Patriotic Fire

by Winston Groom

  Jackson did no such thing, but instead took the little boy into his tent and nursed him with brown sugar water until the child could be sent to Rachel in Nashville. Afterward, the Jacksons named the boy Lincoyer, and he lived with them as beloved as any of their own family until his death from tuburculosis at the age of seventeen.

  Next on Jackson’s list was the large Creek encampment at Talladega,* 24 where some 1,000 Red Sticks had besieged an old fort inhabited by about 150 friendly Creeks. They had been on the verge of starvation when one of their chiefs, “enveloping himself in the skin of a large hog with head and hoofs attached, left the fort and went about rooting and grunting, gradually working his way through the hostile host until he was beyond reach of their arrows.”

  By the time this bold hog-man reached Jackson’s camp, the Americans, too, were on the edge of starvation, their suppliers having failed them. Jackson nevertheless saddled up almost his entire army and moved on Talladega, which he reached in the early hours of November 9, 1813. They formed ranks at sunrise and moved toward the enemy in an envelopment formation similar to the one Coffee had used previously. In the ensuing battle 239 Indian bodies were left on the field, and others, wounded, undoubtedly died in the woods into which they had run. Jackson had 15 men killed and about 80 wounded.

  So far the campaign was going well except for the food situation. The men were down to eating a few biscuits, and “for several days General Jackson and his military family subsisted on tripe, without bread or seasoning.” When that ran out, they began dining on acorns, a meal that has become legendary in accounts of Jackson’s career. As the story goes, when several officers came to Jackson’s headquarters on behalf of their men to complain about the lack of food, the general had laid out before them an elegant table, complete with fine china, linens, and silver water goblets, and he invited them to dine with him. When the astonished men had been seated, Jackson’s orderly brought out a large silver platter piled high with acorns, whereupon Jackson solemnly pronounced words to this effect: “Here, gentlemen, you can see before you that we have no crisis. This country is filled with a wonderful bounty of natural food.”

  Before it got better, it got worse. The Tennessee militia mutinied over the lack of rations and tried to march back toward Nashville; Jackson halted them with his volunteers. Then the volunteers mutinied because their one-year enlistment had run out, and Jackson stopped them with his militia. But clearly the situation had become intolerable, and as the new year of 1814 began Jackson was compelled to cease operations and recruit an entire new army, which he did, bringing in some 2,000 men, supplemented now by a U.S. Army regiment of regulars that included a young lieutenant named Sam Houston, subsequently known as the Father of Texas.

  After retiring to winter quarters, Jackson at last was able to iron out the ration and supply foul-ups and ready himself for the spring campaign, in which he aimed at striking a final, decisive blow to destroy William Weatherford and his Red Sticks. The opportunity came in March 1814 at an obscure loop on the Tallapoosa River called Horseshoe Bend.

  The Indians considered Horseshoe Bend sacred ground. The bend itself was an oblong peninsula formed by the serpentine river and consisting of about a hundred acres of brush and timber, across the neck of which the Indians had built a formidable breastwork of logs, keeping their canoes at the opposite point in case they had to escape. Eight hundred Red Sticks manned the fortification in which they had fabricated two rows of firing loopholes. It was apparent on both sides that the Red Sticks were hunkered down for a fight to the finish.

  On March 27, upon a misty dawn, Jackson had the bend surrounded, while friendly Indian scouts attached to Coffee’s cavalry swam the river and took most of the Red Sticks’ unguarded canoes. The general had placed 1,000 of his soldiers on the banks opposite the Horseshoe to prevent the Red Sticks from swimming to safety, while along the narrow neck he formed up another 1,000 for the assault on the breastwork itself. About ten a.m., his army’s small six-pounder cannon roared into action, slamming balls into the Indian breastwork, but they merely buried themselves in the soft pine planks. Creek riflemen retaliated, but so far no one much had been hurt. Then, when Jackson observed the Indians trying to remove their women and children across the river, out of harm’s way, he halted fire.

