by H. W. Brands
Harrison was in his twelfth year as governor of Indiana Territory, following a decade of military and civilian service on the Ohio frontier. No one knew the Indians of the West better than Harrison, and no western Indian worried him more than Tecumseh. Until recently Tecumseh had labored in the shadow of his brother, the strangely charismatic figure whites called the Prophet. An injury in youth had taken the Prophet’s right eye, which had the paradoxical effect of causing those who met him to sense that he saw things they didn’t. There was nothing wrong with his tongue, which spoke fluently of things seen and unseen, past and future. The past and future ran together in the Prophet’s mind’s eye, which perceived an America without white men, where Indians lived as they had lived since before the eldest elders could recall, at peace with nature and enjoying its bounty. His vision was that of the Great Spirit, or so he said and his followers believed. They also believed that the Great Spirit spoke through him. And the Great Spirit said:
My children, you complain that the animals of the forest are few and scattered. How shall it be otherwise? You destroy them yourselves for the skins only, and leave their bodies to rot or give the best pieces to the whites. I am displeased when I see this, and take them back to the earth that they may not come to you again. You must kill no more animals than are necessary to feed and clothe you. . . . I made all the trees of the forest for your use, but the maple I love the best because it yields sugar for your little ones. You must make it only for them, but sell none to the whites. . . . If you take more than is necessary for your own use, you shall die.
It was easy at first for whites to underestimate the Prophet and the appeal of his message to the western tribes. Thomas Jefferson did. “I concluded . . . that he was a visionary, enveloped in the clouds of their antiquities, and vainly endeavoring to lead back his brethren to the fancied beatitudes of their golden age,” Jefferson said. “I thought there was little danger of his making many proselytes from the habits and comforts they had learned from the whites, to the hardships and privations of savagism, and no great harm if he did. We let him go on, therefore, unmolested.”
Tecumseh was harder to ignore, being much of what his brother was not. Tecumseh was tall and athletically handsome, with arresting demeanor and gaze. “One of the finest looking men I ever saw,” an American army captain wrote after meeting Tecumseh. “About six feet high, straight, with large, fine features, and altogether a daring bold-looking fellow.” Tecumseh’s eloquence was practical rather than mystical, his energy attuned to what might be achieved rather than what might be believed. While the Prophet spoke of a spiritual union of Indians against whites, Tecumseh traveled from village to village and nation to nation, forging a military alliance of Indians against whites. In one respect his task was easy, for by the beginning of the nineteenth century scarcely a tribe of the Ohio Valley hadn’t been cheated out of land by the whites or by Indians corrupted by white promises and white liquor. In another respect, though, the very cheating made his job harder, for the Indians who signed away the land had cast their lot with the whites and weren’t prepared to abandon their sponsors. Some of their resistance to Tecumseh’s message revealed simple self-interest, the reluctance of the comfortable to risk what they had. But some of it reflected a reasoned judgment that the actual alternative to accommodation of whites wasn’t removal of the whites but destruction of the Indians. Tecumseh might preach revival, they said, but he courted disaster.
Those Indians who opposed Tecumseh informed the whites, including Governor Harrison, of his movements and activities. Harrison grew especially nervous when he learned that Tecumseh had approached the British in Canada about weapons and supplies. Till now the trump card of American officials in Ohio and throughout the West had been their monopoly of the trade goods and provisions the Indians had come to depend on. The Prophet’s message of Indian self-sufficiency threatened this monopoly but not seriously, in the judgment of Jefferson and other American officials who concluded that most Indians were addicted to the conveniences contact with whites had brought them. Tecumseh’s challenge was more threatening because it was more realistic. He didn’t eschew civilization but aimed to acquire it, or at least its accoutrements, from the British. “You, Father, have nourished us, and raised us up from childhood,” he addressed the British commander at Fort Malden, on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, in the ceremonial language of Indian diplomacy. “We are now men, and think ourselves capable of defending our country, in which you have given us active assistance and always advice. We are now determined to defend it ourselves . . . and leave you behind, but expecting you will push forward towards us what may be necessary to supply our wants.”
Harrison warned Tecumseh and his followers that they were inviting trouble. “Do not think that the red coats can protect you,” he declared, referring to the British. “They are not able to protect themselves. They do not think of going to war with us. If they did, in a few moons you would see our flags wave on all the forts of Canada.” Harrison asked Tecumseh and the Prophet to consider what they were up against. “I know your warriors are brave. . . . But what can a few brave warriors do against the innumerable warriors of the Seventeen Fires [the United States]? Our blue coats are more numerous than you can count, and our hunting shirts [militia] are like the leaves of the forest or the grains of sand on the Wabash.”
How much Tecumseh knew of American politics at this time is unclear. If he had been listening to the war hawks, he must have questioned Harrison’s assertion that there would be no war between the blue coats and the red coats. He might also have guessed that his own actions and those of his Indian allies could be instrumental in determining whether the Americans and British went to war. One thing he knew for certain: the Indians were losing the peace. Year after year the Americans seized more land, sometimes cloaking the seizure in the language of treaties, often not bothering. Tecumseh wasn’t eager to fight. He didn’t dispute Harrison’s reckoning of the disparity between the numbers of Indians and of whites. But he saw little choice.
