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the sins of the founding father

George Washington, the indigenous tribes, and the decisions that shaped America’s future

By Peter Stark and Amy Ragsdale | Everand.com, 2022

It was still pitch-dark at 4 a.m. on November 4, 1791, when General Arthur St. Clair ordered his men to turn out from the tents they’d erected on top of a low, wooded bluff in what the U.S. had designated as the Northwest Territory. They had “laid on arms” all night—slept with muskets close at hand—due to the threat of attack. After giving the usual morning order to parade, St. Clair dismissed the troops early to begin raising a fort where the bluff overlooked a small river called the Wabash. Through either a stroke of luck or a flash of foresight, he wore his civilian clothes rather than the gaudy general’s uniform he was supposed to wear for the day’s command.

For two months, the general’s troops had hacked their way some one hundred miles from Fort Washington, on the Ohio River, and the tiny settlement of Cincinnati into the wilderness of the Northwest—the “Northwest” being east of the Mississippi at that time. Targeting a complex of Indigenous villages known as Kekionga, and others nearby, St. Clair had been sent by George Washington to confront the recently formed tribal confederacy living there. This “Indian combination,” which had been conducting raids on the white settlers who’d surged into their traditional homelands and hunting grounds, now stuck like a thorn in the side of the infant nation and its first president, barely two years in office.

A year earlier, Washington had dispatched a smaller U.S. force to Kekionga under General Josiah Harmar, but the men, after burning several villages, had been ignominiously routed. Stung by this defeat after his own great victory a decade earlier against the British, Washington informed Congress that he was using his presidential power to call up militiamen to confront the Indian “banditti.” He wanted to make loud and clear the message that the U.S. “is not less capable of punishing their crimes than it is diposed to respect their rights and reward their achievements.” To lead this punitive expedition, he called on St. Clair, a fellow crossing-of-the-Delaware veteran.

On this clear, calm November dawn, a curious sound was heard just as the strengthening light allowed the sentries to see the landscape in the vanishing gloom. To Colonel Winthrop Sargent, it sounded impressively sonorous, like “an infinitude of horse-bells suddenly opening to you.” These, however, were not horse bells. For five minutes, the eerie chorus rose from the woodlands and river bottom and ravines around St. Clair’s camp. It was the sound of the predator encircling the prey, echoing for thousands of years through these rich lands, where herds of buffalo, elk, and even mammoths had long grazed.

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Several weeks later, George and Martha Washington were sitting with dinner guests in the President’s House, on Market Street in Philadelphia, when the president was summoned to the front door to speak privately with a messenger. Washington excused himself and, a few minutes later, returned with a polite apology, rejoining the conversation as if nothing had happened. After dinner, the party adjourned to the drawing room, where a fire blazed in the hearth. The president’s private secretary, Tobias Lear, later recalled that Washington talked politely to each of his guests in turn.

When the guests had left and Martha had retired, Washington closed the parlor door and asked Lear to sit down. The president paced before the fire, then sat on a sofa and told Lear the news. Suddenly jumping up, highly agitated, Washington strode to the door.

He burst out, “Here on this very spot, I took leave of him; I wished him success and honor. ‘You have your instructions,’ I said... ‘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!! ... the very thing I guarded him against!! O God, O God, he’s worse than a murderer!”

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The news the messenger had whispered into the president’s ear was that St. Clair’s forces had been utterly crushed. The mysterious sound of bells ringing through the camp that dawn had emanated from the throats of 1,400 warriors poised to attack.

Out of 1,700 or so American officers and soldiers, approximately 700 were killed, along with about a hundred civilian camp followers, all women and children. Another 350 soldiers and civilians were wounded. Those who could turned and fled down the crude wilderness road. Some made it to a tiny stockade about thirty miles away. Others stumbled the hundred miles back to the safety of Fort Washington, arriving days later, glassy-eyed, clothes shredded to rags. There, they smashed open whiskey barrels and drank themselves into a stupor so profound that it would, they hoped, obliterate the memory of the horrible rout they’d witnessed.

It was such mayhem that exact numbers were never known. Roughly three times as many U.S. soldiers died in the attack as at the infamous Battle of the Little Big Horn, or Custer’s Last Stand, a century later. By comparison, only 210 U.S. cavalrymen died on that sunbaked hilltop in the Great Plains. While countless patriotic books and Hollywood movies have celebrated George Armstrong Custer and his troops for courage and sacrifice, the far worse U.S. defeat on an upper branch of the Wabash River in western Ohio was so humiliating that it has largely been swept under the rug of U.S. history. The voices recounting our national story haven’t even agreed on a name for the battle, such is its humiliating stain on the heroic—and often mythic—legend of our country’s founding.

