Andrew Jackson, American Conquistador
The Creek War and the Conquest of Alabama
General Andrew Jackson assembled his staff at the top of a small hill in what eventually became the state of Alabama, on March 27, 1814. For the last six months, the General’s favored Tennessee Volunteer Militia had battled the Red Club Creek warriors through a bitter winter.¹ When not fighting the Red Clubs, Jackson battled his militia from mutinying and returning home. After the Volunteers had nearly marched back to Tennessee due to disputed enlistment terms, lack of clothing, and meager food supplies, Jackson rode out in their path and threatened to shoot anyone who attempted to leave. This resolve by Old Hickory cowed his men to return to their posts. Through heavy recruiting, the General now faced his elusive enemies with nearly 3,000 regular army and militia troops.
The fortified Red Club village lay nestled at the toe of an inland peninsula created by the fast-moving Tallapoosa River the Americans called Horseshoe Bend. Between Jackson’s force and the village, the Red Clubs had cleared the forest and used the timbers to erect a fortified wood and dirt barricade. The barrier angled inward, funneling any troops through a gauntlet of fire from the gun ports that were distributed along the wall. Approaching the fortification with a direct assault was a deadly prospect.² For nearly a week, defenders poured in from surrounding villages, numbering nearly 1,000 hardened warriors. Most of these Red Clubs had fought the militia in pitched guerrilla-style battles, avoiding any commitment of forces that would result in decisive victories for Jackson’s militia.
Throughout his campaign in the Old Southwest, Jackson utilized a strategy of encircling his enemies, either having the element of surprise or simply superior numbers, which proved marginally successful. On November 3, 1813, Jackson ordered cavalry commander and personal friend, General John Coffee, to attack villages deep in Creek territory. The mounted militia quietly encircled the village of Tallushatchee and proceeded to massacre 186 Creeks, caught in utter surprise. The legendary Davy Crockett, one of the Tennessean Volunteers who had his “dander up” and answered Jackson’s call to fight the Red Clubs, remarked, “we now shot them like dogs.”³ Six days later, Jackson himself nearly exacted a crushing defeat of the Red Clubs as he encircled their outnumbered warriors at the Battle of Talladega. The Red Club warriors slipped through a gap in the militia assault, again ruining Jackson’s hopes to finish the campaign quickly.
The General again deployed his forces to encircle Tohopeka and turn their advantageous fortified position into a deadly killing field.⁴ The war had left little ammunition and powder and the situation was grim in the Red Club village. Despite this, the warriors hoped they could defend against the General’s forces. The most faithful gained courage from their prophets casting magic barriers around the village to strike down any attackers. Red Club pragmatists drew motivation from the purity of their cause to drive out the invading whites. With each side poised for the coming battle, the ramifications of the Creek War echoed throughout the United States for decades to come.
Unbeknownst to the U.S. forces on the precipice of battle was the nuanced and complicated cultural tensions, primarily incensed by poor government policies and encroachment by their fellow citizens, had drove events to coalesce to the war now raging in the Alabama wilderness. The defenders of Tohopeka and the Creeks laying siege had been neighbors or even family after a civil war ripped the Nation apart. At the heart of the Creek civil war was the quickly changing values brought to their shores by Europeans that had began to supplant their traditional Muscogee Creek ways. Exploited through the years, Europeans had taken advantage of the differences in culture, superiority in technology, and immunity from diseases. As a result pressure on the Creeks, and all Native Americans in the region, had increased to address the changing cultural and political norms they faced. As the United States shed its English governance, the new nation continued the practices of “civilizing the savages,” a plan that can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.⁵ Native American’s treatment during this time was brutal and harsh, clearly summed up by Jackson’s own words in his Second Annual Address to Congress:
The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves…By opening…the south to the settlement of the whites it will incalculably strengthen the SW frontier and render the adjacent States strong enough to repel future invasions without remote aid…It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.⁶
Americans, land-hungry and exploding in population, pushed for expansion west. As historian Lucille Griffith states: “The Americans moved in because they wanted land which they saw being unused. It was a sin and a crime…for the heathen to be controlling idle land that Christians wanted to farm.”⁷ These settlers justified the expansion as part of the agricultural development which was a hallmark of early America. This American involvement in the Creek Civil War was perpetuated by the Creek Nation as a political and military force that threatened the stability of the region. Further complicating the situation, the War of 1812 had brought Great Britain and her ally, Spain, to threaten the United States. The Old Southwest was faced with British armed Red Club warriors, adding to the threat they posed and reinforced the need for swift intervention. More importantly, Jackson’s personal intervention in the affairs of the Native Americans served as a clear example of his desire to rid the region for American settlement. Jackson’s involvement in the conflict previews his policies of expansionism into Native American lands which resulted in their forced removal on the Trail of Tears.
