Cozzens A Brutal Reckoning

The Creek Indians and the Epic War for the American South
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ISBN: 978-1-83895-905-0
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

'Cozzens is a master storyteller' The Times 'Extremely well researched' Times Literary Supplement From the devastating invasion by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century to the relentless pressure from white settlers 150 years later, A Brutal Reckoning tells the story of encroachment on the vast Native American territory in the Deep South, which gave rise to the Creek War, the bloodiest in American Indian history, and propelled Andrew Jackson into national prominence, as he led the US Army in a ruthless campaign. It was a war that involved not only white Americans and Native Americans but also the British and the Spanish, and ultimately led to the Trail of Tears, in which the government forcibly removed the entire Creek people, as well as the neighbouring Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee nations, from their homelands, leaving the way open for the conquest of the West. No other single Indian conflict had such a significant impact on the fate of the country. Wonderfully told and brilliantly detailed, A Brutal Reckoning is a sweeping history of a crucial period in the destruction of America's native tribes.

Peter Cozzens is the author of over eighteen books on the Civil War and the American West. He recently retired after thirty years as a Foreign Service Officer with the U. S. Department of State. His previous book, The Earth Is Weeping, was awarded the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History and the Caroline Bancroft History Prize. The Warrior and the Prophet was the winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Biography.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cozzens, Peter

Leseproben

PROLOGUE

Andrew Jackson lay on a couch in an elegant room at the stylish Nashville Inn. The bed was a wreck. The cadaverous Tennessean had soaked two mattresses with his blood and stained the carpet beneath the bedstead scarlet. The place stank of dried blood, diarrhea, and the slippery-elm poultice that doctors had slathered on Jackson’s shattered left shoulder and mangled left arm. Had the attending physician prevailed, there would have been no wounds to plaster. He had urged an amputation, to which the young doctor’s nearly delirious patient objected. “No, I’ll keep my arm,” mumbled Jackson. Such was Jackson’s fearsome reputation that no one presumed to dispute him. Neither did the doctor dare remove the lead ball embedded in his arm.

The fiery forty-six-year-old Tennessee militia general had no one but himself to blame for the grievous wounds that had prostrated him for three weeks and showed scant signs of improving. Cracking a horse whip and brandishing a pistol, on September 4, 1813, Jackson had provoked a pointless but violent confrontation with his former friend and militia subordinate Colonel Thomas Hart Benton on the steps of a Nashville hotel a scant hundred yards from where he now lay. Benton had just returned from Washington, D.C., where he had gone to obtain the War Department’s promise to reimburse Jackson for a crippling debt the general had incurred on behalf of his Tennesseans after they were mustered into U.S. service early in the War of 1812 and then almost immediately cast aside, unpaid, ill-used, and far from home.

While Thomas Hart Benton was away, Jackson acted as second to the opponent of Benton’s younger brother Jesse in a seriocomic, nonlethal duel that earned Jesse a bullet in the buttocks. Learning of the affair, a mortified Thomas Hart Benton publicly impugned Jackson’s honor, a character trait the general held dearer than life itself. For that, his former subordinate must pay. “Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you. Defend yourself,” Jackson had declared when they met. Instead, a slug and two balls from Jesse Benton’s pistol punished Jackson.

While Jackson lay helpless just twelve miles from his plantation, the Hermitage, where his wife, Rachel, and their young adopted son awaited his return, events more momentous than the wounding of the West Tennessee militia’s controversial commanding general gripped the citizens of Nashville. The War of 1812 was going badly for the United States. British forces menaced the Eastern Seaboard and had repelled American attempts to seize Canada. Closer to home, four days after Jackson’s senseless fracas, a rider from the Mississippi Territory galloped into town bearing news of a ruthless Creek massacre of the inhabitants of a frontier stockade called Fort Mims in presentday southwestern Alabama. Horrified whites feared the slaughter portended a massive uprising of the powerful Creek confederacy, perhaps abetted by the British. Would the Tennessee frontier next fall prey to Indian depredations? The governor and Nashville luminaries met to consider their response and what if any role their incapacitated military leader might play. What could Jackson himself, feverish, gaunt, and growing thinner, unable to stand without support, wish for at such a moment? He could wish for war, with himself in the forefront.1

represents the concluding volume in a trilogy that I hope will offer readers a gripping and balanced account of the dispossession of American Indian lands by a relentlessly westering United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also provides a stunning lesson in how the unwavering will of one man—in this case Andrew Jackson—could set the course of a crucial era of American history and almost single-handedly win what was arguably the most consequential Indian war in U.S. history.

