Lone Star Nation (14 page)

Stephen Austin had no difficulty determining where his allegiance lay between Mexico and the rebels. “I am a Mexican citizen and officer and
I will sacrifice my life before I will violate my duty and oath of office
,” he declared. Duty and oath aside, Austin's interests were all with Mexico. After its stumbling start, his colony was getting on its feet, and it did so under the aegis of the Mexican government. Austin's settlers held title to their land and lived in as much peace and order as they had any right to expect so far from real civilization. Independence couldn't improve their condition or his; on the contrary, it was likely to throw everything into turmoil. He didn't wish it for his own colony, and he wouldn't tolerate it for his neighbors.

Austin denounced the rebels to Saucedo. One of their leaders was a man named Burrell Thompson, whom Austin had earlier assisted and who now presumed on that assistance to link Austin to the insurgency. “When I knew him in Missouri,” Austin told Saucedo, by way of disclaimer, “he bore a good character.” But he had since gone bad—and apparently mad. “I have nothing to say in his behalf, further than that he has turned crazy and is surrounded by crazy people.”

Austin spoke even more bluntly to Thompson and the rebels. He damned them for calling on the Cherokees for help. “Great God,” he said, “can it be possible that Americans, high-minded, free born, and honorable themselves, will so far forget the country of their birth, so far forget themselves as to league with barbarians and join a band of savages in a war of murder, massacre, and desolation?” Anyway, the rebels deluded themselves to think they could defeat the Mexican army, or to believe that other settlers would come to their aid. “They can send 3000 men to Nacogdoches if it should be necessary,” Austin said of the Mexican army. “And there is not a man in this colony who would not join them.”

To the Cherokees, Austin issued a counsel of patience—wrapped in a warning. Even a tactical alliance with the rebels, he said, in the hopes of obtaining a land grant from the Mexican government, was fraught with the gravest peril. Speaking from his own experience in Mexico City, Austin wrote to John Hunter, one of the Indian leaders aligned with the Fredonians: “I know that the Cherokees can get their lands if the legal steps are adopted,
and if they take the wrong course they are lost. . . . Before the sword is drawn the Government will yield a little to the Cherokees to keep it in its scabbard, but once drawn and stained with blood they will never yield one hair's breadth and nothing short of extermination or expulsion of that nation will satisfy them.”

To add weight to his arguments, Austin mustered a militia of his own settlers, to defend Mexico against the rebels. “It is a duty,” he declared, “which every good man owes to himself, to his family, and to his country to prepare himself in time and hold himself in readiness to take up arms and march under the banners of their adopted country against them, should they still persist in their mad schemes of independence.”

After Austin registered such vehement opposition, the rebels did not, in fact, persist in their schemes, which came to appear madder each day. The only hope of the Fredonians had been to bring the Austin colony on board; with Austin choosing Mexico—so decisively—the leaders of the rebellion abandoned their quest for independence and retreated into Louisiana.

By early March 1827 Austin was able to report with satisfaction that “tranquility is fully and firmly established.” Assessing conditions in Texas at large, he added, “The whole country in general are gratified, and the Mexican character stands higher here now than it ever did before.”

 P A R T   T W O 

Ravenous
Democracy
 (1828–1834)

C h a p t e r   6

Love and War

O
n the morning of August 30, 1813, a band of Creek Indians quietly approached the fortified home and trading post of Samuel Mims in the part of Mississippi Territory that would become the state of Alabama. The Creeks were led by a chief named Red Eagle, and they called themselves Red Sticks, for the bloody color they painted their war clubs. Red Eagle was an ally of Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who was organizing tribes along the American frontier against white settlers. Tecumseh's message of defiance had split the Creeks, with some advocating cooperation with the whites, and others, including the Red Sticks, favoring war. Red Eagle intended to force the issue by attacking Samuel Mims, who besides being a trader and a proponent of peace between whites and Indians was part Creek.

