Anthony Wayne
Anthony Wayne (1745-1796), better known by his nickname 'Mad Anthony', was a brigadier general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). After the war, he briefly served in Congress before resuming his military career, winning a victory over a coalition of Native American nations at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
Born in Pennsylvania to a family of Irish immigrants, Wayne worked as a land surveyor before joining the Continental Army in 1776. Within a year, he had become a brigadier general, serving with distinction in the Philadelphia Campaign. His finest moment came in July 1779, when he led a nighttime raid against the British garrison at Stony Point, New York, capturing the fort even after sustaining a bullet wound to the head. After the American Revolution, Wayne won election to the House of Representatives as a member of the Federalist Party, working to help strengthen the authority of the federal government. In 1792, he became Senior Army Officer and defeated the Northwestern Confederacy of Native American nations that were contesting the United States' control of the Northwest Territory (modern Ohio). Wayne died shortly after his victory at Fallen Timbers on 15 December 1796, at the age of 51.
Early Life
Anthony Wayne was born on 1 January 1745 at his family's estate of Waynesborough in Easttown, Pennsylvania. He came from a family of Irish Protestants, and his grandfather had fought for the Williamites at the Battle of the Boyne (1 July 1690). In the early 1700s, the Wayne family emigrated from Ireland to the British colony of Pennsylvania, where Anthony's father, Isaac Wayne, found work as a tanner; over the decades, his tannery became the largest in Pennsylvania. In 1739, at the age of 40, Isaac Wayne married Elizabeth Iddings. The couple would have four children, of whom Anthony was the eldest. During the French and Indian War (1754-1763), Isaac served as a captain and raised a company of provincial soldiers. He participated in the 1758 Forbes Expedition to capture Fort Duquesne, in which he served alongside a young Colonel George Washington.
Growing up, Anthony Wayne was expected to inherit the 500-acre Waynesborough and work the fields as a farmer. But Wayne had other plans for his future; having listened to heroic tales of his grandfather's and father's military service as a child, the young Anthony dreamt of winning military glory himself. An insatiable reader, Wayne read all the military histories and classical works he could get his hands on and was soon able to recite both Julius Caesar and William Shakespeare. After completing his education at the College of Pennsylvania, Wayne became a land surveyor. In 1765, he and several of his associates were commissioned by Benjamin Franklin to survey 100,000 acres of land in Nova Scotia. After Wayne surveyed the land, which became the township of Monckton, it was settled by eleven Pennsylvania families of mostly German origin.
In 1763, Wayne married Mary Penrose. The couple had two children: a daughter Margarette (b. 1770) and a son, Isaac (b. 1772). Wayne and his growing family continued to live at Waynesborough, where he split his time between helping his father at the tannery and his own work as a surveyor. But, as relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain continued to deteriorate, Wayne found that he was being drawn toward the Patriot movement, which opposed the 'unjust' policies of the British Parliament such as taxation without colonial representation. In 1775, a year after the death of his father, Wayne was nominated to the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, a shadow government run by American revolutionaries; on this committee, he served alongside prominent Patriot leaders like Benjamin Franklin and John Dickinson.
In this position, Wayne became increasingly radical in his disdain for the British, leading his primarily Quaker constituents to remove him from the committee in October, for fear that he had become too war hawkish. By now, the American Revolutionary War was underway and rapidly escalating. With his brief foray into politics over, Wayne could now follow his childhood dream and enter the military.
Continue reading...
