CHAPTER VI.

HARRISON'S INVASION OF CANADA.-PROCTOR DESTROYS MALDEN AND RETREATS.-TECUMSEH'S REMONSTRANCE.-PURSUIT OF PROCTOR.JOHNSON'S MOUNTED REGIMENT.-BATTLE OF THE THAMES.-SURRENDER OF ENGLISH.-PROCTOR'S FLIGHT.-DEATH OF TECUMSEH. -INDIAN SUBORNATION BY ENGLISH.-ENORMITY OF THAT ALLIANCE. ITS DEMORALIZING EFFECTS.-LAW OF NATIONS THEREUPON. -HARRISON GOES TO BUFFALO-THENCE TO WASHINGTON—AND OHIO. HIS RESIGNATION.-ILLUMINATION FOR HIS AND PERRY'S VICTORIES.-JOSEPH HOPKINSON.

HARRISON'S capture of Proctor was so dependent on Perry's defeat of Barclay, that it hardly would have taken place without that precursor. He had been busy all summer in preparations, to which the popular governors, Isaac Shelby, of Kentucky, and Return Jonathan Meigs, of Ohio, actively contributed; and by the middle of September, had collected on the southern shore of Lake Erie, an army of seven thousand men, undismayed by disasters, eager for action. Perry's fleet was entirely at their service for supplies and transport; the season was favourable; the weather delightful as American autumn, when the sun westers down genial influences. The navy and army were in high spirits. Perry volunteered his services to attend upon Harrison by land and by water. On the 20th of September, the army was embarked on board the fleet; and with prosperous gales through various stages of proceeding, lauded near Malden, the 27th of that month. There our people discovered the demoralizing, and degrading effects on British soldiers, of relying on savage auxiliaries. Major General Proctor, who had obliged Commodore Barclay to risk the battle which lost the lake, was disgracefully afraid to risk one himself. The appearance of Perry's squadron off the English position, even before the engagement, struck terror: now that it transported an army, it produced the most unmanly consternation in Englishmen, guilty of excesses which they felt deserved condign punishment. Proctor's army of banditti dreaded the vengeance of the Kentuckians, whose pretended

savagism in regimentals, they had represented to be as gross as that of their allies in blankets. The English had asserted their right to set Indians on Kentuckians. They were now to be requited. Retribution came with the first reverse of such morality. Proctor was completely unmanned with fear; his troops a mere military populace, or band of robbers loaded with spoils. All they wanted was to escape with life and booty from the vengeance and retaliation they felt conscious of having provoked.They expected to be stripped, mutilated, and massacred; to be allowed none of the mitigations of civilized war. Accordingly, they had been employed, not in preparing for resistance, for which they were strong enough in numbers, fortifications, provisions, and all other requirements; but in destroying forts, magazines, stores, ammunition, and laying waste a fertile region in the season of abundance. Manly resistance, and, if it must be, honourable capitulation, were not thought of; but to save their lives and escape with their booty. The scene presented to Harrison, was at once striking and edifying to a commander, who had been only too observant of the method of hostilities, which his unprincipled enemy did not deserve. Malden was dismantled; the navy yard and barracks burned; all the surrounding country stripped of horses, cattle, and whatever else could be carried off. Amidst desolation and fright the haughty Britons, who let loose the savages to murder and pillage in January, took to flight in October; abandoned or destroyed all they could not run away with; realized all that Chatham said would be the ruinous effects of degrading an army of soldiers into a band of marauders and assassins. vain did the undaunted and eloquent savage chief, Tecumseh, remonstrate against such precipitate, unnecessary, unwise, unmilitary, unmanly and ungenerous flight from overrated danger. While that noble savage remained firm, too many of his profligate red companions had already turned their backs on Proctor, whose terrors were now as much excited by the well-known habits of the Indians, as Hull's had been when they were his pretext, or reason for disgraceful surrender. Several of the Wyandots and other Indians deserted Proctor as soon as they perceived that he was in peril or feared he was. They changed allegiance and affiliation with what they considered the change of fortune. Constancy in patriotism or even party loyalty is no more the virtue of common savages than other unprincipled men.

