The Harmar campaign was an attempt by the United States Army to subdue confederated Native Americans nations in the Northwest Territory that were seen as hostile in Autumn 1790. The campaign was led by General Josiah Harmar and is considered a significant campaign of the Northwest Indian War. The campaign ended with a series of battles on 19–22 October 1790 near the Fort Miami and Miami village of Kekionga. These were all overwhelming victories for the Native Americans and are sometimes collectively referred to as Harmar's Defeat.
From 1784 to 1789, there was considerable violence between encroaching American settlers and the Shawnee and Miami Indians in Kentucky, along the Ohio River, and at the few American settlements north of the Ohio, with some 1,500 settlers killed by the Indians. However, tensions did not escalate into full-blown war. Before the American Revolutionary War, the British had tried to preserve this area as a Native American reserve but were forced to cede what became known as the Northwest Territory when the United States gained independence. American settlers were eager to enter these lands and started to do so in large numbers.
United States Secretary of War Henry Knox at first resisted calls for military action against the resident Native American nations, as the new nation was in a financial hole and had more pressing issues to address. In 1789, President George Washington wrote to Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory (an entity not recognized by its Native inhabitants), and asked him to determine whether the Indians living along the Wabash and Illinois Rivers were "inclined for war or peace" with the United States. St. Clair replied that the tribes "wanted war," and called for American forces to be assembled at Fort Washington (now Cincinnati, Ohio) and Vincennes, Indiana.
Washington and Knox appointed Josiah Harmar, a well-respected veteran of the Revolution, to lead these forces on a punitive expedition into Shawnee and Miami lands as retaliation for the killings of American settlers and travelers on the contested frontier, and to deter the tribes from further attacks. The heavily indebted Harmar had no practical experience fighting Native tribes and suffered from chronic alcoholism, but his appointment was not contested.
In early 1790, emissaries from the United States approached tribal leaders with word that St. Clair wished to discuss peace with the Native Americans at Vincennes. These were generally not well received and reinforced St. Clair's decision to launch an attack. American Indian attacks continued throughout the summer, but just before the campaign was to launch, a party of Miami and Potawatomi representatives arrived at Vincennes to discuss peace. Major Jean François Hamtramck, the commandant at Vincennes, refused to see them unless all American captives held by the tribes were released, a demand impossible to honor.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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