Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans Read online

  The Long Trek Home

  The forty-mile march Jackson had made as a fourteen-year-old prisoner would not be the longest walk of his life. With no steamboat service to carry his army upstream against the current, Jackson and his Tennessee Volunteers faced a long march, one that would take them across five hundred miles of rugged ground, much of it in Indian country.

  On March 25, 1813, they began the trek—but not before Jackson wrote to his congressman: “As long as I have funds or credit, I will stick by [my Volunteers]. I shall march them to Nashville or bury them with the honors of war—Should I die I know they will bury me.”14

  He wrote defiant letters to both Secretary of War Armstrong and General Wilkinson. He would not, could not, abandon his troops. “These brave men, at the call of their country, . . . followed me to the field—I shall carefully march them back to their homes.”15 He even wrote to the president: “I cannot believe [that] after inviting us to rally round the standard of country in its defense . . . you would dismiss us from service eight hundred miles from our homes, without money, without supplies.” It has to be a “mistake,” wrote Jackson.16

  As the dispirited men, let down by their government but not by their general, marched north, illness spread through the ranks. Jackson soon had 150 men on the sick list, 56 of them so ill they could not sit unassisted. Jackson managed to commandeer wagons to carry some of them, but the eleven he found were not enough. He ordered his officers to surrender their horses to the sick. He asked no less of himself, turning over his three horses and walking so that ill Volunteers would travel easier.

  “It is . . . my duty,” he wrote to Rachel, “to act as a father to the sick and to the well and stay with them until I march them into Nashville.”17 He walked alongside his men; they covered an average of eighteen miles a day. He insisted upon order and discipline, but he led by example. He revealed no fatigue; he urged the troops homeward, and they understood his concern for their safety and comfort. As he moved along the column, this man, though well known for his violent and hasty temper, appeared to his men benevolent, humane, and fatherly. “There is not a man belonging to the detachment but what loves him,” one reported.18

  At forty-six, he was older than most of his troops—his face lined, his hair mostly gray—but Jackson made no complaint as he marched. Despite his slight build he was an imposing presence, with his erect posture. He did not need the gold epaulets and other adornments of a general’s uniform to convey his authority. His intense blue eyes, people said, blazed when he was angry. But here Jackson was also the sympathetic man who urged his Volunteers toward home and safety. Admiration for him soared; among the ranks it was whispered that he was defying orders to shepherd them home, that he had reached into his own pockets to provide supplies. The men revered their general, who shared their hardships as they marched together toward Nashville.

  Along the way, one soldier remarked upon Jackson’s toughness.

  Then another observed that he was as “tough as hickory.” Said aloud, the comparison rang true and, soon enough, his men took to calling their commander “Hickory” and eventually “Old Hickory.”19

  The nickname would last a lifetime, long enough for a truly great New Orleans adventure. Madison’s administration had judged the fear for the city’s safety to be a false alarm this time. But the threat would surface again in 1814, when this natural leader and his men would prove their military merit by fighting the hated British.

  In the meantime, another danger to the people of the West was brewing. As Jackson had feared, the Indian trouble in the region was growing more serious by the day. A warring faction of Creeks called the Red Sticks (the tomahawk-like war clubs they carried were painted red) had allied themselves with the British. Soon enough, Andrew Jackson would have to face them down.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Making of a General

  They must be punished—and our frontier protected . . . as I have no doubt but they are urged on by British agents.

  —Andrew Jackson

  After marching his troops back to Nashville, Andrew Jackson once again waited for Washington. His Volunteers’ enlistments had yet to expire (most joined up for a year) but, with no dispatch from the War Department ordering them into battle, the general released his militiamen from duty in the spring of 1813, sending them home to tend to their families and their fields. Then he did the same.

  Life at the Hermitage had many obligations. A well-known horse breeder, Jackson also raised cows and mules. He owned a sawmill and a cotton gin; over the years, he had operated a store and a distillery, and had even invested in a boatyard. Hundreds of his acres were dedicated to growing the all-important cash crop, cotton.

