Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans
320
Tennesseans at War, 1812-1815: Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans
320Overview
Although frequently discussed as separate military conflicts, the War of 1812 against Great Britain and the Creek War against Native Americans in the territory that would become Alabama were part of the same forceful projection of growing American power. Success in both wars won for America security against attack from abroad and vast tracks of new land in “the Old Southwest.” In Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, Tom Kanon explains the role Tennesseans played in these changes and how they remade the south.
Because it was a landlocked frontier state, Tennessee’s economy and security depended heavily upon the river systems that traversed the region; some, like the Tennessee River, flowed south out of the state and into Native American lands. Tennesseans of the period perceived that gaining mastery of these waterways formed an urgent part of their economic survival and stability.
The culmination of fifteen years’ research, Kanon’s work draws on state archives, primary sources, and eyewitness accounts, bringing the information in these materials together for first time. Not only does he narrate the military campaigns at the heart of the young nation’s expansion, but he also deftly recalls the economic and social pressures and opportunities that encouraged large numbers of Tennesseans to leave home and fight. He expertly weaves these themes into a cohesive narrative that culminates in the vivid military victories of the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the legendary Battle of New Orleans—the victory that catapulted Tennessee’s citizen-soldier Andrew Jackson to the presidency.
Expounding on the social roles and conditions of women, slaves, minorities, and Native Americans in Tennessee, Kanon also brings into focus the key idea of the “home front” in the minds of Tennesseans doing battle in Alabama and beyond. Kanon shows how the goal of creating, strengthening, and maintaining an ordered society permeated the choices and actions of the American elites on the frontiers of the young nation.
Much more than a history of Tennesseans or the battles they fought in Alabama, Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, is the gripping story of a pivotal turning point in the history of the young American republic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817387525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Tennesseans at War, 1812â"1815
Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans
By Tom Kanon
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8752-5
CHAPTER 1
"America is the fortunate Country, and the State of Tennessee is the fortunate spot in America," wrote David Campbell in 1809 from Knoxville. "No part of the Earth exceeds us in Soil, climate, and fine Streams of Water.... I rejoice I have settled here, where my family can enjoy plenty, and ease." Campbell, formerly a judge on the Tennessee Superior Court of Law and Equity, penned these lines to his old Virginia acquaintance, Thomas Jefferson. Campbell noted with enthusiasm the rising population of the frontier state as well as the prospect that the Cherokee Indians might soon be leaving the state to resettle west of the Mississippi River. Ultimately, Tennessee's story in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is tied to land and its capacity for profit, whether in speculation or productivity. During the same time, Indian removal became an inseparable element to white autonomy in the region. By the War of 1812, Tennessee consisted of two grand divisions—East and West—separated by the Cumberland Plateau. East Tennessee, stretching from the western border of North Carolina to the plateau, comprised well-watered valleys, thick forests of deciduous trees, and generally fertile soil. West Tennessee (also known as the Nashville or Cumberland Basin), extending from the Cumberland Plateau to the Tennessee River, offered gently rolling hills and plains with an abundance of springs, streams, timber, and natural grasslands. Contemporaries referred to the barren region separating the two divisions as the "Wilderness"—an area about one hundred miles long and fifty miles wide. This geographic barrier became a physical reminder of the "distance" between the two rival divisions.
Census figures for Tennessee in 1810 reveal a total population of 262,000—a nearly 150 percent increase from 1800. Forty percent were under the age of ten, a reflection that the West was a land of youth. (The United States was literally a young nation—the median age of population in 1800 being sixteen—with a third of its entire population under ten years of age.) The 1810 census also disclosed that the majority of Tennesseans now lived, for the first time, in West Tennessee. In fact, the population of that section increased 500 percent during the decade of 1800–1810—a far cry from 1790, when East Tennessee commanded over four times the population of its western counterpart. The census also divulged a more ominous statistic: 79 percent of the state's 44,300 slaves resided in the western part of the state, particularly in the middle counties of Davidson, Wilson, Maury, Williamson, and Bedford. The population growth of West Tennessee, coupled with its huge slave base, reflected the development of a complex market economy based on cotton, tobacco, land speculation, and slavery.
