Patriotic Fire (6 page)

Carroll asked Jackson to be his second, but Jackson demurred and tried to patch things up. When this proved impossible, he reluctantly accompanied Carroll to the dueling grounds. Jesse Benton fired first and nicked Carroll on the thumb, then, “in a fit of panic,” he turned and bent over, exposing his rear end to Colonel Carroll, which was precisely where Jackson’s brigade inspector shot him.*
 
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Having his little brother humiliated in this way did not set well with now Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hart Benton, who had once been Jackson’s friend and envoy to Washington, and he stated to Jackson that it was a “very poor business for a man of [Jackson’s] age and standing” to be involved in a duel between two of his young officers. There things might have rested but for Nashville gossips and troublemakers who kept hinting to each of the ruffled parties that one or the other was saying something impolite about him. Things finally got so bad that Jackson publicly stated he would “horsewhip” Thomas Benton the next time he encountered him.

This occurred six weeks later, on September 4, 1813, when the Bentons rode into Nashville and checked into the City Hotel, across the courthouse square from the Nashville Inn, where Jackson and his associates customarily hung out. News of the Bentons’ arrival quickly got to Jackson, who retrieved his horsewhip and marched over to the hotel to fulfill his promise. There he accosted Thomas Benton in the doorway and, calling him a “damned rascal,” brandished the whip, at which point Benton reached into his pocket for what Jackson thought was a pistol. Jackson outdrew him with his own, backing Benton through the hotel doorway with his pistol leveled. But brother Jesse, hearing the encounter, had sneaked around to the side of the barroom, from which vantage point he fired two shots at Jackson, which smashed into his arm and shoulder. Jackson, toppling, fired at Thomas and missed; then Thomas drew and fired twice at Jackson’s prone figure in front of him, but he missed, too.

Jesse had reloaded and was about to put an end to Andrew Jackson on the spot when two of the general’s friends came bursting into the room. A melee ensued: Stockley Hays, Jackson’s nephew, began stabbing at Jesse with a sword cane, while Jackson’s faithful cavalry commander, John Coffee, brutalized Thomas with the butt of his pistol. Both Bentons managed to make their getaway, but Andrew Jackson was left in very bad shape.

At first it was feared he would not live; his blood soaked up two mattresses before the bleeding stopped. Every physician in Nashville attended the general, and all but one agreed he’d have to have the arm amputated lest gangrene set in and kill him. Jackson would have none of it, though, saying, “I’ll keep my arm.” He remained bedridden for more than three weeks, until momentous news arrived from Alabama.

Following Tecumseh’s visit to the Creek Nation there two years earlier, a band of about two dozen Creek warriors trekked all the way up to Indiana to meet with Tecumseh about the great Indian Confederation he had planned. They accompanied him on several raids against white settlers and also participated in the massacre of U.S. prisoners at the River Raisin in Michigan Territory. Afterward the Creeks returned to Alabama more bloodthirsty than ever, massacring settlers all along the way. When they got home they found that something even larger was in the wind: William Weatherford, the powerful Creek chief now known as Red Eagle, had put on his warpaint.

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eatherford’s ancestry is so unusual that it begs amplification. Nearly a hundred years earlier, in 1722, an officer named Captain Marchand was ordered by French authorities in New Orleans to take a body of troops and establish an outpost on the upper reaches of the Coosa River where it joins the Alabama near present-day Montgomery. Once there he built Fort Toulouse, constituting thereby a French presence against encroachments by the English from their colonies to the east, or by the Spanish, who controlled Florida to the south.

There Marchand met an Indian girl, who produced for him a lovely child they named Sehoy. Shortly afterward, Marchand’s troops mutinied and killed him, which is the end of his story, but the soon-to-be legendary Sehoy grew into a beautiful woman who, when the British encroached into Alabama, just as the French had feared, began consorting with one of their officers, and producing children, until a handsome and wealthy Scottish adventurer by the name of Lachlan McGillivray turned up and “repaid his host’s hospitality” by running away with Sehoy. McGillivray then built a fashionable home on the Coosa River and established an Indian trading post, which soon made him a very wealthy man.