On that sultry morning, men and women—white, Indian, black, and mixed-race—wandered in and out of the open gates at Mims's fort, while children shouted and chased their balls and one another across the square inside the enclosure. The tension among the Creeks and between the Creeks and their neighbors had put the territorial government on alert, and a company of militia had been sent to Mims's place. But no one had seen anything worrisome lately, and the soldiers expected no trouble this day. They lounged and dozed until a drum beat the noontime signal for dinner, when they shook off their lethargy and headed for the mess hall.

In the thick air, the drum's rhythm carried beyond the fort, to the woods where the Red Sticks were hiding, just past the fields that had been cleared as a buffer around the stockade. The Indians' battle plan made the dinner drum the signal for the attack on the fort, and now the Red Sticks raised a war cry that startled those in the stockade who had never heard it and chilled the blood of those who had. The attackers poured across the open space between the trees and the fort, shouting the louder as they went. The militia commander tried to close the gate, but several of the swiftest Red Sticks got there before he secured it. They held the gate open for their fellows, who surged into the fort.

Within seconds it became apparent that this was no attempt to capture the fort or seize its supplies, but a deliberate massacre intended to sow terror among the settlers. The Red Sticks methodically killed soldiers and noncombatants alike, some in the most brutal fashion. The brains of young children were bashed out upon the logs of the fort walls; the bellies of pregnant women were knifed open and their unborn children beaten to death before their eyes. Then the scalpers went to work, seizing bloody trophies from the dead and dying. Nearly 250 persons were killed; the only appreciable group of survivors were blacks taken off as slaves to the attackers.

News of the Fort Mims massacre carried quickly along the frontier and across the West. At Nashville, General Andrew Jackson heard the news and vowed revenge. Jackson commanded the Tennessee militia and considered himself personally responsible for the security of the frontier. Jackson knew all about Tecumseh and the crusade he was preaching against the whites; apart from Jackson's righteous anger at the massacre of innocents, the militia general was convinced that letting this outrage go unpunished would encourage other atrocities.

Righteous anger was the prevailing motif of Jackson's life. As a youth he had fought in the American Revolution, and the experience scarred him literally and figuratively. He was captured after the battle of Hanging Rock, in the Carolina hill country that saw some of the fiercest partisan fighting of the war, and was ordered by a British officer to blacken his boots. Jackson—who grew up without a father, deceased before the boy's birth, and almost without a mother, burdened by the care of several of Jackson's cousins—had always been quicker to sass than to obey, and his impertinent reply provoked the officer to strike at him with a sword. Jackson deflected the blow, but it left an ugly scar behind his ear and a permanent hatred of the British.

Jackson carried his wound and his hatred west after the war, to Tennessee, where he practiced law (being, by all accounts, more forceful in argument than learned in precedent), raced horses (for stakes that alternately enriched and ruined him), and fought duels (for his own honor and the reputation of the great love of his life, Rachel Donelson Jackson). One man died by Jackson's hand; Jackson himself absorbed bullets from various duels. The chronic pain from the bullets that couldn't be dug out did nothing to improve his disposition or alter his philosophy of life, which centered on the conviction that human existence was a struggle and that those who struggled hardest and best deserved the spoils of their victories.

Jackson entered politics in Tennessee, eventually representing his state in the House of Representatives and the Senate. But the office he valued most was command of the militia, and it was to Major General Jackson that the news of the Fort Mims massacre was delivered in September 1813. Jackson laid plans for a reprisal, and prepared his troops.

Among those troops was a young giant—tall, powerfully muscled, physically self-assured—named Sam Houston. Only later would anyone note the parallels, but Houston had been born in the same year (1793) as Stephen Austin, and in the same state (Virginia). Like Austin, Houston went west at an early age. In Houston's case this meant Tennessee, to which he traveled with his widowed mother. Again like the young Austin, Houston attended a private academy, although Houston's academy was in backwoods Blount County, East Tennessee, rather than in well-settled Connecticut. While lacking many educational tools, Houston's academy possessed a copy of the
Iliad,
which filled the boy's head with dreams of romance and battle. He resisted the farm work that occupied his five brothers, and when the elder ones tried to force his hand to the plow, he fled into the forest, to the lands reserved for the Cherokees. Two of his brothers followed him, tracking the runaway to an island in the Tennessee River at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains. The island was the home of Chief Oolooteka, the local Cherokee leader; by the chief's house the brothers discovered young Sam sprawled beneath a tree, reading Homer. They urged him to return to civilization, but he refused, saying (according to his later recollection) that he liked “the wild liberty of the Red Men better than the tyranny of his own brothers.”

