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Winter 1810: New Arrivals in Contested Territory
As the new year broke in 1810, the territory we now call Alabama stood on the knife-edge of empire. White settlers clung to the forts along the Federal Road, because the Indians living in the cradles of the Coosa, Tombigbee, and Black Warrior Rivers were not about to yield their ancestral lands without a fight. Places such as Fort Mims, Tallushatchee, Hillabee, and Horseshoe Bend would soon be carved in local legend. Caught between the declining fortunes of Spanish Florida to the south and British intrigues within their midst, white settlers and increasingly desperate Creeks and Chickasaws faced escalating conflict over the future of the Mississippi Valley.
Like many newly established territories and states in the early nineteenth century, the Mississippi Territory—encompassing most of present-day Mississippi and Alabama—was a product of a surging spirit of national expansion, white settlement, and Native American removal. After the Revolutionary War, the new nation had been granted territorial rights to the land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. British authorities had made provisions for their independent Indian allies living west of the Appalachian Mountains before acknowledging American independence. After the British departed, however, those claims began to fuel racial tensions as whites ignored the treaties signed by their government and settled anyway.
Restless Americans were pulled westward by dreams of economic profit and greater autonomy on the frontier or pushed by shrinking opportunities in the coastal regions. After hard-won negotiations with the Creeks, Thomas Jefferson had authorized a federal road from Athens, Georgia, to Mobile, Alabama, in 1805, and though it was little more than a horse path by 1810, American settlers were pouring into the burgeoning territory. A hard life of clearing trees, cultivating crops, and surviving perpetual border conflicts awaited those brave or foolish enough to attempt the journey.
But come, they did, in swelling numbers—and most without legal title to Alabama lands. On February 7, 1810, David Holmes, governor of the Mississippi Territory, sent a frantic letter to U.S. Secretary of War, William Eustis, saying, “From good information I learn that from four to five thousand white persons are settled within the Indian Boundary and that they are determined to remain there in opposition to the law of the United States until removed by force.” Governor Holmes spent the early months of 1810 buying time with the few troops he had and assuring the Indian tribes that the settlers would be removed from Indian lands in the spring or early summer. But along the road from Georgia, the wagons kept coming.
Spring 1810: Negotiating The Federal Road
In 1810 the “Federal Road,” as it came to be called, was little more than a sandy trail for post riders and Indian traders. Thomas Jefferson, recognizing the importance of New Orleans’s command of commerce coming down the Mississippi River, insisted upon completing negotiations with the Creeks for a mail path through their lands in the Mississippi Territory in 1806. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” Jefferson asserted. “It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass.” Thus a navigable road from Georgia to the newly acquired Louisiana territory was a top priority for his administration.
Benjamin Hawkins, formerly a colonel in the Continental Army, had been appointed general superintendent of Indian affairs and primary U.S. delegate to the Creeks by George Washington in 1796, and it fell to him within a decade to help win a treaty for the Federal Road. Hawkins was not the stereotypical white man who came to steal by pen what he could not take by sword. The Creeks adopted Hawkins into their tribe, and he lived with a Creek woman as his common-law wife. Moreover, Hawkins insisted on bartering the best terms for his Indian allies in any negotiation with the government in Washington, D.C. Hawkins and many perceptive Creek leaders understood that the situation had changed since the colonies threw off Great Britain’s rule in the American Revolution. Obtaining a treaty from the Creeks, who controlled much of present-day Alabama, was no easy feat. The widespread and loosely bound confederation of Creek towns had no overriding governmental authority and no designated spokesman. Internal discord and divisiveness thwarted efforts to unify the nation around a common objective. And the growing anxiety over the erosion of native culture by white settlement undermined enthusiasm for U.S. development in the region. Negotiations for the Federal Road proved arduous.
While the guardians of colonial British interests had valued cordial social and economic relations with the Creeks and other Indian tribes to help maintain order on the southern frontier, the new American leadership prized one Indian possession above all others—land. American speculators, pioneers, and politicians wanted the Creeks’ ancestral lands for farming and settlement. Hawkins and his Creek associates tried to turn this avarice to their advantage by insisting that Indians control the inns and trading posts that would undoubtedly spring up along the trail through Indian country. Indeed, the road eventually connected the Georgia towns of
Milledgeville, Athens, and Macon with Alabama frontier havens such as Ft. Stoddert and Mobile. Yet some Creeks argued that any negotiation with the whites was futile, because once they tasted the fruits of what they craved most they would come back again and again until they pushed the Creeks out. Subsequent events proved these naysayers right.