He confronted Harrison at a council that became famous throughout the West. In August 1810 Tecumseh and several dozen Indians from various tribes met the governor at Vincennes, the capital of Indiana Territory. By now it was plain to Harrison that Tecumseh was “the great man of the party,” as the governor reported to the secretary of war at Washington. Harrison accordingly listened closely while Tecumseh presented the Indian case. The Shawnee leader recounted relations between the Indians of the Ohio Valley and the various interlopers. The French had come first. “They gave us many presents and treated us well. They asked for a small piece of country to live on” and were satisfied with that. The British followed and fought with the French. At first they too treated the Indians well. But then they fought with the Americans, and their fight became the Indians’ fight. “They never troubled us for our lands, but they have done worse by inducing us to go to war.” Several tribes suffered in the conflict between the British and the Americans, and nearly all suffered in the aftermath of the American victory. The Americans murdered Indians, even those bearing flags of peace, and stole their land. The Americans set one tribe against its neighbors and provoked them all to war.
You try to force the red people to do some injury. It is you that is pushing them on to do mischief. You endeavour to make destructions. You wish to prevent the Indians to do as we wish—to unite and let them consider their land as the common property of the whole. You take tribes aside and advise them not to come into this measure. . . . You want by your distinctions of Indian tribes in allotting to each a particular track of land to make them to war with each other. . . . You are continually driving the red people. . . . At last you will drive them into the great lake.
Tecumseh didn’t disguise his contempt for the accommodationists among the Indians or his strategy for dealing with them. He said he intended “to destroy village chiefs by whom all mischief is done. It is they who sell our land to the Americans. Our object is to let all our
affairs be transacted by warriors.” The warriors were taking matters into their own hands. “We shall have a great council at which all the tribes shall be present, when we will show to those who sold that they have no right to sell. . . . We will know what will be done with those chiefs that did sell the land to you. I am not alone in this determination. It is the determination of all the warriors and red people that listen to me.” Harrison should take heed and act accordingly. “I now wish you to listen to me. If you do not it will appear as if you wished me to kill all the chiefs that sold you this land. I tell you this because I am authorized by all the tribes to do so. I am at the head of them all. . . . If you do not restore the land you will have a hand in killing them.”
Harrison started to answer Tecumseh’s charges. The governor said the United States had treated the Indians with fairness and justice. But he hadn’t got far when Tecumseh suddenly stood up, as did his bodyguard of several young warriors with clubs. By Harrison’s account, Tecumseh spoke “with great vehemence and anger” and, by the account of Harrison’s interpreter, called the governor a liar. Harrison’s own bodyguard leaped to the governor’s side, and for a moment it looked as though the looming war would commence then and there. Yet restraint prevailed, even if it couldn’t save this council session, which ended abruptly.
Harrison and Tecumseh met the next day, after tempers had cooled, but to no more positive effect. Harrison said he would relay Tecumseh’s comments to the Great Chief—the American president. It would take time, though, as the American capital was far away.
Tecumseh said he would wait for an answer. “As the Great Chief is to determine the matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put some sense into his head to induce him to direct you to give up this land. It is true; he is so far off. He will not be injured by the war. He may still sit in his town and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out.”
Jackson knew Tecumseh and the Prophet only by reputation. Yet he understood what their movement meant for life all along the frontier. Indian attacks had continued to diminish during the first decade of the nineteenth century, but only a fool would have attributed the decline to any broad conversion of the natives to white manners and practices. Rather it reflected a fatalistic feeling that resistance was futile. This feeling might change in a moment, should an able and persuasive leader—Tecumseh, for example—begin preaching unity in strength. And if that leader had access to British weapons—as Tecumseh apparently did—there might be bloody hell to pay.
Jackson had long been nervous about British meddling. As the one responsible for the security of western Tennessee, he couldn’t afford to be otherwise. In 1808 a man named William Meadows reported a harrowing escape from a large band of Creek warriors who had massacred three families and several other persons near the Tennessee River. Significantly, Meadows added that twelve white men were traveling with the war party that attacked him and the deceased. Jackson would have judged such an attack by Indians alone sufficient grounds for mounting a reprisal, but the presence of the whites among the Creeks struck him as especially alarming. “There can remain no doubt but the twelve whites with them must be agents of a foreign nation exciting the Creeks to hostilities against the United States,” Jackson wrote President Jefferson. “These horrid scenes bring fresh to our recollection the influence during the Revolutionary War that raised the scalping knife and tomahawk against our defenseless women and children. I have but little doubt the present savage cruelty is excited from the same source. The blood of our innocent citizens must not flow with impunity. Justice forbids it, and the present relative situation of our country with foreign nations requires speedy redress and a final check of these hostile murdering Creeks.” Jackson explained that he had put his militia units on the alert. Officers and men were ready to march. But the hard times had left them short of the weapons they required. Jackson hoped the president could help. “Without arms, although brave we cannot fight.”
