A Nation Rising (8 page)

The government's ability to use the power of the prosecutor and grand jury remains one of the greatest threats to individual liberty. And the complicity of the press in these efforts is all too apparent. The means have changed with advances in technology; but the rules have not.

 

B
URR'S LAST MEASURE
of influence may have come from mentoring Martin Van Buren, a young New York attorney from the upstate hamlet of Kinderhook. They had first met in 1803, and in later years they worked together on several cases. Van Buren, who, like Burr, was short and also a “dandy” in his dress, was even rumored to be Burr's illegitimate son. He was not. But this speculation was another part of the continued attacks on Burr's reputation and
legend that continued well in to the late nineteenth century. (Other writers would contend that Burr and his daughter Theodosia were incestuous, but no modern biographer takes this speculation seriously.) Nonetheless, Van Buren profited from Burr's tutelage and did become secretary of state and later, like his mentor, vice president during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the future war hero who had come so close to joining “Burr's conspiracy.”

1806
Andrew Jackson kills the attorney Charles Dickinson in a duel fought over a horse race on May 30.

 

1807
The first of three Embargo Acts is passed on December 22. In an attempt to keep America neutral during the Napoleonic Wars between France and England, these laws essentially ban all trade with foreign countries. They wreak havoc on the American economy.

 

1808
James Madison is elected the fifth president of the United States.

 

1809
The Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his brother, known as the Prophet, begin a campaign to create a Native American tribal confederacy to resist westward movement of American settlers. Tecumseh is allied with the British authorities in Canada.

 

1810
American settlers living in Spanish West Florida rebel against Spain, seizing the fort at Baton Rouge in September. In October, President Madison announces that this region is now part of the Territory of Orleans.

1811
The Battle of Tippecanoe. Governor William Harrison of the Indiana Territory defeats a surprise attack led by Tecumseh's brother, the Prophet.

 

1812
The Territory of Orleans is admitted to the Union as Louisiana, a slave state (the eighteenth state), in April.

1813
The Fort Mims massacre takes place in August.

 

1814
Andrew Jackson defeats the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March, ending the Creek War.

1815
Andrew Jackson leads American forces to victory in the Battle of New Orleans, fought on January 8; it takes place after the peace accord has been signed.

 

1816
James Monroe is elected the sixth president of the United States.

August 30, 1813

O
N A SULTRY
morning in late August, the stifling air—as thick as molasses and heavy as a wet wool blanket—slowed every movement and sapped most ambition. The weather was typical of the densely forested southern wilderness along the Alabama River. The trees in the nearby woods stood unmoved by any breeze. The heat shimmered off a nearby marsh.

This was Mississippi Territory, part of Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, the extraordinary real estate deal that had doubled the size of America in 1803. Here, in what would eventually become the state of Alabama, white settlers had begun to arrive in growing numbers, a swelling tide of farmers eagerly looking for farmland and finding it in the dark, rich soil watered by the nearby Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. One day, this land would be part of King Cotton's domain, the black belt that would produce the American south's “white gold,” enriching a few, enslaving millions of others.

But the future of this settlement held no such promise today. Those who had come to this spot, located some fifty miles north of the port of Mobile, arrived out of fear. In a clearing on about an acre of land at the edge of the dense southern forest and swamplands, they had thrown up a wooden palisade about seven feet tall, with loopholes through which defenders could fire their muskets. The wall was built around the farmhouse and land of a settler named Samuel Mims. Its name, Fort Mims, was deceptive. The simple barricade of sharpened posts, with its single large gate, could hardly be counted as a reliable, strong refuge. Its blockhouse, the central defensive feature, was still unfinished.

But the few hundred settlers who had sought refuge around Fort Mims still considered it a haven from the increasing threat of attack by hostile Creek Indians, who at that moment were at war, both among themselves and against Americans. The violence had grown out of a split within the Creek nation between two warring factions and eventually spilled over into attacks on the white American settlers who continued to stream into the territory, bringing thousands of slaves with them and stealing Creek land and challenging or destroying the Creeks' way of life. One faction of Creeks was willing to accommodate the whites and their ways. The other faction, known as Red Sticks for the color of its war clubs, wanted war.

Living in a scattering of cabins and other small buildings, the community was typical of America's southeastern outback in 1813. The frontier residents included a mix of white settlers; many Muskogee, or Creek, Indians who had completely adopted the farming and trading lifestyle of the whites; and a large number of other
mixed-blood Creeks, descendants of decades of intermarriage and intermingling of Indians and Anglo-American settlers and traders.

