by James Laxer
Following this episode, the Muscogee leaders who sided with the United States wrote to Hawkins to underline their loyalty to the American cause. “You think that we lean to the Shawnee tribes because you saw Tecumseh and his party dance in our square, around our fire,” they wrote, “and some of our people believed their foolish talk . . . You need not be jealous that we shall take up arms against the United States: we mean to kill all our red people that spill the blood of our white friends.”5 As was the case with many other native peoples, the Muscogees were riven with deep, fratricidal divisions about how to respond to the American threat.
In July 1813, the Red Sticks took fateful steps that transformed their conflict with the United States into all-out war. Several Red Stick leaders, accompanied by a party of at least one hundred warriors, rode south to Spanish Pensacola, where they expected to receive arms from the Spaniards for their struggle against the Americans. The Red Sticks were particularly anxious to acquire muskets and rifles,6 but the Spanish governor at Pensacola, Gonzalez Manrique, told the Red Stick leader, the mixed-blood Peter McQueen (also known as Talmuches Hadjo), that he had no arms to give them. The Red Sticks insisted belligerently that they had come to be supplied with weapons. Eventually Manrique provided McQueen and his followers with one thousand pounds of gunpowder, some lead, and food and blankets.
While the expedition to Pensacola was underway, other Red Sticks mounted a siege of Tuckhabatchee, where the Muscogee council leaders who supported the Americans were based. The Red Sticks were not well armed but they maintained their siege for eight days, at which point the council leadership abandoned the town and the Red Sticks proceeded to torch it. In response, the state of Georgia mobilized fifteen hundred militiamen to guard against any attacks across the state’s frontier. Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory also placed their militias on alert.7
Meanwhile, McQueen’s party, returning from Pensacola, set up camp at Burnt Corn Creek. There, on July 27, they were discovered by a U.S. militia unit led by Colonel James Caller, who had recently written to his commander to say that decisive action was needed to stop the Red Sticks from endangering communities in the territory. When Caller came upon McQueen’s camp, the men were cooking and eating and had posted no guards.
The militiamen burst out of the woods and opened fire on the Red Sticks, who returned fire and raced for cover. Instead of pursuing them, the militiamen halted to inspect and divide the baggage McQueen’s men had left behind on their pack horses. This delay gave the Red Sticks time to organize a counterattack, even though only about a dozen of them had guns. They managed to drive off some of their attackers, but others remained, and the two sides exchanged fire for close to an hour. The militiamen then withdrew and the Red Sticks recovered their pack horses. Those who fell at Burnt Corn Creek were the first casualties in the Creek War.8
The victory at Burnt Corn Creek against better-armed and more numerous opponents convinced some of the Red Sticks that they could take on the Americans and win. But in the aftermath of the fight, the political divisions among the Muscogees burst into violence, fomenting attacks and reprisals between the two sides and splitting families. One mixed-blood, who until now had stood in the middle, decided to throw in his lot with the Red Sticks. William Weatherford (Red Eagle), who had refused to side with Tecumseh in 1811, was descended from a Scottish trader and a mother who belonged to the Wind clan. Fluent in Muscogee and English, Red Eagle was a gifted military strategist who had considerable political influence among the Muscogees.
As the Red Sticks mobilized, their fight taking on the character of a national struggle, the settlers, both whites and mixed-bloods, grew increasingly fearful, and many of them abandoned their homes to seek protection in wooden stockades that had been thrown up during the crisis. One of these was Fort Mims, north of Mobile and close to the Alabama River.
The Red Sticks chose Fort Mims as their next target, charging Red Eagle with planning the operation. They mobilized a force of 750 warriors, including a number of black fighters, and sent a smaller force of about 125 men to assault a small stockade nearby, hoping that this secondary operation would confuse their opponents about where the main blow would fall.
Just after noon on August 30, Weatherford led the surprise attack. The people in the fort were eating their lunch, and the main gate of the stockade was wide open. In the first minutes, many of the shocked defenders were killed, but others managed to repel several assaults. After three hours of fighting, in which the houses in the fort were torched, the Red Sticks paused. Their chief had died early in the engagement, and they held a brief council to choose a successor, naming Weatherford to take command.
Weatherford urged the warriors to resume the attack so that they could claim a complete victory. The warriors soon overcame the last resisters. Then came a wanton spree of destruction and mayhem. Although Weatherford tried his best to halt them, many of the Red Sticks set about massacring the men, women, and children who had fallen into their hands. Victims were hacked to pieces and their bodies burned along with the remnants of the fort.
A relief column of the Mississippi Militia arrived on the grisly scene ten days later. Its commander, Major Joseph P. Kennedy, wrote to Brigadier General Ferdinand L. Claiborne, his superior, that “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 the woods around were covered with dead bodies . . . The soldiers and officers with one voice called on divine Providence to revenge the death of our murdered friends.”9
The massacre at Fort Mims ignited an appetite for revenge among Americans far and wide. It drew into the struggle a Tennessean by the name of Andrew Jackson. After moving to Jonesborough, Tennessee, the young Jackson had become a public prosecutor, dealing with issues of petty crime, debt, and drunkenness. Outfitted with a brace of pistols, which he kept in his desk, Jackson was prepared to settle his own disputes by fighting duels. In 1796, he was elected to the House of Representatives, then briefly was named to a vacant Senate seat and spent a short time as a member of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Jackson dabbled in ventures both commercial and political.