One of their sons, Alexander McGillivray, whom Lachlan had sent away to boarding school in Charleston, returned to the Coosa and promptly disavowed both his education and his three-quarters-white blood by joining the Creek “Clan of the Wind,” of which he soon became head chief. The younger McGillivray also disliked Americans, and during the Revolution he became a colonel in the British army, after which he worked in Pensacola for Spain, before changing allegiances once again and winding up at his death, in 1793, “a brigadier-general in the United States Army, worth one hundred thousand dollars, and . . . buried with Masonic honors in a Spanish gentleman’s garden at Pensacola.”

Before Alexander died, however, another Scottish trader named Charles Weatherford happened along and married Alexander’s half sister, whereupon, like the elder McGillivray, this new Scotsman built a fine house for himself and his wife and went on to make a fortune in the Indian trade. Of Weatherford’s two sons—themselves only one-eighth Indian by now—Robert chose the way of the white man (and was never heard of again), but William, like his famous uncle Alexander McGillivray, chose the path of a Creek warrior and soon became known as the ferocious Chief Red Eagle of the Clan of the Wind.

The visit to Alabama by Tecumseh in 1811 had left a murderous impression on Weatherford, which was further exacerbated by the recent construction of the controversial Federal Road through Georgia and Alabama; this road, in addition to facilitating the delivery of mail as it was intended to do, brought more and more settlers into what until then had been an Indian wilderness. Tecumseh’s prophecy was coming true right before Weatherford’s eyes: forests being stripped of trees to make way for fields, rivers turned brown from runoff silt; all that remained was for the Indians to be turned into slaves. Convinced that the only way to put an end to this was to kill as many of these settlers as possible, Weatherford and his band, known as the Red Sticks (à la Tecumseh, for the bright paint on their war clubs), engineered a war of savage depredation against the whites.

Farmers from all over the territory began fleeing into Mobile, the only significant city on the Gulf Coast at the time, or moving into stockades and blockhouses scattered throughout the area. One of these was Fort Mims, a rude stockade hardly worthy of the name, near the Tensaw River about forty miles north of Mobile, owned by a prosperous landowner and ferry operator, Samuel Mims, and recently garrisoned by 120 militia from Louisiana. In addition, inside were approximately 175 white settlers and their women and children, as well as a lesser number of slaves and friendly Indians.*
 
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Despite several warnings from slaves who reported they had seen hostile Indians in the neighborhood, just before noon on August 30, 1813—and five days before Jackson’s disgraceful gunfight with the Bentons—William Weatherford’s war party of about 700 braves came screaming out of a ravine a hundred yards from Fort Mims, completely surprising the settlers and the garrison while they were eating their lunch.

The gates to the fort had become stuck in rain-washed sand and clay, and the war party quickly rushed inside. The carnage was deliberate and awful. All the buildings and houses in the fort were set afire by the Indians, and many settlers burned alive. The rest were tomahawked, scalped, and otherwise mutilated, with only a dozen or so managing to escape by running into a swamp. A militia officer who went to the fort three weeks later—when it was finally considered safe to do so—reported to U.S. authorities that after they had driven off buzzards, wolves, and dogs, his detachment buried “247 white men, women and children.”

Word of the massacre soon spread to Nashville along with eyewitness accounts of bloodcurdling description: “. . . blood and brains bespattered the whole earth. The children were seized by the legs, and killed by batting their heads against the stockading. The women were scalped and those who were pregnant were opened, while they were alive, and the embryo infants let out of the womb.” As the historian Frank Owsley notes, “It was Indian warfare at its worst.”

Reports of this atrocity ignited in Americans a collective cry of indignation and demands for retribution. To the authorities it was obvious that the Indians had now declared full-scale war on the United States. No man recognized this more than Major General Andrew Jackson, who commanded the nearest and most powerful military force that could deal with it. When someone in the legislature lamented how unfortunate it was that Jackson—only two weeks into recovery since his near-fatal wounding by the Bentons—would be unable to command, the general roared, “The devil in hell I’m not!” and published an order to his troops: “The health of your general is restored. He will command in person.” With that, Jackson climbed out of his sickbed, and on October 7, 1813, with his fractured and still bleeding arm in a sling, he marched his 2,500-man army of frontiersmen out of Nashville, southward to the empire of the Creeks.

