The Cost of the Western War

William Crawford did not want to command the Sandusky expedition. That is one of the few unambiguous facts in a story that has been told and retold for two centuries, accumulating layers of heroism and horror that are not easily separated from what the documents actually show.

Crawford was fifty-nine years old in the spring of 1782. He had served competently throughout the war — in the eastern theater, at Fort Pitt, in frontier operations — without ever seeking the kind of dramatic command that would define a reputation. He was a practical man: a land surveyor, a farmer, a militia officer who understood the western frontier because he had spent his adult life on it. He had surveyed land for George Washington, which gave him a connection to the Commander-in-Chief that he never tried to leverage for personal advancement.

The men who planned the Sandusky expedition wanted a leader with enough reputation to recruit volunteers. Crawford had that reputation. He agreed reluctantly, and set out in late May 1782 with roughly 480 men, most of them the same Pennsylvania and Virginia militia who had participated in or condoned the Gnadenhutten massacre three months earlier.

Whether Crawford knew the risk he was taking is impossible to determine from the record. He knew that Gnadenhutten had happened. He knew that the Delaware were furious. He knew that the Ohio country they were marching into was contested ground where the British and their Native allies held the advantage. He went anyway, which is either courage or poor judgment or both, depending on how you weigh what he knew against what he might have predicted.

The engagement near the Sandusky towns on June 4–5 went badly from the start. The Americans fought hard enough to survive the first day, but on the second day a relief force arrived — British Rangers and additional warriors — and the encirclement became real. The retreat became a rout. Crawford was separated from the main body and captured.

What happened next is known from Dr. John Knight's account, written after his own escape. Crawford was turned over to Delaware warriors, tried in a form, and condemned. He spent approximately three hours being tortured before he died. Simon Girty, the Pennsylvania-born renegade who had defected from Fort Pitt four years earlier, was present. Whether Girty attempted to intervene on Crawford's behalf — as some accounts claim — or watched without acting — as Knight's account implies — cannot be resolved from the available evidence.

Crawford's death did not end the western war. The raids continued through 1782 and technically into 1783, until news of the peace treaty reached the frontier months after it was signed. What his death ended was the American willingness to conduct offensive operations out of Pittsburgh. The expedition he had led, the last major American offensive effort of the western war, had failed as completely as possible.

He is remembered today primarily through the county in Ohio that bears his name — the county that contains the approximate site of his execution. That is a kind of commemoration, but it is a thin one for a man whose death illustrated, more clearly than anything else about the western theater, what the Revolution cost the people who fought it on the frontier.