Ohio History Journal

THE BICENTENNIAL OF

MAJOR GENERAL ARTHUR ST. CLAIR1

 

BY THERESA VINTON PIERCE KRULL

 

[This paper was read before the Fifteenth Annual Indiana History

Conference, at Indianapolis, December 8, 1933, and is reprinted, with per-

mission, from the Indiana History Bulletin vol. 11, No. 5.]

The bicentennial of Major General Arthur St. Clair

comes to our calendar with 1934, and should come to the

hearts of all Indianans with a new or renewed sense of

what Arthur St. Clair means in the history of civil gov-

ernment, since Indiana was part and parcel of that

Northwest Territory of which St. Clair was the first

governor.

We "historicals" seem to relish the compressing of

a lot of history into a meaningful phrase, especially

when time is limited. One of the best examples I know

is that sweep of certain centuries summed up in the

sentence "out of his cave came Mahomet, with his scim-

itar, and across Europe flashed the panoply of ten cru-

sades." But I have been going around Indiana and else-

where for five years with a St. Clair tale--partly as

hobby and partly in professional work--prefacing a

story of nearly ten centuries made immortal in the six

short words of St. Clair's countryman, the "Wizard of

the North," thus, "the lordly line of high Saint Clair."

I have been maintaining that for the United States

 

1 This paper is not Mrs. Frederic Krull's unpublished lecture, "The

Lordly Line of High Saint Clair," referred to below, though some material

from it has been used.

Vol. XLIII--17         (257)

• 1
 

258      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

Arthur St. Clair is the climax of that lordly line, while

his descendant, William Noble Wallace of Indiana, is

the poetic fulfillment: when he gave his life in the

World War he returned St. Clair blood to France, shed-

ding it for those Norman lands that gave to his race

the name Saint Clair from Sanctus Clarus, the holy

light.

The Indiana St. Clairs spring from three ancient

strains happily blended: from the Norse origins there

came down to Arthur St. Clair courage in adventure;

from the Scottish branch, moral courage as well; from

the Norman, grace of personality. William Noble Wal-

lace, also, had these characteristics; grandson of Gen-

eral Lew Wallace, he came on the maternal side from

the St. Clairs through the St. Clair-Lawrence-Vance

line which united with that same Noble family which

gave a governor to Indiana, and other useful men and

women.

We cannot today pause among the vast treasures of

Scottish history, legend, and tradition which were

Arthur St. Clair's inheritance, though those are chap-

ters in the lordly line which do delight audiences. The

St. Clair epic ranges down from Norseman and Nor-

man, from jarls of the "windswept Orcades," through

exploits of Robert the Bruce, through Douglases,

through barons of Roslyn, the eerie mystery of whose

famed chapel gives us stained windows aglow at night

whenever

. . . fate draws nigh

The lordly line of high Saint Clair,

down to the heroic scenes of the American Revolution

and a new nation's turmoils of adjustment.

• 2
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  259

One can today only recall briefly to you the chief

dramas in the lifetime of an untitled but well-born St.

Clair, who unheralded save by loving parents, first saw

light in the spring of 17342 in Thurso, Caithness, on

Scotland's northernmost mainland, where his boyish

gaze might on clear days discern the Orkneys, where

Kirkwall, with its Norman ruin, has been a capital a

thousand years.

Plans for St. Clair's education in Edinburgh and

London were disturbed by that inherited wandering foot,

but he got at least a classical foundation. Then we find

him an ensign in His Majesty's Sixtieth Royal Rifles,

the regiment sent across the Atlantic to become the

"Royal American Regiment." Thus was St. Clair with

Jeffrey Lord Amherst at Louisburg, with Wolfe on the

Plains of Abraham at Quebec, and he was gradually

promoted for ability and gallantry in the field.

A romantic interlude at Boston saw his courtship

and marriage, in 1760, with Phoebe Bayard, herself

well born and well dowered, a charming ornament of

both New England and Knickerbocker society. Resign-

ing his commission, St. Clair took up lands on what was

then a far frontier, western Pennsylvania. Had he

tarried in Boston he might have remained an aristo-

cratic fine-gentleman royalist--and gone home with

others. But, as the Honorable Albert Douglas has well

said, had St. Clair gone, "the pioneer life of Pennsyl-

vania, the mighty scenes of the Revolution, the heroic

age of the Northwest Territory, would never have . . .

perpetuated" his name.

 

² April 3 (New Style), March 23, according to the contemporary Eng-

lish calendar, Old Style.

