Pierre Berton's War of 1812 by Pierre Berton Read Free Book Online Page A

of limited vision. He looks like a scholar and is one. With his long nose and gaunt features he could, in different guise, be mistaken for a Roman priest or an Italian noble in a Renaissance painting. He is slightly out of placehere in the wilderness, for he was reared in luxury on a Virginia plantation, trained in Greek and Latin, and has a passion for military history, whose lessons he hopes to absorb.
    He has always been a little out of place. He might have made a good doctor, but his medical studies were cut short by a fall in the family fortunes. In the army, where young officers were drinking themselves into early graves, the temperate ensign buried himself in his books. He will not let himself be seen out of control, through drink or through any other vice, for he has the Harrison name to uphold: his father was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
    He was a good soldier—he might, someone once said, have been another Washington. He fought with the “mad general,” Anthony Wayne, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the epic victory over the Indians that won twenty-five thousand square miles of territory for the white men. Now, a soldier no more but with a soldier’s bearing and a soldier’s outlook, he is, at thirty-nine, a rising politician, living like an aristocrat in the backwoods in his vast brick mansion—the first in the territory—on the outskirts of Vincennes. He calls it Grouseland; with its hand-carved mantels and doors, its four great chimneys, its thirteen rooms and its circular staircase, it has made him proud but property poor.
    His problems are only beginning. He has heard from Billy Wells, the Indian commissioner and interpreter at Fort Wayne, that eighty Indians under the Prophet’s leadership have gathered at Greenville. Wells, an old frontiersman married to the sister of Little Turtle, the Miami chief, sends a messenger to Greenville to deal with the Prophet and ask him and his supporters to come to Fort Wayne for a parley. The answer is given, not by the Prophet but by his elder brother, a handsome war chief with flashing hazel eyes. It is astonishingly blunt:
    “Go back and tell Captain Wells that my fire is kindled on the spot appointed by the Great Spirit above, and if he has anything to communicate to me, he must come here; and I will expect him in six days from this time.”
    This is not the way Indians talk to white men. This is the way white men talk to Indians. For the first time an Indian has sent back a message that is stinging in its style and insulting in its content.
    William Henry Harrison will hear from the Prophet’s brother again and again in the years to come, for he is one of the most extraordinary native North Americans of whom history has record.
    His name is Tecumseh, and six years later in the second year of the war, he and Harrison will meet face to face in mortal combat.

    WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST , 1807. Augustus John Foster, aide to the British minister to the United States, has just dispatched a letter to his mother bewailing his “sad disappointment” over the Chesapeake affair. It is not the incident itself that disturbs him—like every upper-class Englishman, he is convinced that the Royal Navy acted correctly—but the cruel turn of fate that has forced him to remain in the United States, “a land of swamps and pawnbrokers,” and especially in Washington, “a sink of imagination.”
    Foster, who has spent four years at the British legation, cannot wait to shake Washington’s red gumbo from his boots, but the country is in such an uproar that he cannot leave while there is the slightest danger of a rupture between the two nations. Personally, he dismisses the chance of war, cannot conceive that anyone in this ridiculous capital village would have the temerity to challenge the British lion. Still, as he has informed his mother, the Americans keep themselves in a constant ferment: “anything enflames them.” He must remain at his post