Predating the Creeks, the population of what is later Alabama, was the Mound-Builder societies that first encountered the Spaniard, Hernando de Soto as he mercilessly hacked his way through the region in 1539. Their technological superiority notwithstanding, the plagues they brought from Europe effectively destroyed the ancient civilizations throughout the Old Southwest and left a much diminished, but more recognizable Native American population in their place. While de Soto succumbed to a fever and died near Arkansas or Louisiana near the Mississippi River, his legacy of European violence and brutality established the precedent for relations between the two cultures. Those tensions continued to rise into the eighteenth century as settlers expanded into traditional Creek hunting grounds. Reprisal attacks by Creek warriors furthered the cycle of violence. These continued to escalate and each side was convinced the other was on the verge of all-out war. Through it all, the language and cultural barriers remained with little effort for remediation. The differences between European ideals of property and law, held little meaning to the Creeks who shared amongst each other freely, as Robert G. Thrower explains:
…the Creeks possessed few material goods in the first half of the eighteenth century. The primary emphasis was upon community, not individuality. Selfishness was a concept unheard of, as one white trader married to a Creek woman discovered when she insisted on distributing all his trade goods freely to her kin.⁸
The unified and powerful Creek Nation the whites envisioned was in reality, a loose confederation of villages and chiefs that held council among themselves. Many of their decisions were reactions to the brewing events as young warriors, seeking prominence and scalps, attack the region’s settlers as acts of bravado. Creek leaders reacting to these incidents, sent war parties to execute the perpetrators to appease the whites and maintain the peace. But leadership changes were common as different chiefs curried favor in counsel. Further complicating matters, male traders who traveled to the region took Creek wives as a way to gain protection and establish local connections to sell their wares. The children of these marriages formed the mixed-blood leadership ranks inside the Nation during the Creek War. As this generation grew accustomed to plantation life and amenable to the benefits of emulating their white neighbors, they gained standing in both their new white community and the Lower Creek tribes. Conversely, they continued to distance themselves from the traditional Upper Creeks. During his presidency, Jefferson’s goal was to sell goods to the Native Americans and “when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop th[em off] by a cession of lands.” The stated intention was to tie the various tribes that subscribed to the U.S government’s policies to ensure they were wholly dependent and indebted. Adopting agriculture and raising livestock was intended to create firm ties to the whites. By adopting agriculture and horticulture, male Creeks now took on roles that had traditionally been devoted to the women of the tribe and provided another point of contention with the Upper Creeks.
The U.S. plan to anglicize the Creeks was led by Benjamin Hawkins. Appointed by President George Washington in 1796, Hawkins was sympathetic to the Creeks. His actions earned him both adoration and hatred by both sides as his impact on the fate of the Creeks was instrumental. Hawkins took up residence on the Georgia border with the Creek Nation, which placed him nearest the Lower Creeks. He established a plantation to grow crops and raise cattle, all supported by slave labor as an example to train and encourage relations with his Lower Creek neighbors. Author Benjamin Griffin Jr. describes how, “Hawkins fenced in two hundred acres and tried to ‘introduce regular husbandry to serve as a model and stimulus for the neighboring towns who crowd the public shops here, at all seasons, when the hunters are not in the woods.’”⁹ However, the Upper Creeks, with their vast hunting grounds and continued close ties to their Native traditions, saw no need to convert. The Upper Creeks viewed work traditionally; tending to crops and raising livestock were viewed as tasks for women and children, not meant for warriors. This affront on traditional gender roles was unsettling. Combined with the zealous westward expansion and the tipping of the balance of Creek political power towards the Lower Creeks formed the first split between factions inside the Nation. Hawkins, though he had their best interests at heart and was an avid defender of the Creeks, had an unintentional direct impact on sundering the Creeks. This was not enough to cleave these two sides, that came from a former son of the Creeks, Tecumseh.
