A Turning Point in the War of 1812: Fort Meigs and the conquering of America

In the summer of 2009, my family and I embarked on a road trip which took us across the entire state of Ohio.  On this trip among other places, we were able to visit the mostly reconstructed Fort Meigs, which rests on the banks of the Maumee River in north western Ohio, just outside of Perrysburg.    Constructed in the first few months of 1813, at the behest of Major General of the U.S. Army of the Northwest William Henry Harrison, Fort Meigs was the sight of a major siege during the War of 1812, and is perhaps the most important battle sight of the war, as Harrison’s stand there became a major turning point in the war.  The sight of the Fort and the surrounding area were also very important to American territorial ambitions, as the area was highly coveted for its rich farm land and its potential to be a stepping stone for westward expansion

 After the American Revolution the United States implemented an aggressive expansion policy, aiming for no less than complete control of the entire North American continent.  After securing most of the Ohio territory with the Grenville Treaty of 1795, the Americans set their sights on the “Garden Spot” of the Northwest Territory, the region of Northwestern Ohio, which was previously unclaimed by the Ohio Indian wars.  This area was coveted by land speculators and frontiersmen, and was described as being destined to become, “One of the finest settlements in the world,” (Weekly Register, p. 317). 

                Numerous accounts spread, telling of the beauty and of the richness of the northern Ohio plain, as more and more frontiersmen and soldiers pushed forward into Indian country trading and building forts and settlements.  Much was made of the abounding, flat, rich, soil making the region a perfectly irrigable location, capable of cultivating, “the production of grain and crops of almost every kind raised in the United States,” (Weekly Register, p. 315).  The rivers, which included the Miami, Scioto, Cuyahoga, and Maumee as well as many lakes and streams, provided the water to cultivate such crops and were literally flush with fish, as one account maintains, “The quantity of fish at the rapids is almost incredible.  So numerous are they at the rapids of the Miami that a gig may be thrown into the water at random, and it will rarely miss killing one,” (Weekly Register, p. 317).  While many accounts may be slightly embellished, the fact remains that this territory was highly coveted by American frontiersmen as the War of 1812 broke out.

                Fort Meigs was constructed on the southern banks of the Maumee River after the end of the 1812 campaign.    General William Henry Harrison set up this defensive position while in retreat after a defeat at Frenchtown on the Raisin River in Southern Michigan, (Analectic Magazine, p. 508).  900 men of the Pennsylvania and Ohio militia constructed the camp, expecting British and Indian forces to envelope them, which they never did as the British themselves, under General Proctor, retreated back to nearby Fort Malden.   Harrison, who was originally charged with pushing the enemy toward Fort Niagara, was now trying to hold the enemy out of Ohio, (Hafley, p. 01). 

                By mid March Harrison was able to bolster his troops to 1100 with the promise that Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby would supply 3,000 reinforcements soon thereafter.    At the time Shawnee leader Tecumseh urged General Proctor to attack fort Meigs, or risk losing Indian support.  Proctor agreed to, “smoke out” the Americans from their hives, (Hafley, p. 4).  On the 25th of April 1813, 413 British regulars and 468 Canadian militiamen set out in ships across Lake Eerie to the Maumee Bay, while 1200 Indian warriors traveled over land, (Hafley, p. 4). 

                By the night of April 29^th, the British had most of their artillery in place outside the fort.  A few rounds were fired on April 30^th, to no avail.  The siege began in proper on May 1^st.  Proctor was discouraged to see that the Americans were so well entrenched, as he had hoped they would surrender after a few hours of bombardment.  After 12 hours of heavy artillery fire, only 2 Americans had died and only 4 had been wounded.  Proctor fired a thousand more rounds into the fort over the course of the next two days and although the fort smoldered with the devastation of the rounds, Harrison suffered very few casualties and his guns and magazine were still intact.  Harrison’s worst problem was the lack of water.  His only water supply, t he Maumee, had been cut off by Indian forces.   Harrison had very little artillery rounds as well, and therefore was very conservative with them.  In fact, Harrison made a deal with the men that any recovered enemy cannonball capable of being reused would earn whoever found it an extra ration of whiskey, (Hafley p. 5). 

