The Battle of Tippecanoe

Seeing as William Henry Harrison was listed as one of our obscure Presidents, I decided to feature the battle he was known for today (since he had such a short tenure as President that I really had little to choose from there). Harrison ran for President on his fame from this battle – hence the slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”

The battlefield now has a museum and a monument, as well as an interesting website that offers a nice synopsis of the battle:

The Protagonists

Tecumseh and the Prophet planned to unite many tribes into an organized defense against the growing number of western settlers. Through this union they could defend the lands they had lived on for thousands of years.

In addition to being a seat of diplomacy, Prophet's Town became a training center for the warriors, with a rigorous spiritual and athletic regimen. As many as one thousand warriors were based in the capitol at its peak.

The white settlers of the Indiana territory were disturbed by the increasing activities and power of Tecumseh's followers. In the late summer of 1811, the governor of the territory, Gen. William Henry Harrison, organized a small army of 1,000 men, hoping to destroy the town while Tecumseh was on a southern recruitment drive. The regiment arrived on Nov. 6, 1811, and upon meeting with representatives of the Prophet, it was mutually agreed that there would be no hostilities until a meeting could be held on the following day. Harrison's scouts then guided the troops to a suitable campsite on a wooded hill about a mile west of Prophet's Town.

The Battle

Upon arriving at the site, Harrison warned his men of the possible treachery of the Prophet. The troops were placed in a quadrangular formation; each man was to sleep fully clothed. Fires were lit to combat the cold, rainy night, and a large detail was assigned to sentinel the outposts.
Although Tecumseh had warned his brother not to attack the white men until the confederation was strong and completely unified, the incensed Prophet lashed his men with fiery oratory. Claiming the white man's bullets could not harm them, the Prophet led his men near the army campsite. From a high rock ledge west of the camp, he gave an order to attack just before daybreak on the following day.

The sentinels were ready, and the first gunshot was fired when the yells of the warriors were heard. Many of the men awoke to find the Indians upon them. Although only a handful of the soldiers had had previous battle experience, the army bloodily fought off the reckless, determined Indian attack. Two hours later, thirty-seven soldiers were dead, twenty-five others were to die of injuries, and over 126 were wounded. The Indian casualties were unknown, but their spirit was crushed. Angered by his deceit, the weary warriors stripped the Prophet of his power and threatened to kill him.

Harrison, expecting Tecumseh to return with a large band of Indians, fortified his camp soon after the battle. No man was permitted to sleep the following night.

Taking care of their dead and wounded, the demoralized Indians left Prophet's Town, abandoning most of their food and belongings. When Harrison's men arrived at the village on November 8, they found only an aged squaw, whom they left with a wounded chief found not far from the battlefield. After burning the town, the army began their painful return to Vincennes.

The Aftermath

Tecumseh returned three months later to find his dream in ashes. Believing the reconstruction of the confederation to be too risky and the chance of Indian survival under the United States government to be dim, he gathered his remaining followers and allied himself with the British forces. Tecumseh played a key role in the War of 1812, being active in the fall of Detroit, but he was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, at the age of forty-five.

Scorned by the Indians and renounced by Tecumseh, the Prophet took refuge along nearby Wildcat Creek. Although remaining in disgrace, the Prophet retained a small band of followers, who roamed with him through the Northwest and Canada during the War of 1812. He died in Wyandotte County, Kansas, in November, 1834.

Gen. Harrison remained governor of Indiana Territory until September, 1812, when he was assigned command of the Northwestern frontier in the War of 1812. He was in command at the capture of Detroit and the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh was killed. At the close of the war, Harrison returned to public life at his old home in North Bend, Ohio. He served in the Ohio state senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate.

The Battle of Tippecanoe is considered by many to be one of the opening battles of the War of 1812.

Listening to Calvin Coolidge

You can hear President Calvin Cooldige's actual voice from 1928 in this YouTube video. He does not sound like I had imagined him to sound like.

Blogger Poll: Who do you think is the most obscure American President?

Blogger has a new feature for allowing blogs to have polls. I decided to give it a try. If you look over to the right, you will see a question. It is "Who do you think is the most obscure American President?" I decided on five possible candidates.

Please vote in the poll. It will be up a week. Do you think this is a good feature? Should I keep this up with new weekly questions? If so, do you have suggestions for future questions?

Update:

This poll has closed. Thanks to those who voted. The winner of the highly unscientific poll was Fillmore at 51%. Arthur came in second with 20%.

Millard Fillmore Before the Presidency

This is a fun overview of Fillmore's life before the Presidency from the Miller Center of Public Affairs:

Millard Fillmore came into the world just one week into the nineteenth century. His large, desperately poor family knew little but struggle and failure. Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore had originally lived in Vermont, but by the time of Millard's birth on January 7, 1800, they had settled in upstate New York on a farm between Syracuse and Ithaca. The boy was the second of eight children and the eldest son. Farming the lean, rocky soil of Cayuga County proved to be a losing proposition, and the family often went hungry. While Millard had very little schooling as a young child due to the demands of the farm, he displayed both curiosity and ambition.

