THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR
THE WAR THAT WASN’T A WAR
I WONDER how many of the white-clad, white-shod folk who lounge their winters away on the golf-links at St. Augustine or in wheeled chairs propelled by Ethiopians along the fragrant pathways of Palm Beach ever speculate as to how it happens that the flags which fly over the Ponce de Leon and the Royal Poinciana are made of red, white, and blue bunting instead, say, of red and yellow. Not many of them, I expect, for professional joy hunters have no time to spare for history. I wonder how many of those people who complacently regard themselves as well-read and well-informed could tell you offhand, if you asked them, how Florida became American or give you even the barest outline of the conception and execution of that daring and cynical scheme whereby it was added to the Union. I wonder how many professors of history in our schools and colleges are aware that Florida was once a republic—for but a brief time, it is true—with a flag and a president and an army of its own. I wonder how many of our military and naval officers know that we foughtSpanish soldiers and stormed Spanish forts and captured Spanish towns and hauled down Spanish colors (all quite unofficially, of course) fourscore years before Schley and Sampson sunk the Spanish fleet off Santiago. And, finally, I wonder how many people have ever so much as heard of the Emperor McGillivray, who held his barbaric court at Tallahassee and was a general in the armies of England, Spain, and the United States at the same time; of Sir Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier of fortune who attempted to establish a kingdom at Fernandina and died King of the Mosquito Coast; or any of those other strange and romantic figures—De Aury, Hubbard, Peire, Humbert—who followed him. It is a dashing story but a bloody one, and those who have no stomach for intrigue and treachery and massacre and ambushes and storming parties and filibustering expeditions had better turn elsewhere for their reading.
Some one has aptly remarked that the history of Florida is but a bowl of blood, and that, were a man to cast into it some chemical that would separate the solid ingredients from the mere water, he would find that the precipitate at the bottom consisted of little save death and disappointment. Certainly the Spaniards were rewarded by littlemore, for after they had ruled it for two hundred and fifty years the net results of their labor were the beggarly settlements at Pensacola and St. Augustine. In 1763 England ceded Havana to Spain in exchange for Florida, and for a brief time that harassed country was on speaking terms with peace and prosperity, for the English established settlements and built roads and started schools, as is the quaint Anglo-Saxon way. But with the loss of her American colonies, in 1783, England suddenly concluded that it was not worth her while to retain this now isolated province; so she ceded it back to Spain, and the settlers found that their work had gone for nothing. A Spanish lethargy promptly settled upon the land; grass sprang up in the main streets of the towns; the noon-hour was expanded into asiestawhich lasted from twelve to four; the indigo plantations started by the English colonists were neglected and ran out; the injustice, cruelty, and oppression which everywhere characterized Spanish rule entered upon a return engagement; and Florida became a savage and lawless borderland, where Indians, runaway slaves, filibusters, frontiersmen, and fugitives from justice fought each other and united only in jeering at the feeble rule of Spain.
At this time the colony was divided into two provinces, known as East and West Florida. The former province was virtually identical with the present State, extending from the Perdido River (now the boundary-line between the States of Florida and Alabama) eastward to the Atlantic Ocean, including the great peninsula lying south of Georgia and stretching across almost six degrees of latitude. On its Atlantic seaboard were the towns of Fernandina and St. Augustine, and on the Gulf coast the ports of Pensacola and St. Marks. The province of West Florida extended from the Perdido westward, according to the Spanish claims, to the Mississippi and included the river town of Baton Rouge and the Gulf port of Mobile. It will be seen, therefore, that Spain was in possession of all that great semicircle of Gulf coast stretching from Key West to New Orleans.
In 1803, Napoleon, hard-pressed for funds with which to continue his European campaigns, sold the colony of Louisiana to the United States as unconcernedly as though he were disposing of a suburban building lot. This proceeding was typical of the utter indifference with which the sovereigns of the Old World were accustomed to transfer their colonies in the New. The colonists,however much they may have loved their sovereign, their country, or her institutions, were bought, sold, or given away, without their consent and often without their knowledge. This enormous addition to the national domain made it not only desirable but imperative that the United States acquire ports upon the Gulf of Mexico, so that the settlers in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Georgia might have an outlet for their products. The gentlemen in frock coats and high black stocks who were at the tiller of our ship of state determined, therefore, that the Floridas must become American—peacefully if possible, forcibly if there was no other way.
