The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  THE TEENAGED JAMES KNEW little at the time about such momentous matters tearing at his nation. He worried more about the source of his next meal. He would one day come to take many of the same political stances as his famous cousin, but for now he mainly shared the family’s high forehead, framed in his case by chestnut hair—though he combed his over rather than back like the senator’s scare-crow mane—along with unearthly high cheekbones and a thin-lipped mouth. Not as strikingly handsome as John C. Calhoun, whose entrance into a room as a young man turned all heads, James also lacked his cousin’s most prominent physical feature, enormous, globular eyes that engaged whatever they spied with a piercing stare and flashed in the heat of congressional debate like hot coals in the night.

  In any case, James looked not to John C. but to his eldest brother, Ezekiel Noble Calhoun, as the model of what a sensible young man with an education might accomplish. Twelve years James’s senior, Ezekiel had left the Calhoun Settlement behind in better times to earn a medical degree in Philadelphia, then returned South to set up what was now a flourishing medical practice more than one hundred miles inland at Decatur, Georgia, a small village 135 miles west of the South Carolina border but still the most important settlement in that state’s white northwestern frontier. The people of the sparsely settled region turned to Ezekiel as their most capable physician, known for his patent medicines’ exceptional healing powers—and potent alcohol content.

  ONCE JAMES HAD TURNED the farm and its slaves over to his sisters, he rode west, alone on horseback with just the clothes on his back. Along the way, he stopped overnight with a cousin, Joseph, before continuing the next morning with ten borrowed dollars in his pocket.

  If the past he rode away from had left him penniless, he traveled toward golden prospects—literally. Gold—glistening metal, long storied, and able to make a man rich overnight—had been discovered the year before in the mountainous north of Georgia. This year, 1829, America’s first great gold rush sent an estimated 35,000 prospectors pouring into the land in a matter of months. In their frenzy to get rich, the men—some, like James, looking to escape their hard-times backcountry farms, many more arriving in hopes of owning property for the first time—paid no heed to the existing claims to the land they prospected on. Why should they? The Cherokee owned most of it, and Indian tribes living within Georgia’s borders had few rights to legal protection from the white government and scant recourse for fending off the prospectors’ invasion of the lower Appalachian reaches.

  Recognizing the reality on the ground, the Georgia government made clear, too, that it no longer respected treaties, signed in some cases nearly four decades before, giving the Cherokee Nation sovereignty over the mountainous northwestern triangle of the state, including the lower Blue Ridge foothills where prospectors panned the first bits of gold. The great Indian fighter Andrew Jackson had declared during his first days in office his intention to rid the Southeast of its native population once and for all. The federal government, which in the past had intervened on behalf of the Indians to fend off illicit white incursions, offered little hope for protection any longer. Among the men who owned one of the most productive mines was Jackson’s own vice president, James’s powerful cousin, John Caldwell Calhoun.

  Even without the gold fever, though, the great, fast-opening West tugged at James’s and thousands of other young Americans’ hearts like a magnet. The very air they breathed and water they drank drew them further and further inland. “To move was in the blood of everyone,” recalled the son of one pioneering family that pulled up stakes from a farm not far from the Calhoun Settlement in the same year as James Calhoun to plunge deep into Georgia. Another Abbeville neighbor, whose family traveled from there west and then again to move still further into the Georgia frontier, remembered how he was “reared to a belief and faith in the pleasure of frequent change of country.” The vastness of America, the opportunity that vastness represented, and these new Americans’ ever-present need to move on, to search for a better, or simply a new, life over the horizon, drew these Southern pioneers like a great calling.

  The Indians contemptuously termed the flinty men, often illiterate and sometimes belligerently racist, as well as the rest of the white pioneers moving into their former Georgia lands from Virginia and out from the Carolina piedmont, “Virginians.” The Cherokee and their sometime enemies, the Creek, hunted the land neighboring the frontier trading roads over which wagon trainloads of Virginians bounced by the hundreds every day. Well-off whites, including wealthy plantation owners and cotton and slave merchants, also sneered at the peripatetic and typically impoverished pioneers passing through on the move west, derisively calling them “crackers.”

  Indifferent to the scorn, the Virginians, or crackers, arrived by the hundreds and even thousands day after day. During the first four decades of the nineteenth century, Georgia’s white population exploded, growing by nearly fourfold, from 162,000 to 691,000. They would fill the beckoning promise of Georgia’s vast interior emptiness—an emptiness to all, that is, except its indigenous inhabitants.

  JAMES UNDERSTOOD THAT HIS own life’s journey would carry him westward out the winding roads beyond the sun-baked fields, boggy canebrake, and pine and hardwood stands of the Calhoun Settlement, but the destiny he saw for himself was unlike that of most other Virginians. At the end of his westward road, he would not be panning for gold or otherwise sweating beneath a hot sun. He understood that life in the young republic could offer other paths to opportunity for an ambitious American boy. The career of John C. Calhoun had proved that a man’s mind, not just his brawn, could win him great standing and fortune in the young nation.

