Tecumseh and Brock (26 page)

Chapter 14

The Creek War

F
AR TO THE
SOUTH
of the Great Lakes where Tecumseh had fought, another native struggle was underway. The great Shawnee chief had helped sow the seeds for what came to be known as the Creek War.

Tecumseh's journey to Tuckhabatchee in September 1811 won a militant Muscogee faction called the Red Sticks to his cause. The war of the Muscogees was waged in the land now known as the Old Southwest. This region, in which Spain, France, and Britain had had imperial interests, was a magnet for settlers, especially wealthy landowners who hungered to create a new cotton kingdom to replace the land farther east, where the soil had been depleted by intensive agriculture.

To make sense of the Creek War, the stage needs to be set for the southern theatre of conflict. The influence of the Red Sticks, who drew their name from the red war clubs that they carried as a symbol of justice, spread rapidly through Upper Creek settlements in the early months of 1812. The movement was one of resistance, not only to the encroachment of settlers on Muscogee land but also to the increasing influence of American ways upon Muscogee society. Adherents of the Red Stick movement attacked and intimidated those who did not share their views, in some cases murdering them.
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The great earthquake that struck the area around New Madrid, Missouri, on December 16, 1811, reinforced support for the rebel movement. So too did the sight of a comet in the heavens in the autumn of 1811. Some Muscogees associated the comet with the words Tecumseh had spoken at their council, when he said, “You shall see my arm of fire stretched athwart the sky.”
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The Shawnee chief had prophesied events that would shake the world. His prophesy seemed to many to carry great meaning. As elsewhere among native peoples, the earthquake and the comet were interpreted as a signal of the Great Spirit's displeasure with the native peoples' adoption of the European lifestyle.

By June 1812, when war erupted in the North against Great Britain, the Americans were also embroiled in a conflict across their southern border in Florida, with the Seminole natives and with runaway blacks who had escaped from slavery in Georgia. With the tacit support of Washington, freelance military operations were mounted from Georgia to seize territory in Florida from the weak Spanish administration. For the Seminole natives, resistance to the American intruders was similar in character to movements elsewhere on the continent to protect native land and sovereignty. For the blacks (known as the Maroons), the prospect of an American occupation threatened them with no less than enslavement. In July and August 1812, the two groups resisted an incursion of self-proclaimed U.S.
Patriots and drove them back across the border.
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Subsequent U.S.
attacks were also rebuffed. The pattern on the southern frontier was the same as on the western and northern frontiers of the United States: where American settlers and their political backers saw opportunities for expansion, they acted on them, and the native population resisted.

In 1810 American freelancers had seized Baton Rouge and adjacent parts of Spanish West Florida and had called on the U.S. Congress to annex the area. On October 27, 1810, President James Madison proclaimed that the portion of West Florida between the Mississippi and Perdido Rivers was now U.S. territory.
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In February 1813, the Madison administration took action to acquire another piece of territory on the Gulf Coast, instructing the commander of the U.S. Seventh Military District at New Orleans to seize Mobile from Spain. Two months later, General James Wilkinson, who later commanded American units in the northern war against the British, led the landing of six hundred American troops against the Spanish bastion near Mobile. The Spaniards surrendered without firing a shot. Thus the Americans obtained Mobile, gateway to much of the Alabama interior.

On the road to their own war with the United States, the Red Sticks were involved in the fighting between the British and the Americans as backers of Tecumseh's native confederacy. Fanning the flames of American resentment against the militant Muscogee faction, a number of Red Sticks allied with Tecumseh participated in the January 1813 battles at the River Raisin.

The following month, another incident incited rage among Americans. Red Sticks returning south from the River Raisin murdered members of seven white families in the Ohio Valley. When he received word of the murders, Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins called on the leaders of the Muscogee National Council to punish the perpetrators. A party led by William McIntosh, an influential mixed-blood Muscogee, set out to hunt down the killers, ambushing them in the house where they slept. When the culprits ran out of ammunition and refused to lay down their weapons, McIntosh had the house set alight and five of the murderers were either burned to death or died trying to get away. The next day the leader of the Red Stick group was also hunted down and killed.

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.”
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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