The Bonfire

by Marc Wortman

  Jackson did not wait for the natives to choose their course. He rammed the Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830, authorizing land and money in return for migration by the remaining Indians of the Southeast. Even the legendary frontiersman Davy Crockett, now a Tennessee congressman, who had fought the Red Stick with Jackson at Horseshoe Bend, declared himself, in response to what he termed “a wicked, unjust measure,” more willing to be “honestly and politically damned than hypocritically immortalized.” Crockett broke with his former field commander over the act. He paid the price for opposing the immensely popular legislation by losing his congressional seat in the next election.

  By contrast, Jackson’s vice president at the start of his first term, John C. Calhoun, had abandoned his ties with Adams and the National Republicans, precursors to the Whigs, to run on Old Hickory’s triumphant Democratic ticket. He now loudly endorsed the relocation measure. Its passage sounded the death knell for the natives’ and their white supporters’ hope of staving off final federal action against them.

  In the winter of 1834, a first group of 634 Creek Indians departed voluntarily for the West. The exodus proved a disaster when private contractors, paid out of Indian reparation funds, failed to deliver on the government’s promised aid. Unprepared for the cold they encountered along the trail and lacking food, scores of Indians froze to death. Many more perished from starvation and sickness. By the time the wanderers reached Oklahoma, 161 had died.

  WORD CAME EAST ABOUT this early group’s horrific experiences. This did little to encourage the remaining tribe members, no matter how destitute, to follow them. Most were disinclined to move, sharing Speckled Snake’s bitterness about the trail of broken promises. The Creek ignored Jackson’s warnings and Georgia’s and Alabama’s governors’ increasingly vocal and threatening insistence that they go sooner rather than later. Over the next few seasons, clashes between the Creek and white settlers intensified and grew more violent. To the south, settlers faced worse Indian troubles. Along the vast Florida peninsula, sparsely populated settlements lived in terror of depredations by Seminoles. That nation had a long warring tradition. It had also become a haven for runaway slaves, who lived freely among the natives. White pressure to hand over the blacks living among them incensed the Seminoles. Rather than acceptance of the government’s paltry removal terms, which dictated they relocate among the Creek in the West, resistance grew.

  In December 1835, Seminoles ambushed two companies of U.S. Army troops near present day Ocala, killing more than one hundred soldiers. Just three from the companies survived the fight. With the rallying cry of vengeance for “Dade’s Massacre,” a viciously murderous war exploded in Florida. It would prove the longest in American history until the Vietnam War 130 years later.

  The army’s inability to quell the Florida violence swiftly sparked fears all along the Chattahoochee River that the Seminoles’ Creek brethren would be inspired to rise up there. Rumors flew that a war-making alliance was in the offing between the Seminole and the Creek. U.S. Army and militia troops patrolled the swampy, largely un-populated space between the tribes to keep them from linking up. But those efforts could not stave off continuing Creek depredations. A second, and this time final, war erupted between white Americans and Alabama and Georgia Creeks in 1836.

  Starting in early May, ragtag bands of Creeks in war paint began attacking homesteads and murdering settlers. Local estimates claimed the uprising warriors totaled more than a thousand men, though the number was likely much lower. On May 15, the conflagration became open insurrection when a Creek band, said to have numbered three hundred or more, infiltrated Roanoke, a small settlement town on the east bank of the Chattahoochee River about thirty miles south of Columbus, while its residents slept. The raiders shot and hacked to death at least a dozen townspeople and slaves in their beds, scalped several, and torched the town. Native warriors later attacked two troop transport steamers plying the Chattahoochee, leaving numerous crewmembers and passengers dead.

  Word flew about the river towns and farms of “men, women and children murdered in every direction.” Terrified families abandoned their homes and fled for protection within the stockade fort at Columbus. Some 2,400 refugees streamed into town, living in camps, lean-tos, and churches.