  CHAPTER 3

  REMOVAL

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF RIDING, James Calhoun arrived broke, achy, and tired in Decatur, the most important white town near the Chattahoochee River, the new border with the Indian nations. His brother Ezekiel, with his large family—eventually incorporating ten children, not counting two others who died—welcomed him. Ezekiel rejoiced at his coming. Moreover, he was pleased to discover he liked his much younger brother, with his pleasant disposition and eager manner. He saw in him the best of the Upstate farming community they had grown up in. Practical and resourceful, industrious and scrupulously honest, the teenager was comfortable in his own skin, combative when warranted, yet sober when necessary. Though his parents had valued education, they had had little means left for his formal education by the time he reached school age. However bright James was, he could read and write only haltingly; he would need more education to succeed. Still, his brother recognized in him a forthrightness, native intelligence, and ability to win the trust of those around him, even among Ezekiel’s circle of the leading citizens of Decatur. He was a young man who merited nurturing.

  Ezekiel sent his brother to David Kiddoo’s small academy in town. There James acquired the rudiments of a classical education. The notables of Decatur soon saw his qualities. Hines Holt, a local judge and political leader, watched the young man in a debate competition. Holt was so impressed by his carefully prepared argument and convincing delivery that he invited James to apprentice in his law firm’s office. In 1832, James was admitted to the bar, passing, said the presiding judge, “a fine examination, indeed.” For James, the first, all-important step in realizing a long-suppressed hope had come to pass. He had never dared to tell anyone that his life’s secret dream had been to become an attorney.

  LAW QUICKLY BECAME THE backbone of his life. All else formed up around it. That same year, he met Emma Eliza Dabney on a visit with her brother, a fellow Decatur attorney with whom Calhoun partnered for a period. Emma was a belle, the daughter of a Jasper County settler who had prospered such that he was now a plantation owner with extensive land- and slaveholdings. James and Emma married. Seven children would follow over the coming decade and a half.

  James realized beyond his imaginings the ambitions for a better life he had harbored back at the Calhoun Settlement. He almost immediately dev
eloped a thriving legal practice, winning a reputation as the most effective collections attorney in that part of the state. He also made his mark as a trial attorney and became known for untheatrical but persuasive oral arguments before the bar. As an attorney and a friend, he gained a reputation for honesty and integrity. “There were no concealments, disguises or two-faces about him,” recalled a later neighbor. Explaining his success, the same man said that, though “he exhibited no flash of genius,” Calhoun possessed above all “sober common sense. He took a view of a subject and fully grasped it, and so presented it to gain the conquest in the hour of contention.”

  He was also “social, kind and mild in disposition” as well as “a gifted speaker,” remarked another family friend. Cautious good sense and popularity among the region’s leading citizens soon led many to call upon him to gain his views on the day’s political questions. As he traveled for the court circuit, he also built a widening circle of admirers.

  And he made money, plenty of money. Successful attorneys at the time could earn more than $20,000 a year. From the percentage of the payments he collected for his clients, Calhoun made even more. Soon, he owned a large Decatur house and purchased the first of what would eventually be several plantations, locally and in the state’s southern cotton belt. He also acquired slaves, families of whom would eventually amount to fifty bondsmen working his farms and serving his family at home. Slaves betokened prestige since a skilled and healthy one cost as much as $1,500 at a time when arable cotton land could cost as little as $2 an acre.

  To his many household servants and field hands, his son Patrick would later insist, “he was a kind master, and resembled but little the characters of slave owners as portrayed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Of course, no former slave owner’s descendents would say otherwise. Undoubtedly, James, like most large-scale slave owners, engaged in the trade of men, women, and children without regard for its impact on the individuals and their families. A quarter of all slave families were separated by sales—husbands from wives, children from parents. James would seem to have found the idyll that eluded the Calhoun settlers. But peace had not yet come to Georgia. The Southeast’s Indian “problem” that had so plagued the Calhoun Virginians from the time of their migration into the up-country frontier remained unresolved. The natives’ destiny continued to influence James Calhoun’s own destiny, even as tragedy fell, forever, on the Indians.

  DECATUR SAT JUST BELOW what had once been a shifting line between the Cherokee tribal land to the north and the vast southern territory where their once-fierce former rivals, the Creek, or Muskogee tribe, had ranged over millennia. Despite the 1829 gold rush, the Cherokee enjoyed a measure of isolation and a chance to develop a successful tribal economy within their greatly reduced, mountainous northwestern Georgia nation. The Creek hadn’t been so fortunate. Their lands abutting those of their Seminole cousins in Florida were composed of black, rich soil, fertile and ideal for King Cotton. Whites coveted the chance to build new plantations and spread their settlements swiftly over the natives’ traditional land.

  The fiery Andrew Jackson had earlier crushed the Red Stick tribe at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, forcing them and U.S.-allied Lower Creek tribes to agree to the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Its terms ceded fourteen million of their acres to white settlement—all Creek southern Georgia territory and most of what shortly formed the state of Alabama. The once fierce and feared natives moved from their former towns and hunting range to a rump of Georgia land along the Chattahoochee River and a larger tract in the Alabama hill country west of the river. (Some Creek also descended into Florida to live with the Seminoles.)

