In early 1813 the winter air was grey and barren, and the sun burned cold over what would soon become central Alabama. The Creeks’ desperate cultural balancing act between the loaded words “tradition” and “progress”–which increasingly seemed a generational dispute, almost as much as political or social contest–had exploded along the Ohio River in February.
Little Warrior and a small party of Red Stick Creeks killed two white families near the mouth of the river, and white settlers across the trans-Appalachian West demanded they be handed over. Given the rising tension in and around the Creek nation and across the West, neither the raid nor Benjamin Hawkins’s extradition request was particularly surprising. Disappointing perhaps, but not surprising. Still, Big Warrior and many of the older chiefs wearily looked for solace in the skies, but it would not come. Little Warrior’s bold but myopic audacity left the chiefs with a dilemma. Big Warrior, Speaker for the Upper Creeks and nominal voice of the moderates caught in the middle, knew he could not hand over Little Warrior to the whites and maintain respect and unity among his own people. Neither could he absolve the guilty and move on and avoid extralegal conflict with American settlers. To make matters worse, after Big Warrior had executed many of those responsible, Little Warrior himself escaped down the Black Warrior River and started gathering supporters among the Creeks there. Little Warrior, it now seemed clear, wanted a war between the Creeks to decide their cultural future, and the older chiefs understood that eventually they must oblige him. White settlement helped spark the tensions, but Creeks also viewed it as collateral: if war must come, they reasoned, better to keep the land-hungry Americans out of it. Thus, Big Warrior pronounced Little Warrior’s life forfeit and moved to assuage white fears of collusion. “You must not think from any conduct of the Little Warrior,” he wrote to territorial Judge Harry Toulmin in April, “that the chiefs are any foes of the whites. Should he commit any depredations there do not, by any rash means fall upon our villages that are above you, for they are friendly, and will not do anything that is not agreeable to the chiefs.” Big Warrior gave Toulmin carte blanche to kill Little Warrior, provided he visited any further atrocities upon white settlements. Big Warrior also urged the old judge to reach out to the Choctaws and Chickasaws to help bring Little Warrior down.
All of this was far more planned than accomplished. Little Warrior and those who supported his iconoclasm would make no more concessions to encroaching whites or to those who were either too old or too weak to resist the heady American cultural export of white “civilization.” But it is too simple, too clean, and far too neat to boil the coming Creek Civil War down to a doomed Luddite attempt to resist modernity. It is true that white encroachment on Creek lands, particularly near the Federal Road, certainly drove many dissidents to take up the red club of war. And to many, the National Council seemed too ready to bend to Hawkins’s will and too weak to prevent the continued impoverishment of many of the Creek peoples. Yet it was not a simple case of “have nots” rising against “haves.” Indeed, the Upper and Lower Creeks, and the myriad of other interests and points of view that led them to war, represented more than the sum of their fears. Their war was not simply a desperate reaction to forces beyond their control. Instead, Alabama’s Creeks sought to preserve their culture, as they understood it, for themselves and their posterity. In the end, it is probably more accurate to conclude that the Creek War was made possible by the tone and temper of the times (i.e., continuing white expansion down the Federal Road, coupled with economic hardship among many Creeks, and the confusion of America’s second war with Great Britain, among other things), rather than any one broad narrative or historical analysis. However, in 1813 factions of Upper and Lower Creeks, and a number of white and black settlers, did engage in war. Those choices, while informed by the needs of the moment, set the dark and bloody stage for the final act by which half of the Mississippi Territory became Alabama.
All of this was far more planned than accomplished. Little Warrior and those who supported his iconoclasm would make no more concessions to encroaching whites or to those who were either too old or too weak to resist the heady American cultural export of white “civilization.” But it is too simple, too clean, and far too neat to boil the coming Creek Civil War down to a doomed Luddite attempt to resist modernity. It is true that white encroachment on Creek lands, particularly near the Federal Road, certainly drove many dissidents to take up the red club of war. And to many, the National Council seemed too ready to bend to Hawkins’s will and too weak to prevent the continued impoverishment of many of the Creek peoples. Yet it was not a simple case of “have nots” rising against “haves.” Indeed, the Upper and Lower Creeks, and the myriad of other interests and points of view that led them to war, represented more than the sum of their fears. Their war was not simply a desperate reaction to forces beyond their control. Instead, Alabama’s Creeks sought to preserve their culture, as they understood it, for themselves and their posterity. In the end, it is probably more accurate to conclude that the Creek War was made possible by the tone and temper of the times (i.e., continuing white expansion down the Federal Road, coupled with economic hardship among many Creeks, and the confusion of America’s second war with Great Britain, among other things), rather than any one broad narrative or historical analysis. However, in 1813 factions of Upper and Lower Creeks, and a number of white and black settlers, did engage in war. Those choices, while informed by the needs of the moment, set the dark and bloody stage for the final act by which half of the Mississippi Territory became Alabama.