• 3
 

260      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

Pennsylvania remembers his services gratefully: he

not only reentered military service as commandant of

Fort Ligonier, one of the forts strung across Pennsyl-

vania by the British, but held numerous civil offices. In

these he was a negotiator respected by Indians, loved

by colonists; a negotiator valued--and needed--by the

Penns, both John and William; a protector of Virgin-

ians fleeing from Lord Dunmore and his agent, Dr.

John Connolly; a pacificator not only between red and

white, but among whites of rival religions. He is un-

derstood to have drawn as well as signed the Declara-

tion of Hannastown, one of those minor colonial decla-

rations of independence so significant, merely dwarfed

by that written by Jefferson. He persuaded many a Scot-

tish pioneer and loyalist to stand by the cause of the

colonies and later saved "the ragged Pennsylvania line"

out of his own purse. He hastened to Philadelphia and

placed his sword at the disposal of Hancock.

St. Clair's revolutionary service alone should endear

him to any loyal American, as it did to Washington,

Lafayette, and the other protagonists of that mighty

stage. In all phases of his life, may it be said here, St.

Clair won and kept the personal esteem of superior men.

Some claim for him the strategy of Three Rivers; Gen-

eral Wilkinson credits St. Clair with the success of the

New Jersey campaign; St. Clair was at Valley Forge

with Washington and stood near when Yorktown's

great day dawned. He was seen among Washington's

favorite generals when his idolized chief took the oath

of office in 1789.

In the meantime a certain George Rogers Clark had

become the hero of Vincennes, and meanwhile, too,

• 4
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  261

General St. Clair was president of the Continental Con-

gress when it passed the Ordinance of 1787, "erecting

the vast and hard won territory northwest of the Ohio

into a region dedicated to civil government." St. Clair

was chosen first governor of that unwieldy wilderness,

terrifying to the imagination in its possibilities, which

was to evolve into our great commonwealths, with

weighty implications beyond even their confines. Ter-

rific it was, in its solitudes of forest and tall grasses, its

Indian fastnesses, its ragged settlements down the Ohio

to the French holdings, which were hungry and unhappy

when Clark's victory had not been followed up with in-

stantly defined jurisdictions and protections.

The Northwest Territory period of St. Clair's life

while as heroic as any, seems to be the least romantic to

many audiences. Perhaps no wonder--life in the wil-

derness is not lived in the foreshortened chapters of

even realistic fiction; it seems one hardship or massacre

after another, and many do not grasp what an epic of

citizenship is the struggle to establish a just and func-

tioning civil government in such a region, far from its

federal capital. Governor St. Clair believed in and rea-

lized, the right and capacity of Anglo-Saxons to govern

themselves.

After the simple ceremonies and stately salutes on

the Campus Martius at Marietta, Ohio--"little treasure

town of history"--Governor St. Clair and the three

judges also appointed to the Territory, set about their

laborious tasks of enforcing the provisions of the Ordi-

nance of 1787. Among its great pronouncements, as

you know, were absence of slavery, religious freedom,

fundamentals of education, right of habeas corpus, pro-

• 5
 

262      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

tection of private property rights, as well as provision

for territorial representation and ultimate conditions for

statehood.

One of those three judges was Dr. Samuel Holden

Parsons, who had been favored for governor by Dr.

Manasseh Cutler, Massachusetts proponent of the Ohio

Company. But I can find no proof that St. Clair cam-

paigned for the office or knew who would be appointed.

He said, indeed, that he had no taste for land specula-

tion but would be proud to be the father of a country.

Always did St. Clair think of service in the broad terms

of human rights and progress.

The State of Ohio chose July 15, 1933, the 145th

anniversary of Governor St. Clair's inaugural at Mari-

etta, as Ohio Day at A Century of Progress. Notice

their program for that day, with St. Clair's portrait and

a brief biography; and while they have him interred in

the wrong spot, note that they honor "this eminent

statesman and revered patriot in dedicating the exer-

cises of 'Ohio Day' . . . to his beloved memory, as well

as commemorating the establishment of Civil Govern-

ment under the Ordinance of 1787."

Ohioans suspect some inaccuracies on their souvenir

historical map and perhaps might have taken more

counsel with their historical society, but my stress is

upon their desire to honor St. Clair, who was also their

first territorial governor.

St. Clair was solicited at one time to seek the gover-

norship of Pennsylvania. There had he founded his

best-loved home; there, he expected to end his days in

peace when official days were done, and when his coun-

try should have reimbursed him for what he had spent

• 6
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  263

of his own fortune for her sake; there dwelt part of his

large family; and from high Pennsylvania office he

could have advanced even further in political distinc-

tions such as he already saw some of his revolutionary

colleagues enjoying. His wife would have liked it, too,

poor lady, scarce fitted for wilderness rigors. We do

not find her among the colonial dames (though she was

one) making the stately minuets of New York and Phil-

adelphia which pageantry now delighteth to honor; no

--she was engrossed with a large family and a country

estate in the Pennsylvania hills, while her husband,

though sometimes in the cities on government business,

was mostly in the West, striving to bring semblance of

order and civilization's processes into the military and

civil procedures of the settlements.

