Andrew Jackson (37 page)

Jackson had just reached Nashville when his appointment to command the Seventh District came through from Washington. The Seventh District comprised Tennessee, Mississippi Territory, and Louisiana, and its command made Jackson responsible for negotiating the peace settlement with the Creeks. Accordingly he had time only to kiss Rachel hello before he had to kiss her good-bye and head south again.

He knew what he wanted from a treaty. The long marches to and from the lower country had given him plenty of time to think about the future of the Southwest. Despite having accepted the services of some of the Creeks against the others, he saw less to distinguish the friendlies from the hostiles than many of his compatriots did. Defeated hostiles could turn friendly, but irritated friendlies could turn hostile. Jackson may have been harder-hearted than some of his contemporaries, or perhaps he was simply more realistic, yet whatever the cause, he didn’t believe that whites and Indians could live in peaceful proximity. At least they couldn’t so long as the Indians clung to their tribal ways, which included the ability to make war against one another and against the whites. This wasn’t wholly the fault of the Indians. White settlers were endlessly pushy, and foreign whites—British and Spanish—were always eager to provoke the Indians against Americans. Jackson couldn’t do anything about the pushiness of the settlers, which came with human nature. But he could do something about the foreigners and about the Indians’ ability to respond to provocations with a renewal of war.

The “grand policy of the government,” he explained to Tennessee senator John Williams, ought to be to link the white settlements in Georgia with those of Tennessee and Mississippi Territory. The connected settlements would form a “bulwark against foreign invasion” and prevent the “introduction of foreign influence to corrupt the minds of the Indians.” The settlements would also split the Creek nation, diminishing the capacity of irreconcilables among them to start another war. Perhaps surprisingly for the one who had led the fighting against them, Jackson thought the hostile Creeks ought not to be stripped of lands. Politics in the states that had contributed soldiers to the fighting required seizing some of the land to pay the costs of the campaign; Jackson couldn’t prevent that. But even the hostile Creeks had to live. “Humanity dictates that the conquered part of the nation should be allotted sufficient space for agricultural purposes.” Yet that space needn’t be their traditional territory. Some might come from the lands of the friendly Creeks, who would simply have to make room.

The friendly Creeks wouldn’t like Jackson’s plan, and neither would their northern neighbors. Jackson believed that the collapse of Tecumseh’s alliance and the current moment of American victory provided a chance to solve some long-standing problems. Cherokee and Chickasaw lands might be appropriated in the name of national defense. To the Chickasaws in particular, the American government might truthfully say, “You have proved to us that you cannot protect the whites on the roads through your country. The enemy you have permitted to pass through your nation, kill and plunder our nation, and carry off our women and children captives.” Jackson didn’t advocate simply seizing the land; the Indians must receive fair compensation for surrendering their rights. But the transfer was necessary. “Our national security requires it, and
their
security requires it. . . . It must be done.”

And so it was. When the Creeks gathered at Fort Jackson, the leaders of the friendly bands predictably expected a reward for their loyalty. They discovered to their shock that Jackson proposed to punish them: for failing to keep order within the Creek nation and for thereby allowing the Red Sticks to commit their depredations against the whites. “The truth is,” Jackson told a delegation of the Creek leaders, “the great body of the Creek chiefs and warriors did not respect the power of the United States. They thought we were an insignificant nation, that we would be overpowered by the British.” How did Jackson know this? By the Creeks’ response to Tecumseh. “If they had not thought so, Tecumseh would have had no influence. He would have been sent back to the British, or delivered to the United States as a prisoner, or shot. If my enemy goes to the house of my friend, and tells my friend he means to kill me, my friend becomes my enemy if he does not at least tell me I am to be killed.” Jackson expressed sorrow that the Creeks had not heeded the words of their wise chiefs who had counseled continued attachment to the United States. “Had you listened to them, you would yet have been a rich, powerful, and happy people. Your woods would yet have been filled with flocks, and herds of cattle; your fields with corn. Your towns and villages would not have been burned, nor your women and children wandering in the woods, exposed to starvation and cold. But you listened to prophets and bad men; your warriors have been slain, your nation is defenceless—you are reduced to such want as to receive food from your father the President of the United States.”

The Creek delegation protested Jackson’s patent disingenuousness. He had been happy to exploit the division among the Creeks while the battle raged, they pointed out, but now he claimed that no such division existed. Big Warrior, speaking for his fellows, didn’t deny that the Red Sticks had warred upon the whites. But many other Creeks had refused to join them, and the result had been the war within the Creek nation. “The spilling blood of white people, and giving satisfaction for it, was the cause of war amongst us, and nothing else.” How could Jackson say the friendly Creeks had done nothing to restrain the wrongdoers? What more could they have done? Big Warrior appealed to the memory of the first of the Great Fathers, General Washington, who had held out the arm of friendship to the Creeks and signed the initial treaty with them. “To that arm of friendship I hold fast.” Beyond the claims of friendship and justice, Big Warrior reminded Jackson that not all the Creeks were reconciled to peace with the Americans and that the British were still bent on trouble. A punitive peace, by destroying the credibility of the friendly Creeks, would make the task of the British easier.

