PAPER V—THE OLD MILITARY ROAD
By John Trotwood Moore
The verdict of another century is sure to crystallize in the now growing belief that the two greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic were both named Jackson—Andrew and Stonewall.
The battles of all other commanders—the slow, ponderous, red-tape, unimaginative stands and retreats of Washington; the stubborn, mathematical defenses of the perfectly poised Lee; the ponderous hammerings of the stoical, machine-made Grant—all these were generals after a rule and a school. But the two Jacksons were a law unto themselves. They were comets among fixed stars, meteors in a still heaven. After the frightful holocausts of the Civil War, everything before it looks small.
But there are tragedies, even in an ant hill, and the life of the Republic came nearer going out in the wilderness of 1815 than at Bull Run, Shiloh or Gettysburg, fifty years later.
As the fighting savior of his country, posterity is ultimately bound to rank Jackson ahead of Washington; for Jackson finished the War of Independence, begun in 1776, on the eighth day of January, 1815.
And he finished it forever.
England never considered the matter closed at Yorktown, and when she marched through the North, burning Washington in wantonness and derision, knocking her generals about as so many dummies and their soldiers as so many tenpins, she was thinking of King’s Mountain and Yorktown.
Before Jackson’s day nothing was possible for the young Republic. She was gagged and bound, lying between England’s devil, on the north and west, and Spain’s deep, blue sea, on the south.
Since Jackson’s day everything has been possible for her; a century of progress and peace; the great Republic; the Monroe doctrine; the fighting prestige that could originate the cheek of a Venezuela bluff, and the remark the British admiral made to the German admiral at Manila.
The Civil War was a Johnstown flood, that made everything before it look like the breaking of a mill dam on Coon Creek; but the Civil War established nothing—literally nothing. Two peoples of the same blood and ideals had merely theorized themselves apart and into a war brought on by shadows bent on holding office and hence incapable of telling the truth. The two things they thought they were fighting to decide are just as strongly fixed to-day as they then were, to wit: that the town clerk is still the man to attend to the town pump, and that white is not black and never will be.
The only thing settled was whether there should be one town pump or forty-five, and whether it were better for the white to work the black under a life lease or a yearly one. The ideals, aims, purposes and principles of the Republic are the same to-day as they were before the big fight, and that it was a family scrap in which both sides would quickly double on any meddling intruder was demonstrated to the undoing of the arrogant Spaniard, who first trampled on the Republic’s ideals until she got to the fighting point and then foolishly brought on the war, believing, among other things, that the “Southern Confederacy would rise again” and help her in the fight.
And the Confederacy arose—at Manila and Santiago.
But so much has happened since Jackson and New Orleans, and so few really knew on what a narrow thread the life of all American ideals hung in those gloomy January days of 1815, and so long has it been crowded out for meaner things that it needs telling again, that the children may know it. For the grown people of to-day, born under lucky stars, made possible by the genius of Jackson’s work and the glory of his sacrifices, have been so busy picking up dollars that they have neglected to look up, even at the stars. This story is to show them the star.
The gamest thing God ever gave to the human race was Andrew Jackson. I hesitate, in a brief story like this, to attempt to tell the hardships, sickness, sufferings, mutiny, bickerings, jealousies, insults, lies, treacheries, butcheries called battles, and starvations that he overcame to save his people and his country from Indians, Spain and England, and the Republic from that spirit of disintegration beginning with the Hartford Convention and ending with nullification. For be it known to all men and remembered, not in malice, but in forgiveness, that the first secession convention that ever assembled to dissolve this Union of States came together at Hartford, Conn., the very day Jackson was fighting to the death to save the Union at New Orleans.
The beautiful Horse Shoe Bend (Tohopcka), on the Tallapoosa River, Alabama—the last stand of the Creek Nation, and where, in a bloody fight, it was destroyed by Jackson.
(Taken April 9, 1906, for Trotwood’s Monthly by C. W. Thomas, Dadeville, Ala.)
And I say, not in malice, for there was in this, as there was in the other attempts of it in 1861, no question either of right or of wrong. Nation—Country—Republic—Empire—these are all merely abstract things bound up in the concrete idea of a home. As long as the home maximizes and the Nation minimizes, the latter is safe. But when it is reversed, when doubt and uncertainty and discontent come in, the abstract thing is lost in the struggle for the concrete. And every home idea has the right to fight for its existence.
