Federal authorities in 1793 identified five hundred Muskogee towns where they believed the majority of insurgents resided. Secretary of War Knox called on the Georgia militia for federal service. The federal Indian agent notified the War Department that the settlers were set on assaulting the Muskogees and asked that a thousand federal troops be deployed to occupy the insurgent Muskogee towns. Although the War Department rejected that idea and war was postponed, the restless Georgian militiamen deserted after having rushed to the Muskogee territory to loot, burn, and kill, only to be forced to wait. Persistent squatter attacks on Muskogee farmers, traders, and towns continued.
During the winter of 1793–94, Georgia border squatters formed an armed group of landless settlers. The leader, Elijah Clarke, was a veteran Indian killer and had been a major general in the Georgia militia during the war of independence, in which he commanded rangers to destroy Indigenous towns and fields. As a US patriot hero, Clarke was certain that his former troops would never take up arms against him. Clarke and his rangers declared the independence of their own republic, but Georgia state authorities captured him and destroyed the rebel stronghold. Still, Clarke’s action sent a strong message to state and federal authorities that landless squatters were determined to take Indigenous lands. They would get the leader they needed for that purpose a decade later. Meanwhile, the elite of the Muskogee towns were successful in marginalizing the insurgents, while the federal government increased grants, and the wealthy class of Muskogees established trading posts, making whiskey cheaply available to impoverished Muskogees.22
THE DIE IS CAST
The successful settler intrusion into western Georgia made Alabama and Mississippi the next objectives for the rapidly expanding slave-worked plantation economy, which, along with land sales of occupied Indigenous lands by private speculators, was essential to the US economy as a whole. The plantation economy required vast swaths of land for cash crops, even before cotton was king, leaving in its wake destroyed Indigenous national territories and Anglo settlers who would fight and die driving out the Indigenous communities yet remain landless themselves, moving on to the next frontier to try again. US colonization produced the subsequent hideous slavery-based rule of the Old Southwest, which would flourish for seven more decades. Unlike in the Ohio Country, the Washington administration avoided force and in doing so alienated settlers in the region. By preventing them from wiping out the Muskogees, the federal government was seen as the enemy, just as the British authority had been for an earlier generation of determined settlers. But that would soon change with the Muskogee War of 1813–14, narrated in the following chapter, in which, as Robert V. Remini puts it in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, “Tennessee frontiersman Andrew Jackson, commanding both regular Army troops and frontiersmen, personally guaranteed that the Creeks would feel the full brunt of total war.”23
During 1810–15, then, two parallel wars were ongoing, one in the Ohio Country—the Old Northwest—which ended with the defeat of the Tecumseh-led alliance, and the other the war against the Muskogee Nation in 1813–14. Unlike the 1812–15 war between Britain and the United States, with which these wars overlapped, the situation did not return to things being as they had been before, but rather culminated in the elimination of Indigenous power east of the Mississippi. US conquest was not determined by the defeat of the British in battle in 1815, but rather by genocidal war and forced removal.24
US leaders brought counterinsurgency out of the pre-independence period into the new republic, imprinting on the fledgling federal army a way of war with formidable consequences for the continent and the world. Counterinsurgent warfare and ethnic cleansing targeting Indigenous civilians continued to define US war making throughout the nineteenth century, with markers such as the three US counterinsurgent wars against the Seminoles through the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to Wounded Knee in 1890. Early on, regular armies had incorporated these strategies and tactics as a way of war to which it often turned, although frequently the regular army simply stood by while local militias and settlers acting on their own used terror against Indigenous noncombatants.
Irregular warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.25
SIX
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS AND ANDREW JACKSON’S WHITE REPUBLIC
The settler’s work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler.
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
In 1803, the Jefferson administration, without consulting any affected Indigenous nation, purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte. Louisiana comprised 828,000 square miles, and its addition doubled the size of the United States. The territory encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Pawnee, Osage, and Comanche, among other peoples of the bison. It also included the area that would soon be designated Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the site of relocation of Indigenous peoples from west of the Mississippi. Fifteen future states would emerge from the taking: all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; Minnesota west of the Mississippi; most of North and South Dakota; northeastern New Mexico and North Texas; the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans. The territory pressed against lands occupied by Spain, including Texas and all the territory west of the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. These would soon be next on the US annexation list.1
At the time, many US Americans saw the purchase as a strategic means of averting war with France while securing commerce on the Mississippi. But it was not long before some began eyeing it for settlement and others proposing an “exchange” of Indigenous lands in the Old Northwest and Old Southwest for lands west of the Mississippi.2 Before turning to conquest and colonization west of the Mississippi, the slavery-based rule of the Southeast would be ethnically cleansed of Indigenous peoples. The man for the job was Andrew Jackson.