Despite brewing tensions, a war was not predestined. Not until the Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh, traveled south from the Ohio Valley and incited the Creeks with his vision for a unified pan-Indian nation to stand against the Americans spreading into their lands. Tecumseh encouraged Creeks to reject white ideals of property, to stop drinking alcohol, and to return to their traditional ways. His message resonated deeply with the Upper Creeks that had not benefit from both the proximity and adoption of agriculture and European values. Tecumseh also injected a new religious element that spread through the Upper Creeks, emboldening them with magical powers of protection against their foes. This religious fervor granted their leaders a new form of political power and helped unify their people against the Lower Creeks and their American allies.
Tecumseh’s mission was not the first attempt to unify the Native Americans against the Europeans who started settling the Eastern Seaboard. Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, raised forces in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (1763), in an effort to unify the tribes to combat the British and curb their expansion into tribal lands. Pontiac’s devastating attacks on the western-most British forts pushed the English back to the Atlantic. The fast-moving raids extended the Native Americans’ supply lines. The pace changed as Pontiac’s forces advanced and turned into extended sieges of the remaining forts, turning the route into a quagmire. The British mustered a counter-attack that pushed Pontiac’s forces back and the protracted nature of combat over such distances forced him to negotiate for peace.¹⁰ While Pontiac might not have succeeded in his plans for a pan-Indian confederation, the outbreak of violence made it clear the British government needed to stem the tide of settlers flowing over the Appalachians heading west into Indian lands. The Proclamation Line of 1763 was enacted and ended any further westward expansion. The Colonists, after fighting the French for these lands, included this grievance in their message to the King when they declared independence in 1776. Thomas Jefferson, listing the transgressions of the King in the Declaration of Independence, stated, “[h]e has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”¹¹ As the colonists become Revolutionaries, the British enlisted their former Indian enemies in the fight and encouraged the Native Americans to take up arms. British regiments, augmented by Native Americans, were renowned for their brutality during the Revolution, a point of contention Jefferson also cited in the Declaration. After the peace treaty was signed, the Americans were free to rush past the Proclamation Line, enthusiastically claiming the forbidden lands in the west.
The Great Comet of 1811 ominously preceded Tecumseh’s arrival to the Creek Nation. The event was significant to the superstitious Creeks and only added to the gravity was welcomed by the council. Tecumseh’s journey south from the Ohio Valley was only moderately received by the tribes that met the western border with the U.S. After a rousing speech to the Creeks, Tecumseh was able to convince many tribal leaders, notably many of the Upper Creeks, to join his cause of forming a pan-Indian alliance. Tecumseh’s arguments were still not enough to convince some hold-outs who argued their close ties to the U.S., economic benefits, or simple pragmatism was reason enough to go to war with the U.S. Most of the naysayers were Lower Creeks. However, for Upper Creeks, Tecumseh’s message was a call to arms and a promise to be armed by the British. Finding a receptive audience for his message and planting the seeds for the religious revolution that accompanied his efforts, Tecumseh’s departure was also fortuitous. One holdout chief, Pushmatha, criticized Tecumseh and his mission. The Shawnee warrior responded with, “You do not believe the Great Spirit has sent me. You shall believe it. I will leave directly and go straight to Detroit. When I get there I will stamp my foot upon the ground and shake down every house in Tookabatcha.”¹²
Several weeks later, a massive earthquake rocked the Old Southwest reaching a magnitude of 7.9, leveled houses and terrified the inhabitants of the region. Tecumseh, as historian Kathryn Braun illustrates, “called for unity and armed resistance to American expansion was accompanied by ‘new war songs and dances’ as well as prophetic messages. The occurrence of comets and earthquakes seemed to confirm the messages of the prophets. The call for rejection of the American system, armed resistance to American expansion, and revitalization of Creek culture found receptive ears.”¹³ This confluence of events convinced many to join Tecumseh. Still, Upper Creeks needed to consolidate their power and gain additional warriors. Weir explains, “the prophets intended to kill those Creeks responsible for the execution of the various murderers of the whites over the past year…,” including Creeks loyal to the U.S. and Hawkins himself. Only after their internal affairs had been decisively resolved did they plan on joining Tecumseh.
