USA > Pennsylvania > Westmoreland County > History of Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, Vol. I > Part 72
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"The committee conceive it but justice to the Commander-in-Chief to say that in their opinion the failure of the late expedition can in no respect be im- puted to his conduct, either at any time before or during the action, but that as his conduct in all the preparatory arrangements was marked with peculiar ability and zeal, so his conduct during the action furnishes strong testimonies of his coolness and integrity."
When a new expedition was organized under General Anthony Wayne, who succeeded St. Clair as commander of the army, the latter tendered the benefit of the information concerning the enemy which he had purchased so dearly. In reply, President Washington wrote him as follows:
"Your wishes to afford your successor all the information of which you are capable, although unnecessary for any personal conviction, must be regarded as additional evidence of the goodness of your heart and your attachment to your country."
General Wayne was successful in 1794 because the nation was by that time aroused to the serious nature of the contest, and gave him an army which he drilled for over two years before he gave battle. As Forbes profited by Brad- dock's defeat, so Wayne remembered St. Clair's disaster, and took precautions which would have been impossible for St. Clair to take. It seems that in all wars, defeats are necessary to inspire the people with a true realization of the magnitude of the situation. No intelligent student of history claims now that St. Clair should have been expected to hold Ticonderoga against Burgoyne's army, or that his army was properly equipped to meet the Indians in 1791. Notwithstanding all this, public sentiment was for years against him. Even in the highly educated and considerate age in which we live, there are a few who are in some degree inclined to forget the great achievements of both his mili- tary and civil life, and remember him largely in connection with this unfortun-
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ate defeat which ended his military career. But they are not found among the enlightened leaders of public opinion, nor have they carefully investigated the facts connected with the history of that period.
He was retained as Governor of the Territory until the beginning of Thomas Jefferson's administration, in all a period of fifteen years, and was re- moved by Jefferson in 1802. As we have said, he was an ardent Federalist and had unbounded admiration for the centralized power doctrine as advocated by Alexander Hamilton. Holding such views, he was necessarily antagonistic to the tenets of Jefferson, whose views were opposite those of Hamilton. St. Clair had moreover advocated the re-election of John Adams, whose unpopular administration, favoring among other things the deservedly obnoxious alien and sedition laws, had elected Jefferson. It was therefore but natural that the new president should remove him from office. The people of Ohio were largely Jeffersonian in their opinions and were anxious to form a state which could be brought about only through Jefferson and his friends. St. Clair had the veto power, which he was often forced to exercise, and to this his people were also opposed, for they were filled with the idea that the people alone should rule a state, and as they construed it, the veto power in one man was at war with the principles of a free government. Their ideas of Democratic equality were hos- tile to almost every principle which St. Clair, the open and avowed Federalist, represented.
It is not to be understood that he was absent from Westmoreland county all the time during which he was governor of the northwestern territory. The court records show that he was often in the county. On June 1Ith, 1793, he gave his bond for the appearance of some defendants in court at the next ses- sions. On May 30 he signed a petition, his name heading it, asking for a road, and when it was granted the record shows that the order was lifted in Septem- ber, 1794, "by Gen. St. Clair." A thorough search might reveal evidence of his being here a great many times, but we deem it unnecessary. St. Clair was the owner of lands in Westmoreland county for some time before he advocated the formation of the county. In 1767-68 and '69 he was stationed at Ligonier as commander of the garrison, and this was probably his first connection with the county. During these years he made application for various tracts of lands and had them patented on the opening of the land office for this section in 1769. He was therefore a military resident of the county six years prior to its forma- tion. But on April 5, 1770, he was appointed surveyor of the District of Cum- berland, and was also a member of the Proprietary Council from Cumberland county by appointment of the Penns, dated May 23, 1770. Furthermore, he was appointed a justice in May, 1770, of Cumberland county, for that part of the county lying west of Laurel Hill territory, afterwards included in West- moreland county. This was the policy of Penn, to appoint a resident of these outlying sections of the new counties, so that the settlers might at least have an apparent show of justice. St. Clair must therefore have lived here more or less in 1770, after he ceased to be commandant of Fort Ligonier. In March, 1771, Bedford county was formed, and he was appointed its first prothonotary, regis-
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ter, etc., and was again a justice for that part of the new county lying west of Laurel Hill. It is furthermore admitted generally that his son, Arthur St. Clair, Jr., was born at Ligonier in 1771, though the date is not known. It is not easy therefore to determine the exact time that he became a permanent citi- zen of our county. When our county was formed ( February 26, 1773) he was appointed first prothonotary, and also a justice of the peace. It is, however, safe to say that he was connected with the county more or less from 1767, when he first commanded Fort Ligonier, till 1772, after which time he became a permanent citizen of Ligonier Valley. He was therefore a citizen of our county for over fifty-one years. During the years prior to the Revolution his corres- pondence, which was very extensive, is generally dated at Ligonier, with an occasional letter from Hannastown, written when court was in session there. During the Revolutionary war his family resided in Philadelphia, as will appear later on.
