THE CREEK WAR AND THE VICTORY OF NEW ORLEANS
Every schoolboy knows and loves the story of the midnight ride of Paul
Revere. But hardly anybody has heard of the twenty-day,
fifteen-hundred-mile ride of "Billy" Phillips, the President's express
courier, who in 1812 carried to the Southwest the news that the people
of the United States had entered upon a second war with their British
kinsmen. William Phillips was a young, lithe Tennesseean whom Senator
Campbell took to Washington in 1811 as secretary. When not more than
sixteen years old he had enjoyed the honor of riding Andrew Jackson's
famous steed, Truxton, in a heat race, for the largest purse ever heard
of west of the mountains, with the proud owner on one side of the
stakes. In Washington he occasionally turned an honest penny by
jockey-riding in the races on the old track of Bladensburg, and
eventually he became one of a squad of ten or twelve expert horsemen
employed by the Government in carrying urgent long-distance messages.
After much hesitation, Congress passed a joint resolution at about five
o'clock on Friday, June 18, 1812, declaring war against Great Britain.
Before sundown the express couriers were dashing swiftly on their
several courses, some toward reluctant New England, some toward
Pennsylvania and New York, some southward, some westward. To Phillips
it fell to carry the momentous news to his own Tennessee country and
thence down the Mississippi to New Orleans. That the task was
undertaken with all due energy is sufficiently attested in a letter
written by a Baptist clergyman at Lexington, North Carolina, to a
friend, who happened to have been one of Jackson's old teachers at the
Waxhaws. "I have to inform you," runs the communication, "that just now
the President's express-rider, Bill Phillips, has tore through this
little place without stopping. He came and went in a cloud of dust, his
horse's tail and his own long hair streaming alike in the wind as they
flew by. But as he passed the tavern stand where some were gathered he
swung his leather wallet by its straps above his head and
shouted--'Here's the Stuff! Wake up! War! War with England!! War!!!'
Then he disappeared in a cloud of dust down the Salisbury Road like a
streak of Greased Lightnin'." Nine days brought the indefatigable
courier past Hillsboro, Salisbury, Morganton, Jonesboro, and Knoxville
to Nashville--a daily average of ninety-five miles over mountains and
through uncleared country. In eleven days more the President's
dispatches were in the hands of Governor Claiborne at New Orleans.
The joy of the West was unbounded. The frontiersman was always ready
for a fight, and just now he especially wanted a fight with England. He
resented the insults that his country had suffered at the hands of the
English authorities and had little patience with the vacillating policy
so long pursued by Congress and the Madison Administration. Other
grievances came closer home. For two years the West had been disturbed
by Indian wars and intrigues for which the English officers and agents
in Canada were held largely responsible. In 1811 Governor Harrison of
Indiana Territory defeated the Indians at Tippecanoe. But Tecumseh was
even then working among the Creeks, Cherokees, and other southern
tribes with a view to a confederation which should be powerful enough
to put a stop to the sale of land to the advancing white population. A
renewal of the disorders was therefore momentarily expected.
Furthermore, the people of the Southwest were as usual on bad terms
with their Spanish neighbors in Florida and Texas; they coveted an
opportunity for vengeance for wrongs which they had suffered; and some
longed for the conquest of Spanish territory. At all events, war with
England was the more welcome because Spain, as an ally of that power,
was likely to be involved.
Nowhere was the news received with greater enthusiasm than at
Nashville; and by no one with more satisfaction than by Andrew Jackson.
As major general of militia Jackson had for ten years awaited just such
a chance for action. In 1811 he wrote fervently to Harrison offering to
come to his assistance in the Wabash expedition with five hundred West
Tennesseeans, but his services were not needed. At the close of the
year he induced the Governor of his State, William Blount, to inform
the War Department that he could have twenty-five hundred men "before
Quebec within ninety days" if desired. Again he was refused. But now
his opportunity had come. Billy Phillips was hardly on his way to
Natchez before Jackson, Blount, and Benton were addressing a mass
meeting called to "ratify" the declaration of war, and on the following
day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson
tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring
the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it
might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend
upon them to stay "till they or the last armed foe expires."