Now, it must be borne in mind that at this time Spain had no diplomatic intercourse with the United States, the gigantic policy of Napoleon having, for the time being, erased her from the list of nations. Thus overwhelmed at home, her possessions in America were either in a state of open revolt or in so defenseless a condition that they were ready to drop like ripe plums into the hands of any nation which shook the tree. It will thus be seen that the gentlemen in Washington quite evidently knew what they were about when they chose a time when Mother Spain was confined to her bed, as the result of the beatingup she had received from Napoleon, to elope with her daughter Florida.
Once set in motion, the machinery of conquest proceeded to pare off slices of Florida with the neatness and despatch of a meat-cutting machine. The plans of the American Government worked out as smoothly as a church wedding which has been rehearsed beforehand. The carefully laid scheme first manifested itself in October, 1810, when a revolution broke out in that portion of West Florida bordering upon the Mississippi. In that region there was a family of American settlers named Kemper who had suffered many injustices under Spanish rule. Two of these men, Samuel and Reuben (the same Reuben Kemper, by the way, whose exploits in Mexico are described in “Adventurers All”), determined to get rid of their hated rulers, incited the neighboring settlers to rise in armed revolt. Assembling at St. Francisville, they marched through the night, arrived before Baton Rouge at dawn, took it by surprise, and after a skirmish in which the Spanish governor was killed drove out the garrison and occupied the town. In order to throw a cloak of legality over their acts, the revolutionists organized a convention, issued a declaration of independence modelled on Jefferson’s immortaldocument, elected Fulwar Skipwith, formerly American diplomatic agent in France, president of the new republic, and hoisted over the captured town a flag with a single star—the same emblem under which the Texans were to win their independence thirty odd years later. This done, the infant republic asked the United States to recognize it as an independent nation. But President Monroe, instead of extending recognition, asserting that the revolted province had been ceded by Spain to France along with Louisiana in 1800, and therefore, being part and parcel of Louisiana, belonged to the United States anyway, declared the Territory of West Florida, as far east as the Pearl River, an American possession.
Shortly after the capture of Baton Rouge Colonel Kemper, acting under orders from the revolutionary government, led another expedition against Mobile. Made overconfident by their easy triumph at Baton Rouge, the filibusters encamped a few miles above Mobile and spent the night in a grand carousal in celebration of their anticipated victory on the morrow. But the Spanish governor, learning from a spy of the Americans’ befuddled condition, sallied out at the head of three hundred men, took the revolutionists by surprise, and completely routed them. A major and ninemen who were taken prisoners were transported to Havana, where they paid for their affront to the majesty of Spain by spending five years in Morro Castle. A few weeks later a strong force of American regulars arrived off Mobile and coolly sat down within sight of the Spanish fortifications. They explained their presence to the Spanish governor by saying that they had been sent by the American Government to protect him and his men from further attacks by the insurgents. The gentlemen who were shaping the policies of the nation in Washington certainly must have had a sense of humor. Though the Spanish flag still flew over Mobile, the United States was now, to all intents and purposes, in complete possession of West Florida. In the spring of 1812, when the American Government finally determined on a war with England, the strategic importance of Mobile became apparent and President Monroe, deciding that the time had come to end the farce, despatched an expedition under General Wilkinson to oust the Spanish garrison and formally occupy the city. The United States was now in full possession of one of the Gulf ports she had so long been coveting, and the machinery of conquest was still in working order.
