV had never before fired a round, live or blank.
St. Clair's force assembled in the summer of 1791 at Fort Washington near what is now Cincinnati, Ohio.Everyone, from the commander to the most raggedy private, seems to have hated the whole business. Supplies were slow in arriving and bad when they arrived. Transport - horses and mules - was in bad shape, the animals in poor health and their fodder lean or nonexistent.
Act IV: Anabasis, or, The Journey Up.
We do not have an extant copy of St. Clair's orders. From what I can tell his objective was purely geographical; to construct a string of fortifications northwards from Fort Washington to the heart of the Miami country. The defeat of the Confederacy forces seems to have been considered an afterthought, regardless of the good showing they had made against Harmar's force the previous year.
St. Clair does seem to have had some notion of the hazards of his movement in enemy country; we have a contemporary document prepared by the Army's Adjutant General entitled "Order of Battle, march and encampment of the Army of the United States under Major General Arthur St. Clair during the campaign of 1791" showing that the commander understood the need to move and encamp carefully in enemy territory.But the logistical and disciplinary problems were so great that the force was unable to move until September. Benjamin Lossing, writing in 1869, gives us a delightfully Victorian word-picture of the expedition.
After noting that the force departed Fort Washington on 5-6 SEP 1791 Lossing says that they marched north twenty miles to the modern town of Hamilton where they constructed a fort named for the place. From there the force marched a further forty-two miles to a site in the present Darke County, Ohio, where they built a second fortification they called Fort Jefferson.
Then Lossing (1869) continues:
"When they moved from there, on the 24th of October, they began to encounter the subtle foe in small parties. It was evident that dusky scouts were hanging upon their flanks, and they became hourly more cautious and vigilant. The nights were frosty, but serene. The days were genial and brilliant. The summer warmth had been diffused over the whole of September; and now the forests were arrayed in all the gorgeous beauty of autumnal splendors peculiar to them.
At length, when dark clouds were overhead, and falling leaves were thick in their path, the invading army halted and encamped upon the borders of an unknown stream, which proved to be a chief tributary of the Upper Wabash. They were ninety-seven miles from Fort Washington, deep in the wilderness. A light fall of snow lay upon the ground – so light that it appeared like hoar-frost. Over a piece of rising ground, timbered with oak, ash, and hickory, the encampment was spread, with a fordable stream, forty feet in width, in front. The army lay in two lines, seventy yards apart, with four pieces of cannon in the centre of each. Across the stream, and beyond a rich bottom land three hundred yards in width, was an elevated plain, covered with an open forest of stately trees. There the militia – three hundred and fifty independent, half-insubordinate men, under Lieutenant Colonel Oldham, of Kentucky – were encamped.
Eight weary miles through the woods the soldiers had marched that day, and when the camp was arranged the sun was low in the cloudless sky of the west. The tired soldiers early sought repose, without suspicion of danger near. All around them were evidences of old and recent Indian camps, and a few lurking savages had been seen by vigilant eyes; but no one knew whether Little Turtle and his confederates, with their followers, were near or far away."
They were not far away. The battle would occur the next morning.
Sources: As always when we deal with engagements between Western forces and native groups the problem is that the sources are hopelessly one-sided.
On the one side we have all the daily business records of an early industrial Army and a modern government; War Department papers such as the above, logistical returns, daily reports, casualty lists, rosters, muster lists, as well as the original summations such as the results of inquiries or the reports of courts-martial and committee meetings. One good place to start is here, the War Department papers for 1791, if for no other reason than to marvel that any military business got done before the invention of the typewriter. Much of the handwriting is difficult to read, to say the least.
The investigation of the disaster initiated by the House of Representatives (more of which later) is summarized in "Causes of the Failure of the Expedition against the Indians in 1791, under the command of Major General St. Clair," contained in the American State Papers, Class V, Military Affairs, Vol. I, pp. 36-39, Document No.5.St. Clair's account of the battle: "A Narrative of the Manner in which the Campaign against the indians, in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-one, was Conducted, under the Command of Major General Arthur St. Clair" was published in Philadelphia in 1812. This account is, obviously, biased in the general's favor.
Of the numerous volumes published since the era one of the most accessible and useful is the recent Osprey campaign issue "Wabash 1791" by John Winkler
On the other we have, if extant, usually oral histories at best, or sometimes written accounts told to third parties, often ling after the events of the day. Among the secondary sources that discuss the native troops, their leaders, and the issues they fought for are Harold Allison's "The Tragic Saga of the Indiana Indians" (1986), Lewis's "The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash" (1987) and John Sugden's "Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees"
And perhaps the most memorable - and certainly the most haunting - is the ballad "St. Clair's Defeat" that was written some time in the 19th Century within the lifetimes of the survivors.