After some delay the offer was accepted. Already the fiery major
general was dreaming of a conquest of Florida. "You burn with anxiety,"
ran a proclamation issued to his division in midsummer, "to learn on
what theater your arms will find employment. Then turn your eyes to the
South! Behold in the province of West Florida a territory whose rivers
and harbors are indispensable to the prosperity of the western, and
still more so, to the eastern division of our state. . . . It is here
that an employment adapted to your situation awaits your courage and
your zeal, and while extending in this quarter the boundaries of the
Republic to the Gulf of Mexico, you will experience a peculiar
satisfaction in having conferred a signal benefit on that section of
the Union to which you yourselves immediately belong."
It lay in the cards that Jackson was to be a principal agent in
wresting the Florida country from the Spaniards; and while there was at
Washington no intention of allowing him to set off post-haste upon the
mission, all of the services which he was called upon to render during
the war converged directly upon that objective. After what seemed an
interminable period of waiting came the first order to move. Fifteen
hundred Tennessee troops were to go to New Orleans, ostensibly to
protect the city against a possible British attack, but mainly to be
quickly available in case an invasion of West Florida should be decided
upon; and Jackson, freshly commissioned major general of volunteers,
was to lead the expedition.
The rendezvous was fixed at Nashville for early December; and when more
than two thousand men, representing almost every family of influence in
the western half of the State, presented themselves, Governor Blount
authorized the whole number to be mustered. On the 7th of January the
hastily equipped detachment started, fourteen hundred infantrymen going
down the ice-clogged Cumberland in flatboats and six hundred and
seventy mounted riflemen proceeding by land. The Governor sent a letter
carrying his blessing. Jackson responded with an effusive note in which
he expressed the hope that "the God of battles may be with us." Parton
says with truth that the heart of western Tennessee went down the river
with the expedition. In a letter to the Secretary of War Jackson
declared that his men had no "constitutional scruples," but would, if
so ordered, plant the American eagle on the "walls" of Mobile,
Pensacola, and St. Augustine.
After five weeks the troops, in high spirits, reassembled at Natchez.
Then came cruel disappointment. From New Orleans Governor James
Wilkinson, doubtless moved by hatred of Jackson quite as much as by
considerations of public policy, ordered the little army to stay where
it was. And on the 15th of March there was placed in the commander's
hands a curt note from the Secretary of War saying that the reasons for
the undertaking had disappeared, and announcing that the corps under
the Tennesseean's command had "ceased to exist."
Jackson flew into a rage--and with more reason than on certain other
occasions. He was sure that there was treachery somewhere; at the
least, it was all a trick to bring a couple of thousand good Tennessee
volunteers within the clutches of Wilkinson's recruiting officers. He
managed to write to the President a temperate letter of protest; but to
Governor Blount and to the troops he unbosomed himself with
characteristic forcefulness of speech. There was nothing to do but
return home. But the irate commander determined to do it in a manner to
impress the country. He kept his force intact, drew rations from the
commissary department at Natchez, and marched back to Nashville with
all the Èclat that would have attended a returning conqueror. When
Wilkinson's subordinates refused to pay the cost of transporting the
sick, Jackson pledged his own credit for the purpose, to the amount of
twelve thousand dollars. It was on the trying return march that his
riflemen conferred on him the happy nickname "Old Hickory."
The Secretary of War later sought to appease the irascible major
general by offering a wholly plausible explanation of the sudden
reversal of the Government's policy; and the expenses of the troops on
the return march were fully met out of the national treasury. But
Jackson drew from the experience only gall and wormwood. About the time
when the men reached Natchez, Congress definitely authorized the
President to take possession of Mobile and that part of Florida west of
the Perdido River; and, back once more in the humdrum life of
Nashville, the disappointed officer could only sit idly by while his
pet project was successfully carried out by General Wilkinson, the man
whom, perhaps above all others, he loathed. But other work was
preparing; and, after all, most of Florida was yet to be won.
In the late summer of 1813 the western country was startled by news of
a sudden attack of a band of upwards of a thousand Creeks on Fort Mims,
Alabama, culminating in a massacre in which two hundred and fifty white
men, women, and children lost their lives. It was the most bloody
occurrence of the kind in several decades, and it brought instantly to
a head a situation which Jackson, in common with many other military
men, had long viewed with apprehension.