Three weeks later Jackson discovered, to his enormous embarrassment, that William Meadows was a spinner of tales. Exaggerated atrocity stories were a staple of frontier life. Often the exaggeration was the understandable result of trauma, of survivors overestimating the ordeals they had gone through. Sometimes it was deliberate, the work of persons who hoped to clear Indians from desirable land. Meadows’s motives were unknown, but Jackson’s investigation showed his report to be greatly embellished or wholly fabricated. “In all probability,” Jackson admitted to Jefferson, “William Meadows is a base man and devoid of truth.” Yet Jackson didn’t retreat entirely from the argument his earlier letter had made. “I am still apprehensive that part of the Creeks are not friendly disposed towards the United States, and it is still probable that there are agents from some foreign power instigating them to mischief.” This being the case, the militia continued to require increased support. Jackson said he had been paying certain militia expenses out of his own pocket. He was happy to do so, but his pockets had bottoms. And any policy that relied on the militia to support themselves was doomed to failure. They simply didn’t have the resources.
Jackson shared with Jefferson a lesson he had learned in the Revolutionary War, one that would inform his military policy—and in fact his whole political philosophy—for the rest of his life. “The poor always make the best soldiers,” he said. The rich were unreliable. “In the day of danger the wealthy enjoy too much ease to court danger.” The poor knew hardship and danger from their daily lives. When the nation called, they were the first to answer. A republic that relied on the poor would survive, a republic that depended on the rich perhaps not.
Willie Blount had his own reasons for fanning fear of the Indians. When Blount succeeded John Sevier as governor of Tennessee in 1809, he initially hoped for peace with the Indians, but he insisted that it be peace on white—or, more precisely, Blount’s—terms. Blount was Jackson’s age and had lived in Tennessee nearly as long. He witnessed the chronic conflict between settlers and Indians, and by the time he became governor he concluded that the only solution was for the Indians to move across the Mississippi. “I am willing to act justly towards them,” Blount wrote Jackson not long after entering the governor’s house. But justice had to be tempered with realism. And, realistically, the Indians would never have peace so long as they were “surrounded by states thickly populated by people who have different interests.” Blount proposed an exchange of real estate with the Cherokees and the Chickasaws: their current tribal lands for new lands west of the Mississippi. Tennessee didn’t actually own any land over the river, but the United States owned the entire Louisiana Territory, and as one of the states Tennessee had a fair claim to part of that. A portion of Tennessee’s claim could be transferred to the Cherokees and Chickasaws. “It would be promotive of their interest as nations to settle over the Mississippi,” Blount told Jackson. “Game is there very abundant, the climate friendly to their constitutions, and much of the country is inhabited by people (Indians) whose manners and customs are more assimilated to theirs than those of the people where they now live.” If they stayed where they were, they would lose their national character, if they survived at all. Beyond the river they could remain a cohesive people.
It went without saying that the emigration of the two tribes would benefit Tennessee. The state would gain land and eliminate the source of the friction that had vexed the people since the first white settlements. Blount thought his plan would serve the broader American interest as well. The residence of the Cherokees and Chickasaws—two relatively “civilized” tribes, and favorably disposed, at this point, toward the United States—would have a calming influence on their new neighbors. “Their intercourse with the neighboring Indians could by precept and example civilize them faster and make more favorable impressions on them of the friendship of the United States towards Indians in general than could be effected in any other way with ten-fold the expense.”
Jackson would come to agree with Blount on the merits of putting distance between the
whites and the Indians, but for now he needed the Cherokees, if not the Chickasaws, just where they were. As Tecumseh’s message took hold, attacks against white settlements increased. In the spring of 1812 a band of Creeks killed six settlers in Humphreys County and carried off another, Martha Crowley, the wife of a riverboat man. Jackson was traveling when the first reports reached Nashville. By the time he got back the reports had been confirmed. “My heart bleeds within me on the receipt of the news of the horrid cruelty and murders committed by a party of Creeks on our innocent wives and little babes since I left home,” he told Governor Blount. “They must be punished.” Jackson believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the British were behind the Creek rising. This made swift retribution all the more essential. “The sooner they can be attacked, the less will be their resistance and the fewer the nations or tribes that we will have to war with. It is therefore necessary for the protection of the frontier that we march into the Creek nation and demand the perpetrators at the point of the bayonet. If refused, that we make reprisals and lay their towns in ashes.” Striking hard and fast would yield the additional benefit of forcing the hand of wavering Indians. “The Cherokees will join us if we show an immediate spirit of revenge.” So critical was swiftness that the governor need provide only part of the expense of the campaign. “Give me the power to procure provisions and munitions of war by your orders, and I will pledge myself for the balance.”
When Blount was slow to respond, Jackson took matters into his own hands. “I shall wait no longer than the 20th or 25th,” he informed the governor in early July. “With such arms and supplies as I can obtain I shall penetrate the Creek towns until the captive, with her captors, are delivered up, and think myself justifiable in laying waste their villages, burning their houses, killing their warriors, and leading into captivity their wives and children until I do obtain a surrender of the captive and the captors.”