By the summer of 1813, the Red Clubs were now properly encouraged, were in desperate need of war-making supplies. A party was formed to negotiate with the Spanish in Pensacola for ammunition, powder, and other material required for their campaign. Rumored to be in the Creek’s possession was a letter, signed by the British, authorizing the Spanish governor to supply the warriors. While the letter was never recovered, word of its existence was enough to send the region near the Tensaw River into a panic. Tensaw inhabitants feared that British-supplied Creeks were poised to storm the plantations and farms, slaughtering everyone in their path. A small militia force of Mississippi territory militia, commanded by Colonel James Collier, was called up in response to the reports of armed Creeks heading to Pensacola and dispatched to intercept them on their return from Pensacola, hopefully with the British-signed letter in hand. Attached to Collier’s militia was Captain Dixon Bailey, a mixed-blood Creek that had a large Lower Creek family. Bailey’s involvement changed the course of the Creek civil war.
The Red Club warriors were unable to secure proper arms in Pensacola. They were successful in obtaining food and blankets which they begrudgingly accepted and returned home. Collier’s militia forces ambushed the Creeks on their approach to Burnt Corn Creek on July 29, 1813. The shocked Red Clubs retreated into the safety of the surrounding swamps, leaving their “8 or 10 pack horses loaded with powder, lead and blankets,” behind.¹⁵ The militia, seeing these valuable prizes, shifted from routing the Red Clubs to looting. The Red Clubs, taking advantage of their enemies’ divided attention counter-attacked, driving away the militia as quickly as they had charged. Approximately twenty Creeks and two militiamen were killed. But the involvement of Bailey enraged the Red Clubs.
The families of the dead at Burnt Corn Creek called for traditional retribution. Tecumseh’s pan-Indian alliance was in jeopardy as the Red Clubs engaged in their revenge against members of both the Lower Creeks and the U.S. militia. Roger Thrower posits that, “…[t]he intentions of the Red Sticks, traveling back from Pensacola with their supplies and munitions, were to focus attacks upon certain Upper Creek towns that had become more pro-American. Those plans changed abruptly following the attack upon the Red Sticks by both US militia and mixed-blood Creek militia from Tensaw.”¹⁶ As the situation boiled over, the Creek civil war started in earnest as Red Club retribution was sought.
The Tensaw settlers, in a panic to the opening of hostilities at Burnt Corn Creek uprooted entire plantations to a handful of hastily constructed Forts for protection. Fort Mims was one of these places where a garrison of militia forces was posted and led by Major Daniel Beasley and 265 militia troops. They had spent their time there slowly erecting the fortifications around Samuel Mims’s home in the midst of the August humidity. With them were approximately 252 Tensaw refugees and their livestock camped within the walls of the fort. Fearful plantation owners sent their slaves to tend to their crops. Those slaves returned with reports of Red Club sightings to Major Beasley, according to Weir, was drunk, dismissed these as “mistakes” and promptly punished the slaves.¹⁷ As a result, no other precautions were taken.
Forces led by William Weatherford, a mixed-blood Creek leader, also known as Red Eagle, assembled a large war party of approximately 750 warriors. In the days preceding the fight, Red Clubs scouted the area around and inside the fort. Through their good intelligence, Weatherford learned the best time to strike was in the afternoon during lunch when guards were distracted and the refugee settlers were gathered together. Thus, on August 30, 1813, at 11 AM, Weatherford and his warriors stormed the gates of the fort, rushed the gun ports normally used by defenders, and caught the unsuspecting soldiers and civilians lunching. The surprise was complete as the Red Clubs slaughtered the panicked inhabitants of Fort Mims. Despite the element of surprise, warriors were hindered at the gate as it became a funnel, slowing them down and allowing the defenders to counter-attack after taking refuge in the homes and blockhouses throughout the fort. The warriors were eventually forced to regroup and to decide if they should proceed with the assault or withdraw. Weatherford decided the attack had been successful and departed with his band of warriors. However, a large number of Red Clubs remained, determined to exact retribution against the Bailey family who was still sheltering within. Taking up torches, they burned the remaining structures. Those that were not flushed out, scalped, and then clubbed to death, were left to burn alive. Some women and children were spared as captives. Slaves were captured and, being the most valuable property, were generally not harmed. An estimated 500 Red Clubs died as did a similar number of defenders. All the militia forces, Major Beasley and Captain Bailey included, were killed. Only thirty-six survivors elude the Red Clubs.
