Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America, Mary Stockwell. Yale University Press (ISBN: 9780300251876) 2018.
Summary: A biography of “Mad” Anthony Wayne centered on his successful campaign to defeat Native tribes in the Northwest Territory.
For three years I lived one block from the Anthony Wayne Trail (part of US 24) in Toledo, Ohio. I knew little more than that it was the fastest way to downtown Toledo from our apartment, and that Anthony Wayne had fought against Native tribes in that part of northwest Ohio, and that Fort Wayne, southwest on US 24, was named after him.
Mary Stockwell’s biography of Wayne renders a far more complicated portrait of this man and explains why he succeeded where others before him failed on what was then the northwest frontier of the young country. Wayne had been one of Washington’s “warhorses” during the War for Independence. He led successful campaigns at Ticonderoga, Germantown, Stony Point (a signature victory against a British strong point), and after Yorktown, in Georgia, leading to the disbanding of British forces in the South.
Yet Washington was ambivalent about him. He reminds me of Grant. He was an aggressive fighter in contrast to the more cautious Washington, sometimes exposing himself to risks. Stockwell describes this ambivalence. Wayne did all asked of him by Washington and would do more. Yet others advanced past him. Stockwell interleaves Wayne’s Revolutionary War career with the account of Wayne’s campaign in the Ohio country of the Northwest Territory. By doing so, we meet a general at once an aggressive fighter and disciplinarian, yet one who struggled with self doubts.
Like Grant, Wayne struggled with what to do when he was not fighting. He endangered his estate in Pennsylvania with bad land acquisitions in the South. He briefly served in Congress. He at least flirted with an affair. He drank, suffered from old war injuries, and gout.
Yet American affairs were going badly. The British refused to settle a string of forts in Ohio and what is now Michigan. They enlisted a confederacy of tribes to fight for them in an effort to prevent settlement north of the Ohio River despite an agreement in 1785 by some tribes to allow settlers to settle in the southern half of what is now Ohio. In 1791, General Arthur St. Clair who was also governor of the Northwest Territory, was routed in a battle against Little Turtle near Fort Recovery in western Ohio near the present Indiana border. General Harmar, who had preceded him also was defeated in 1790.
Stockwell recounts how now-President Washington, after rejecting other candidates called Wayne out of retirement in the spring of 1792. She narrates the formation of a new, larger force, the Legion of the United States and Wayne’s move to Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio River, to recruit the army.
Both in his initial training camp in Legionville, near Pittsburgh, and later in Greenville, in western Ohio, Wayne built a fighting force for a different kind of warfare, marked by vigilance, discipline, and drills. Other troops had fled under fire. He wanted his to hold or advance and to know what to do. He became known by native scouts as “the General that does not sleep.”
Stockwell recounts the adversity he endured, from delayed supplies to desertions of Kentucky volunteers. Worse was the covert betrayal of General James Wilkinson, his second in command, who was secretly feeding negative reports to congressmen about Wayne and undercutting supply efforts. It later came out that he was collaborating with a foreign power, Spain.
By the summer of 1794, Wayne was ready to advance north. Natives fled ahead of him as he marched north to the Maumee River, building Fort Defiance at the junction of the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers. He then marched downstream toward the British Fort Miami. The Native tribes of the Confederacy sought refuge but the British, not wanting open war with the United States, shut them out, betraying their alliance. This led to the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers, where Wayne defeated the Confederacy on the battlefield. He subsequently seized a center of the Confederacy, Kekionga, which he transformed into Fort Wayne.
Stockwell shows how Wayne transitioned from winning on the battlefield to wooing tribal leaders who had been abandoned by the British. He offered a settlement with minor adjustments of the 1785 agreement, allowing tribes to remain in northern Ohio while Americans could settle in the south. The Treaty of Greenville was agreed to in 1795. The location of my home in central Ohio is on land ceded by this treaty. Following the treaty, Wayne supplied food and farming supplies to the Native people.
Sadly, Wayne’s wife, from whom he was estranged, died during this campaign. His daughter and son were as well, although he re-established a relationship with the latter. A year later, Wayne was dead, from his old war wounds. Stockwell portrays a man good at one thing, winning battles and securing territory for his country.
While Stockwell offers an illuminating portrayal of Wayne, and one that portrays him magnanimous in peace with tribal leaders, she treads lightly on the larger issues at stake in America’s advance on tribal lands. She mostly focuses on the British exploitation of the tribes. There is little about their displacement from eastern lands. Nor does she discuss how quickly settlers moved north of the treaty line, displacing the tribes further west after the defeat of Tecumseh. By 1803, Ohio as it is presently configured, achieved statehood.
She observes Wayne’s apprehension of the threat the British and their tribal allies posed on the American frontier. Part of it was that the British had not honored their agreements from the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and were using the tribes for both trade benefits and to hold onto what was no longer theirs. But there seems to be no questioning of the fact that all of the conflict was over who would control these tribal lands, assuming the eventual displacement of Native tribes, first in southern Ohio, then all of the state, after Wayne’s death.
What Stockwell does do is establish Wayne as one of our outstanding early military leaders, despite Washington’s uncertainties. We also see a man whose love of country left little room for family. Like Grant, he was really good at one thing–fighting.