Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (7 page)

It was dark before we finished killing them—I ordered the dead bodies of the Indians to be counted, the next morning, and exclusive of those
buried in their watry grave, who were killed in the [river] and who after being wounded plunged into it, there were counted, five hundred and fifty seven.

To ensure precision and avoid double counting, white soldiers cut off the noses of dead Indians as they went. It was harder to count those Indians dead in the river, but some of John Coffee’s men affixed their signatures to a statement guessing that beyond the 557 bodies on land, an additional 300 Creeks were “buried in their watry grave.” Given the exaggeration that has always attended body counts of enemies in wartime, this guess was almost certainly too high. Some Creeks were known to have escaped, including Menawa, a wounded Creek leader, but a great many Creek males were slaughtered at Horseshoe Bend, leaving 350 women and children to be taken prisoner with only 3 men. An American soldier said the Tallapoosa had become a
“River of blood,” writing that it was “very perceptably bloody” even at “10 O’clock at night.” It seems unlikely that a river of the Tallapoosa’s volume could truly have been so affected, but the letter did reflect the soldier’s state of mind.

It fell to John Ross, as one of the few literate Cherokees, to compile a report on the Cherokee Regiment’s wounded and dead. He listed the injuries company by company, such as the men of “Capt Speirs Company.”

“Do.” was a common abbreviation for “ditto,” which Ross used when the word “killed” became tiresome to repeat. He noted a total of eighteen Cherokees killed and thirty-six wounded. About one of every twelve Cherokees was injured or dead, a significant toll for a single day’s fight, which underlined their vital role. The toll among the much larger white force—
26 killed, and up to 107 wounded, depending on the count—was comparatively light, although it is still jarring to read the final two sentences of a letter that John Coffee wrote after the battle to his wife:

Having now nearly compleated our business here, I shall soon turn me towards home when I hope to enjoy the remainder of my life with you in quiet—my love to our little daughter—and all friends—

Lemul Montgomery was killed in battle at the charge against the breast works by a ball through his head—

The blunt way the soldiers discussed death in letters to their families suggests that violence, particularly involving Indians, was an ordinary feature of frontier life—and also that in their campaign of vengeance men had become desensitized. Years afterward, historians recorded the memories of elderly veterans, like the one who testified that “
many of the Tennessee soldiers cut long strips of skin from the bodies of the dead Indians and from these made bridle reins.” Another veteran said that “
when the Horse Shoe village was set on fire,” a very old Indian continued pounding corn on a mortar as if oblivious to the battle around him, until a white soldier “shot him dead, assigning as his reason for so doing that he might be able to report when he went home that he had killed an Indian.” Another soldier struck a boy “five or six years of age” with the butt of his rifle, later explaining that he killed the child because he “
would have become an Indian some day.”

What did Jackson think of such atrocities? The soldiers’ commanding general would become known in later years as an “Indian hater,” though the evidence suggests Jackson’s views were more complex. It was true that Jackson’s army killed almost everyone they could in the Horseshoe. It was also true that he depended on natives as part of his army, and that some, like Major Ridge, gave him the greatest respect. When the fighting was over, Jackson remembered his promise to give Indians the same pay and benefits as white soldiers. Three years after the war, learning that widows of Cherokee soldiers were not receiving death benefits, he appealed on their behalf to the War Department: “
I did believe they were to be considered in every respect on the same footing with the militia . . . I made this promise believing it was Just,” he said, insisting that the families of the Cherokee dead must now be “placed in the same situation of the wives & children of our soldiers who have fell in Battle.” The contradictions are breathtaking. He wrote this remarkable letter urging equal benefits for a racial minority while visiting the Cherokee Nation in 1817, during an attempt to negotiate a treaty obtaining substantial Cherokee land for nothing. Even that treaty contained contradictions; profoundly unfair as it was, it included a
provision offering individual farms along with U.S. citizenship to some Cherokees who wished to claim it.
Three hundred eleven heads of families took the offer. Though he was deeply prejudiced, it is more relevant to say that
Jackson was violently opposed to anyone who stood in his way. When people posed no threat to his interests, he allowed himself to act on impulses of fairness that he otherwise suppressed.

It was the Red Sticks’ misfortune to stand in Jackson’s way, and Jackson showed no regret for the devastation he had inflicted. Days after Horseshoe Bend, one of his letters made its way to the public, becoming in effect a press release. It was published in the
National Intelligencer,
an influential Washington newspaper. As printed, Jackson’s account of the battle only briefly mentioned the Cherokees, noting their casualties but not the Cherokee attack that triggered the final assault. The letter did include Jackson’s testimony that the Creeks fought bravely, but were “
cut to pieces” until the battlefield was “strewed with the slain,” including a Creek spiritual leader who had been “shot in the mouth by a grapeshot, as if heaven designed to chastise his impostures by an appropriate punishment.”

