Some percentage of alcohol sales went to Indians. They were said to be especially susceptible to drink. Accounts of alcoholism among white men in that era suggest that natives may not have handled their liquor worse than anybody else. (The Choctaws noticed this, and when they imposed prohibition on themselves, they wryly noted in a public letter that “ardent spirits have been banished from among us, and have been compelled to take up their abode among our civilized white neighbors.”) But there was no doubt that when Indians drank, it was a curse. Drunkenness led to violence and allowed white men to cheat Indians out of trade goods or land. The federal government banned the sale of alcohol on Indian territories, which merely caused natives to travel to the nearest white towns. The trade grew so pernicious that in 1808 President Thomas Jefferson urged state governors to crack down on white sellers. The long-term effectiveness of his appeal can be measured by a French traveler’s account from 1825. Spending the night in a white settlement at the edge of the Creek Nation in Alabama, the traveler found the town “almost entirely inhabited” by “avaricious wretches” who had “assembled from all parts of the globe” to “poison the tribes with intoxicating liquors, and afterwards ruin them by duplicity and overreaching.”
General William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory in the early years of the century, noticed a difference between Indians in close contact with white people and those who were not. The man from a more distant tribe “is generally well-clothed, healthy, and vigorous,” while an Indian nearby was more likely “half-naked, filthy, and enfeebled by intoxication.” The tribes closest to Harrison were “the most depraved wretches on earth.” Harrison’s awareness that Indians were suffering from their interaction with white society did not change his view of his duty. Rounding up some “depraved wretches,” he negotiated treaties in 1804, 1805, and 1809, purchasing millions of acres of Indiana land at nominal prices.
These land cessions set off a chain of events that reverberated for years, eventually helping to spark Andrew Jackson’s military campaign in 1813–14. An eloquent and idealistic Shawnee, Tecumseh, used the injustice of Harrison’s 1809 treaty to build opposition to the white man’s land grabs. With his brother, said to be a prophet, he was uniting western tribes in a great confederation. He said the United States must never sign another treaty unless it was with all the tribes, for the land belonged in common to all. Harrison’s army drove off Tecumseh’s men in an early-morning battle at Tippecanoe, Indiana, in 1811, but Tecumseh missed the fight. He was off to the south, on a journey to find allies among the Creeks of the Mississippi Territory.
Tecumseh’s speeches, or talks as they were called, caused a sensation in the Creek Nation. The most prominent Creek leader, known as Big Warrior, warned his people that “it was easier to begin a war than to end one.” But there were fault lines in the Creek Nation, caused by the federal policy of encouraging Indians to civilize. Some Creeks resisted adopting white culture, and their resistance meshed with Tecumseh’s call to defend their ancient hunting grounds. Although Tecumseh failed to win the allegiance of the divided nation, he left the Creeks with a memorable prediction. As one Creek writer recalled, Tecumseh said he would “ascend to the top of a mountain … and raise his foot and stamp it on the earth three times. By these actions he could make the whole earth tremble,” and all the nations of the earth would feel the power of his cause.
What happened next can be seen through the eyes of a very young witness. Margaret Eades Austill was probably under ten years old, but had an eye for detail that she wrote down years later. In 1811, the same year that Tecumseh made his disappointing visit to the Mississippi Territory, Miss Austill arrived. Her family had moved westward from Augusta, Georgia, in just the kind of migration that was beginning to transform the region. They joined two other families in a westward journey with “about one hundred slave men, women and children,” including a servant named Hannah, who was “black or rather blue black, with clear blue eyes.” (If Margaret contemplated the sort of master-slave relationship that may have produced a woman with such a “peculiar appearance,” she did not mention it.) On the way to Mississippi, the families passed by Cherokees, who “were kind and friendly,” then entered domains that seemed more threatening. “As soon as we entered the Creek or Muskogee Nation, we could see the terrible hatred to the whites… . At night the wagons were all fixed around the encampment, the women and children and negroes in the center, the men keeping guard with the guns, so we made a formidable appearance of defense.” Indians trailed the wagon train as it lumbered across the landscape.
One night after a fearful day, the Indians had followed us for miles [and] we camped in an old field. Just as supper was announced, a most terrific earthquake took place, the horses all broke loose, the wagon chains jingled, and every face was pale with fear and terror. The Indians came in numbers around us looking frightened, and grunting out their prayers, and oh, the night was spent in terror by all but the next day some of the Indians came to us and said it was Tecumseh stamping his foot for war.
It was the New Madrid earthquake of December 1811, which shook the whole Mississippi Valley and beyond with such force that the great river briefly flowed backward. Tecumseh had just received a divine endorsement.