Though Hawkins’s efforts were initially successful, and Creeks retained control of commerce along the new road and surrounding rivers of middle Alabama and Mississippi, controversy continued in the region. Both the Jefferson and Madison administrations wanted to upgrade the nation’s internal defenses cheaply, and improvements to existing roads seemed a logical choice. Thus, in June 1810, Secretary of War William Eustis ordered Fort Stoddert’s commanding officer, Col. Richard Sparks, to examine and document the horse paths that composed the Federal Road, marking a military road that would expedite the flow of supplies and troops to defend the Gulf Coast. Fort Stoddert’s 1st Lt. John Roger Nelson Luckett made the first significant survey to expand road construction in territorial Alabama soon after—but
none too soon. Within a couple of years, the Federal Road would become a logistical necessity for U.S. troops.
Summer 1810: Murder And Sovereignty
In the summer of 1810, Creeks in the Mississippi Territory watched with growing apprehension as white settlers continued to pour down the Federal Road into Indian Country. Many Creeks believed that violence was inevitable to protect what was left of their way of life. Others took a more conciliatory tone
and searched for ways to achieve a peaceful resolution. Thus, increasing Anglo advancement exacerbated both Creek-White and intratribal tensions on the Alabama frontier.
The way of life many Creeks sought to protect depended heavily on trade and travel across much of present-day Alabama. Whites and Creeks alike used canoes, American-made barges, and large, flat-bottomed boats called “bateaux” to navigate the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Coosa Rivers. Indeed, as frontier whites attempted to use the Coosa River increasingly as a passage to Mobile after Tennessee became a state in 1796, Creeks refused them access and seized the goods of any who violated their territory without permission. The Creek Confederacy was growing less and less conciliatory as white expansion continued.
Many Creeks argued that white settlement along the watersheds was a direct threat, because Indians maintained farms and villages along the river bottoms throughout the Mississippi Territory and jealously guarded their lands from encroachment. While a growing number of Creeks stressed that a bigger commitment to farming was the only way to consistently feed their people and maintain civil relations with neighboring whites, many Creek warriors maintained that farming was women’s work, and peaceful relations with frontier whites and other Indian tribes was a poor price to pay for losing their manly heritage. They stubbornly continued to hunt for deer and bear in Alabama forests as late as 1810. These hunting practices brought them into direct confrontation with white settlers and sometimes with each other.
For those U.S. officials charged with keeping peace in the territory, strife among the natives could pose a sticky dilemma. Early in the summer two Indian men named Illetchetubba and Jim killed another tribesman known as Chealebeh for an unknown insult. Gov. David Holmes recognized his tenuous situation, as territorial chief magistrate of a region he did not fully control. Thus he wrote his friend Judge Harry Toulmin on June 5, 1810, that “to punish them under our laws might be attended with unpleasant consequences: I have therefore enclosed to you a Pardon (dated the same day). It will be proper however before they are released, that they should be made sensible that they have been guilty of an infraction of our laws and that in the future such conduct will not be tolerated.” Holmes knew that if he ordered the two men hung, as they deserved under American laws, he risked war with the Creeks for infringing on their sovereignty. Yet he wanted to send a warning to the Creeks: lawlessness and violence on the frontier would no longer be tolerated.
Fall 1810: White Settlement and Life on the Frontier
The October 16, 1810, edition of the Washingtonian carried exciting news for any settler looking to the Mississippi Territory for new opportunities: “About the middle of August orders from the secretary of the war department arrived at the post of Fort Stoddard commanding Col. Richard Sparks to detach two commissioned officers, four noncommissioned, and twenty privates, to form two companies for the purpose of exploring between that place and Highwasee (sic), taking a survey of the distance, and learning every particular they possibly can, respecting soil, growth, water, & c.” In the weeks ahead, the United States Army would complete a detailed survey to promote further settlement in the Mississippi Territory.
Census records and contemporary accounts show that many settlers coming to Alabama in 1810 clung to the rivers and streams, southern coastline, and to the North Country, near present-day Huntsville, because rivers were natural highways and it was safer to live close to others. For those adventuring settlers, surviving the trip was only the beginning. Life in this rugged frontier meant punishing and unrelenting physical labor. Indeed, early settlers lived in one- or two-room ramshackle cabins that provided little relief from the scorching heat of southern summers. The family remained the essential unit of production on the frontier and the primary means of mutual prosperity. Thus, women and children were not exempt from the hand-splitting toil required for survival and usually planted crops and kept weeds down, while also mending broken fences and feeding and caring for farm animals. Menfolk and boys old enough to lend a hand cleared trees to build cabins and plant fields, slaughtered livestock for food and trade, and hunted for game. In 1810 dangerous wildlife such as snakes and bears roamed across much of Alabama and Mississippi, and settlers came knowing that it was a land where the promise of rich soil was clouded by the crushing labor involved in its development.