But winning is another thing, and if they fail no man has any license to whisper traitor.
But for Jackson and the peace brought at Ghent by his destruction of the most formidable savage allies England ever had, and the menace of the struggling Republic’s existence; by his prompt unmasking of treacherous Spain at Pensacola and startling the hitherto unbeaten Briton by knocking his forts down about his ears at Mobile and sinking their ships in the bay, Gettysburg would doubtless have been fought a half century earlier, and in Massachusetts.
Let us see: The War of 1812 was forced on the States intentionally and with all the emphasis of a bully who meets a timid enemy on the highway and kicks and cuffs him for pure cussedness. New England was for standing the kicking so long as her ships and schooners might still traffic in negro slaves, rum, codfish and castor oil. The war tied up her hulls to rotting at the wharves.
The war, until Jackson was discovered, had been a farce. From the Great Lakes to the South the bull-dozing, beef-eating, bloody-shirted Briton simply walked over the Yankee. “You’ll be setting the dogs on us next,” said a squad of Yankee soldiers, who staggered into a British camp to surrender and got cursed for coming.
Not one victory had they won. The British had burned the capital and run the President out of the back door. They had murdered citizens in the streets, and so empty was the treasury, and so degraded her credit that the Secretary of War had to pledge his private credit to get money enough to send Jackson to New Orleans. There was not money or credit enough left to buy wood to keep the cadets warm at West Point, and the young soldiers of the Republic’s future wars had to go into the woods and cut it and bring it in.
And all the time New England, the head and front of the Republic, sat sullen, secretly aiding the enemy and watching for a chance to secede. “Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America,” said the Boston Gazette, “who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison and Jefferson, and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their faces against us for years and spirited up the brutal part of the populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we then be held in slavery and driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction? No more taxes for New England until the administration makes peace.” As if the cuffed and cudgeled administration was not doing its best, even to parting with the last raiment on the back of its self-respect!
Since the beginning of things there have been two kinds of great men—talkers and doers. The former are called orators when they talk so much and so well that their talk becomes natural.
Clay was a talker—Jackson a doer. There was a time when these two men ran side by side in the minds and memories of the living public. But that public is dead now, and they are far apart. Only the doer lives, as only the doer should live. Talk, since the beginning of time, has been the cheapest commodity of the human race. “And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent.... But I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue.... And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said. Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.... And he shall be to thee instead of a mouth.” That is the Biblical precedent for placing the orator over the doer.
Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron. Clay, oily and brainy, and a man who “can speak well,” was sent over to make peace, with Bayard, and Gallatin, and Crawford and Adams—all Aarons and orators, and, praise God, all now dead and fast being forgotten. And they had been in Europe twelve long months, cooling their heels at the doors of diplomacy, or begging at the back door of its kitchen for such crumbs as the children might sweep off for the dogs. And after a while they got a few crumbs—England might be induced to quit her laying on of the lash if certain things were done to salve her wounded honor, including the fact that she could still impress American seaman wherever she could find them, and certain territory transferred to England, including what is now Wisconsin and Michigan and parts of Illinois and Indiana. For England of that day was the England of this day—a bully and a land-grabber.
And then the climax came—Bonaparte went under. Bonaparte, who had kept England so busy she hadn’t had time to whip us before, now in his fall unfettered the one thousand warships of Britain that had kept him out of the Channel and the Mediterranean and the army that later sent him to his Waterloo, and all these were free to fight the helpless under-dog across the waters.
And then the Aarons gave it up. One of them, Gallatin, wrote home from England: “The war is popular here, and that their national pride, inflated by their last unexpected success, cannot be satisfied without what they call the chastisement of America, cannot be doubted. They do not even suspect that we have any just cause of complaint, and consider us altogether the aggressor and the allies of Bonaparte.”
Lake Tensaw, Ala. Known as the old Boatyard Lake. It was here that Aaron Burr was landed as he was being conveyed from Washington to Fort Stoddard, and near where the horrible massacre of Fort Mims occurred.
