Today In History

Tecumseh, the great Shawnee statesman and military leader, is killed in battle with US Troops near Chatham, Ontario, Canada. The legend that Richard Johnson, later US Senator from Kentucky and Vice President of the United States, fired the killing shot is almost certainly apocryphal (1813).

Tecumseh was not the first to conceive of the idea of a pan-Indian alliance against white invaders; Obwandiyag (Pontiac) had created a coalition of Great Lakes tribes in the 1760's. But Tecumseh's was more wide-spread, reaching from Canada to Florida, and was probably the last such alliance that had a reasonable chance of checking, if not halting, the American invasion of Indian Country. Indeed, one of the great, unappreciated turning points of America history occurred in 1810-1811, when Tecumseh journeyed south to recruit the Muskogee (Creek), Cherokee and other southeastern tribes. In the end, only one faction of the Creeks (the so-called Red Sticks) joined; The Ridge warned Tecumseh that he would personally kill him if he set foot in Cherokee country. Had things gone otherwise, and the Cherokee and the majority of the Creeks thrown their lot in with Tecumseh, and had Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa followed instructions, it is very likely the US would have decisively lost the War of 1812. America at the point simply did not have enough troops to fight a British invasion and defend the entirety of the Western Frontier from a general Indian uprising. In such a scenario, Tecumseh might have well achieved his goal of an Indian nation between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, though the long-term viability of such a state is open to question.

Today In History...

...Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appamattox Court House, Virginia (1865). It is worth reflecting on this day just how right Bismarck was when he remarked "God has a special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America." Had Robert E. Lee listened to his advisors and ordered his army to disperse and commence guerilla warfare, America in the 19th Century (which was bad enough) might have painfully resembled Iraq in the 21st, a theory expanded upon at length by Jay Winik in his excellent book, "April 1865: the Month that Saved America." I wouldn't wish for that reality, of course, but it does lead me inevitably to wonder what would have happened to the tribes of the West if the entire US Army had been pinned down for decades fighting Confederate insurgents.

What Might Have Been, Part II

In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter explores an alternate history where Bush ignores the neo-cons in his response to 9/11. It's not very realistic, of course; Bush is a neo-con, not their prisoner or their puppet, but it shows how the world might've been a much better place, even without Al Gore in the White House.