by H. W. Brands
The battle commenced as planned. Jackson’s forward guard poured several rifle volleys into the Red Sticks and then fell back to the main body of Tennessee troops. The Red Sticks, overcoming their surprise at being attacked from the rear, chased the Tennesseans. The center of Jackson’s infantry line was supposed to step forward and meet the charge, but some of the men, through a combination of misunderstanding and momentary failure of nerve, began to retreat. Briefly the battle plan appeared to unravel. Jackson ordered a corps of cavalry to dismount and fill the gap in the lines. “This order was executed with a great deal of promptitude and effect,” he explained afterward. “The militia, seeing this, speedily rallied, and the fire became general along the front line.” Now the enemy began to retreat, and the Tennesseans to pursue. “The right wing chased them with a most destructive fire to the mountains, a distance of about three miles.” Jackson judged that if he hadn’t been obliged to dismount his cavalry, the horsemen would have annihilated the enemy. As it was, the triumph was overwhelming: three hundred hostiles killed, against seventeen Tennesseans. Jackson couldn’t have been prouder of his men. “All the officers acted with the utmost bravery, and so did all the privates, except that part of the militia who retreated at the commencement of the battle, and they hastened to atone for their error. Taking the whole together, they have realized the high expectations I had formed of them.”
As gratifying as the victory at Talladega was, it did nothing for Jackson’s growing problem of supply. He had hoped some food might arrive at Ten Islands while his strike force was gone; none did. “We were out of provisions and half starved for many days, and to heighten my mortification when we returned here last evening had not one mouthful to give the wounded or well,” he wrote Rachel. What kind of commander offered nothing better to his brave soldiers? “My mind for the want of provision is harassed. My feelings excoriated with the complaints of the men.”
The complaints increased as the food supply diminished. “It is with extreme pain I inform you that a turbulent and mutinous disposition has manifested itself in my camp,” Jackson wrote Governor Blount in mid-November. “Petition on petition has been handed from the officers of the different brigades containing statements of their privations and sufferings and requesting me to return into the settlements.” Jackson couldn’t blame the men for feeling ill-used. They had risked their lives and were now being left to starve. He tried to talk patience into them, arguing that provisions were on the way and must arrive soon. He bought a little time by having the brigade generals poll their officers. One brigade gave Jackson four days: if supplies didn’t arrive in that time, they were leaving. Another brigade wanted to depart at once. Only Coffee and his cavalry brigade resolved to stay regardless.
Tecumseh’s troubles were of a different sort. After the defeat of the Shawnees and their allies at Prophetstown in the autumn of 1811, he had returned north lest Harrison draw the Indians into other premature battles. Tecumseh knew the Americans could crush the Indians if the Indians stood alone, and he placed less faith than his brother in the intervention of the Great Spirit. Tecumseh looked not to heaven but to London, believing that the struggle between the British and the Americans would give the Indians their—only—opportunity to reclaim what they had lost during the previous several generations. The Indians must organize, but they must also be patient, waiting for the struggle between the red coats and the blue to develop.
Tecumseh’s counsel gained credibility from an utterly unexpected source, one so strange as to beggar the imagination of nearly everyone who encountered it. Starting in December 1811 and lasting for several weeks, a series of enormous earthquakes shook the heartland of North America as no one living could recall it ever having been shaken. The quakes centered just south of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, but their rumbling was felt several hundred miles away. The heaving rerouted the Mississippi, creating channels where none had existed, lakes where there had been river, and islands where the land had been attached to the shore.
The region’s prescientific peoples—of all races—naturally detected supernatural significance in the rare and frightening event, and they tried to fathom what that significance was. No credible evidence indicates that Tecumseh literally predicted the earthquakes, but he was clever enough not to deny claims that he had. He had been near the epicenter, and several versions of the story had him saying he would stamp his foot and shake the earth, bringing destruction to those who denied his message. Even those minimalists who doubted that he had actually predicted the quakes found it easy to see them as a sign of a new era, perhaps the one Tecumseh and his brother had forecast.
The outbreak of formal war between the British and the Americans rewarded Tecumseh’s patience, and the early Anglo-Indian victories in the northwest made him more credible than ever. The rising of the Red Sticks in the Creek country suggested that his southern diplomacy hadn’t been in vain. In early 1813 it was possible for Tecumseh—and Indian irredentists generally—to be more hopeful than they had been in decades that they might again be masters of the lands of their fathers.
But then the British began to lose their nerve. They didn’t exploit their northwestern victories and drive deep into Ohio, as Tecumseh wished. And after Americans under Oliver Hazard Perry won a battle of the “big canoes” on Lake Erie, the British commander at Detroit, Henry Proctor, decided to retreat down the Thames River.
Tecumseh felt betrayed, and he told Proctor as much.
Summer before last, when I came forward with my red brethren, and was ready to take up the hatchet in favor of our British father, we were told not to be in a hurry, that he had not yet determined to fight the Americans. . . . When war was declared, our father stood up and gave us the tomahawk, and told us that he was then ready to strike the Americans; that he wanted our assistance and that he would certainly get us our lands back, which the Americans had taken from us. . . . You always told us that you would never draw your foot off British ground; but now, father, we see you are drawing back. . . . We are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must compare our father’s conduct to a fat animal that carries its tail upon its back but when affrighted, he drops it between his legs and runs off.