  U.S. ARMY TROOPS UNDER Gen. Winfield Scott already had their hands full dealing with the Seminole uprising in the Florida swamps. Georgia called for federal support, and General Scott, dismissed from Florida for his failure to quell the violence there, moved to Columbus to take charge of what had become a second front in a regional Indian insurrection. Shortly after the burning of Roanoke, Gov. William Schley sent out a statewide call for volunteers to suppress the insurgency. Georgia had a long history of assembling citizen self-defense forces, and men from across the state joined hastily formed militia companies. Most men came from nearby towns, but counties as far off as the South Carolina border contributed companies.

  Though living at a comfortable remove from the troubles, the Calhoun brothers in Decatur responded, as had their forebears, to the call to battle the Indians. In Decatur, Ezekiel Calhoun formed the region’s first militia regiment, the mounted DeKalb County Light Infantry consisting of seventy-four men. Under a new company flag, he led them through a cheering crowd down the Chattahoochee. The DeKalb militia joined the flood that soon amounted to nearly 4,800 Georgians and others—including some from as far off as New York, along with more than 1,100 Creeks who sided against their fellow tribesmen—who came riding into Columbus and neighboring forts to join up with about 1,100 regular army troops in the region. In addition, 4,300 Alabamans joined the effort.

  Not long after watching his older brother lead his men away to war, James set aside his budding law practice and bid his young wife and infant children goodbye. He joined a second DeKalb cavalry formation. Calhoun’s fellow militiamen elected him captain. In late June 1836, he rode at the head of a company of irregulars to Columbus and entered the midst of the last fitful violence of the Creek War.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE hastily assembled militia companies in Columbus drew army surgeon Jacob Motte up short—and gave him little confidence in their fighting ability. Sent here from his home in Charleston, he watched company after company come into town. “They presented a glorious array of dirks, pistols, and bowie-knives, with no scarcity of dirt,” he observed of the motley militiamen parading along the streets of Columbus. “It seemed as if every ragamuffin of Georgia, deeming himself an invincible warrior, had enlisted under the standard of Mars, which many from their conduct must have mistaken for the standard of Bacchus, as they observed the articles of the latter god with much greater reverence.”

  Poorly armed and likely hungover like the others, both Calhoun brothers’ companies mustered into the army in Columbus with the Battalion Georgia Cavalry, commanded by its flamboyant major, Julius Caesar Alford. “The Old War Horse of Troup” was a States’ Rights Whig leader in Troup County. In the following year, he would go to Congress, where he scared the daylights out of other representatives on the House floor when he let out an Indian war whoop in defiant answer to a Northern representative’s condemnation of white actions against the Creek.

  It wasn’t long before things took on a more serious cast, and the DeKalb cavalrymen were called into action. At the end of June, following an Indian raid on riverside plantations in Stewart County downriver from Columbus, Alford’s ninety-eight-man force was quickly dispatched to reinforce nearby Fort McCreary. The Fort McCreary blockhouse and stockade commanded a hilltop overlooking the war-blasted countryside. The militia and army men stationed there could peer out over the flats along the Chattahoochee River a mile away and miles beyond into the Alabama Creek hill country. Lookouts and scouts watched from there for Indian incursions into Georgia.

  Most major clashes with the Creek in Georgia had occurred around the fort, including the war’s most important battle, on June 9, across William Shepherd’s plantation’s fields and swamps. The several score soldie
rs and civilians killed in that and other fights lay buried along the crest of the Fort McCreary hill. The bones of the many more Indians killed in the fighting lay unburied, bleaching in the sun. Surgeon Motte marched through the region shortly before the Calhoun regiment arrived. He saw “nothing but a continued series of black heaps of ashes” where settlers had once made their homes.

