Josiah Harmar

Josiah Harmar was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and educated at a Quaker school.

He started his military career during the American Revolutionary War, receiving a commission as a captain in 1775. In 1775, Harmar first saw action during the American invasion of Canada, fighting in the Battle of Quebec.[1] He served under George Washington and Henry Lee during the war. Harmar was one of the officers of the Continental Army who served under Washington during the winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge.[1] Washington had a high opinion of Harmar during the Revolutionary War, writing that Harmar was one of the "gentlemen...personally known to me as one of the best officers in the Army".[1] By the end of the war, Harmar was serving as adjutant to General Nathanael Greene, who commanded the Continental Army in the South.[1] A lieutenant colonel at its conclusion, he was chosen by Congress in 1784 to relay the ratified Treaty of Paris to commissioner Benjamin Franklin in Paris. During his time in France, Harmar was received at the Palace of Versailles by King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, being introduced to the king and queen by the Marquis de Lafayette.[1] In Paris, Harmar lived lavishly and in the process, went into debt, which required that he continue his military career.[1] Harmar wrote "the expenses which must necessarily be incurred in living in, and in viewing this magnificent city [Paris] demand for the benefit of the United States my speedy embarkation".[2]

Harmar was an original member of the Pennsylvania Society of the Cincinnati when it was founded on October 4, 1783. The same day, he was elected as the Society's first secretary. Harmar served as secretary of the Society for two years.[3] Harmar married Sarah C. Jenkins on 10 October 1784 in Philadelphia.[4]

In the 1780s, many Americans wished to settle the "Old Northwest" as the Midwest was known at the time, which of course meant displacing the Indian tribes living there.[5] Supported by the British who still held fur-trading forts in the Old Northwest, the Indians of the Western Confederacy were resolved to oppose the Americans.[5] In 1784, the newly independent United States had almost no army, as the Continental Army had been disbanded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.[6] In 1784, the entire United States Army comprised just 55 artillerymen at West Point and 25 more at Fort Pitt (modern Pittsburgh). For defense, the United States relied upon the state militias, who disliked fighting outside of their own states.[6] To enforce American claims upon the Old Northwest, on 3 June 1784, Congress called for a federal regiment, known as the First American Regiment, of about seven hundred men, to be supplied and paid for by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.[6]

As the largest contingent (about 260 men) came from Pensylvania, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was allowed to choose the commander of the regiment. Thomas Mifflin, a powerful Pennsylvania politician, successfully pushed for his friend Josiah Harmar to become commander.[6] Harmar was described as a political general with a fondness for alcohol who was only given the position due to his political connections.[7] Harmar's first task was to train the First American Regiment, imposing a rigorous training regime intended to turn the sons of farmers, unemployed urban laborers, and assorted adventurers into professional soldiers.[8] Harmar was known as a strict disciplinarian who would punish his soldiers harshly if their uniforms were dirty or rust appeared on their weapons.[8] Harmar reported to Congress in September 1784 that his emphasis upon Prussian-style drill and discipline was having results as "the troops begin to have a just idea of the noble profession of arms".[8] Shortly afterwards, Harmar was ordered to march to Fort Pitt for his regiment was needed to enforce American claims on the Northwest.[8] Harmar was not impressed with the people of Fort Pitt, writing that they "lived in dirty log cabins and were prone to find joy in liquor and fighting".[9]

As commander of the First American Regiment, Harmar was the senior officer in the United States Army from 1784 to 1791, commanding from Fort McIntosh. Initially, the First American Regiment was to be based in Fort Pitt, but as the Indian chiefs he was to negotiate with did not want to visit Fort Pitt, Harmar relocated his command to Fort McIntosh.[9] Harmar described Fort McIntosh when he found it as having been thoroughly looted by settlers heading for Kentucky, writing the settlers had "destroyed the gates, drawn all the Nails from the roofs, taken off the boards and plundered it of ever article".[9] Harmar was impressed with the richness of the land of the Northwest. In 1785, he wrote to a friend: "I wish you were here to view the beauties of Fort M'Intosh. What think you of pike of 24 lbs, a perch of 15 to 20 lbs, cat-fish of 40 lbs, bass, pickerel, sturgeon &c &c. You would certainly enjoy yourself."[6] Harmar also enjoyed the strawberries growing in the wild, writing: "The earth is most luxuriantly covered with them – we have them in such plenty that I am almost surfeited with them; the addition of fine rich cream is not lacking".[10] He also consumed huge quantities of wine, cognac, whiskey and rum with every meal.[11] In a letter to his patron Mifflin, Harmar stated that stories of "Venison, two or three inches deep cut of fat, turkey at once pence per pound, buffalo in abundance and catfish of one hundred pounds that are by no means exaggerated", going on to write that "cornfields, gardens &c, now appear in places which were lately the habitation of wild beasts. Such are the glories of industry."[11]