From time immemorial the broad stretches of hill and valley land
southwards from the winding Tennessee to the Gulf were occupied, or
used as hunting grounds, by the warlike tribes forming the loose-knit
Creek Confederacy. Much of this land was extremely fertile, and most of
it required little labor to prepare it for cultivation. Consequently
after 1800 the influx of white settlers, mainly cotton raisers, was
heavy; and by 1812 the great triangular area between the Alabama and
the Tombigbee, as well as extensive tracts along the upper Tombigbee
and the Mobile, was quite fully occupied. The heart of the Creek
country was the region about the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, which
join in central Alabama to form the stream which bears the State's
name. But not even this district was immune from encroachment.
The Creeks were not of a sort to submit to the loss of their lands
without a struggle. Though Tecumseh, in 1811, had brought them to the
point of an uprising, his plans were not carried out, and it remained
for the news of hostilities between the United States and Great Britain
to rouse the war spirit afresh. In a short time the entire Creek
country was aflame. Arms and ammunition the Indians obtained from the
Spaniards across the Florida border, and Colonel Edward Nicholls, now
stationed at Pensacola as provisional British Governor, gave them open
encouragement. The danger was understood not only among the people of
the Southwest but in Washington. Before plans of defense could be
carried into effect, however, the war broke out, and the wretched
people who had crowded into the flimsy stockade called by courtesy Fort
Mims were massacred.
Hardly had the heap of ruins, ghastly with human bodies, ceased to
smolder before fleet riders were spreading the news in Georgia, in
Louisiana, and in Tennessee. A shudder swept the country. Every exposed
community expected to be attacked next. The people's demand for
vengeance was overmastering, and from north, west, and east volunteer
armies were soon on the march. Tennessee sent two quotas, one from the
eastern counties under General John Cocke, the other from the western
under Andrew Jackson. When the news of the disaster on the Mobile
reached Nashville, Jackson was lying helpless from wounds received in
his fight with the Bentons. But he issued the necessary orders from his
bed and let it be known with customary vigor that he, the senior major
general, and no one else, would lead the expedition; and though three
weeks later he started off with his arm tightly bandaged to his side
and a shoulder so sore that it could not bear the pressure of an
epaulette, lead the expedition he did.
About the middle of October the emaciated but dogged commander brought
his forces together, 2700 strong, at Huntsville and began cutting his
way across the mountains toward the principal Creek settlements. His
plan was to fall suddenly upon these settlements, strike terror into
the inhabitants, and force a peace on terms that would guarantee the
safety of the frontier populations. Supplies were slow to arrive, and
Jackson fumed and stormed. He quarreled desperately, too, with Cocke,
whom he unjustly blamed for mismanagement. But at last he was able to
emerge on the banks of the Coosa and build a stockade, Fort Strother,
to serve as a base for the campaign.
During the months that followed, the intrepid leader was compelled to
fight two foes--his insubordinate militiamen and the Creeks. His
command consisted partly of militia and partly of volunteers, including
many men who had first enlisted for the expedition down the
Mississippi. Starvation and disease caused loud murmurings, and after
one or two minor victories had been won the militiamen took it into
their heads to go back home. Jackson drew up the volunteers across the
mutineers' path and drove them back to the camp. Then the volunteers
started off, and the militia had to be used to bring them back! At one
time the furious general faced a mutinous band single-handed and,
swearing that he would shoot the first man who stirred, awed the
recalcitrants into obedience. On another occasion he had a youth who
had been guilty of insubordination shot before the whole army as an
object lesson. At last it became apparent that nothing could be done
with such troops, and the volunteers--such of them as had not already
slipped away--were allowed to go home. Governor Blount advised that the
whole undertaking be given up. But Jackson wrote him a letter that
brought a flush of shame to his cheek, and in a short time fresh forces
by the hundreds, with ample supplies, were on the way to Fort Strother.
Among the newcomers was a lank, angular-featured frontiersman who
answered to the name of Sam Houston.