Reports of the massacre quickly spread throughout America. The press embellished the gruesome events while downplaying the fact that most of the civilians in the fort had been siblings and neighbors of the attackers. To historian Mike Bunn, this event had explosive repercussions for the Creeks: “…it’s essentially the Pearl Harbor of the nineteenth century. This was an attack that raised an awareness of something that was happening down here that most people really had no idea…”¹⁸ Jackson, after reading the papers, was determined to avenge the Americans lost at Fort Mims. As historian Tom Kanon points out, “when Jackson issued his general orders to the Tennessee militia in July 1813 — before the declaration of war against the Creeks — he offered his troops this incentive for the possible elimination of the Muscogee Nation: ‘The country to the South is inviting. Let us consolidate it as part of our Union. The soil which now lies waste and uncultivated, may be controverted [sic] into rich harvest fields, to supply the wants of millions.’”¹⁹ The General’s intentions were clear, the land is there for the taking. The Fort Mims massacre was simply the event needed to galvanize support for his army to take action to open the region for conquest and later settlement.
The governors of the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and the Mississippi territory raised militias to combat the escalating situation. President James Madison diverted Major General Thomas Pinckney to assume command to coordinate the poorly managed militia forces while augmenting them with regular Army troops. Jackson and his Tennessee militia forces deployed to the interior of Alabama from the frontier town of Huntsville. Inexperienced in fighting Indians, ill-dressed, and undersupplied, Jackson’s men followed the General into the Southern wilderness. Despite their lack of experience, they emerged relatively victorious from several battles with Red Clubs. Jackson’s main culprit during the winter was the short enlistment terms of his militia forces. He sends for a fresh batch of troops to be recruited from Tennessee. By March, Jackson was ready to proceed with a force of nearly 3,000 troops which consisted of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and allied Cherokee and Lower Creek warriors. As the General approached Horseshoe Bend at the end of March 1814, Upper Creek reinforcements from the surrounding villages gathered, numbering nearly 1,000. An additional 350 women and children, the family of the warriors, were also encamped there. Menawa, the Red Club Chief leading the warriors at Tohopeka, pinned in the peninsula, had a challenging defense to plan. He hoped to hold Jackson at Tohopeka and, failing that, slow down his assault long enough to evacuate the women and children and escape down the Tallapoosa River.
Jackson, after a troublesome morning assembling his forces, ordered a bombardment of the log wall at 10:30 AM. This onslaught lasted for two hours with little progress. Taking the initiative, a party of Cherokee and Lower Creek forded the river to capture Red Club canoes to begin an amphibious assault with this small band of warriors. They established a beachhead and began assaulting the village of Tohopeka, protected only by a small rearguard of Red Clubs. Burning the huts and causing panic, Native American forces shifted the momentum of the battle. The rearguard now withdrew to the defensive wall and Jackson, seeing the smoke from these fires, assumed his cavalry had found a way to assault from the rear. Jackson ended the artillery bombardment and called the infantry forward to charge the breastworks. The Red Clubs stood their ground and were slaughtered by Jackson’s forces. The total dead was estimated at 857, however that number is unclear as Coffee’s troops shot many escaping warriors from their position on the surrounding banks. A few did escape, including Red Club chief Menawa. Approximately 350 women and children were taken as prisoners, most of whom were the wives and children of the defenders.
Jackson’s victory over the Red Clubs at Horseshoe Bend left no other sizable force of warriors to oppose the Americans. Small bands of fighters fled, heading into the swamps of Spanish Florida to join the Seminoles, themselves once a tribe of the Creek Nation. Pinckney now had an opportunity to sue for peace with the Red Clubs with non-negotiable terms in which the U.S. was: to be repaid for the war in land, open up the Nation with “military posts and roads,” “to surrender…all prophets,” and indemnify allied Native American “with Red Clubs lands.”²⁰ Had these terms been exacted, the Creek War might have remained a footnote in the history of the War of 1812. Instead, Jackson’s true intentions for the region were revealed.
