A History of the American People

Indians seem to have preferred tribalism when they had the choice. In that case, said the settlers,
you must move west, to where there is still game and tribalism is still possible.
The War of 1812 increased the leverage of the settlers-one reason why they favored it so
strongly-because the British played the Indian card and therefore justified the most ferocious
anti-Indian measures. The British pursued a systematic policy of organizing and arming
minorities against the United States. They liberated black slaves wherever they could. In the
region of the Apalachicola River, then the boundary between West and East Florida, the British
major Edward Nicholas, with four officers and 108 Royal Marines, armed and to some extent
trained over 4,000 Creeks and Seminoles, distributing 3,000 muskets, 1,000 carbines, 1,000
pistols, 500 rifles, and a million rounds of ammunition."' The Indians themselves were divided
on whether to take advantage of all this and attack American settlements. But the leader of their
war party, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh (1768-1813) was in no doubt. With his remarkable
oratory, and the predictions of his brother, The Prophet,' he had organized a league of Indian tribes and he told their elite (mainly Creeks) in October 1811:Let the white race perish! They
seize your land. They corrupt your women. They trample on the bones of your dead! Back
whence they came, on a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back-aye, back to the great water
whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings-destroy their stock-slay
their wives and children that their very breed may perish! War now! War always! War on the
living! War on the dead!'
When the war broke out, the militant Creeks, known as the Red Sticks (they carried bright red
war-clubs), joined in enthusiastically, some of them traveling as far north as Canada to massacre
the demoralized American invaders in late 1812. On their way home they murdered American
settlers on the Ohio, and this in turn led to civil war among the Indians, for the Chickasaw,
fearing reprisals, demanded that the southern Creeks punish the murderers. In the wild frontier
territory north of the Spanish colonial capital of Pensacola, the American settlers, plus Indian
friendlies,' attempted a massacre of the Red Sticks, led by the half-breed Peter McQueen, who had his own prophet in the shape of High-Head Jim. The attempt failed, and the whites retreated into the stockade of another half-breed, Samuel Mims, who was prowhite, 50 miles north of Mobile, on the Gulf. It was an acre of ground surrounded by a log fence, with slits for muskets and two gates. Inside were 150 militiamen, 300 whites, half-breeds and friendlies, and another 300 black slaves. Yet another half-breed, Dixon Bailey, was appointed commander. It must be grasped that, at this time, much of the Far South, especially near the coasts, was a lawless area anyway, where groups of men, whites, Indians, half-breeds, escaped slaves, mulattoes, banded together, running their own townships, changing sides frequently. Fort Mims was a typical pawn in this game. A slave who warned Bailey that the Red Sticks were coming was deemed a liar and flogged, and the stockade gates were actually open when 1,000 Sticks attacked. Bailey was killed trying to shut the gates and all except fifteen whites were slaughtered.The children were seized
by the legs and killed by battering 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.' The Creeks murdered 553 men, women, and children and took away 250 scalps
on poles.
At this point Major-General Jackson was told to take the Tennessee militia smith and avenge
the disaster. It was just the kind of job he liked and the opportunity for which he had been
waiting. On Indians he had exactly the same views as the leader of the anti-British faction in the
West, Henry Clay of Kentucky (1777-1852), Speaker of the House and organizer of what were
known as the War Hawks. Clay, and John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina (1782-1850), the