by H. W. Brands
John Reid, who witnessed the confrontation at close firsthand, recorded the moment of truth.
The general rode along the line, which had been formed agreeably to his orders, and addressed them by companies, in a strain of impassioned eloquence. He feelingly expatiated on their former good conduct, and the esteem and applause it had secured them; and pointed to the disgrace which they must heap upon themselves, their families, and country, by persisting, even if they could succeed, in the present mutiny. But he told them they should not succeed but by passing over his body; that even in opposing their mutinous spirit he should perish honorably, by perishing at his post and in the discharge of his duty.
“Reinforcements,” he continued, “are preparing to hasten to my assistance; it cannot be long before they will arrive. I am, too, in daily expectation of receiving information whether you may be discharged or not. Until then, you must not, and shall not, retire. I have done with entreaty; it has been used long enough. I will attempt it no more. You must now determine whether you will go, or peaceably remain. If you persist in your determination to move forcibly off, the point between us shall soon be decided.”
At first they hesitated. He demanded an explicit and positive answer. They still hesitated, and he commanded the artillerist to prepare the match, he himself remaining in front of the volunteers and within the line of fire, which he intended soon to order.
Alarmed at his apparent determination, and dreading the consequences involved in such a contest, “let us return” was presently lisped along the line, and was soon after determined upon. The officers now came forward and pledged themselves for their men, who either nodded assent or openly expressed a willingness to retire to their quarters and remain without further tumult until information were had or the expected aid arrived.
Thus passed away a moment of the greatest peril, pregnant with the most important consequences.
None present ever forgot the performance. For many years Tennesseans told of Jackson threatening to blow his own men, and himself, to pieces to make his patriotic point. Participants disputed the details, including whether the threat to march had actually reached the point of mutiny. But none disputed Jackson’s resolve.
In Jackson’s army that season was a young man named David Crockett. Born on the banks of the Nolichucky River in eastern Tennessee to a family plagued by bad luck, Crockett left home at twelve to seek his fortune. He never found much fortune but did discover a gift for hunting and a knack for telling stories. He moved west with the tide of settlement and in 1813 was living in Franklin County, just north of the Mississippi Territory border, when the shocking news of the Fort Mims massacre set all Tennessee on edge. Crockett was old enough to have family recollections of Indian massacres—“By the Creeks my grandfather and grandmother Crockett were both murdered in their own house,” he said—and young enough (twenty-seven in 1813) not to have fought the Indians himself. “There had been no war among us for so long that but few who were not too old to bear arms knew any thing about the business. I, for one, had often thought about war, and had often heard it described.” The stories inevitably evoked questions as to whether the younger generation could match the courage of their elders. The Mims massacre provided a chance to see. “When I heard of the mischief which was done at the fort, I instantly felt like going.”
Crockett’s dependents felt differently, as dependents of prospective heroes often do. “My wife, who had heard me say I meant to go to the war, began to beg me not to turn out. She said she was a stranger in the parts where we lived, had no connexions living near her, and that she and our little children would be left in a lonesome and unhappy situation if I went away.” Crockett conceded the weight of her arguments. “But my countrymen had been murdered, and I knew that the next thing would be that the Indians would be scalping the women and children all about there if we didn’t put a stop to it. I reasoned the case with her as well as I could, and told her that if every man would wait till his wife got willing for him to go to war, there would be no fighting done, until we would all be killed in our own houses.” She wasn’t convinced, but she realized she couldn’t stop him. “Seeing I was bent on it, all she did was to cry a little and turn about to her work. The truth is, my dander was up, and nothing but war could bring it right again.”