  As Jackson turned to his own interests during the spring of 1813, Mr. Madison’s War was concentrated more than a thousand miles north of New Orleans. For once, good news arrived from Canada: the U.S. Army had captured York, Ontario, in May, although drunken American soldiers had plundered the place, violating the rules of war by burning most of York’s public buildings in celebration. But the rest of the news was bad for the Americans. The British continued to ravage the coast, burning the city of Havre de Grace, Maryland, in May. Reports circulated of women and children running for their lives as the attackers looted the town’s church. A month later the ill-fated Chesapeake was captured once again by the Royal Navy. And then the president fell ill with “bilious fever.” At Montpelier, their home in central Virginia, with Mr. Madison in a delirium, Mrs. Madison worried he might die.

  In Tennessee, however, the summer passed peacefully until, with August giving way to September, life in Andrew Jackson’s West took a sudden turn. In a matter of days, two events would alter the course of Jackson’s life. One almost killed him, and the other accelerated his rise to the status of genuine American hero.

  Caught in the Cross Fire

  Years earlier, Jackson, known for his fiery temper, had fought several duels. As an angry twenty-two-year-old, he had issued a challenge over a minor courtroom disagreement, but both duelists had fired harmlessly in the air, realizing their argument was not worth dying for.1 The more serious matter of a slander to Rachel Jackson’s honor had led Jackson to an armed face-to-face with the sitting governor of Tennessee, John Sevier, in 1803. Once more, however, no blood was let, and the confrontation ended in a cascade of insults. In an 1806 duel, he killed a man who had called him a “worthless scoundrel” and a “coward.”2 Jackson had sustained a chest wound when a lead ball broke two ribs and lodged deep in his left lung (the injury would never entirely heal, causing periodic lung hemorrhages later in life). In 1813, however, Andrew Jackson most wanted to fight America’s enemies, not argumentative opponents.

  Then in June one of his officers, William Carroll, asked the general to be his second. Carroll was to duel Jesse Benton, the younger brother of another of Jackson’s officers, Thomas Hart Benton; an exchange of insults between the two men had escalated until Benton, believing his honor as a gentleman had been questioned, demanded satisfaction. Jackson tried to talk his way out of participating, knowing he had nothing to prove and much to lose. “I am not the man for such an affair,” he told Carroll. “I am too old.”3 But his attempt to negotiate a peaceful solution failed, and the duel was fought with the general standing by.

  Unfortunately for Jackson, that was not the end of the matter.

  In the June 14 duel, Jesse Benton sustained a wound to his buttocks, which some saw as a sign of cowardice, since it meant he had turned his back. Soon both Bentons were blaming Jackson, who had been charged with making sure the duel was fairly fought. The brothers publicly accused him of overseeing a duel “conducted . . . in a savage, unequal, unfair, and base manner.”4 The general, deeply offended, let it be known that he would horsewhip Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hart Benton the next time they met.

  On September 4, hearing the Bentons were in town, Jackson went to confront them, horsewhip in hand, at Nashv
ille’s City Hotel. The action quickly escalated. Gunshots were exchanged, and Jackson was left bleeding profusely after lead from Jesse Benton’s pistol smashed the general’s left shoulder and lodged in his upper arm. Jackson’s blood soaked through not one mattress but two, and doctors saw no alternative to amputation. But Jackson refused.

  “I’ll keep my arm,” he managed to say as he blacked out, and the respect and fear in which he was held meant no doctor would go against his order.5

  Rachel arrived from the Hermitage to attend to her husband and, for many days, Old Hickory seemed suspended between life and death. But he refused to die. More than two weeks would pass before he could rise from his bed.

  Then a courier brought news of an Indian massacre of settlers at Fort Mims, more than four hundred miles away. Red Stick Creeks were responsible, led by Chief Red Eagle, also known as William Weatherford, the son of a Native American mother and a Scots trader. Red Eagle and his band of Creeks had surprised the inhabitants of a small village inside a crude stockade near the Alabama River. The news was shocking: although protected by militiamen, on August 30, 1813, all but a handful of the roughly three hundred inhabitants—including many women and children—had been slaughtered. As a U.S. Army major reported from the scene some days later, the devastation was terrible, with the remains of “Indians, Negroes, white men, women and children . . . in one promiscuous ruin. . . . The main building was burned to ashes, which were filled with bones. The plains and the woods around were covered with dead bodies.”6

  Emerging from his fever-induced delirium, Jackson absorbed the news and saw the call to action: Fort Mims must be avenged and, soon enough, Governor Blount and President Madison so ordered. (It wasn’t lost on Jackson that Fort Mims, located within range of the Gulf Coast, would bring him much closer to New Orleans, once again raising concern about a possible British invasion.) Though he still lay on what might have been his deathbed, Major General Andrew Jackson issued his own orders, on September 24, 1813, for his “brave Tennesseans” to assemble. The two thousand men of his division were to gather at Fayetteville, Tennessee, in two weeks’ time.

  Jackson’s left arm and shoulder were unusable, thanks to his injuries, but he made his men a promise. “The health of your General is restored,” he told them. “He will command in person.”7

  Not even a near-fatal gun brawl could keep Andrew Jackson from doing his duty.

  Marching to Battle

  A month to the day after the City Hotel gunfight, the first of the Tennessee Volunteers headed south. John Coffee, now a brigadier general, sat on his horse at the head of the army since Andrew Jackson, though gaining strength, was still recovering. But Old Hickory sent a message that was read to the men. “The blood of our women and children, recently spilled at Fort Mims, calls for our vengeance,” he exhorted. “It must not call in vain.”8

  Jackson would not be far behind Coffee, mounting his horse three days later. Pale and drawn, he pushed himself hard, even though his left arm was in a sling, Jesse Benton’s bullet still lodged in the bone. As November approached, he caught up with his Volunteers, and they made their way into Creek country. Supplies would be a continuing problem so far from civilization, but Jackson would not be deterred.

  Impatient though he was, Jackson considered with care information on the enemy provided by friendly Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees. Setting aside his deep distrust of Indians, he urged his commanders to make allies of Native Americans who had chosen not to join the Red Sticks’ uprising. Out of instinct rather than military training—of which he had little—Jackson understood that intelligence concerning his enemies’ forces would be invaluable.

  When his spies reported a large enemy force a dozen miles south of his encampment on the Coosa River, Jackson ordered General John Coffee and his brigade of nine hundred horsemen to attack the Red Sticks at the island community known as Tallushatchee.

  Jackson was not there, but a young enlistee named David Crockett witnessed the battle. “I saw some warriors run into a house,” he remembered years later. “We pursued them until we got near the house, when we saw a squaw sitting in the door, and she placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand, and then took an arrow, and, raising her feet, she drew with all her might, and let fly at us, and she killed a man. . . . His death so enraged us all, that she was fired on, and had at least twenty balls blown through her. This was the first man I ever saw killed with a bow and arrow.”9

  The American force, outnumbering the Tallushatchee defenders five to one, decimated the Red Sticks, just as Jackson had ordered. After counting 186 dead warriors, Coffee reported, “Not one . . . escaped to carry the news.”10

  Jackson arrived to inspect the smoking ruins of Tallushatchee. No wholesale slaughter of families had occurred, and Coffee’s forces held eighty-four prisoners, all women and children. Jackson’s interpreter, an Indian trader fluent in Creek, brought a Native American infant to the general. The boy had been found in the embrace of his dead mother. When urged to give the child nourishment, the surviving Creek women had refused. “All his relations are dead,” they reportedly said, “[so] kill him too.”11

  Having lost his own mother in wartime, Jackson was moved by the orphaned boy. Only hours after ordering the assault on the Indian camp, the general mixed a few grains of brown sugar with water and coaxed the tiny child to drink.