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ndrew Jackson’s brand of warfare, while not as brutal as that of the Red Sticks, was certainly no picnic for the Indians. Whenever he reached a Creek village whose occupants were suspected of participating in the uprising, Jackson burned it to the ground and sent the inhabitants fleeing toward Spanish Florida. If they resisted, he ordered them hunted down and killed. In the process, Jackson had the additional concept of establishing a permanent north-south road through the wilderness from Nashville to Mobile—felling trees, removing stumps, filling, backing, leveling, and bridging—to open the Gulf trade to Tennessee (which, in fact, he did).

Not only that, but when he was finished with the Creeks in Alabama, Jackson had determined to move against the Spanish stronghold at Pensacola to eject them from or neutralize their control over West Florida. Although Spain was ostensibly at peace with the United States, Jackson knew from his many spies that the Spanish were quietly arming and supplying the Creeks and other Indians, inspiring them to cause trouble in the southern regions of the country. And there were worse things, too, far worse, that Jackson did not know at the time.

With Brigadier John Coffee’s 1,200-man cavalry as its spearhead, Jackson’s army marched southward. There were several major battles, the first fought at the large Creek town of Talluschatchee. There Coffee, a giant of a man who would go on to become Jackson’s most trusted lieutenant, was fighting the first military engagement of his life, but proved he had an unerring aptitude for it. He posted his men in two large half-circles, performing an envelopment outside the town. When the Indians spotted several riders sent in as “bait,” they all rushed out to give chase, and Coffee’s men sprung the trap. Many Creeks were killed, and the rest ran back into the town, where they were relentlessly hunted down by the Tennesseans. “We shot them like dogs,” Davy Crockett remembered.

Several dozen braves ran into a large hut guarded at the door by a Creek squaw with a bow and arrow. When she killed a young lieutenant with it, she was in turn shot by his troops and the hut set afire, roasting the Indians alive. One hundred and eighty-six dead Indians were counted when the battle was over, and several dozen women and children taken into custody, including a beautiful boy about three years old who was found terrified and crying in his dead mother’s arms. When Coffee’s men marched the women and children back to Jackson’s camp, the general immediately noticed the boy and inquired of the squaws who among them was going to take care of him. Their reply disgusted the general: “All his relations are dead; kill him too,” they said.

Jackson did no such thing, but instead took the little boy into his tent and nursed him with brown sugar water until the child could be sent to Rachel in Nashville. Afterward, the Jacksons named the boy Lincoyer, and he lived with them as beloved as any of their own family until his death from tuburculosis at the age of seventeen.

Next on Jackson’s list was the large Creek encampment at Talladega,*
 
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where some 1,000 Red Sticks had besieged an old fort inhabited by about 150 friendly Creeks. They had been on the verge of starvation when one of their chiefs, “enveloping himself in the skin of a large hog with head and hoofs attached, left the fort and went about rooting and grunting, gradually working his way through the hostile host until he was beyond reach of their arrows.”

By the time this bold hog-man reached Jackson’s camp, the Americans, too, were on the edge of starvation, their suppliers having failed them. Jackson nevertheless saddled up almost his entire army and moved on Talladega, which he reached in the early hours of November 9, 1813. They formed ranks at sunrise and moved toward the enemy in an envelopment formation similar to the one Coffee had used previously. In the ensuing battle 239 Indian bodies were left on the field, and others, wounded, undoubtedly died in the woods into which they had run. Jackson had 15 men killed and about 80 wounded.

So far the campaign was going well except for the food situation. The men were down to eating a few biscuits, and “for several days General Jackson and his military family subsisted on tripe, without bread or seasoning.” When that ran out, they began dining on acorns, a meal that has become legendary in accounts of Jackson’s career. As the story goes, when several officers came to Jackson’s headquarters on behalf of their men to complain about the lack of food, the general had laid out before them an elegant table, complete with fine china, linens, and silver water goblets, and he invited them to dine with him. When the astonished men had been seated, Jackson’s orderly brought out a large silver platter piled high with acorns, whereupon Jackson solemnly pronounced words to this effect: “Here, gentlemen, you can see before you that we have no crisis. This country is filled with a wonderful bounty of natural food.”

