when as a matter of fact it was ominous. McGillivray never intended to
execute the terms of the treaty, only in so far as they would conduce to
his personal ends, for on his return to the South, he at once entered into
secret negotiations with the Spanish. He explained to them that his jaunt
to the capital was a mere ruse, in order to gather information, the better
to aid the king of Spain, and that he was just now ready to render to
Spain the most efficient service. Here, then, was an American general
disporting himself in the national uniform, spurs, boots, epaulettes, and
all, betraying the government into the hands of a foreign foe. While
drawing the pay of a brigadier, he was, as a secret emissary of Spain, the
recipient of a sum much larger.
In order, at last, to promote his schemes, he fomented strife and
agitation among the chiefs, by instigating them to protest against the
terms of the treaty. Meanwhile, he informed the government at New York
that he was doing his utmost to enforce the terms, and must have broad
discretion and ample time, in order to accomplish the end in view. Between
himself and the secretary of war an active correspondence was kept up in
which correspondence the atrocious Alexander McGillivray was more than a
match for the cabinet officer of Washington. Thus went events for years
together.
THE CURTAIN FALLS
In the records of the race, it would be difficult to find embodied in the
life and career of any one, more strange and incongruous elements than
those which entered into the history of General Alexander McGillivray.
Though unquestionably a man of ability, that ability was turned into the
most wicked of channels; highly gifted with the elements of leadership,
these were devoted to the single end of the enhancement of his purse;
gracious in manner, courteous, and ostensibly obliging to an astonishing
degree, yet, at bottom, all this demonstration was only so many decoys to
catch the unsuspecting, and even to the suspicious they were oftener than
otherwise availing; cool and collected, placid and serene, it was but the
charm to wheedle the confidence in order to sinister consummation, and,
while emphatic sometimes with a make-believe sincerity, it was only to
delude.
McGillivray's only idea of right was that of self-gratification. If to do
right at any time was most productive of methods of self-promotion, why he
would adopt that course, but only as a means of convenience. Unhampered by
a sense of obligation and unchecked by conscientious scruple, his
prodigious intellect and fertility of resource made Alexander McGillivray
the most dangerous of men. Yet he could descant at length with all the
mein of a moral philosopher on duty and obligation, the rights of man, the
turpitude of wrong, the cruelty of injustice, the inhumanity of deception,
and all else in the catalogue of morality. His familiarity with all these
afforded him room for the amplest guilt. Self was his measuring rod, laid
with accurate hand on the most contradictory of conditions.
The amplitude of his personal forces enabled McGillivray to do what the
fewest can successfully--wind his sinuous course through the most tangled
conditions, while dealing with a number of conflicting agencies and
causes, and yet equally dupe all, and if apprehended, be able so to summon
to his defense a sufficiency of plausibility as actually to invest the
whole situation with a sheen of fairness. Contradictory at many points, he
could give to all the aspect of consistency.
The only service that Alexander McGillivray rendered was that of
preventing a general outbreak of the Indian tribes, which fact was due,
not to his horror of blood, so much, as to the fact that using the deluded
red man, he was able to hold him up as an object of fear, and thus elicit
by agitation and apprehension, that which would conduce to his emolument.
He never did right unless it was to his profit, and falsehood was
preferable to truth, if it would serve a turn to his personal profit. He
derived abundant encouragement from the conditions of his environment, to
which his character was exactly adapted. The man and the occasion met in
Alexander McGillivray.
As the agent of the government entrusted with the dispensation of the
financial and commercial gifts to the Indians, in accordance with the
secret treaty with President Washington, no one ever knew how much, or how
little, the poor red men ever received. The fact that the arrangement was
a secret one, was much to the purpose and pleasure of McGillivray. The
government promptly met its obligation, and there is not wanting evidence
that there all sense of obligation ended. This notorious man went to his
grave invested with the deepest suspicion. Nor was it altogether
restricted to suspicion, this outrageous conduct of Alexander McGillivray.