Here is a sample of their contempt and billingsgate from the London Sun, one of England’s great papers, of September 3, 1814: “The American army of copper captains and Falstaff recruits defy the pen of satire to paint them worse than they are—worthless, lying, treacherous, slanderous, cowardly and vaporing heroes, with boastings in their loud tongues and terror in their quaking hearts. Were it not that the course of punishment they are undergoing is necessary to the ends of moral and religious justice, we declare before our country that we should feel ashamed of victory over such ignoble foes. The quarrel resembles one between a gentleman and a chimney sweeper—the former may beat the low scoundrel to his heart’s contentment, but there is no honor in the exploit, and he is sure to be covered with the soil and dirt of his ignominious antagonist. But necessity will sometimes compel us to descend from our station to chastise a vagabond, and endure the disgrace of a contest in order to repress, by wholesome correction, the presumptuous insolence and mischievous designs of the basest assailant.”
And the Times—the so-called thunderer—speaking of President Madison: “This fellow, notorious for lying, for imposture of all kind, for his barbarous warfare both in Canada and against the Creek Indians, for everything, in short, that can debase and degrade a government.”
When word came to Lord Castlereagh of the capture of Washington and the King of France said he doubted the truth of it, Castlereagh said: “It is true beyond all question, and I expect that by now most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans and have command of all the waters of the Mississippi and lakes. So that the Americans are now but little better than prisoners at large in their own country.”
And that is exactly what might have happened but for one backwoods Moses. And this Moses—it is ludicrous, even in its tragedy, to think what he was doing when the event happened that first started him in his fame-crowned career.
A lank, fiery, swearing, drinking frontier lawyer, and general of coon-skin militia, sharp and sallow of face, blue of eye, peaked of head, his hair grizzled and tied with eel-skin, anointed with bear’s oil. Fighting chickens or duels, running horse races or hounds, buying land and negroes, standing stallions and for every office worth while, from Major General to Supreme Judge, and in all of it and every thing, getting there.
“Getting there” more nearly fitted him in every thing he ever attempted than any man of his day and generation. No American save Grant, Forrest, Stonewall Jackson and Roosevelt has ever come anywhere near his record of accomplishing things, and the latter has never yet had half a chance for showing what he might do in a pinch.
“Jim,” said one of Old Hickory’s negroes to another, the day after the old warrior died, “does yo’ think ole Marster has gone to heab’n?”
“Nigger,” said the other one, with becoming scorn, “does you think ole Marster has gone to de other place?”
“No, no! I don’t think dat—in course ole Marster couldn’t go to hell—he wus too good an’ kind a man fur dat, an’ too nice a gemman; but I jes’ can’t xackly see how he cu’d go to heab’n. De good Book say you mustn’t kill an’ you mustn’t cuss, an’ you know ole Marster wus right peart at both.”
“Nigger,” said the other, with emphasis, “if ole Marster tuk a noshun to go into heab’n jes’ tell me who gwine ter keep him out—jes tell me!”
Great men are teeth in the cog-wheels of things, and sooner or later the grooves they were made to fit will come to them.
The opportunity that knocked at Jackson’s door came from the arm of as gallant an Indian as ever made his word his bond—William Weatherford, the Red Eagle, war chief of the fighting Creeks.
Years before, a Scotch boy, Lachlan McGillivray, sixteen years old, ran away from home in a ship bound for Charleston, S. C. He reached there penniless, joined some Indian traders, and drove their pack horses into the Creek nation—for a jack knife! He traded this to the Indians for some deerskins and laid the foundation of a fortune that made him the greatest man in the Creek Nation and a power that three nations—Spain, England and America—courted till his death. He married Sehoy Marchand, a half-breed, sixteen-year-old Indian girl, with the sprightliness of her French father and the black eyes of her princess mother, Sehoy, a full-blooded Creek of the tribe of the Wind. Their son, Alexander McGillivray, though three-quarters white, became the most powerful and influential Indian of his day. He held his own in diplomacy and statesmanship with England, France and Spain. He was more than a match for the feeble government at Washington. His sister, Sehoy McGillivray, married a Georgian, Charles Weatherford, who lived with the Indians, owned land by counties, upon it the first race track in Alabama, owned negroes, thoroughbred horses, sheep and kine, ran the first cotton gin and held the first place of power among his people.
Weatherford, the Red Eagle, seven-eighths white, was his son, and Sehoy McGillivray was his mother. In his veins was Scotch, English, French and she whose family was of the Wind. He was an extraordinary man.
“His bearing,” said Pickett, who knew him well, “was gentlemanly and dignified. His eyes were large, dark, brilliant and flashing. He was one of nature’s noblemen—a man of strict honor and unsurpassed courage.”