The rise of the Tennessee frontier came as no surprise to those who experienced it. Daniel Smith, a surveyor and secretary of the Southwest Territory, prophetically wrote in 1793: "The progress of population in that country is no more to be prevented or restrained than the flowing of the rivers. It cannot be retarded by laws, nor by treaties, nor by a stronger curb—the fear of death." Smith cited the progress made by Kentucky, where migration thrived "in the face of numerous and hostile savages." He correctly predicted a similar pattern for Tennesseans, then in the midst of a bloody and gruesome war with the aboriginal inhabitants of the territory—a conflict that left lasting psychological scars on both Indians and Anglo-Americans. James Winchester, as colonel in the West Tennessee militia, experienced firsthand the devastation of Indian raids in the early 1790s. His brother was ambushed and slain in July 1794, along with two young cousins killed and scalped, and a Cumberland man "shot with nine balls, and a tomahawk left sticking in his skull." William Hall, another Cumberland settler, vividly remembered an Indian attack in 1793 on a small party of whites, including a seventeen-year-old girl whose father was executed and scalped. She then fell to the same fate. Hall arrived with a rescue party and found the girl "lying on the ground, terribly, mortally wounded, scalped and bleeding." "She was faintly moaning when I came up, and was lying on her face," he somberly recalled. Hall was no stranger to such grisly sights. In June 1787 he witnessed his brother's death; two members of a group of ambushing Indians sunk their tomahawks into each side of his brain. Two months later, Hall and his family were waylaid again. This time another brother and Hall's father were shot to death ("he fell pierced by thirteen bullets"). In the eastern section of the state, in the Holston settlements, Tennesseans shared similar stories. The Knoxville Gazette reported seventy-one deaths by Indian depredations in less than a seven-month period in 1793.
Anglo-American settlers responded to Indian depredations with a savagery equaling (and, at times, surpassing) that of their enemies. In May 1793 Indians committed a series of raids near Knoxville, where one small party killed a white man and his son. Territorial governor William Blount ordered Captain John Beard, with fifty mounted infantry, to pursue the perpetrators. Beard later claimed the trail led to the town of Hanging Maw (friendly to the United States), where envoys from Chickamauga (or lower Cherokees) towns had gathered. Although Beard's orders specified he not cross the Tennessee River in his pursuit, he attacked the town in a spirit of vengeance, killing about a dozen individuals, including a white man with his Indian wife and family. The attackers severely wounded Chief Hanging Maw, his wife, and daughter. Fearing the outbreak of a general war, Secretary Daniel Smith pleaded with Hanging Maw and other Cherokee leaders not to react violently. Beard was tried before a court-martial but acquitted due to strong public sentiment in his favor. Beard's raid and its consequences typified the powder-keg situation in the southern backcountry in the early 1790s. On one hand, besieged settlers endured swift, brutal attacks designed to spread fear throughout the white communities encroaching on land Indians declared as their own. The federal government, on the other hand, aware of the expense involved in subduing warring Indians (nearly five-sixths of federal operating expenditures went to support the Indian wars between 1790 and 1796), made efforts to deflect the growing tension on the frontier. For instance, in its attempt to pacify the warring southern Indians, the federal government quietly increased the Cherokee annuities by 50 percent.
Although the War Department sympathized with the Tennesseans, the agency did not condone any invasions of Indian territory. Instead it authorized militiamen to assume defensive positions and dispatched ammunition when it could. Combined forces of Cherokee, Creek, and Shawnee Indians, bent on creating havoc in both East and West Tennessee, pressured the settlers' endurance to the limit. Tennesseans, not satisfied with a defensive posture, took matters into their own hands, as exemplified by the September 1794 expedition to the Nickajack towns where Major James Ore (under orders from James Robertson) attacked and destroyed the Chickamauga villages of Nickajack and Running Water. Territorial governor William Blount, on the surface, condemned the act, but he certainly knew of it ahead of time and may have even helped plan it. Thus the situation in Tennessee in the early 1790s comprised a double-edged imbroglio for territorial officials: frustration over Indian depredations and white settlers killing innocent Indians—and a federal government reluctant to make a military commitment. As a result, Tennesseans set a pattern for learning how to deal with the Indian "problem" on their own.
The Indian warfare of the 1790s produced at least three key lessons for future Tennesseans: all Indians were to be held in suspicion, whites intruding on Indian land only acerbated the situation, and violence represented the ultimate solution against Indian hostility. In the midst of the frontier fighting in 1792, Governor Blount received a letter from a constituent who admitted that many Cherokees desired peace, but there were those who killed settlers and stole horses. The writer of the letter preferred an open war with the Cherokees because, as he put it, "a man would then know when he saw an Indian he saw an Enemy & be prepared & act accordingly." Because backcountry settlers justified their own hatred and cruelty toward Indians by labeling them as hostile, savage, and inferior beings, depredations were seldom blamed on individual Indians or even tribes, but on Indians as a whole. The literature of the day, the narratives handed down from generation to generation, and visual depictions (such as paintings and museum displays) consciously promoted this slanted view.
The distrust of the Southeast Indians as promulgated by Anglo-Americans is epitomized in the 1812 remarks of John Sevier to his son. "There is not the least confidence to be placed in savages," decried the old Indian fighter. "I would not trust neither Chickasaws, nor Cherokees too far." As for the Creeks, Sevier summed up his attitude by declaring them "as great a set of villains as ever lived." The reality of the situation, however, painted a different picture. In an effort to get the US government to stop whites from trespassing on Creek land, one chief contacted President James Madison in 1809 with a litany of complaints concerning white incursions: stealing cattle, cutting timber, killing game—all in Creek territory. The chief also cited the extreme poverty in which the Creeks were living, with very little clothing and ammunition. To its credit, the federal government did make some attempt at rectifying the dire circumstances by forcibly removing white squatters from Creek lands—two thousand in 1809 alone. These and earlier attempts, however, never seemed to stem the tide of white encroachment.