CAREER BUILDING THROUGH GENOCIDE
Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land. This trend of extermination became common in the twentieth century as the United States seized military and economic control of the world, capping five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism.3 The canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor (1871–90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, “The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world.”4 Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.
Andrew Jackson was an influential
Tennessee land speculator, politician, and wealthy owner of a slave-worked plantation, the Hermitage. He was also a veteran Indian killer. Jackson’s family personified the Protestant Scots-Irish migration to the borderlands of empires. Jackson’s Scots-Irish parents and two older brothers arrived in Pennsylvania from County Antrim in Northern Ireland in 1765. The Jacksons soon moved to a Scots-Irish community on the North Carolina border with South Carolina. Jackson’s father died after a logging accident a few weeks before Andrew’s birth in 1767. Life was hard for a single mother and three children on the frontier. At age thirteen, with little education, Jackson became a courier for the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of independence from Britain. Jackson’s mother and his brothers died during the war, leaving him an orphan. He worked at various jobs, then studied law and was admitted to the bar in the Western District of North Carolina, which would later become the state of Tennessee. Through his legal work, most of which related to disputed land claims, he acquired a plantation near Nashville worked by 150 slaves. He helped usher in Tennessee as a state in 1796, then was elected as its US senator, an office he quit after a year to become a judge in the Tennessee Supreme Court for six years.
As the most notorious land speculator in western Tennessee, Jackson enriched himself by acquiring a portion of the Chickasaw Nation’s land. It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command of the Tennessee militia as a colonel and began his Indian-killing military career. After his brutal war of annihilation against the Muskogee Nation, Jackson continued building his national military and political career by tackling the resistant Seminoles in what are known as the Seminole Wars. In 1836, during the second of these wars, US Army general Thomas S. Jesup captured the popular Anglo attitude toward the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” By then Jackson was finishing his second term as the most popular president in US history to that date, and the policy of genocide was embedded in the highest office of the US government.5
In the Southeast, the Choctaws and Chickasaws turned exclusively to US traders once the new US republic effectively cut off access to the Spanish in Florida. Soon they were trapped in the US trading world, in which they would run up debts and then have no way to pay other than by ceding land to creditors who were often acting as agents of the federal government. This was no accidental outcome but was foreseen and encouraged by Jefferson. In 1805, the Choctaws ceded most of their lands to the United States for $50,000, and the Chickasaws relinquished all their lands north of the Tennessee River for $20,000. Many Choctaws and Chickasaws thus became landless participants in the expanding plantation economy, burdened by debts and poverty.6
The division of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation and the rise of Andrew Jackson as a result led to his eventual elevation to the presidency and carrying out of the final solution—elimination of all the Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi through forced removal. After the Choctaws and Chickasaws lost most of their territories, only the Muskogees continued to resist the United States.
The Muskogee Nation was a federation of autonomous towns located in the valleys of the many rivers that crisscross what are now the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of Georgia and Florida. The Lower Creeks inhabited and farmed in the eastern part of this region watered by the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola Rivers, while the Upper Creeks lived west of them, in the valleys of the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Alabama Rivers. Following US independence, the Muskogees were divided by settler colonialism. Lower Creek villages became economically dependent on settlers and emulated settlers’ values, including ownership of African slaves. This was largely due to two decades of diligent work on the part of US Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. He was in charge of the US government’s “civilization” project, lending the settler moniker “Five Civilized Tribes” to describe the great agricultural nations of the Southeast. Hawkins’s mission was to instill Euro-American values and practices in Indigenous peoples—including the profit motive, privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealth by a few, and slavery—allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the Muskogees. At the time of independence, hundreds of settlers were squatting illegally on lands of Muskogees of the Lower Creek towns, and that is where Hawkins concentrated, leaving the Muskogees up-river alone. However, traditionalists among the Upper Creeks, who had allied with Tecumseh and the Shawnee confederation, understood that they would be next, as they saw the twenty-year Hawkins project transforming some citizens of the Lower Creek towns into wealthy plantation and slave owners, while the majority became landless and poor.
