In 1777, things were not looking good for American independence. People were calling it the year of the hangman, for the number 7’s resemblance to the gallows from which they were sure Revolutionary leaders soon would swing. In the fall, the Continental Army abandoned Philadelphia. Encamped 20 miles north of the city, George Washington had his mood improved by the optimistic young Brig. Gen. Anthony Wayne. According to Wayne, the skirmishes with the British had not been losses so much as valuable lessons. He told his commander that “total defeat” of the British was imminent.
As Mary Stockwell shows in her fine biography of Wayne, these dark days forged a bond between the generals that Washington would remember 15 years later, when he was the first president of a nation whose survival was still uncertain. In 1792 as in 1777, he believed Wayne, and through him America, could succeed despite the odds.
By 1792, Washington had sent two armies west against the Ohio Valley Indian Confederacy, which included Shawnees, Delawares, Ottawas and Potawatomis. The Indian Confederacy had trounced both armies, with shocking casualties: 1,000 Americans dead or wounded in one battle. Free land in the west had been one of the demands of the Revolution, and Washington had promised that as president he would open the Ohio Valley to American settlement. Instead, the Indian Confederacy was growing, armed by Britain and Spain, which both had forts and troops along the border.
As Ms. Stockwell explains, “The nation that Washington had spent so much of his life building” was ready to “die on the vine, bottled up along the Atlantic, surrounded by hostile tribes and nations.” Because of the Ohio Valley defeats, Washington was under Congressional investigation. There would have to be another, bigger force raised, armed, trained and sent west. In a nation without a standing army, where frontier violence and the recent losses had left potential recruits with “a paralyzing fear of the Indians,” the task was daunting. As Washington considered who should command this vital expedition, he realized his only choice was Anthony Wayne.
A bronze relief of Anthony Wayne on the Wayne County building in Detroit, Mich. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
PHOTO: WSJ
UNLIKELY GENERAL
By Mary Stockwell
Yale, 363 pages, $35
Yale, 363 pages, $35
In many ways, Wayne was Washington’s opposite. His quick temper and rash decision-making had earned him the nickname “Mad Anthony.” He drank to excess, cheated on his wife, and was prone to depression. By 1792 he was hobbled with gout, recurring malaria and a lead ball in his leg from the Yorktown campaign. He had also been accused of rigging two elections: Deep in debt, he had tried to sell his family estate in Pennsylvania out from under his wife and children and had run for Congress in part because elected officials were immune from debt prosecution. But Wayne was loyal to Washington and his country, and the aging general agreed to “wrap his swollen legs and arms in flannel, pack up his best brandy and Madeira and his writing table, and head west to Ohio.”
Ms. Stockwell’s main story line follows Wayne west in the 1790s as he recruits and trains an army and faces the Ohio Valley Indian Confederacy. Along the way, she deftly uses flashbacks to tell the larger story of Wayne’s life. When Wayne hears of the death of his wife, Mary (Polly) Penrose Wayne, while on the campaign, Ms. Stockwell takes us back to their courtship and Wayne’s failures as a husband. She paints a poignant picture of Polly’s gradual transformation from a wife who wrote (in vain) urging her husband to visit when he was encamped only 20 miles from home, to a more independent woman who wrote him only terse occasional reports.
In a weaker writer’s hands, these flashbacks might be distracting or confusing, but Ms. Stockwell’s careful structure and clear, driving prose builds suspense and connects the Revolution to the 1790s. When Wayne arrives at Pittsburgh as a “General without troops,” we flash back to a more hopeful time, the frenzied opening months of the Revolution, in which young Wayne wrote broadsides, gave speeches about “American liberty” and was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly (with no charges of election tampering).
By the time he was building an army from scratch in the Ohio Valley a decade after the Revolution, Wayne was no longer surprised at insufficient uniforms, shoes, food, muskets and powder. He was disappointed, though, to discover that most Americans on the frontier suspected he would either lead them to their deaths at the hands of Indians or tax their whiskey. Nonetheless, Wayne’s combination of boldness and skill were required in the current crisis, and he did what Washington had asked of him: He taught his men to steel themselves against surprise attack, through practice and by making them “as afraid of him as they were of the Indians.”
Ms. Stockwell, former chair of history at Ohio’s Lourdes University, is so skilled at understanding and conveying her subject’s perspective that—as often happens to a biographer— she becomes overly persuaded by it. Part of the problem is that she relies almost exclusively on primary sources written by Wayne and his comrades, and the histories she cites are mostly decades old. Because Ms. Stockwell relies entirely on Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee’s memoirs for an event in which Wayne ordered the killing of a group of Creek Indians, she writes only that Wayne decided on a “death sentence for the prisoners.” In fact, the British and Creeks believed Wayne had murdered a parlay party, violating the rules of warfare. Similarly, Ms. Stockwell claims that, after Wayne’s military and diplomatic victories, the defeated Indians “now admired him” as “a hero” and contentedly “returned to their villages,” where “corn was again planted in patches of sunlight in the forest and along the bottomlands.” This bucolic version seems to merely be Wayne’s wishful thinking.
Still, Anthony Wayne’s perspective is a fascinating and valuable one—a window into the trials of Revolution and independence that did not cease as the new country sought to gain its footing at home and abroad. Both Wayne and Washington kept working to, as Ms. Stockwell puts it, “truly secure the Revolution” throughout their lives.
Ms. DuVal, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of “Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.”
Appeared in the May 16, 2018, print edition as 'He Opened The Way West.'