Before it got better, it got worse. The Tennessee militia mutinied over the lack of rations and tried to march back toward Nashville; Jackson halted them with his volunteers. Then the volunteers mutinied because their one-year enlistment had run out, and Jackson stopped them with his militia. But clearly the situation had become intolerable, and as the new year of 1814 began Jackson was compelled to cease operations and recruit an entire new army, which he did, bringing in some 2,000 men, supplemented now by a U.S. Army regiment of regulars that included a young lieutenant named Sam Houston, subsequently known as the Father of Texas.

After retiring to winter quarters, Jackson at last was able to iron out the ration and supply foul-ups and ready himself for the spring campaign, in which he aimed at striking a final, decisive blow to destroy William Weatherford and his Red Sticks. The opportunity came in March 1814 at an obscure loop on the Tallapoosa River called Horseshoe Bend.

The Indians considered Horseshoe Bend sacred ground. The bend itself was an oblong peninsula formed by the serpentine river and consisting of about a hundred acres of brush and timber, across the neck of which the Indians had built a formidable breastwork of logs, keeping their canoes at the opposite point in case they had to escape. Eight hundred Red Sticks manned the fortification in which they had fabricated two rows of firing loopholes. It was apparent on both sides that the Red Sticks were hunkered down for a fight to the finish.

On March 27, upon a misty dawn, Jackson had the bend surrounded, while friendly Indian scouts attached to Coffee’s cavalry swam the river and took most of the Red Sticks’ unguarded canoes. The general had placed 1,000 of his soldiers on the banks opposite the Horseshoe to prevent the Red Sticks from swimming to safety, while along the narrow neck he formed up another 1,000 for the assault on the breastwork itself. About ten a.m., his army’s small six-pounder cannon roared into action, slamming balls into the Indian breastwork, but they merely buried themselves in the soft pine planks. Creek riflemen retaliated, but so far no one much had been hurt. Then, when Jackson observed the Indians trying to remove their women and children across the river, out of harm’s way, he halted fire.

So it went until about half past noon, when there was no more reason for delay. Then the drummers of the 39th Infantry Regiment of U.S. Army regulars began to beat out the long roll—the signal to charge. Jackson’s 1,000 infantry rushed the Indian lines, with the 39th Regiment leading the way. The first man to get atop it was Major Lemuel Montgomery, who was immediately killed by a shot to the head.*
 
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Big Sam Houston was one of the next to claw his way up the rampart and, brandishing his sword, was seen to jump down into the swarm of Indian defenders, slashing away.

For the next three hours the battle raged fierce and desperate, breaking down into dozens of separate fights throughout the hundred-acre peninsula; with rifles, bayonets, swords, knives, spears, clubs, bows and arrows, tomahawks, rocks, fists, and teeth the Indians and soldiers went at it. About three p.m. it began to rain, and Jackson sent an offer urging the Red Sticks to surrender. Instead, they shot the messenger, and the battle continued with renewed fury. Houston was carried from the field, shot twice through the shoulder and with “a ghastly wound in his thigh” from a barbed arrow. He was not expected to live. Some of the Indians tried to escape by plunging into the river, but rifle fire from both banks soon turned the Tallapoosa red with blood.

Late in the afternoon the fighting became desultory as the soldiers came together against isolated pockets of resistance. “Not an Indian asked for quarter, nor would accept it if offered.” Finally, when it became too dark to see, the fighting ceased, and next morning’s sun rose over a frightful tableau. Five hundred and fifty-seven Indian bodies were strewn over the little bend in the river; at least another 200 had “found a grave at the bottom of the river,” while it was estimated that another 100 or so died of their wounds in the forest.

The back of the Red Stick confederacy was broken.

After weighting down his own 49 dead and sinking them into the river to keep them from being scalped by any returning Indians, Jackson by midday on March 28 had his army—including 157 wounded—on the five-day northward march back to their encampment. His only regret was that William Weatherford was not found among the Indian dead and would have to be hunted down—or so he thought.

