The Fight for a Free Sea | Page 8

a
dashing adventure, and Winchester ordered half his total force to march
and destroy this detachment of the enemy. The troops accordingly set

out, drove home a brisk assault, cleared Frenchtown of its defenders,
and held their ground awaiting orders.
Winchester then realized that he had leaped before he looked. He had
seriously weakened his own force while the column at Frenchtown was
in peril from two thousand hostile troops and Indians only eighteen
miles beyond the river Raisin. The Kentuckians left with him decided
matters for themselves. They insisted on marching to the support of
their comrades at Frenchtown. Meanwhile General Harrison had
learned of this fatuous division of strength and was hastening to the
base at the falls of the Maumee. There he found only three hundred
men. All the others had gone with Winchester to reinforce the men at
Frenchtown. It was too late to summon troops from other points, and
Harrison waited with forebodings of disaster.
News reached him after two days. The Americans at the Raisin had
suffered not only a defeat but a massacre. Nearly four hundred were
killed in battle or in flight. Those who survived were prisoners. No
more than thirty had escaped of a force one thousand strong. The
enemy had won this extraordinary success with five hundred white
troops and about the same number of Indians, led by Colonel Procter,
whom Brock had placed in command of the fort at Amherstburg.
Procter's name is infamous in the annals of the war. The worst
traditions of Indian atrocity, uncontrolled and even encouraged, cluster
about his memory. He was later promoted in rank instead of being
degraded, a costly blunder which England came to regret and at last
redeemed. A notoriously incompetent officer, on this one occasion of
the battle of the Raisin he acted with decision and took advantage of
the American blunder.
The conduct of General Winchester after his arrival at Frenchtown is
inexplicable. He did nothing to prepare his force for action even on
learning that the British were advancing from Amherstburg. A report of
the disaster, after recording that no patrols or pickets were ordered out
during the night, goes on:
The troops were permitted to select, each for himself, such quarters on
the west side of the river as might please him best, whilst the general

took his quarters on the east side--not the least regard being paid to
defense, order, regularity, or system in the posting of the different
corps.... Destitute of artillery, or engineers, of men who had ever heard
or seen the least of an enemy; and with but a very inadequate supply of
ammunition--how he ever could have entertained the most distant hope
of success, or what right he had to presume to claim it, is to me one of
the strangest things in the world.
At dawn, on the 21st of January, the British and Indians, having
crossed the frozen Detroit River the day before, formed within musket
shot of the American lines and opened the attack with a battery of
three-pounders. They might have rushed the camp with bayonet and
tomahawk and killed most of the defenders asleep, but the cannonade
alarmed the Kentuckians and they took cover behind a picket fence,
using their long rifles so expertly that they killed or wounded a hundred
and eighty-five of the British regulars, who thereupon had to abandon
their artillery. Meanwhile, the American regular force, caught on open
ground, was flanked and driven toward the river, carrying a militia
regiment with it. Panic spread among these unfortunate men and they
fled through the deep snow, Winchester among them, while six
hundred whooping Indians slew and scalped them without mercy as
they ran.
But behind the picket fence the Kentuckians still squinted along the
barrels of their rifles and hammered home more bullets and patches.
Three hundred and eighty-four of them, they showed a spirit that made
their conduct the bright, heroic episode of that black day. Forgotten are
their mutinies, their profane disregard of the Articles of War, their jeers
at generals and such. They finished in style and covered the multitude
of their sins. Unclothed, unfed, uncared for, dirty, and wretched, they
proved themselves worthy to be called American soldiers. They fought
until there was no more ammunition, until they were surrounded by a
thousand of the enemy, and then they honorably surrendered.
The brutal Procter, aware that the Indians would commit hideous
outrages if left unrestrained, nevertheless returned to Amherstburg with
his troops and his prisoners, leaving the American wounded to their

fate. That night the savages came back to Frenchtown and massacred
those hurt and helpless men, thirty in number.
This unhappy incident of the campaign, not so much a battle as a
catastrophe, delayed Harrison's operations. His failures had shaken
popular confidence,