The defeat came at a vulnerable moment both for St. Clair and the newly created United States. The wet clay from which the republic was molded hadn’t yet dried, much less been subjected to extreme heat. The American War for Independence had been won just eight years earlier. And only two years earlier, in 1789, had the federal government begun to operate under the U.S. Constitution. The amendments protecting individual freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, and other crucial defenses against a tyrannical government had not yet been ratified by all fourteen states. The new nation, in other words, remained very much a work in progress, a loose confederation whose members were struggling to figure out how to function as a whole.

The destruction of St. Clair’s force quickly exposed deep, inherent tensions in the newly launched American experiment: how to calibrate the balance of power between the states and a central government, between Congress and the president, and between the military and everyone else? Should the nation maintain a permanent army at the risk of it being co-opted by a tyrant? Then there was the issue at the heart of St. Clair’s attempted attack on Kekionga. If the nation was to expand, it needed land—to pay off debts to veterans of the revolution and as a buffer to protect its borders, as well as to accommodate a growing population. With the great sweep of unsettled western lands, how far would the nation reach to the west? How would it treat the Indigenous peoples who’d been there since time immemorial? Would they, too, receive the freedoms and liberties the nation’s founders had struggled so hard to achieve for themselves?

With the crushing of St. Clair, these difficult questions were no longer abstract ideas debated in Congress or theories etched on parchment. They had suddenly grown very real. For the Founders, November 4, 1791, in some ways resembled January 6, 2021—it was a shocking moment of reckoning. Now, as then, violent events highlight the precariousness of the republic. Now, as then, they impart the sobering realization that, if not properly managed, the American experiment could fail.

Profound silences pock the otherwise stentorian passages of our founding document, the United States Constitution. Whether by accident or design, the Founders left future generations to hash out elemental issues that continue to challenge, and at times threaten, American society. The Constitution lays out the principle of separation of powers, often referred to as checks and balances, but not always how it is to be practiced. How does one branch check another? Does one hold ultimate power—and if so, which? The Executive Branch? Congress? The courts?

The bloody debacle in the Ohio wilderness in the fall of 1791 brought this constitutional conundrum into stark relief. How could this happen? asked the stunned American public and outraged members of Congress. They wanted accountability. They wanted the facts, the truth. Congress then had to ask itself, Who should investigate this?

“The issue of congressional inquiries into executive branch affairs ... [is] an example of a really important area of constitutional law about which the text of the Constitution doesn’t say anything,” says Matthew Waxman, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia University who has written about the St. Clair disaster and its aftermath. “The text of the Constitution is silent on these things.”

At first, members of Congress suggested that George Washington himself should investigate and issue a report. Other members, however, quickly pointed out that this meant the president would investigate his own office, the Department of War being part of the Executive Branch. If wrongdoing were found in how the Executive Branch carried out its duties, they argued, Congress would be compelled to impeach the president. This rendered it unlikely that the president would issue an honest report. So Congress decided to investigate the battle and the role played by the Executive Branch.

As Congress began its investigation, almost immediately another constitutional dilemma reared its head. Congress wanted to request that President Washington turn over any of his papers relating to the matter. Was it legal to ask? Could the president refuse? If he did, what recourse did Congress have? The Constitution said nothing.

Today, the nation finds itself facing the same predicament. Is the ex-president who fiercely fought against the results of an election that saw him defeated obliged to turn over to Congress papers that might illuminate how, and why, and upon whose instigation, rioters stormed the Capitol to halt the certification of that election’s results? And under what obligation are his aides, his assistants, his staff, his own children? Again, the Constitution doesn’t say. There is no mention of “executive privilege” in the document.

The battle of 1791 also raised the question of who has the power to declare war, and who commands the national military. Indigenous forces wiped out St. Clair’s army in part because the warriors had far better training, discipline, and leadership. St. Clair’s men, many complained, were woefully underprepared and underequipped.

This was more or less accurate. The U.S. barely had a national military in 1791. Many Americans didn’t want a national military; they feared a national military. The thinking, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, was that national armies belonged to tyrants like King George III, from whom the colonists had just broken free. Such kings wielded their militaries for personal gain and to keep themselves in power. Instead of a standing national army, the United States would rely on states’ individual militias to defend the nation from threats.

“[S]tanding armies in a time of peace,” thundered one member of Congress during the Founding Era, “are inconsistent with the principles of republican governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.”

According to Matthew Waxman, it took both politicians and the American public almost a century to “realize this experiment of continuing to fight wars with militia forces just isn’t working. They’re not good enough.” The new republic had to figure out how to create a national army and control it. “From the country’s founding,” says Waxman, “one of the big problems the Constitution was designed to try to deal with was the idea that, if you want to create military power, what happens if it turns inward?” In other words, what happens if the military goes rogue on the orders of someone in power?