  “Charity and Christianity says he ought to be taken care of,” he wrote to Rachel.12 The boy, named Lyncoya, would be adopted as a member of their family, to be raised and educated at the Hermitage as if he were the couple’s blood child.

  As he had been ordered to do, Jackson avenged the Fort Mims massacre. Yet, while the warrior Jackson could be ruthless, the aftermath at Tallushatchee revealed his strong instincts as a father not only to his men but to the meek and the vanquished.

  Jackson Takes Talladega

  Six days later, Jackson faced a test of his personal toughness.

  Not all the Creeks had taken up arms against the Americans, and Jackson promised to protect the friendly Indians, who also included Cherokees and Choctaws. As he assured one Native American ally, “If one hair of your head is hurt, . . . I will sacrifice a hundred lives to pay for it.”13

  He got his chance with the arrival, at sunset, on November 7, 1813, of an express rider. Having grunted and rooted his way through Red Stick lines, disguised beneath the skin of a hog with head and hooves still attached, the messenger brought word that an estimated one thousand warriors had besieged the settlement of friendly Creeks at Talladega. William Weatherford—Red Eagle—and his Red Sticks stood poised to do to their brothers, who were allied with the enemy, what they had done to the settlers at Fort Mims.

  Andrew Jackson was in no condition to field this call to action. As if the wounds to his useless left arm were not enough—he needed help mounting his horse, and simply unfolding a map posed a challenge—a case of dysentery racked him. For years, he had suffered almost constantly from intestinal problems, ranging from bouts of diarrhea to constipation, but now the discomfort was so intense that he had trouble sitting up straight. Still, pain could not be allowed to stand in the way, and slouched against a tree, he rapidly conceived a plan. Jackson and his men were on the march by midnight.

  As he rode to the endangered Indian settlement at Talladega, he leaned forward in the saddle, almost hugging the neck of his horse, attempting to ease his abdominal pain. The ride was more than twenty-five miles long, but by sunset the following day, Jackson’s army, consisting of twelve hundred foot soldiers and eight hundred men on horseback, made camp within range of their destination. Again Jackson did not sleep, but questioned his scouts about the terrain as he formulated a battle plan. At 4:00 a.m., he ordered his sleeping men awakened. His battle orders, as Jackson himself described them in a letter to Governor Blount, called for the advance of the infantry “in three lines—the militia on the left, and the volunteers on the right. The caval
ry formed the two extreme wings, and were ordered to advance in a curve.”14

  With the bulk of his forces fixed in position, he ordered three mounted companies of men armed with rifles and muskets to advance. Jackson expected the hostile Indians to attack this American vanguard, which could then fall back as if in retreat. The Indians in pursuit would come into the range of his larger force, where his cavalry could trap them in a deadly crossfire.

  The fight began with a roar of Indian guns as Weatherford’s Red Sticks, naked but for their red war paint, burst from a dense thicket. They were “like a cloud of Egyptian locusts,” Davy Crockett wrote, “screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head.”15

  The plan unfolded as designed, and the Red Sticks ran directly into Jackson’s trap. A hail of American bullets began to take a terrible toll, though the Indians, some with guns, many armed only with bows and arrows, fought back. There should have been no escape—but Weatherford and a large contingent of Creeks swarmed through a gap in the line. Though some of Jackson’s men pursued them, seven hundred warriors escaped into the hills.

  When the dead were counted, Weatherford had lost 299, Jackson 15. And Jackson gained a new nickname: to the Red Sticks, he became Sharp Knife.

  The inexperienced general, despite a useless left arm, his body more than a little wasted by dysentery, had masterminded his first big battle and led his men to victory. Although Jackson, as ever, was ready to carry on the honorable fight, the result at Talladega would be the last good news for many weeks to come.

  CHAPTER 4

  A River Dyed Red

  The power of the Creeks is I think forever broken.