General Coffee said also in this letter, which is preserved in the archives of the Tennessee Historical Society, that "the force of the enemy was a little upwards of one thousand warriors, picked men, sent forward to destroy our army." By dint of adding to the numbers of Indians known to have been killed in the two battles thus far fought as many more as he believed to have been killed, and assuming that the wounded equalled the killed in numbers, General Coffee arrived at the conclusion that the battles of Tallushatchee and Talladega had left the fighting force of the Creeks "a thousand men weaker" than when the campaign began. The calculation was scarcely a fair one, however; assumptions respecting dead men not found are necessarily unsafe, and as there were no wounded men at all left alive at Tallushatchee, the calculation respecting wounded men was of course founded upon an erroneous assumption, to say nothing of the fact that the only men wounded and not killed at Talladega were so slightly wounded that they succeeded in getting away, and hence could scarcely be accounted lost to the Creeks.
It is easy to pardon the enthusiastic general his slight overestimate of the damage inflicted upon the enemy, whom he was so earnestly anxious to defeat. The damage was great, certainly, and the success thus far attained had been secured at small cost in the matter of the lives of the white troops.
The object for which Jackson had marched from Fort Strother to Talladega was fully accomplished. The hostile Creeks in that quarter had been routed with heavy loss, and the little band of beleaguered friendly Indians were released from their dangerous and trying situation; but Jackson's army was hungry, and there was a prospect that actual starvation would presently overtake it. The little food that was found at Talladega was distributed among the men, sufficing to satisfy their immediate needs.
The pressing necessity of the hour now was to return with all possible haste to Fort Strother, which must not be left in its defenceless state a moment longer than was absolutely necessary; but an instantaneous beginning of the return march was wholly out of the question. The men had begun their toilsome journey at midnight between the 7th and 8th of November, had marched all day on the 8th, and, after a few hours' rest, had begun to march again a little after midnight, to go into battle early on the morning of the 9th. Now that the battle was done, they were utterly worn out, and must rest. Accordingly, the army went into camp for the night, after they had buried their dead comrades. The next day the return march was begun, and on the 11th of November the weary army arrived at their encampment.
The fort was unharmed, but it was destitute of provisions, and for a time it was with great difficulty that Jackson prevented a mutiny among the troops, whose only food was the meagre supply gleaned from the surrounding wilderness.
CHAPTER XVIII.
GENERAL COCKE'S CONDUCT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
It is necessary now to explain the circumstances which left Fort Strother without the garrison under General White, which General Jackson had provided for its defence during his absence, and to show to what consequences this failure of the East Tennessee commander to co-operate with General Jackson presently led. The writers upon these historical events differ very widely in their judgment of the case, and most of them severely censure General Cocke, attributing his conduct to an unworthy jealousy. His rank was the same as that of General Jackson; but, as was said in a former chapter, Jackson's commission was the older one, and hence if Cocke had joined his "ranking officer," Jackson would have been in command of the whole force. It was alleged at the time and afterward that both the East Tennessee troops and their commander were jealous of Jackson and his army, and envious of that army's success. To this unworthy motive General Cocke's conduct has generally been attributed. Mr. Pickett, in his History of Alabama, gives an account of the matter, which is substantially the same as those given by Drake in his Book of the Indians, and by most other writers.
In that account he says, without doubt or qualification, that the want of concert between the two divisions of the army grew "out of a jealousy of the former [the East Tennessee division], and a strong desire to share some of the glory which the latter had already acquired in the few battles they had fought."