Andrew Jackson (32 page)

Jackson worried less about the Indians than about hunger. His army wasn’t large but it went through wagons of food—when it could get them. Lately it hadn’t seen any wagons and was living off the land, which in late autumn wasn’t yielding much. Jackson’s raiders scrounged from the Indian villages they burned. “I yesterday sent out Lieutenant Colonel Dyer with two hundred of the cavalry to attack a town called Littefutchee about twenty miles distant. This morning about four o’clock they returned, bringing with them about thirty prisoners: men, women, and children. The village they burnt. What is very agreeable, they state they found in the fields near the village a considerable quantity of corn, and in the country round-about many beeves.” Unfortunately Dyer’s company lacked the means to transport all the food, and in any event foraging was no substitute for regular provisions. “We have been very wretchedly supplied,” Jackson told Blount. “Scarcely two rations in succession have been drawn.” The men’s spirits remained good for the time being. “Whilst we can procure an ear of corn apiece, or anything that will serve as a substitute for it, we shall continue our exertions to accomplish the objects for which we were sent out. The cheerfulness with which my men submit to privations and are ready to encounter danger does honor to the government.” But moods changed on empty bellies. “What I dread . . . infinitely more than the fact of the enemy is the want of supplies.”

J
ackson continued the search for Weatherford and the Red Sticks. He ordered Coffee’s cavalry brigade to reduce the Creek town of Tallushatchee. “He has executed this order in elegant style,” Jackson reported to Rachel a few days later, “leaving dead on the field one hundred and seventy-six, and taking eighty prisoners. Forty prisoners was left on the ground, many of them wounded, others to take care of them.” Most of the prisoners were being transported to the nearest white settlement. But one—not exactly a prisoner, since he was an infant—was receiving special treatment. “I send on a little Indian boy for Andrew,” Jackson told Rachel. “All his family is destroyed. He is about the age of Theodore.”

Rarely did the two sides of Jackson—the fierce and the tender—appear so starkly counterpoised. The same letter that began with approval for an “elegant” raid that drenched an Indian town in blood ended with the news that Jackson and Rachel were adopting an Indian child orphaned by the action. This wasn’t their first Indian adoption. The young boy named Theodore had come to live at the Hermitage earlier, under circumstances lost to history. Although Jackson didn’t comment on the fact, he must have noticed the symmetry between his own behavior and that of Indian war chiefs, who could direct the most brutal attacks against adults and then take the orphans into their own lodges. Pity certainly moved the Indians in such cases, but at the same time the adopters sought to swell the ranks of their bands and tribes. In Jackson’s case, he pitied the Creek child—named Lyncoya—but he also wanted to provide Rachel another child and Andrew (and Theodore) a brother. Before the Creek campaign ended, the southern tribes would call Jackson “Sharp Knife” and deem him a fearsome war chief. At the beginning he was already acting like a chief.

T
he Creek War had begun as a conflict among the Creeks, and it retained that internecine aspect after the intervention of Jackson’s forces. In early November a band of Creeks friendly to the Americans found itself besieged at Talladega by a much larger contingent of Red Sticks. The friendlies, low on supplies and especially water, managed to get a message to Jackson at Ten Islands, thirty miles away. Jackson perceived a double opportunity in the situation: to strike the Red Sticks while they were preoccupied with their Creek enemies and to demonstrate that friendship with the Americans meant something tangible.

Immediately upon receiving the message, Jackson ordered his troops to set out. Swiftness was essential, for in heading to Talladega he necessarily left his camp at Ten Islands, which included the customary complement of sick soldiers and some lately wounded, undefended. Crossing the Coosa took his two thousand troops—twelve hundred infantry, eight hundred cavalry—several hours. Marching most of the way to Talladega filled the short November day and much of the ensuing night. He let his men catch their breath just short of the reach and awareness of the Red Sticks, but two hours before dawn they were on the trail again, moving forward slowly now, careful to give no sign of their approach.

“At sunrise we came within half a mile of them,” Jackson explained in his after-action report. “Having formed my men, I moved on in battle order. The infantry were in three lines—the militia on the left, and the volunteers on the right. The cavalry formed the two extreme wings, and were ordered to advance in a curve, keeping their rear connected with the advance of their infantry lines, and enclose the enemy in a circle.” Jackson had no solid idea how many the Red Sticks were, nor they how many the Tennesseans were. But he hoped to lure them away from their siege and into battle against his forces. With luck the friendly Creeks would then attack the Red Sticks from the rear. Even if they didn’t, he hoped to encircle the Red Sticks and destroy them.

The battle commenced as planned. Jackson’s forward guard poured several rifle volleys into the Red Sticks and then fell back to the main body of Tennessee troops. The Red Sticks, overcoming their surprise at being attacked from the rear, chased the Tennesseans. The center of Jackson’s infantry line was supposed to step forward and meet the charge, but some of the men, through a combination of misunderstanding and momentary failure of nerve, began to retreat. Briefly the battle plan appeared to unravel. Jackson ordered a corps of cavalry to dismount and fill the gap in the lines. “This order was executed with a great deal of promptitude and effect,” he explained afterward. “The militia, seeing this, speedily rallied, and the fire became general along the front line.” Now the enemy began to retreat, and the Tennesseans to pursue. “The right wing chased them with a most destructive fire to the mountains, a distance of about three miles.” Jackson judged that if he hadn’t been obliged to dismount his cavalry, the horsemen would have annihilated the enemy. As it was, the triumph was overwhelming: three hundred hostiles killed, against seventeen Tennesseans. Jackson couldn’t have been prouder of his men. “All the officers acted with the utmost bravery, and so did all the privates, except that part of the militia who retreated at the commencement of the battle, and they hastened to atone for their error. Taking the whole together, they have realized the high expectations I had formed of them.”

A
s gratifying as the victory at Talladega was, it did nothing for Jackson’s growing problem of supply. He had hoped some food might arrive at Ten Islands while his strike force was gone; none did. “We were out of provisions and half starved for many days, and to heighten my mortification when we returned here last evening had not one mouthful to give the wounded or well,” he wrote Rachel. What kind of commander offered nothing better to his brave soldiers? “My mind for the want of provision is harassed. My feelings excoriated with the complaints of the men.”

The complaints increased as the food supply diminished. “It is with extreme pain I inform you that a turbulent and mutinous disposition has manifested itself in my camp,” Jackson wrote Governor Blount in mid-November. “Petition on petition has been handed from the officers of the different brigades containing statements of their privations and sufferings and requesting me to return into the settlements.” Jackson couldn’t blame the men for feeling ill-used. They had risked their lives and were now being left to starve. He tried to talk patience into them, arguing that provisions were on the way and must arrive soon. He bought a little time by having the brigade generals poll their officers. One brigade gave Jackson four days: if supplies didn’t arrive in that time, they were leaving. Another brigade wanted to depart at once. Only Coffee and his cavalry brigade resolved to stay regardless.

T
ecumseh’s troubles were of a different sort. After the defeat of the Shawnees and their allies at Prophetstown in the autumn of 1811, he had returned north lest Harrison draw the Indians into other premature battles. Tecumseh knew the Americans could crush the Indians if the Indians stood alone, and he placed less faith than his brother in the intervention of the Great Spirit. Tecumseh looked not to heaven but to London, believing that the struggle between the British and the Americans would give the Indians their—only—opportunity to reclaim what they had lost during the previous several generations. The Indians must organize, but they must also be patient, waiting for the struggle between the red coats and the blue to develop.

Tecumseh’s counsel gained credibility from an utterly unexpected source, one so strange as to beggar the imagination of nearly everyone who encountered it. Starting in December 1811 and lasting for several weeks, a series of enormous earthquakes shook the heartland of North America as no one living could recall it ever having been shaken. The quakes centered just south of the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, but their rumbling was felt several hundred miles away. The heaving rerouted the Mississippi, creating channels where none had existed, lakes where there had been river, and islands where the land had been attached to the shore.

The region’s prescientific peoples—of all races—naturally detected supernatural significance in the rare and frightening event, and they tried to fathom what that significance was. No credible evidence indicates that Tecumseh literally predicted the earthquakes, but he was clever enough not to deny claims that he had. He had been near the epicenter, and several versions of the story had him saying he would stamp his foot and shake the earth, bringing destruction to those who denied his message. Even those minimalists who doubted that he had actually predicted the quakes found it easy to see them as a sign of a new era, perhaps the one Tecumseh and his brother had forecast.

The outbreak of formal war between the British and the Americans rewarded Tecumseh’s patience, and the early Anglo-Indian victories in the northwest made him more credible than ever. The rising of the Red Sticks in the Creek country suggested that his southern diplomacy hadn’t been in vain. In early 1813 it was possible for Tecumseh—and Indian irredentists generally—to be more hopeful than they had been in decades that they might again be masters of the lands of their fathers.

But then the British began to lose their nerve. They didn’t exploit their northwestern victories and drive deep into Ohio, as Tecumseh wished. And after Americans under Oliver Hazard Perry won a battle of the “big canoes” on Lake Erie, the British commander at Detroit, Henry Proctor, decided to retreat down the Thames River.

Tecumseh felt betrayed, and he told Proctor as much.

Summer before last, when I came forward with my red brethren, and was ready to take up the hatchet in favor of our British father, we were told not to be in a hurry, that he had not yet determined to fight the Americans. . . . When war was declared, our father stood up and gave us the tomahawk, and told us that he was then ready to strike the Americans; that he wanted our assistance and that he would certainly get us our lands back, which the Americans had taken from us. . . . You always told us that you would never draw your foot off British ground; but now, father, we see you are drawing back. . . . We are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must compare our father’s conduct to a fat animal that carries its tail upon its back but when affrighted, he drops it between his legs and runs off.

When it became apparent that Tecumseh’s scorn wouldn’t change Proctor’s mind, the Shawnee leader asked simply to be given the means to stand and fight the Americans.

You have got the arms and ammunition which our great father sent for his red children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to us. . . . Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it be his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.

Proctor wouldn’t do even this. He took his troops and weapons and headed north, leaving Tecumseh to decide whether to stand and fight or to follow. Complicating the issue, as always, was the question of Indian women and children. The British had promised to defend them, and Tecumseh had brought them forward to the British lines. But now the British were leaving them behind. Tecumseh knew he couldn’t shield the women and children, without Proctor’s help, from the Americans’ wrath. It didn’t take him more than a few bitter moments to realize he had to follow the redcoats down the river.

Proctor wasn’t quite as faithless as Tecumseh feared. The British general retreated to a position he considered more defensible, and there he turned to meet the Americans. Tecumseh caught up with Proctor and walked among the British ranks in the moments before battle. “He was dressed in his usual deer skin dress, which admirably displayed his light yet sinewy figure,” John Richardson, one of the British soldiers, recalled. “In his handkerchief, rolled as a turban over his brow, was placed a handsome ostrich feather. . . . He pressed the hand of each officer as he passed, made some remark in Shawnee appropriate to the occasion, which was sufficiently understood by the expressive signs accompanying them, and then passed away forever from our view.” To Proctor, Tecumseh said, “Father, tell your young men to be firm, and all will be well.”

Tecumseh must have known that more than firmness in the ranks was required. Proctor wasn’t a coward, but neither was he much of a soldier. “His inferior officers say that his conduct has been a continued series of blunders,” William Henry Harrison remarked after interviewing those officers, who became his prisoners in the battle for which Tecumseh was preparing the troops. “The contest was not for a moment doubtful.” Proctor possessed the advantage of terrain, having chosen a battlefield that restricted Harrison’s movements, and perhaps of numbers, although this was hard to tell, given the substantial portion of Indian irregulars on his side. (Harrison’s force also included Indians of various tribes, but many fewer than Proctor’s.) Yet the fighting style of the Americans, especially Harrison’s Kentucky militia, suited the forest in which much of the fighting took place. “The American backwoodsmen ride better in the woods than any other people,” Harrison explained. “A musket or rifle is no impediment to them, being accustomed to carry them on horseback from their earliest youth.”