A Nation Rising (9 page)

The man who would track down William Weatherford was not given to words that were not backed by action. Since childhood, he had seen the violence of the world and often responded in kind. “Commanding, shrewd, intuitive, yet not especially articulate, al
ternately bad-tempered and well-mannered, Jackson embodied the nation's birth and youth,” wrote Jon Meacham in
American Lion
. “Jackson was fond of well-cut clothes, racehorses, dueling, newspapers, gambling, whiskey, coffee, a pipe, a pretty woman, children and good company…. Depending on the moment, he could succumb to the impulses of a warlike temperament or draw on his reserves of unaffected warmth.”
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Born in 1767, in South Carolina, Andrew Jackson had survived a brutally harsh and violent early life, coming of age in the unforgiving world of the colonial frontier and witnessing some of the most savage warfare of the American Revolution. His Scots-Irish father, also Andrew, arrived in America in 1765 with his wife Elizabeth and their two sons: Hugh, two years old when they arrived; and Robert, aged six months. While working the fields on a hardscrabble farm, the father dropped dead in February 1767, leaving behind a pregnant wife and the two young boys. Elizabeth Jackson moved in with relatives, and Andrew was born a month later, on March 15, 1767. He spent his early years in the home of relatives, the Crawfords.

Obviously bright, but with a boyhood reputation as a bit of a hell-raiser, Andrew Jackson balked at school. His mother's hope that he might go into the ministry was far from realistic. As Jackson's biographer Robert Remini once noted, “For one thing he swore a blue streak, fine, lovely, bloodcurdling oaths that could frighten people half to death. Also, he was wild and reckless…. There was an air of uneasy restlessness about him, an exuberance that found outlets in outrageous tricks and games. Every now and then, he showed an ugly side that labeled him a bully. Although not a
coward, he would purposely terrorize people if angered or if it suited his needs.”
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When the Revolution came to South Carolina, Andrew Jackson saw war and its depredations at their worst. In 1779, his brother Hugh, then sixteen years old, was killed in battle at Stono Ferry. The following year, British forces under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton—a notorious officer known as “Bloody Ban” or “the Butcher”—descended on Charleston, South Carolina. They laid waste to the town, by many accounts inflicting a vicious massacre that left more than 100 Americans dead, many after they had tried to surrender.

Then, in April 1781, Andrew and his brother Robert were taken prisoner. There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that a British officer ordered the Jackson boys to clean his boots. Both defiantly refused, supposedly asserting that as prisoners of war they weren't required to do this. Jackson later claimed that the officer hit him and Robert with a sword for their defiance. They were then taken to a British prison camp in Camden, where their mother eventually won their release by pleading with the British. But on the trip home, Robert died; the head wound he had received from the officer's blow had become infected.

Not long after that, Jackson's mother went off to nurse some American prisoners who were being held on a British ship in Charleston harbor. Andrew Jackson never saw her again. Elizabeth Jackson fell ill with cholera and died in 1781, the year that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and the war came to an end. At age fourteen, Andrew Jackson was orphaned. He had lost two brothers and his mother to the war; he had never known his father. His
nightmarish childhood clearly hardened him. But as Robert Remini remarks, “No one has ever seriously questioned Jackson's courage or his sense of duty. Those who knew his family background understood a little about where and how he had obtained them.”
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These war experiences also made Jackson intensely distrust those forces he saw as enemies of America. In his experience, they were the British, the Spanish, and the Indians. For the rest of his life, he hated all three with a passion that often drove his questionable actions.

 

L
IKE MANY OTHER
Native Americans of his day, William Weatherford saw the American government, and most whites, as the enemy. Long before the American Indian wars took place on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century and became a staple of dime novels and Hollywood, long before the “pony soldiers” battled the Sioux, Weatherford and other Indians in the eastern and southern states had fought furiously against the encroachment of white American settlers. They were battling history and modernity.

Born around 1781, William Weatherford was the son of Charles Weatherford, a Scottish merchant and horse breeder who ran a trading post and racetrack. William's mother was a Creek of noble lineage. Such ancestry was not at all unusual. A roster of the names of a number of significant Creek tribal leaders of this generation reads like a gathering of the Highlands clans: they included Peter McQueen; William McIntosh, Weatherford's cousin; and Alexander McGillivray, Weatherford's uncle, who had earlier signed a peace treaty with George Washington's secretary of war, Henry Knox.

As the nineteenth century opened, many Creeks lived in settled towns and villages in Georgia and the future Alabama. Part of the Muskogee (or Muskogean) speaking groups in the American Southeast that included the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Alabama nations, they had been forced from their traditional territories with the arrival of the Spanish and later the English in the American Southeast. But they remained a force in the region, and in 1730 a Creek trade delegation had traveled to London to negotiate agreements with the British government. Demolishing the simplistic image of the fur trade as a lopsided deal in which “civilized” Europeans exchanged trinkets for furs and skins with unsophisticated natives, the historian Daniel K. Richter explains, “A series of fatal bovine epidemics struck continental Europe, creating a huge market among leather workers for North American deerskins to replace now-scarce cattle hides. The Creeks—controlling territories that, largely as a result of their own previous slave-raiding expeditions, were devoid of humans but thronging with white-tailed deer—were ideally placed to profit from that demand.”
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Having allied themselves with the British during the Revolution, the Creeks felt betrayed when they learned that the English had simply transferred ownership of their territory to the new American nation under the terms of the peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War in 1783.