Tecumseh, the greatest of all Indians, and a general in the English army, stirred up the Creeks as they were never aroused before. Acting for England with Spain, holding Florida as a secret and treacherous ally, he induced Weatherford to lead his Indians against Ft. Mims, in South Alabama, filled with men, women and children who had fled there for safety and were guarded by a lot of drunken, bragging American troops. The tragedy was inevitable, for both Spain and England were behind the Indians, England offering a reward for every American scalp—man’s or woman’s or child’s. And when the sun went down on the 30th day of August, 1813, unless she lied to the Indians, as is likely, she paid for five hundred and thirty of them.
Money payment for the scalps of helpless women and children! Grand old England of Shakespeare, Drake and Wellington! Glorious vandals of Ft. Mims and Washington and New Orleans! When I think of her in those days I remember only Davy Crockett’s famous toast to her: “The British,” said old Davy, holding up a horn full of whiskey, “an’ may their ribs make the gridirons of hell!”
The road to old Fort Mims, as it is to-day.
But it was not all a one-sided fight—they died game, even the little children—and the Indians buried six hundred of their warriors among the potato vines outside the stockade.
Weatherford and Tecumseh sowed the wind. In vain the Red Eagle pleaded for the lives of the women and children of the fort. For them he almost lost his own life and with clubs and guns drawn on him was forced to flee to save his life.
Not knowing this, the Americans marked him for death first and branded him “the butcher of Ft. Mims.”
Five days after this massacre, which changed the boundaries of the continent and threw Jackson into an arena calling for every quality of his grit and brain for years afterwards, Jackson, all unconscious of this opportunity of his life—for the sweat-covered courier did not reach Nashville with the news until September 19th—was engaged in a street fight to a finish with Thomas H. and Jesse Benton—two men who were afterwards his political champions.
It was a foolish, silly quarrel, more like that of boys than men. Jackson was drawn into it through the eternal fiber in him that forced him to make his friend’s quarrel his own. This friend was William Carroll, afterwards the gallant general who stood by him to a finish at New Orleans. Both Thomas H. and Jesse Benton were young lawyers living in Nashville. They were friends of Jackson. Thomas H. at the time was away in Philadelphia on business of great importance to Jackson. Jesse possessed much of his brother’s fluency with none of his brains. He was eccentric and excitable. In a dispute he challenged Captain Carroll. It was all because some younger officers were jealous of Carroll and wanted to break his influence with Jackson.
In the duel with Carroll (which was harmless) he involved Jackson, and it ended in Jackson and the two Bentons fighting, in the streets of Nashville, a bloody duel, in which Jackson was shot, his arm and shoulder shattered, and the two Bentons found themselves, one in the bottom of a cellar, and the other’s life saved by the luckiest chance. Jackson almost bled to death. It was three weeks before he could leave his bed.
That was September 4, 1813. Even then a horseman was riding day and night through the wilderness of Alabama with news of the Indian butchery. Even then the Creeks, victorious and bloodthirsty, had collected an army greater than any which confronted for years and baffled Miles, Crook, Custer and Canby, and were marching toward the Tennessee and Georgia frontiers, with Weatherford, the Invincible, at their head. And Jackson, the man who was to save them and fight the most brilliant Indian war ever fought on American soil, maimed, half-dead and soaking mattresses with his blood.
The news made him forget his wounds and his feuds. Tennessee acted and placed her treasury and her sons at the service of the man who would lead them against the Indians. Jackson was in command, but Jackson was dead—so they said. But when a member of the committee of the Legislature came to his room and propped him up long enough to hear the committee’s report, and regrets that he was not able to take the field—“The devil in hell I can’t!” he shouted, as he got out of bed and began then and there his campaign against the Creeks. His proclamation followed. Propped up in bed, he wrote: “The horrid butcheries perpetrated on our defenseless fellow-citizens near Ft. Stoddard cannot fail to excite in every bosom a spirit of revenge.... It surely never would be said that the brave Tennesseeans wanted other inducements than patriotism and humanity to rush to the aid of our bleeding neighbors and friends and relatives.”
October 4 was the day he designated for the troops to meet at Fayetteville, Tenn., and on October 4 Jackson was there.
A book might be written on Jackson’s Creek war. The Duke of Wellington said that if Jackson had done nothing else this war would have ranked him among the greatest generals.