  So it went until about half past noon, when there was no more reason for delay. Then the drummers of the 39th Infantry Regiment of U.S. Army regulars began to beat out the long roll—the signal to charge. Jackson’s 1,000 infantry rushed the Indian lines, with the 39th Regiment leading the way. The first man to get atop it was Major Lemuel Montgomery, who was immediately killed by a shot to the head.* 25 Big Sam Houston was one of the next to claw his way up the rampart and, brandishing his sword, was seen to jump down into the swarm of Indian defenders, slashing away.

  For the next three hours the battle raged fierce and desperate, breaking down into dozens of separate fights throughout the hundred-acre peninsula; with rifles, bayonets, swords, knives, spears, clubs, bows and arrows, tomahawks, rocks, fists, and teeth the Indians and soldiers went at it. About three p.m. it began to rain, and Jackson sent an offer urging the Red Sticks to surrender. Instead, they shot the messenger, and the battle continued with renewed fury. Houston was carried from the field, shot twice through the shoulder and with “a ghastly wound in his thigh” from a barbed arrow. He was not expected to live. Some of the Indians tried to escape by plunging into the river, but rifle fire from both banks soon turned the Tallapoosa red with blood.

  Late in the afternoon the fighting became desultory as the soldiers came together against isolated pockets of resistance. “Not an Indian asked for quarter, nor would accept it if offered.” Finally, when it became too dark to see, the fighting ceased, and next morning’s sun rose over a frightful tableau. Five hundred and fifty-seven Indian bodies were strewn over the little bend in the river; at least another 200 had “found a grave at the bottom of the river,” while it was estimated that another 100 or so died of their wounds in the forest.

  The back of the Red Stick confederacy was broken.

  After weighting down his own 49 dead and sinking them into the river to keep them from being scalped by any returning Indians, Jackson by midday on March 28 had his army—including 157 wounded—on the five-day northward march back to their encampment. His only regret was that William Weatherford was not found among the Indian dead and would have to be hunted down—or so he thought.

  Jackson had established his base at Fort Toulouse, ironically the original French outpost at the fork of the Coosa and Tallapoosa that Weatherford’s great-great-great-grandfather had built a hunded years earlier. It was rehabilitated and renamed Fort Jackson, and there the remaining Creek chiefs began coming to Jackson to surrender—fourteen of them in all. After securing promises of their good behavior, he pardoned them and set them free.

  Then one day a tall, light-skinned Indian with a newly killed deer slung over his saddle rode into the American camp and asked directions to Jackson’s tent. When it was pointed out, the Indian spurred his horse in that direction, where, at the flap of the tent, he encountered Chief Big Warrior, one of the friendly Indians who had been fighting at Jackson’s side.

  “Ah!” Big Warrior exclaimed. “Bill Weatherford, have we got you at last?”

  Weatherford began damning his antagonist as a traitor, and threatening to shoot him, when Jackson suddenly burst out of the tent.

  “How dare you ride up to my tent after having murdered the women and children at Fort Mims!” the general shouted.

  According to witnesses, Weatherford replied with the following soliloquy, as if from some staged modern-day Indian pageant:

  “General Jackson, I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to request on behalf of myself. You can kill me if you desire. But I come to beg you to send for the women and children of the war party, who are now starving in the woods. Their fields and [corn] cribs have been destroyed by your people, who
have driven them into the woods without an ear of corn. I am now done fighting. The Red Sticks are nearly all killed. If I could fight you any longer, I would most heartily do so. Send for the women and children. They never did you any harm. But kill me, if the white people want it done.”

  The great crowd of officers and men who by now had gathered around the tent began to shout in chorus: “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” But Jackson hushed them up, declaring, “Any man who would kill as brave a man as this would rob the dead.”

