by H. W. Brands
Jackson gave the order for the frontal assault. A drum roll announced the charge, and the men gave a joyous war whoop as they surged forward. Jackson’s aide John Reid described the moment in a letter to his wife. “I never had such emotions as while the long roll was beating, and the troops in motion,” Reid said. “It was not fear, it was not anxiety or concern of the fate of those who were so soon to fall, but it was a kind of enthusiasm that thrilled through every nerve and animated me with the belief that the day was ours without adverting to what it must cost us.”
The army volunteers and the militia together tore across the open space before the breastwork, absorbing heavy fire from the portholes in the wooden wall. At the wall itself they were in less immediate danger, but they once more exposed themselves by jamming their own muskets into the portholes and returning the Red Stick fire at point-blank range. “A terrible conflict ensued,” John Reid told his father. It was man against man, lead against lead. The weapons, let alone the men, could hardly stand the heat. “In many instances the balls of the enemy were found welded to the muzzles of our guns.”
The Tennesseans scrambled up the breastwork. The leaders of the assault inevitably faced the greatest danger. Lemuel Montgomery was first atop the wall and the first killed, by a bullet through the forehead. Others followed. “At length we mounted the walls and took possession of the other side,” John Reid said. The fighting only intensified. “Now it was that the contest was not so much for victory as for life. On every side were heard the groans of the dying and the shouts of the victors.”
Sam Houston was one of the first inside the battlements. His large frame, almost as tall as the wall itself, made an easy target as he went over the top. An Indian arrow impaled him in the upper thigh, but he continued forward, half falling inside the fort. Inspired by his example, other troops went over, driving the enemy back and away from the ramparts. The Tennesseans opened the gates and still more of their fellows poured through.
“The event could no longer be doubtful,” Jackson wrote. “The enemy, although many of them fought to the last with that kind of bravery which desperation inspires, were at length entirely routed and cut to pieces. The whole margin of the river which surrounded the peninsula was strewed with the slain.” But even after the outcome became apparent, the Red Sticks fought on. One band of diehards took refuge in a narrow defile covered by fallen logs. Jackson asked for volunteers to root them out. Houston had paused long enough to have a comrade extract the arrow from his thigh. The amateur surgeon tugged gently at first, but the barbed arrow refused to yield. He hesitated to pull harder, fearing Houston couldn’t stand the pain and damage. Houston threatened to shoot the fellow if he didn’t yank for all he was worth. He grimly did so, extracting a ghastly chunk of Houston’s flesh along with the arrow and leaving Houston bleeding badly. Jackson rode by at just this time, commended Houston for gallantry, and told him to sit out the rest of the battle. But when Jackson called for the volunteers against the enemy redoubt, Houston once more stepped—or, in this case, hobbled—to the front. Shouting encouragement to the others, he charged the redoubt, only to be hit again, by a bullet to the shoulder and another to the arm. He slumped to the ground semiconscious.
The fighting continued, albeit with diminishing intensity, for hours. The surviving Red Sticks dug in beneath the river bank and behind rocks, holding their attackers at bay until finally overpowered. Darkness brought a halt, but the fighting resumed the next morning.
When the killing finally ceased, even Jackson was shocked by its extent. “The carnage was dreadful,” he wrote Rachel. “Exclusive of those buried in their watery grave, who were killed in the river and who after being wounded plunged into it, there were counted five hundred and fifty seven.” John Coffee estimated the dead in the river at 250 to 300. Many had tried to cross, Coffee said. “But not one escaped; very few ever reached the bank, and those were killed the instant they landed.” The slaughter in the river was confirmed in substance if not detail by William Bradford, an infantry officer who remarked succinctly, “The river ran red with blood.” Alexander McCulloch noticed the same phenomenon. “The Tallapoosa might truly be called the river of blood,” McCulloch said, “for the water was so stained that at ten o’clock at night it was very perceptibly bloody, so much so that it could not be used.”
I think it is the most complete victory that has been obtained over the Indians in America,” William Carroll wrote three days later. Carroll, in camp with Jackson and nursing a wound suffered in the battle, couldn’t know that Horseshoe Bend not only was the most complete—that is, bloodiest—single victory of whites over Indians in American history to that date but would forever retain that dubious distinction. It was also the decisive victory in the climactic struggle for what was then the American Southwest. The Creek War represented the last, best hope of the counteroffensive preached by Tecumseh and the final phase of the contest for the dark and bloody ground of the old Southwest. In the bend of the Tallapoosa River, in the spring of 1814, Andrew Jackson seized the prize for which six generations of Euro-Americans and Native Americans had been fighting.
All this would become apparent in time, but in the immediate aftermath of the battle Jackson couldn’t say just what he had won. He wasn’t even sure he had defeated the Red Sticks. As he tallied the carnage he remarked to Rachel, “What effect this will produce on those infatuated and deluded people, I cannot yet say.” For all the hostile Creeks killed at Horseshoe Bend, others remained at large, stubbornly refusing to lay down their arms. Jackson had no choice but to steel his troops for more fighting. He congratulated them on what they had accomplished. “The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children. . . . They have disappeared from the face of the earth.” But he added, “Our enemy are not sufficiently humbled since they do not sue for peace. A collection of their forces again await our approach and remain to be dispersed.” To Rachel he predicted one more battle. “I will give them, with the permission of heaven, the final stroke.”
