by H. W. Brands
Tennessee shook its head over the Jackson-Benton scrape. Feuds and duels had lost their cachet from the early, rough years of Cumberland settlement, and though Jackson’s friends loyally backed him, the larger community wondered what a man of his age and reputation was doing brawling with youngsters like the Bentons. Two decades previous, Jackson’s injury might have been a badge of honor. Now it seemed a mark of stupidity. Before the fight he had been the darling of the state, the father-protector of her volunteers. Now he lay in a hotel bed, clinging to life and overhearing, through the fog of his pain, the puzzled criticism of those who had lately applauded him.
His reputation would have fallen further had the murmuring about him not been silenced by shocking news from the southern frontier. Tecumseh had been at work among the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles, preaching union and defiance. By now he had honed his delivery and made his message almost irresistible. An eyewitness to a war council of Tecumseh and the Creeks remembered the Shawnee leader’s effect on the Creek soldiers. “I have heard many great orators, but I never saw one with the vocal powers of Tecumseh,” this observer said. “A thousand tomahawks were brandished in the air. Even the Big Warrior, who had been true to the whites, and remained faithful during the war, was, for the moment, visibly affected, and more than once I saw his huge hand clutch, spasmodically, the handle of his knife.” Tecumseh told of his exploits in the north: “In defiance of the white warriors of Ohio and Kentucky, I have traveled through their settlements, once our favorite hunting grounds. No war whoop was sounded, but there is blood on our knives. The palefaces felt the blow, and knew not whence it came.” He preached his race war more passionately than ever.
Accursed be the race that has seized our country and made women of our warriors. Our fathers, from their tombs, reproach us as slaves and cowards. I hear them now in the wailing winds. The Muscogee [another name for the Creek tribe] was once a mighty people. The Georgians trembled at your war whoop, and the maidens of my tribe, on the distant lakes, sung the prowess of your warriors and sighed for their embraces. Now your blood is white; your tomahawks have no edge; your bows and arrows were buried with your fathers. Oh, Muscogees, brush from your eyelids the sleep of slavery. Once more strike for vengeance, once more for your country. The spirits of the mighty dead complain. The tears drop from the weeping skies. Let the white race perish.
They seize your lands. They corrupt your women. They trample on the ashes of your dead. Back, whence they came, upon a trail of blood they must be driven. Back! Back! Ay, into the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings! Destroy their stock! Slay their wives and children! The Red Man owns the country. War now! War forever! War upon the living! War upon the dead! Dig their very corpses from the grave. Our country must give no rest to a white man’s bones!
This is the will of the Great Spirit, revealed to my brother, his familiar, the Prophet of the Lakes. He sends me to you. All the tribes of the north are dancing the war dance. Two mighty warriors across the seas [Britain and Spain] will send us arms.
Tecumseh will soon return to his country. My prophets shall tarry with you. They will stand between you and the bullets of your enemies. When the white men approach you, the yawning earth shall swallow them up. Soon shall you see my arm of fire stretch athwart the sky. I will stamp my foot at Tippecanoe, and the very earth shall shake.
Tecumseh did indeed return north, but his message stuck with a faction of Creeks who called themselves Red Sticks and followed a chief named William Weatherford. In the complex cultural history of the frontier, few men so puzzled white Americans as Weatherford. He was more white than Indian (his father was Scot, his mother half Scot and a quarter French), yet he was more devoted to Indian independence than most full-bloods. His devotion inspired him to join Tecumseh’s race war, which triggered a civil war among the Creeks, between Weatherford’s Red Sticks and the more assimilated members of the tribe.