Jackson had established his base at Fort Toulouse, ironically the original French outpost at the fork of the Coosa and Tallapoosa that Weatherford’s great-great-great-grandfather had built a hunded years earlier. It was rehabilitated and renamed Fort Jackson, and there the remaining Creek chiefs began coming to Jackson to surrender—fourteen of them in all. After securing promises of their good behavior, he pardoned them and set them free.

Then one day a tall, light-skinned Indian with a newly killed deer slung over his saddle rode into the American camp and asked directions to Jackson’s tent. When it was pointed out, the Indian spurred his horse in that direction, where, at the flap of the tent, he encountered Chief Big Warrior, one of the friendly Indians who had been fighting at Jackson’s side.

“Ah!” Big Warrior exclaimed. “Bill Weatherford, have we got you at last?”

Weatherford began damning his antagonist as a traitor, and threatening to shoot him, when Jackson suddenly burst out of the tent.

“How dare you ride up to my tent after having murdered the women and children at Fort Mims!” the general shouted.

According to witnesses, Weatherford replied with the following soliloquy, as if from some staged modern-day Indian pageant:

“General Jackson, I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to request on behalf of myself. You can kill me if you desire. But I come to beg you to send for the women and children of the war party, who are now starving in the woods. Their fields and [corn] cribs have been destroyed by your people, who have driven them into the woods without an ear of corn. I am now done fighting. The Red Sticks are nearly all killed. If I could fight you any longer, I would most heartily do so. Send for the women and children. They never did you any harm. But kill me, if the white people want it done.”

The great crowd of officers and men who by now had gathered around the tent began to shout in chorus: “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” But Jackson hushed them up, declaring, “Any man who would kill as brave a man as this would rob the dead.”

The general invited Weatherford to dismount and come into his tent for an interview, which he did, dragging the deer along as a gift. It is said that Jackson talked of forming a lasting peace with the Indians and that Weatherford agreed, telling the general, “Once I could animate my warriors to battle; but I cannot animate the dead,” and similar sentiments, until the conversation finally ended, with Weatherford free to go. Afterward, Weatherford returned to his plantation at Little River, north of Mobile, where he resumed the white man’s ways and dress and lived the remainder of his long life amid his many slaves, raising cotton and livestock and telling stories from the days of the Red Sticks. For his part, Jackson, as Weatherford had requested, called in the Indian women and children from the woods and, as the spring of 1814 turned to summer, maintained more than five thousand Creeks against starvation by feeding them from U.S. Army stores.

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hen news of the victory over the Creeks was received in Washington, Jackson—despite misgivings in the War Department—was commissioned a major general of regular troops in the United States Army, a significant leap for a former general of state militia or even of volunteers. He must have wondered, though, general of what, since his Tennesseans were all sent home to be mustered out, and in his whole department he could call on no more than three understrength regiments of regulars.

Nevertheless, there was important work to be done. Washington had decided that Jackson should negotiate a peace treaty with the Creeks that would not only spell out their prospective relationship with the federal government and delineate their future territory, but also provide for “reparations” for the cost of the war. Naturally the reparations would have to be concessions of land in what the Indians presently considered their territory. Since the Indians didn’t have much to bring to the bargaining table, the general, in the August 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, was able to persuade the chiefs to cede to the United States for settlement some 150,000 square miles of land—twenty-three million acres—nearly three-quarters of the state of Alabama. When word of the treaty terms spread through the North, some people decried it as excessive and unfair, but Jackson’s reasoning was that American settlers were going to move there anyway, like it or not, and that it was best to separate them and the Indians from close proximity.*
 
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Then there was the subject of Spanish West Florida, which had been chafing at Jackson for more than two years. Many of the unrepentant Red Sticks had fled to Florida under the protection of the Spanish authorities, who gave them arms and military supplies. Jackson was certain no good would come of that. He fretted about it all spring and summer, but since the United States was technically at peace with Spain, he could think of no good reason to oust the Spaniards from Florida without causing an international incident. Though Jackson didn’t know it yet, a reason had already been provided by events five thousand miles away.