Thinking his son needed a trade and perhaps relishing the prospect of one fewer mouth to feed, Nathaniel Fillmore arranged an apprenticeship for Millard when the boy became a teenager. A clothmaker paid the family a small sum, took the boy to another town, and worked him nearly to an early grave. Millard detested the drudgery of the cloth trade. Barely able to read, he used his meager funds to buy a dictionary, stealing looks at it when the clothmaker's attentions were elsewhere. The apprenticeship amounted to little more than slavery, and the experience no doubt had considerable impact on an issue that would dominate Fillmore's political life. The young man borrowed thirty dollars and used it to buy his freedom from the apprenticeship. Millard then walked home to the family farm, which was one hundred miles away.

Escape From Poverty
Back home, Millard resolved to somehow gain an education. He pored over any book he could get his hands on and attended school in a nearby town. The teacher there, a highly intelligent, well-read young woman named Abigail Powers, would be the greatest influence on his life. Just nineteen, not even two years older than Millard, Abigail was probably the first person to encourage his ambition to become anything but a farmer or a tradesman. She loaned him books, challenged him to study difficult subjects, and cheered him on. Nathaniel Fillmore, meanwhile, finally saw that his son might have meant what he said about wanting to become a lawyer and arranged a clerkship with a local judge that would also allow Millard to study law. The teenager attacked the difficult bookwork with untiring relish, teaching school to support himself. He also began courting Abigail Powers. Impressed with his work ethic and aspirations, she accepted his engagement proposal in 1819.

About this time, Fillmore's family gave up their troubled farm and moved to East Aurora, a town near Buffalo. The young man moved with them, taught school and clerked, and gained admission to the New York bar in 1823. He opened a law practice in East Aurora and married Abigail Powers in early 1826. She counseled and advised her husband in his career, and the young lawyer prospered. The couple would have two children -- a boy, also named Millard, in 1828, and a girl named Mary four years later.

The Gateway to Politics
A few months after the marriage, a strange incident catapulted Fillmore into politics. Many of the era's ruling politicians were Freemasons, including General Andrew Jackson, the most popular man in America at the time. A man named William Morgan, a disaffected Mason evidently readying an exposé of the organization, was allegedly kidnapped and never seen again. Widespread suspicion arose that Masonic interests were behind Morgan's disappearance, and soon an Anti-Masonic Party arose to combat the fraternal order's political influence. One hotbed of the new party lay in western New York, and Fillmore joined it.

Not even thirty years old, articulate, tall and stately, Fillmore had already become a highly respectable figure in his area, and the fledgling party's leadership approached him about running for the New York state legislature. In 1829, he began his first of three terms in the state assembly. The driving force behind considerable legislation, he focused particular energy on the issue of debtor imprisonment. In that era, it was common to throw people who were unable to pay debts into prison. No doubt remembering the poverty he had so recently escaped, Fillmore worked hard to pass laws forbidding such incarcerations. Such policies played well with citizens in his district, and they elected Fillmore to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1832.

At that time, Andrew Jackson was President. Anyone who saw Jackson as power hungry and abhorred the policies he pursued gravitated toward the Whig Party. By 1834, Fillmore's increasingly marginalized Anti-Masonic Party had merged with the Whigs. One of its leaders in New York was newspaper publisher Thurlow Weed, who had been an Anti-Masonic leader and had helped with Fillmore's political climb. Joining the Whigs before Fillmore, Weed quickly took over the New York organization of the new party. Weed, who was deeply opposed to slavery, supported an agenda that was increasingly at odds with Fillmore's. Fillmore was also opposed to slavery in principle but thought that compromise was essential to resolving the issue.

Fillmore was reelected to Congress three times between 1837 and 1843. During his last term, which spanned from 1841 to 1843, he was named chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which dealt with tax and financial issues. He was aligned with the beliefs of Whig Party leader Henry Clay on the one issue eclipsing all others in that day -- slavery. Both Fillmore and Clay were convinced that only compromise could keep the nation whole. Late in this congressional term, Fillmore also oversaw implementation of a high tariff intended to protect imports.

In 1843, Fillmore left the House in hopes of gaining the Whig vice presidential nomination for 1844 and joining Henry Clay on the ticket. Thurlow Weed convinced -- or, more accurately, ordered -- Fillmore to run for governor of New York instead. In a close race, Fillmore lost, a defeat he blamed on abolitionists, recent Catholic immigrants, and Thurlow Weed. Feeling that Weed had undermined his candidacy, Fillmore broke with the party boss. In the end, Clay lost the presidential election to Democrat James Polk. Being out of a job, Fillmore looked for an opportunity that would keep him in politics. In 1847, he won election as New York's comptroller, or chief financial overseer. Fillmore's winning margin over his Democratic rival was so wide that he was instantly seen as a leading Whig candidate for the upcoming 1848 national campaign.