Ignore the video attached - some idiot didn't know the difference between the French and Indian War (the video is from a film version of the British assault on Fort Ticonderoga) and the Battle of the Wabash, - but you might listen to the doleful little tune while you read the sorry tale that follows.
The Engagement: Lossing describes the morning of 4 NOV:
"The morning of the 4th dawned brilliantly. "Moderate northwest wind, serene atmosphere, and unclouded sky." All night long the sentinels had been firing upon prowling Indians, and the men, by order of the commanding general, had slept upon their arms."
Despite the clear warnings that the enemy both knew his force's location and was making a reconnaissance of its position, St. Clair had already failed to make some elementary precautions.
First he had divided his force or, to be precise since he had little effective control of his militia element at this point, allowed it to be divided. Neither the regular elements nor the militia could effectively support the other.
(here's the legend for the map above, keyed to the letters next to the units): a Butler’s battalion; b b artillery; c Clarke’s battalion; d Patterson’s battalion; e Faulkner’s rifle company; f f cavalry; g detachment of U. S. Second Regiment; h Gaither’s battalion; j Beddinger’s battalion; b n p flank guards; o 2 pickets; s swamp; m camp guard.
The "numerous crosses represent the enemy"
z z, troops retreating; the crooked stream, a tributary of the Wabash.
He also either failed, or was unable, to insist on any sort of field fortifications. Even a low log breastwork or some sort of brush abatis might have helped his force survive the coming encounter.
And that was not long in coming.
Like many tribal or preindustrial troops, the Confederacy had no more than a handful of simple tactics. These were no less effective for their simplicity; ambush, hasty, and deliberate attack still work just like they worked in Pharoah's day because they're fundamentally sound. Having made a thorough recon of the U.S. position the central element of Miamis, Shawnees, and Delawares slammed into the worse-organized militia camp.Let's go to Lossing again:
"The troops had been early mustered and dismissed from parade. They were preparing for breakfast, when, half an hour before sunrise, a body of Indians, with yells that wakened horrid echoes miles away through the forest, fell suddenly upon the militia. The assailed camp was immediately broken up, and the frightened soldiers, most of whom had never been in battle, rushed wildly across the bottom and the creek into the lines of the regulars, producing alarm and confusion there. The Indians closely followed, and fell upon the regulars."
This is classic irregular warfare; slow, careful IPB (intelligence preparation of the battlefield) followed by sudden, violent close action - we saw this at the Little Bighorn almost 100 years later.
And, again as we've seen since then, the native light infantry continued forward, "hugging the belt", driving the broken militia into the unshaken enemy regulars, successfully masking the potentially effective organized fire and heavy weapons of those regulars.
Because one very real danger to the Confederacy were the cannon of the U.S. Artillery. This is where one of the Confederacy leaders - said to be Mihšihkinaahkwa - had done his tactical planning; he had told off designated marksmen to target the gunners. The U.S. redlegs found out that snowy day what other smooth-bore artillerists were to learn painfully over the next fifty years - that a smoothbore cannon without a body of formed troops to hit was fearsomely vulnerable to concealed riflemen whose range was only slightly less than their own.
Some time early in the morning so many of the gun crews had been killed or wounded that the remaining gunners spiked their cannons - drove actual nails into the touchholes to disable them - rather than face the ultimate artillery disgrace of losing a mission-capable cannon.
The U.S. regulars were still, at bottom, good troops. They broke their musket stacks and formed into volley firing lines. Their disciplined fires drove the initial Confederacy assault back, and continued to hold their ground even as the attacking force completely enveloped them. Forming a 360-degree perimeter the U.S. forces continued to fight for the next several hours.The tactical errors of St. Clair and his officers continued to hammer them, however. For some reason the regular officers were convinced that the bayonet was their combat weapon of decision and persisted in making repeated bayonet charges out of their perimeter. The Confederacy troops fell back before these rushes, which inevitably ran out of energy and cohesion among the snowy woods and were then surrounded and cut apart. COL Darke supposedly was among the most hardheaded of these bayonet-fighters and payed the price; his son Joseph died somewhere out in the woods of Ohio.
By about 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning the untenable position of the St. Clair force was obvious even to its commander. He ordered a breakout toward Fort Jefferson and abandoned his artillery, supplies and, worst of all, his wounded - knowing that the native tribes had no use for wounded enemies, and neither the capability nor the inclination to treat them.