But the final stroke never fell—or, rather, it had already fallen. After Horseshoe Bend, Jackson’s forces mounted raids on several Red Stick villages along the lower Tallapoosa. Yet the villages were all deserted. One of Coffee’s men recalled an empty council house that contained grim evidence of the cause of the current campaign. “High up on the central pole inside were numerous arrows sticking straight out, on which hung the scalps of the men, women and children massacred at Fort Mims. These were taken down and decently buried.” Further reconnaissance met no more resistance. The surviving Red Sticks had vanished, some apparently south to Spanish Florida, others into the general population of Creeks.
The hostile whose escape most vexed Jackson was William Weatherford. By chance Weatherford had been absent from Horseshoe Bend on the morning of the Tennesseans’ attack, and it was Jackson’s discovery that Weatherford wasn’t among the killed that most caused him to think the war would continue. By this time Weatherford had a reputation among whites for bravery and elusiveness that made him seem the very soul of the Creek resistance. During one battle, when he was surrounded and apparently cut off from all escape, he seized a horse and galloped to the edge of a cliff that stood some eighty feet above the Alabama River. Without breaking the horse’s stride he leaped the animal far out over the water while his pursuers watched in stupefaction. Horse and rider fell and fell and finally landed in the river with a tremendous splash. The frantic horse surfaced, its eyes rolling with terror, and kicked toward the opposite shore. The still-astonished Tennesseans saw Weatherford come up, clinging to the animal’s mane with one hand, his rifle in the other. With a powerful kick of his own legs and a pull on the mane, he hoisted himself onto the horse’s back. A few of the Tennesseans recovered sufficiently to fire a few rounds, but the Red Stick leader was out of range and soon gone.
If the war had been only about warriors, Weatherford probably would have remained a fugitive and continued fighting. But in the days and then weeks a
fter Horseshoe Bend, he realized that further resistance would destroy not only his warriors—most of whom were dead already—but their dependents. As always, the women and children suffered the most. They hid in the forest from Jackson and his Indian allies, but in the forest they couldn’t find enough food. They weakened, sickened, and began to die, forcing Weatherford to sue for peace. On the same horse that survived the leap into the Alabama, he rode to Fort Jackson, as the Tennesseans proudly called a structure built below the Horseshoe. Friendly Indians were coming and going, and no one much noticed Weatherford, even after he asked some of the soldiers where he might find their commander.
Jackson had never met Weatherford and didn’t recognize him till the Creek leader identified himself. But he quickly appreciated the man’s presence and gifts of leadership. William Carroll described the meeting. “He was a little scant of six feet tall, rather slender in build but sinewy and graceful,” Carroll said of Weatherford. “His dress was part white and part Indian, like himself. His features were clean-cut and sharp, his nose like a hawk’s beak and his complexion almost white. He spoke very slowly and deliberately in pretty fair English, but often hesitated for a word as if not much practiced in speaking that language. When he spoke the Muscogee tongue, though, he talked fast and apparently—to judge from the effect of his talk upon the Indians who could understand him—with great force. . . . He was one of nature’s great men.” On this occasion Weatherford was understandably subdued. “He was solemn in manner and seemed greatly depressed by the forlorn condition of his people, though he did not seem to care for his own fate, whatever it might be.”
Jackson was surprised at seeing Weatherford and initially disconcerted. “I had directed that you should be brought to me confined,” Jackson said. “Had you appeared in this way, I should have known how to have treated you.”
“I am in your power,” Weatherford responded.
Do with me as you please. I have done the white people all the harm I could. I have fought them, and I have fought them bravely. If I had an army I would yet fight and contend to the last. But I have none. My people are all gone. I can now do no more than to weep over the misfortunes of my nation. Once I could animate my warriors to battle, but I can not animate the dead. . . .
I have not surrendered myself thoughtlessly. Whilst there was a chance of success I never left my post nor supplicated peace. But now I ask it for my nation and not for myself. On the miseries and misfortunes brought upon my country, I look back with deepest sorrow and wish to avert still greater calamities. . . . You are a brave man and I rely upon your generosity. You will exact no terms of a conquered people but such as they can accede to. Whatever they may be, it would be madness and folly to oppose.
Jackson’s answer to this speech went unrecorded by witnesses. Fanciful reconstructions by others had him sharing a brandy with his defeated foe, the two commanders meeting in mutual respect at battle’s end. This would have been entirely unlike Jackson, for whom war wasn’t a game but a deadly serious business. Weatherford might be brave, but he was, in Jackson’s eyes, a murderer of innocents. More plausible is a version related by one who knew Weatherford and apparently got it from him. “General Jackson said to Weatherford that he was astonished at a man of his good sense, and almost a white man, taking sides with an ignorant set of savages, and being led astray by men who professed to be prophets and gifted with a supernatural influence. And more than all, he had led the Indians and was one of the prime movers of the massacre at Fort Mims.” Weatherford, by this account, denied that he himself had believed in the prophets and asserted that much of what had happened at Fort Mims had been beyond his control. He asked Jackson to consider what would have been the reaction among whites had he—Weatherford—joined them against his red brothers. “It would have been attributed to cowardice and not thanked.” He wished Jackson to know, although he didn’t expect Jackson to believe, that he had been a restraining force among the Red Sticks. “Now, sir, I have told the truth,” he closed. “If you think I deserve death, do as you please. I shall only beg for the protection of a starving parcel of women and children, and those ignorant men who have been led into the war by their chiefs.”
