Who won the Battle of the Thames?
On 5 October 1813 an American army under William Henry Harrison defeated a retreating British force and its Native allies on the Thames River in Upper Canada. The Shawnee leader Tecumseh was killed, and with him the Native confederacy that had fought alongside the British collapsed.1
On 5 October 1813 the armies of the young United States won one of their clearest victories of the War of 1812, deep in Upper Canada on the banks of the Thames River. It destroyed a British army, and it killed Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader whose confederacy had been Britain's most important ally on the frontier. This is how it happened.2
Part of The greatest battles in American history · Before: The Battle of Lake Erie · Next: The Battle of Baltimore and Fort McHenry
After the victory on Lake Erie
In September 1813 the American navy under Oliver Hazard Perry won command of Lake Erie, cutting the supply line that fed the British army holding Detroit and the western frontier. Without it, the British general Henry Procter could not stay. He abandoned Detroit and the fort at Amherstburg and began a slow retreat eastward up the valley of the Thames.3
Procter's Native allies, led by the Shawnee statesman and war leader Tecumseh, were dismayed by the withdrawal. Tecumseh had built a broad confederacy of peoples to resist American expansion, and he had staked it on the British alliance. He urged a stand rather than a retreat, and reluctantly followed as the army fell back.4
Harrison's pursuit
William Henry Harrison, commanding the American army of the Northwest, crossed into Canada and pursued the retreating British, his force swollen by a large body of mounted Kentucky volunteers under Richard Mentor Johnson. Procter's retreat was slow and badly managed, his men tired and short of food, and Harrison steadily closed the gap.5
At last, near Moraviantown, Procter turned to fight, with Tecumseh's warriors in swampy ground on the British right.6
The battle
Harrison saw that the British line was thin and loosely formed and did something unusual: he ordered Johnson's mounted riflemen to charge straight through it. The horsemen broke the British regulars almost at once, and Procter's line collapsed; the general himself fled the field, and hundreds of his men surrendered.7
The harder fighting was on the flank, where Tecumseh and his warriors held the swampy ground and resisted fiercely. There the battle was close and bitter, until Tecumseh fell and the heart went out of the Native resistance.
How many soldiers fought and died at the Battle of the Thames?
The American Battlefield Trust puts about 1,400 men on the British side and 3,760 on Harrison's; The Canadian Encyclopedia gives Procter roughly 900 men and Tecumseh about 500 warriors. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says the British flight left about 500 warriors to face some 3,000 Americans. American losses were light, no more than 27 killed, while nearly all of Procter's soldiers who stayed on the field were killed or captured.8
The tallies differ by source. The American Battlefield Trust counts 27 Americans killed and 57 wounded, and on the British side 51 killed, 35 wounded and 579 captured or missing. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives lower American losses, 7 killed and 22 wounded, records 606 British soldiers killed or captured, and estimates that 33 Native warriors died. Harrison, reporting to the Secretary of War on 9 October 1813, wrote that thirty-three Indians had been “found upon the ground besides those killed in the retreat”, so his figure leaves out the warriors killed in the pursuit. Both agree that only about 250 of Procter's soldiers got away: the Trust says some 250 fled with the general, and the Encyclopedia that 246 escaped to the head of Lake Ontario.9
The death of Tecumseh
Tecumseh was killed in the fighting on the flank, and his death decided far more than the battle. The confederacy he had spent years building, a major Native attempt to halt American expansion in the region, fell apart without him, and his allies drifted away.
Who killed Tecumseh?
No one knows. Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky was credited with shooting Tecumseh and built a political career on it, but no real evidence ever tied him to the killing. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes that neither the identity of the man who killed Tecumseh nor what became of his remains is known.10
Johnson himself was badly wounded during the war. His supporters turned the claim into a campaign jingle, which the National Park Service records as “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh”, and he went on to serve as vice president of the United States under Martin Van Buren, from 1837 to 1841. The popular prints that show Johnson firing his pistol at Tecumseh, like the one at the top of this page, picture the legend; the Park Service notes that the details and accuracy of the scene are still debated.11
Why was the Battle of the Thames important?
The Battle of the Thames destroyed Tecumseh's confederacy, the Native alliance that had led resistance to American expansion in the Old Northwest, which collapsed with his death. Coming weeks after Perry's victory on Lake Erie, it confirmed the American recovery of Detroit and stripped the western peninsula of Upper Canada of the army that had defended it.12
Harrison's earlier attack at Tippecanoe in 1811 had not broken that alliance: according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, by June 1812 the confederacy was at least as strong as before. The Thames did what Tippecanoe had not. Little more than a week after the battle, some of the nations that had fought there signed a truce with the Americans, and effective Native resistance south of the Great Lakes practically ceased.13
The Battle of the Thames secured the Northwest frontier for the United States and left the Americans in firm control of the frontier around Detroit. It also ended the long partnership between Britain and the Native peoples of the Ohio country, who were left without their great leader or their foreign backer.14
For Harrison the victory was the making of a reputation that, with his earlier fight at Tippecanoe, would one day carry him to the presidency. Procter was court-martialed for his handling of the retreat. His court-martial opened in Montreal in December 1814 and sentenced him to a public reprimand and six months' suspension from rank and pay, which the Prince Regent reduced to a simple reprimand; he never held a senior command again. And Tecumseh passed into legend as one of the most formidable leaders the frontier ever produced. The Thames is one of the battles in our survey of the greatest battles in American history.15
Where was the Battle of the Thames fought?
The battle was fought beside the Thames River in Upper Canada, near the Moravian mission village of Fairfield, which is why Canadians also call it the Battle of Moraviantown. Today the site lies near Thamesville in the municipality of Chatham-Kent, Ontario, and is marked on Longwoods Road (Highway 2).16
The village paid for its position. A Parks Canada plaque records that Fairfield, home to Delaware refugees whom Moravian missionaries had brought from Ohio in 1792, was destroyed by the invading American forces after the battle, and that its people were later resettled on the opposite bank of the river. Fairfield on the Thames was designated a national historic site of Canada in 1945. Chatham-Kent's Tecumseh Parkway, a signed driving route along the river, follows the 1813 retreat and links the battlefield, the Tecumseh Monument and the Fairfield site.17
Another American victory of the War of 1812 is told in the Battle of New Orleans. To test yourself on the battles that shaped the United States, try the American battles quiz or Where Was It Fought?18