When the war finally came in the summer of 1812, it would not end well for Tecumseh. After a stunning early success—he helped British troops capture the American fort at Detroit—he was killed by William Henry Harrison’s troops at the Battle of the Thames. But he had put a jolt into a faction of the Creeks, who rose in revolt, first against their nation’s leaders and then against white men. The traditionalists became known as the Red Sticks, apparently because of the red war clubs held by their prophets. A Creek writer of the era said the traditionalists formed encampments where they conducted “fanatical riots of shaving their heads and painting them red for distinction.” By July 1813 the Creek Nation was in a state of “civil war,” according to John Ross. The Cherokee trader heard news of the trouble when traveling in the Mississippi Territory, and wrote a federal Indian agent with “intelligence” that “this present crisis is very serious,” and the whole Creek Nation could be conquered by “the Superior force of the rebels.” Some of the rebels were traveling to Spanish-controlled Florida for gunpowder. Local white forces tried to intercept the gunpowder shipment, fighting an inconclusive battle that only seemed to increase the Red Sticks’ resolve.
By now the family of Margaret Eades Austill had made a homestead in the Mississippi Territory, north of Mobile Bay. “One morning,” she recalled, “mother, sister and myself were alone except [for] the servants. Father had gone to the plantation when a man rode up to the gate and called to mother to fly for the Creek Indians had crossed the Alabama [River] and were killing the people. Mother said ‘where shall I fly to, in God’s name?’” The man advised the family to retreat to a place called Carney’s Bluff, where settlers, “all hands, negroes and whites,” were building a makeshift fort.
When we arrived at the river it was a busy scene, men hard at work chopping and clearing a place for a Fort, women and children crying, no place to sit down, nothing to eat, all confusion and dismay, expecting every moment to be scalped and tomahawked … I went to mother and told her I was tired and sleepy she untied her apron and spread it down on the ground and told me to say my prayers and go to sleep. So I laid down but could not go to sleep the roots hurt me so badly. I told mother I had rather jump in the river [than] lie there. She replied “Perhaps it would be best for us all to jump in the river.”
Carney’s Bluff was not attacked, though the settlers were not wrong to worry. They were fortunate the Red Stick leaders were choosing a different target.
• • •
The Creek uprising was not Andrew Jackson’s business at first. He was occupied elsewhere on fool’s errands. When he first organized twenty-five hundred volunteers in the snow at Nashville in December 1812, they were placed at the disposal of the War Department in Washington for se
rvice wherever in the country they might be needed. It was presumed that their enemy would be British invaders, not Indians, and Jackson was ordered to move toward New Orleans in case a British fleet appeared at the mouth of the Mississippi. His little army made it as far as Natchez, Mississippi, before falling victim to the administrative chaos that characterized the war. He received orders from the War Department saying his force was no longer needed. He was told to disband his unit immediately, leaving the men to find their way home to Tennessee by themselves.
Inexplicable though the order was to Jackson, it fit a pattern: Americans were learning how to fight a war, and it showed. The United States had sent undersized and undertrained forces on grandiose missions, such as invading British Canada, with predictable results. A progression of disasters (with some heroic interruptions) would continue right up to August 1814, when British forces strolled into Washington and set the president’s house and the Capitol on fire. That Jackson would be ordered to disband his force in the middle of such a war was no worse than might be expected. Jackson’s response to this order proved him to be very much like the men he struggled to control, from Private John Wood to Adjutant John Ross: he would not follow an order that made no sense to him. Considerably modifying his instructions, Jackson kept his unit together long enough to march them back to Tennessee. Only then did he send them to their homes, and even then he left an expectation that he might call on them again. It was said to be during this march that Jackson acquired the nickname Old Hickory, representing his toughness.
He returned to his wife, Rachel, at their house at the Hermitage, and awaited developments. Waiting must have been difficult for such an energetic personality, because he passed the time by working his way into a complicated and pointless quarrel with Thomas Hart Benton, his own military aide. This was the dispute that led to a gunfight inside a Nashville hotel in the summer of 1813, which is why, days later, he was in bed with a lead ball in his shoulder when news came that it was time to return to the war.
Reclining in pain at the Hermitage, Jackson read the news: an improvised white fortification, similar to the one at Carney’s Bluff, had been overwhelmed by Creek attackers. The whole Mississippi Territory seemed to be in danger. Reinforcements for the beleaguered Mississippians must now come from several directions, and they would include Jackson’s own Tennessee troops. Determined to command in person, Jackson drew up a proclamation calling both federal and state volunteers to duty, though he had to be helped onto his horse at the appointed time. Richard K. Call, he of the yellow-fringed hunting shirt, left his family a romanticized though plausible description of Jackson on the first part of the road south from Nashville, “with his arm in a sling looking pale and emaciated suffering from wounds recently received,” but still with an air of command as he rode alongside troops who’d stopped to rest. His wife, Rachel, arrived in a carriage from Nashville, having brought several ladies to observe the troops and see off her husband. After a short visit, Jackson bade her good-bye and turned his horse southward, toward the land where his destiny lay.
