Mary Stockwell - Unlikely General: Mad Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America

UNLIKELY GENERAL

Mad Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America

Mary Stockwell

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory
of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.

Copyright 2018 by Mary Stockwell. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953580

ISBN 978-0-300-21475-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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To Jamie

I must first thank my sister Roberta Stockwell, a talented artist, excellent writer and historian in her own right, and professional cartographer who made the maps for this book. I will always appreciate the fact that she took me on a trip to Valley Forge, mainly to see the statue of Anthony Wayne. Although she lived and worked in New York City at the time, she grew up, like the rest of our family, in the Maumee River Valley, not far from the Fallen Timbers Battlefield. She knew the statue of Wayne that looks out over the Maumee Rapids and was surprised to see him high on his horse at Valley Forge. Later we went to visit his estate at Waynesborough, where the guides were happy to meet people who knew the western Wayne.

Thanks also to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for the fellowship they awarded me to study the Wayne Papers in the Bancroft Collection at the New York Public Library. The historian George Bancroft transcribed five hundred of Waynes best letters that are housed in the Wayne Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. His transcriptions provide the Rosetta Stone for deciphering Waynes swift-moving and often difficult to read handwriting. I am also grateful to the staff of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan for awarding me two Earhart Foundation Fellowships to study the Anthony Wayne Papers, the Nathanael Greene Papers, and many other valuable collections at their institution. The staff members of the Clements Library, including Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Jayne Ptolemy, Diana Sykes, Wendy Mekins, Valerie Proehl, Barbara Bradley, and Shneen Coldiron were thoroughly professional, but also kind and welcoming. I am likewise grateful to Adina Berk, Senior Editor for History at Yale University Press, most especially for shepherding the book through the review process; her assistant, Eva Skewes; Noreen OConnor-Abel, for her masterful copyediting; and Chris Rogers, the former Editorial Director at Yale University Press, who accepted the proposal for Unlikely General.

My thanks go as well to Robert McDonald, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy, who invited me to participate in the Sons of the Father Conference on Washington and His Protgs at West Point. He edited a wonderful book entitled Sons of the Father: Washington and His Protgs (University Press of Virginia, 2013), which collected the papers presented at the conference, including my article Most Loyal but Forgotten Son: Anthony Waynes Relationship with George Washington. Thanks, too, to Paul Lamb, then a literary agent at Howard Morheim, who luckily for me had roomed in college at DePauw University with a student from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had visited historic Fort Wayne with his roommates family and was surprised to learn from my proposal that there was so much more to the story of Mad Anthony Wayne.

Late on a Friday evening in December 1791, a soldier and his servant could be seen racing on horseback through the streets of Philadelphia. They did not stop until they reached the Presidents House on Market Street, just two blocks from where the Second Congress, elected the year before, was in session. After dismounting, the soldier handed the reins of his horse to his servant, hurried up the steps, and knocked on the front door. Old German John, the porter who greeted him, said the president could not be disturbed since he was having dinner with his wife and several guests. When the soldier answered that he had important dispatches, the porter sent a servant into the dining room to fetch Tobias Lear, Washingtons personal secretary. Lear promised to give the dispatches to the president at the proper time, but the soldier would not hear of it. He said he had just come from the western country with orders to place the dispatches directly in the hands of General Washington. There must have been something desperate enough in the mans voice to make Lear fetch the president.

He went back into the dining room and whispered the cause of the commotion in the hallway to Washington. Lear then took the same place he had taken for the last seven years since becoming the generals secretary and the tutor of his grandchildren. He watched the president leave the room, come back a few minutes later, and take his own seat at the table. Washington revealed nothing about what had happened in the hallway with the soldier. Instead he merely apologized for leaving his dinner guests. Lear noticed that his appearance was exactly the same when he came back into the room as when he had left. Everything went on as usual, he later remembered, except for an odd remark, I knew it would be so, that the president muttered to himself. When dinner was finished, Martha Washington led everyone upstairs into the drawing room on the second floor. Here they chatted until precisely ten oclock, the hour when the president liked to retire. The guests said good-bye to their hosts, with Washington taking the time to bid farewell to the ladies one by one. Mrs. Washington stayed with her husband and his secretary a while longer before retiring to her bedroom down the hallway at the back of the house.

What happened next would stay with Tobias Lear for the rest of his life, although he would only confess the details shortly before his death. Washington sat down on a couch in front of the fireplace and told Lear to sit next to him. Here they remained in silence side by side for some time. The expression on the presidents face was just as it had been before and after he met the soldier in the hallway. But then a sudden change came over him as he struggled to control the emotions welling up inside him. Lear realized that the president had managed to suppress these feelings for the last few hours. While most people outside of Washingtons inner circle always saw him in complete control of himself, his family and closest aides knew how terrible Washingtons passions, especially his anger, could be when roused. On this wintry night, something in the dispatches delivered from the western country broke open the floodgates within the president. Its all over, he said vehemently, never moving from the same spot where he first sat down on the couch, St. Clairs defeatedroutedthe officers, nearly all killed, the men by wholesale; the rout completetoo shocking to think ofand a surprise into the bargain!