People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [76]
Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion:
The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the Redmen to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers—those who want all and will not do with less.
Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States government, Tecumseh organized in 1811 an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: “Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.”
The Creeks, who occupied most of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, were divided among themselves. Some were willing to adopt the civilization of the white man in order to live in peace. Others, insisting on their land and their culture, were called “Red Sticks.” The Red Sticks in 1813 massacred 250 people at Fort Mims, whereupon Jackson’s troops burned down a Creek village, killing men, women, children. Jackson established the tactic of promising rewards in land and plunder: “. . . if either party, cherokees, friendly creeks, or whites, takes property of the Red Sticks, the property belongs to those who take it.”
Not all his enlisted men were enthusiastic for the fighting. There were mutinies; the men were hungry, their enlistment terms were up, they were tired of fighting and wanted to go home. Jackson wrote to his wife about “the once brave and patriotic volunteers . . . sunk . . . to mere whining, complaining, seditioners and mutineers. . . .” When a seventeen-year-old soldier who had refused to clean up his food, and threatened his officer with a gun, was sentenced to death by a court-martial, Jackson turned down a plea for commutation of sentence and ordered the execution to proceed. He then walked out of earshot of the firing squad.
Jackson became a national hero when in 1814 he fought the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against a thousand Creeks and killed eight hundred of them, with few casualties on his side. His white troops had failed in a frontal attack on the Creeks, but the Cherokees with him, promised governmental friendship if they joined the war, swam the river, came up behind the Creeks, and won the battle for Jackson.
When the war ended, Jackson and friends of his began buying up the seized Creek lands. He got himself appointed treaty commissioner and dictated a treaty which took away half the land of the Creek nation. Rogin says it was “the largest single Indian cession of southern American land.” It took land from Creeks who had fought with Jackson as well as those who had fought against him, and when Big Warrior, a chief of the friendly Creeks, protested, Jackson said:
Listen. . . . The United States would have been justified by the Great Spirit, had they taken all the land of the nation. . . . Listen—the truth is, the great body of the Creek chiefs and warriors did not respect the power of the United States—They thought we were an insignificant nation—that we would be overpowered by the British. . . . They were fat with eating beef—they wanted flogging. . . . We bleed our enemies in such cases to give them their senses.
As Rogin puts it: “Jackson had conquered ‘the cream of the Creek country,’ and it would guarantee southwestern prosperity. He had supplied the expanding cotton kingdom with a vast and valuable acreage.”
Jackson’s 1814 treaty with the Creeks started something new and important. It granted