  By early July, though, the last Indian combatants, starving and short on ammunition, began turning themselves in. The fighting appeared over, and Governor Schley declared the need for the militia at an end. Thereafter, James Calhoun and others held over on army duty spent their time arresting Creek stragglers and preventing the few bands remaining in Georgia from returning across the river or fleeing into Florida. Toward the end of the month, Major Alford was called back from Fort McCreary to Columbus. He turned to James Calhoun, younger than many officers on hand, and placed him in command of the company composed mostly of his DeKalb County neighbors.

  On the morning of July 24, a scout reported spying evidence of Creek bands making their way across a swamp through the same plantations natives had attacked earlier. Calhoun assembled eighty men from his command and led them out in pursuit of the enemy. In scouring the swamp, they found a fresh trail heading in the direction of the village of Lumpkin. The troops followed the Creek trail on foot, leading their horses through the boot-sucking, mosquito-infested bog. It was not long before they came upon a thirty-member Indian party, naked and painted, which distinguished the unfriendly tribesmen from their government-aligned kinsmen. A hot skirmish ensued.

  Calhoun’s men killed seven Indians. The rest of the band broke in headlong flight down the trail. The DeKalb company gave chase, pursuing the retreating natives through the swamp and into a hammock. Suddenly, the Creek combatants halted and turned around on their pursuers. The militiamen drew up in a line and prepared to fire on them, but at the same time gunfire burst from the surrounding brush, raking Calhoun’s line. They had been lured into an ambush. The militiamen discovered they were completely flanked by what some estimated to be more than two hundred Creek warriors. Several whites fell.

  Calhoun’s men returned fire, but in their rush to chase after the escaping natives, they had carried too few cartridges and balls. Their little firepower soon spent, they fell back. As they did, Calhoun returned to retrieve his horse, which he had left in the clearing when the fighting commenced. The Creek concentrated their gunfire on him, making mounting too dangerous. “Affording the Indians a fair opportunity to cut him down,” reported one of his men, he ignored the balls whistling around him. Fortunately, the Indians were poor shots. He took the horse’s reins and led the terrified animal back to the shelter of the brush before retreating with the rest of his troops.

  His superiors praised his bravery, but five DeKalb County men had been shot dead in the day’s fighting. Several others had fallen wounded. A Columbus newspaper proclaimed that, had they not run short of ammunition, “the DeKalb boys would never have turned their backs upon their enemy, although they may have outnumbered them three to one.” That bravado—and the reality of an inadequately prepared military force flushed with the fever of war and inebriated with equal measures of high spirits and liquid spirits rushing headlong into battle—would recur in the South’s future. Next time, however, battling Southerners would encounter an enemy far better prepared to meet them on the battlefield.

  The hungry and outmanned Indians had little but their oft-practiced guerilla tactics and desperation to bring to the battlefield. Over the next few days, Fort McCreary troops returned in force to the Stewart County fields and swamps. The major general in command of U.S. forces in Columbus ordered them to flush out the “fugitive” Creek. “The Indians must not escape,” he declared. Few did.

  THE LAST CREEK HOLDOUTS soon turned themselves in or were killed. By the end of August, white forces had ended all Creek resistance in Georgia. Operations to search out remaining tribesmen in Alabama continued until early the following year, when not a single Creek remained to fight in Georgia or Alabama.

  The next spring, the army rounded up thousands of Creek families, including many whose men had fought together with U.S. Army forces, and drove them into concentration camps before moving them west. Even then, some resisted to the end. According to army surgeon Motte, rather than be taken alive, Creek men and women would often poison or drown their children before slitting their own throats. “With them their country was life, and without the former the latter was valueless,” he commented.

  A series of water and overland transports took the natives to Oklahoma. Many never made it. At least one steamer overloaded with chained Indian prisoners sank, drowning 311 Creek men, women, and children.

  Few government-guaranteed resources for food or shelter ever materialized for those who reached the Indian Territory. In 1832, 21,792 Creeks had lived in Georgia and Alabama. Twenty years after the Second Creek War and the natives’ removal beyond the Mississippi River, the tribe had not recovered from the devastation. Just 13,573 Creeks remained alive in Oklahoma—though back east, a few Creeks had disappeared among the Seminoles to fight on in the Florida swamps, while whites enslaved others captured during the fighting.