Traditionalist fighters, called Red Sticks due to the color of their wooden spears, began an offensive against collaborating Upper Creeks and settlers that ended in civil war during 1813. The Red Sticks created chaos that affected Hawkins’s scheme, as they attacked anyone associated with his program. Their effectiveness, however, provoked a genocidal counteroffensive not officially authorized by the federal government, led by Andrew Jackson who was then head of the Tennessee militias. Jackson threatened to form his own mercenary army to drive the Muskogees “into the ocean” if the government failed to eradicate the insurgents.7 Although Jackson and his fellow Tennesseans made it clear that their goal was extermination of the Muskogee Nation, their rhetoric claimed self-defense. In a series of search-and-destroy missions over three months prior to the final assault on the Red Sticks, Jackson’s mercenaries killed hundreds of Muskogee civilians, pursuing without mercy even homeless and starved refugees seeking shelter and safety. By this point, the Red Sticks had killed most of the Muskogee Nation livestock both to deprive US soldiers of food and to rid Muskogee culture of the colonizers’ influence.8
Both Shawnee fighters and Africans who had freed themselves from slavery allied with the Red Sticks. With all their families they set up a fortified encampment at Tohopeka at the Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama. Jackson proceeded to mobilize Lower Creek fighters and some Cherokee allies against the Red Sticks. In March 1814, with seven hundred mounted militiamen and six hundred Cherokee and Lower Creek fighters, Jackson’s armies attacked the Red Stick stronghold. The mercenaries captured three hundred Red Stick wives and children and held them as hostages to induce Muskogee surrender. Of a thousand Red Stick and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. Jackson lost forty-nine men.
In the aftermath of “the Battle of Horseshoe Bend,” as it is known in US military annals, Jackson’s troops fashioned reins for their horses’ bridles from skin stripped from the Muskogee bodies, and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given “to the ladies of Tennessee.”9 Following the slaughter, Jackson justified his troops’ actions: “The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders.… They have disappeared from the face of the Earth.… How lamentable it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the carcasses of the slain! But it is in the dispensation of that providence, which inflicts partial evil to produce general good.”10
Horseshoe Bend marked the end of the Muskogees’ resistance in their original homeland. As historian Alan Brinkley has observed, Jackson’s political fortunes depended on the fate of the Indians—that is, their eradication.11
The surrender document the Muskogee Nation was forced to sign in 1814, the Treaty of Fort Jackson, asserted that they had lost under “principles of national justice and honorable war.” Andrew Jackson, the only US negotiator of the treaty, insisted on nothing less than the total destruction of the Muskogee Nation, which the Muskogees had no power to refuse or negotiate. These terms of total surrender shocked the small group of Muskogee plantation and slave owners, who thought that they had been thoroughly accepted by the US Americans. They had fought alongside the Anglo militias against the majority Red Sticks in the war just concluded, yet all Muskogees were now to be punished equally. To no avail did the “friendlies” prostrate themselves before Jackson at the treaty meeting, begging
that they and their holdings be spared. Jackson told them that the extreme punishment exacted upon them should teach all those who would try to oppose US domination. “We bleed our enemies in such cases,” he explained, “to give them their senses.”12 Military historian Grenier observes that “Jackson’s ‘bleeding’ of the Muskogees marks a culminating point in American military history as the end of the Transappalachian East’s Indian wars.… The conquest of the West was not guaranteed by defeating the British Army in battle in 1815, but by defeating and driving the Indians from their homelands.”13
The treaty obliged surviving Muskogees to move onto western remnants of their homelands, and Jackson, far from being reprimanded for his genocidal methods, won a commission from President James Madison as major general in the US Army. The territory that would become Alabama and Mississippi now lay open to Anglo-American settlement, an ominous green light to the expansion of plantation slavery. The Muskogee War thus inscribed a US policy of ethnic cleansing onto an entire Indigenous population. The policy originated by Andrew Jackson in that war would be reconfirmed politically when he became president in 1828.14
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Page 12