How prescient the Founders were to worry about the eventual rise of a despot. As more evidence surfaces of attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election—much of it uncovered by the investigating U.S. congressional committee—it becomes frighteningly apparent how close the nation came to failing this most fundamental exercise of democracy. The details continue to emerge: the seven-point plan to overturn the election, the so- called “blueprint for a coup”; the slates of fake electors from seven states; the pressure from the Oval Office on Georgia election officials to “find” 11,780 votes; the suggestion by some advisors that the president order the massive—and thus essentially unstoppable—U.S. military or Department of Homeland Security to seize supposedly rigged voting machines that cost the losing candidate the presidency that he, in true imperial tradition, considered his to keep.

The Founders mortally feared a leader who, wielding a national army under his own command, could in effect declare war on the U.S. electorate. Until recently, most modern-day Americans would have scoffed at that dread.

Finally, and most tragically, St. Clair’s defeat presaged the manifest destiny that would urge white settlers farther and farther west, at the expense of those who already lived there. Consider the ambitions that drove St. Clair’s march on Kekionga. Washington, an early and passionate investor in Ohio wilderness lands, was determined to push the western frontier to secure financial stability for both the nation and himself. He had managed to acquire thousands of acres of personal land in that new frontier and banked on leasing it to shore up the accumulating debts of his eastern estates. This question of presidential conflict of interest—of whether a president’s personal wealth or relationships could influence national policy—was not under debate in 1791, but it certainly is now.

Unresolved in this grand experiment in liberty and self-actualization was the place of hundreds of Indigenous tribes. Many of the founders of the United States belonged to a Virginia hierarchy that identified eight different social strata, from plantation owners down to enslaved Africans, but didn’t even acknowledge the existence of Native Americans. Slavery was already deeply embedded in the Americas by the time of the U.S. founding, but the country’s policy toward Indigenous peoples remained a blank slate. While devoting meticulous detail to the structuring of a new government, the U.S. Constitution says little about accommodating governments that already existed across the continent—those of countless tribes. The men governing this new country could have related to these Indigenous peoples in a wide spectrum of ways, as both the French and British had. Greed for land and decisions made by default and deception led instead to what, in modern terms, amounted to genocide. The alarming destruction of St. Clair’s forces hardened white attitudes toward Indigenous peoples in ways that linger more than two centuries later.

The Founders started out nobly enough.

“The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians,” reads the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787 to establish a U.S. territory in the great swath of land around the Great Lakes. “[T]heir lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent...”

Within months, however, the nobility of that statement crashed headlong into land-hungry whites—both poor immigrants and well-to-do Eastern speculators—many of whom seemed to have the attitude of “treaties be damned.”

“They rather forgot about the Trade and Intercourse Act [which stated that only U.S.-authorized representatives could trade with, or buy land from, Native Americans] and the Northwest Ordinance, and everybody rushed in to try to swindle the Indians out of their land,” says attorney Tim Coulter, a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation and director of the Indian Law Resource Center, in Washington, D.C., which works to protect Indigenous land rights throughout the Americas. “There was just a world of illegal activity going on around Indian lands, even though the policy was one of treaty-making.”

The early Spanish had argued heatedly about whether Indigenous peoples had souls, an issue resolved for conquistadors in 1542, when the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Spain finally ruled that, yes, they did. American settlers commonly believed that Indigenous peoples wasted the land by using it as hunting grounds and to suit their “wandering ways,” as some Founders described the Indian mode of life, rather than for the purposes that they believed God had ordained: for mankind to be fruitful and multiply, subdue the wilderness, and rule over all living things. Therefore, went the rationale, we’ll take the land and use it in the way God intended.

Even before Congress laid out its new government, George Washington had established a U.S. policy toward Indigenous peoples.

“[T]he Indians ... will ever retreat as our Settlements advance upon them,” he wrote in 1783 to a congressional committee, “and they will be as ready to sell, as we are to buy; that it is the cheapest as well as the least distressing way of dealing with them.”

The United States wouldn’t unfairly take Indian lands; it would buy them. It hadn’t occurred to Washington that the tribes might not want to sell.

What followed were years of increasingly paternalistic and arrogant policies toward Indigenous peoples that would see the federal government take more than 95 percent of their lands, encourage the destruction of food sources like bison, take their children and place them in boarding schools for “assimilation,” and deny them the right to vote until the 1920s—a towering monument to systematic oppression. These were things that, it seemed to some at the time, had to be done.

St. Clair’s ignominious defeat was a major catalyst for much of this. This obscure, little-known, and indefinitively named battle in the Ohio wilderness profoundly affected the size and shape of the United States and the intricate workings of the nation’s fledgling government. It affected the extent of its future westward reach and the treatment of non-whites. And it exposed gaping holes in our bedrock document, the Constitution. Two hundred and thirty years later, the nation continues to live with the consequences of our Founding Fathers’ ambiguous language, indeterminate policies, and racial prejudices.

To be continued….

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