I cannot accept this as meant literally. But what a record of hardships, grit, perseverance, gameness, generalship, resourcefulness, agony of overcoming it is! Just one month from the day of his street duel in Nashville he rendezvoused his troops at Fayetteville. He could not mount his horse without help. He could not bear for a coat collar to touch his shattered shoulder. The least unguarded movement, and a thrill of agony went through his bloodless frame.
We all remember the lives and years and treasure it took to subdue even the Sioux of the Northwest. Ask Crook and Miles and also poor Custer—soldiers all, equipped to a king’s taste and backed by the best army of Indian fighters the world ever saw—except one, and that one the smaller army that Jackson had to subdue in a twelve months the most powerful federation of the most intelligent Indians living.
Jackson marched into their territory October, 1813. By April, 1814, they were killed or conquered, and those who remained, even their greatest chief, William Weatherford, were his friends and allies.
Old oak near Fort Mims.
The infallible proof of a great general is his ability to turn his conquered foes into friends. This was Alexander’s, Caesar’s, Jackson’s, and Grant’s decoration. It was lacking in William the Conqueror, in Wellington, Sherman and Sheridan. From Nashville to Fayetteville is eighty miles along the old military road, now as prosperous a farming country as ever an army tramped across. At one o’clock, October 11, a courier dashed into camp from John Coffee, guarding the frontier at the Tennessee river, crying that the Creeks were coming. He started back in five minutes, saying that Jackson was coming instantly. Instantly was always the better part of his religion. He acted instantly at New Orleans, and it was all that saved him. And no general, by the record, who ever lived before or since, save perhaps Stonewall Jackson, would have done it. Incredulous as it seems, by eight o’clock that same night these 2,500 Tennesseeans, with their sick and wounded general, had marched, footing it, thirty-two miles to Huntsville. Thirty-two miles in less than seven hours!
They crossed the river at Ditto’s Landing, and then began that remarkable war of the civilized against the barbarian, equaled only when Caesar marched into the woods of Germany and fought their great Teutonic hordes from daylight till death.
And the Nervit were not braver than the Creeks under Weatherford, the Red Eagle. Canby was an Indian fighter, tried and resourceful. He fought through the Mexican War, on the plains with Albert Sidney Johnston, through the Civil War, capturing Mobile, and proved to be a hard-fighting and an iron soldier. But the Modocs butchered him.
Custer—his fate is yet fresh in the minds of the living. In the war between whites he was the equal of Wheeler. With as many men and far better equipped than Jackson ever dreamed that men could be, he attacked a mere handful of Indians compared to the great wilderness of them. Jackson marched into and conquered, and yet they killed Custer, and every man of his brave but unthinking force. “Twenty-five hundred men and thirteen hundred horses on the bluffs of the Tennessee,” writes Parton, “on the borders of the civilization, about to plunge into pathless woods and march, no one knew how far, into the fastnesses and secret retreats of a savage enemy! Such a body will consume ten wagon loads of provisions every day. For a week’s subsistence they require a thousand bushels of grain, twenty tons of flesh, a thousand gallons of whisky, and many hundredweight of miscellaneous stores.” Yet Jackson fed them, with little aid from any outside source, often eating nothing but parched acorns himself. His pathetic letters begging, commanding, beseeching the governors of Tennessee and Georgia for food for his troops are written with an ink of fire. “There is an enemy I dread more than I do the hostile Creeks,” he wrote, “and whose power, I am fearful I shall first be made to feel. I mean that meager monster, famine. I shall leave this encampment in the morning direct for Ten Islands, and hence with as little delay as possible to the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, and yet I have not on hand two days’ supply of breadstuffs.”
Hunger and mutiny—what would Custer and Crook and Canby and Miles have done had these been added to the Indians? He ate acorns, and with a single rifle barring the path of his starved and mutining troops, he literally bluffed and drove them on. Seeing it all clearly now, his victory over the Indians was the lesser one.
Fighting Indians, fighting mutiny, fighting famine, fighting the terrible enervating, blood-sucking disease that preyed on his very vitals—this was the Andrew Jackson in the pitiless forests of that pitiless age, with one arm in a sling, sallow, bloodless and emaciated, resting his rifle across his horse’s neck in front of the column of starved and mutinous troops homeward bound and with eyes blazing, his grizzled hair bristling with fury, exclaiming: “By the Eternal, I will blow the first damned villain into eternity that advances another step! I will hold this fort if only two men will stay with me!”