The war among the Creeks produced terror and chaos on the southern frontier. White settlers fled their farms for the safety of forts and blockhouses erected along the Alabama and other rivers. Fort Mims was one such outpost, having grown up around the trading establishment of Samuel Mims, a day’s ride northeast of Mobile and slightly farther northwest of Pensacola. Mims’s fort was a ramshackle affair, with several buildings linked by an afterthought stockade. In the late summer of 1813 it sheltered, besides Mims and his family and the regular clerks and clientele, hundreds of settler families from the Alabama Valley. The Creek war had frightened them, and in their fright they took refuge within the nearest wooden walls, flimsy though Mims’s were. They also implored Governor Claiborne of neighboring Orleans Territory to send soldiers to protect them. Claiborne consented, dispatching two hundred untested troops under the command of Major Daniel Beasley.
For a few weeks in August nothing happened, leaving Beasley to grumble at being sent to this hardship post. His troops spent lazy days avoiding the summer sun and watching the children frolic in the yard of the fort. The residents and guests wandered in and out through the open gate, stretching their legs, tending livestock, and slowly losing their fear of imminent attack. On August 29, two slaves ventured a few miles from the fort, only to run back claiming they had seen painted Indians. So complacent had Beasley become that he thought they were lying, stirring mischief for reasons only they knew. He ordered them flogged.
But that night and till dawn the next morning, the painted Indians the slaves had seen, and hundreds of others similarly made up, crept toward the fort. As the sun rose they flattened themselves to the earth in a swale a quarter mile from the stockade. For hours they lay silently, waiting for the noontime dinner drum that Weatherford had made the signal for the attack. They sweated; the sun rose higher. Finally the drum began to beat, calling the soldiers in to the mess hall and the children in from their games.
The Red Sticks rose silently from their hiding place. No one saw them until they surged across the open area ringing the fort and raised a soul-rending war cry. Now Beasley, finally believing what he couldn’t deny, ran to the gate of the stockade to close it before the attackers got there. He might have succeeded had it not stuck in soil washed down by recent rain. During the moment he needed to get it free, the fastest of the Red Sticks reached the opening. Beasley fell beneath their tomahawks and clubs, and they trampled over him into the fort.
Their very appearance appalled the defenders of the fort. “Every Indian was provided with a gun, war club, and a bow and arrows pointed with iron spikes,” a survivor named Thomas Holmes recalled. “With few exceptions they were naked; around the waist was drawn a girdle from which was tied a cow’s tail running down the back and almost dragging the ground. It is impossible to imagine people so horribly painted. Some were painted half red and half black. Some were adorned with feathers. Their faces were painted so as to show their terrible contortions.”
The soldiers and residents mounted what resistance they could. The attackers hesitated when five of their prophets, who had declared that the white men’s bullets would split in two and pass around their bodies, fell dead from undivided rounds. But their numbers—at least a thousand—were overwhelming. The Red Sticks slaughtered every white person they could reach, and when some of the whites took refuge in the buildings of the fort, Weatherford’s men set the buildings on fire and murdered them as they streamed out. By certain accounts, Weatherford tried to stem the massacre, but the attackers’ blood was up and they threatened to kill him if he stood in their way. Women and children died by the score and then the hundred, often dispatched in the most brutal fashion. Friendly Indians and black slaves were swept up in the carnage. The sole survivors were a dozen soldiers who cut a hole in the stockade and fled into the woods and some black slaves whom the Red Sticks appropriated for their own use. “The destruction of the fort is horrible to tell,” Thomas Holmes wrote. “There were 553 citizens and soldiers and among the number about 453 women and children. . . . Only 13 escape
d. The way that many of the unfortunate women were mangled and cut to pieces is shocking to humanity, for very many of the women who were pregnant had their unborn infants cut from the womb and lay by their bleeding mothers. They were stripped of every article of apparel; not satisfied with this, they inhumanly scalped every solitary one.” An army major who later led a squadron to bury the dead gagged at what he found. “Indians, negroes, white men, women and children lay in one promiscuous ruin. All were scalped, and the females of every age were butchered in a manner which neither decency nor language will permit me to describe. The main building was burned to ashes, which were filled with bones. The plains and woods around were covered with dead bodies.”
