Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  And so on March 14 Jackson threw down a marker. He would not send home another complaining soldier, nor would he let his army fall apart. At midday the general had his entire force assemble “on an elevated piece of ground, in front of the fort,” as an eyewitness reported, and the prisoner was led before them. Jackson’s letter was read aloud, followed by “the performance of divine service.” The firing squad took one step forward. They shot Private Wood on schedule. Understanding at the end that he truly would be killed, Private Wood had dictated a farewell message to his parents, which a fellow soldier took down for him; perhaps young Wood had never learned to write. According to the soldier who wrote and mailed it, Wood’s farewell was composed in rhyme.

  Jackson was beginning to impose his will on a new democratic society. He was channeling the energy of that society toward a great goal that even he probably did not yet fully see: the complete reorganization of the southern United States. Natives in that region had been on the defensive for centuries, but in 1814 five southern Indian nations still held their heartlands. The parade ground at Fort Strother, at noon on March 14, was where Andrew Jackson first demonstrated how far he would go to change that. Neither his enemies nor his own men would be allowed to stand in his way.

  Two

  Urge On All Those Cherokees

  The burial of John Wood was a last bit of business for Jackson’s troops to complete before the army began to move. If his men were still “clamorous,” most would for now march in the direction he ordered. He intended to leave Fort Strother and follow the southward course of a nearby river, the Coosa, one of several streams that radiated out from Mobile Bay like the gnarled fingers of an old man’s hand. Jackson was far out on this finger, and now pointed his army in the direction of the palm.

  Jackson was concentrating his scattered forces for this move. A messenger had gone to summon Jackson’s friend John Coffee, who often kept his horsemen to the north. Other messengers searched out the six hundred or more Cherokees and friendly Creeks who were serving as part of Jackson’s army. At least one messenger departed the Mississippi Territory, traveling northeastward up the Coosa and into the northern part of the state of Georgia. This was Cherokee country, where the courier found Second Lieutenant John Ross, an adjutant, or assistant to a senior officer, in the Cherokee Regiment.

  When the summons arrived, the first thing Ross did was to pass on the news. He sat down to compose a note. He wrote to Return J. Meigs, the federal Indian agent—the government’s representative to the Cherokee Nation, as well as Ross’s elderly friend and patron.

  Sir

  I have this moment received by Express a letter from Colo. Morgan dated Ft. Armstrong 1st March—intimating that he had just recd. Marching orders & would march this morning for Fort Strother with all the Cherokees with him.

  A detail of this letter suggests that Ross, like so many in Jackson’s army, insisted on doing his duty in his own way. The summons said the march had already begun, meaning Ross must be needed urgently, but Ross informed Meigs without apparent concern that he did not intend to leave Chickamauga for three or four days. It’s not certain what business detained him. He could have been performing the time-consuming rituals that Cherokee tradition required before going to war, although it is just as likely that Ross had more prosaic concerns. He had a wife at home, Quatie, who later that year would bear their first child. He may also have had a duty to gather supplies, which the army was so terrible at providing. Ross, after all, was a trader, and his trading firm had signed a contract to supply the Cherokee Regiment with everything from blankets to corn. There was no doubt, however, that Ross would go. He was hoping Meigs would send reinforcements from among the Cherokee Nation.

  All those who wish to signalize themselves by fighting & taking revenge for the blood of the innocent will now step forward & you will be good enough to urge on all those Cherokees that have been delayed … I am Sir yrs respectfully

  Jno Ross.

  When he was ready, Ross started back toward his unit.

  John Ross was twenty-three years old. He was a good deal shorter than many Cherokee men, and was almost certainly wearing white men’s clothes. Traveling with his brother Lewis and perhaps other Cherokees, Ross began the ride of a little over a hundred miles, likely heading south until they struck the Coosa. They would have followed its winding course toward the army. Somewhere along the Coosa they crossed the border from Georgia to the Mississippi Territory—it was impossible to know just where, for the state line imagined by white men had never been marked.