  ALTHOUGH THE BATTLE WENT badly for Calhoun’s forces, he showed himself cool in command and brave under fire. A superior officer described the stand by the outnumbered militiamen as “one of the best battles fought during the campaign.” Calhoun would never forget his trial by fire or the violence and its consequences. He counted that day among the two “proudest” events of his life. The next would not come for another thirty years—this time in a far greater war, one fought against his own countrymen.

  James Calhoun returned home from the Creek War to a hero’s welcome. The Indian problem was nearly resolved with the removal of the Creeks. The Creeks’ ancient foe, the Cherokee, watched the doings in the state’s southern tier with trepidation. Georgia and its Alabama neighbor could embark on settlement and development unhindered by a foreign civilization in their midst.

  For James Calhoun, this marked another turning point in his life too. Vigorous, thirty-five years old, increasingly wealthy and respected, and now emblazoned with military title and honors, he was ready to embark on the next stage of his career—in a boundless, sunny, southern land emptied of all but the last of its aboriginal inhabitants.

  CHAPTER 4

  SHERMAN IN THE SWAMP

  JAMES CALHOUN AND HIS Georgia militiamen were not alone in learning new military skills in the Indian Wars. Although the South’s frontier demarcated by the receding native presence had moved across the Mississippi to the vast western reaches of the continent, and almost everywhere the land once populated by Indians was opened to white settlement, there remained one glaring—and to the United States galling—exception: Florida. There the story was different. The Seminoles fought a running guerilla battle within the labyrinth of mangrove swamps, saw-grass glades, pine barrens, and hammocks. They refused to capitulate. The war between white and red, though, was a seasonal affair. Only a fool would willingly fight the enemy as well as the heat, humidity, and malarial mosquitoes in the summer months. Fighting by the calendar worked in the Indians’ favor. After harvesting their summer crop and tending to their cattle in the peninsula’s remote interior reaches, they returned in small bands each winter to raid settlers’ homes and attack army patrols before melting away into the impenetrable greenery.

  For years, white civilians, terrified to remain in their homes, lived within the shield of a chain of army forts, often while receiving federal subsistence payments. After summers spent lounging in the palmetto shade, fishing the lagoons, and hunting the glades, army companies garrisoned in the forts embarked each fall down the trails left by the Indians through the dense, razor-edged saw grass. There they braved possible ambush—and alligators—at every turn.

  The heat and humidity of Florida’s unmapped wetlands was the chief enemy American soldiers and officers faced. Poorly acclimated, they were mis
erable and frequently fell ill. Disease was the soldier’s deadliest foe. More than 1,200 soldiers died of disease, mostly malaria and yellow fever, while Seminole ambushers killed 328 more, along with 55 militiamen.

  With a force that numbered between 4,000 and 9,000, the army enjoyed at least a four-to-one numerical advantage over its Seminole opposition, growing to as much as a twenty-to-one advantage—higher yet when the home guard was included. Native and allied black warriors were estimated to total just 2,000 at their peak, their number declining over the course of the war to little more than one hundred. The army’s failure to stomp out the resistance despite such overwhelming odds drove the old, but still fiery, ex-Indian fighter Andrew Jackson to a spitting fury. He railed at a military performance he proclaimed “disgraceful . . . to the American character.”

  Unable to answer the Indians’ guerilla tactics or even understand their baffling diplomatic maneuvers—which seemed to veer without explanation between acceptance of surrender terms and renewed attacks—several of the nation’s most famously heroic officers from previous wars had seen their careers sullied or destroyed, including Generals Winfield Scott, Thomas Jesup, Alexander Macomb, and Zachary Taylor. Year after year, the army’s next new leader announced that the war’s end was near. Winter after winter, the “beaten” Seminoles swept back, plundering and killing settlers and ambushing troops.