The Fort Mims massacre signaled a terrifying escalation of violence along the frontier. Inhabitants and onlookers were accustomed to spontaneous raids that killed isolated settlers by the handful. This attack was entirely different. It was premeditated, it targeted a garrisoned fort, and it produced hundreds of deaths. Everyone knew what Tecumseh had been preaching. The Fort Mims attack showed that the sermon was being taken to heart. One didn’t have to be an alarmist to fear that the aboriginal war against all the whites had begun.
James Madison, hardly an alarmist on the Indian issue, recalled the Tennessee volunteers lately released from service. Governor Blount relayed the summons to Jackson, by now returned to the Hermitage but still in pain from his bullet wounds. The rush of adrenaline from the prospect of combat supplied a natural analgesic. “Brave Tennesseans!” Jackson declared. “Your frontier is threatened with invasion by the savage foe. Already they advance towards your frontier with their scalping knives unsheathed, to butcher your wives, your children, and your helpless babes. Time is not to be lost.” Jackson ordered the troops to rendezvous at Fayetteville, in Lincoln County some eighty miles south of Nashville, in early October. As they had all heard of his injury, he felt obliged to assure them that he was ready to return to the field. “The health of your General is restored. He will command in person.”
In fact his health was far from restored. Jackson had escaped infection largely because the doctors who treated him left the bullet in his shoulder in place. Physicians in those days didn’t know what caused infection, but they did know that digging around in human flesh made it more likely. Yet their decision meant that his shoulder would never fully heal, which they also knew. In the short term his left arm was unusable. But he could get around, if not easily, and he could ride a horse, if not comfortably. And he was improving. “My health is good and my arm mending fast,” he wrote Rachel, only a bit too reassuringly, from the mustering camp in mid-October.
By this time Jackson’s worst fears about the Fort Mims massacre—that it signaled a unified Indian campaign all along the frontier—were subsiding. Intelligence from the southern districts reported that the Red Sticks were a minority among the Creeks and that most of the neighboring Cherokees wanted nothing to do with them. Jackson urged his lieutenants to cultivate the friendly Indians. “I wish you to receive and to treat with great kindness all such spies from the Creek nation as may offer you any communication,” he told John Coffee, his best cavalry commander. And he approved a simple scheme for keeping friends and foes straight. “Our friends shall wear white plumes in their hair, or deer’s tails.”
Jackson and his men set off at a blistering pace, to catch and punish the Red Sticks responsible for the Fort Mims atrocity before they could repeat the performance or disperse. His army covered thirty miles to Huntsville in eight hours the first day and kept pushing hard after that. Jackson’s cavalry, under Coffee, moved even faster. But the enemy was elusive. Coffee conducted an armed reconnaissance into Creek territory, burning villages and capturing supplies but finding neither Weatherford nor his warriors. Jackson’s Indian allies didn’t initially do any better. “I have spies out constantly,” a Cherokee leader named Pathkiller reported to Jackson from Turkey Town. “The day before yesterday our spies returned and they only discovered eleven fires about fifteen miles from this place. . . . They were not warring [parties] because women were seen about the fires.”
Yet hints and rumors placed the Red Sticks in the vicinity of the Ten Islands of the Coosa River, and Jackson marched in that direction. “We are now within twenty miles of the Ten Islands and it is said within sixteen of the enemy,” Jackson informed Governor Blount in late October. Jackson’s spies said the Red Sticks numbered a thousand, but he had his doubts. “Any force they may have so near us, I cannot believe to be very great.”