For three years Houston dwelt among the Cherokees. Oolooteka called himself John Jolly among whites, and the adopted surname suited his character. He was far more genial than Houston's brothers, and the teenage boy found in him a refreshing relief from them, and a substitute for his missing father. As a name for himself, Houston took Colonneh, or Raven, a bird that symbolized good luck and also wanderlust. Houston learned the Cherokee language and the arts and crafts and lore of the tribe. He learned to hunt like a Cherokee, dance and sing like a Cherokee, and commune with the Cherokee spirits and gods.

He returned to white civilization in time for the War of 1812. And when he heard that the U.S. Army was recruiting in Tennessee—and paying cash bonuses—for service against the British and their Indian allies (including the followers of Tecumseh), he enlisted. A lieutenant colonel in his regiment was Thomas Hart Benton, a Missourian bound for greater things, including a central role in America's westward expansion. Benton's chief contribution at this point consisted of noting the martial prospects of the twenty-year-old Houston, who had grown to his adult six feet two inches and was showing some of the charisma of leadership that would characterize his career. Benton brought Houston to the attention of Andrew Jackson, then preparing to march against the Red Sticks. If Houston, as an adopted Indian, had any reservations about striking the Creeks, those reservations were allayed by the cooperation of the Cherokees—and some other Creeks—against Red Eagle's army.

By the time Jackson was ready to attack Red Eagle, he commanded regular U.S. infantry troops, including Houston, as well as Tennessee militiamen. The former had received some training and learned some discipline; the militia were innocent of both. Previous campaigns with the militia had taught Jackson that indiscipline meant death to soldiers and failure to campaigns, and he was determined to teach all his men discipline, regardless of cost.

His determination was tested as his army approached Red Eagle's base on the Tallapoosa River. A militiaman—or militia boy, for he was still in his teens—named John Woods belonged to a company notorious for its resistance to military order. On sentry duty one chill February morning, Woods received permission from an officer to retire early to his tent for breakfast. Another officer, encountering him there, upbraided him for leaving his post before his watch ended. Harsh words ensued, prompting the emotional—and exhausted—Woods to seize a gun and threaten to kill anyone who tried to make him obey the second officer's order. Upon this, shouts of “Mutiny!” rang about the camp, and to Jackson's tent. The general leaped up and called for honest soldiers to help him put down the rebellion. “Shoot him! Shoot him!” he ordered. “Blow ten balls through the damned villain's body!”

Woods surrendered his weapon before matters came to that, and the various onlookers sighed in relief that no one had been killed. But Jackson refused to let the incident pass. He convened a court-martial, which charged Woods with mutiny. The verdict was guilty and the sentence death. Many in camp thought Jackson, having made his point, would grant a reprieve. Yet Jackson stood firm and insisted that the sentence be carried out. He gathered the whole army, and in their presence had a firing squad execute the unfortunate boy.

What Sam Houston made of the execution is hard to say. Years later he would have his own troubles with military indiscipline; perhaps then he longed for Jackson's ability to strike exemplary fear into the hearts of his soldiers. But for now he respected Jackson's resolve and sought to earn the general's approval.

When Jackson's scouts reached the Red Stick stronghold at the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa, they were impressed and daunted by what they saw. The Indians had built a fort in the bend of the river, surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by a breastwork of thick logs laid horizontally. The breastwork left gun holes for outbound fire, and it was curved concavely to allow the riflemen inside the fort to cover every inch of the wall. A single gate afforded the only entrance. Jackson appreciated what he was up against. “It is impossible to conceive a situation more eligible for defense than the one they had chosen,” he recorded. “And the skill which they manifested in their breast work was really astonishing.”