After having been reduced for a short period to one hundred men,
Jackson by early spring had an army of five thousand, including a
regiment of regulars, and found it once more possible to act. The enemy
decided to make its stand at a spot called by the Indians Tohopeka, by
the whites Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa. Here a thousand warriors,
with many women and children, took refuge behind breastworks which they
believed impregnable, and here, in late March, Jackson attacked with a
force of three thousand men. No quarter was asked and none given, on
either side, and the battle quickly became a butchery. Driven by fire
from a thicket of dry brush in which they took refuge, the Creek
warriors were shot down or bayoneted by the hundreds; those who plunged
into the river for safety were killed as they swam. Scarcely a hundred
survived. Among the number was a youth who could speak a little
English, and whose broken leg one of the surgeons undertook to treat.
Three stalwart riflemen were required to hold the patient. "Lie still,
my boy, they will save your life," said Jackson encouragingly, as he
came upon the scene. "No good," replied the disconsolate victim. "No
good. Cure um now, kill um again!"
The victory practically ended the war. Many of the "Red Sticks," as the
Creek braves were called, fled beyond the Florida border; but
many--among them the astute half-breed Weathersford, who had ordered
the assault on Fort Mims--came in and surrendered. Fort Jackson, built
in the river fork, became an outpost of American sovereignty in the
very heart of the Creek district. "The fiends of the Tallapoosa,"
declared the victorious commander in his farewell address to his men,
"will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of
our borders."
Jackson returned to Tennessee to find himself the most popular man in
the State. Nashville gave him the first of what was destined to be a
long series of tumultuous receptions; and within a month the news came
that William Henry Harrison had resigned his commission and that
Jackson had been appointed a major general in the army of the United
States, with command in the southwestern district, including Mobile and
New Orleans. "Thus did the frontier soldier, who eighteen months
earlier had not commanded an expedition or a detachment, come to occupy
the highest rank in the army of his country. No other man in that
country's service since the Revolution has risen to the top quite so
quickly." π π Bassett, The Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. I, p. 123.
By his appointment Jackson became the eventual successor of General
Wilkinson, with headquarters at New Orleans. His first move, however,
was to pay a visit to Mobile; and on his way thither, in August, 1814,
he paused in the Creek country to garner the fruits of his late
victory. A council of the surviving chiefs was assembled and a treaty
was presented, with a demand that it be signed forthwith. The terms
took the Indians aback, but argument was useless. The whites were
granted full rights to maintain military posts and roads and to
navigate the rivers in the Creek lands; the Creeks had to promise to
stop trading with British and Spanish posts; and they were made to cede
to the United States all the lands which their people had claimed west
and southeast of the Coosa River--more than half of their ancient
territories. Thus was the glory of the Creek nation brought to an end.
Meanwhile the war with Great Britain was entering a new and threatening
phase. No notable successes had been achieved on land, and repeated
attempts to reduce Canada had signally failed. On the Great Lakes and
the high seas the navy had won glory, but only a handful of privateers
was left to keep up the fight. The collapse of Napoleon's power had
brought a lull in Europe, and the British were free to concentrate
their energies as never before on the conflict in America. The effects
were promptly seen in the campaign which led to the capture of
Washington and the burning of the Federal Capitol in August, 1814. They
were equally manifest in a well-laid plan for a great assault on the
country's southern borders and on the great Mississippi Valley beyond.
The last-mentioned project meant that, after two years of immunity, the
Southwest had become a main theater of the war. There was plenty of
warning of what was coming, for the British squadron intended for the
attack began assembling in the West Indies before the close of summer.
No one knew, however, where or when the blow would fall. To Jackson the
first necessity seemed to be to make sure of the defenses of Mobile.
For a time, at all events, he believed that the attack would be made
there, rather than at New Orleans; and an attempt of a British naval
force in September to destroy Fort Bowyer, at the entrance to Mobile
Bay, confirmed his opinion.
But the chief attraction of Mobile for the General was its proximity to
Florida. In July he had written to Washington asking permission to
occupy Pensacola. Months passed without a reply. Temptation to action
grew; and when, in October, three thousand Tennessee troops arrived
under one of the subordinate officers in the recent Creek War, longer
hesitation seemed a sign of weakness. Jackson therefore led his forces
against the Spanish stronghold, now in British hands, and quickly
forced its surrender. His men blew up one of the two forts, and the
British blew up the other. Within a week the work was done and the
General, well pleased with his exploit, was back at Mobile. There he
found awaiting him, in reply to his July letter, an order from the new
Secretary of War, James Monroe, forbidding him to touch Pensacola. No
great harm was done, for the invaded territory was no longer neutral
soil, and the task of soothing the ruffled feelings of the Spanish
court did not prove difficult.