Why, then, did settlers continue to come? Vast tracts of land with deep, rich soil for cultivation awaited any who could muster the courage and capital to make the trip. And for the less fortunate, reasonably good land and loans from shaky and sometimes shady lenders could be obtained. Life might be hard but moving west seemed, to many, the best way to open new opportunities for both themselves and their children.
Creek Indians controlled much of this region—a matter of perpetual concern. But relations generally had been amiable between whites and Indians in the past. If differences arose, settlers reassured themselves that the Louisiana land purchase of 1803 was being settled in an orderly way with no Indian wars. Surely a similarly cordial accord could happen in the Mississippi Territory, could it not?
Winter 1811: Land Speculation in Huntsville
In early 1811 many people from crowded eastern states were drawn to the rich bottomland of northern Alabama. Shortly after President Madison took office in early 1809, the U.S. government had ordered land sales in this part of the future state to raise money and encourage settlement for its development. The federal land office’s relocation from Nashville to Huntsville likely also helped warm tepid initial sales. Remarkably, these land purchases were largely unaffected by growing martial tensions between the United States and Great Britain or threats from nearby Indian tribes. Settlers and speculators purchased over 77,000 acres in the waning months of 1810, and prospects were even brighter heading into 1811.
Among the newcomers was Revolutionary War veteran John Hunt, who came to Alabama from Tennessee in 1805 to seek his fortune. Scouting the best land in the region, Hunt placed his cabin in the fertile valley above the “Big Spring.” This modest homestead signaled the birth of the town that would eventually bear his name, though not without an interesting twist. Four years after Hunt arrived, LeRoy Pope, a wealthy Georgia financier, bought sixty acres of the best tracts of land near his original settlement. Pope encouraged Huntsville’s first settlers to change the town’s name to “Twickenham,” after the English village where poet Alexander Pope made his
home nearly a century before. LeRoy Pope admired the poet and wanted to honor him. Though the two men do not seem to have been related, some evidence suggests that LeRoy Pope’s family also had roots in Twickenham. Not surprisingly, “Twickenham” garnered little popularity, and on November 25, 1811, the Mississippi Territorial Legislature changed the city’s name back to “Huntsville” to permanently honor John Hunt.
Pope and other wealthy speculators facilitated settlement by purchasing broad swaths of “undeveloped” land, then making smaller parcels available to families or individuals willing to put in the backbreaking labor of clearing land, planting fields, and establishing viable farms. Many settlers could not obtain proper title to land claims, and some could not pay the requisite taxes. So a number moved on, reopening the newly cleared virgin soil to purchase and resale. Much of the settlement in northern Alabama in the early nineteenth century occurred in this fashion, and this settlement impetus lay at the heart of the coming conflict with the Creeks. The original thirteen states could neither hold the new nation’s bursting population nor curb the restless drive for expansion among its citizenry. Outposts and frontier settlements such as Huntsville marked a rising tide of development that drove American whites and their Creek counterparts closer and closer toward war.
Spring 1811: Tradition v. Modernity in Creek Culture
In 1811 Creek Indians living in the Mississippi Territory faced a cultural identity crisis. White Americans continued to pour into the northern and southern reaches of their lands, putting up permanent settlements in places like Huntsville. Worse, some Creeks seemed far too accommodating of American territorial expansion. Indeed, for those Creeks who valued tradition over compliance, the May 9, 1811, edition of the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser merely highlighted a longstanding problem: "It is between these two rivers [the Apalachicola and St. Marks' on the southeastern border of present-day Alabama and Florida] that a considerable purchase of lands, amounting to about one million of acres, was sometime since made of the Creek Indians, by Messrs. John Forbes and Co. of Pensacola." For many Creeks, selling ancestral lands was the first step toward societal marginalization and cultural
insignificance.