  The Cherokee Regiment they rejoined included Pathkiller, the tribe’s aged principal chief, but in practice a white officer gave the orders. Colonel Gideon Morgan—well known to Cherokees through his Cherokee wife—was the commander who had sent the message to summon Ross. Morgan in turn was under Jackson’s command, and the regiment was on the federal payroll. General Jackson had promised that the Cherokees would receive the same pay and benefits as white soldiers, including benefits to their families if they were killed.

  Here among the gathering regiment was a man named George Guess, known to fellow Cherokees as Sequoyah. Here were other Cherokee men who, in accordance with custom, were known by names that reflected their exploits, attributes, or a wry sense of humor: the Mouse, the Broom, Club Foot, Old Turkey, Old Brains, Whiteman Killer. Before long John Ross would be recording some of these names on a list of the wounded and dead. Here also was a great fighter known in Cherokee as Tahseekeyarkey, and in English as Shoe Boots, after the high European-style boots he wore. He was a company commander, and also a free spirit. Sometimes on the march he would stop, crow like a cock, and continue on his way. It was alleged that he met Jackson once, and told the general that while he crowed like a cock, he was not a “chicken heart.” Jackson was not segregated from the Indians: at least one, known as Tobacco Juice, was among a unit of “spies,” or scouts, who had been detailed to serve as General Jackson’s bodyguard. In such a small army it is reasonable to think that Ross, as an officer, had his first conversation with General Jackson; even if not, he would certainly have spotted the general on his horse, his face grim and wrinkled either from determination or from pain, and would have come to know the hint of a brogue in Jackson’s voice.

  Why was Ross fighting on Jackson’s side, the side of the United States? Things had not always been so. Within living memory, the Cherokees’ fathers and grandfathers had been at war against the very sort of white settlers who made up the bulk of Andrew Jackson’s army. When the American colonists declared their independence in 1776, the Cherokees of the Appalachian interior remained loyal to Britain. John Ross’s grandfather, a Scottish trader, helped to arm and organize the Cherokees to fight on the British side against the new United States. The Cherokee conflict against their white neighbors continued even after the American War of Independence ended in 1783. They were still at war when John Ross was born in 1790.

  All that had changed by the time the Cherokee Regiment was formed in 1813. Cherokees had a new outlook, which was visible as the regiment prepared to move south with the army. There were, for example, the white man’s clothes favored by John Ross, and the famous footwear of Shoe Boots. Much of the nation had adopted European-style clothes, or mixed white and native styles. It was still possible to find a man dressed in the old style, his ears slit and weighed down by heavy earrings, as well as a breastplate and wampum around his neck if he was a man of authority, but many another man would wear a buckskin hunting jacket, once disdained as a symbol of white settlers. John Ross, among others, was sometimes spied wearing a Middle Eastern–style turban. Cherokee women, for whom it was once socially acceptable to walk about half-naked, now commonly wore modest full-length dresses, the cloth for which they had often spun themselves. This outward change in clothing reflected deeper changes in Cherokee society. Despite the resistance of traditionalists, many Cherokees had been adapting to the culture of the great white tribes that increasingly surrounded them. They had been enco
uraged to do so ever since a peace treaty was signed in 1791 between the Cherokees and President George Washington’s administration. Washington vowed that he would respect the rights and borders of Indian nations, and his approach was enshrined in a series of laws known as the Indian Intercourse Acts. The federal government, not states or individuals, would manage relations with the tribes. Government trading posts would sell Indians the goods required for civilization—whether plows for modern agriculture, or books, or boots for Shoe Boots. This was all part of Washington’s sophisticated effort to keep the peace, which he considered “honorable to the national character” as well as “sound policy.” Cherokees were particularly adept at seizing the advantages offered.