The office of Governor of the Western Territory did not require his entire attention, for he was frequently at Ligonier looking after his property, and part of the time his family resided there. He built his residence near Fort Ligonier (a part of which is yet standing and well cared for) before the death of Washington, for there is a well handed down tradition that Washington sent him two expert carpenters from near Mount Vernon, who came out on horseback to do the finer work. Their work was the admiration of the common people, and is equal to the best work on the old colonial houses. It was cer- tainly done by expert workmen who could not have found regular employment on the frontier in that age. Washington died in 1799, and was not acquainted with St. Clair prior to the Revolution. It is probable that it was built during the latter part of his term of governorship, perhaps looking forward to the time when he should retire from public life and pass the remaining years of his life- in ease and comfort in his new residence. It was, or is, situated about one and a half miles northwest of Ligonier. It is all gone now save one room, torn down perhaps by the ruthless hand of an ignorant iconoclast who neither knew of nor cared for its historical associations. The quaintly devised woodwork, the mantlepiece and wainscoating, no doubt the work of Washington's carpen- ters, doubtless saved the one room from destruction. It is now in the possession of Mr. H. S. Denny, who appreciates and preserves it because of its historic association. Vying in stately simplicity of design and in rich interior with the woodwork of our best homes in modern times, it bids fair to bear down to com- ing generations one of the few splendid specimens of Colonial architecture in western Pennsylvania.
Into this house he moved his family when he returned from the Northwest- ern Territory, and tried to build up his shattered fortunes, though he was in his sixty-seventh year. He first erected an iron furnace called Hermitage, near his residence, and for a time manufactured iron castings of various kinds. In a few years he leased the furnace property to James Hamilton & Company for $3,000 per year. The crumbling ruins of the old furnace stack were torn away
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about 1880 by one who did not appreciate their historic value, and there is left ·of it now only a mound of earth and stones to mark the spot where it stood.
Before the Revolution, St. Clair had built a flouring mill on his estate on Mill creek, a tributary of the Loyalhanna, which was, by the way, one of the first mills west of the Allegheny mountains. When he entered the army he gave this mill to his neighbors to use while he was gone. But nearly eight years passed before he returned to find it in ruins. He therefore renewed the mill, and in many other ways contributed to the good of the people until his creditors seized his property. The story of his financial difficulties is not a pleasant one to contemplate. He received with his wife, as we have said, 14,000 pounds, or $70,000. In addition to that he had large tracts of land given him by the Crown, the Penns, the State of Pennsylvania and by the United States. He had also made some good land investments. All of his property was swept away to satisfy his creditors. In a letter to William B. Giles he says that the office of governor of the Northwestern Territory was forced upon him by friends who thought it would be an opportunity for him to replenish his for- tunes, and that it proved otherwise, for he "had neither taste nor genius for speculation in land, nor did I consider it consistent with the office." He was too old to recuperate his fortunes when he returned to Ligonier, and in a few years was sold out by the sheriff. The most lamentable feature of his em- barrassment is that his debts were nearly all contracted in the interests of the republic, and should have been paid by the state or nation and not by St. Clair. During his last years he presented several memorials to the legislature and to congress asking, not for charity, but for a simple reimbursement of the money he had expended in the public interest. Not a single statement in any of them was ever refuted or even denied. In one of them he explains his situation by saying that when he entered the Revolution he could not leave his young wife, born and bred in the best society of Boston, alone with her children in an un- protected and hostile frontier. So he was compelled to sell real estate in west- ern Pennsylvania, upon some of which he had expended large amounts of money, at a great sacrifice. This was sold for 2,000 pounds ($10,000) in de- ferred payments. But the purchaser paid him in depreciated Continental cur- rency, so that of the 2,000 pounds he received only one hundred, that is, one- twentieth of the sacrifice price. Then he purchased a house in Pottsgrove, near Philadelphia, for his family to reside in while he was in the army. On selling this he lost one-half by the bankruptcy of the purchaser.
