He spent the winter in organizing and drilling his forces on the bank of the Ohio where Cincinnati now stands, but which was then merely a fort and huddle of houses.  He made the most careful preparations for the expedition, and early in the spring, he commenced his march northward into the Indian country.  The savages gathered to repulse him at a spot on the Maumee where, years before, a tornado had cut a wide swath through the forest, rendering it all but impenetrable.  Here, on the twentieth of August, 1794, he advanced against the enemy, and, throwing his troops into the “Fallen Timbers,” in which the Indians were ambushed, routed them out, cut them down, and administered a defeat so crushing that they could not rally from it, and their whole country was laid waste with fire and sword.  Wayne did his work well, burning their villages, and destroying their crops, so that they would have no means of sustenance during the coming winter.  Thoroughly cowed by this treatment, the Indians sued for peace, and at Greenville, nearly a year later, Wayne made a treaty in which twelve tribes took part.  It marked the beginning of a lasting peace, which opened the “Old Northwest” to the white settler.

* * * * *

No soldier of the Revolution, with the exception of Washington, was elevated to the presidency, nor did any of them attain an exalted place in the councils of the Nation.  Statecraft and military genius rarely go hand in hand, and it was not until 1828 that a man whose reputation had been made chiefly on the battlefield was sent to the White House.  Andrew Jackson was the only soldier, with one exception, who came out of the War of 1812 with any great reputation, and it is only fair to add that his victory at New Orleans was due more to the rashness of the British in advancing to a frontal attack against a force of entrenched sharpshooters than to any remarkable generalship on the American side.

The war with Mexico found two able generals ready to hand, and laid the foundations of the reputations of many more.  “Old Rough and Ready” Zachary Taylor, who commanded during the campaign which ended with the brilliant victory at Buena Vista, had been tested in the fire of frontier warfare, and won the presidency in 1848; and Franklin Pierce, who commanded one of the divisions which captured the City of Mexico, won the same prize four years later.  It was in this war that Grant, Lee, Johnston, Davis, Meade, Hooker, Thomas, Sherman, and a score of others who were to win fame fifteen years later, got their baptism of fire.  Their history belongs to the period of the Civil War and will be told there; but the chief military glory of the war with Mexico centres about a man who divided the honors of the War of 1812 with Andrew Jackson but who failed to achieve the presidency, and whose usefulness had ended before the Civil War began—­Winfield Scott.