Jackson would soon demonstrate that he had a punishment in mind that was far more important to him than blood.

Within a few weeks after the battle Jackson had sealed his conquest by marching to the Creek heartland. He occupied the ruins of a fort there, which was renamed Fort Jackson in his honor, and brusquely demanded the unconditional surrender of Creek chiefs who came professing peace. He also demanded that they bring him William Weatherford, the rebels’ war leader, as a prisoner. Weatherford saved them the trouble by boldly marching into Jackson’s camp alone, gaining an audience with the general, and frankly admitting that he was surrendering only because he had no troops left. Jackson was so impressed that he let Weatherford go free.

Weatherford’s surrender became part of the mythology of the Creek War, a moment of closure in the later style of Lee at Appomattox. The reality was different. The comparison would be better if, after General
Lee surrendered in 1865, other Confederate soldiers retreated into the hills and fought on for many years. That was roughly what happened with the Red Stick rebels in 1814. They were devastated at the Horseshoe but not eliminated. Weatherford was virtually the only rebel leader who surrendered. Others fled southward through the woods, crossing the border to Spanish Florida, where they were soon receiving arms and supplies from British ships offshore. These rebels would emerge to conduct raids on white settlers for many years.

The refusal of most Red Sticks to give up caused some awkwardness when Jackson organized peace talks in July, at Fort Jackson, under the shade of his marquee. The Creeks were dignified and had no reason to be hostile. Nearly all were Jackson’s allies, for the enemies had not come. This proved no obstacle for Jackson. He demanded land from all the Creeks, enemies and allies alike. The cession he dictated was roughly in the shape of the letter “L.” The horizontal leg ran along the whole length of the border with Florida, and cut off the Creeks from any possible contact with Spanish territory. The vertical leg rose through the center of what is now Alabama, and cut off the Creeks from tribes and white settlers farther west. Aside from strategic considerations, the region to be surrendered consisted of twenty-three million acres of saleable real estate.

One account records the Creek leader Big Warrior rising to remind Jackson that he had gone into battle
against
the Red Sticks. “
I made this war, which has proved so fatal to my country, that the treaty entered into a long time ago with father Washington might not be broken. To his friendly arm I hold fast.” But Washington’s friendly arm was long gone, and Jackson had instructions from Washington, DC. The chiefs could accept his terms or flee to Florida. When, on August 6, Big Warrior appealed for a settlement to be delayed until the Red Sticks were actually defeated, Jackson wrote the Creek leaders a letter. He said his land grab was necessary to separate loyal Creeks from Red Sticks.

Brothers—You say, that when they are all conquered, we will settle—that the war is not over.
I answer—we know the war is not over—and
that is one reason why we will run a line between our friends and our enemies. . . . The safety of the United States and your nation requires, that enemies must be separated from Friends. . . . Therefore we will run the line—our friends will sign the treaty.

Jackson was making peace not with enemies but with friends, and was warning Big Warrior that if he failed to sign, he would cease to
be
a friend. The chiefs yielded, marking Jackson’s first great step in the removal of the Indians from the Southeast. The Creeks once had been the most powerful and most centrally located of the region’s native nations. Now they were isolated, and their power was destroyed.

After the sad Creek chiefs approved the Treaty of Fort Jackson on August 9, 1814, their war was largely over. Jackson’s would continue. Rewarded for his victory with a permanent major generalship in the U.S. Army, he rebuilt his force again over the summer, accepting more recruits, putting down more mutinies, and having more soldiers shot. Running desperately short of funds to supply his troops, he wrote for help to
friends in Nashville, who appealed to a bank for $50,000. He briefly invaded Spanish Florida, chasing British troops, and then arrived at New Orleans in time for the main British invasion that winter. But John Ross would not be among the defenders at the Battle of New Orleans at the start of 1815, for by then he and the Cherokee Regiment had gone home. There was a divide in Jackson’s forces, between the men who became his absolute loyalists and remained with him to the end, and those whose loyalty was conditional—who followed him into battle when they felt it was right, but also insisted upon their right to leave. John Ross was among the conditional men. He left a few weeks after the carnage of Horseshoe Bend. He was home well before the signing of the Treaty of Fort Jackson, though as a reader of newspapers and gatherer of intelligence, he followed the negotiations and grasped their importance. The next time Ross came to the attention of history it would not be in the service of General Jackson, but in defiance of him—and in defense of Cherokee lands.

