Saint Clair's Defeat

DESCRIPTION: Saint Clair leads an army against the Indians "on the banks of the St. Marie." Hundreds of men are killed. Several noteworthy officers are among the casualties. Victims may be scalped or tomahawked. The rest make their way home as best they can.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1836 (songster, according to Cohen)
KEYWORDS: Indians(Am.) war
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Nov. 4, 1791 - The army of Gen. Arthur St. Clair, the first (territorial) governor of Ohio, is attacked by Indians on the banks of the Wabash.
FOUND IN: US(Ap,MW)
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Gainer-FolkSongsFromTheWestVirginiaHills, pp. 150-151, "St. Clair's Defeat" (1 text, 1 tune)
Eddy-BalladsAndSongsFromOhio 116, "On the Eighth Day of November" (1 text, 1 tune -- though only Eddy's first verse goes with this ballad. Verses 2 and 3 come from "James Ervin" [Laws J15])
Grimes-StoriesFromTheAnneGrimesCollection, p. 102, "Sinclaire's Defeat" (1 text, 1 tune, a copy of a 1938 broadside), p. 105, "St. Clair's Defeat" (1 text)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia2, pp. 393-394, "Sinclair's Defeat" (1 text)
Salt-BuckeyeHeritage-OhiosHistory, pp. 31-32, "St. Clair's Defeat" (1 text, 1 tune)
ST E116 (Full)
Roud #4028
NOTES [669 words]: St. Clair's expedition was mounted by President Washington to deal with the refusal of the British to evacuate certain frontier forts. St. Clair was to build a fort on the site of what is now Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Jameson, p. 570, gives this biography of St. Clair, which somehow manages to omit this battle: "St. Clair, Arthur (1734-1818), came to America as a British soldier in 1758. He served under General Amherst at Louisbourg, and distinguished himself at Quebec. Joining the American cause, he accompanied General Sullivan in the expedition to Canada in 1776. He commanded a brigade at Trenton and Princeton. He was appointed major-general and succeeded General Gates at Ticonderoga, which he surrendered [actually, evacuated] in 1777. He fought at Yorktown. He represented Pennsylvania in the Continental Congress from 1785 to 1787, and was Governor of the Northwest Territory from 1789 to 1802."
"Congress appointed Arthur St. Clair, a major general of the Revolution, as the [Northwest]] territory's first governor" (Peckham, p. 30). In the years that followed, there were many minor, and not-so-minor, fights with the local Indians in what is now western Ohio and Indiana. In one of these, one of the leading officers on the frontier, Josiah Harmar, was badly defeated (Burns/Dunn, p. 100). St. Clair decided to lead a force to avenge the defeat. The Miami indians were the particular target. He was supposed to build a series of small forts, anchored by a large one at the mouth of the Maumee (Peckham, p. 32), i.e. near what is now Toledo, Ohio.
St. Clair's force contained both regulars and militia, and as is typical of the militias of this period, they did not work together well. The militia were expected by the end of June 1791, but didn't show up until September, and were under strength. And the terms of some of their enlistments had expired, so they eft, and St. Clair sent some of his regulars after them while taking the rest of his force on his expedition. They ran into perhaps a thousand men under Little Turtle.
The exact magnitude of the defeat is uncertain; although St. Clair set out with a force variously estimated as from 2000 to 3000 men (including the entire U.S. regular army), he may have lost a thousand of those to disease and desertion along the way. Peckham, p. 33. estimates he had 1400 men when he was attacked, and says, "The militia fled, the guns were abandoned, the regulars were no match for the attackers, and soon the whole army was in retreat."
St. Clair's casualties have been variously estimated as 600 to 900 men. One account, Collins, p. 15, "Forces under the command of the territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair, had been walloped by the Indian chief Little Turtle in a fight that would come to be known as St. Clair's Defeat. It would go down in history as the worst loss ever to be suffered by white forces in the Indian wars -- and in fact, in terms of casualty rates, one of the worst defeats in all of American military history. Little Turtle's men, numbering fewer than five hundred, had killed 630 American soldiers -- nearly two-thirds of the total force."
Peckham, p. 33, says, "The killed and wounded amounted to 928, the worst defeat suffered by American arms up to modern times. Migration to the West was checked. President Washington was angry and chagrined. He appointed his old comrade Anthony Wayne to command the U. S. Army and reorganize it."
Burns/Dunn, p. 100, says there were 600 casualties, which they calculate as almost half the force.
Somehow, St. Clair, despite this, was still on the job for another decade! But it was Anthony Wayne's forces which won the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and forced a peace, in which the Indians "ceded over twenty-five thousand square miles of eastern and southern Ohio for $25,000 and a $9,500 annuity" (Burns/Dunn, p. 100). A history of mistreatment of the Indians by the United States government had begun.
As "On the Eighth Day of November, " this song is item dA30 in Laws's Appendix II. - RBW
Bibliography

Burns/Dunn: James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, George Washington [a volume in the American Presidents series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.], Times Books, 2004
Collins: Gail Collins, William Henry Harrison [a volume in the American Presidents series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.], Times Books, 2012
Jameson: J. Franklin Jameson's Dictionary of United States History 1492-1895, Puritan Press, 1894
Peckham: Howard H. Peckham, Indiana: A History, 1978; I use the 2003 University of Illinois paperback

Last updated in version 5.3
File: E116

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