Remember the Raisin! (All of it)

Most, perhaps all, American high schools have required American history classes. In fact, when I was curriculum director for a small rural school, American history was taught in elementary, middle, and high school. In all those classes, the progression was the same. A nod to the pilgrims, time spent on the revolutionary war and the civil war, The world wars were covered, and often the Vietnam war was squeezed into the end. No matter the grade level, the high points were the same. In all this study of American wars, the War of 1812 was barely mentioned. We might hear about Dolly Madison and the burning of the white house, but little of the far-reaching consequences of this conflict.

And yet, in some ways the war of 1812 was one of the most consequential and darkest of wars, especially for the indigenous population, with brutal and horrific acts perpetrated on all sides.

This war was fought on many fronts, from the Eastern seaboard to New Orleans to the Great Lakes. In the area around Detroit, British, Indigenous, and United States forces struggled for the control of the Great Lakes, a crucial area for trade and commerce. In 1812, war was declared. In August, US General Hull surrendered Detroit and the Michigan territory to the British. Soldiers from the Native and British alliance occupied the River Riasion settlement, a small village established by land grants from the Potawatomi to the French. 

Less than a year later, on Jan. 18 1813, US forces attacked the village and retook it in the first brutal battle of the River Raisin.  Four days later, the alliance of British and Native troops defeated the Us forces, in what was the deadliest defeat of the War of 1812. Of the nearly 1000 US soldiers holding the town, only 33 escaped capture or death. Even after the battle, the killing went on, with Native warriors taking revenge on the wounded prisoners, killing scores and burning homes and crops.

Throughout the United States, people were horrified by this ‘massacre’. “Remember the Raisin” became a battle cry, and a political slogan fueling violence and outrage  toward Native people and helping put William Henry Harrison in the White House.

But the defeat and slaughter  of the American forces only tells half of the story, the winner’s half. The battle cry does not ask listeners to remember the first battle of the River Raisin, where  American forces were equally inhumane and savage, firing on the wounded and committing other heinous war crimes. American history books call the first battle a ‘victory’ but it was just as much a massacre as the second, only a ‘massacre’ perpetrated by the winners of the war. The cry does not ask us to remember that the Native people were fighting against a vicious, inexorable invader. They were fighting for their homes, their lives.

The real tragedy of the Battle of the River Raisin is in the aftermath. In the years following, this fight was used as justification for the removal of Native peoples from their homeland. Native nations were forced to cede more and more land. Any hope for stopping US expansion disappeared. 

In 2010, the River Raisin National Battlefield park was established. With the cooperation of many Tribes, nonprofit groups, and government organizations, the park works to tell the story,  the full story of the Battle of the River Raisin, not just the ‘winners’ side. 

So we should indeed Remember the Raisin, all of it, not as the heroic winners of a long ago battle, but as a warning against the inhumanity of war, and a reminder that the victors in any war are not always the ‘good guys.’