In a memorial to the Assembly he says that, beginning in 1774, he supplied nearly all the forts and blockhouses in Westmoreland county with arms and means of defense at his own expense. To Congress he says that in the darkest days of the Revolution, when Washington's soldiers were daily deserting him and the army rapidly melting away because they had not been paid, Washington himself applied to St. Clair to save the "Pennsylvania Line," the best organiza- tion in the entire army. St. Clair accordingly advanced the money for re- cruiting and for bounty, and put forth such other influence that with the aid of .Colonel William Butler the Line was saved. To this claim the government,
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through its committee of Congress, unable to deny it, pleaded the statute of limitations. But the indebtedness which directly caused the sale of his real es- tate was contracted while he was Governor of the Territory. Among other anomalous duties which he performed there, was to act as Indian agent of the territory, and as such he negotiated several important treaties. But in paying the Indians and in supplying them according to the terms of the treaty, the money appropriated was not generally sufficient, and St. Clair, rather than allow the negotiations to fail, advanced the money out of his own pocket. In one treaty he expended sixteen thousand dollars while but eight thousand had been set aside for it. Eight thousand dollars then was almost a princely sum.
When the army for the disastrous campaign of 1791 against the Indians was collected at Cincinnati, it was found that the money appropriated for the. purpose was not sufficient to properly equip it. James O'Harra was quarter- master-general of the army, and was a man of abundant means. St. Clair ob- ligated himself to repay O'Harra if the latter would furnish the necessary money so that the army could move on, and it was accordingly furnished. Later, when St. Clair presented this bill to the treasury, he was told that there was no money- appropriated to pay bills in excess of the original amount provided for the ex- pedition. All successive efforts to secure an appropriation were fruitless. St. Clair had given his bond to O'Harra on the express promise of the Secretary of the Treasury that it would be repaid with interest. It probably would have been had Alexander Hamilton remained in office. The face of the bond was $7,042. It was never paid to St. Clair, not one cent of it. Suit was brought by James O'Harra in the Westmoreland courts, and St. Clair, not wanting to contest its payment or validity, came into court and confessed judgment in favor . of O'Harra for $10.632.17, that being the debt and interest. Executions on this judgment were issued from time to time, and finally all of his property was sold from him, The sale could not have taken place at a worse time for St. Clair, for it was sold when the embargo had driven all the money out of the country. Property which had been valued at $50,000 was sold and did not bring more than the debt, interest and costs amounted to. The suit was brought by Hugh Ross as attorney for James O'Harra. Alexander Johnston was the sheriff of Westmoreland when the property was sold. This was in 1808. The tract of land at Ligonier, including the mansion house and the Hermitage furnace property, was sold for $4,000, though the furnace and the mill alone had rented for $3.000 per year. His creditors did not stop with selling his land but sold also all his personal property, except a few articles which he selected and which were exempt from sale. Among those selected was one bed and bedding, a few books from his classical library, and among them was his fav- orite Horace, whose classic beauty of verse he had long admired, and a bust of John Paul Jones, King of the Seas, presented to him and sent by Jones himself from Paris. This he prized very highly and kept till his death.