Harmar signed the Treaty of Fort McIntosh on 21 January 1785, the same year that he ordered the construction of Fort Harmar near what is now Marietta, Ohio. Harmar did not think the Treaty of Fort McIntosh that he had just signed with the Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Wyandot ceding what is now southeastern Ohio to the United States to be worth much, writing: "Between you and me, vain and ineffectual all treaties will be, until we take possession of the posts. One treaty held at Detroit would give dignity and consequence to the United States, and answer every purpose".[12]

Until the creation of the Northwest Territory in 1787, the Northwest had no government beyond the U.S. Army, and even after the creation of the Northwest Territory, the area was administered by the War Department for several more years.[12] At this time, hundreds of American settlers, anxious to acquire the rich lands beyond the Ohio River, had begun to illegally settle in the Old Northwest, and in March 1785, Harmar was ordered by Congress to evict the squatters as no land surveys had been performed yet nor had the U.S. government started the work of selling the land.[13] Harmar described the evictions as a painful process as his soldiers had to force the settlers off their newly build homesteads and in his letters to Congress, Harmar asked that the land be surveyed and sold before the entire Northwest was overrun by "lawless bands whose actions are a disgrace to human nature".[14] In May 1785, Thomas Hutchins was appointed Geographer of the United States by Congress and was ordered to go to the Northwest to survey all land of the land, starting with the Seven Ranges.[14] Harmar was ordered by Congress to provide protection for the land surveyors.[14] In September 1785, when Hutchins and his surveyors arrived, Harmar assured him that he "very safely repair with the Surveyors in the intersection of Pennsylvania with the Ohio".[14] In October 1785, Harmar founded Fort Harmar to provide protection for the surveyors.[15] At Fort Harmar, he supplied himself with much luxuries such as Windsor chairs, which led the American historian Wiley Sword to write that Harmar's "considerable urbanity may have rendered him somewhat suspect as an Indian fighter".[11] In November 1785, Harmar reported to Congress that the early arrival of winter together with the fact that soldiers who were guarding the surveyors from Indians and squatters were "barefoot and miserably off for clothing" had ended the surveying for that year.[15]

One Indian people who refused to sign a treaty giving up their lands was the Shawnee, and Harmar was ordered in October 1785 to advance to the Great Miami River in order to persuade the Shawnee to sign away their land.[12] At the time, Congress took the viewpoint that the Indians living in the Old Northwest had by supporting the British in the Revolutionary War forfeited their land, from which they were to be evicted from, and the land handed over to American settlers.[16] The Indians did not share this viewpoint that they were defeated peoples living on a land that rightfully belonged to the Americans, and many began to resist efforts to evict them.

As a commander, Harmar was a stern martinet who was much influenced by Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben's manual Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, better known as the Blue Book for the Prussian-style training of American troops.[11] The American historian William Guthman noted: "Steuben's manual was aimed at combatting British and Hessian forces – not the backwoods guerilla fighting of the highly skilled American Indian warriors the regiment would eventually fight. Short-sightedness on the part of the military was the reason that no preparatory training in guerrilla warfare was ever imposed on the Army... no federal unit under Harmar or St. Clair was ever instructed in the frontiersmen's method of war".[11] Harmar doggedly insisted on Prussian-style training designed for the clash of regular forces in Central Europe, not the frontier style of irregular warfare in the forests of the Old Northwest that his men required.[10] The former Prussian officer Steuben held only a divisional command in the Continental Army, but as the chief trainer of the Continental Army, he had introduced Prussian drill and discipline into the American Army, and thanks to Steuben's training, the Continental Army became a formidable force. It is very unlikely that the Continental Army would have won the Revolutionary War without Steuben's training, and as a result, Steuben was greatly admired by many American officers. One of those officers was Harmar, who at the time of his death in 1813, was still insisting to anyone who would listen that all that was needed for victory was to follow the precepts laid down in Steuben's Blue Book.[11]

Harmar also supervised the construction of Fort Steuben near present-day Steubenville, Ohio. In June 1787, he reported to Congress that the Seven Ranges had been surveyed, and the white settlers could finally legally move in.[15] He was brevetted as a brigadier general in July 1787.[17] On 17 July 1787, Harmar visited Vincennes, at the time a mostly French-Canadian town, where he was welcomed by the "principle French inhabitants" and where he informed them that the area was now part of the United States.[18] The people of Vincennes' previous encounters with the Americans had been with the lawless Kentucky militia, who had not impressed them, which led Harmar in a letter to the people of Vincennes to tell them the men they met before were "not real Americans".[18] During his time at Vincennes, several Indian chiefs came to visit him, where Harmar sought to "impress upon them as much as possible the majesty of the United States" and the wish of the U.S government "to live in peace with them".[19] Harmar then visited Cahokia and Kaskaskia whose inhabitants had not seen any representatives of the U.S. government since the Revolutionary War, and who Harmar reported had shown "decent submission & respect" for the U.S. government.[20] Harmar was finally received at St. Louis by Major Francisco Cruzat of the Spanish Army where Harmar reported he was "politely entertained" while noting that the entire Spanish garrison at St. Louis numbered only 20 men.[20]