  The very same Cherokee leaders who advocated change were the ones who went on to establish the Cherokee Regiment. These leaders included the most imposing man in the regiment, who was known as the Ridge. Barrel-chested, thick-faced, with curly hair that was starting to go gray, the Ridge was in his mid-forties. He had grown up in the old Cherokee ways, without the slightest formal education and with an early introduction to the rituals of hunting and war. More than a few men had died by his hand. Yet as he matured, the Ridge had chosen another way. He began to rise in Cherokee leadership in the 1790s when he spoke against the tribal law of revenge, which called for a family to respond in kind when one of its members was killed. The law was eventually abolished. The Ridge also took up agriculture. Now he was a planter, ferry operator, store owner, and slave owner. He never learned to speak English well, but was a powerful advocate for modernizing his nation.

  It was the Ridge who, with two other leaders, promoted the idea that Cherokees should raise a force to defend the United States in the War of 1812. Ridge argued before the Cherokee leadership council that they must fight to ensure their own survival. If Cherokees remained neutral, they inevitably would be seen as enemies, because trigger-happy white men would categorize all Indians as either with them or against them. The leadership council agreed. By then Meigs, the old Indian agent, had already recommended that the army enroll Cherokees: “They are real horsemen, they are remarkable for the ease with which they ride … they are like blank stationery on which may be written anything.” General Jackson soon filled in the blank. The Ridge was given the rank of lieutenant and later promoted to the rank by which he would always afterward be known—Major Ridge.

  When John Ross joined this unit, he could give different meanings to his service depending on how he defined his identity. As a white trader’s son who was close to the Indian agent, Ross could think of himself like his loyalist grandfather during the Revolution—a white man organizing friendly Indians to put down a rebellion. But as the descendant of Cherokee women, he could also think of himself as a Cherokee who risked his life for the United States in order to ensure his rights within it. This latter meaning is the one Ross voiced after the war was over.

  Now, in March 1814, Ross and other men of the Cherokee Regiment were departing Fort Strother along with Jackson’s main force—Coffee’s horsemen, the Thirty-Ninth Regiment, and the clamorous Tennessee militiamen. Somewhere in the crowd was Jackson himself, wild-haired, high on his horse, and soon to be overcome with frustration. So long as the troops had been spread out, they were easier to feed, since smaller units could live off the land, but when several thousand were concentrated, the specter of starvation returned. Army contractors had sent Jackson a letter announcing their success in depositing food at an outpost of friendly Creeks called Talladega, but the army found no supplies when it arrived. Jackson wrote the contractors, and the courtesy of his wording barely contained his rage: “What could have occasioned you to the erroneous belief on which you felicitate yourselves … I am quite at a loss to conjecture.” He would have eight days’ rations for the troops’ next move, barely enough to reach their ultimate destination and return if nothing went wrong.

  Straight downriver, roughly midway between the army and Mobile Bay, was the heart of the Creek Nation, although Jackson was in no rush to get there. It was far more important to destroy Creek forces, so the general planned a detour. The men left the Coosa behind, marching eastward through the woods. They approached a river called the Tallapoosa, the next finger on that gnarled hand of rivers running down to Mobile Bay. The rude path his army was following was familiar to Jackson. Back in January, learning of a large Creek encampment, he had raced along this same route toward the enemy with nine hundred newly arrived militiamen, only to realize that the Creeks were so numerous, and so well fortified, that if he attacked, he would fail. He chose instead to back away—and then the Creeks attacked him. Dozens of his men were killed before he drove off the assault. Now Jackson was returning with his enlarged force, including a couple of small artillery pieces, determined to finish the job.

  Sometimes along the march, the general stopped and climbed down from his horse. A subordinate would hack down a sapling and Jackson would drape himself over it in the only pose that relieved his abdominal pain. Then he’d mount again, hardly more than a cadaver on a horse, with his bodyguard eyeing him. They continued toward the enemy’s camp, tucked in a curve of the Tallapoosa River. It was a place the Creeks called Tohopeka, and white men called Horseshoe Bend.

