Sept. 26. chosen braves, visited the distant Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws of the South to induce them to join his alliance. At Vincennes, whose inhabitants had been fully roused to their danger, Harrison gathered a respectable military force; volunteers from Kentucky promptly responding to his call, and a regiment of regulars arriving from Pittsburg. Leaving Vincennes in September Harrison proceeded cautiously up the valley of the Wabash, completed a stockade fort by October upon a high bluff, near the Oct. 28. present site of Terre Haute, and advanced to the Prophet's town on the Tippecanoe. Tecumseh was absent, and the Prophet and his followers, taken thus by surprise, asked for a parley, which was granted. Wrought up to frenzy, however, in the course of their nocturnal rites, and confiding in the supernatural gifts of their medicine man, the savages treacherously assailed Harrison's camp the next morning at daybreak; but Harrison's troops stood their ground, and after a general battle, which lasted until sunrise, the invaders were dispersed at the point of the bayonet. Though dearly bought, the victory was complete and decisive; for advancing the next day Nov. 8. upon the Prophet's town Harrison found it entirely Nov. 6. Nov. 7. deserted. The town was burned, with its stores, and our forces returned to Vincennes.* The immediate result of this expedition was to relieve our Northwestern settlers from the menace of powerful Indian combinations on the frontiers. Most of the Prophet's followers who survived the battle dispersed to their several tribes, cursing their credulity. Tecumseh returning soon afterwards from his southern journey found his schemes frustrated by the brother, who had played warrior in his absence, and presently crossing into Canada he joined the British cause. All this deepened American resentment against England, for the signs were numerous that British emissaries tampered with the Shawnoese brothers. "Return those lands," had been * Harrison lost in killed and wounded about 180. For a full description of the Tippecanoe expedition see Harrison's Report to the Secretary of War, November, 1811; Lossing's War of 1812, 191-209, and authorities cited. 1811. TWELFTH CONGRESS ASSEMBLES. 335 the warrior's exhortation, "and Tecumseh will be the friend of the Americans. He likes not the English, who are continually setting the Indians on the Americans." Our Western pioneers were firmly convinced that the frontier Indians had been equipped against them out of the King's stores at Malden. And England's employment of the red men against the whites, a few months later, not as soldiers, but as a species of bloodhound, is an admitted stain on her national character. "The British authorities," says one of her own writers," undoubtedly put arms into the hands of the Indian chiefs when the war broke out."* Nov. 4. Three days before the battle of the Tippecanoe was fought, whose tidings reached Washington early in December, the Twelfth Congress is seen assembling, in obedience to the President's proclamation, a month before the usual time. That proclamation was ominous of war, but still more so are the changes which the growing war sentiment of a year has wrought in the composition of that body. The Senate, which loses Pickering, has only six Federalists left, four of whom represent Connecticut and Delaware; 37 out of 142 is their full proportion in the House,† Quincy leading them as before, with the support of Chittenden, the studious Pitkin, Emott of New York, and Key of Maryland. Except for Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Delaware, all the Eastern. and Middle States have delegations in which Republicans predominate, while those of Pennsylvania, the South and the West are almost exclusively of that party. John Randolph, with his speckled politics, is like a turkey's egg in such a nest. But the most remarkable change of all is seen in the new * Knight's History of England, ch. xviii. The American belief on this point appears strongly manifested in American newspapers of that day. See National Intelligencer and Niles's Register, September, 1811. Of British agents various anecdotes in point were related. English gunpowder and new English fusees and rifles were found on the field after the battle of Tippecanoe. Governor Harrison confirmed the current opinion that the British government intermeddled with our Indian relations. Niles's Register, December 28th, 1811. See, too, Report from the Secretary of War, 2 Niles's Register, 342. See Niles's Register, November 30th, 1811. tone of Republicanism in Congress and new leadership. Little heeding the national perils which demand statesmanship, Giles of the Senate, whose experience should have kept him first in influence, involved himself deeper in his personal feuds with the administration, and the sounder Crawford leads instead, with Campbell of Tennessee, lately prominent in the House. As for the House-which fixes the public gaze more constantly-moderate, non-resistant Republicans have disappeared, and the war-hawks are in the ascendant. Jeffersonism and peace are already reckoned with the past; even Madison and Gallatin may be transferred to the retired list. Young America now finds expression. States of later date than the Convention of 1787 demand war; and ardent men, who were babes when the Revolution was fought, push boldly to the front and assume command. Clay of Kentucky, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, John C. Calhoun, Langdon Cheves and William Lowndes of South Carolina, are all new in the House, and all strong and