This time the breakout succeeded. The Confederacy troops pursued for several miles before losing interest and returning to the more entertaining looting and torturing of the prisoners.
Only 24 officers and troopers reached Fort Jefferson unwounded, and less than a total of 100 men reached safety.The execution fires burned for days afterward.
St. Clair admitted the disaster; "It was, in fact, a flight" he wrote to Henry Knox. His President was apoplectic. He ranted to his private secretary
"Here, yes, HERE, on this very spot, I took leave of him. I wished him success and honor. You have your instructions, I said, from the Secretary of War. I had a strict eye to them, and will add but one word – beware of a surprise! I repeat it – BEWARE OF A SURPRISE! You know how the Indians fight us. He went off with that, as my last solemn warning, thrown into his ears. And yet!! to suffer that army to be cut to pieces, hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise – the very thing I guarded him against!! O God, O God, he is worse than a murderer! How can he answer it to his country? The blood of the slain is upon him – the curse of widows and orphans – the curse of Heaven!"
It is difficult to comprehend the size of the butchery relative to the size of the country and the Army - the dead of Wabash constituted one-quarter of the entire U.S. Army of 1791. It was as if the Afghan muj managed to kill 10,000 GIs in a single engagement. St. Clair's defeat stunned the Army and the nation.
The Outcome: Decisive Western Confederacy tactical victory
The Impact: As always with native American victories, the best the natives could hope for was a short reprieve. The sheer numbers of the white invaders, their better organization, their more powerful industrial economy (which freed them from the fragility of a subsistence economy) meant that no American defeat would ever be really decisive. Within three years "Mad" Anthony Wayne would bring the Confederacy to its knees at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
Guns, germs, and steel - and printing, paved roads, Robert's Rules of Order, and the steam engine - doomed the Western Confederacy. Within a generation the scattered, desperate remnants of the proud nations that sent their fighting men to defeat the white army at the Wabash were broken, scattered fugitives being forced far from their homes and into a penurious, disinherited future.That did no good for St. Clair's wretched troops, though. From the Wiki entry:
"The American casualty rate, among the soldiers, was 97.4 percent, including 632 of 920 killed (69%) and 264 wounded. Nearly all of the 200 camp followers were slaughtered, for a total of 832 Americans killed."
The 2nd U.S. Infantry was destroyed and had to be completely reconstituted. Something was clearly wrong with the Army of 1791.
And so the disaster resulted in the changes that produced, in time, the U.S. Army of today. In 1792 the Congress raised new units, took control of the militia with the Militia Acts that required the state rabble to meet federal troop standards, and made them federal troops upon the command of the President. One of the new troop units, the "Legion of the United States" was critical in the destruction of the fighting power of the Confederacy at Fallen Timbers. And the new forces were also instrumental in establishing federal power by their employment during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.
Perhaps the most significant consequence of the battle - and the least remarked at the time - was in the establishment of the now-pernicious practice of "executive privilege".
St. Clair reported to his superiors in Philadelphia in JAN 1792. He refused to take the blame for the mess, blaming his militia commanders, the quartermaster general as well as the War Department. The President through SEC Knox refused him a court-martial and forced him into retirement.
The House of Representatives had other ideas. It began the very first Congressional investigation in U.S. history and demanded documents from the War Department. SEC Knox believed that this transgressed the "separation of powers" doctrine and went to Washington, suggesting that the administration resist this demand. Washington, in turn, pulled his department heads (Knox, Jefferson (State), Hamilton (Treasury), and Attorney General Randolph) to discuss this question - the first recorded meeting of what would become the Cabinet.
In the end Congress got their papers...but the result of this and several following meetings was that Washington and his cabinet concluded that, at least in theory, the both on the grounds of separation of powers as well as "the public good/official secrets" that refusing to divulge any papers or materials was constitutionally legal, a precedent that remains troubling to this day.
Touchline Tattles: Perhaps the most dismal little tale that hangs from the deadly morning along the Wabash is the tale of the last days of Arthur St. Clair.
Keep in mind that this man had stood on the heights of power. He had been general and a hero of the Revolution. He was president of the Congress of the United States Assembled, making the de-facto ruler of the Articles United States, and as such he was only a little less crucial to the eventual Constitutional U.S. than Washington himself. He helped force through the passage of that document, and then even after his defeat on the Wabash remained the governor of the Northwest Territories. In that post he spent a pantsload of money out of his own pocket, sure that his new government would reimburse him.
It didn't.