                On May 4^th, Proctor sent a messenger under white flag to the fort with surrender terms.  Harrison’s reply was, “’Tell General Proctor that if he shall take the fort it will be under circumstances that will do him more honor than a thousand surrenders,’” (Hafley, p. 6).  Later on that night Harrison received word that General Clay of the Kentucky militia was at nearby Fort Defiance and was sending 1200 militia to come to the aid of Fort Meigs.  Upon hearing the good news, Harrison devised a plan of attack.  His orders for Clay’s men were simple.  About 800 men would attack the batteries on the north side of the Maumee.  Once they had overtaken the small British force, they were to disable the cannon and retreat back across the river to the fort.  Meanwhile Harrison and the remaining 400 of Clay’s force would begin to attack Indian and British forces on the south side of the river and pinch them in between the two forces, (Hafley, p. 6). 

                The attack did not go as planned.  The 800 men lead by Colonel Dudley overran the British batteries with relative ease, and were able to disable the guns, however, the soldiers did not then retreat back to Fort Meigs.  They chased the enemy through the woods and within sight of the main British force.   Spread out and confused, the men attempting to make it back to the rally point but were quickly overran by Indian forces.  British commanders were able to restrain the Indian forces from massacring nearly the entire force.  Dudley had been cut down and scalped however and many had been forced to run a gauntlet of tomahawks and clubs.  The force was subdued and put in the stockade at nearby Fort Miami.  Of the 846 men which had attacked, only 170 made it back across the river to the fort.  Clay had suffered a few casualties as well and arrived back with roughly 300 men, (Hafley,p. 7).

                After resembling in the fort, major forces set out and pushed the British and Indian forces back across the river.  With little artillery support, the British could hardly mount a rally.  Hours of fierce hand to hand combat ensued in the wooded ravines surrounding the fort.  About 30 Americans were killed and 90 were wounded, but they had successfully dismantled the British batteries and captured 42 British prisoners, (Hafley, p.8). 

                By this time the siege was basically over.  Many Indians, disillusioned by British military might wandered off and abandoned the fight.  Tecumseh remained with Proctor and on May 8^th the British ended their siege.  An unsuccessful siege of nearby Fort Stephens in the later part of July sent Proctor and Tecumseh limping back to Fort Malden.  Taking the offensive, Harrison ordered Fort Meigs dismantled only to be used as storage while his forces pursued Proctor into Canada dealing him a decisive defeat on the Thames River near Moravian town.   This is where Tecumseh died.  The battles at Fort Meigs and Fort Stephens were a major turning point in the war.  It turned the tables on the British, halted the invasion of Ohio and the Northwest Territory and allowed the Americans to lead a successful offensive campaign into Canada, (Hafley, p. 9).

                After the defeat of the Indians and British in the War of 1812, the Americans began to more aggressively settle the areas of the Northwest Territory previously controlled by the Indians.  In 1825 a major road was constructed connecting Fort Meigs with Detroit, showing that not only the surrounding area, but the fort itself became a major stop on many pioneers’ ventures west.  Fort Meigs should be considered one of the most important battle sights in American history.

Website Review: In the Valley of the Shadow

The era of the American Civil War was truly a time of great change. The war itself was the great climax of a century long stalemate of an increasingly divided nation; a conflict that pitted northern free state interests against southern slave state interests. The war was staged on a very grand scale and as such there are a great deal of historic documents, which detail the conflict, available to anyone willing to search for them; everything from personal letters of correspondence to military records. Also because there was such a divide in the values of those involved and affected by the conflict, there was no shortage of newspaper articles being printed about the conflict and offering opinions on who was right and who was wrong. The website titled In the Valley of the Shadow, funded by the University of Virginia Library and the Virginia Center for Digital History, attempts to scale down the war and show through historic archive of these resources how different and how similar life was for two different counties before, during, and after the Civil War. The two counties, Franklin County Pennsylvania and Augusta County Virginia, are located in the same valley and share the same natural resources, but both are located on opposite sides of the Union/Confederate divide. The resources available through the website provide the user with a rich and intimate portrait of these two places and allow the user to actively engage the geography, economy, society, and political issues of the time which divided these two otherwise very similar places.


