The siege of Fort Meigs was a significant War of 1812 military engagement in northwestern Ohio during the spring of 1813. British regulars and militia led by Brigadier General Henry Procter, supported by Indigenous forces led by Tecumseh, attempted to capture the recently constructed fort in order to forestall Major General William Henry Harrison's campaign to retake Detroit and invade Upper Canada. An American attempt to relieve the fort on May 5 resulted in heavy casualties, however, Procter was unable to breech Harrison's defences and withdrew after a 11-day siege.
In August 1812, Brigadier General William Hull surrendered Detroit, the Michigan Territory and most of the Army of the Northwest to British forces led by Major General Isaac Brock. In order to recover Detroit and advance into Upper Canada, the Americans quickly moved to rebuild. William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, was given command of the Army of the Northwest by President James Madison and accepted a commission as a major general in the regular army.
Harrison initially planned a winter campaign but his advance was hampered by bad weather and a shortage of supplies. On January 22, 1813, the wing of his army commanded by Brigadier General James Winchester was defeated at the Battle of Frenchtown. Harrison had been en route to Frenchtown with supplies and reinforcements when news of Winchester's defeat reached him. He withdrew back to the Maumee River, ordered Winchester's stores at the rapids burned, then pulled his soldiers further back to the Portage River. Harrison returned to the rapids at the beginning of February and began construction of Fort Meigs, named after Return J. Meigs Jr., the Governor of Ohio.
Fort Meigs was situated on the southeast side of the Maumee River slightly above the foot of the rapids. Across the river were the ruins of the old British Fort Miami and the site of the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers. Designed by Captains Charles Gratiot and Eleazer Wood of the Army Corps of Engineers, it would be the largest wooden stockaded fort ever built in the United States. The fort sat atop a 40 foot (12 m) embankment that sloped down to the river. A fifteen-foot earth and log palisade linked seven blockhouses and five elevated batteries, and encompassed an area of almost 10 acres (4.0 ha).
In early March, Harrison dispatched a strike force led by Captain Angus Langham of the 19th Infantry to cross frozen Lake Erie and conduct a hit-and-run attack against the British naval yard at Amherstburg in Upper Canada. Langham's detachment of 168 regulars and militia crossed the ice to South Bass Island but discovered that the lake was open to the north. Langham returned to Lake Erie's south shore and reported the expedition's failure to Harrison.
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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