His claims before Congress were advocated by such men as Joseph Hopkin- son, the eloquent John Sergeant, and by Henry Clay, the gifted leader from Kentucky. The Assembly of Pennsylvania pensioned him, and in 1817, a year
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before his death, increased it to fifty dollars per month. Congress the same year granted him sixty dollars per month and dated it back a year. There be- ing no law to forbid it, this was attached by his creditors before it left the hands of the treasurer, and St. Clair never received one cent of it. Soon after the sale of his property he was turned out of house and home. Daniel St. Clair, his son, owned a tract of land on the Chestnut Ridge, above the Four Mile Run, and to this the old man and his family removed. Broken with the storms of more than three score years and ten, saddened by the memories of the past, and denied by ingratitude what was justly due him from his state and nation, he quietly awaited the last roll call. By this time, too, his wife, formerly the accomplished Phoebe Bayard, of Boston, had become weakened in intellect and was the addi- tional care of his old age. To secure bread for his family he entertained trav- elers, though his house was but little more than a four roomed log cabin. On January 24, 1814, he was granted a tavern license by the Westmoreland court.
To a truly altruistic man like St. Clair, who had really given of his abund- ance with a profligate hand to the weak and destitute, poverty, rather than a disgrace, was a bright and shining crown of glory which now only adds to his greatness. No one who was capable of appreciating true worth ever came in contact with him, even when in poverty, who did not recognize at once the presence of a statesman, a soldier from head to foot, a scholar in the broadest sense of the term, and a patriot pure and simple. Read his letter to the ladies of New York who, hearing of his needs, sent him a present of four hundred dol- lars, and compare it with our best English letters. We can only quote a few sentences :
"To soothe affliction is certainly a happy privilege, and is the appropriate privilege of the fair sex. And although I feel all I can feel for the relief brought to myself, their attention to my daughters touches me most. Had I not met with distress I should not have, perhaps, known their worth. Though all their prospects in life (and they were once very flattering) have been blasted, not a sigh, not a murmur, has been allowed to escape them in my presence, and all their plans have been directed to rendering my reverses less affecting to me ; and yet I can truly testify that it is entirely on their account that my situation ever gave me a moment's pain."
It has been said that St. Clair in his last years was somewhat given to the use of intoxicants. Though after the general custom of his day he often drank liquor, there is no authority whatever for the statement that he used it to excess in any period of his life. The last pen picture of him we have is given below in full. It refers to a period but three years before his death, when he was al- most overwhelmed with a mountain of sorrow, yet it is not by any means the picture of a man overthrown by the use of liquor. There are few public men of our day who would not feel proud to be described in words like those which follow. They are from the pen of Elisha Whittlesey who, with Joshua R. Giddings and James A. Garfield, represented the Ashtabula district in Con- gress for fifty-six years. Whittlesey was afterwards for many years an auditor of the United States Treasury, and therefore, by a life association with distin-
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guished men, could recognize ability when he found it. In a letter to Senator Richard Broadhead in 1856, he wrote as follows :
"In 1815 three persons and myself performed a journey from Ohio to Con- necticut on horseback in the month of May. Having understood that General St. Clair kept a small tavern on the Ridge east of Greensburg, I proposed that we stop at his house and spend the night. He had no grain for our horses, and, after spending an hour with him in the most agreeable and interesting conver- sation respecting his early knowledge of the Northwestern Territory, we took our leave of him with deep regret.
"I never was in the presence of a man that caused me to feel the same de- gree of veneration and esteem. He wore a citizen's dress of black of the Revol- ution ; his hair was clubbed and powdered. When we entered he arose with dignity and received us most courteously. His dwelling was a common double log house of the western country, that a neighborhood would roll up in an afternoon. Chestnut Ridge was bleak and barren. There lived the friend and confidant of Washington, the ex-Governor of the fairest portion of creation. It was in the neighborhood if not in view of a large estate at Ligonier that he owned at the commencement of the Revolution, and which, as I have at times understood, was sacrificed to promote the success of the Revolution. Poverty did not cause him to lose self-respect ; and were he now living his personal ap- pearance would command universal admiration."