1767–
1814

O
nce in a letter, John Ross referred to the boundary of the Cherokee Nation. He called the area beyond the Cherokee border the “
whiteside.” He wrote that compound word as if it was in common use, as it might have been for a man like Ross, who lived on the dividing line between two worlds. Part white and part Cherokee, he grew up crossing and recrossing a border between races. Not until well into his adult life did he definitively signal where he would come to rest.

Ross was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of white traders who had lived in the Cherokee Nation since British colonial times, though the word “trader” did not really describe the compass of their influence. They acted as vital links between the Indian and white worlds. Traders bought furs and other items, exchanging them for cloth, guns, beads, and whiskey. Often they married native women, which explained Ross’s Cherokee blood. His prosperous family built homes in Cherokee places that would later become famous landmarks of the Civil War, like Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain.

From his earliest days Ross felt the tug of competing identities.
Born October 3, 1790, he spent his early years surrounded by Cherokees who visited his father’s store. Cherokee children were his friends. One year his mother made plans to take her children to the annual Green Corn Festival, one of the celebrations around which the Cherokee year was organized. She expected him to dress like a white child, but the boy didn’t want to appear before his friends that way.
She let him change into traditional Indian dress—which, for a small boy, might not be very much clothing at all.

Kooweskoowe, the bird’s name he received at adulthood, appropriately honored his ancestry in the
Cherokee Bird Clan. His great-grandmother had been a full-blooded Indian, a woman named
Ghigooie, whose clan was one of seven into which the nation was divided. She married a Scottish trader and bore children, including Ross’s maternal grandmother. That grandmother—half white, half Indian—grew up to marry another Scottish trader. He was John McDonald, an outsize character whose personal experience with shifting loyalties foreshadowed Ross’s own.

McDonald was among generations of northern Britons who flooded the American colonies throughout the eighteenth century. From Ireland, Scotland, and northern England came roughly
a quarter-million people, a migration that played an enormous role in shaping the early American identity. While most of these migrants settled among colonists like themselves, the traders found opportunity beyond the frontier, on the Indian map. McDonald learned the Cherokee language and became an adviser to Cherokee leaders. He was also a sort of diplomat representing the interests of the British crown. When other colonists revolted in 1775, McDonald remained loyal to his king, as did the Cherokees, who saw the distant king as their protector against the land-grabbing white men who lived nearby.
Enrolled as a British soldier, McDonald organized Cherokees to fight the American rebels. He became the sort of overseas operator the British Empire used for
centuries, Lawrence-of-Arabia types who learned local tongues and motivated native armies to fight in the British cause. In McDonald’s case it was a lost cause. When the British gave up in 1783, they abandoned their Indian allies as well as Tories like McDonald. He became American by force of circumstance rather than by choice.

The Tory trader did not embrace his new identity easily. He became a one-man nation with his own foreign policy. He continued living among the Cherokees, but as they negotiated for peace with the new United States, McDonald maintained ties with Britain and even with Spain, which controlled Florida and New Orleans to the south. He was not alone in hedging his bets with the Spanish. James Wilkinson, the commander in chief of the U.S. Army, received barrels of Spanish coins in payment for intelligence and advice. Farmers and traders had to swear allegiance to Spain to ship goods down the Mississippi. Generations later, a historian discovered the astounding news that
Andrew Jackson himself took a secret oath to the Spanish crown. These oaths were mostly a farce; westerners got the access to New Orleans that they needed, and never got around to delivering the interior United States to Spanish control. But nobody was certain where John McDonald’s loyalties lay. In 1792
he went on the Spanish payroll, earning $500 a year, a substantial sum on the cash-poor frontier.

One day the trader learned of two other white men in danger. They were traveling by boat down the Tennessee River when a band of Cherokees seized them. The leader of the Cherokee band, known as Bloody Fellow, was angry at the white men for giving a ride to a native who was out of favor. But McDonald arrived in time to smooth over the dispute, managing the affair so adroitly that Bloody Fellow changed his mind about the white travelers and welcomed them to trade with the Cherokees. One, Daniel Ross, settled near McDonald. He was yet another Scotsman, and married McDonald’s daughter Mollie, who was one-fourth Cherokee.
Of their nine children, John Ross was the third, and the oldest son.

 • • • 

Nothing about his ancestry made it impossible for Ross to be regarded simply as Cherokee. Cherokee society was matrilineal, with ancestry traced through mothers rather than fathers, and Ross could follow his Cherokee blood directly through his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. All those white men were less relevant. It was expected that a woman would marry outside her clan, and common to marry outside her nation. The idea that Ross was only “one-eighth Cherokee” would not have made much sense in Cherokee culture.