Creek Indians populated most of the countryside of the future state of Alabama and many viewed accommodation as a dangerous game. While white settlers made initial forays into places in the northern and southern regions of the Mississippi Territory, Creeks lived in well-developed
cities with customs and traditions stretching over a century. Whites looked to this fertile land with an eye toward expansion and commercial development, yet the Creeks saw the tradition of many years and the work of many hands in the deep black soil along the streams and riverbeds. Thus, many Indians viewed ever-expanding white settlement as a threat to Creek sovereignty, heritage, and custom. Moreover, many Creeks were ill at ease with changing social and cultural dynamics. Throughout much of their history, family acted as the critical social component of everyday Creek life, with women as the heads of households. In this matrilineal world, women owned houses and land, and property followed female lineages. Men hunted for game and protected the family and the tribe from invaders. This traditional arrangement collided with those Creeks who viewed favorable adjustments with patrilineal, individualistic Americans as desirable.
Benjamin Hawkins illuminated the views of Creek welfare in his strategy for Creek "development" in 1807: "The plan I persue [sic] is to lead the Indian from hunting to the pastoral life, to agriculture, household manufactures." He intended to teach them "a knowledge of weights and measures, money and figures, to be honest and true to themselves as well as to their neighbors, to protect innocence, to punish guilt, to fit them to be useful members of the planet
they inhabit and lastly, letters." Hawkins supported a Creek National Council, which gained support among the lower Creek tribes, and he hoped to negotiate with these supposedly forward-looking Creeks in bringing their nations into the modern world.
Of course, not all Creeks agreed. Some argued that any treaties they signed with Americans always seemed to benefit white settlement over Indian culture. And the Creeks who cooperated with them were an element in need of a reckoning.
Summer 1811: Forebodings of the Prophet and the Shooting Star
As the sultry heat of summer 1811 deepened across the Mississippi Territory, a dark warning came in the news. In August the Indiana Territorial Assembly and its governor—future U.S. President William Henry Harrison—gathered in Vincennes and listened as renowned Shawnee leader Tecumseh ("Shooting Star") announced his coming plans: "In obedience to my master, the British, I have now succeeded in uniting the northern tribes of Indians in a confederacy for the purpose of attacking the United States, and I am now on my way to stir up the southern Indians." Inspired by the spiritual visions of his brother Tenskwatawa, also called "the Prophet"—and bolstered by British promises—Tecumseh hoped to bring all the tribes living
west of the Appalachians together as a mighty army to reverse white expansion. Shrewd enough to read the rising Anglo-American diplomatic tensions, the old warrior sent a message for whites
and Indians alike: War was coming.
Tecumseh planned to journey south into a rugged terrain of the American frontier to recruit assimilation-resistant southern Indians to his banner and make the case for a united effort against white encroachment. From his speech at Vincennes to the Creek village of Tukabatchee (or "Tuckabatchee"), on the banks of the Tallapoosa River, Tecumseh would travel through the heart of disparate Indian nations. The Shawnees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Upper and Lower Creeks all jealously guarded their customs, traditions, and territories. These were not squatters on U.S. lands, nor were the various groups bound together by a shared sense of cultural victimization. They were sovereign nations whose histories in this territory stretched back over
centuries and many of whom were as likely to fight one another as to unite against the Americans.
Thus, Tecumseh had to carry their message down across the rolling hills of the Kentucky piedmont, over the lush bottom lands of the basin fed by the Tennessee River, and into the heart of present-day Alabama. Indian tribes, some hostile, some friendly, occupied much of this territory. As Tecumseh looked south, however, the spotty settlements of white homesteads dotting the landscape, here and there, were a sinister omen. From his point of view, the Indian tribes must put aside old hates and recognize a new enemy. No treaty would keep the white Americans out of Indian lands, and he believed that the only way for the various tribes to ensure their survival was to unite. Tecumseh made no secret of his plans and looked to bring his message to the powerful Creek Indians gathering on the banks of the Tallapoosa at Tukabatchee.
Fall 1811: When the Earth Shook
In October 1811 at the Creek town of Tukabatchee, on the banks of the Tallapoosa River, the so-called National Council gathered to consider if and how to take advantage of the Federal Road. The famed Shawnee Chief Tecumseh rose to address the leaders present from a number of the various Creek tribes living in the Mississippi Territory, and the assembly grew quiet. According to one biographer, white frontiersman Sam Dale sat in the crowd that day with Benjamin Hawkins and remembered Tecumseh saying: "Accursed be the race that has seized on our country and made women of our warriors. Our fathers, from their tombs, reproach us as slaves and cowards. I hear them now in the wailing winds." The great warrior wanted the Creeks to join him in a pan-Indian war against further American encroachment. "War now! War forever! War upon the living! War upon the dead! Dig their very corpses from the ground," he thundered, "our country must give no rest to a white man's bones."