earnest. Porter of New York, Wright of Maryland, Williams of South Carolina, and Troup of Georgia, are older legislators of similar convictions; the grim old Sevier, Tennessee's pioneer, is no orator, but he votes as he would level a rifle. That the House had passed out of the control of temporizers and the Old Thirteen was revealed on the first ballot for Speaker, when Henry Clay received 75 votes against 38 for Bibb of Georgia, the peace candidate, and 3 scattering votes for Macon. "Who is Clay?" asked the country, confusing the Speaker thus selected with a Virginia member of that name; and the press responded that he was a new man, of talents and eloquence, quite popular, who appeared to preside impartially. So much for a three years' record at this epoch in the United States Senate, where owl-like seniority blinked down impetuous youth, until the young men now and presently appearing in the House became transferred thither, and made it the great arena of national debates.* Henry Clay served in the Senate in Burr's day for a short period, and then returning *Clay wrote Monroe, that preferring the turbulence of the House to the solemn stillness of the Senate, his tastes now led him thither. Monroe Correspondence, November, 1810. 1811. HENRY CLAY FOR SPEAKER. 337 after a long absence, in 1810, to fill a vacancy, had lately made himself conspicuous by espousing protective measures, and helping destroy the national bank. He was one who sprung up amid adverse surroundings in an old State, gained richness of growth by being early transplanted; a Virginian by birth, the son of a Baptist clorgyman, who left him an orphan and destitute in infancy. The bright mill-boy of the "Slashes," gained the first rudiments of learning from a rude district school, worked his way to the bar as a clerical drudge, and then, removing from Richmond to the new State of Kentucky, rose rapidly in fame as a criminal lawyer, and thence came naturally into public life on a broadening arena. Rashly confident, perhaps, in youth, Clay had a capacious intellect, and learned by experience; he combined, moreover, the generous honor of the Old Dominion with the Western dash and faith in a boundless development. The secret of his power lay, however, in the inherited gift of persuading others, in his mastery of the American heart, which he swayed while swaying with it,-first, by his eloquence, full of bold imagery, whose vehemence shamed the timid and roused the vigorous; next, by a skilful management of men with different proclivities, whom he drew together by a thrill of personal sympathy. It was an art he constantly cultivated to remember faces he had once met, and recall each name. A free liver, he would play cards and sport far into the night, reading thus his compeers, while statesmen abstemious and industrious, like the younger Adams, measured their slumbers in order to be up with the morrow's sun and kindle the study fire. Clay's oratory may have burned out with the inspiring occasion; his legislative compromises may have poulticed more sores than they healed; but as a representative of national ideas and national selfassertion against Europe-as statesman, legislator, negotiator, Clay now becomes for fifty years a remarkable figure in American politics. His accession to the Speakership was of itself a * "The Slashes" was a sobriquet applied to the Virginia rural district where Clay passed his childhood. Here he was seen carrying his bag of grain to the mill, riding upon a sorry horse, with a rope bridle and no saddle. See Colton's Life of Clay. conspicuous event. Feeble hesitancy lost its cling on events. From the moment this tall, slender son of Kentucky, with long brown hair, blue eyes, large mouth, peaked nose, and shaven face mounted the steps and took the gavel into his hand Quincy and Randolph had a foeman worthy of them; the House the popular leader which two Presidents had sought in vain; and the country a foreign policy the most spirited, if not the wisest. The import of the President's opening message was "to get ready to fight, and fight when we were ready."* But its tone by no means indicated a present readiness, but rather that the country ought to be put in a posture of defence. In summoning Congress thus early, Madison did not despair of making a stroke of diplomacy, though by this time, in truth, the ministry Foster represented would not believe the United States meant war until they saw us actually in it. Nov. 29. If the President meant that Congress, instead of the Executive, should sound the trumpet, he was not kept long waiting. The House Committee on Foreign Relations, through Porter of New York, whom Clay had placed at their head, took war ground at once. The time had come, was the language of their report, for choosing between tame submission to Great Britain and resistance by all the means in our power. They recited the full story of England's systematic aggressions. They recommended that the existing regiments should be filled at once, and 10,000 additional regulars raised to serve for three years; that the President should be authorized to accept 50,000 volunteers, and call out such militia detachments as might be needful; that all the public vessels not already in service should be fitted out, and merchant vessels allowed to arm. This report, as both Porter and Grundy of the committee explained to the House, pledged all who supported it to open and decided war with Great Britain, a war as vigorous as possible. Its recommendations were adopted in the popular branch by immense Dec. * Thus Monroe explained it. Monroe Correspondence, June 13th, 1812. |