In April 1788, Harmar greeted Rufus Putnam of the Ohio Land Company, who had promoted "Putnam's Paradise" in New England, and he founded the village of Marietta next to Fort Harmar.[21] Harmar reported in June 1788 that between December 1787-June 1788 at least 6, 000 settlers had passed through Fort Harmar on their way to found settlements beyond the Ohio river, writing "The Emigration is almost incredible".[22] At the new village of Marietta, Harmar celebrated the Fourth of July in 1788 with Putnam, having his regiment march down the street in a parade.[23] At Fort Harmar, he built a "commodious fine house...an elegant building for this wooden part of the world", where his wife and his son Charles joined him.[23]

As more and more settlers moved into the Northwest, more and more reports of violence between the settlers and the Indians reached Fort Harmar.[22] Harmar complained that the government was tardy with paying his men, to which he was informed that because fewer than the requisite nine states were represented in Congress because some states were boycotting Congress, it was impossible to pass a budget.[23] For this reason, Harmar welcomed the constitution of 1787, which replaced the Articles of Confederation, expressing the hope with a newly strong federal government that "Anarchy and Confusion will now leave and that a vigorous government will take its place".[24]

With low-level warfare in the Northwest between the Indians and the settlers now the norm, Harmar together with the governor of the Northwest Territory, General Arthur St. Clair started talks in January 1789 with Indian leaders representing the remaining Iroquois, the Ottawa, Chippewa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Sauk, and Lenape peoples, where the Indians were informed that they could either sell their land for a set price or face war.[25] Both St. Clair and Harmar refused the Indian demand that no more white settlement be allowed beyond the Ohio River, and the resulting Treaty of Fort Harmar saw more land ceded to the United States.[25] None of the Indian peoples living on the Wabash River attended the conference having not been invited, and Harmar predicted that this would mean war with the Miami, the Shawnee and those Potawatomi living on the Wabash.[25] One of Harmar's aides called the Treaty of Fort Harmar a "farce" done to amuse Congress which had the notion the Northwest could be colonized peacefully and predicted the Western Confederacy would fight.[25]

He directed the construction in 1789 of Fort Washington on the Ohio River (located in modern-day Cincinnati), which was built to protect the southern settlements in the Northwest Territory. The fort was named in honor of President Washington. Harmar arrived at the fort on December 28, 1789, and welcomed Governor St. Clair there three days later.

By August 1789, enough reports had reached President Washington of widespread violence in the Northwest that he argued that the situation required the "immediate intervention of the General Government".[25]

Harmar's relations with his superiors were not good.[26] President Washington's War Secretary, Henry Knox, was a firm believer that the nation's first line of defense should be the state militias and was hostile to the very idea of a standing army.[26] Knox was a Revolutionary War veteran with a distinguished record, but as War Secretary, he proved to be an unsavory character whose principal interest was engaging in land speculation.[26] As Secretary of War, Knox confiscated land belonging to the Indians, and then sold it at rock-bottom prices to land companies (in which he happened to be a shareholder), which then marked up the land and sold it to American settlers.[26] At the time, the rules on conflicts of interest did not exist and these transactions were legal, through widely viewed as unethical and morally dishonest.[26] To make good these land sales required that the Indians living on the land that Knox was planning to sell be displaced, which made Knox one of the leading hawks in New York (which at the time was the U.S. capital), forever urging that all of the Indians be cleared off the land, so he could sell it all.[26] At the same time, Knox's dislike of the U.S. Army and his preference for using the state militias made the task of displacing the Indians more difficult than it otherwise would have been.[26] The American journalist James Perry wrote that "even Harmar" saw the "danger" of Washington's and Knox's attempts to fight war in the Northwest on the cheap by mobilizing the state militias of Pennsylvania and Kentucky instead of raising more U.S. Army troops.[26]

