Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (6 page)

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.

T
he 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 reported 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.”

 • • • 

Here John Ross begins to play a larger role in our story, for
the Cherokee Regiment joined in the campaign to torch villages. In November 1813 the regiment joined a force of Tennesseans approaching a Creek town called Hillabee. The attackers apparently did not know, and did not pause to find out, that the Creeks of Hillabee had already resolved to give up the war, and had sent a peace envoy to General Jackson at Fort Strother. The Creeks were completely surprised by white and Cherokee attackers who slaughtered many villagers without losing a man. This massacre may have persuaded other Creeks that they would never be permitted to surrender. Many, their villages burned and their
food destroyed, were concentrating at a fortified camp in a sharp curve of the Tallapoosa River, the curve called Horseshoe Bend. This was the encampment that Jackson’s army approached on the morning of March 27, 1814.

Jackson gave orders to position his troops on the battlefield. The Cherokees would not charge directly at the Creek encampment; the general had a more suitable purpose in mind for them. Instead, some of Jackson’s white troops faced the camp, taking possession of a small hill overlooking it. The hill was no more than thirty to forty feet higher than the camp, but high enough for the soldiers to behold the obstacle that awaited them. The river bend “resembles, in its curvature, that of a horseshoe, and is thence called by that name among the whites,” Jackson wrote afterward. The Creeks had built their camp inside the peninsula:

Nature furnishes few situations as eligible for defence; and barbarians have never rendered one more secure by art. Across the neck of land which leads into it from the north, they had erected a breastwork of the greatest compactness and strength, from 5 to 8 feet high, and prepared with double rows of port-holes very artfully arranged.

From these portholes, Jackson declared, the Creek defenders could fire outward “in perfect security,” defending an area inside the wall that Jackson estimated at eighty to a hundred acres. The wall was constructed of
two rows of heavy logs, placed about four feet apart. Between the logs the Creeks had packed clay. Jackson hoped to blast a hole in this barrier with two cannons his troops had dragged through the forest all the way from Fort Strother. Their crews rolled them up to the little
hill, just 125 yards from the nearest portion of the wall. The guns jerked backward on their wheels, white smoke rolled out of the muzzles, and the sound of their fire echoed across the river valley, but the first shots either buried themselves in the wall or bounced off.

And yet Jackson’s letter about the impressively defensible territory,
and “barbarians” who “never rendered” a position “more secure by art,” was misleading. He wrote those words after the battle, in a letter that newspapers reprinted and that historians have quoted ever since. In truth Horseshoe Bend was an appalling choice of locations to defend. The whole history of warfare argued against it. To walk the Horseshoe Bend battlefield today is to be horrified by the small distance between the battle lines: Jackson’s artillerymen could look down on the defensive wall from higher ground. More important, the outnumbered Creeks drew themselves into a confined location where they could be targeted and killed whenever Jackson could gather a large enough force. They might instead have survived for years as guerrilla fighters (as Creeks who did not concentrate in the Horseshoe went on to do, working out of sanctuaries in Spanish Florida). The hit-and-run attack was a customary Indian style of warfare, yet these determined traditionalists broke with tradition. Possibly hoping to protect women and children from the white horsemen, they performed a fatal imitation of the white man’s art of war. If confronted by a superior force, they would be trapped for a massacre as surely as the white settlers at Fort Mims.

Not only that. The Red Sticks inside the Horseshoe were a nearly spent force, desperate members of a society near collapse. Men, women, and children had gathered there seeking shelter from marauding horsemen. It was less a citadel than a refugee camp for survivors of Andrew Jackson’s ruthlessly effective warfare—those who had not yet been set on fire atop a potato cellar, for instance. The Indians’ condition would still be evident generations after the battle, when archaeologists digging up the Creek village inside the fortress found artifacts that were scarce and poor, not much beyond “
gun parts and ammunition” as well as “ceramics and glass.” Their trade with the outside world had been disrupted, and their meager possessions reflected “the
destitute condition of a people whose homes had been recently burned.” These were the people who peered through the portholes of their wall and saw Jackson’s two cannons open fire.

Where were Ross and the Cherokees as the cannonade began? They were sealing the trap. Jackson sent John Coffee’s horsemen, along with the Cherokee Regiment and other friendly Indians, to move
behind
the Horseshoe, on the far side of the river. If the Creeks should attempt to retreat across the river, they would be shot as they paddled their canoes across. Here the Cherokees and white horsemen waited as the bombardment began, but after two hours, some could wait no longer.
Three Cherokees, led by a man known as the Whale, swam across the Tallapoosa and into the Creek camp. The Whale was wounded and unable to return; the other two Cherokees stole Creek canoes tied up by the waterside and paddled them across to their comrades—who swiftly filled the canoes and paddled them back, forming a party of marauders behind the enemy lines. There is no evidence that Ross crossed the river, although
the party is known to have included Major Ridge, the upscale planter who was in time to become Ross’s vital ally and mentor. The Cherokees fought courageously and caused confusion in the Creek camp.

Jackson, perceiving from the high ground that his Cherokees were inside the Horseshoe, still refrained from ordering his white troops against the obstacle of the wall, but “
when I found those engaged in the interior of the bend, were about to be overpowered, I ordered the charge.” The regulars of the Thirty-Ninth Regiment, including the young ensign Sam Houston, raced across the little patch of open ground between them and the wall. They fired inward through the Indian portholes—apparently just as badly designed as the portholes at Fort Mims—and scaled the wall to begin brutal hand-to-hand combat. Struck by a barbed arrow in the thigh,
Houston compelled a comrade to yank it out and continued fighting. Many Creeks were killed where they stood. Others retreated toward
their second line of defense, a tangle of felled trees inside the Horseshoe. Still others fled toward the river, taking shelter beneath the bluffs below the white men. When Jackson sent a man down a bluff to demand their surrender, the Creeks fired on the emissary. Jackson’s men
set fire to the underbrush, and then shot Red Stick fighters as they fled the flames. Creeks who tried to swim away
across the Tallapoosa became target practice for the Cherokees and Coffee’s horsemen on the far shore.

Decades later, John Ross would write a letter to Andrew Jackson, reminding him of the day they served together in arms against the “
unfortunate and deluded red foe,” a “portentous day” that was “shrouded by a cloud of darkness, besprinkled with the awful streaks of blood and death. It is in the hour of such times that the heart of man can be truly tested and correctly judged.” Perhaps Ross was right that it was a moment to judge the hearts of men. But Andrew Jackson had no time for such poetic thoughts. Shortly after the engagement he described the slaughter of the Indians in a letter to his wife, Rachel: