Patriotic Fire Read online

  As time went by Jackson progressed from prosecutor to judge, at the same time acquiring vast amounts of land in the area, upon which, using slave labor, he raised cotton, corn, and wheat and eventually built his splendid mansion, the Hermitage. He also built up one of the finest stables of racehorses in the South, winning (or losing, as the case sometimes was) large sums of money. Almost from the moment of his arrival in Tennessee Jackson’s career was meteoric. In 1796 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1797 he was elected to the U.S. Senate; in 1802 he was elected major general of the Tennessee militia.* 19

  By this time the Jacksons had a growing brood in their household. After Rachel lost a number of infants in childbirth, the couple began taking in orphans or children whose parents were unable to properly care for them; one of these was legally adopted and christened Andrew Jackson, Jr.

  During this period there were, occasionally, unfortunate vicissitudes. In 1806 Jackson became, arguably, the best pistol shot in Tennessee after killing a man named Charles Dickinson (whom everybody had said was the best shot in Tennessee) in a duel over a horseracing bet. In 1803 he had gotten into a dispute with then Tennessee governor John “Nolichucky Jack” Sevier, an old rival whom Jackson had publicly exposed for perpetrating large real estate frauds. When Sevier retaliated by insulting Mrs. Jackson regarding her alleged adultery, he was promptly challenged to a duel.

  The governor did not wish to fight a duel with Jackson, however, pleading old age, his service in the Revolutionary War, and the likely resultant poverty of his large family, should he lose. But neither would he apologize for making a crack about Jackson’s “taking a trip to Natchez with another man’s wife [Rachel],” so Jackson promptly published a screed on the front page of the local newspaper in which he called Sevier all the ugly things that were fit to print, including a “coward.” Jackson then set out for the appointed dueling grounds to await the governor, who was not at all punctual. What happened next, by the account of Marquis James, one of Jackson’s biographers, is worth quoting in its entirety:

  “For five days they encamped at the Point and had started to leave when Sevier appeared with several armed men. Andrew Greer rode ahead and addressed Jackson, who suddenly left off speaking and drew a pistol, dismounted and drew a second pistol. Turning, Greer perceived Sevier off his horse with pistols in his hands advancing on Jackson. Twenty steps apart they halted and began to abuse each other, the governor damning him to fire away. After a little of this both put away their arms. There were more words and Jackson rushed at Sevier saying he was going to cane him. [Then] Sevier drew his sword, ‘which frightened his horse, which ran away with the governor’s pistols.’ Jackson drew a pistol and the governor went behind a tree and damned Jackson: ‘Did he want to fire on a naked man?’ he asked. George Washington Sevier, the governor’s seventeen-year-old son, then drew on Jackson and Dr. Van Dyke [Jackson’s second] drew on Washington.

  “Members of the Sevier party rushed up making amicable signs. They got the three men to put away their guns and suggested that the governor relinquish the field, which he did, swearing at Jackson and receiving [Jackson’s] comments in return as long as either could hear.”* 20

  So it sometimes went on dueling days, but Jackson’s next encounter was not to be so uneventful.

  With the War of 1812 four months old and still going terribly for the Americans, and with Jackson still brooding in Nashville with his militia division, something finally seemed to be happening. Washington had sent out its call for 50,000 volunteers from the various states. Unlike militia, these would come directly under the authority of the War Department, as would their commanding officer. The governor of Tennessee, William Blount, appointed Jackson to the post of major general of U.S. volunteers, certainly an exalted regular army slot for a mere militia officer. Tennessee’s quota had been 1,500 men, but 2,500—including the famed frontiersman Davy Crockett—joined up from mid-October until the end of December, walking or riding out of the canebreaks, mountains, and backwoods communities to form up in Nashville on the banks of the frozen Cumberland River. Jackson personally mortgaged much of his fortune to supply and equip them.

  Unfortunately—or so concluded Jackson—his orders were not to march his force to the fighting fronts along the Canadian border, but instead to go to New Orleans and reinforce the despised Wilkinson, who had not yet left for his unsatisfactory performance in the north, and who was supposed to march on Spanish West Florida, where the Spanish and British were stirring up the Indians against the United States. Accordingly, Jackson moved his men eight hundred miles by river rafts down to Natchez, just above New Orleans, where he received a further communiqué from the War Department canceling the whole mission and telling him to disband his army and go home. Jackson did no such thing, at least not the part about disbanding his army. He believed that the new orders were nothing more than a smarmy ploy to get rid of him and to have his volunteers serve under Wilkinson. Instead, he vowed to march his men all the way back to Nashville himself, which he did, acquiring in the process the nickname “Old Hickory,” when somebody watching the general leading his men out of the wilderness remarked, “He’s tough as hickory,” after the toughest wood he knew. The name stuck, but it was also along this arduous march that serious trouble began to fester.

  The Benton brothers, both officers in Jackson’s army, were from a prominent and wealthy family in Franklin, just outside Nashville. The younger Benton had become friends with one Lieutenant Littleton Johnson, who had developed a grudge against Lieutenant Colonel William Carroll, the brigade inspector. Johnson sent Jesse Benton to Carroll with a challenge to a duel. Carroll refused on grounds that Johnson was not a gentleman;* 21 Benton then declared that if that be so, he himself was one, and promptly challenged Carroll personally to the duel.

  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.* 22

  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 hi
s 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.

  Weatherford’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.* 23

  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.

  Four

  Andrew 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 caus
e 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.