Sometimes he differed with his colleagues and some

Scotch firmness revealed itself. While courtly in man-

ners, he could speak plainly in a crisis. But a study of

his behavior and of the language of his letters and his

own "Narrative" convinces me, as it has all unbiased

students of his life, that he was incapable of stubborn-

ness except in what he believed to be right, and that

more often than not, until the later years of his govern-

orship, his was a more judicial view of circumstances

than that held by others. And he always retained

Washington's confidence. Meantime, all the problems

of the Territory, and his viewpoints, decisions, made

their contribution, directly or indirectly, to Indiana, as

he was "laying the foundations of great states," as the

Ordinance intended.

In 1790 we find him at Fort Washington, where he

is said to have changed the curious compound "Losanti-

• 7
 

264      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

ville" to "Cincinnati," in honor of those giants with

whom he had been associated. From there he went

down the Ohio and up the Mississippi to Kaskaskia, to

see what could be done for the unhappy settlers for

whom Father Gibault pleaded.

St. Clair intended to pass a similar time at Vincennes,

but returned eastward, not only to push relief measures

for Father Gibault's people, but also because the Indians,

encouraged by the British, were even worse out of hand.

Because of that premature return up the Ohio one can-

not be certain that he was at Vincennes. Would that

we could say precisely where and when he may have laid

his weary head and chilled body upon Indiana shores!

This is something we would like to determine if possible

before the General Arthur St. Clair Chapter of the

Daughters of the American Revolution erects its long-

contemplated tablet to his honor and memory. Dr.

James A. Woodburn agrees that St. Clair may be rea-

sonably supposed to have passed through our Fort

Wayne region also, on journeys to Detroit.

Would that we might acquire and restore that man-

sion at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, built for St. Clair's

granddaughter Mary Lawrence Vance, by Captain

Samuel Vance. Mary was the daughter of Elizabeth

St. Clair and Captain John Lawrence, of Philadelphia,

for whom Lawrenceburg is named. This is surely the

finest mansion of its decade and type extant in Indiana.

Now owned by flour mills, its Palladian window and

ample wings are obscured from the Ohio River upon

which it was for generations a landmark of hospitality.

Restored, it would parallel the Lanier mansion in edu-

• 8
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  265

cational beauty and would rival the Taft museum in

Cincinnati as a house.

When the Indian depredations resulted in Wash-

ington's orders to hasten the rebuke to those who had

made life a burden to General Josiah Harmar and

others, circumstances made "St. Clair's defeat" tragic-

ally inevitable. Poor support by the War Department;

slow arrival of green men; lack of time to discipline

and equip discontented militia; jealous silences by Gen-

eral Butler when he should have spoken, all piled up

tragedy. Read St. Clair's own "Narrative," observe

that he had insufficient time in which to train his men,

that he had to see personally to such things as setting

up a forge at Fort Washington to make those barest

essentials of equipment with which they were supposed

to have come. Washington always relied on St. Clair's

resourcefulness in crises, but prodding him into that

meeting with the Indians in western Ohio seems to me

in some wise comparable in result with the fate of the

Light Brigade. St. Clair obeyed, and when surprised

early on the morning of November 4, 1791, suffered a

slaughter among his fourteen hundred men, reduced by

deserters from  two thousand.  General Butler died

against a tree, and St. Clair, ill with fever, had four

horses killed under or beside him. Censure fell heaviest

upon that head whose chestnut hair had turned white

in the service of the Territory; that frame whose stam-

ina had suffered from exposure in that service; that

governor whose stipend scarcely ever paid his mere trav-

eling expenses; that Revolutionary veteran whose finan-

cial sacrifices had never been repaid at all. But St.

Clair's honor always was white and despite those always

• 9
 

266      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

jealous of a fine flower of a lordly line, the Congres-

sional inquiry and President Washington completely ex-

onerated him from blame.

The site of this battle, later named Fort Recovery,

is marked by an imposing obelisk, commemorating both

Anthony Wayne and St. Clair and their men. It was

unveiled by St. Clair's descendant, Belle Noble Dean,

of Indianapolis.

Before Wayne finally broke the Indian power at

Fallen Timbers in 1794, mark, he was allowed two

years in which to drill and equip a better force, to say

nothing of the better support which he received from

public opinion for his expedition. Credit where credit

is due, but St. Clair's other and many services have been

obscured long enough by that terrible day of 1791.

