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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unlikely General: "Mad" Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America by Mary Stockwell Gregory J. W. Urwin (bio) Keywords Anthony Wayne, American Revolution, Continental Army, Native Americans Unlikely General: "Mad" Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America. By Mary Stockwell. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 363. Cloth, $35.00.) The generals who helped George Washington lead the Continental Army to victory in the American War of Independence rarely rose above the level of mediocrity. Though by no means deficient in courage, few of these men displayed any flair for tactics and even fewer came close to matching Washington's gift for strategy. One Continental general who managed to stand out among his peers was Anthony Wayne of Pennsylvania. Although Brigadier General Wayne made his share of mistakes, he emerged from the Revolutionary War with a reputation as an outstanding battlefield commander. His aggressiveness in combat and inspiring charisma earned him the nickname, "Mad Anthony." Taking command of four battalions of elite Continental light infantry, Wayne copied one of the enemy's most terrifying tactics—a bayonet assault conducted in the dead of night—to capture the British outpost of Stony Point overlooking the Hudson River on June 15, 1779. Two years later, Lieutenant General Charles, Second Earl Cornwallis, lured Wayne into an ambush at Green Spring, Virginia, but the bold Pennsylvanian saved his troops from annihilation by ordering an attack that enabled them to fight their way clear of superior numbers. After helping to force Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, Wayne marched south to end the war by trying to wrest control of Georgia from the British and their Indian allies. America's first nine years of peace did not treat Wayne kindly. His efforts to become a prosperous rice planter on the lands presented to him by a grateful Georgia state government resulted in failure and mounting debt. Turning to politics to salvage his fortunes, he won election to the House of Representatives from Georgia's First District, but charges of election fraud caused Congress to vote unanimously on March 16, 1792, to expel Wayne from office. Shortly thereafter, President George Washington gave his disgraced comrade-in-arms a chance to redeem himself by offering him command of the U.S. Army, which was being expanded and reorganized as the Legion of the United States. The mission that Washington entrusted to Major General Wayne was a daunting one—assert American sovereignty [End Page 138] over the lands north and west of the Ohio River. That region lay under the control of a powerful coalition of native peoples aided by military garrisons that British authorities had refused to withdraw from American soil in violation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. In 1790 and 1791, the Ohio Indians repelled attempts by American troops to bring them to heel. The second confrontation ended in a humiliating disaster on November 4, 1791, when the Indians launched a surprise attack against an unfortified camp containing 1,400 soldiers commanded by Major General Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory. Out-thought and outfought, St. Clair's unfortunate army lost nearly half of its number killed, with the survivors saving their lives in an ignominious rout. Wayne particularly mourned the death of Major General Richard Butler, one of his closest friends from Continental Army days. As Wayne contemplated his revived military career, he wondered if he would end up sharing Butler's fate. Mary Stockwell's Unlikely General tells the story of Anthony Wayne's two-year struggle to recruit and train an army capable of defeating the Ohio Indians on their home ground, the campaign he waged that culminated in victory at Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794, and the treaty signed at Fort Greenville a year later that opened much of the Northwest Territory to American settlement. Although Stockwell focuses primarily on Wayne's leadership of the Legion of the United States, she devotes nearly half of each chapter to relating earlier moments of his life via flashbacks. She is a skilled enough writer to employ this literary conceit without confusing the reader. A much more complex man steps from Stockwell's pages than the...