As the autumn wore on, signs multiplied that the first British
objective in the South was to be New Orleans, and no efforts were
spared by the authorities at Washington to arouse the Southwest to its
danger and to stimulate an outpouring of troops sufficient to repel any
force that might be landed at the mouth of the Mississippi. On the 21st
of November, Jackson set out for the menaced city. Five days later a
fleet of fifty vessels, carrying ten thousand veteran British troops
under command of Generals Pakenham and Gibbs, started from Jamaica for
what was expected to be an easy conquest. On the 10th of December the
hostile armada cast anchor off the Louisiana coast. Two weeks later
some two thousand redcoats emerged from Lake Borgne, within six or
seven miles of New Orleans, when the approach to the city on that side
was as yet unguarded by a gun or a man or an entrenchment.
That the "impossible" was now accomplished was due mainly to Jackson,
although credit must not be withheld from a dozen energetic subordinate
officers nor from the thousands of patriots who made up the rank and
file of the hastily gathered forces of defense. Men from Louisiana,
Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee--all contributed to one
of the most remarkable military achievements in our history; although
when the fight was over it was found that hundreds were still as
unarmed as when they arrived upon the scene.
A preliminary clash, in a dense fog, on the second evening before
Christmas served to inspire each army with a wholesome respect for the
other. The British decided to postpone further action until their
entire force could be brought up, and this gave Jackson just the time
he needed to assemble his own scattered divisions, select lines of
defense, and throw up breastworks. By the end of the first week of
January both sides were ready for the test.
The British army was a splendid body of seven thousand trained
soldiers, seamen, and marines.
There were regiments which had helped Wellington to win Talavera,
Salamanca, and Victoria, and within a few short months some of these
same regiments were to stand in that thin red line which Ney and
Napoleon's guard could never break. Their general, Pakenham,
Wellington's brother-in-law, was a distinguished pupil of his
illustrious kinsman. Could frontiersmen who had never fought together
before, who had never seen the face of a civilized foe, withstand the
conquerors of Napoleon? But two branches of the same stubborn race were
represented on that little watery plain. The soldiers trained to serve
the strongest will in the Old World were face to face with the rough
and ready yeomanry embattled for defense by the one man of the new
world whose soul had most iron in it. It was Salamanca against
Tohopeka, discipline against individual alertness, the Briton of the
little Isle against the Briton of the wastes and wilds. But there was
one great difference. Wellington, "the Iron Duke," was not there; "Old
Hickory" was everywhere along the American lines. π
π Brown, Andrew Jackson, pp. 75-76.
Behind their battery-studded parapets the Americans waited for the
British to make an assault. This the invaders did, five thousand
strong, on January 8, 1815. The fighting was hard, but the main attack
failed at every point. Three British major generals, including
Pakenham, were killed early in the action, and the total British loss
exceeded two thousand. The American loss was but seventy-one. The
shattered foe fell back, lay inactive for ten days, and then quietly
withdrew as they had come. Though Jackson was not noted for piety, he
always believed that his success on this occasion was the work of
Providence. "Heaven, to be sure," he wrote to Monroe, "has interposed
most wonderfully in our behalf, and I am filled with gratitude when I
look back to what we have escaped."
By curious irony, the victory had no bearing upon the formal results of
the war. A treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent two weeks before,
and the news of the pacification and of the exploit at New Orleans
reached the distracted President at almost the same time. But who shall
say that the battle was not one of the most momentous in American
history? It compensated for a score of humiliations suffered by the
country in the preceding years. It revived the people's drooping pride
and put new energy into the nation's dealings with its rivals,
contributing more than any other single event to make this war indeed a
"second war of independence." "Now," declared Henry Clay when the news
reached him in Paris, "I can go to England without mortification."
Finally, the battle brought Andrew Jackson into his own as the idol and
incarnation of the West, and set the western democracy decisively
forward as a force to be reckoned with in national affairs.