Jackson worried less about the Indians than about hunger. His army wasn’t large but it went through wagons of food—when it could get them. Lately it hadn’t seen any wagons and was living off the land, which in late autumn wasn’t yielding much. Jackson’s raiders scrounged from the Indian villages they burned. “I yesterday sent out Lieutenant Colonel Dyer with two hundred of the cavalry to attack a town called Littefutchee about twenty miles distant. This morning about four o’clock they returned, bringing with them about thirty prisoners: men, women, and children. The village they burnt. What is very agreeable, they state they found in the fields near the village a considerable quantity of corn, and in the country round-about many beeves.” Unfortunately Dyer’s company lacked the means to transport all the food, and in any event foraging was no substitute for regular provisions. “We have been very wretchedly supplied,” Jackson told Blount. “Scarcely two rations in succession have been drawn.” The men’s spirits remained good for the time being. “Whilst we can procure an ear of corn apiece, or anything that will serve as a substitute for it, we shall continue our exertions to accomplish the objects for which we were sent out. The cheerfulness with which my men submit to privations and are ready to encounter danger does honor to the government.” But moods changed on empty bellies. “What I dread . . . infinitely more than the fact of the enemy is the want of supplies.”
Jackson continued the search for Weatherford and the Red Sticks. He ordered Coffee’s cavalry brigade to reduce the Creek town of Tallushatchee. “He has executed this order in elegant style,” Jackson reported to Rachel a few days later, “leaving dead on the field one hundred and seventy-six, and taking eighty prisoners. Forty prisoners was left on the ground, many of them wounded, others to take care of them.” Most of the prisoners were being transported to the nearest white settlement. But one—not exactly a prisoner, since he was an infant—was receiving special treatment. “I send on a little Indian boy for Andrew,” Jackson told Rachel. “All his family is destroyed. He is about the age of Theodore.”
Rarely did the two sides of Jackson—the fierce and the tender—appear so starkly counterpoised. The same letter that began with approval for an “elegant” raid that drenched an Indian town in blood ended with the news that Jackson and Rachel were adopting an Indian child orphaned by the action. This wasn’t their first Indian adoption. The young boy named Theodore had come to live at the Hermitage earlier, under circumstances lost to history. Although Jackson didn’t comment on the fact, he must have noticed the symmetry between his own behavior and that of Indian war chiefs, who could direct the most brutal attacks against adults and then take the orphans into their own lodges. Pity certainly moved the Indians in such cases, but at the same time the adopters sought to swell the ranks of their bands and tribes. In Jackson’s case, he pitied the Creek child—named Lyncoya—but he also wanted to provide Rachel another child and Andrew (and Theodore) a brother. Before the Creek campaign ended, the southern tribes would call Jackson “Sharp Knife” and deem him a fearsome war chief. At the beginning he was already acting like a chief.
The Creek War had begun as a conflict among the Creeks, and it retained that internecine aspect after the intervention of Jackson’s forces. In early November a band of Creeks friendly to the Americans found itself besieged at Talladega by a much larger contingent of Red Sticks. The friendlies, low on supplies and especially water, managed to get a message to Jackson at Ten Islands, thirty miles away. Jackson perceived a doub
le opportunity in the situation: to strike the Red Sticks while they were preoccupied with their Creek enemies and to demonstrate that friendship with the Americans meant something tangible.
Immediately upon receiving the message, Jackson ordered his troops to set out. Swiftness was essential, for in heading to Talladega he necessarily left his camp at Ten Islands, which included the customary complement of sick soldiers and some lately wounded, undefended. Crossing the Coosa took his two thousand troops—twelve hundred infantry, eight hundred cavalry—several hours. Marching most of the way to Talladega filled the short November day and much of the ensuing night. He let his men catch their breath just short of the reach and awareness of the Red Sticks, but two hours before dawn they were on the trail again, moving forward slowly now, careful to give no sign of their approach.
“At sunrise we came within half a mile of them,” Jackson explained in his after-action report. “Having formed my men, I moved on in battle order. The infantry were in three lines—the militia on the left, and the volunteers on the right. The cavalry formed the two extreme wings, and were ordered to advance in a curve, keeping their rear connected with the advance of their infantry lines, and enclose the enemy in a circle.” Jackson had no solid idea how many the Red Sticks were, nor they how many the Tennesseans were. But he hoped to lure them away from their siege and into battle against his forces. With luck the friendly Creeks would then attack the Red Sticks from the rear. Even if they didn’t, he hoped to encircle the Red Sticks and destroy them.
