Autumn of the Black Snake
The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
William Hogeland's Autumn of the Black Snake presents forgotten story of how the U.S. Army was created to fight a crucial Indian war.
When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the newly independent United States savored its victory and hoped for a great future. And yet the republic soon found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its borderlands. In 1791, years of skirmishes, raids, and quagmire climaxed in the grisly defeat of American militiamen by a brilliantly organized confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians. With nearly one thousand U.S. casualties, this was the worst defeat the nation would ever suffer at native hands. Americans were shocked, perhaps none more so than their commander in chief, George Washington, who saw in the debacle an urgent lesson: the United States needed an army.
Autumn of the Black Snake tells the overlooked story of how Washington achieved his aim. In evocative and absorbing prose, William Hogeland conjures up the woodland battles and the hardball politics that formed the Legion of the United States, our first true standing army. His memorable portraits of leaders on both sides—from the daring war chiefs Blue Jacket and Little Turtle to the doomed commander Richard Butler and a steely, even ruthless Washington—drive a tale of horrific violence, brilliant strategizing, stupendous blunders, and valorous deeds. This sweeping account, at once exciting and dark, builds to a crescendo as Washington and Alexander Hamilton, at enormous risk, outmaneuver Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other skeptics of standing armies—and Washington appoints the seemingly disreputable Anthony Wayne, known as Mad Anthony, to lead the legion. Wayne marches into the forests of the Old Northwest, where the very Indians he is charged with defeating will bestow on him, with grudging admiration, a new name: the Black Snake.
Autumn of the Black Snake is a dramatic work of military and political history, told in a colorful, sometimes startling blow-by-blow narrative. It is also an original interpretation of how greed, honor, political beliefs, and vivid personalities converged on the killing fields of the Ohio valley, where the United States Army would win its first victory, and in so doing destroy the coalition of Indians who came closer than any, before or since, to halting the nation’s westward expansion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing with dual purposes in mind, historian Hogeland (Founding Finance) grippingly relates the battles over the Ohio Valley between the fledgling U.S. and a coalition of the Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware nations. Hogeland's principal aim is to relate the circumstances under which the fledging U.S. created a national army after the American Revolution in the face of deep apprehension about a standing military force. Well-known Revolutionary characters (Washington and Hamilton, for instance) fill Hogeland's pages; so too do colorful, little-known, and impressively skilled British military figures and Native Americans. Hogeland's second aim is to rescue an American general, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and his Native American adversaries from undeserved obscurity. In this he succeeds fully, though Wayne, Blue Jacket, and Little Turtle are unlikely to become household names. The story's outcome, ending in a treaty after the Army's victory in the critical 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers in Ohio, secured the Old Northwest for American settlers and accelerated the epochal, tragic eviction of native tribes from their original lands across the continent. Stuffed with detail, Hogeland's solid and distinctive book fills a significant gap in the narrative history of the United States. Maps.
