ton and Fort Jefferson before winter set in, but was himself surprised while on a branch of the Wabash near the present western boundary of Ohio. Under the leadership of Little Turtle, whom the Shawnee Brave, Tecumseh, was serving as a scout, he was worried back to his seat of government.

Anthony Wayne was Washington's personal choice as commander to retrieve the situation and build up a sort of prestige for the United States among the tribes of the Northwest. Against the judgment of his advisers, for Wayne was mistrusted as rattlebrained by many of his associates, the President commissioned him to raise an army. This Wayne did near Pittsburgh, in the summer of 1792; but instead of hurrying his untrained force to the Maumee, he held them in camp and under discipline until in the spring of 1793 he was ready to take them down the Ohio to Fort Washington. Even here he was in no hurry, despite the nervousness of the border settlers. He marched north along St. Clair's cordon of forts to a point some six miles beyond Fort Jefferson, where he erected Fort Greenville and wintered in 1793-1794.

The Indian curiosity grew as Wayne led his legion into their midst. Under the discipline of Harmar and St. Clair they had been allowed to visit the camp of the army even while the war was on, and had been able to stroll among the tents and pilfer under the very eyes of the troops. With Wayne there was a sentinel that challenged the Indian at the limit of the camp, and either turned him back or escorted him under guard to the tent of the commander, where there was a parade of troops under arms. There was no straggling of men and no free pilfering. Instead of seeking a fight in 1793, Wayne was content to march a detachment to the site of St. Clair's defeat and build and garrison there a new post that bore the significant name of Fort Recovery. In the summer of 1794 Wayne took to the open.

A certain Major Campbell, of the English establishment, commanded at Detroit, and watched the approach of Wayne with as much curiosity as did the Indians. He warned the American officer that a further penetration might bring him into trouble; to which Wayne replied not only with stern words, but with an advance to the Maumee, where the Auglaize enters, and with the construction there of Fort Defiance. In August he moved on down the Maumee, towards the head of Toledo Bay where was a British station, but before he arrived there the Indians blocked his track. Some forty miles below Fort Defiance, where a tornado had left a

natural breastwork of trees and brush, Little Turtle marshaled his braves. There may have been some English and Canadians fighting with him; Wayne at least thought so. It was as unusual, and as little in accord with the ordinary tactics of Indian warriors, for them to lie quietly behind cover and await attack as it would have been for them to enter into a pitched battle with an entrenched enemy. On August 20, 1794, they were totally defeated, their picked warriors were slain, and the demoralized survivors were brought to the frame of mind that both Harmar and St. Clair had previously sought to establish. With the campaign over, Wayne marched without hindrance to the source of the Maumee, and there erected Fort Wayne.

The Treaty of Greenville was concluded by the conqueror on August 3, 1795. Little Turtle, of the Miami, who had now had his fill of warfare with the whites, became an influence towards conciliation and peace; and the numerous tribes whose homes between the Wabash and the Ohio were threatened by the American influx, accepted the unavoidable recognition of American title. The boundary line that was here established started on the Ohio shore opposite the mouth of the Kentucky River; thence it ran east of north to Fort Recovery, at which point it turned sharply to the east, running through central Ohio to the head of the Cuyahoga, and down this stream to Lake Erie. Fort Wayne, a little beyond the boundary, became a military post, but it was not greatly needed, for while the generation that fought the Battle of Fallen Timbers dominated, the Old Northwest enjoyed a lasting peace.

CHAPTER IX

THE WESTERN BOUNDARIES

WITH "dry decency and cold civility," the English Government allowed John Adams, minister from the United States, to reside in London for the four years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. But when he gave up as hopeless the task of negotiating a satisfactory treaty of commerce with that country and took his departure in 1788, he had nothing to show for his efforts; and in the audience of departure King George III bluntly informed him that when the United States fulfilled its part of the treaty, he would execute his. In vain Adams endeavored to procure the evacuation of the western posts. In formal arguments, he was ever confronted with counterclaims regarding the British debts, for the States had disregarded the recommendations of the treaty that British subjects be allowed to recover their pre-war debts, and that the laws discriminating against the Tories be made less onerous. If Adams could have gone behind the claims of unpaid bills and an unfulfilled treaty, he would have found in the papers of the British offices a multitude of protests from British merchants and subjects residing in Canada, directed against the transfer of the region of the Great Lakes to the United States at any time. The British commandant at Niagara, in 1789, acted in this spirit and refused to let Americans even view the falls, alleging that "too many people have seen the falls already." The British debts, however, were a real grievance, and a better pretext. So long as the United States showed no sign of being able to safeguard itself or to protect its border population, there was small chance that the English side of the treaty would be carried out.