Detection was unescapable under certain conditions. Secret agents of a
suspicious government, spying out his varied transactions, exposed his
atrocity time and again, but in each instance, it was found that he had so
successfully woven a network of defense, that to undertake to eliminate
him by force, would have been like tearing a new patch from an old
garment, according to the sacred parable, the rent of which would have
been made the worse thereby.
The government sought by indirection and not always in the most creditable
way, to uproot the confidence of the Indians by due exposure, but
McGillivray was never found unprovided with means to account for the
reasonableness of each separate charge. With the strategy of a Napoleon,
this extraordinary man could outgeneral all who were pitted against him.
Such was the character, such the career of Alexander McGillivray.
He was now an old man. The stylus of care and of responsibility, assumed
in an arena the most atrocious, had drawn deep grooves on his brow. His
silver hair and tottering gait admonished him of the brief time that was
his, but so far from relaxing his grip on the things which had actuated
him throughout, this condition only served to tighten it. Experience had
sharpened his wits, and villainy had made him impregnable in plying his
art. His was a master passion that gave fresh desperateness in view of the
approaching end. A vast fortune was his, and with the passion of the man
who never had a higher dream than that of personal gain, he hugged it with
a tenacity common to men under conditions of advancing age, yet knowing
meanwhile, that with his end would come that of the use of his immense
means.
He lived to see himself repudiated by all alike. He was rejected by the
American government, cast out by the Spaniards, and, by degrees, came to
be distrusted even by the Indians. All sense of remorse was gone, all the
finer emotions which shrink from public exposure of wrong, long ago
deadened. Moral obliquity was complete, and hardened iniquity made him
insensible to the frown of reproach with which he was everywhere met.
Worn out by the criminality of a long life, McGillivray sought a home, in
his last days, at Little River, in the lower part of Monroe County, where
he died on February 17, 1793. His remains were taken to Pensacola and
interred in the spacious gardens of William Panton, a wealthy Scotch
merchant, with whom McGillivray had long been associated in business
connections. His very aged father survived him, and was still living at
Dummaglass, Scotland, to whom William Panton wrote of the death of his
notorious son. Thus passed away the greatest diplomat Alabama ever
produced, but he left to posterity nothing worthy of emulation.
LORENZO DOW
So far as can be ascertained, and the fact seems beyond doubt, the first
protestant that ever preached in Alabama was the eccentric Methodist
minister, Lorenzo Dow. He combined in his character a number of strange
elements, some of which were quite strong, and by his stentorian preaching
he stirred the people wherever he went. He was unique in his make-up, and
no conjecture could be had of what he would ever say or do. Mr. Dow
reached the distant frontier settlements of Alabama along the Tombigbee as
early as 1793. He was a fearless, stern, plain, and indefatigable preacher
of the old-time type, who spurned all danger, and boldly faced the direst
of perils on the border, that he might preach the gospel. He had a notable
career, though still a young man, before he found his way to the vanguard
of western civilization.
Born in Connecticut during the stormy days of the Revolution, Dow became a
Christian in his youth, and for some time was perplexed about what church
relationship he should form. He finally joined the Methodists, as the zeal
of that people was an attraction to his heated temperament. His errant and
arbitrary course soon made him an undesirable acquisition to the
Methodists, and while not severing his relations with the church, he was
disposed to yield to a disposition to become a general evangelist or
missionary of the independent type. His health was broken, and he
conceived the idea of going as far westward as the advanced line of
Caucasian occupation had gone, taking with him on his perilous journey
his young wife.
At this time Mr. Dow was about twenty-seven years old. By means of the
tedious and uncomfortable methods of travel at that early time, he found
his way from New England to the thin line of settlements along the
Tombigbee. Here, in company with his wife, Peggy, he preached as a son of
thunder, but as though the dangers encountered did not gratify his love of
the perilous, he sought his way through the dangerous wilds to the region
of Natchez, Mississippi, long before made an important French settlement.
