Henry Dearborn Revisited

Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War

In a prior blog about North Hampton native son Dearborn, I mentioned he was the first person from New Hampshire chosen for a President’s cabinet and held the position of Secretary of War from 1801 to 1809 under Thomas Jefferson.  

At that time, “war” meant not only skirmishes against the British just north in Canada, and the Spanish and French in west Florida and Louisiana but also indigenous people native to the Northwest Territory and those eastern tribes that had already been pushed west by the colonists. 

While Dearborn was serving in Washington, D.C. two men in the Northwest Territory occupied some of his attention.  

The first was William Henry Harrison. Son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Harrison had arrived at what is now Cincinnati as an 18 year old Ensign in 1791. In 1801 he was appointed Governor of the newly established Indiana Territory which had been carved out of the Northwest Territory. A member of the Virginia slave-owning planter class, he was a bright young man out to make a name for himself. Much later he was the “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too” president who died barely a month after his inauguration in 1841.  

The second was Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief born about 1768 in what is now Ohio. Tecumseh was recognized by many, including the British who fought with him and Americans who negotiated with and fought against him, as a brave and skillful leader and warrior, and a great orator. After his death in 1813, Tecumseh became a legend.  

There’s a sculpture The Dying Tecumseh at the Smithsonian, carved in 1857 and transferred from the U.S. Capitol in 1916. The Civil War general who marched through Georgia was named William Tecumseh Sherman. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay about him. The U.S. Naval Academy has a sculpture that by the 1880s was renamed Tecumseh. Midshipmen to this day have rituals, praying to the bronze sculpture before exams and covering it with “war paint” before the Army-Navy football game. And New Hampshire has its Mount Tecumseh, part of the White Mountains, and located in Waterville Valley.  

The years between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were not quiet in parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio. In 1795 the Treaty of Greenville aimed to end hostilities between the American army and militias and indigenous people. It ended violence temporarily, and established Indian lands. However, by 1800, numerous tribes from the eastern United States had been pushed out of their homelands. Tired of being displaced, they made their stand in Indiana and Ohio.  

Governor Harrison wrote Dearborn a report, citing conditions in graphic terms, relaying the complaints of native leaders, and asking that they be conveyed to President Jefferson.

“They say that their people have been killed—their lands settled on – their game wantonly destroyed – and their young men made drunk and cheated of the peltries which formerly procured them necessary articles of clothing, arms, and ammunition to hunt with. Of the truth of all these charges I am well convinced.”

“Thousands of the wild animals from which the Indians derive their subsistence have been destroyed by white people. They complain in their speeches to me that many parts of their Country, which abounded with game when the general peace was made in 1795, now scarcely contains a sufficiency to give food to the few Indians who pass through there.

“The people of Kentucky… make a constant practice of crossing over [the Ohio River] on the Indian lands opposite to them every fall to kill deer, bear, and buffalo – the latter from being a great abundance a few years ago is not scarcely to be met with….One white hunter will destroy more game than five of the common Indians – the latter generally contenting himself with a sufficient for present subsistence – while the other eager after game, hunt for the skin of the animal alone.”  

Harrison urged the President through Dearborn to order the survey of the Greenville Line that separated white lands from native lands. He could do nothing to stop the violations until the line was clearly marked.  

There was no answer from Jefferson or Dearborn. Jefferson thought expanding westward was key to nation-building. Dearborn followed the President’s lead, helping form the policy on Indians, the goal of which was to establish a strong western boundary by procuring lands along the Mississippi and its tributaries. 

Harrison read the writing on the wall, and changed tactics entirely. He suggested the Treaty of Greenville could be interpreted as “Much more extensive than is generally imagined.” Harrison then sought land beyond the line – legal loopholes, pitting tribal factions against one another, arguing that treaties made between native nations and early French traders or by private land speculation companies remained valid under the U.S. administration even though Congress had annulled such private deals twice.

"The Indians," Jefferson wrote to Dearborn in 1803, “being once closed in between strong settled countries on the Mississippi & Atlantic, will, for want of game, be forced to agriculture, will find that small portions of land well improved, will be worth more to them than extensive forests unemployed, and will be continually parting with portions of them, for money to buy stock, utensils & necessaries for their farms & families.” That was the plan. 

Where did this leave Chief Tecumesh? He initially worked for a peaceful co-existence but in 1809 Harrison negotiated the Treaty of Fort Wayne purchasing for a pittance (2 cents an acre) about 3 million acres of land in what is now Illinois and Indiana. Many Indian chiefs had signed the treaty but others were deliberately excluded from the negotiations, and there was widespread outrage.  

Tecumseh’s speech in 1810 to Harrison is the only time they met face to face for a council, held outside of Grouseland, Harrison’s mansion. [Excerpts of Tecusmeh’s orations and a poem are available online].

Reasoning that land in North America, especially in the Ohio valley, belonged to all of the tribes in common, Tecumseh maintained that sales of territory by any single tribe to the United States were null and void. After the Federal Government refused to recognize this principle, Tecumseh attempted to organize a great Confederacy to stem the white tide.

While Tecumseh was in the South working to unite the tribes, Federal troops under Governor Harrison defeated and scattered Native American forces on November 7, 1811 in the Battle of Tippecanoe. This defeat doomed the Native American Confederacy.

After Congress declared war on Great Britain the following year, Tecumseh accepted a commission as a brigadier general in the British army. He cooperated with British troops to win a number of victories in the Great Lakes region, including the capture of Detroit. However, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's victory on Lake Erie, late in the summer of 1813, cut British supply lines and prompted them to withdraw. Tecumseh and his braves covered the British retirement until American troops led by Harrison, now a major general, caught up with them at Moraviantown. Tecumseh was killed in the ensuing Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813.

As for Dearborn, Lewis and Clark named a river in Montana after him in 1803. Other sites in once disputed territories include Dearborn County, Indiana; Dearborn, Michigan; Dearborn, Missouri; Fort Dearborn and then Dearborn Street in Chicago. Locally, during World War II a coastal defense fort was named Fort Dearborn to guard approaches to Portsmouth. Remnants remain at Odiorne State Park.