Free Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom Page B

Weatherford, which was further exacerbated by the recent construction of the controversial Federal Road through Georgia and Alabama; this road, in addition to facilitating the delivery of mail as it was intended to do, brought more and more settlers into what until then had been an Indian wilderness. Tecumseh’s prophecy was coming true right before Weatherford’s eyes: forests being stripped of trees to make way for fields, rivers turned brown from runoff silt; all that remained was for the Indians to be turned into slaves. Convinced that the only way to put an end to this was to kill as many of these settlers as possible, Weatherford and his band, known as the Red Sticks (à la Tecumseh, for the bright paint on their war clubs), engineered a war of savage depredation against the whites.
    Farmers from all over the territory began fleeing into Mobile, the only significant city on the Gulf Coast at the time, or moving into stockades and blockhouses scattered throughout the area. One of these was Fort Mims, a rude stockade hardly worthy of the name, near the Tensaw River about forty miles north of Mobile, owned by a prosperous landowner and ferry operator, Samuel Mims, and recently garrisoned by 120 militia from Louisiana. In addition, inside were approximately 175 white settlers and their women and children, as well as a lesser number of slaves and friendly Indians.*  23
    Despite several warnings from slaves who reported they had seen hostile Indians in the neighborhood, just before noon on August 30, 1813—and five days before Jackson’s disgraceful gunfight with the Bentons—William Weatherford’s war party of about 700 braves came screaming out of a ravine a hundred yards from Fort Mims, completely surprising the settlers and the garrison while they were eating their lunch.
    The gates to the fort had become stuck in rain-washed sand and clay, and the war party quickly rushed inside. The carnage was deliberate and awful. All the buildings and houses in the fort were set afire by the Indians, and many settlers burned alive. The rest were tomahawked, scalped, and otherwise mutilated, with only a dozen or so managing to escape by running into a swamp. A militia officer who went to the fort three weeks later—when it was finally considered safe to do so—reported to U.S. authorities that after they had driven off buzzards, wolves, and dogs, his detachment buried “247 white men, women and children.”
    Word of the massacre soon spread to Nashville along with eyewitness accounts of bloodcurdling description: “. . . blood and brains bespattered the whole earth. The children were seized by the legs, and killed by batting 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.” As the historian Frank Owsley notes, “It was Indian warfare at its worst.”
    Reports of this atrocity ignited in Americans a collective cry of indignation and demands for retribution. To the authorities it was obvious that the Indians had now declared full-scale war on the United States. No man recognized this more than Major General Andrew Jackson, who commanded the nearest and most powerful military force that could deal with it. When someone in the legislature lamented how unfortunate it was that Jackson—only two weeks into recovery since his near-fatal wounding by the Bentons—would be unable to command, the general roared, “The devil in hell I’m not!” and published an order to his troops: “The health of your general is restored. He will command in person.” With that, Jackson climbed out of his sickbed, and on October 7, 1813, with his fractured and still bleeding arm in a sling, he marched his 2,500-man army of frontiersmen out of Nashville, southward to the empire of the Creeks.

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    A ndrew Jackson’s brand of warfare, while not as brutal as that of the Red Sticks, was certainly no picnic for the Indians.