Tennessee's hunger for Indian land was insatiable, and, as far back as territorial status, it was apparent most white Tennesseans agreed on the complete elimination of Indians from their state. Statehood in 1796 did little to appease Anglo-American appetites. The Cherokees held at least 25,000 square miles of land within the chartered limits of the state, while the Chickasaws possessed over seven million acres of land, mostly between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers. Secretary of War James McHenry received a letter from one of his treaty commissioners, Alfred Moore, in 1799 stating that Tennesseans "burn with indignation at the restraints put upon their avidity for the Indian lands." State officials, observed Moore, "want all the land and not a part." Tennesseans actually instigated war with the Indians, and "whoever shall have the address to effect this," Moore noted, "will rise high in the estimation of his countrymen." Governor John Sevier, lamenting in 1800 over the fact that the Cherokees held valuable, fertile lands within the state, not to mention the access of navigable streams, expressed his disgust with the "Indian hordes ... composed of the little tawny murdering tribes that were our earliest and most poisonous enemies." At the opening of the nineteenth century, the Cherokees found themselves vainly struggling to keep their lands, although promised by Tennessee officials that no more cessions would be asked of them. Certain Cherokee chiefs received bribes in the form of concessions—money, guns, and such—to promote further cessions, thus creating rifts within the Cherokee leadership.
Justification for Indian removal in the early 1800s constituted a clear and logical argument, at least for white Tennesseans. To most Americans, Indians were "wasting" land that could be put to good use by whites who could better cultivate it. No matter that Indians did practice agriculture; the farming they did was simply not enough. As a result, Indians impeded the progress of "civilized" Americans. Indian claims presented a legal obstacle in Tennessee's quest to rid the state of nonwhite elements. Removal to the West would alleviate that problem. Tennessee officials, such as Governor Willie (pronounced "Wylie") Blount, therefore made Indian relocation a top priority in their administrations. In March 1811, Blount indicated he would "work cheerfully" to promote Indian settlement west of the Mississippi. Not only would tangled land claims be resolved, but also removal would better guard against foreign "tampering" with Indians. True, the Indians claimed rights to the land by virtue of their nativity, but, as Blount expressed it, "I have doubts whether a tribe ... should have, and hold, a good title to a large unsettled Country ... [there] ought to be some limitation to their bounds." From the beginning of his administration, Blount worked to extinguish Indian titles to lands within the state—urging removal as the solution—and doggedly continued this policy throughout his three terms (1809–15).
While land west of the Mississippi River held little interest to Anglo-Americans in the early 1800s, the Mississippi River itself represented the lifeblood of the Old Southwest. Daniel Smith defined two issues threatening the existence of the Tennessee settlements: invasion by southern Indians and the denial of free access by river to the port of New Orleans. "The western people consider the navigation of the Mississippi as the light of the sun, a birth-right that cannot be alienated," professed Smith in 1793. Because of its geographic location, it seemed natural for Americans to have access to this river, despite the fact that Spain claimed navigation rights. According to one Tennessee politician in 1795, free access to the Mississippi was all the people needed to become numerous and wealthy. So adamant were Tennesseans about their navigation privileges that the state constitution of 1796 included in its Declaration of Rights, "That an equal participation of the free navigation of the Mississippi, is one of the inherent rights of the citizens of this State; it cannot therefore, be conceded to any prince, potentate, power, person, or persons whatever."
The waning Spanish empire looked at the Mississippi River as the last bulwark between their fading dreams of a North American empire and the onslaught of Anglo-American settlers pressing on Spanish borders. "From the moment his Majesty loses dominion of the Mississippi, " warned a Spanish official, "an equal fate will be decreed for the Kingdom of Mexico." With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Tennessee now rested in the geographic center of the nation, providing the state with a false sense of security. "What a proud pre-eminence of situation do we hold in the union," declared one Tennessee politician, "no longer considering ourselves as the outskirts of the nation, trembling at every hostile appearance of our neighbors." Although the United States obtained free navigation on the Mississippi through the Louisiana Purchase, Americans were constantly aware of the precarious hold they had on the waterway. Potential enemies still waited in the wings to seize the opportunity to stifle western commerce. A toast given at an 1808 Fourth of July celebration in Greeneville, Tennessee, reiterated the river's importance to the state: "The navigation of the Mississippi—The life and soul of the commerce of the Western Country."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tennesseans at War, 1812â"1815 by Tom Kanon. Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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