In

These untutored instruments of English profligacy turned from a great father over the sea to another at Washington, when they apprehended that the armies of the latter were the strongest.— Winnebagoes, Kickapoos, Hurons, and other braves of English reliance, deserted with the first reverse, while Tecumseh and apparently most of his numerous followers, remained faithful.Proctor's fears were strange to the noble barbarian, who fell sword in hand when the English general ignominously fled. All the martial spirit Proctor had left, was the mere energy of despair, and that undone by avarice. The spies he had dispatched to the American camp, reported fifteen thousand men, when there were but seven. But long before they landed in Canada, as soon as the lake was lost, as early as the 17th of September, when Harrison had not yet embarked, Proctor proclaimed martial law, in order that he might rob with impunity. Every one, and every place within his reach, was despoiled of every thing his disheartened myrmidons could lay their hands on, to be packed up and carried off. The torch was applied to all the rest. In the midst of this devastation, which terrified his army and their Indian dependents, and before the latter began to waver in their attachment, at a season of great plenty, when the harvests were abundant, the trees loaded with fruit, the waters swarmed with fish, the woods with game; when fifteen thousand rations were issued every day by the English commissariat to the Indians; when Proctor was strong in every thing but courage-in this scene of alarm, wanton power, and pusillanimous evasion, Tecumseh, proudly erect, and indomitable, appealed to the English general to stay and fight, not fly, like a coward and thief. "Father," said this sylvan hero to the despondent Briton, "listen to your red children. They are standing all around, ready to fight and die for you. Do not forsake, do not alarm them. In the old war your fathers deserted ours. Will you do it again? You invited, encouraged, supplied us with arms, to war on the Americans.— When I first raised my tomahawk, you told me to wait awhile, to keep my braves in readiness till you were ready. Then you gave us rifles to recover the hunting grounds we had lost, and promised we should have them always. Ever since you desired it, we have fought by your side; and when did we turn our backs to the foe? At the Rapids, indeed, we did not strike hard, for we could not get at ground-hogs who took refuge in a hole.

But at the Raisin, you know what we did. Listen to us, now, father; you are instead of our great father over the sea. The ships went out to fight on the lake-you made them go out.Where are they? We do not know what happened; we heard the great guns. They sounded loud and far, and since we have seen you tying up bundles to carry away; you told us always that you would never run away; that the English never do. Will you now run before you have even seen the enemy? If so, let us have food and arms. Do not take every thing from us. We will stay and fight. We are not afraid. We do not like to run, at any rate till we have fought and find our enemies the strongest. We have never been beat on land; but we do not know what has happened on the water. My brother, the prophet, is among the Creeks. They are doing what you directed when I visited them. The war is prosperous. Our lives are in the keeping of the Great Spirit. You have plenty of arms and ammunition. Leave them with us, if you must go. We are resolved to fight, and leave our bones on the lands that belong to us, if so the Great Spirit wills. We cannot run away like dogs with tails down, till now proudly curled over our backs in defiance."

Tecumseh's speech was as ineffectual to stop Proctor's flight as Chatham's had been to deter the employment of savage auxiliaries. So panic-struck, and precipitate was the English retreat, loaded with plunder, that they did not stop even to destroy the bridges to impede pursuit; but hurried off in the utmost confusion-ignoble Englishmen, forgetful

That Chatham's language was their native tongue,

And Wolfe's great name compatriot with their own.

General Harrison almost desponded of overtaking the fugitives. On the 27th September, 1813, he wrote to the secretary of war, that he would pursue them next day, but that there was no probability of overtaking them. But the Kentuckians were resolved on the revenge of, at any rate, a battle with their murderers at Raisin. Old Governor Shelby, in his sixty-third year, mounted on the only horse to be found, ardent as when he scaled the steeps of King's Mountain thirty years before, William Barry and Charles Wickliffe, both subseqently Postmasters-General of the United States, John Crittenden, now the eloquent and popular senator from Kentucky, with many more, were deter

mined that Proctor should not escape. They were not to be disappointed by any irresolution or deterred by any obstacle. Harrison, therefore, with Commodore Perry, General Cass, General Green Clay, and an army eager for action, pushed forward without delay or hesitation, by forced marches, over rivers, morasses, through broken countries, attended by some boats and water craft; continually finding Proctor's stores, provisions, ammunition, and arms, either deserted by the way, or so weakly guarded, by small detachments of the enemy, as to offer no resistance. Seldom was flight more mismanaged than that of the English. Long before overtaken, they had given up. The whole way from Malden to the Thames, betrayed their extreme perturbation. Even the dispatches and documents, which, afterwards published in all our newspapers, betrayed their connection at once despicable and detestable, with the Indians-even these were suffered to fall into the hands of their pursuers. Instead of fighting where they were well entrenched, fortified, and provided, they were forced to encounter an attack under many disadvantages of their own making, and no raw militia were ever cowed more disgracefully than these British regulars, from the moment they abandoned Malden, to their throwing down their arms and begging for mercy on the Thames. At length, on the morning of the 5th October, 1813, near an Indian settlement called the Moravian towns, on the river Thames, Harrison came up with the English, 800 regular troops under Major General Proctor, and 1200 Indians headed by Tecumseh. By this time, Colonel Johnson's regiment of 1200 mounted men, armed with guns, without either pistols or sabres, had joined General Harrison, having, by forced marches, followed from the moment they got his orders to do so. The particulars of their march are given in Mr. McAfee's volume, who commanded one of the troops, with great fidelity and vivid description. The regiment was commanded by the member of Congress, Richard M. Johnson, who will take no umbrage at its being stated that his brother James, the lieutenant-colonel of that fine regiment, was a man, not of more courage, for that could hardly be, but of more talent than the gallant colonel himself, remarkable for the good qualities which distinguish a numerous family of western chivalry.

Armstrong, always sarcastic and contemptuous towards Har