To Dow peril was a fascination, and like the Vikings of Saga story, he
sought danger in order to gratify a desire to fight. Not that he was a man
of physical violence, but his love of contention and of opposition was
without bound. He loved combat for its own sake, and was never so much at
peace as when engaged in wordy war. He was of that mold of humanity that
immensely preferred disagreement with one than tranquil acquiescence. He
rusted when not in use. His blade glimmered only by constant wielding.
From the region of Natchez, he returned at last to the Tombigbee and
Tensas settlements, virile, strenuous, impetuous, and fiery. His journal,
which seems to have been sacredly kept, discloses many romantic adventures
among the wild tribes, many of the leading spirits among whom regarded him
with a terror that was awfully sacred, because of his utter lack of fear,
his consuming zeal, and his stormy preaching. In advance of the choice of
St. Stephens as the territorial capital, he visited the location while
only one family was residing there. Impressed by the location which
overlooks the river from an elevation, and the country beyond, Dow
predicted that it would become a point of great importance. Both in his
diary and in the "Vicissitudes" of Peggy Dow, we learn much of the
adventures of this anomalous brace of souls. He would sleep in the open
air in the resinous regions of South Alabama, where the abounding pine
straw could be raked together in a heap for a mattress, and where he could
be lulled to slumber by the soothing monotone of the tall pine trees.
There is little doubt that the frail system of this wonderful man was
prolonged, by being nurtured in the open air, freighted with turpentine,
and strengthened by activity.
Mrs. Peggy, on the other hand, judging from the tone of her journal, did
not find so much gratification in this rough and tumble method of life, as
did her incorrigible liege lord. There is an undisguised reluctance in her
words of compliance with conditions from which there was no appeal.
One of the most singular chapters in the life of Lorenzo Dow preceded his
invasion of the far Southwest. When seized by a peculiar fancy that he was
called to preach to the Roman Catholics of the world, and having learned
that Ireland was one of their strongholds, he hied himself thither. To the
quaint Irish, he was a wonder. His vociferous preaching and pungent zeal
drew large crowds, but at times his path was not strewn with primroses,
and the rougher element of the Irish throngs offered battle at times to
his vaunting banters, but nothing was more to the liking of the
indomitable Lorenzo. He stood ready to meet any rising emergency even when
it was as grave as the attacks of the scraggy sons of the Emerald Isle.
From Ireland he crossed over into Britain, and introduced the camp meeting
method of worship, which meetings became popular in England, and later, in
the United States. So far as is known Lorenzo Dow was the founder of the
camp meeting with its flexibility and abandon of worship. His way in
England was clearer than it had been in Ireland. To the staid Briton, he
was an object of wonder, and his natural eloquence and eccentricities of
speech and of dress, won for him boundless popularity, and the pressing
throng heard him with avidity. He found peculiar delight in his assaults
on the Jesuits, whom he denounced as conspirators against civil and
religious freedom.
Weird, stormy, and extensive as the career of Lorenzo Dow was, he was not
an old man when he died, being only fifty-seven. He fought off
constitutional weakness and heroically braced himself against the inroad
of disease, with the same force with which he did all things else. For
years he held the dark monster, death, at bay, and grimly declined to die
that he might live and fight, to do which none was fonder than the
redoubtable Dow.
As may be easily inferred, Dow was a man of scant learning, so far as
pertains to books, but he was a close and apt student of men and of
affairs, and from his acquired fund, he preached with great effectiveness,
unrestrained by conventionality, and unhindered by prim propriety. He told
the truth as he saw it, not in tones of choice diction, but with a
quaintness and pluck, and with such projectile force as to stir conviction
and arouse action. He chose to be called a Methodist, yet he chafed under
the imposed limitations of his church, and defiantly trampled down all
restrictions, while he followed the bent of his own sweet will, controlled
by none, not even his bosom companion, Peggy, if the indirect suggestions
of her journal are to be relied on. He did not seek to found churches, but
only desired to preach in his own wild manner. Sometimes he would make
appointments a year in advance, at remote points, but would meet them
promptly at the hour named.