In addition to the settlers and Indians, there were a significant number of black slaves, perhaps as many as 200, owned by both white settlers and Creek Indians, who had traditionally kept prisoners of tribal wars as slaves but had adopted the European preference for African slaves as well. The Creek were one of the so-called Civilized Tribes of the Southeast, many of whom had adjusted to the Anglo-American culture and economy, some of them even accepting baptism as Christians. There was also a small force of Louisiana militiamen assigned to provide security. In other words, Fort Mims was a curious melting pot of early-nineteenth-century frontier America.

Complicating the lives of the settlers, Creek Indians, and slaves at Fort Mims was the fact that the United States was at war. A little more than a year before, in June 1812, the nation had declared war on England. Although the news of that far-off conflict was slow in arriving and barely mattered to day-to-day life in Fort Mims, the war brought to the fretful settlers a constant stream of rumors: the Spanish and British were supposedly planning to ally themselves with hostile Creeks, arm 15,000 of the Indians with muskets, and set them loose on the American South, opening a new front in the war.

The idea that the British would stir up the Creeks was a nightmarish prospect to the American settlers. When a group of Creek warriors actually did travel to Pensacola, a fortified town in Spanish Florida, to receive some weapons promised by the Spanish, an American militia force attacked the Creek party in an otherwise inconsequential skirmish called the Battle of Burnt Corn Creek. Suddenly an all-out Indian war loomed much larger.

That is why the small detachment of Louisiana militiamen stood guard at Fort Mims. Their commander, Major David Beasley, may have thought all the talk of war was just that—talk. But when two slaves reported seeing some Indians nearby wearing war paint on August 29, 1813, Beasley dispatched some scouts. They found no sign of Indians, of trouble, or of any imminent attack. Beasley had the slaves whipped. His judgment would prove fatal.

At about noon on August 30, children danced in the open yard of the enclosed compound. A few soldiers played cards, and some of them reportedly got drunk. Lunch was set out for the gathering workers, who came to the fort at the sound of a military drum calling them to eat. Then, without warning, between 750 and 1,000 Creek warriors emerged from the tall grass and deep woods surrounding Fort Mims, howling their bloodcurdling war cries. With the suddenness and violent fury of a Gulf hurricane, they were on the fort. Carrying muskets, tomahawks, and the red-painted war clubs, they completely surprised the lone sentry posted at the open gate, who was distracted by the card game his fellow soldiers were playing nearby.

With the first shouts of “Indians,” Daniel Beasley bolted toward the fort's gate, which was not only wide open, but also immovably jammed by large piles of drifting sand. Almost immediately, Beasley was shot in the stomach and gravely wounded, but he still tried to close the gate. It would not budge, and as Beasley fell, he desperately implored his soldiers to make a stand, even as the first wave of attackers quickly finished him off with their war clubs, now reddened by blood.

The Massacre at Fort Mims was on. The war party, led by the
mixed-blood renegade Peter McQueen, pushed into the stockade. The Red Stick warriors attacked head-on, having been assured by their tribal priests that they had magical protection from the weapons of whites. That assurance quickly proved wrong, as the historian Sean Michael O'Brien recounts: “Four Red Stick prophets, covered in feathers and black war paint, were first to enter the fort, with their warriors close behind. Confident that the bullets of the white men would simply pass harmlessly around their bodies, the prophets marched boldly through the gate. Three of them fell dead at once as the soldiers mustered their courage and opened fire.”
¹

The militiamen inside the fort, along with the others in the settlement, vainly tried to fight back. Some took refuge in the main Mims house, at the center of the compound, which was partly surrounded by a low wall. As women loaded guns, the men fired at their attackers from the upper windows.

In a second building, the loom house known as “the bastion,” another officer rallied his men to keep up a steady stream of musket fire that held some promise of turning back the Creek attackers. Women joined the fighting, including the stoic wife, now the widow, of Major Beasley: “Inside the bastion, Major Beasley's wife loaded weapons and urged the men not to surrender, and when a sick sergeant would not get up and fight, she became so enraged that she stabbed him with a bayonet.”
²

After three hours of intense hand-to-hand fighting in the sapping heat, the onslaught of the Red Stick warriors seemed to flag, and the assault died down. The Red Sticks learned that their principal chief, Far-Off Warrior, had been killed—and this news also seemed to take much of the starch out of their fight. But the other
chiefs then chose William Weatherford, also known as Red Eagle, as their new chief. A mixed-blood Creek with a white father, William Weatherford had cast his lot with the Red Stick Creeks.

Red Eagle immediately called for a renewed assault on the stockade. Using axes, the Red Sticks, with an overwhelming number of fighters, broke through the compound's western wall, and a swarm of warriors poured into the enclosure. Red Eagle's warriors soon began to torch some of the houses. The Mims house, one of the best-defended buildings, was set on fire by burning arrows, and some of the women and children ran from it to the nearby loom house. As the frenzy of the attackers gained momentum, the grisly end of Fort Mims was approaching fast.