And his troubles were not over. With the rise of

party strife between the Federalists and the party of

Jefferson in the early years of the nineteenth century,

the heroic temper of the revolutionary period having

somewhat receded, that strife was felt in the Territory.

Indiana became a separate unit under Governor William

Henry Harrison and passed from St. Clair's jurisdic-

tion, but in the Ohio region there raged bitter contro-

versies between the immediate statehood party and the

governor's adherents over such questions as whether

Ohio had yet the right to expect statehood under the Or-

dinance, whether the Legislature should meet at Chilli-

cothe or Cincinnati, whether the boundary should be

the Scioto River. While those struggles concern Ohio

more than Indiana they concerned St. Clair very con-

siderably at the time. He was accused of exceeding his

powers and authority, of "too aristocratic behavior,"

• 10
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  267

when his habit was at all times to stand for a non-aris-

tocratic form of government. He believed time and

methods wrong. In 1902, certain Ohioans said, "we

have kept faith with St. Clair," which one now better

understands. But at the time, St. Clair, who was, as

Judge Jacob Burnet of Cincinnati said, "open, frank

. . . accessible to persons of every rank," found that

"high talents united with unfaltering integrity are not

always sufficient to guide a man in the path of political

safety." This quotation from the Honorable Albert

Douglas has something in it strangely familiar to mod-

ern ears. Greatly provoked, St. Clair lost his sense of

proportion and made a fiery address to the Legislature,

thus playing into the hands of those men able to in-

fluence Thomas Jefferson into removing St. Clair from

office, for which we cannot forgive Jefferson because it

was mainly political. Nor would a Jeffersonian Congress

repay Federalist debts. Those sums which St. Clair had

willingly lent his adopted country when she sorely

needed them were never denied to be morally due, but

repayment was postponed beyond hope. General Ogle

said that the "way congress treated St. Clair is fit to be

mentioned only in the black of night."

And so the aging general saw his Pennsylvania

home, that loved retreat which had been named, with

pathetic irony "The Hermitage," sold by the sheriff.

The General eked out a bare living selling supplies to

travelers along the road, from the log cabin provided

by his eldest son. Here he was visited by many persons

of distinction such as Henry Clay, Lewis Cass, Charles

Mercer, William  Henry Harrison, and Joshua Gid-

dings.

• 11
 

268      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

Our St. Clair Chapter of the Daughters of the

American Revolution was the first organization, we be-

lieve, to suggest that St. Clair's bicentennial be observed

throughout the land, certainly throughout the North-

west Territory. The chapter will observe it in April

and hopes for sufficient funds to erect a memorial tab-

let. The chapter petitioned the United States Post Of-

fice Department in September, through Representative

Louis Ludlow, to issue a commemorative stamp bearing

St. Clair's portrait. The State Society of the Daughters

of the American Revolution has approved this peti-

tion.³ The Pennsylvania Society also has approved it

and the Ohio press has begun to take some notice of the

petition. Dr. Harlow Lindley has mentioned it appre-

ciatively in the Museum Echoes from Columbus.

At Greensburg, Pennsylvania, rest Arthur and

Phoebe Bayard St. Clair in a tomb erected by the Ma-

sons fourteen years after the general's interment in

1818. It is inscribed as a "humble monument in place

of a nobler one due from his country." At Greensburg

the Daughters of the American Revolution named their

chapter for "Phoebe Bayard." It has lately dedicated

to her a memorial granite bench. To Mrs. John W.

Fairing, of Greensburg, is due thanks for creating great

enthusiasm for the St. Clair bicentennial.  She has

asked every chapter regent in Pennsylvania to address

the Post Office Department, for the New Deal stamp

program for 1934 is reported as already heavily charged

with philatelic change.

The Detroit chapter of the Daughters of the Amer-

ican Revolution is named for a St. Clair daughter,

Louisa St. Clair Robb; the Ann Crooker St. Clair Chap-

• 12
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  269

ter, of Effingham, Illinois, for another descendant. The

former has already asked George Catlin of the Detroit

News to address it on St. Clair in January.

The bicentennial is not, however, a matter for the

Daughters of the American Revolution alone, though

they were quick to see in the proposed stamp an oppor-

tunity for patriotic education, which is one of their cor-

nerstones. It is a cornerstone of all historically minded

bodies. Such folk are rising to our support, not only

in the matter of the stamp proposal, but in the general

commemoration of St. Clair. Will you not help? We

must make Washington, D. C., know that this stamp is

wanted and timely. Who is worthier of philatelic hon-

ors in 1934 than Arthur St. Clair? Will you who helped

make effective the sentiment for a Clark Memorial at

Vincennes overlook the one whose "labors and accom-

plishments in the Northwest Territory" it is "hard to

overstate"? Will you, who have pasted on your own and

your historical society's mail, the portraits of Kosciusko,

von Steuben, Sullivan, and some presidents who were

not St. Clair's equal, spread this fact to Washington?

