Illinois in the War of 1812
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Illinois in the War of 1812

Gillum Ferguson

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eBook - ePub

Illinois in the War of 1812

Gillum Ferguson

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About This Book

Russell P. Strange "Book of the Year" Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2012.

On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. Split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. The extreme southern part of the region was rich in timber, but the dominant feature of the landscape was the vast tall grass prairie that stretched without major interruption from Lake Michigan for more than three hundred miles to the south. The territory was largely inhabited by Indians: Sauk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and others. By 1812, however, pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation. Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, in which white settlers faced both Indians resistant to their encroachments and British forces poised to seize control of the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes. The war ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Sometimes led by skillful tacticians, at other times by blundering looters who got lost in the tall grass, the combatants showed each other little mercy. Until and even after the war was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois. In this engrossing new history, published upon the war's bicentennial, Gillum Ferguson underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences. Endorsed by the Illinois Society of the War of 1812 and the Illinois War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.

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Year
2012
ISBN
9780252094552

ONE

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Morning

For more than twenty years, between 1792 and 1815, much of the world was wracked by war as Great Britain fought for its life against the dynamic power of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Other European nations were drawn in, on both sides, and although the war was centered in Europe, few regions of the world were untouched by the fighting. Warfare eventually spread even to North America, drawing the United States into a largely unwanted war, against Britain and British-controlled Canada, that has been remembered as the War of 1812.
For twelve years the pacifist administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had done all they could to avoid war, as both Britain and France interfered with American trade, kidnapped American sailors on the high seas, tampered with Indian tribes in U.S. territory, and in general treated the new country as a second-class sovereignty. The Americans had responded with ineffective diplomatic protests and the self-defeating policy of an embargo on their own trade, until at last, goaded beyond endurance, the young nation proved to the world that there were some insults it would not swallow and a point beyond which it would not be pushed, by declaring war on Britain on June 18, 1812.1
For more than two and a half years, the United States fought with varying success against Britain and its Indian allies. The war was one that Britain also had not wanted, a sideshow to its life-and-death struggle with France, and one to which it could afford to devote only meager resources. To maintain its position in North America, Britain had to rely heavily on Indian allies who had their own grievances against the Americans. Although, on the more populous fronts of the northeast, British troops opposed American forces directly, in the sparsely populated territories of the Northwest the character of the war was very different.
One of the frontier regions touched by war was Illinois Territory. Only recently split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois and Wisconsin, together with a part of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Minnesota east of the Mississippi River. All those states, especially Illinois, would eventually owe their existence, at least in part, to the War of 1812.
Although in its extreme southern part, along the main rivers, and in the northwest corner Illinois was rich in timber—black walnut, ash, bur oak, and sugar maple in the bottom lands and, in the uplands, post oak, white oak, hickory, and cherry—the dominant feature of the future state as a whole was its characteristic tall-grass prairie. Beginning in the south, and extending to what is now the Wisconsin border, stretched a series of prairies, growing ever wider and more extensive the farther north they lay. Separating them were lines of timber along the streams and rivers, as well as intermittent groves, “like islands in the ocean,” ranging from four or five trees to woods, or “timbers,” covering hundreds of acres. The largest prairie of all was the Grand Prairie, which ran without significant interruption from Chicago for more than 300 miles southwest to the northeastern corner of what is now Jackson County.2
The first reaction of a traveler seeing the prairie for the first time was wonder at its beauty. Easterner Timothy Flint thought the prairie “a most glorious spectacle” and compared it to “an immense flower garden.”3 In spring, when the grass was short, it was adorned with delicate flowers such as the violet and wild strawberry, but, as the coarse prairie grasses grew to a height of six to ten feet, the spring flowers disappeared and were succeeded by others that grew with the grasses, until soon millions of flowers produced a riot of color and fragrance, which in its turn gave way to the darker colors and lesser variety of autumn. As a traveler proceeded farther into the prairie, the pleasure he took in its first appearance was apt to give way to awe and unease at its vast extent and loneliness. Indians were almost the only human inhabitants. Springs were few in the high prairies and the lack of timber for firewood and building had thus far made white settlers reluctant to venture onto it. Over the prairies quiet reigned, broken here and there by the booming of prairie chickens in the tall grass or the persistent cry of the dickcissel. On rare occasions the sky might be darkened by huge flocks of passenger pigeons flying overhead, millions of them migrating together from one roost to another, the noise of their beating wings like thunder and their dung falling like snow.4