With the War of 1812 still raging, Pinckney withdrew as head negotiator to fight the British. Jackson, through his own political machinations, was appointed in Pinckney’s stead alongside Benjamin Hawkins. The chiefs of the Creek Nation were called to a peace council on August 1, 1814. According to Weir, “[a]ll but perhaps one of the chiefs who attended the conference belonged to the friendly party. The rest of the nation was in Florida,”²¹ still fighting for a chance to reclaim their land. Jackson received word of this and their continued collusion with the British and wielded this information along with his modified version of Pinckney’s initial peace terms. Jackson expanded the land seizures to a total of twenty-one million acres. Ignoring the fourth condition to indemnify his allied Lower Creeks with enemy lands, Sharp Knife demanded eight million acres of their land. The Lower Creek Chiefs protested for three days but Jackson was firm, and was supported, somewhat surprisingly, by Hawkins. After a three-day standoff, allied Lower Creek Chiefs and warriors carved out a small victory by granting each one-acre reservations.
Jackson’s peace treaty was notable for the lack of Creek signatures. Instead, the assembled chiefs were recognized by their printed names and the inclusion of their “mark,” an “X” to represent their signatory understanding of the treaty. The treaty, according to Weir, was read aloud by a translator in their native Muscogee tongue, and copies were distributed, still maintained in the Poarch Creek archives.²² The some of the Creeks may have spoken English, nearly none represented at the negotiations were capable of writing. Their own Muscogee language had no written form. The Treaty terms, while claiming the lands, offered little recourse. Their signing of the treaty, Jackson argued, created a buffer between the Creeks and foreign powers, explicitly, Britain and Spain. Through this cessation of land, the Upper Creeks traditional hunting lifestyle was now untenable. Now, Creeks laid down their war clubs and adopted the only option left to preserve their people. Upper and Lower Creek began tending lands as Hawkins’ government policy designed. The Treaty also provided for the fact the Nation faces the simple problems of feeding and clothing her people and, charitably, offered food until crops were grown in adequate quantities.
After completion of the negotiations, Creeks disputed the treaty. Their primary argument was made from the closure of the War of 1812 which as archeologist Gregory A. Waselkov argues, “By the terms of Article Nine the United States agreed to restore all rights and lands to British-allied Indians with whom the United States was still at war at the time of the treaty signing.”²³ The Creeks were outraged, but their protests were ignored. Rather than face forced removal, they joined the Seminole tribes in Spanish Florida. Their combined forces continued resisting government efforts to remove the tribes from Florida after gaining statehood. There were three Seminole Wars fought over the next four decades. Eventually, the US government ended all efforts to remove the Seminoles, and they were the only tribe to resist government removal efforts.
Despite successfully negotiating to remain on their existing land the remaining clans faced a bleak and poverty-stricken future. Defeated and ignored by federal efforts to move the hostile Creeks to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, the Lower Creek tribe members were left to carve out an existence in the backwoods of Alabama. The Treaty of Jackson required payment for the lands procured which was not paid until a lengthy legal battle in 1974. Each member of the tribe received their payment of $112, the 1813 dollar amount. The Poarch Creeks Chief, Calvin McGhee, bolstered by the success of recouping this payment pushed for federal recognition of the tribe. Supported and funded by the meager donations pooled through cookouts and other volunteer actions by the tribe, the Poarch Creeks gained federal recognition in 1984. The Poarch Creek Indians remain the only reservation in the state of Alabama.
Jackson was called back to the Old Southwest and, after a series of adventures through Spanish Florida, captured Pensacola and moved on to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans. This victory on January 8, 1815, granted the U.S. a closing victory in the War of 1812 despite the Treaty of Ghent brokering an end to hostilities two months prior. These final acts by Jackson catapulted him into national fame. His presidential campaign cited his illustrious military campaigns against the Creeks, Spanish, and British during his presidential campaigns.
As he had while in command of the militia, Jackson’s designs for the newly formed state of Alabama, gained on December 14, 1819, included drastic expansion of settlements at the expense of the Native Americans in the region. When he was elevated to the presidency in 1829, the lessons he learned from the Creek War came to fruition. Jackson completed purging the Native Americans, allied and enemy, with his signature on the Indian Removal Act of 1830. A sliver of hope remained when the Cherokee tribe, a long-time ally of the U.S. and of Jackson during the Creek War, sued to remain on their lands.²⁴ Their victory in the Supreme Court was still not enough to stop the General as he refused to acknowledge the Court’s ruling. Undeterred, he continued with federal removal, allegedly exclaiming, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” As many as 16,500 Native Americans died during their expulsion West on the Trail of Tears.