The Valley Project began with a proposal by Edward L. Ayers in September of 1991. Ayers, who is now the President of the University of Richmond and is an historian of the American South, had originally intended the project to be a traditional book which compared life in a northern and southern location. Once the implementation of the World Wide Web took over, it was clear the Valley Project would make use of this vast new resource. The project was slowly pieced together over the course of the next decade. The Valley Project amassed thousands of letters, diaries, memoirs, census records, church records, government records, battle reports, speeches, and newspapers and digitized them, creating a fast, easy to use archival database which would allow users from all over to make use of the records previously only available to those who could travel to Virginia and Pennsylvania. Ayers did publish the book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, based off of the finding of the Valley Project.

While the Valley Project website is almost exclusively an archival database it does offer a few teaching resources to scholars planning on teaching about the Civil War. Teachers can have their students review newspaper articles to see how papers in the North and in the South put their own spin on events. Students can review slave owner wills to see what happened to slaves when their owners died, they can also review newspapers to review causes of death in the 1850s and 60s. Actually the teaching resources available through the site are very extensive. It would make a great addition to any classroom project.

The site is very easy to access and very well organized. It is organized into three main categories; The Eve of War, The War Years, and the Aftermath. Each category contains seven or eight subcategories like Letters and Diaries, Newspapers, maps and images, Census, solider, and veteran records, Church records and freedman Bureau records, and statistics of before and after the war. The quality of these resources is very good. Each resource is giving a brief introduction. Very little historical interpretation is implemented, beyond what can be reasonably assumed with the primary source. For instance, under the state category Industry Using Slave Labor a brief introduction is given, stating that slaveholders in Augusta Virginia predominated in low skill industry like distilleries and flour mills, as oppose to artisans such as blacksmiths and coopers who rarely owned slaves. One might further interpret that the reasoning behind this was that artisans refused to remain in such close proximity to their slaves while men of industry could separate themselves from the laboring population, however the website doesn’t make any assumptions or interpretations of this sort. The same is basically true of the website as a whole. Interpretation is left to those studying the archives, rather than those that have assembled it. For this reason alone, the website caters more to scholars and academics than to the majority of the population. So the target audience is that of historian, professors, and the young scholars attempting to break into the field of American history.

The strengths of the archive lie in its ability to compare both counties from one another, but also the counties compared with itself before and after and during the war. What demographic, economic, and political changes did the populations of these counties go through as a result of the American Civil War? As a student of history I can check the party affiliation differences between those in the southern county and those in the northern county. 72% of registered Augusta County Virginia activists were actually Whigs and only 28% were democrats. 57% of the Franklin County Pennsylvania activists were Democrats, and 43% were Republicans, according to the 1860 records. There are countless demographic and societal statistics like this one could verify while using the sight resources. It is very easy to access this information which is all in one place. It is truly an invaluable resource to young scholars.

There are several drawbacks to the site however. The scope is highly limited. The demographic statistics that are true in the case of these border towns are almost certainly not true of most other areas in the Union or Confederacy. The website really can’t be used to represent entire areas of the population as the resources almost all evaluate on an individual basis and not on American society as a whole. However the aim of the site is not to provide the user with a broad scale of statistics, rather an intimate portrait of these two counties. Also, the way in which the church and military records portion of the website is set up is rather limited. It is essentially a search database, and in order to search anything you must first have a name to search. However this obstacle can overcome if the user first searches the diaries and letters archive which lists authors by name, and correspondingly searchers the author’s name in the church and military records archive.

In closing I would just like to say that I very much enjoyed the website and found it to be very useful. While limited in scope and targeted to a specific audience, the functioning of the website is impeccable and the value of its documents is limitless. As we progress further into another era of great change in American history, one can only hope that our limitless resources are used to produce more things of value, such as this website, which help to further our academic interpretations of the past.