The massacre at Fort Mims generated a political shock wave in Tennessee, where the state legislature passed an act on September 25, 1813, calling up thirty-five hundred volunteers to counter the Red Stick threat. This mobilization followed the mustering of fifteen hundred militiamen earlier in the summer. Andrew Jackson learned about the Fort Mims massacre when he was at his home, the Hermitage, near Nashville, recovering from a bullet wound suffered in a street fight. Jackson declared to Tennessee volunteers, “The horrid butcheries . . . can not fail to excite in every bosom a spirit of revenge.” Arriving at Fayetteville, near the Alabama border, on October 7, Jackson took direct command of one thousand infantrymen and a further force of thirteen hundred cavalrymen and mounted riflemen, to be led under Jackson’s overall command by Brigadier General John Coffee. Coffee was Jackson’s best friend and business partner, a man in whom the future president of the United States had complete confidence.10
Jackson’s foray into Muscogee territory began inauspiciously. The militiamen were supplied with insufficient provisions. At one point, members of his party threatened to defect, and only Jackson’s gift for profane bombast brought them back into line.11 Pushing into the heart of Muscogee country in late October, the members of the expedition were desperate for food. They came upon a native village and attacked it solely to make off with the cattle and corn of the villagers. That expedient netted Jackson and his party food for an additional three days. In addition, Jackson’s men took twenty-nine Muscogees prisoner, including a number of women and children, and burned the village of Littafuchee, located on Canoe Creek in the present-day Alabama county of St. Clair.12
One member of Jackson’s force was a twenty-seven-year-old Tennessean by the name of David Crockett, who had signed up with the expedition to avenge the Fort Mims massacre. A self-styled sharpshooter, Crockett would become famous to millions of children through a mid-twentieth-century television series that portrayed him as displaying all the virtues of the plain-spoken American frontiersman. Before departing with the troops, Crockett explained to his wife why he had to go on the expedition. “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,” he told her. “I reasoned the case with her as well as I could,” he wrote in his memoir, “and told her, that if every man would wait until his wife got willing to go to war, there would be no fighting done, until we would all be killed in our own houses.”13
Jackson led his troops east from Littafuchee to launch an attack on the small Muscogee town of Tallushatchee, located not far from present-day Jacksonville, Alabama. Having learned that a large number of Red Stick warriors were positioned in the town, Jackson ordered Coffee to attack it with nine hundred members of his mounted force. The troops were shown the way to the town by a party of Cherokee warriors and two Muscogees who had sided with the Americans.
As Davy Crockett described the attack, the soldiers approached the town in two columns and “then closed up at both ends, so as to surround it completely.” When the Red Sticks saw one of the soldiers approaching, “they raised the yell, and came running at him like so many red devils.” With the Americans surrounding the town and pouring volleys of fire into it, some of the natives surrendered. Others were chased into the dwellings. Crockett recounted an attack on forty-six warriors he saw taking cover in a house. When Crockett and his fellow soldiers got near the house, “We saw a squaw sitting in the door, and she placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand, and then took an arrow, and raising her feet, she drew with all her might, and let fly at us, and she killed a man . . . His death so enraged all of us, that she was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her.” Then the soldiers dealt with the warriors: “We now shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six warriors in it. I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house. His arm and thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him . . . He was still trying to crawl along; but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old. So sullen is the Indian, when his dander is up, that he had sooner die than make a noise or ask for quarters [sic].”14
To finish off the Red Sticks, the soldiers torched the remaining houses. The warriors trapped inside burned to death and those who tried to flee were gunned down when they tried to make their escape.
Coffee’s force killed and captured 186 warriors, and 5 members of the Tennessee contingent were killed. Following their destruction of the town, Coffee’s men rejoined Jackson’s force and discovered that no new food supplies had arrived. The next day, some of the men who had been involved in the attack returned to the burnt-out ruins of Tallushatchee to scavenge for something to eat. Despite the stench of the corpses and the appalling sight of the dead, one of the men uncovered a potato cellar beneath one of the burnt dwellings, and the soldiers helped themselves to its contents. “For we were all hungry as wolves,” Crockett recorded.15
In the midst of the ruins, soldiers heard the crying of a small infant, who was found near the body of his dead mother. They picked up the baby and took him back to Jackson’s camp. When Jackson saw the baby he asked some of the Muscogee women who had been taken prisoner if they would look after the infant. They refused, telling the general that all the baby’s relatives were dead and that the soldiers should kill him too.16 Jackson felt a surge of compassion for the baby, who was about ten months old, about the same age as his own adopted son, Andrew Jr. The general decided he would adopt the boy, and send him back to the Hermitage in Tennessee to live with his family there. To make sure he could be cared for, Jackson took a Muscogee woman as a slave.17
Whatever the range of emotions he experienced during his campaign, Jackson was developing a taste for war and for the glory it could win him.