Many white people, far more focused on racial purity, would not have accepted a man with Ross’s genealogy as white. But Ross could pass as white among those who did not know his family. His upbringing made this possible. He grew up in an English-speaking household, which the Ross family made a little outpost of white civilization. They kept the house stocked with books, maps, and
the most recent newspapers available on the frontier; Daniel Ross wanted his children to read. (John Ross returned the favor on at least one occasion in later life, helping to keep the house stocked with reading material; his 1813 letter to the federal Indian agent warning about the Creek rebellion ended with a friendly postscript: “Grand Father & Father presents their respects to you & will be very thankful if you will
send a few late newspapers by the bearer.”) Young John began his formal education around age nine, when his father hired a tutor. He went on to study at a private academy established for the benefit of Indians, and emerged well educated by the standards of the frontier. As an adult Ross would come to look striking in the European-style clothing that had made him uncomfortable as a boy. His best-known portrait showed him in a formal dark suit with a vest, his hair carefully trimmed and combed back, his large eyes focused on the artist, looking every bit the youthful statesman with his right hand holding a piece of paper. He moved about the Cherokee Nation in
boots and a jacket, sometimes topped by a broad-brimmed, flat-crowned
planter’s hat. Because he could have passed as a white man, his leadership skills and eloquence might well have led him to prominence, given the widening opportunities for white men in Andrew Jackson’s America. Yet something drew Ross away from the whiteside and closer to his Indian identity. Given the ability to claim membership in one of two different groups, Ross gradually strengthened his ties to the group that was smaller, more vulnerable, and seemingly destined to lose.

He certainly prospered as a Cherokee, because he was an entrepreneur. He developed real estate in both the Cherokee and white senses of the term. Although Cherokee land was owned in common by the nation, plots could be improved by individuals, as Ross did with houses and fields and the Tennessee River settlement called Ross’s Landing. On the whiteside, Ross speculated in land as allowed by white custom,
purchasing remote tracts in hopes that spreading settlement would increase their value. Ross also purchased people as slaves. Decades after Ross’s death, a ninety-six-year-old man testified to an oral historian: “
My grandfather, father and Auntie were bought by John Ross.” Ross later sold the father in a trade for real estate. Ross’s slaves, like his wife and children, were very rarely discussed in his letters, although we can occasionally glimpse them. When Ross referred to “the bearer of this letter” or sending “newspapers by the bearer,” it is reasonable to imagine that the papers were carried across the Cherokee Nation in a black hand.

Ross was wealthy enough that when he became a Cherokee leader, his political opponents questioned how he made his money. They never proved their suspicions of corruption, and the modern-day editor of Ross’s papers found no sign that Ross had dipped into the Cherokee treasury. When Ross emerged as a leading defender of Indian rights, his white critics made a darker allegation.
Ross wasn’t a true Indian, they charged, but part of a mixed-blood elite who misled simple-minded Cherokees to maintain positions of personal wealth and privilege. It was certainly correct that some elites of native nations proved to be
excessively self-interested, although it is challenging to classify Ross among them. Corruptible elites commonly worked
with
white men rather than against them, trading away communal land if the government paid bribes or granted plots of land in their names. John
Ross himself was granted 640 acres as part of a treaty with the United States in 1819. But if the land grant was meant to peel him away from the Cherokee Nation, it didn’t work. He grew more steadfast in defense of the people he regarded as his own. He persisted even after his house was taken away from him and occupied by white settlers.

If Ross ever explained his choice, the explanation has not survived. He might have been the last to know, given the human tendency to choose a course in life and find the reasons afterward. Once he became a Cherokee leader it would have been politically awkward to admit that he ever had a chance to assume a different allegiance. But in pondering his eventual stand on the Cherokee side of the line, it is worth considering the cumulative effect of Ross’s experiences. This book began with Ross’s journey down the Tennessee River in 1812, when he was challenged from the riverbank by white horsemen. Prudence required Ross to obscure his Cherokee heritage and pass as white. This was probably not the only time he ever had to do so. He certainly encountered many people over the years who would have treated him differently depending on whether they perceived him as a white man in a statesman’s black clothes, or a suspicious character on a boat with red men. Ross would have taken their view of Indians personally: it was an affront to him and to his family, particularly his mother. A man in frontier America was expected to seek redress for insults. Though Ross never challenged other men to duels, as Andrew Jackson did, he was equally jealous of his honor. Ross’s answer could have been the life he chose. Maybe he remembered the behavior of the white horsemen who confronted him along the bank of the Tennessee River. Maybe he didn’t want to be one of them.