When it became apparent that Tecumseh’s scorn wouldn’t change Proctor’s mind, the Shawnee leader asked simply to be given the means to stand and fight the Americans.
You have got the arms and ammunition which our great father sent for his red children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to us. . . . Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it be his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.
Proctor wouldn’t do even this. He took his troops and weapons and headed north, leaving Tecumseh to decide whether to stand and fight or to follow. Complicating the issue, as always, was the question of Indian women and children. The British had promised to defend them, and Tecumseh had brought them forward to the British lines. But now the British were leaving them behind. Tecumseh knew he couldn’t shield the women and children, without Proctor’s help, from the Americans’ wrath. It didn’t take him more than a few bitter moments to realize he had to follow the redcoats down the river.
Proctor wasn’t quite as faithless as Tecumseh feared. The British general retreated to a position he considered more defensible, and there he turned to meet the Americans. Tecumseh caught up with Proctor and walked among the British ranks in the moments before battle. “He was dressed in his usual deer skin dress, which admirably displayed his light yet sinewy figure,” John Richardson, one of the British soldiers, recalled. “In his handkerchief, rolled as a turban over his brow, was placed a handsome ostrich feather. . . . He pressed the hand of each officer as he passed, made some remark in Shawnee appropriate to the occasion, which was sufficiently understood by the expressive signs accompanying them, and then passed away forever from our view.” To Proctor, Tecumseh said, “Father, tell your young men to be firm, and all wi
ll be well.”
Tecumseh must have known that more than firmness in the ranks was required. Proctor wasn’t a coward, but neither was he much of a soldier. “His inferior officers say that his conduct has been a continued series of blunders,” William Henry Harrison remarked after interviewing those officers, who became his prisoners in the battle for which Tecumseh was preparing the troops. “The contest was not for a moment doubtful.” Proctor possessed the advantage of terrain, having chosen a battlefield that restricted Harrison’s movements, and perhaps of numbers, although this was hard to tell, given the substantial portion of Indian irregulars on his side. (Harrison’s force also included Indians of various tribes, but many fewer than Proctor’s.) Yet the fighting style of the Americans, especially Harrison’s Kentucky militia, suited the forest in which much of the fighting took place. “The American backwoodsmen ride better in the woods than any other people,” Harrison explained. “A musket or rifle is no impediment to them, being accustomed to carry them on horseback from their earliest youth.”
Harrison’s mounted troops shattered the British lines at the start of the battle, leaving Tecumseh’s Indian force to carry the weight of the contest. They fought gallantly, and none more gallantly than their leader. Tecumseh placed himself in the thickest of the struggle. He urged his comrades forward, shouting defiance and showing the way. In his exposed position he was an irresistible target for the American rifles. One bullet hit him in the arm. He paused just long enough to bind the wound before taking up weapons again. He drew more bullets and went down.
His fall demoralized his warriors, and the battle degenerated into a rout. Proctor fled the field, leaving several hundred of his troops to surrender. The casualties were surprisingly light, given the lopsidedness of the outcome. Harrison counted twelve British dead and twenty-two wounded, against twelve American dead and seventeen wounded. “The Indians suffered most,” he added, “thirty-three of them having been found upon the ground besides those killed in the retreat.”
The Indian dead included Tecumseh. “I saw him with my own eyes,” Thomas Rowland, a major under Harrison, explained. “It was the first time I had seen this celebrated chief. There was something so majestic, so dignified, and yet so mild in his countenance, as he lay stretched on the ground where a few moments before he had rallied his men to the fight, that while gazing on him with admiration and pity, I forgot he was a savage. . . . He had such a countenance as I shall never forget.”
Tecumseh’s death killed his hopes of rolling back the tide of white settlement. Indian resistance would continue, but the unity he preached and imperfectly accomplished couldn’t survive without its apostle and ablest practitioner. Neither whites nor Indians had ever seen his like or would see it again.
Jackson applauded the death of the Shawnee leader and would have appreciated it more had he not been utterly occupied trying to hold his own army together. The men were constantly hungry. Provisions never arrived on time, and when they did arrive they fell far short of the need. Clothing wore thin and then out. Hundreds of miles of marching had put holes in shoes and boots, finally leaving the worst-shod unshod entirely. The weather turned cold, and the men shivered in the rain. The one thing that kept many of the volunteers from abandoning the field dishonorably was the knowledge that their honorable discharge would come in early December.
Or so they interpreted their terms of enlistment. Much of Jackson’s force had accompanied him to Natchez the previous winter, and these men counted their twelve-month enlistment as starting with their muster in December 1812. They considered themselves no less brave or patriotic than anyone else in Jackson’s army—or than Jackson himself, for that matter—but they had made plans based on service only till December 1813. Jackson hadn’t helped matters by his haste in recalling them to avenge the Fort Mims massacre. The men had leaped to obey, but their very alacrity meant that many had had no time to prepare either themselves or their families for a long absence. They came without winter clothes and without having left means for their families to survive till spring. Farmwork needed doing; mortgages had to be paid. “If they do not get home soon, there are many of them who will be literally ruined,” Colonel William Martin told Jackson on December 4.