  The 1814 Fort Jackson treaty made Georgia’s opening to white settlement all but complete—except for the northwestern corner still in Cherokee hands. The U.S. Army manned a chain of forts running from a site near Decatur southwest to Columbus 110 miles away on the middle far western border of the state and on down toward the Florida swamplands to protect rapidly filling settlements along the Chattahoochee.

  Following the humiliation of the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the Creek Tribal Council declared that any chief who made further territorial concessions to the white government, at any price, acted without his people’s support and faced execution. That didn’t stop William McIntosh, a chief of the Lower Creek tribe, though a half-caste, with an Indian mother and a white trader father. Educated in white schools, McIntosh readily sided with U.S. military ambitions in leading a large Lower Creek force against the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend. He also happened to be cousin to the governor of Georgia, who would employ almost any means to rid the state of its last Indians. McIntosh shared the belief common among sympathetic whites that the only viable course for his people’s survival was accommodation to white demands. A decade after Fort Jackson had seemed to settle the matter, he brokered a new treaty with representatives of President James Monroe’s secretary of war, John C. Calhoun. (Calhoun was not only active in Southern Indian affairs but also formulated policy for exiling the Old Northwest’s battered and reduced tribal remnants from north of the Ohio River to the trans-Mississippi West’s northern Indian Territory.)

  The deal they reached provided the natives a newly designated home in the vast arid spaces beyond the Mississippi River in the Oklahoma Territory. Concluded in 1826, the Treaty of Indian Springs ceded all but a last strip of Creek land in Georgia and Alabama along the Chattahoochee for white settlement and, at $2 an acre plus the promise of federal assistance in resettling in the West, enriched McIntosh personally.

  When John Quincy Adams took office, with Calhoun as vice president, the Massachusetts patrician son of a Founding Father president was more sympathetic to the Indians’ plight and even threatened to use military force to keep white surveyors off Creek land. However, he needed Southern support and soon dropped his opposition to the unequal treaty. The final Treaty of Washington sweetened the deal but ceded nearly all the Creek land. Despite the Creek Council’s strong opposition, McIntosh signed the treaty, which was promptly ratified by the U.S. government. McIntosh pocketed $40,000.

  During a triumphal return tour through the United States at about the same time, the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero from France, visited Georgia and, while traveling through the frontier region, paid a visit to some white-educated Creek tribesmen. When Lafayette asked about the McIntosh treaty with the federal government, one Creek man gestured toward his knife. “McIntosh,” he spat out the name, “has sold the land of his fathers, and sacrificed us all to his avarice.”

  McIntosh never had much time to enjoy his gains. He soon paid the price for his actions. Not long after Lafayette’s visit, fellow tribesmen surrounded McIntosh’s house, where they carried out the council’s edict, slashing and stabbing him and three compatriots to death.

  MCINTOSH WAS GONE, but the Creeks’ agony had really just begun—though it would soon be over, for Georgia and Alabama were ready to gobble up every last morsel of their once great nation. A further deal forced upon the tribe required those members who wished to remain in the East to take private ownership of specific plots of land surveyed by the government, which drew up property lines and issued deeds to tribesmen. Most of the new deed holders could not read their papers. Never having owned private property before, few grasped the significance of the title papers they had pocketed. They proved easy marks for swindlers, who fleeced many of the natives out of their deeds in return for a pittance, often after getting the deed holders drunk. The Indians complained but had no right to recourse through the white judicial system.

  The Creek were quickly reduced to an ever-more constricted homeland filling rapidly with white settlers. In many cases, desperate Creeks were left homeless. Impoverished and facing starvation, small groups crossed beyond tribal boundaries into settled Georgia to hunt on white-owned land. They also occasionally raided farms and stole cattle. Local whites thought little of killing Indians suspected of thieving or even those just found walking through their unfenced property. W
ith tensions building, the federal government urged the last remaining Indians to move west to the new national home designated for them in Oklahoma—or face a worse fate if they remained.

  On March 23, 1829, Jackson, referring to himself as “your Father,” addressed the Creek chiefs and their allies in a message both conciliatory and grim. He noted their endless conflict with their white neighbors, their refusal, in his view, to adapt to white society, and their consequent dire condition: “ Where you now are, you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace. Your game is destroyed, and many of your people will not work and till the earth.” But, he reminded the Indians, they had an alternative. “Beyond the great River Mississippi,” he told them, “where a part of your nation has gone, your Father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it.” To end further conflict, he promised “a fair price” in return and that “there your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty.”

  In answer, Creek chief Speckled Snake pointed to Old Hickory’s and other previous presidents’ addresses to the Indians. He proclaimed,I have heard a great many talks from our great father, and they all began and ended the same. Brothers! When he made us a talk on a former occasion, he said, “Get a little farther. Go beyond the Oconee and the Ocmulgee. There is a pleasant country.” He also said, “It will be yours forever.” Now he says, “The land you live on is not yours. Go beyond the Mississippi. There is game. There you may remain while the grass grows or the water runs.” Brothers! Will not our great father come there also?