Something in Weatherford’s manner struck a chord in Jackson. Though he might have executed the Red Stick leader for his role in the Fort Mims murders, he didn’t. In fact he held Weatherford only briefly. He chose to trust his sincerity, and on Weatherford’s promise to try to persuade the remaining Red Sticks to surrender, Jackson let him go.
A visitor to the nation’s capital the month before the declaration of war against Britain was struck by the partisan divide between Republicans and Federalists. “The opposite parties live separate from each other, and have but little intercourse except on business,” he wrote. “I once asked Mr. Potter [Elisha Potter, a Federalist congressman from Rhode Island] if it would not be better for the members of different parties to live more together and become more sociable with each other. He said they could not live in peace together, and that, after the contentions which they continually had in the hall”—Congress—“they required some rest and quiet when they got home. He said also that some of the Democrats”—Republicans—“are men of such unruly minds that it is extremely difficult to be upon good terms with them. ‘There is that Willis Alston [Republican congressman from North Carolina],’ said he. ‘Why he is as clear a brute as ever wore a tail.’”
Wars often draw parties and factions together, as peacetime rivals rally against the common foe. The War of 1812 had the opposite effect in America, driving the parties apart. Federalists blamed the Republicans for the war, which disrupted their commerce and the ties to Britain they had reconstructed since the Revolutionary War. They criticized the administration and at every step tried to block all but the most narrowly defensive measures. Republicans responded by lashing the Federalists as Tories and traitors. “When war is declared,” asserted a Republican paper in Baltimore, “there are but two parties: Citizen Soldiers and Enemies—Americans and Tories.” Republicans in Baltimore took this maxim to the street, rioting against Federalists to tunes from the Revolutionary War (“We’ll feather and tar every damned British Tory / And that is the way for American glory”). One man was killed in the riot, and nearly a dozen were injured, some quite badly.
Had the war been successful and short, the opposition wouldn’t have mattered. But the war was neither, and even those who had been hottest for the conflict soon had to admit that things weren’t going as they had anticipated. “I have intended, my dear Rodney, twenty times to write you,” Henry Clay explained to an old friend during the first winter of the war, after the string of defeats in the Northwest. “But, really, such have been the mortifying incidents of the last campaign on that theater where all our strength was supposed to lay that I have not had the courage to portray my feelings to you.” America’s problems, Clay contended, started at the top. “It is vain to conceal the fact—at least I will not attempt to disguise with you—Mr. Madison is wholly unfit for the storms of war. Nature has cast him in too benevolent a mould. Admirably adapted to the tranquil scenes of peace, blending all the mild and amiable virtues, he is not fit for the rough and rude blasts which the conflicts of nations generate.” Madison’s advisers were no better, and the president failed to call them to account. “He is so hesitating, so tardy, so far behind the national sentiment, in his proceedings toward his war ministers, that he will lose whatever credit he might otherwise acquire by the introduction of suitable characters in their places.”
The good news of the next several months was that the bad news wasn’t worse. Spirits rose with Perry’s victory on Lake Erie and Harrison’s on the Thames, and then with Jackson’s on the Tallapoosa. But hard upon these last good tidings from across the Appalachians came grim word from across the Atlantic. During the spring of 1814, during the very hours when Jackson was crushing the Creeks, British and allied European forces were defeating the French. The Napoleonic tide had crested at Moscow in 1812
, where the Russians saved their country by burning their holy city. Deprived of shelter and sustenance, Napoleon was compelled to retreat before the Russian winter, which decimated his army and, more important, destroyed the sense of inevitability that had long been his principal asset. The Russians chased him west and were joined by the Prussians and the Austrians. The Spanish and Dutch revolted against their Bonapartist rulers and gave aid to the British. Napoleon parried the allied thrusts with his customary brilliance but with diminishing resources, and in the last days of March 1814—while Jackson’s men were taking Horseshoe Bend—the allies took Paris. Like William Weatherford, Napoleon evaded his enemies awhile longer, but he too finally gave himself up.
Napoleon’s defeat augured badly for America. “You are sufficiently aware of the total change in our affairs produced by the late revolution and by the restoration of universal peace in the European world, from which we are alone excluded,” Albert Gallatin, Madison’s Treasury secretary, wrote Henry Clay. “A well organised and large army is at once liberated from any European employment, and ready, together with a superabundant naval force, to act immediately against us. How ill prepared we are to meet it in a proper manner, no one knows better than yourself, but above all our own divisions and the hostile attitude of the eastern states give room to apprehend that a continuance of the war might prove vitally fatal to the United States.”