Two hundred years later the prairie has all but disappeared, along with many of the animals that once thrived upon it. The hordes of buffalo were already nearly gone, the great herds having been destroyed, according to the Indians, by severe winters fifty or sixty years earlier, but a few stragglers remained, for a buffalo was reportedly killed in Edwards County as late as 1816. Still, travelers on the prairie frequently encountered their horned skulls and bones, and in some places acres of ground were covered with bones, showing that a large herd had once perished there. The tracks the buffalo had made, moving in single file from the prairies to the rivers and salt licks, were still followed by Indians and other travelers, the first roadways of the territory. Still present, but following the buffalo on the path to extermination was the elk. Large herds once thronged the Illinois River region, but they too were decimated by heavy snows in the 1760s. In the early 1800s there was still a brisk trade in elk hides along the upper Illinois River, but within a few years overhunting with firearms and dogs would cause that trade to disappear. Still plentiful were the herds of white-tailed deer, which were a principal source of meat and hides, but they too were beginning a long decline to extinction. (The deer that are now so abundant in the state all descend from a different herd successfully reintroduced beginning in the 1930s).5
During the day black bears slumbered in the timbers along the rivers, emerging at dusk to hunt for food. They themselves were hunted for meat and hides by red and white alike, and their numbers were declining. Mountain lions, “panthers” to the pioneers, were never common, and they always avoided the open country, but they lurked in the forests and around the riverbanks in southern Illinois. As late as about 1860, a panther killed and devoured a little girl who had strayed too near the woods in Jackson County. Throughout the territory, true wolves, canis lupus, could be heard howling around the cabins at night, and farmers would bring their animals into the farmyard to protect them from the circling packs. Often, however, the wolves would drive the dogs under the house and kill a sheep or a young pig before they could be chased away.6
In all the Illinois Territory’s vast expanse of more than 110,000 square miles, the takers of the 1810 census counted only 12,282 inhabitants, excluding Indians, most of them clustered along the rivers that now form the southern rim of the state of Illinois. Except for the tiny remnants of the Kaskaskia and Piankashaw tribes, the oldest residents of Illinois were the French. They had lived along the Mississippi since the days of Louis XIV, in the old villages of Cahokia and Kaskaskia, but defeat in the French and Indian War, twenty years of British rule, and the chaos that followed the transfer to American authority drove many Illinois Frenchmen to migrate to the west bank of the Mississippi, where the new city of Saint Louis, founded by Pierre LaClede and Auguste Chouteau in 1760, became the most enduring achievement of their migration.7
By 1812, what remained of the Illinois French population was concentrated in three principal villages along the Mississippi River, a tiny outpost on the Illinois River at Peoria, and some small settlements along the Wabash in the shadow of Vincennes, Indiana. At a greater distance, but still within the boundaries of the territory, were two small French communities in what is now Wisconsin. Most important of the Illinois settlements was Kaskaskia, on the river of the same name just three miles north of where it then flowed into the Mississippi. By the end of the eighteenth century the village was falling into ruin, but when Illinois Territory was formed in 1809 Kaskaskia was named the capital. As capital, the village became the resort of ambitious English speakers coming from the east, and its French character became somewhat diluted. An acerbic visitor to the capital observed a few years later that “The inhabitants are all generals, colonels, majors, land speculators or adventurers, with now and then a robber and a cutthroat.”8 Although selection as territorial capital and later as the first state capital prolonged the importance of the village for a time, Kaskaskia had already lost its former position as the metropolis of the upper Mississippi. The 1810 census reported the population of the village as only 622, although two years later a visitor estimated the population as being between 800 and 1,000.9 By contrast, in 1810 its younger rival, Saint Louis, had already reached a population of 5667.10
French culture also survived in the small neighboring village of Prairie du Rocher, and, farther north, in Cahokia, which dated from 1699 and so has a well-founded claim to be the oldest town in Illinois. By 1812 English was on the way to becoming the majority language in the village, but the French were still strong in Cahokia and would retain some political importance until the Saint Clair county courthouse was moved to Belleville in 1814. Cahokia would then lapse into obscurity, but even today it retains a few tangible reminders of its French past.11
The new English-speaking residents distrusted the French and doubted their loyalty to a country they had never asked to be part of. Moreover, the French were conservative in retaining their customs. They cherished the Catholic religion, uncommon among the American newcomers, and continued their own traditional amusements, such as community dancing. They still wore their traditional garments, such as the capot, a white-blanket coat equipped with a cape to pull over the head in cold weather. The blanket coat was adopted by many of the Americans, but the distinctive and invariable mark of a French man or woman was a blue kerchief covering the head. All the French villages along the Mississippi were bordered by common fields, in which each of the habitants was assigned a long, narrow strip to farm and also by a commons for grazing the villagers’ cattle. The English-speaking incomers had no very high opinion of the French work ethic, which sought to maintain a large space for the enjoyment of life. Especially suspicious was the traditional cordiality between the Frenchmen and the Indians, with whom they frequently intermarried, and it cannot have helped that the Indians themselves looked back at the days of French rule as a kind of Golden Age.12