In point of whimsicalness, Lorenzo Dow has had few peers, for he would
veer from the ordinary, for which he had a singular passion, but no one
was ever found who could pronounce Lorenzo Dow a fool. He was not without
extravagance of speech and of manner, but when challenged, he was gladly
able to evince strength equal to the occasion.
His son, Neal Dow, was a brigadier in the Union army, and the author of
the "Maine law," which procured a prohibitory statute for his state.
WEATHERFORD, THE "RED EAGLE"
The most picturesque figure among the Indian leaders of the Alabama
tribes, was William Weatherford, called by the Creeks, of whom he was the
splendid commander, Lamochattee, or Red Eagle. He was a nephew of Gen.
Alexander McGillivray, and had an equal admixture of blood in his veins.
Weatherford was reared near Montgomery, at the village of Coosada, just
below the junction of the Coosa and the Tallapoosa Rivers, where his
father owned a plantation, a large store, and a popular race track.
Charles Weatherford, the father, was a white man who had married a
half-breed, and became very popular and influential among the Indians, as
an agent in important functions, in negotiating with the Spanish and the
Americans.
The son, even from boyhood, was a pet among the Indians, by whom he was
greatly pampered and flattered, and into the wild pursuits of whom the lad
entered with a gusto. With them he hunted and swam, practiced athletics,
on foot and on horse, danced with them at their rude frolics, vied with
the best in the use of the bow and arrow, the rifle and pistol, in all of
which he became an expert, much to the delight of the warriors. He was
especially skilled in horsemanship, his taste for which was gratified to
the amplest by the fine animals in his father's stables, which animals
were kept for racing purposes.
The pronounced force of Weatherford's leadership was early shown, when he
would join in the perilous expeditions of his tribe against others in the
frequent wars along the Cumberland and the Chattahoochee, and in other
regions, as well. Not only for these qualities was the handsome and
chivalrous young man idolized, but also for his gifted oratory. He had a
voluble tongue, possessed a wonderful power of persuasion, and his
knowledge of Indian character enabled him to inflame and sway their
volatile passions at will.
At an early age, Weatherford became a dominant figure among the tribes,
and soon came to be proclaimed a great leader. He understood perfectly the
Indian character, and his power of discernment taught him when to speak,
and when to keep silent. Genius, judgment, oratory, and courage were the
ranking qualities of Weatherford's character, which, when taken in
connection with his natural gracefulness and agility, made him an object
little short of adoration to the untutored tribes. Nor was this yet all,
for to these meritorious qualities were added others which while
forbidding to sense of refinement, greatly enhanced Weatherford in the
estimation of the Indian. He was avaricious, treacherous, blood-thirsty,
and a glutton and debauchee of a low cast.
Early in life, he came into possession of a fine plantation, which he
every way beautified, while his home was made the abode of the worst vices
to which the Indian was addicted, all of which served to elevate him in
Indian esteem. His physique afforded him another advantage, for he was
tall, symmetrically built, and bore himself with the erectness of a
flagstaff, while his large black eyes were flashing, his nose of the
Grecian mold, with other features in harmonious blend. Such was the Red
Eagle of the Creeks, who was to become their great leader and champion, in
the stormy years that were to be. Like Hannibal of old concerning the
Romans, Weatherford had early instilled into him a profound antipathy for
the whites. His uncle, General McGillivray, to whom the young man was
greatly attached, and to whom, too, he was an ideal, had early injected
into the heart of the nephew hatred for the white man, and hostility
toward him. Weatherford when young would accompany his favorite uncle to
Pensacola, and while associating with the Spanish, he would imbibe
additional rancor for the Anglo-Saxon. To him, the encroachment of the
white population on Alabama soil, meant robbery and ruin to the Indian,
and the worst blood of his nature was fired with growing intensity
throughout the period during which he was ripening into manhood.
