River Raisin: Remember the Raisin

You are passing through Monroe, Michigan, thirty-five miles south of Detroit, where the River Raisin meets Lake Erie. What happened here over four days in January of eighteen thirteen was the deadliest battle fought on Michigan soil and the single greatest American defeat of the War of eighteen twelve. The rallying cry it produced would echo across the frontier for the rest of the war.

The trouble began with an American advance. General James Winchester ordered roughly one thousand Kentucky militia and regulars south to retake the French-Canadian settlement called Frenchtown from a British and Native American detachment. On January eighteenth, the Americans succeeded, driving the defenders back across the frozen river. They celebrated too soon.

On the morning of January twenty-second, British Brigadier General Henry Proctor arrived before dawn with about twelve hundred British regulars, Canadian militia, and Potawatomi and Ottawa warriors led by chiefs allied with Tecumseh. The surprise attack overran the American left flank within minutes. Winchester was captured before the battle was an hour old. Facing annihilation, he surrendered his entire force. Casualties among the Americans reached roughly four hundred killed and five hundred forty-seven captured. The British lost fewer than forty dead.

The massacre came the next morning. Proctor marched the prisoners who could walk north toward Fort Malden. The wounded, perhaps sixty or more men, were left behind in Frenchtown with a promise of safe escort. On January twenty-third, Native warriors who were not under Proctor's control returned to the village, killed the wounded men still lying in farmhouses, and set the buildings on fire. Some prisoners were tomahawked trying to escape the flames.

The phrase 'Remember the Raisin' spread through Kentucky and the frontier states like fire. It became the most potent recruitment slogan of the war's western theater, fueling the American campaigns that eventually turned the tide at the Battle of the Thames and killed Tecumseh in October of that same year.

The National Battlefield Park here, authorized in two thousand nine and opened the following year, is the only federal park in the country dedicated solely to the War of eighteen twelve.