Jackson didn’t need reminding of the British threat. In fact it was his fear of the British, more than his feelings about the Creeks, that motivated his peace plan. “The war is not over,” he told Big Warrior and the others, regarding the conflict with Britain. And until that war was over the Americans had to look first to their security. Jackson pointed out that under the treaty with General Washington that Big Warrior cited, the Creeks were obliged to hand over enemies of the United States, including the likes of Tecumseh. They hadn’t. “The United States would have been justified by the Great Spirit had they taken all the lands of the nation merely for keeping it a secret that her enemies were in the nation.” The United States was not taking all the lands of the Creeks. They were left with more than enough to support themselves. But the American government insisted on separating the Creek lands from Spanish Florida, lest British agents or their Spanish accomplices continue to foment rebellion among the Creeks—a rebellion that would end only in the utter destruction of the Creeks. “We will run a line between our friends and our enemies. We wish to save our friends, protect them, support them.
We will do all these things
. We will destroy our enemies because we love our friends and ourselves. The safety of the United States and your nation requires that enemies must be separated from friends. We wish to know them from each other. We wish to be able to say to our soldiers: Here is one, there is the other. . . .
Therefore we will run the line
.”

Jackson wouldn’t force the Creek leaders to sign the treaty. “Our friends will sign the treaty,” he said. And they would receive food, clothing, and the protection of the United States. Those who didn’t sign the treaty would be considered enemies. But they would be allowed to go, with Jackson’s help. “They shall have provisions to carry them away. We do not want them. We wish them to join their friends that all may be destroyed together.”

Here Jackson wasn’t being disingenuous, merely blunt. He knew that Big Warrior and the other chiefs had little alternative to signing the treaty. “The whole Creek nation is in a most wretched state,” he wrote the War Department. Two seasons of war—and his own scorched-earth policy—had driven it to the brink of starvation. “Could you only see the misery and wretchedness of those creatures perishing from want of food and picking up the grains of corn scattered from the mouths of the horses and trodden in the earth,” he told Rachel, “I know your humanity would feel for them.” Jackson’s humanity felt for them, too, but so did his strategic sense. After Big Warrior and the other chiefs signed the treaty, as Jackson guessed they would, he wrote to the War Department, “They
must
be
fed
and
clothed
or necessity will compel them to embrace the proferred friendship of the British.”

T
he Fort Jackson treaty was a gamble: that the Creeks would be more influenced by American threats than by British promises. The gamble paid off with most of the Creeks, who bitterly but nonviolently acquiesced to Jackson’s dictation. Yet a minority did just the opposite, with the encouragement of the British. “The Creeks were depressed in spirit beyond all example,” Jackson learned from an informant on the lower Mobile River. “They were about to give themselves up, when a runner came from the Apalachicola”—in Florida—“to Pensacola to inform them of the arrival of supplies from the British. They then became in a moment as insolent as they had been before submissive. Instead of surrendering, a party of twenty-five started out to collect cattle in the settlements east of Mobile river and bay.”

Jackson took this challenge as an opportunity. He relayed the intelligence to the War Department in Washington, with a request for permission to clear up the problem. “Will the government say to me: Require a few hundred militia (which can be had for the campaign at one day’s notice) and with such of my disposable force of regulars proceed to——— and reduce it. If so, I promise the war in the South has a speedy termination and British influence forever cut off from the Indians in that quarter.”

The government wasn’t ready to give Jackson such carte blanche or to fill in the blank with a specific reference. Washington was used to alarmist tales from the West, and officials of the Madison administration suspected similar embroidery here. Moreover, Jackson was talking about invading Spanish territory, and Madison, having trouble enough with Britain, had no desire to double his enemies. He ordered Jackson to gather additional intelligence and keep his powder dry but to stay clear of Spanish soil.

W
hat constituted Spanish soil in the vicinity of Florida was a debated issue in 1814. The United States government in 1810 had unilaterally enforced its interpretation of the Louisiana Purchase—that Louisiana included the left bank of the Mississippi to the mouth of the river and stretched east almost to Pensacola—by occupying that district, including Mobile. The Spanish government accepted neither the interpretation nor the occupation but, lacking the troops to prevent the latter, was compelled to suffer the former. Spain did, however, garrison Pensacola, about sixty miles east of Mobile.

Jackson had his own interpretation of who ought to govern Florida, and it didn’t include Spain. Without explicitly violating Madison’s orders—yet—he launched a psychological offensive against the Spanish force at Pensacola. He traveled to Mobile and from there addressed a stream of messages to the commandant of the Pensacola garrison, Mateo González Manrique, that were at first direct, then presumptuous, and finally belligerent. “I am informed that the enemies of the United States, who have been murdering our unoffending women and children, have sought and obtained asylum from justice within the territory of Spain,” Jackson said, regarding some Creek warriors still at large. “Information has also been received that permission was given to our open enemy, an officer commanding his Britannic majesty’s frigate the
Orpheus
, to land within the territory of Spain 25,000 stand of arms with 300 barrels of ammunition, for the avowed purpose of enabling the vanquished Creeks to renew a sanguinary war with the United States.” Jackson said he hoped these reports were unfounded. But he wanted González to know that he was monitoring the situation and would expect Spanish cooperation in tracking down the hostile Indians and preventing the British from violating Spain’s neutrality.

González responded as Jackson doubtless expected and desired. He called the letter “impertinent” and “an insult.” Jackson’s courier, John Gordon, reported that González said “the Spaniards would die before they would comply with such a demand.” Gordon added that rumors were circulating in Pensacola that Spain was about to declare war on the United States. Whether González had inspired the rumors, Gordon couldn’t tell.

Jackson would have been happy for war against Spain, but he doubted things would come to that. “Whatever may be the wishes of the Spanish government,” he remarked to a fellow American officer, “her weak and exhausted situation at present will prevent her from making war upon us. . . . She is too sensible of her own situation not to know that a declaration of war would deprive her of all her territory in North and South America as far as the isthmus of Darien. . . . The rumor of a declaration of war against us is unfounded.”