For his part, Harmar wrote: "No person can hold a more contemptible opinion of the militia in general than I do... It is lamentable... that the government is so feeble as not to afford three or four regiments of national troops properly organized that would soon settle the business with these perfidious villains upon the Wabash."[27] One of Harmar's subordinates, Major Ebenezer Denny, called the Kentucky militia out to assist with conquering the Old Northwest "raw and unused to the gun or the woods; indeed, many are without guns".[27] Harmar complained that the men of the Pennsylvania militia were "hardly able to bear arms - such as old, infirm men and young boys".[27] There were so many sickly, underage and old men in the Pennsylvania contingent sent out to serve under him that Harmar refused to commit them to action in the coming campaign.[27] Very few men wanted to serve in the militia, let alone in a dangerous expedition to the frontier of the Northwest, and so the militiamen sent to serve under Harmar tended not to be the best caliber of troops.[27] The American historian Michael S. Warner described the Kentucky and Pennsylvania militiamen as lacking "discipline, experience and in many cases even muskets".[28]

In 1790, Harmar was sent on expeditions against Native Americans and the remaining British in the Northwest Territory. The British who held fur trading forts in the Northwest kept the Indians well supplied with guns and ammunition to keep the Americans out of the area.[6] Furthermore, the Montreal-based North West Company had taken over the old French fur trading routes together with the services of the French-Canadian Voyageurs, and thus had a vested interest in keeping the Northwest for the Indians who sold them the furs that were the source of such profit to them. Knox in a letter on 7 June 1790 ordered Harmar "to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Indian banditti".[27] At the same time, Knox sent a letter to Major Patrick Murray commanding the British garrison at Fort Detroit, telling him of the coming expedition.[29] The British response was to inform all of the Indian tribes of the expedition and to release a huge number of rifles and ammunition to the Indians.[29]

Knox, who stood to greatly profit if the Indians were cleared out of the Northwest, seemed to have ordered the expedition in a moment of rage at the obstinate resistance of the Miami, Shawnee and Potawatomi peoples who resisted his attempts to evict them, leading Warnar to comment that anger is not the best emotion when making command decisions.[30] Knox, in his letters to Harmar, repeatedly advised him to move fast, strike hard, and avoid drinking, saying that sober generals were victorious generals. The frequency of the last warning indicated that Knox did not have much confidence in Harmar, which led Warner to question just why he was given the command in the first place given the evident doubts that both Washington and Knox had about him.[30]

With the appointment of Major General Arthur St. Clair as commander of the U.S. Army in March 1791, Harmar was no longer the Army's senior officer. After resigning from the Army on January 1, 1792, Harmar returned to Pennsylvania and served as the state's adjutant general from 1793 to 1799.[54] Harmar was popular in Philadelphia during his last years, being described as well "regarded by all who knew him, for he was of genial manner".[1] Harmar was described as "tall and well-built, with a manly port, blue eyes, and keen martial glance. He was very bald, wore a cocked hat, and his powdered hair in a cue".[2]

Harmar died in what was then near Philadelphia (but now considered South Philadelphia) at his estate, "The Retreat near Gray's Ferry and the Schuylkill River. He is buried at the Episcopal Church of St. James Kingsessing, in West Philadelphia. His widow was the former Sarah Jenkins (1760-1848). In addition to one son and a daughter who died as children, Harmar had a daughter, Eliza Harmar Thomas (1787-1869), and sons Josiah Harmar (1802–1848); who would, in turn, have a son and grandson with the same name, but who lived in Connecticut) and William Harmar (1803–1878).

• Captain, Thompson's Pennsylvania Rifle Battalion - October 27, 1775
• Captain, 1st Continental Infantry Regiment - January 1, 1776
• Major, 3rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment - October 1, 1776
• Lieutenant Colonel, 6th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment - June 6, 1777
• Lieutenant Colonel Commandant, 7th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment - August 9, 1780
• Lieutenant Colonel, 3rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment - January 17, 1781
• Lieutenant Colonel, 1st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment - January 1, 1783
• Brevet Colonel, Continental Army - September 30, 1783
• Discharged - November 3, 1783
• Lieutenant Colonel Commandant, First American Regiment - August 12, 1784
• Brevet Brigadier General - July 31, 1787
• Resigned - January 1, 1792

Note - General Harmar was the senior officer and commander of the United States Army from August 12, 1784, to March 4, 1791.

[55]

• Bell, William Gardner (2005). "Josiah Harmar". Commanding Generals and Chiefs of Staff: Portraits and Biographical Sketchs. United States Army Center of Military History. pp. 116–17. Archived from the original on April 10, 2021. Retrieved June 14, 2010.
• Wilson, James Grant; Fiske, John (1887). "Josiah Harmar". Appleton's cyclopædia of American biography. Vol. 3. p. 84. Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography
• Shaw, John Robert, Oressa M. Teagarden, and Jeanne L. Crabtree. John Robert Shaw: An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777–1807. Athens: Ohio, 1992. Print.

• The papers of General Josiah Harmar, by Howard Henry Peckham, 1937

• Ohio History Central bio of Harmar
• "Harmar, Josiah" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.
• American Revolution Institute