Weatherford was scarcely thirty years old when Tecumseh, the celebrated
chief, visited the Muscogees, in 1812. The popularity and bearing of the
young favorite of the Creeks caught the eye of the astute old chief, who
took the young man at once into his confidence, opened his plans for the
extinction of the white race in Alabama, and flattered him not a little,
when he named Weatherford the intrepid leader of the tribes of the south.
Tecumseh wished him to plunge into the war of extermination at once, but
Weatherford asked for time to consider the assumption of a charge so
grave, and promised to give his final answer on the return of Tecumseh in
the near future.
The truth is, that Weatherford had serious misgivings about his relation
to the pending troubles, and with all his dash and venom, he was not
without judgment and discrimination. While he hated the white man, he knew
his courage and force, and besides, he had many relatives and friends who
would resist any demonstration of hostility on the part of the Indians.
Yet Tecumseh, by fervor of appeal, had fired the Indian heart, and the
tribes were seething for the onset. Under these conditions, Weatherford
found himself in a dilemma.
Quietly stealing away from his plantation in the neighborhood of Wetumpka,
he went down the Alabama River to the region of Little River, in the lower
part of Monroe, to confer with his brother, Jack Weatherford, and his
half-brother, David Tait. The difficulty of the situation was increased
when both advised the younger brother to have nothing to do with the
impending troubles, and urged him to return to his home, and with his
family, slaves, and stock, to flee to the region in which they resided.
These older brothers predicted not only defeat, but disaster to
Weatherford, if he should yield to the solicitations of the tribes to
become their leader. The brothers pointed out that while much injury might
be inflicted on the whites, they would, in the end, crush the Indians;
that he would do well not to be drawn into the hostile campaign. The
advice was accepted, and William Weatherford retraced his steps to the
upper counties, with the intention of adopting the course suggested, but
it was too late.
ENFORCED ACQUIESCENCE
The tumult of passion raised by Tecumseh, and the full knowledge of the
proposal which he had made to Weatherford, as well as the well-known fact
of his kinship with certain influential families in lower Monroe, of their
attitude to the Indians, and last of all, the hesitation of Weatherford to
assume command, and his strange visit to his brothers--all of these things
awoke suspicion and placed the Indians on their guard. Here was a reversal
of human sentiment as sudden and as powerful as possible. Weatherford had
been idolized till suspicion was aroused, when his presumed treachery was
watched with much eagerness. On his return from the visit to his brothers,
Weatherford was chagrined, and doubly disappointed, to find that his
premises had been invaded, his family, slaves, and stock seized by the
Indians, and held under close guard against his return. Not only so, but
they laid hold on him also, and notified him that they would kill him and
his if he did not join them, and lead them against the whites. It was now
death, or submission to their demand, the latter of which was, after all,
not difficult for Weatherford, for the denunciation heard by him on every
hand, revived the old fire in his heart, and complete as the change was,
as a result of his visit to his brothers, he now cordially acquiesced in
their demands, and announced himself ready to lead them to the field.
Under these compulsory conditions, Weatherford fed afresh his hatred for
the white race, recalling that which his uncle had instilled, and with
all his being, he threw himself into the cause of the Indians, and became
the most brilliant and the bitterest of Indian leaders. Since there was
nothing left but acquiescence with the demands of the Indians, Weatherford
gored himself to unquenchable hatred, and boldly took the field at the
head of the hilarious and tawny braves. Summoning to his support all the
resources for a fierce war, and calling to his aid every available warrior
of the tribe, a thousand in number, he was ready for the march to the
counties of the south. Already hostilities had broken out in the southern
quarter of the state, and the initial victory of the Indians at the battle
of Burnt Corn, gave vigor to his spirits, and led him utterly to repudiate
the sentiments which he cherished when he left the homes of his brothers,
only a few weeks before.