With their last refuge now completely ablaze, the remaining settlers were forced to flee the conflagration. As they ran for their lives, Red Stick warriors began the grim business of taking scalps. Finally, the air was filled with the sound of explosions as the powder magazine inside the Mims house exploded. For the settlers of Fort Mims, the apocalypse had come.

In the loom house, the last structure still being defended, Captain Dixon Bailey, half Creek himself, kept up a staunch resistance but realized that the odds were simply too great. With the building ablaze, he and the fort's assistant surgeon, Dr. Holmes, cut a hole in a wall. Accompanied by Bailey's ailing son, carried by a slave named Tom, and a black woman named Hester, Bailey and Holmes ran for the wood line. But Tom and the boy were quickly caught and brought down. Bailey saw the attacking Indians smash both of their heads with war clubs. Continuing to run from the compound, Bailey, Dr. Holmes, and Hester made it to a nearby swamp. Wounded
and bleeding, Bailey died there. The doctor found a hiding place in the marsh, while Hester walked the twelve miles to Fort Stoddert and reported what had happened at Fort Mims.
³

After Bailey's doomed breakout, the last of the resistance inside the fort quickly collapsed. The Red Sticks' advantage in numbers and arms was too great. The warriors finally battered down the entry to the bastion and fell on the last of the settlers. Dragged into the open yard amid the burning buildings, the exploding ordnance, and the screams of the dying, most of the surviving whites and mixed bloods alike were slaughtered without mercy.

In a grim summary of the fighting and its aftermath, Sean Michael O'Brien records, “Small children were taken by the feet and dashed against the walls of the fort, splattering the walls with brains and blood. Women were stripped, scalped and mutilated. Pregnant women were ripped open and their unborn babies killed before their eyes.”
⁴

According to later accounts, William Weatherford—Red Eagle—attempted in vain to stop the killings of the women and children. But the bloodlust was too high. Later, Weatherford would say of the deadly assault on Fort Mims: “My warriors were like famished wolves and the first taste of blood made their appetites insatiable.”
⁵

Perhaps forty defenders escaped to tell the tale of the Fort Mims Massacre. Some Red Stick warriors recognized familiar faces among the survivors and took them captive instead of killing them. The slaves who survived were marched away, simply to become slaves of the Red Stick Creeks. More than 250 of the inhabitants of Fort Mims were killed or taken captive.

When a relief column from Fort Stoddert finally arrived days later, they found the grim evidence of the horrific massacre. The soldiers buried at least 247 bodies, many of them scalped, dismembered, and charred from the fires. The attack on Fort Mims—the worst frontier massacre in American history—and its aftermath would have extraordinary consequences for the country.

 

W
HAT HAPPENED AT
Fort Mims was a result of more than a simple act of Native American rage at the white incursions into their lands or even of a tribal power struggle spiraling out of control. It was a complex and volatile mixture of competing territorial ambitions, international intrigues, greed, power plays, the vain attempt at survival of a culture and people, and warring civilizations. But mostly it remains a quintessential American story: a struggle over real estate—having it, wanting it, and fighting for it, sometimes to the death. The terrible violence that swept over Fort Mims was neither unusual for its day nor one-sided.

The story of Fort Mims and the Creek nation would be largely overlooked when the history of this period was written. But this horrific assault was as dramatic and devastating an attack as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 was for later generations of Americans. Even though the nation was at war with England, shocked and angry Americans demanded vengeance; it would come swiftly, decisively, and with a fury that nearly matched the violent atrocities of that day in Fort Mims.

The bloody fighting and conflict that followed—a small “war within a war” fought during the War of 1812—were relatively brief,
a matter of months. In reality, there was a series of localized battles between American militia forces and portions of the Creek nation. To understand the Fort Mims Massacre and its place in American history, it is probably best to understand the two men who would oppose each other in the Creek War. One of those men might have been a savior and liberator to his people—had he prevailed. He was charismatic, daring, and ruthless in his own way—as much a folk hero to his Creek followers as William Wallace, depicted in
Braveheart
, might seem to Scots and to modern moviegoers. William Weatherford, also called Red Eagle, wanted what William Wallace, or George Washington, for that matter, wanted: freedom and his peoples' land. But he lost the war and was largely forgotten by the history books.

His opposite was equally daring, resolute, and certainly ruthless. He became America's seventh president. Andrew Jackson's exploits at the Battle of New Orleans, the decisive American victory over some of England's best troops in January 1815—after the War of 1812 was officially over—embellished Jackson's reputation as the greatest American general since George Washington. But that is not where the legend of Jackson began. It really started when he pursued the Indians who had attacked Fort Mims, promising as he set out, “Long shall the Creeks remember Fort Mims in bitterness and in tears.”

It was not an empty threat.