Crockett served as a scout for the cavalry regiment Jackson sent south ahead of the main body of troops. Asked to choose a partner, he selected a teenager named George Russell. Crockett’s commander said Russell was too young, lacking even a beard. “I was a little nettled at this,” Crockett recalled. “I know’d George Russell, and I know’d there was no mistake in him; and I didn’t think courage ought to be measured by the beard, for fear a goat would have the preference over a man.” Crockett carried the point, and the two ranged far ahead of Jackson’s advancing force. They took part in the Battle of Tallushatchee, the one for which Jackson praised Coffee’s “elegant style.” In Crockett’s telling the fight was more savage than elegant. Coffee’s men, including Crockett, and their Indian allies, encircled the town and closed in on its inhabitants. Some of the women pleaded to be taken prisoner, and the Tennesseans began to oblige. But a group of nearly four dozen warriors barricaded themselves in a house, and when Crockett’s company started to assault the building, a woman whom the Tennesseans apparently thought was surrendering fired an arrow that killed one of Crockett’s comrades. “His death so enraged us all that she was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her. . . . We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it.”
Crockett and his comrades had shared the privations of Jackson’s army before the battle, and their collective hunger now contributed to an especially gruesome aspect of the denouement of the Tallushatchee fight. Returning to their own camp and finding no rations there, they retraced their steps to the Indian town in hope of discovering some stores they had overlooked. “Many of the carcasses of the Indians were still to be seen. They looked very awful, for the burning had not entirely consumed them, but given them a very terrible appearance, at least what remained of them. It was, somehow or other, found out that the house had a potato cellar under it, and an immediate examination was made, for we were all as hungry as wolves. We found a fine chance of potatoes in it, and hunger compelled us to eat them, though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them and they looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”
Crockett fought directly under Jackson at Talladega, and he marched with Jackson back to Ten Islands, where the general had hoped to receive the sorely needed provisions. “We were all likely to perish,” Crockett said. “The weather also began to get very cold; and our clothes were nearly worn out, and horses getting feeble and very poor.” Crockett’s colonel was among those officers who suggested to Jackson that the men be allowed to return home to fetch winter clothes and fresh horses.
And in the end Jackson was compelled to accede. The general could threaten to blow mutineers to kingdom come, but neither his threats nor his cannons could put food in the men’s mouths or clothes on their backs. In the weeks after the showdown he quietly discharged the most malcontented, judging their departure good riddance, and he allowed others, including Crockett, to take a few weeks to refresh, restock, and get ready for the final offensive against the Red Sticks.
As Crockett was leaving Jackson’s camp another young man, six years Crockett’s junior, was arriving. Sam Houston had left home at about the same age Crockett did, although in Houston’s case it was to run away and live with the Cherokees, his neighbors in the mountains of East Tennessee. Houston was a romantic by temperament. He had read Pope’s translation of the Iliad so often he had it nearly by heart. And the plodding life of a farmer repelled him. His five brothers tracked him to an island in the Tennessee River where he had joined the family of Chief Oolooteka. The brothers demanded that he return wi
th them to civilization and the plow. He refused, declaring (as he explained later, in the third person grandiloquent), that “the wild liberty of the red man suited his nature far better than the restraints of the white settlements.” The brothers departed, thinking the novelty of Indian life would fade and he would come home. But it didn’t, and he remained with the Cherokees. He adopted Cherokee speech, Cherokee dress, Cherokee tastes, and a Cherokee name: Colonneh, or Raven. “Nearly five years of experience in this mode of living initiated him into all the secrets of Indian life,” he recounted of himself, “and gave him a knowledge of the savage character that made him a complete master over the Indian mind, as his intercourse with the red man in after years proved.”
By the time Houston returned to white society, the War of 1812 had begun. He learned that the U.S. Army was paying cash bonuses to volunteers for service on the western frontier against the British and their Indian allies. As these latter didn’t include the Cherokees, who were siding with the Americans, he tendered his services. Tall, broad-shouldered, and physically self-confident, he made a distinct impression on his superiors, who included Jackson’s former aide and current enemy, Thomas Hart Benton. Benton helped Houston obtain promotion from ensign to lieutenant, which office he held when the War Department in early 1814 finally heeded Jackson’s call for reinforcements. Houston’s Thirty-ninth Regiment marched south to meet Jackson’s army at Fort Strother, not far from Ten Islands.