By another December it will be too late, not for a

stamp sometime, but for one in the bicentennial year

with all the consequent educational value and backing

that press and community can pass along to the schools.

St. Clair's descendants are restrained by very mod-

esty from pressing this matter. I am not one of them--

though often under suspicion of it--so may I close with

the verses of one of them, Arda Bates St. Clair Rorison,

 

3 Since this paper was read, endorsement followed by the Ohio D. A. R.

and Senator S. D. Fess, the Colonial Dames of Indiana, the Indiana S. A.

R., and the Pennsylvania D. A. R. etc.

• 13
 

270        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications

daughter of Mary Vance Rorison, now a resident of

California, whose poetic gift saw in St. Clair's solitary

death-chill in the sunset on Chestnut Ridge, near Ligo-

nier, a fulfillment of the ancient superstition that mys-

terious fires redden Roslyn Chapel "when fate draws

nigh the lordly line."4

 

O'er Chestnut Ridge, a roseate hue,

Bursts forth and travels, resting where

Fraternity pays tribute true

To hero-chieftain, brave St. Clair.

He held his soldiers' hearts steelbound;

Their leal devotion was his throne,

And, though death's dateless night surround,

Love's hand rechisels, now, his stone.

As Scottish legend tells the tale

Of far-famed Roslyn's auriole bright,

Whose rays empurpled spire and vine

And framed the chapel, all in light,

Then to the Castle--omen drear,

To presage death to princely heir,

The mystic messenger drew near,

The lordly line of high Saint Clair;

So may we fancy that same glow,

On rainbow bridge has crossed the sea,

On honored tomb its shafts to throw

And hover o'er Westmoreland's lea.

Let us with thistle, Scotland's pledge,

Entwine the laurel, glory's crown;

The thorn must prick the joy's full fledge,

For so shared hardship, his renown.

 

4 "Lines Commemorative of the Unveiling of the Monument, August

15, 1913." The 1913 monument is a granite duplicate of the sandstone

one first erected by the Masons of Greensburg in 1832. Permission to

erect the replica was granted by the Society of St. Clair Descendants, of

which Miss Rorison is a member.

• 14
 

The Bicentennial of Arthur St. Clair  271

 

And may the mountain laurel grand,

O'er Hermitage a sentry be,

And let, for sweet remembrance, stand

As Mason emblem, rosemary.

 

RESOLUTION ADOPTED BY THE INDIANA HISTORICAL

SOCIETY

WHEREAS, Major General Arthur St. Clair, ap-

pointed governor of the Territory Northwest of the

River Ohio in 1787 and serving in that capacity until

1802, developed the first territorial organization in the

United States and laid the foundation for the procedure

of succeeding territorial governors in the temporary

organization of the greater part of the present United

States, and

WHEREAS, The development of the United States by

the organization of territories in such a way that the

inhabitants were speedily grouped into states which

have been admitted into the Union on equal terms with

the thirteen original states, is one of the most important

and determinative factors of our national greatness, and

WHEREAS, Governor Arthur St. Clair, in addition

to his great influence as the first territorial governor of

the United States, performed distinguished services in

the War of the American Revolution after having left

the regular English army and become a citizen in the

American colonies, and furthermore sacrificed his per-

sonal fortune in the service of his adopted country, and

WHEREAS, The five states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,

Michigan, and Wisconsin have been formed from the

Northwest Territory which St. Clair, notwithstanding

a grave defeat at the hands of the Indians in the early

• 15
 

272        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications days of his governorship, administered with exemplary skill and wisdom, Therefore be it Resolved, That the Indiana Historical Society in annual meeting assembled at Indianapolis do respect- fully urge the postmaster general of the United States to issue a suitable commemorative stamp on April 3, 1934, bearing a likeness of General Arthur St. Clair, and to put on sale such commemorative stamp on that day in the capitals of the five states formed from the Northwest Territory; that is, in Columbus, Ohio, In- dianapolis, Indiana, Springfield, Illinois, Lansing, Mich- igan, and Madison, Wisconsin. NOTE: Since the commemorative stamp has not been issued, why might it not be issued in 1938 in connection with the commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of civil gov- ernment in the Northwest Territory, at Marietta, Ohio--Editor.

• 16