Jackson’s vision for the South was now written in the lives of the tribes he expelled from their homes. The General’s involvement in their removal first began with the signing of the Treaty of Jackson and was a proving ground for the methods he was able to employ against the Creeks. Support, both politically and publicly, for their removal, demonstrated that the American expansionism into the Old Southwest was unabated. Alabama Fever gripped the region and settlement of the Creek lands began in earnest. Jackson’s successful conquest of these Native American tribes opened Alabama for white settlement and primed the area for statehood, at significant cost.
Notes
¹ Red Club or Red Stick is used to define the warriors of the Upper Creeks. I have chosen to use Red Club as it describes their terrifying weapon of choice, large wooden clubs with embedded blades. Red Sticks also offers confusion as the Creeks used a practice of using sticks, painted red for times of war, in bundles of specific numbers to days until a battle or attack was to be made to coordinate the villages warriors.
² Lucille Griffith, Alabama: A Documentary History to 1900 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1968), 113.
³ Howard T. Weir. “A Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 1813–14.” (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2016.), 372, ebook, Apple Books.
⁴ Jackson outnumbers his opponent by the largest margin and with the best outfit of troops the General fielded in battle: nearly 3,000 troops to the Red Club’s 1,000.
⁵ “From Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, 27 February 1803,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-39-02-0500. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 39, 13 November 1802–3 March 1803, ed. Barbara B. Oberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 589–593.]
⁶ “Transcript of President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress ‘On Indian Removal’ (1830),” accessed November 4, 2018, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=25&page=transcript.
⁷ Griffith, “Alabama,” 101..
⁸ Robert G. Thrower “Causalities and Consequences of the Creek War: A Modern Creek Perspective,” in Tohopeka : Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: Pebble Hill Books, 2012). eBook Collection, EBSCOhost.
⁹ Benjamin W. Griffith. 1988. “McIntosh and Weatherford, Creek Indian Leaders.” Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed April 25, 2018), 5.
¹⁰ Virginia, Mary E. Pontiac (Tribal Chief). (Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2015), 2p., https://ezproxy.montevallo.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ers&AN=99110071&site=eds-live. The British contract Black Dog, a member of the Peoria Indians and allies in Pontiac’s alliance, to assassinate Pontiac. His death starts an a tribal conflict.
¹¹ Thomas Jefferson. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” National Archives and Records Administration, 25 Sept. 2018, www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.
¹² Weir, 188.
¹³ Kathryn E. Holland Braund. “Creek War 1813–14,” accessed October 25, 2018. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1820
¹⁴ Weir, 312.
¹⁵ L. Griffith, “Alabama,” 106.
¹⁶ Thrower, 16.
¹⁷ Weir, 262.
¹⁸ Mike Bunn, “Battle for Fort Mims (Documentary),” TwoEggs, video, February 14, 2018, 6:45 https://twoegg.tv/2018/02/fortmimsvideo/
¹⁹ Tom Kanon, “Before Horseshoe: Andrew Jackson’s Campaigns in the Creek War prior to Horseshoe Bend,” in Tohopeka : Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: Pebble Hill Books, 2012). eBook Collection, EBSCOhost.
²⁰ Weir, 745.
²¹ Weir, 769.
²² Office of Archives and Records Management, Poarch Band of Creek Indians. “Planting the Seeds of Knowledge” (program pamphlet presented at a conference observing the 200th anniversary of the Red Stick War of 1813–14, Atmore, Alabama, August 23, 2014). A copy of the Treaty of Jackson is preserved in their archives and the program included a scanned and text version of the treaty generously provided by the archives.
²³ Gregory Waselkov, “Fort Jackson and the Aftermath,” in Tohopeka : Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812, ed. by Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: Pebble Hill Books, 2012). eBook Collection, EBSCOhost, 66. Article Nine states: The United States of America engage to put an end immediately after the Ratification of the present Treaty to hostilities with all the Tribes or Nations of Indians with whom they may be at war at the time of such Ratification, and forthwith to restore to such Tribes or Nations respectively all the possessions, rights, and privileges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in one thousand eight hundred and eleven previous to such hostilities.
²⁴ “Worcester v. Georgia.” Oyez. Accessed November 4, 2018. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/31us515.
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