Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 8).djvu/139

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ST. CLAIR'S CAMPAIGN
135

were not keeping up. Tonight (the eighth) St. Clair wrote a stinging letter to Israel Ludlow. Instead of having ninety thousand rations, as was promised, St. Clair had to write "by day after tomorrow I shall not have an ounce unless some arrives. . . If you found the transportation impracticable, you ought to have informed me, that I might have taken means to have got supplies forward, or not have committed my army to the wilderness. . . No disappointment should have happened which was in the power of money to prevent; and money could certainly have prevented any here. . . Want of drivers will be no excuse to a starving army and a disappointed people."[1]

Another exceedingly unfortunate affair demanded St. Clair's attention, in his opinion, that night. He had given carefully studied and explicit orders by which the army should march. As noted, General Butler changed the order of march as he threatened to do in his letter to St. Clair from Fort Hamilton. The reasons for the

  1. St. Clair Papers, vol. ii, p. 247. This letter may have been written at Fort Hamilton.