Jackson’s next target was Talladega, a Muscogee trading post east of the Coosa River that was outfitted with a stockade. The Tennesseans tried to use the same tactics that had worked so well for them in their previous engagement. They advanced on the town and attempted to surround it. The resourceful Red Eagle, however, knew the enemy was coming. He had moved his warriors to the nearby woods, where he waited to launch a surprise attack of his own.
From their concealed position, the Red Sticks rushed forth at a portion of the Tennessee force. In Crockett’s lurid account of the attack, the Red Sticks were “all painted as red as scarlet, and were just as naked as they were born.” He described them as “being like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose.”18
Many of the mounted militiamen fell from their horses in their rush to make it to the relative safety of the fort. Militiamen in the woods opened fire on the Red Sticks, who turned in their direction and attempted a charge that was broken by a further volley of fire. Trapped by militiamen on both sides, the Red Sticks fought a desperate twenty-minute battle, deploying muskets and bows and arrows against their foes. At last, the native warriors found a gap in Jackson’s line and rushed through into the nearby woods. Coffee’s mounted militiamen took up a hot pursuit and inflicted more casualties on the Red Sticks. The native allies of the Americans, who had been holed up in the fort, came out to slake their thirst at a nearby spring. The Red Sticks had been besieging them for days.
Three hundred Red Sticks died in the encounter, while only fifteen militiamen were killed and eighty-five wounded. Two more soldiers died later of their wounds. But seven hundred Red Sticks had made it through the gap to safety, prepared to fight another day. Jackson’s troops had managed to kill or wound about one thousand warriors in the Battles of Tallushatchee and Talladega.
After the latter battle, Jackson ruefully concluded, “Had I not been compelled by the faux pas of the militia in the onset of the battle, to dismount my reserves, I believe not a man of them would have escaped.”19
With insufficient provisions to feed his troops, and worried about the security of his base and supply lines, Jackson decided that he could not continue his pursuit of the remaining Red Stick warriors, and pulled back to the Coosa River. Meanwhile, another Tennessee force, commanded by Major General John Cocke, with whom Jackson had been attempting to coordinate, was experiencing its own supply problems.
Cocke determined that he and his men would carry on their own campaign against other Red Stick power centres. What he did not know was that the chiefs of the Hillabee towns (Muscogee settlements located on creeks and rivers not far from the Tallapoosa River in what is now northeastern Alabama) had decided they wanted to end their support for the Red Sticks and make peace with the Americans. In return for surrendering any Red Stick leaders among them and handing back property taken from white settlers, especially their slaves, the warriors in the Hillabee towns had secured a truce with Jackson.
The militiamen under Cocke’s direction, along with their Cherokee allies — who had been won over to the American cause with the promise that they would be recognized as a people20 — surrounded the settlement of Hillabee Creek in the pre-dawn hours. Among those in the town were sixty-five wounded warriors who had survived the attack at Talledega, along with their women and children. At dawn, the attack was unleashed on the unsuspecting men and women, who thought they were protected by the truce. The Cherokee warriors went in first, followed by the troops. Guns and bayonets cut down those in the cabins. In less than fifteen minutes, the slaughter was complete. Two hundred and fifty-six prisoners, most of them women and children, were taken, and the town was burnt to the ground. The prisoners were dispatched to the Hiwasse
e Garrison of the Cherokee Nation, located in southeastern Tennessee, a post where federal U.S. troops were stationed.
The massacre at Hillabee Creek extinguished any hope of a quick end to the Creek War. The Hillabee Muscogees held Jackson responsible for what they saw as a betrayal. In the struggles to come, they aligned themselves fiercely on the side of the Red Sticks, holding out until the end.¶¶¶21
While Cocke was launching the ill-fated assault on the Hillabee settlement, Jackson faced a problem within his own ranks. The supply issues had not been resolved, and in mid-November 1813, a large faction of the Tennessee Militia decided they had had enough and that they were going to head home. The crisis came to a head on November 10, at Fort Strother, when the rations for Jackson’s soldiers ran out. Over the previous five days, his men had eaten less than two meals. Not only were the soldiers on the verge of starvation, the nights were growing longer and colder as autumn advanced, and many of them did not have proper clothing to cope with the rapidly dropping temperatures.
Jackson was determined to carry on the war against the Red Sticks until victory was achieved. His quest for glory or triumph was so strong that it overcame his personal ills. He suffered from persistent diarrhea and from the bullet that remained in his shoulder as a result of the brawl he had been involved in just prior to the expedition. The militiamen under his command were in an increasingly mutinous state. A number of his officers presented him with a petition urging him to march to Fort Deposit, eighty kilometres over mountainous country north of Fort Strother. There, the men would find food. But that would lead Jackson’s force away from the heartland of the Red Sticks. He urged the officers to wait a little longer for a relief column carrying provisions.
