Always sensitive to the smallest insult to his vanity, Wilkinson had been infuriated by Wayne’s refusal of the Christmas invitation. During the early months of 1794, Wilkinson periodically declared himself to be close to resignation. “I am unsettled in my purpose whether I shall join the army or not,” he told Innes, and with still more of a flourish told Brown, “I owe so much to my own feelings and to Professional reputation, that I cannot consent to sacrifice the one, or to hazard the other, under the administration of a weak, corrupt minister or a despotic, Vainglorious, ignorant General.” But in truth, as he recognized himself, he could never quit the army “because I know the profession of arms to be my Fort[e], and I verily believe that the Hour may possibly come when my talents into that line might be of important account to our Country.”
Instead, he devoted himself to encouraging the opposition to Wayne until camp gossip took to labeling the two camps using terms such as “such an Officer is in favor of Wayne— and such a one is in favor of Wilkinson.” The depth of Wilkinson’s hatred could be gauged from an article he sent to a Cincinnati newspaper signed “Army Wretched” that damned Wayne for drunkenness, incompetence, wastefulness, and favoritism toward “his pimps and parasites.” Unfortunately for this attempt to stampede public opinion, General Charles Scott visited Wayne’s command headquarters at Fort Greeneville soon afterward and offered a different perspective on the general’s conduct. “During my stay I found him attending with great Sobriety & extream attention to the Duty of army,” Scott reported to Knox, “he paid the most Unwearied attention to the most minute thing possible in person.” When the government published Scott’s testimony in rebuttal, Wilkinson contemptuously dismissed Scott, once his friend and comrade-in-arms, as “a fool, a poltroon and a scoundrel.”
By the spring, Wayne’s supporters had made him aware of Wilkinson’s hostility. Wayne’s suspicions were directed particularly at the failure of the victuallers Elliott and Williams to supply the army with enough food. In Wayne’s view, this was a deliberate attempt to sabotage his preparations for war, and he accused Wilkinson to his face of being “the cause of the fault of the Contractors.” His second- in- command retaliated in his own fashion, as Wayne discovered when a Philadelphia merchant reported that some senators were proposing to impeach the Legion’s commander “at the request of Wilkinson for Pedulation, Speculation, Fraud &c.”
The longer the Legion remained inactive, the more poisonous the conflict became. No army can remain ready for battle—“in the crouch,” to use modern jargon—for long without the aggression beginning to spill over into feuds and quarrels. But for the Legion, the lengthy delay was especially damaging. Even after training was completed, federal negotiators continued their talks with Little Turtle and other Native American leaders in an attempt to arrange a new boundary that would guarantee Indian land rights, but allow settlers to move into the Ohio Valley. In the summer, as though the waiting had undermined their physical health as much as their morale, an epidemic of illness ravaged the troops. “We labor under a universal influenza,” Wilkinson told his friends, “and tertians [fevers], quotidians & intermittents rage beyond anything I have ever seen.”
Yet while there remained a chance of signing a peace treaty with the Six Nations in the north and the western confederation in the northwest, Washington and Knox forbade Wayne to take any aggressive action. Chafing against the restraint, Wayne inched northward, constructing a fort that he named Recovery on the site of St. Clair’s defeat.
Quite suddenly the talks broke down because Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and their allies could not bring themselves to yield up the swath of land in the Northwest Territory demanded by U.S. negotiators. In a historic misjudgment, they insisted on maintaining the Ohio River as the border. On June 30, 1794, more than a thousand Shawnee and other warriors under Blue Jacket launched a surprise attack on Fort Recovery, the site where St. Clair’s army had been annihilated. This time the attack failed, but it put an end to negotiations. Immediately Scott and the Kentucky horsemen were summoned to join the regulars, and on July 28 the Legion of the United States at last marched from Fort Greeneville.
AS THE SECONDMOST SE NIOR OFFICER, Brigadier General James Wilkinson had command of the right wing. It gave him a close-up position from which to criticize Wayne. He duly carped at the decision to leave the biggest cannons behind and, more insistently, at the slowness of the advance— twelve careful miles a day, always surrounded by a swarm of cavalry and riflemen, and halting well before nightfall so that entrenchments and fortifications could be put in place. Instead of following the St. Marys River westward, out into the open prairie where centers of Indian population were situated, Wayne struck due north, still keeping to rough territory so that the army had to force its way through “Thickets almost impervious,” one of his men complained, “thru Marassies [morasses], Defiles & beds of Nettles more than waist high & miles in length.” This unexpected maneuver, made possible by the absence of heavy artillery, wrong-footed the western confederation’s army and put the Legion between Blue Jacket and supplies he expected from the British in Fort Miami, a newly constructed outpost, close to present Toledo, Ohio.
When the Legion at last emerged from the undergrowth, they found themselves on the banks of the Maumee River, which flows northward into Lake Erie. Even Wilkinson, who had spent the previous days offering Wayne unsought advice on where they might be, was overwhelmed by the pristine beauty of the open countryside before them. “The River meandering in various directions thro a natural meadow in high cultivation & of great extent,” he wrote John Brown, “this meadow bounded by noble eminences, crowned with lofty timber on either side, with Indian Villages, scattered along the Eastern [bank] & the British flag [flying] upon the Western Bank; after a dreary Journey of more than 200 miles from the Ohio, thro an uncultivated Wilderness, [the scene] fills the mind with the most Interesting Emotions, and affords the most pleasing recreation to the Eye.”
Once more, Wayne ignored his second-in- command’s advice to make a rapid move against Blue Jacket and instead spent days erecting yet another armed camp, Fort Deposit, where the army stored its tents and wagons. With his soldiers refreshed and unburdened, Wayne then marched northeast along the Maumee River towards the wooded hillside from which Fort Miami dominated the valley. On August 19, the Legion’s scouts found the Indians’ abandoned camp. Again Wilkinson and other senior officers urged immediate pursuit and attack, the kind of rapid maneuver that the Legion was designed for, but again Wayne chose the safer option of setting up camp.
The delay allowed Blue Jacket to assemble a force of about thirteen hundred men, strengthened by some sixty Canadian militia, and to take up position between the Legion and Fort Miami with their center in a clearing in the wood where a cyclone had torn up the trees. Here, late on the morning of August 20, 1794, cautiously advancing in two columns behind a double screen of sharpshooters and light infantry, the Legion met the enemy they had spent eighteen months training to fight.