Some of the English-speaking immigrants came originally from northeastern states such as Pennsylvania, often by way of frontier Ohio, but the majority came from or through Virginia, Kentucky, or Tennessee. For them the Indians were the hereditary enemy, and the settlers’ inborn hatred of them was further aggravated by the frontier war that raged in Illinois, as elsewhere in the Northwest, until the battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville imposed a temporary peace in 1795. The first predominately English-speaking settlement was made along the Mississippi, in what became known as the American Bottom, “extending” said an early observer, “along the eastern bank of the [Mississippi] river … to the Piasa hills, four miles above the mouth of the Missouri. It is several miles in width, and has a soil of astonishing fertility, consisting of comparatively recent depositions from the river. It has all the disadvantages usually attending tracts of recent river alluvion, the most valuable parts of it being liable to be swept away by the current of the Mississippi, and its surface descending from the brink of the river to the stagnant hills and lagoons, at the outskirts of the valley. But the inexhaustible fertility of its soil makes amends for the insalubrity of the air, and the inconveniences of a flat and marshy situation; and this valley is undoubtedly destined to become one of the most populous parts of America.”13 The first home of the English-speaking settlers was the New Design community, in the present Monroe County.14 New Design suffered severely in the Indian war of the late 1780s and early 1790s, and after 1799 it came to be overshadowed by the Goshen Settlement, farther north along the Mississippi. The Goshen settlement was a decentralized farming community embracing much of present Madison County, or at least the part southwest of a line drawn between the modern communities of Bethalto and Saint Jacob.15
These settlements sprouted a few small branches along waterways such as the Kaskaskia River and Shoal Creek, where a handful of fearless pioneers had ventured into the present Bond and Clinton counties and now maintained themselves with difficulty along the streams and rivers that formed the main avenue of transportation. For the most part, however, American settlement extended no more than twenty miles from the Mississippi River. Beyond that frontier lay the vast and empty prairie, where a shortage of wood for fires and building, along with the chilling unfamiliarity of the wide-open spaces, had, for the time being, retarded settlement. East of the American Bottom lay 150 miles of wilderness to cross before a traveler would once again encounter even the rudiments of civilization.
Beside the Ohio River, at the eastern edge of the territory, was Shawneetown. This new city, the port of entry for travelers approaching Illinois from the east, was built on the site of a village of the Shawnee Indians, who in the 1740s had lived there briefly before moving on, having perhaps realized that the combination of low ground and frequent high waters made the location unsuitable for habitation. The Shawnee left behind them only two small burial mounds and the persistent, though unfounded, local legend that southern Illinois was once the domain of the Shawnee.16 The new city was surveyed by order of Congress, a rare distinction, but even William Rector, the surveyor who laid out the city in lots, recognized that the location had been poorly chosen and tried to have the new city moved inland. His pleas were to no avail; and Shawneetown would remain subject to flooding for more than a century. Only after the great flood of 1937 would a majority of the citizens, finally heeding both Rector’s warnings and the example of the Shawnee Indians, move the city to higher ground. At the time, however, Shawneetown was booming. Barges and keelboats tied up at the docks, taking on loads of salt and furs, after unloading merchandise and passengers bound by land for Kaskaskia or the other western settlements along the Mississippi. Shawneetown was one of the few places in the territory where there were retail shops and also, because of the nearness of the United States Salines (on which more later), one of the few places where there was plenty of money to spend in them. Despite the presence of money and commerce, however, inability to get title to land had discouraged building. Most of the houses were mere log cabins, with now and then a frame structure interspersed among them. It was just as well that more elaborate buildings had not been raised: during the wet spring of 1813 water stood twelve to fourteen feet deep in the streets of Shawneetown and some cabins simply floated away downriver. Outside flood season, the town was noted for a rough-and-tumble atmosphere created by the ubiquitous boatmen: “a rough set of men, much given to drinking whiskey, fighting, and gouging, that is they fight up and down, trying to put out each others eyes with their fingers and thumbs, and sometimes biting off each others noses or ears.” There was no church in Shawneetown.17
A few miles to the west of Shawneetown, near the present village of Equality, lay the source of much of Shawneetown’s prosperity, the United States Salines, the site of the most important industry in the new territory. There, bubbling from two large springs, came saltwater in sufficient quantities to permit commercial production of salt. In those days before refrigeration, salt was no mere table seasoning, but a vital commodity that enabled the pioneer to cure meat and vegetables for preservation. So important were the Salines that when the public lands were at last put on sale in 1814 the government retained ownership of a tract of more than 150 square miles around the salt springs, although it leased the actual operation to a series of entrepreneurs. Along with hard currency and the blessing of salt, the Salines also spilled onto the free soil of Illinois the stain of slavery. Although by the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 the lands north of the Ohio were declared to be free territory, in practice the government winked at a form of slavery practiced at the Salines. The severe shortage of labor in the territory led the lessees to import slaves from across the Ohio River to labor at salt making under “voluntary” short-term indentures, under which their masters in Kentucky and Tennessee would reap the monetary reward o...

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