Historians dispute the veracity of Dale's account but nearly all concede that Tecumseh came south to recruit the powerful Creeks to join his cause. Though some doubt the recorded accuracy of Tecumseh's words, the fiery sentiment embedded within them is obvious. With white settlement occurring at a prodigious rate and the rapid decline of traditional practices, such as hunting and trading, many Creeks saw their civilization at a crossroads. It was under these pressures that the National Council met and deliberated. And their conclusions had farreaching consequences. Indeed, it was this body that made the controversial choice to work with agents like Benjamin Hawkins to support limited expansion of the Federal Road, favorable trading arrangements with American merchants, and even annuity payments from the U.S. government to purchase favored hunting grounds for continued white settlement. The National Council and it adherents among the Creeks argued that these policies were the best way to move the Creek peoples into the modern world.
Not everyone agreed. A traditionalist faction of Upper Creeks, later called "Red Sticks" because the clubs they wielded in battle, found Tecumseh's rhetoric appealing. In fact, it was no coincidence that Tecumseh brought his message to Tukabatchee. The village sat squarely on the Tallapoosa river at the southern edge of Upper Creek territory. Indeed, the Red Stick Creeks railed against white acculturation and vowed to maintain a "pure" Creek society. As they saw it, any reception of white culture such as spun cloth, iron pots, or even domesticated animals, was anathema to Creek culture's very essence.
While moderate Creeks might dismiss Tecumseh, the more radical warriors sat in rapt attention, hanging on his every word. "Soon shall you see my arm of fire stretched [towards] the sky," Dale's biographer credits him with warning the Creek council. "I will stamp my foot at Tippecanoe, and the very earth shall shake." True or not, the story creates compelling drama when paired with verifiable events.
On December 16, 1811, the earth shook. A massive earthquake centered at New Madrid, Missouri, shook much of the United States and surrounding territory. It is certainly plausible that many Red Stick Creeks took this as a sign that Tecumseh was right. They must choose either war or cultural extinction and destroy any who stood in their way. Thus, Creeks found themselves facing conflict on several fronts—not only with white settlers, but also within their own population.
Winter 1812: Opportunity in the Territory
While Tecumseh raged against white intrusion and the Creeks debated war, settlers continued to pour into the Mississippi Territory. What drove so many people to continue to risk the perils of travel to this volatile region? Commercial opportunity. In the first two decades after the Constitution’s ratification, the population of the seaboard states was growing at a ponderous rate. The best land was long since settled, forcing those who hoped to buy choice, inexpensive land to consider the trans-Appalachian West.
The venture often proved rewarding. As an observer in New Orleans in early 1812 points out, the Mississippi Territory was brimming with profit. “Since my temporary residence in this place,” he wrote back to Washington, D.C., “I have taken some pains to ascertain the quantity of cotton raised in, and of course exported from, the Mississippi Territory, and I think I am safe in fixing it at about thirty thousand bales [per year], averaging 375 lbs. per bale, which at ten cents per pound amounts to at least the round sum of one million of dollars.” Indeed, “it is no uncommon thing to count the arrival, at this time, of from fifteen to twenty wagon loads per day, each carrying upon an average five bales.”
Alabama’s deep black soil and the growing entrenchment of slave labor fueled cotton production in the settled portions of the territorial wilderness. It is remarkable to note the level of development and ever-increasing crop yields produced, given the increasing threats from hostile Creeks and deteriorating relations with Great Britain. Cotton prices steeled the nerves of wary white settlers and pushed expansion forward. Many whites hoped, and some Creeks feared, that American “civilization” would soon follow their lead. Gristmills, sawmills, liveries, metal smithies, churches, stores, saloons, and brothels were just a few of the hobgoblins, in the eyes of many Creeks, that attended white “progress.” Yet not all Creeks agreed. Among the Creek Indians of the Mississippi Territory, the National Council and the Lower Creeks saw a variety of opportunities for profit and peaceful coexistence with white settlers. However, for Upper Creeks, accommodating white settlement was nothing less than the prostitution of their history, culture, and society for short-term gains. They argued that the National Council’s stance would ensure that Creeks served whites and leave their traditional lands a desolate wasteland in the face of American greed.
Joseph W. Pearson is a PhD student in the department of history at the University of Alabama. His research interests include the nineteenth-century South, antebellum politics, and political culture.
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