  Three

  Stamping His Foot for War

  Ross and Jackson were alike that late winter of 1814 in that they were not yet figures of legend. Jackson was a Tennessee politico with a checkered reputation. Had his precarious health collapsed on March 15, his forty-seventh birthday, he would have been buried somewhere near John Wood without a single achievement that later generations would recall. Ross was hardly more than a youth, slim of both stature and achievement, probably known even within the Cherokee Nation mainly as a descendant of notable traders. Now the two men were about to begin their long engagement with history. To understand how the country changed during their time, it is useful to glimpse the United States as they found it.

  In 1814 the American frontier, the farthest western point of consistent white settlement, was roughly where Jackson lived. It was Middle Tennessee. Farther west than that the Indian map was the governing map, and the map of the United States became more imaginary with every mile. In fact Middle Tennessee formed a salient, a peninsula of settlement. Other parts of the frontier were not so far west. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase extended the nation beyond the Mississippi, but except for a few cities such as New Orleans and St. Louis, the Purchase too was almost entirely the domain of Indians. Thus when Americans spoke of “the West” in Jackson’s day, they usually referred not to Oregon or the Rockies, but to Nashville, or Lexington, Kentucky, or “the Ohio country.” That was the frontier.

  This early version of the West was attracting migrants. The national population was exploding—from about four million in 1790 to more than seven million in 1810—and many were shifting westward. New roads and technology encouraged their movement. A traditional westward route led by horse or stagecoach over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, at the headwaters of the Ohio River, from which the Mississippi Valley became accessible by boat. It could take many weeks to float with the current to New Orleans, and it was challenging to return, but in September 1811, associates of Robert Fulton completed a steamboat at Pittsburgh and sent it downriver and back again. Trade was increasing on many rivers, such as the Cumberland, on the banks of which Andrew Jackson for years operated a store offering supplies such as butcher knives, cotton hoes, coffee, “Segars,” chocolate, brimstone, and pink ladies’ hats. The store was near the Hermitage, the farm he bought in 1804, which would remain his home and headquarters for the rest of his life. On the cash-poor frontier, farmers often paid Jackson with cotton, which he shipped downriver toward New Orleans and the wider world.

  Industry was growing as the nation spread. A census report in 1810 found that manufacturers were forging so much out of iron—wagon wheels, stoves, firearms, machinery, hammers, steam engines—that they were desperate for miners to produce more iron ore. Pennsylvania each year
was making “nine pounds of nails for each person in the state.” Since nails were used to fasten everything else, the production of seven million pounds of nails in a single year by a single state suggested the scale of construction and manufacturing. Southern states were expanding cotton production so rapidly that it would soon become “the most considerable of our manufactures,” often woven into cloth on “family looms,” for the greatest of the New England textile mills had yet to be built. The cotton was grown largely on plantations run with slave labor. Slavery, though gradually disappearing in the North, was increasing in importance below the Ohio. Many westbound settlers brought the slave economy with them. Some Indians adopted the practice of slave owning. White owners also complained that escaped slaves found refuge within Indian nations.

  Farmers in every state produced distilled spirits—rye whiskey, corn whiskey, applejack, rum—a total of 25,804,792 gallons of hard liquor in a year: more than three and a half gallons for every man, woman, and child. It was such a hard-drinking nation that the census report gently promoted the health benefits of beer, ale, and malt liquor, said to be more “moralizing” and “salubrious” than the hard stuff. Few people followed this advice, the report admitted. It was hard to find a “foaming” cold beer in the summer. Many a man, Andrew Jackson among them, found it “salubrious” instead to mix a little gin with the water he was drinking. And when Jackson mortally wounded a man in a duel in 1806, there was only one thing to do for his antagonist as he lay dying: to comfort the man in his final hours, Jackson sent a bottle of wine.