  The general invited Weatherford to dismount and come into his tent for an interview, which he did, dragging the deer along as a gift. It is said that Jackson talked of forming a lasting peace with the Indians and that Weatherford agreed, telling the general, “Once I could animate my warriors to battle; but I cannot animate the dead,” and similar sentiments, until the conversation finally ended, with Weatherford free to go. Afterward, Weatherford returned to his plantation at Little River, north of Mobile, where he resumed the white man’s ways and dress and lived the remainder of his long life amid his many slaves, raising cotton and livestock and telling stories from the days of the Red Sticks. For his part, Jackson, as Weatherford had requested, called in the Indian women and children from the woods and, as the spring of 1814 turned to summer, maintained more than five thousand Creeks against starvation by feeding them from U.S. Army stores.

  When news of the victory over the Creeks was received in Washington, Jackson—despite misgivings in the War Department—was commissioned a major general of regular troops in the United States Army, a significant leap for a former general of state militia or even of volunteers. He must have wondered, though, general of what, since his Tennesseans were all sent home to be mustered out, and in his whole department he could call on no more than three understrength regiments of regulars.

  Nevertheless, there was important work to be done. Washington had decided that Jackson should negotiate a peace treaty with the Creeks that would not only spell out their prospective relationship with the federal government and delineate their future territory, but also provide for “reparations” for the cost of the war. Naturally the reparations would have to be concessions of land in what the Indians presently considered their territory. Since the Indians didn’t have much to bring to the bargaining table, the general, in the August 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, was able to persuade the chiefs to cede to the United States for settlement some 150,000 square miles of land—twenty-three million acres—nearly three-quarters of the state of Alabama. When word of the treaty terms spread through the North, some people decried it as excessive and unfair, but Jackson’s reasoning was that American settlers were going to move there anyway, like it or not, and that it was best to separate them and the Indians from close proximity.* 26

  Then there was the subject of Spanish West Florida, which had been chafing at Jackson for more than two years. Many of the unrepentant Red Sticks had fled to Florida under the protection of the Spanish authorities, who gave them arms and military supplies. Jackson was certain no good would come of that. He fretted about it all spring and summer, but since the United States was technically at peace with Spain, he could think of no good reason to oust the Spaniards from Florida without causing an international incident. Though Jackson didn’t know it yet, a reason had already been provided by events five thousand miles away.

  Following his retreat from Moscow in the bitter winter of 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte saw his European empire beginning to crumble. His armies were defeated time and again by an allied coalition of Great Britain and most of the other countries of Europe. At the same time Jackson was slaughtering the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, Paris was captured and Napoleon sent into exile, thus freeing tens of thousands of soldiers of the British empire to deal with the Americans.

  Accordingly, by the summer of 1814 some 40,000 British troops had been shipped to the American theater as well as additional numbers of British warships. The Americans, though, could by now themselves muster nearly 45,000 men in uniform, but these were spread all over the land, and no one could know where a British force would strike.

  They found out soon enough when a British army from Canada occupied Maine and took control of its public property, while at the same time an armada sailed into the Chesapeake with the intention of taking Washington and Baltimore. News of the British arrival caused alarm in both cities, since everyone recalled the depredations a year earlier when a British force had attacked Hampton, Virginia. In that sorry episode, according to a British officer who was there, “every horror was committed with impunity, rape, murder, pillage, and not a man was punished!”* 27 Thus, the frightened citizens of Washington and Baltimore wondered, if the British had done that to sleepy little Hampton, what would they do to them?

  On August 24, 1814, the British landed in southern Maryland and marched on the nation’s capital with 4,500 veterans, many of them veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns, who simply steamrolled over the green 7,000-man American militia that Secretary of War Armstong had hastily assembled.* 28 Under the command of Major General Robert Ross and Admiral Alexander Cochrane, the redcoats entered Washington that same evening and set fire to all the public buildings, including the Capitol, the White House, and the Library of Congress. Spared only was the U.S. Patent Office, presumably on the theory that valuable things might be taken from it instead.