St. Clair at no time in the army appeared so great as when under adverse circumstances he tried to save an army or prevent its destruction. So it may have been that in the poverty of his declining years only his true greatness as- serted itself, and shone forth all the more brilliantly. At all events, at no time did he appear to greater advantage. He easily forgot that the nation had taken the best years of his life and much of his property, and, now in want, another generation of rulers had refused to recompense him. One sentence from his letter just quoted is the key to his entire life. "It is entirely on their account that my situation ever gave me a moment's pain." He always forgot himself when the rights of others or the interests of the state were being considered. He was president of the Pennsylvania Society of the Cincinnati, and perhaps more than any other was an exemplar of their motto, "Omnia relinquit servare republicam."
Here, then, on the mountains, in a log cabin, lived the friend and companion of Washington, Greene, Steuben, Lafayette, Hamilton, Franklin, Wayne and Schuyler, and in no small degree did he share their glory. When the Revolu- tion closed he was one of the leading men of the new nation, whether considered as a gentleman, a soldier, a scholar, or a statesman. His conversation was al- ways embellished with wit and wisdom. His manners were those of the pol- ished society in which his earlier days were spent, and no adversity could change him in this respect. In his solitary mountain home he was much given to reflection. Often he was seen wandering alone over the hills and through the wilderness with his hands behind his back and in deep thought, like Napo- leon on the bleak and lonely island of St. Helena. He often drove or rode
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down to Ligonier or Youngstown, and at the latter place frequently met Will- iam Findley, our member of Congress and one of the leading men of his day. At Skyles' tavern they often sat and talked for hours, and around them gathered their unlettered neighbors to listen to their conversation. St. Clair generally rode a small gray horse, but sometimes drove in a low wheeled carriage. He was then described as a tall man with square shoulders, cleanly shaved, and most dignified in his address. In his youth he was described as being very tall and graceful, with chestnut brown hair, blue eyes and fair complexion, and was moreover a complete master of all the accomplishments of the best society of the age. His portrait given in this work is from a later painting by Peale, the original of which is in Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
On one occasion St. Clair and Findley were talking, perhaps concerning measures in Congress for St. Clair's reimbursement. Findley was then a man of wealth and power; St. Clair was almost an outcast. Findley, with perhaps the kindliest feelings, said, "General, I pity your case and heartily sympathize with you." Whereupon the old warrior, broken with years and decay, proudly drew himself up and with flashing eyes said, "I am sorry, sir, but I can't ap- preciate your sympathy."
Toasted at a militia muster by a thoughtless admirer as the "brave but un- fortunate St. Clair," he drew his sword in an instant and demanded that the offender retract his words. He would not be complimented and commiserated in a breath ; his achievements in the service of England and America, in peace and in war. were deserving of all glory, without a compromising word of pity or regret.
On August 30th, 1818, he had driven down the Ridge on his way to Youngs- town. Most likely he sustained a paralytic stroke, for by some means he fell from his wagon and lay unconscious by the roadside. He was soon found by some passersby and taken to his home, where he died the day following, without regaining consciousness. Three graves were dug for him-one in Unity Presbyterian graveyard, near the house of Findley, and which was nearest the temporary home of St. Clair ; one at Ligonier, where he had so long resided ; and one at Greensburg, the county-seat of the county which was mainly erected through his efforts. The citizens of the latter place promptly held a public meeting in the courthouse, adopted appropriate resolutions looking to- ward his interment in their cemetery, and appointed a committee to wait on the family and ask that this be selected as his final resting place. This request was put in the form of a letter to his daughter, Louisa Robb, and was signed by the members of the committee appointed. The following is the letter, with the names of the committee attached :
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