The principal events of largely occur concurrently with those of the locus shifting from Indian warfare in the presentday Midwest to the horrific combat and colossal betrayals that largely eradicated the Indian presence in the Deep South. Only after the U.S. government cleared the country east of the Mississippi River of its Native population was the way open for the conquest of the West, which is the subject of

relates a vital chapter in American history, largely forgotten but of immense consequence for the future of the United States. No other Indian conflict in our nation’s history so changed the complexion of American society as did the Creek War, which lies at the heart of this book. A dispute that began as a Creek civil war became a ruthless struggle against American expansion, erupting in the midst of the War of 1812. Not only was the Creek War the most pitiless clash between American Indians and whites in U.S. history, but the defeat of the Red Sticks—as those opposed to American encroachment were known because of the red war clubs they carried—also cost the entire Creek people as well as the neighboring Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations their homelands. The collapse of Red Stick resistance in 1814 led inexorably to the Indian Trail of Tears two decades later, which opened Alabama, much of Mississippi, and portions of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to white settlement. That in turn gave rise to the Cotton Kingdom, without which there would have been no casus belli for the American Civil War.

The Creek War also thrust Andrew Jackson into national prominence. He began the conflict a general in the Tennessee militia whose political star seemed on the wane. Jackson’s victory over the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the climactic action of the Creek War, won him a major general’s commission in the Regular army and command of the vast military district that embraced New Orleans. Without the Creek War, Jackson would never have had the opportunity to beat the British at the Battle of New Orleans and become the most celebrated general to emerge from the War of 1812. But did Jackson really deserve the accolades and the promotion that came after Horseshoe Bend? Prior to that battle his combat performance against the Red Sticks had been mixed at best. He had suffered more than one battlefield setback and had lost many of his troops to mutiny. As for Horseshoe Bend, it was not Jackson but rather his Cherokee and friendly Creek scouts acting on their own initiative—the very men he would later expel on the Trail of Tears—who won the battle for him.

Jackson commanded but one of seven columns that invaded the Creek nation during the war. To his credit, he alone possessed the will to see the conflict through. While commanders from Georgia, the Mississippi Territory, and eastern Tennessee abbreviated their campaigns because of chronic supply shortages, enlistment problems, Red Stick resilience, and the relative indifference of a U.S. government locked in war with Great Britain, Jackson persevered. Enfeebled by a festering gunshot wound and severe chronic diarrhea, and plagued by inconstant superiors, Jackson demonstrated fortitude and personal courage rarely witnessed in American military annals. He brooked no dissent, treating his own sometimes recalcitrant troops with a harshness that astonished the militiamen and volunteers. examines Jackson’s unbridled ambition, outsized sense of honor and duty, and periodic cruelty in the context of his times. His command shortcomings and successes are explored, presenting what I hope is a fair and nuanced reevaluation of Jackson the general. Such is the chronology of events, and the need to understand Creek Indian society and the factors that precipitated the Creek War, that Jackson does not stomp onto the stage until part 3 of the narrative. From the moment he plunges into the conflict, however, Jackson dominates the narrative just as he did the conduct of the Creek War. For this inevitable delay in introducing the key nemesis, first of the Red Sticks and subsequently of all southeastern Indian tribes, I beg the reader’s indulgence.

The Creek confederacy represented the largest Native presence of the South. So long as the Creeks possessed their vast country, white settlement could expand no farther into what became the American South than central Georgia. It is critical to our appreciation of the challenges that Jackson confronted, then, and also a matter of fairness to the Creek people, that their early history and way of life be given its due. Jackson’s successful prosecution of the Creek War cannot be adequately judged without an understanding of what came before. Neither can the richness, diversity, and perseverance of the people he conquered be appreciated without a full rendering of the events predating the conflict. This is the purpose of part 1 of our story.

The Creek War began as a civil war within the Creek community and gave rise to the Red Stick militants who precipitated conflict with the United States. It was the most devastating internecine struggle that any Native people suffered as a consequence of contact with white Americans. It was a bitter struggle pitting brother against brother, violently dividing families to an even greater extent than the American Civil War. It is a tragedy little known today, but one that merits a full rendition not only in its own right but also if one is to grasp the temper of the times and the milieu in which Jackson operated. The rise...