Then he came down on the wrong side of Ohio statehood.
The the new President, Jefferson, sacked him.
He returned to his home outside Pittsburg, a debtor, and lost his home and his possessions. He moved to a hillside shack outside the Ligonier Valley, overlooking what is now Latrobe, opened a tavern and, the former president of his country, bankrupt and ignored, served rum and bread to strangers traveling the Forbes Road. Some time in the teens he was described in a letter: "I saw a relic of the revolution today serving ale at a tavern, it was Arthur St. Clair."
He died in the late summer of 1818, supposedly after a fall from a wagon; one can only imagine how the old campaigner got to be in a state that would enable him to fall from a wagon and be killed.
He was buried in a small park in Greensburg, Pennsylvania by the charity of his fellow Masons. His original monument was not well-made and crumbled in the early Twentieth Century; the local historical society replaced it with a stone that is carved to read: "The earthly remains of Arthur St. Clair are deposited beneath this humble monument which is erected to supply the place of a nobler one due from his country."
No such stone was ever placed there.Today whatever remains of the patriot, revolutionary, political leader, and commander that was so roughly mishandled on that snowy November morning, is forgotten in a weedy corner of rural Pennsylvania, his only honor guard the crumpled cans that litter his grave like the bodies of his soldiers scattered over the bloody snow beside the Wabash two hundred and twenty years ago.
I've been up every morning since Monday at four and working long past dark. It's been effing cold, and today it's supposed to get worse - driving rain and temperatures in the low forties. I'm whacked, and so posting's been light.
And in all honesty the recent destruction of the Occupy sites in Portland, Oakland, and NYC has me truly, viciously depressed. Sucking-the-muzzle depressed. What-the-fuck-are-you-people-thinking depressed.
Here are people, committed people, concerned people, trying to tell you politicians and plutocrats that returning this country to the political and economic land of the Gilded Age might...just might...ALSO return us to anarchist bombings, labor riots, and the Upton Sinclair jungle of violent urban poor and rural squalor...and your reaction is to flex-cuff 'em and and ignore 'em?
Yes, they're annoying. Yes, they're all over your nice little parks. Yes, you'd rather not think about what they're talking about just bybeing there. But...instead of reflecting on the past fifty years of relative peace and prosperity they'rer trying to talk about returning to, you're doubling down on the Boss Tweed plutocratic fucking crazy?
Are you fucking insane?
You WANT to hand your country over to the sort of malefactors of great wealth that created and then destroyed the Mortgage Bubble Economy that landed us in the Lesser Depression?
And yet you can STILL find the time and money to chase some raggedy-assed muj around the hills of West Buttfuckistan?
As they say on Mandalore: Kaysh mirsh solus. Your fucking brain cell is lonely.
And speaking of Mandos, right now I'm feeling kinda all kinds of Mando about my "leaders" - in Portland, fucking Bloomberg in NYC, inside the Beltway...and not in a good way. Specifically, "Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur"
It's a good day for someone else to die. and I can think of a number right off the top of my head.
And now I have to go out in the wind and rain and make a living.
My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.
The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rumsfeld/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.
After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."
All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?
Over at MilPub one of the commentors brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.
And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?
Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.
So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!
But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).
We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.
We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".
Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.
Yeah, that.
But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.
So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.
Wars and Rumors of Wars
Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.
Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.
And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.
We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.
Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.
And that, we will never do.
And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.
We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.
You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.
So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.
But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.
This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.
We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.
So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.
The Laughing Policeman
On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.
We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.
Why, I do not know.
And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.
And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".
Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?
Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?
Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?
In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.
Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.
But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.
But...
Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.
And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.
So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.
So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.
We were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.
"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"
Except this; at the time he was killed, Dr. King had moved on. He was fighting then not just for civil rights, but for civil justice. And, specifically, for the idea that the rich and powerful nation he was born to was called to do more than merely build highways and float aircraft carriers. That as an American citizen he, and all of us, should be able to find and do a good day's work for a good day's pay. 
Think about it. We commonly accept - in fact, it's an article of faith amongst most Americans and among the political Right as a body - that there are and always will be people in this country who cannot find a job. Not don't want a job; who desperately, fiercely want to work but cannot get hired.
I've never known anyone who wouldn't try and fly across the Columbia River by flapping their arms if they could land a decent job at a decent wage. Why does this seem like such a damn deadly difficult thing for many Americans to recognize?
So maybe today is as good a day as any to wonder; what would our nation be like if one of the most important things on our domestic agenda was finding good work; hard, satisfying, decently-paying work, for every American who wanted it?