The campaign of Wayne played a part in solving the diplomatic tangles of the United States which was nearly as important as the part played in settling tangles of the border. Twice in the autumn of 1794, and each time in a frontier cause, the new republic showed a spirit to defend itself. The large army of militia that was marched to western Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Insurrection, indicated a determination to enforce the power of Congress to "lay and collect" taxes. Wayne's well-disciplined advance created in every month after 1793 a stronger disposition to respect the

military capacity of the United States. His erection of Fort Defiance, in the first week of August, 1794, was a gesture whose meaning the British officers at Detroit could not mistake. The crushing victory at Fallen Timbers broke at once the Indian power of independent resistance, and the British disposition to give them aid and encouragement. John Jay, whom Washington sent to London in the summer of 1794 to make a peace that could be maintained, found in the affairs along the northern border almost the only topic upon which he could make headway.

The outbreak of the French Revolution, and the general European war that came with it, brought to a crisis the question of securing an understanding with Great Britain. The popular disposition in the United States was to support a war against England regardless of American condition to maintain it. The alliance with France, concluded in 1778, called for American aid in case France should be attacked by her enemies, and the French Republic interpreted the war as such an attack. It would have been easiest for Washington to place himself at the head of this feeling of popular sympathy, and plunge the country into warfare on the side of France. Nowhere would such a decision have been more popular than throughout the new settlements, where men responded readily to the ideas of liberty and democracy. But it might well have been suicide, for there was neither army nor navy; the militia was without organization; and in the spring of 1793 when Citizen Genêt arrived in Philadelphia bearing the suggestion that America aid her ally, it had not been established that America could either enforce her own domestic laws or suppress a few thousand resentful savages on her border. Not yet in possession of her own conceded limits, the United States was hardly in a position to bid defiance to Great Britain.

A wave of sympathy with France poured over the United States. The course of Genêt to the seat of government from Charleston, where he landed, was like a triumphal progress; with civic banquets, denunciation of Britain, and flattery of France. The democratic clubs of France became the model for political clubs in the United States; and to these flocked the younger men, east or west, who were outside the governing class and were disposed to believe that the friends of Washington contemplated, if not a monarchy and another King George, at least a centralized government in which State and popular liberty would disappear. Genêt proceeded to outfit privateers in American ports, to prey

upon British commerce, and to commission roving characters in the western settlements to organize raids upon the Spanish territory. The Secretary of State, Jefferson, was a pronounced Francophile, even though he yielded to the pressure of the Cabinet and wrote a famous proclamation of neutrality which was issued April 22, 1793. By order of Washington Genêt was soon disavowed as minister from France on account of his transgressions of neutrality; but he stayed in the United States and found a refuge with a family of Washington's opponents, where he married a daughter and bred a line of sturdy American descendants.

The one sure thing before Washington was the need for peace; and England itself was making this almost impossible by a rough and autocratic administration of maritime law as it affected the rights of neutrals. The mission of Jay was to prevent a war and to give a sign to the uneasy people that Washington was not sitting without action in the crisis. Jay found the British reluctant to make any commercial treaty with the United States. Before the Revolution, the colonies as parts of the British dominion had enjoyed a large measure of the trade in supplies with other British colonies, as well as with England direct. Outsiders were excluded by the commercial system from any part in this trade; but it missed the attention of the Americans that success in the Revolution would place them outside the protected circle, and deprive them of free access to the markets, especially those in the West Indies upon which they had long depended for sugar, molasses, and coined money. As an independent nation the United States asked England to admit it to the favors that only British colonies ordinarily enjoyed, and was vexed when England declined to grant the request. Jay could get no commercial privileges that Congress regarded as worth having, and when his treaty of November 19, 1794, was under consideration, the French party regarded it as humiliating and empty.

The treaty, however, accomplished the basic thing; it pledged "a firm, inviolable and universal peace, and a true and sincere friendship," between the two countries that were tottering on the verge of war. And in its second article the British sovereign promised to "withdraw all his troops and garrisons from the posts and places within the boundary lines assigned by the treaty of peace to the United States." This was to be accomplished by June 1, 1796, and in consideration for it (or for any treaty at all) the United States accepted the responsibility for and agreed to