Four
It Was Dark Before We Finished Killing Them
The massacre that drew Jackson and Ross into the Mississippi Territory was a special act of brutality. When John Ross left behind his note about “taking revenge for the blood of the innocent,” he was probably referring to blood spilled at Fort Mims, near Mobile Bay. Several hundred white settlers and friendly Creeks had taken the Red Stick threat seriously enough to cluster inside this privately built stockade, but their citadel was amateurishly designed and defended. The commander did not believe slaves in nearby fields who reported seeing Indians. It may have been hard to imagine that Creeks would attack a fort defended by well over a hundred members of the territorial militia. What the commander did not realize was that the Red Sticks had assembled an overwhelming assault force of 726 men, including escaped slaves and some of the Creeks’ own slaves. They were near enough to watch white scouts patrolling the area, and could even hear the white men talking.
The Red Stick leaders included a man known among whites as William Weatherford, and among Creeks as Lamochattee. Like Robert E. Lee in a later war, Weatherford doubted the wisdom of the rebellion but fought to the fullest. Contradictory legends came to surround him, but a Creek historian who lived through the war (and who was Weatherford’s brother-in-law) left a credible account. The Creek historian wrote that it was Weatherford who persuaded a Red Stick council that Fort Mims could be overwhelmed. After the Red Stick force drew near Fort Mims on August 29, Weatherford slipped through the night with two confederates to examine the white men’s stockade. He peered through one of the portholes the defenders had cut in order to shoot through the wall. He realized the attackers could use the same openings to fire into the compound. When the Creeks attacked the next day, they were under orders to race across the surrounding fields without firing a shot in order to seize possession of the gun holes. Instead of sheltering gunmen aiming out, the stockade now sheltered gunmen aiming in.
The defenders retreated to their buildings and kept up a devastating defensive fire. Of four attackers assured by the Red Sticks’ spiritual leader that they would be invulnerable to white men’s bullets, three were quickly killed. In all, 202 Creeks were killed and many wounded. Finally the attackers set the buildings on fire, forcing the defenders into the open. Ten days later, when white troops arrived to bury the dead, their commanding officer described “Indians, negroes, white men, women and children,” lying “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.”
News of the massacre proved to be a powerful motivational tool for General Jackson. His proclamation calling his troops to battle urged that Tennesseans respond to the “horrid butcheries” with a “spirit of revenge.” The men who answered included David Crockett, who in 1813 was a young hunter, indifferent farmer, and talented storyteller. Crockett attended a militia recruitment meeting over the protests of his wife, who said if he marched off to war “she and our little children would be left in an unhappy situation.” Crockett replied that someone had to fight or “we would all be killed in our own houses… . Seeing I was bent on it, all she did was 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 enlisted with a unit of mounted volunteers—a paramilitary force might be a more descriptive modern phrase. Under the command of Jackson’s friend John Coffee they ranged across Creek territory. Creeks slipped away as they approached, and Coffee had to satisfy himself with scorched earth. “I burnt three towns but never saw an Indian,” the commander complained in a letter to his wife. Crockett participated in at least one of these raids, in which the hungry troops cleared out the village corncribs and then “burned the town to ashes.” The food wasn’t enough to sustain the troops for long. Crockett gained Coffee’s permission to wander away from his unit and hunt deer, and once discovered a deer that an Indian must have killed and skinned only minutes before. Crockett hoisted it on his horse and brought it back to camp. If the militiamen were staggering on the edge of starvation, so were the Creeks, for whatever food the white men consumed came out of the mouths of the locals.
In October the mounted men finally took a village by surprise. Some Creeks surrendered as the assault began on the village of Tallushatchee, but others seemed to expect no quarter. Crockett said that dozens of people retreated into a single house, and a woman in the door fired an arrow and killed a militiaman. This enraged his comrades, Crockett said: “We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it.”
Only a handful of whites were killed in the battle, which John Coffee laconically called “a small scirmish with the Indians” in a letter to his wife. Crockett’s account described the gruesome death of a boy, perhaps twelve years old, in the flames by the side of the house. He also r
eported what happened the day after the battle, when the ashes of the house had cooled:
It was, somehow or other, found out that the house had a potatoe 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.
Andrew Jackson was not served a portion of this victory meal. He was not present. But a few days later, the army commander came away with a memento. Eighty prisoners had been taken in the village, among them an infant boy found in the arms of his dead mother. Some Creek women were of the opinion that the child should be killed, as his parents were dead, but the tiny orphan was brought to Fort Strother and shown to Jackson. The general decided that he would keep the baby. “When I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him,” the general wrote at the time. Jackson and the baby were both members of the brotherhood of orphans: Jackson had never met his own father, and lost his mother to disease when he was a boy during the Revolution. The general decided the infant should become a playmate for Andrew Jackson Jr., the white son he and Rachel had adopted from relatives. “I send on a little Indian boy for Andrew,” Jackson wrote to Rachel, in a letter that was meant to accompany the child as he was transported to the Hermitage in Nashville. “All his family is destroyed.”
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 4