Under an official United States federal policy of “civilization,” many Creeks and members of the other nations of the Southeast accepted the new way. As Richter explains, the U.S. government, “sought to teach Indian peoples to abandon their traditional gendered economy of male hunting, female agriculture and communal
landholding in favor of male plow agriculture and animal husbandry, female domesticity, and especially, private property. This shift toward a Euro-American way of life, the theory went, would allow Indians to prosper on a much smaller land base, opening up the vast remainder to White yeoman farmers. Of course, it also envisioned the end of Indian culture and Indian political autonomy.”
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The shift created policies that soon had Indians heavily in debt, which forced the tribes to cede enormous tracts of their lands to the federal government. In the midst of these increasingly corrupt and often underhanded dealings, aggressive white settlers were also raising tensions by swarming into the contested territories. Tribal lands, once held communally, were swallowed at an alarming rate, and although the Creeks attempted to accommodate white ways, their existence as a people was under assault. Also, to the typical white settler, the Indians were for the most part “savages,” with no rights to land to which they had no deeds.

This was the crisis facing William Weatherford's Creek people as the War of 1812 approached. A turning point in Weatherford's life and in the future of the Creek nation came with the arrival in Creek territory of Tecumseh, a charismatic Shawnee leader who was trying to unite the disparate Native American tribes against the American government. Tecumseh had been born around 1768 in what is now Dayton, Ohio. Part Creek on his mother's side, he grew up at war with Americans. As a teenager, he joined the British during the Revolution. After the war, he fought on the losing side in several of the notable battles that secured American control over the future states of Ohio and Indiana.

While living in Ohio, Tecumseh apparently fell in love with
a white woman: Rebecca Galloway, the daughter of a farmer. She taught him history, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
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But she wanted him to abandon his traditional ways, and Tecumseh refused. Around 1805, Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa—usually called “the Prophet”—became part of a militant Native American religious revival in which all tribes were urged to reject white ways and stop ceding lands to the United States. Just as the Great Awakening had transformed colonial American society and politics in the 1740s, this Native American “awakening” was succeeding in creating a united front against the inexorable westward movement of Americans into Indian lands in the Midwest.

Tall, impressive in his demeanor, and a natural orator, Tecumseh set out on a mission to create a confederation of Indian nations that could roll back the American advance and restore native traditions. Between 1809 and 1811, he began to preach “red unity” as a means of survival. Tecumseh provided political leadership, and his brother, the Prophet, gave their mission the feel of a religious crusade. He appealed mainly to the “Young Turks,” angry young Indian men who did not want to be forced out of their land by the white settlers.

“Tecumseh's movement was a coalition of warriors, not of tribes,” writes the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway. “Warriors from far and wide cast aside their venal chiefs and gravitated to Tecumseh and his vision of a still-strong Indian nation that would stand up to American aggression.”
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In 1811, Tecumseh took that vision to the Southeast, holding a series of tribal councils with leaders of the Civilized Nations, including the Creeks. His appeal merely divided the Creek leadership between two rival camps: those who wanted to join Tecumseh—
and some actually did ride off with the Shawnee general—and the “accommodationists,” who thought that the prospect of war with America was suicidal. William Weatherford was initially caught between the two, but he would eventually be brought to the side of the warriors. This fundamental fissure within Creek ranks eventually contributed to a Creek tribal civil war that, fatefully, led to the attack on Fort Mims, and after that, the wider Creek War.

While Tecumseh was still on his recruiting mission through the Southeast, however, events spun beyond his control. His brother, the Prophet, who lacked Tecumseh's military genius and tactical skills, was contending with an American army led by the governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison. The son of Benjamin Harrison, a wealthy Virginia planter who had signed the Declaration, William Harrison would become the country's ninth president.
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In November 1811, Harrison's 1,000-man force arrived at the Prophet's town, known as Tippecanoe. That night, the Prophet ordered an attack on Harrison's camp. Although Harrison's losses were far greater than those of the Indians, the Indian forces retreated and Harrison was able to claim a victory at Tippecanoe, burning the Prophet's deserted village and securing his own status as a bona fide war hero and Indian fighter. (And providing his memorable 1840 presidential campaign slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”)

This setback weakened the Prophet's standing and credibility because his prediction that American bullets would not harm his
warriors was clearly wrong. Following this defeat, Tecumseh decided to ally his forces with the British once more. When the War of 1812 began, Tecumseh joined a British major general, Isaac Brock, in forcing the surrender of a fort and town, both known as Detroit, in what was then Michigan Territory. But in October 1813, Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of Thames in Ontario. According to popular reports at the time, Tecumseh's body was dismembered by American troops, but no evidence of his remains was ever discovered.

Tecumseh's death was also a fatal blow to the realization of a great American Indian confederacy that might have delayed or staved off the press of white settlers flowing west. But Tecumseh's impact outlived him. “Although Indian hopes for holding the Northwest had died with Tecumseh, he had spread his word in the South more effectively than he knew,” the historians Robert Utley and Wilcomb Washburn wrote. “Even while he was making his last stand on the Thames, Indians a thousand miles away who had been inspired by his rhetoric were beginning a struggle that would last nearly thirty years.”
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Following Tecumseh's lead and his vision, the Red Stick Creeks also turned to the British as allies. With war under way against the upstart Americans, British agents in the Southeast openly recruited Indians and fugitive African Americans. By July 1813, the British and Spanish in Florida were providing weapons and powder to the Creeks and other tribes. The worst fears of the Americans living in the southern territories bordering Florida had come true. That was what sent a force of Alabama militiamen against the Red Sticks at Burnt Corn Creek. When the Creeks won that minor skirmish, it opened the floodgates for an open war against white settlers.

And that war would become part of the larger war fought between the British and Americans, a conflict that the historian Walter Borneman once described as “a silly little war—fought between creaking sailing ships and inexperienced armies led by bumbling generals…. In the retrospect of two centuries of American history, however, the War of 1812 stands out as the coming of age of a nation.”
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