Martin commanded the most restive regiment, and he found himself caught between the understandable desire of his men to get home and Jackson’s insistence that they stay. To encourage participation in the Creek campaign, Martin and his fellow officers had emphasized that the men wouldn’t be asked to serve beyond December 10. “This was one of our strongest arguments to get the men out,” he told Jackson. Without it, many of them wouldn’t have come. For their discharge to be delayed would provoke great distress and anger. Martin realized this wasn’t what Jackson wanted to hear, and so it was with trepidation that he made his men’s case to the general.
It would be desirable for those men who have served with honor to be honorably discharged, and that they should return to their families and friends without even the semblance of disgrace. . . . It is with their General, whom they love, to place them in that situation. They say, and with truth, that with him they have suffered, have fought and have conquered. They feel a pride of having fought under his command. . . . But having devoted considerable portion of their time to the service of their country, by which their domestic concerns are much deranged, they wish to return and attend to their own affairs. Above all things they wish to part with their General with that cordiality with which they have served together. . . . This is the language and those are the feelings of these noble hearted soldiers.
Jackson was beginning to have doubts about the noble hearts of Martin’s soldiers, but he was absolutely sure the colonel wasn’t doing anything to enhance their nobility. Martin should be appealing to the patriotism of the men, Jackson judged, not pandering to their homesickness. Yet Jackson managed to hold his temper while he composed his response, which took the same high ground Martin trod. “It is well known that the 10th of December 1812 was the proudest day of my life,” Jackson said. “It was the proudest day for West Tennessee. . . . We braved the snowy blasts and the dangers of the icy sea”—river, that is—“without murmur, did our duty and established a fame by our proper conduct.” Officers and men had stood together against the “fatal order” of dismissal from service, and had returned to Tennessee together. They must stand together now. The men had enlisted for twelve months’ service but had given barely four. Their term would expire not on December 10 but the following June. This should have been clear to the officers, who should have made it clear to the men.
Jackson closed with an appeal and a warning. “The honor of the volunteers has been the constant care, theme, and pride of life. It is so still, and I have a pleasing hope that they will nobly die before they will do an act that will disgrace them. I still have a pleasing hope, when they reflect upon the rules and articles of war, they never will attempt an act of mutiny.” But they must know that if they did, he would act accordingly. “I will quell mutiny and punish desertion when and wheresoever it may be attempted. I shall always do my duty.”
As a showdown loomed, a group of Jackson’s officers tried to avert it. “Our men have come out with patriotic motives but were advised not to bring their clothing necessary for the present and approaching season,” they said. The men’s horses were worn out and required replacing. “If permitted to return only the shortest time to their homes,” the officers promised, the troops “would get fresh horses and bring clothing, prepared to go with you through the winter season or until the end of the campaign.” The men were not mutinous, merely hungry and cold. “We find this only one sentiment pervades the whole of our men, and hope you will modify your order.”
Jackson didn’t relish a showdown, either. He tried to prevent it by haranguing his superiors and provisioners to deliver the food and clothing his men so desperately needed. “In the name of God, what is McGee doing?” he demanded regarding one jobber who had taken the government’s money but not de
livered the bread he had promised. “It is wholly unaccountable that not a pound of it has ever arrived.” And he explained to his men that even if he wanted to discharge them, he lacked the authority to do so. Only the governor could discharge the militia.
This last argument was correct but disingenuous. Jackson had never allowed lack of authority to prevent him from doing what he thought duty required, and he wouldn’t have allowed lack of authority to prevent him from discharging the troops. Yet he employed the argument to give himself more time. He conspicuously applied to the governor for permission to discharge, knowing that the application and any response would consume two weeks or more and hoping that supplies would arrive in the meantime. He guessed that full bellies would change everything.
The tension escalated as December 10 approached. “What may be attempted tomorrow I cannot tell,” Jackson wrote Coffee on the ninth. But Jackson was ready, and he wanted Coffee, who controlled the road home, to be ready as well. “Should they attempt to march off in mass, I shall do my duty. Should the mutineers be too strong, and you should meet any officers or men returning without my written authority, you will arrest and bring them back. . . . If they attempt to disobey your order, you will immediately fire on them and continue the fire until they are subdued.”
That evening the crisis came to a head. One of Jackson’s lieutenants arrived breathless at his tent with word that his brigade of volunteers was preparing to march north at daybreak. Jackson scribbled an order to the whole army: “The commanding general being informed that an actual mutiny exists in his camp, all officers and soldiers are commanded to put it down.” The offending brigade was ordered to assemble in formation. Jackson directed that his artillery be placed in front of and behind the volunteer brigade, with cannons at the ready. Loyal militia units were stationed on the route north.