Nearly every young man who served under Jackson came to view the general as a second father, but for none did the paternal element matter more than for Houston. Houston had lost his actual father at an early age and spent much of his life looking for a substitute. Chief Oolooteka served for a time, and for this Houston was ever grateful. But a white boy couldn’t plausibly model himself after an Indian chief—at least not a white boy whose ambition burned the way Houston’s did, for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand—now there was a model for any lad. He was as fearless as Houston hoped he himself would be, as principled, as devoted to cause and country. From the moment they were introduced, during that difficult winter of the campaign against the Creeks, the young lieutenant sought to attract the general’s attention and win his favor.
John Wood wanted less attention from Jackson, rather than more. Wood hadn’t turned eighteen when he joined his older brother in one of Jackson’s militia companies. He may or may not have known that this particular company had been among the most mutiny-minded in Jackson’s army, held in camp at one stage only by the drawn weapons of Jackson loyalists. The episode angered the general and caused him to expect the worst of the company’s members.
Jackson was still angry and distrustful when Wood retired early from picket duty one cold morning in February 1814. The boy had been out all night with neither food nor proper clothing, and the officer of the watch told him to get some breakfast. He was still eating when a second officer encountered him and demanded to know why he wasn’t on duty. Wood answered in the tone of many of the militia, intensified in his case by hunger, weariness, and a certain innate emotionalism. His impertinent retort provoked the officer, who at once ordered him back to the perimeter. Wood refused, more disrespectfully. The altercation escalated, with the officer ordering Wood’s arrest and Wood waving his rifle toward those who would have carried out the order.
When Jackson heard that someone from the mutinous company was again defying orders, he flew into a rage. “Which is the damned rascal?” he thundered. “Shoot him! Shoot him! Blow ten balls through the damned villain’s body!”
Wood’s comrades were considerably more frightened of Jackson than of the boy, and, braving Wood’s brandished weapon, they persuaded him to put it down. He was taken into custody and placed under guard.
Nearly all hoped and apparently most expected that when Jackson’s temper cooled, the boy would be released and his indiscretion forgotten. He was, after all, a youngster, new to soldiering. Whether Jackson realized how green Wood was became a matter of intense debate after Jackson entered national politics. He claimed to believe that Wood had been part of the earlier mutiny and that this new violation constituted a second capital offense. Jackson’s enemies insisted that Jackson knew better and was looking for someone to make an example of.
In all likelihood Jackson was honestly mistaken. He cared deeply for his men, as he had showed many times and would show again. He typically forgave first offenders, as he had forgiven most of those in Wood’s company.
But honest or otherwise, Jackson’s mistake cost Wood dearly. Jackson convened a court martial and held it to a strict interpretation of the military code. The court found Wood guilty and ordered his execution. The whole army held its breath as Jackson let the lesson sink in. Nearly all expected to exhale as he suspended the sentence, as he surely must.
He didn’t. Convinced that the survival of the army depended on the restoration of discipline—and believing Wood a recidivist—he ordered the execution to proceed. “The offenses of which you have been found guilty are such as cannot be permitted to pass unpunished in an army but at the hazard of its ruin,” Jackson wrote to Wood in a letter read at the execution. “An army cannot exist where order and subordination are wholly disregarded. . . . The disobedience of orders and the contempt of officers speedily lead to a state of disorganization and ruin and mutiny.” Speaking to the other troops more than to Wood, Jackson continued, “This is an important crisis in which if we all act as becomes us, every thing is to be hoped for towards the accomplishment of the objects of our government; if otherwise, every thing to be feared. How it becomes us to act, we all know, and what our punishment shall be if we act otherwise, must be known also.”
Jackson never wrote a memoir of the Creek campaign (or of any other part of his life), but an account begun by John Reid, his chief aide, and completed under Jackson’s supervision after Reid’s sudden death, provided a close substitute. That work concluded its brief account of the Wood case with what certainly was Jackson’s view of the execution and its denouement: “Painful as it was to the feelings of the general, he viewed it as a sacrifice essential to the preservation of good order. . . . The execution was productive of the happiest effects; order was produced, and that opinion, so long indulged, that a militia-man was for no offence to suffer death was, for the moment, abandoned. . . . A strict obedience afterwards characterized the army.”
