Free A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans by Michael Farquhar Page A

he wrote, Johnson raised two regiments of Kentucky volunteers, and in the fall of 1813 led them north to join the army of his future rival, General William Henry Harrison. Their quarry was British general Henry Procter and his Indian allies under the leadership of the famed Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh. “Oh, how I did want to catch that fellow [Procter],” Johnson later wrote. “I never thirsted for a man’s blood but Procter was a monster.”
    The fateful clash came along the Thames River on the lower Ontario peninsula. Procter had been attempting to retreat after an American naval victory on Lake Erie made his position untenable, but Tecumseh shamed him into making a stand. On October 5, 1813, British forces were formed in a line of battle at Moraviantown, while Tecumseh’s warriors took up flanking positions along a swamp on the British right. Johnson’s brother James smashed through the British line, which sent Procter scurrying away to safety, but Tecumseh remained in position and kept fighting. It was then that Richard Johnson led a group of volunteers, known as “the Forlorn Hope,” into a nearly suicidal assault on the Indian flank. Tangled in briar and under a relentless volley, fifteen members of the Forlorn Hope were killed instantly and four more were wounded. Johnson himself was shot through the hip and thigh, but pressed on with the rest of his regiment. He received several more wounds and had his horse shot from beneath him, yet he still managed to kill Tecumseh 2 and thus break the back of the Indian confederacy that had long plagued the Northwest Territory.
    Richard Johnson returned to Congress in 1814 as a war hero, with the wounds that disabled him for the rest of his life to prove it. The Battle of the Thames had been one of the most decisive in the War of 1812, and Tecumseh’s death boosted his political fortunes considerably. “Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!” his supporters would chant during many campaigns to come. Johnson’s newfound status probably saved him from the furor that erupted over a bill he sponsored in 1816 that granted members of Congress an annual salary. (They were previously paid only for the days when Congress was in session.) Many of his colleagues lost their seats in the aftermath of the unpopular measure, and Johnson himself repudiated it the next year. He was also left unscathed by what historian Robert V. Remini called a “colossal boondoggle” involving the construction of a series of fortresses along the Missouri River to the Yellowstone. Johnson, who was chairman of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Department of War, secured for his brother James the contract to supply materials for the new outpost. Only problem was, the steamboats James Johnson had built to transport men and supplies couldn’t navigate shallow water. The ill-fated venture cost the government a fortune, but as President James Monroe noted, “the people of the whole western country” considered the project a worthy measure “to preserve the peace of the frontier.” The Johnsons were celebrated rather than derided.
    Throughout the rest of his term in the House, which lasted until 1819, and then in the Senate, Johnson’s popularity was enhanced by his consistent advocacy of veterans and war widows relief, as well as his efforts to end imprisonment for debtors. In a speech before the Senate in 1823, he declared, “the principle is deemed too dangerous to be tolerated in a free government, to permit a man for any pecuniary consideration, to dispose of the liberty of his equal.” Johnson’s principles drew him to a coalition emerging under the leadership of Senator Martin Van Buren that eventually became the Democratic Party. And to its future standard-bearer, Andrew Jackson, he offered his unswerving loyalty. Johnson vigorously defended the Hero of New Orleans over charges that he had