Here are two pictures of him, then that go into you and stay—one of his innate tenderness, the other his undying grit. At the battle of Tallushatchee an Indian mother was found dead with a half-starved babe at her breast. “Let it die,” said the other squaws; “all its people are dead. It is the law of our race.” Jackson had it taken to his own tent and found a little brown sugar to make it a tea. He had it cared for, took it home, adopted it, raised and educated it. It knew no father or mother save the conquering Jackson and the good Aunt Rachel.
Imagine Caesar coming out of Gaul with a fair-haired white child in his tent! This man was greater than Caesar, ay, than ten Caesars.
The other was his grit. Unable to eat what little he had, unable to sleep, there were times even when he could not sit his horse for the griping pains of an outraged stomach. Only one thing gave him relief, and how he discovered it no one ever knew. Down from his horse he would slide, have a young sapling bent down, and hang over it, head down, till he deadened the terrible pain. Imagine Alexander’s Greeks marching across Asia and beholding their god hanging over a young tree, head down, racked with the pain of a woman.
On Lake Tensaw, near Fort Mims. It was here Jackson camped on his way to Fort Mims, after the massacre.
The finish came at Tohopeka (the Horse Shoe) on the banks of the sweet-running Tallapoosa, as beautiful to-day as then. Never had Indians fortified before—breastworks invulnerable, with portholes. Behind that, logs and brushwood, from behind which Indians love to fight, and all unseen. And the Creek Nation died there almost to a man and a woman.
The scene of the Red Eagle’s surrender is worthy a great artist. In the forests of Alabama. Sentinels—soldiers. The marquee of General Jackson. Big Warrior, a scalawag Creek, sunning himself by the door. Riding through the forest on the same gray, half-thoroughbred horse that leaped the bluff with him at the Holy Ground the Red Eagle comes to give himself up, that his starving people might live. Tell me not this was martyrdom and patriotism of the highest, for well did he know what they thought of him, “the butcher of Ft. Mims,” and easily could he have escaped and gone in to the British in Florida, as many of his comrades had done.
But if he had gone who would protect and plead for the starving women and children? Besides, he had found out the British and the Spaniards, and he hated their ways. He knew that his life alone would atone for it all, and so he rode up to surrender and be shot for his people. A deer crosses his path. He kills it with his rifle and flings it over the pommel of the saddle. Some sentinels stop him. One points out the General’s tent, but none suspects it is he, else he had not lived to reach the door.
Astonished, dumbfounded, Big Warrior rubs his eyes and looks. Is he asleep? Can it be—can it be—
“Ha, Bill Weatherford! Have we got you at last?”
Weatherford looked at him. “You traitor, speak not to me, or I will put a ball through your heart.”
General Jackson heard, and, furious, stalked out with Hawkins at his heels. “How dare you, sir, ride up to my tent, having murdered the women and children of Ft. Mims?”
Soldiers near by sprang up with bitter oaths. Not one but would have given an arm for the honor of killing him. A dozen guns leap up in the wild shout and babble for precedence, but Weatherford sits and calmly looks into their muzzles, while Jackson waves his hand and says: “Silence, and let him speak!”
“I am not afraid of you, General Jackson—I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to ask for myself. Kill me if you wish. I come to plead for the women and children starving in the woods. Their fields are destroyed, their homes gone, their cribs empty. They have nothing to eat. Send out your men and bring them in. I did all I could to stop the massacre at Ft. Mims. I am done fighting. My warriors all are killed. Kill me now, if you wish, but save the remnant of our noble race.”
“Kill him! Kill him!” shouted the soldiers, as their guns came up again. But as he spoke Jackson had seen and understood. Over the head of the chief he saw, over the clamoring, cursing troops who begged for his blood, over the past, over Ft. Mims, over all—to Pensacola—to the British sheltered there, waiting to march into his land to plunder and burn; to the Spanish, two-faced and deceitful, urging them on.
Instantly he acted. Instantly his great heart, as true for the truth as a hound for the trail, saw the nobility of the savage towering above the littleness and ignominy of the greater race. And there flashed in his broader vision Pensacola and New Orleans. He turned to his troops: “Who’d kill so brave a man as this would rob the dead.”
Weatherford then threw his game at his feet. “Take it, my General, for Weatherford is starving.”
Jackson seized his hand: “No, by God, you come in and eat with me.”
(The next paper will be “The Road to New Orleans.”)