  The librarian of Congress had quickly grabbed the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the papers of George Washington, and other sacred documents and put them in carts to be taken into the Virginia countryside and, it was hoped, out of danger. (The next time this occurred was on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when all important and irreplaceable documents were shipped off in railroad trains to the U.S. gold reserve safes at Fort Knox, Kentucky.)

  Administration officials, including President Madison, fled into the countryside, but not before the president’s saucy little wife, Dolley, saved a portrait of George Washington and other historic keepsakes. So hasty was their exit that a full dinner table in the White House dining room, set with china, silver, and crystal, was left with a still-warm meal served on its plates—enjoyed with irony and mirth by British soldiers just before they burned the place down, or so it was said. The inability to defend even its capital city became the conclusive disaster for American arms.

  With Washington laid in ashes, and much plunder removed, the British next turned on Baltimore, which they attacked on September 12, after landing about fourteen miles below the city. There, however, things began to go wrong. The Baltimoreans had assembled a militia army estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 men and built up a strong line of earthworks. To the dismay of the British troops, along the route of march General Ross was killed by an American sniper, and no amount of bombarding by His Majesty’s imperial navy could bring Fort McHenry—key to the city—to surrender.* 29 When “dawn’s early light” revealed that Fort McHenry was still standing and that the Americans were firmly entrenched in their lines, Admiral Cochrane sourly called off the attack and sailed out of the bay, but not before his men plundered private property, razed churches, and even looted graveyards, prompting a congressman to exclaim that their conduct “would have disgraced cannibals!”

  The British operations against Washington and Baltimore were never intended to actually occupy those cities, but rather were intended as a diversion to remove American attention from New Orleans, a port with a population of about 25,000—by far the largest and most important city west of the Appalachians. Nevertheless, the attacks were humiliating for the citizenry, who could not understand how their soldiers had let such things happen. A young minister passing through gloomily described “the traces of devastation and death . . . visible in the half-covered graves along the highway between Baltimore and Washington. The blackened walls of the Capitol at Washington, and the destruction in every part of the city, presented an awful picture of the horrors of war.”

  Precisely what the British intentions we
re regarding Louisiana will probably never be known, but some of the facts and questions follow. The British government never considered Napoleon the legitimate ruler of France, and so whatever transactions he made while in power—including selling the lands of the Louisiana Purchase to the United States in 1803—were deemed null and void. That having been said, the British claimed to be anxious to conclude the war and entered into peace negotiations with the Madison administration at the very time that Cochrane’s fleet was sailing west to sack and burn the American capital. The American and British peace commissioners got down to business at Ghent, a town in western Belgium, but negotiations quickly stalled just about the time the British foreign secretary made his threat about burning the cities of the East Coast, capturing New Orleans, and turning the United States into an island upon which the Americans would be prisoners. Shortly afterward, however, the British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, wrote his foreign secretary to the effect that Britain should “not continue the war for the purpose of obtaining or securing any acquisition of territory.”

  The American peace commission wasn’t so sure, however, as one of its members wrote: “It is impossible to tell what is the real intentn. of the British Govt. on the question of Peace or War. They probably mean to be govd. by events.” In fact, the American suspicions were not unjustified; England then was on the verge of becoming the greatest imperialist power on earth, and her foreign policy tended to be shifty and opportunistic. Who is to say that if, as expected, the British army crushed the New Orleans militia as they had the militia at Washington, and took the city, they would not then declare the Louisiana Purchase void and plant the Union Jack in that priceless territory, comprising all of the American land west of the Mississippi—an area larger than the United States itself prior to the purchase. That certainly seems to have been the object, for Cochrane’s orders stated explicitly that he was not to be governed by any events arising from the peace commission then sitting at Ghent. Historian and Jackson biographer Robert V. Remini believes the British plan was “to occupy a large stretch of important and valuable territory . . . that could be demanded as the price of peace.” In other words, once New Orleans was conquered, British terms for ending the war would include the Americans ceding the Louisiana Purchase territory over to them.