Obedience was essential in what followed. Jackson’s scouts informed him that William Weatherford and the main body of Red Sticks had built a fortress near the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers, where the Tallapoosa looped back on itself in a horseshoe bend, forming a narrow-necked peninsula comprising between eighty and one hundred acres. A village occupied the end of the peninsula, while a forbidding breastwork of earth and logs crossed the three-hundred-yard neck and secured the village from frontal attack. In March 1814 some thousand warriors gathered there, along with a few hundred women and children. “It is impossible to conceive a situation more eligible for defense than the one they had chosen,” Jackson recalled. “And the skill which they manifested in their breast-work was really astonishing. It extended across the point in such a direction as that a force approaching would be exposed to a double fire while they lay entirely safe behind it.”
Jackson nonetheless determined to take the battle to the enemy. For months he had chased the Red Sticks, and now that they stood to fight, he wouldn’t let his chance slip. He called on the men to show the courage of which he knew them capable. “An opportunity is at length offered you of manifesting your zeal to your country and avenging the cruelties committed upon our defenceless fellow citizens.” The men had suffered to reach this day and place; now was the time to redeem their suffering. They had chafed at his insistence on discipline; now they would discover what discipline was for. “In the hour of battle you must be cool and collected. When your officer orders you to fire, you must execute the command with deliberateness and aim. Let every shot te
ll.” Jackson promised his men he would never order a retreat, and he felt confident they would never choose to retreat on their own. But just in case, he stated his policy clearly: “Any officer or soldier who flies before the enemy without being compelled to do so by superior force and actual necessity shall suffer death.”
Jackson’s battle plan reflected his overall strategy for the campaign. The objective was not the Red Stick village but the destruction of the enemy. For this reason it was essential to prevent escape. The village touched the river on three sides, and the Red Sticks had readied canoes for flight. Jackson deployed Coffee’s cavalry and the friendly Cherokees and Creeks along the outside of the river bend, to cover the stream with gunfire in the event the enemy tried to cross. For the frontal assault against the breastwork, he relied on his Tennesseans. They had never stormed a stronghold, and he couldn’t say how well they would perform such a harrowing maneuver. But he thought it only prudent to reserve this most dangerous part of the assault to the men who had been with him the longest.
The combined force of Tennesseans and friendly Indians camped six miles from the Horseshoe Bend on the night of March 26, and early the next morning they moved out. Coffee’s cavalry and the Indians crossed the river and got behind the Red Stick village, while Jackson’s infantry approached the breastwork from the front. Two small cannons accompanied the foot soldiers. Jackson positioned these on a high point only eighty yards from the closest part of the wall. At half past ten the cannons opened fire. Their three- and six-pound balls did little damage at first, and in fact the exposed artillerymen were in greater danger from the muskets of the Red Sticks behind the wall than the latter were from the cannon rounds.
But the cannon fire kept the defenders distracted while Jackson’s Cherokee and Creek allies attacked from the rear. Apparently this attack was more than Coffee or Jackson had counted on. “I had ordered the Indians on our approach to the bend of the river to advance secretly and take positions on the bank of the river and prevent the enemy from crossing,” Coffee explained to Jackson afterward. “Then within a quarter of a mile of the river, the firing of your cannon commenced when the Indians with me rushed forward with great impetuosity to the river banks. . . . While some kept up a fire across the river (which is about 120 yards wide) to prevent the enemy’s approach to the bank, others plunged in the water and swam over the river for canoes that lay on the other shore in considerable numbers and brought them across, in which craft a number of these embarked and landed on the bank with the enemy.” Between 150 and 200 Cherokees crossed the river, accompanied by a smaller number of Coffee’s Tennesseans. “They advanced into the village and very shortly drove the enemy up the bank of the river to the fortified works from which they were fighting you.”