Meanwhile the American Government, having heard rumors that the British were about to assume control of East Florida under the provisions of a secret arrangement with Spain, asked permission of the Spanish authorities to occupy that province with troops that it might not be used by the British as a base of operations. (The occupation was to be purely temporary; oh, yes indeed, the American troops would be withdrawn as soon as the war-clouds which were piling up along the political horizon lifted a little.) It is scarcely to be wondered at, however, that Spain curtly refused the request, whereupon Congress, in secret session, passed an act authorizing the seizure of East Florida. But it would have smacked too much of highway robbery or of burglary, whichever you choose to call it, for the United States to have sent a military expedition into the province and taken it by force of arms. That would have been just a little too coarse and crude and might, moreover, have called forth a European protest. But surely no blame could be attached to the United States because the settlers in southern Georgia, exasperated, they said, by the lawless conditions which prevailed in the adjacent Spanish province, suddenly determined to follow the example of their neighbors in West Floridaand organize a republican form of government in East Florida as a preliminary to applying for admission to the Union. It was a strange coincidence, was it not, that the instigator of the revolution, General George Mathews, a former governor of Georgia, had been appointed a commissioner, under the secret act of Congress, to secure the province? Amelia Island, lying just off the Florida coast and a little below the boundary of Georgia, provided an admirable base of operations. The fine harbor of its capital, Fernandina, was just becoming of considerable commercial importance and in Spanish hands might prove a serious menace to the United States in the approaching war with England. Hence the acquisition of this island and harbor was regarded by the American authorities as a military necessity. Early in 1812, therefore, a force of some two hundred Georgian frontiersmen under General Mathews moved down upon Fernandina and sent a flag of truce, demanding the surrender of the town and island. As a flotilla of American gunboats, by a streak of the greatest good luck, happened into the harbor at this psychological moment, and a force of American regulars, by another singular coincidence, appeared upon the scene and placed themselves under Mathews’sorders, there was nothing left for the Spanish commandant but to haul down his flag. Whereupon General Mathews, assuming the attitude of a protector, took possession of the place in the name of the United States. With the precedent of Baton Rouge to guide him, Mathews naturally supposed that the secret and ambiguously worded instructions under which he had gone to Fernandina meant that he was to take possession of East Florida, and he was strengthened in this supposition by the condition of affairs that he found there. St. Mary’s River was filled with British vessels engaged in smuggling British merchandise into the United States in defiance of the Embargo Act, while Amelia Island was a notorious rendezvous for smugglers, upon whom the Spanish authorities looked with marked tolerance, if, indeed, they did not lend them actual assistance. As soon as the Americans took possession a custom-house was established, the smuggling promptly ceased, and over the fort was raised a flag bearing the inscription: “Vox populi lex salutis.” Though the uneducated frontiersmen were a trifle hazy as to the motto’s meaning, it sounded well and lent a certain air of dignity to the proceedings. The next move of the insurgents, now become eight hundred strongby reinforcements from Georgia, was to besiege the Spanish governor in St. Augustine, for Mathews, confident that Congress would pass a bill sanctioning his seizure of the province, ran things with a high hand. As a matter of fact, such a bill was passed by the House in secret session, but was rejected by the Senate, whereupon President Madison disavowed the act of Mathews and ordered him to evacuate the territory he had seized—probably because it was deemed unwise to provoke hostilities with another power at the very moment we had declared war on England. But the conquest of Florida was not abandoned—merely postponed.
A century ago the region south of the Tennessee River was popularly known as “the Creek country.” Because it lay directly athwart the best water communications between the settlements in Tennessee and the outside world, and because its lands were among the most fertile in the South, the eyes of the American pioneers were turned covetously upon it. Now, no one realized better than the Creeks themselves that if they were to hold their lands they must fight for them. Their decision to resist American encroachments was strengthened by the appearance among them of the great northern chieftain, Tecumseh. InOctober, 1811, this remarkable man, in pursuance of his scheme for uniting the red men from the Great Lakes to the Gulf in an Indian confederacy for the purpose of resisting the white man’s further progress westward, suddenly appeared at a Creek council held on the upper Tallapoosa. Perhaps the most brilliant orator the Indian race has ever produced and gifted with extraordinary personal magnetism, he held his audience spellbound as, standing in the circle of light thrown by the council-fire, ringed about by row on row of blanketed and feathered warriors, he outlined his scheme for a union of all the Indians of the West in a confederation powerful enough to bid defiance to the white man. Standing like a bronze statue, the firelight playing on his haughty features, his copper skin, and the single eagle feather slanting in his hair, he held aloft his war-club; then, finger by finger, he slowly relaxed his grasp until it crashed to the ground. By that significant pantomime, so powerful in its appeal to the primitive intellects of his hearers, he drove home with telling effect the weakness which comes from disunion. Though a few weeks later, on the banks of the Tippecanoe River, William Henry Harrison broke Tecumseh’s power forever and drove him from American soil, he had aroused in theCreeks a determination to retain their lands or to go down upon them fighting.
Meanwhile British agents had been secretly at work among the discontented Creeks, whooping them on to a campaign of extermination against the American settlers and supplying them with arms and ammunition in return for the promise of their assistance in the war which every one realized was now at hand. On the 18th of June, 1812, Congress declared war on England, and a week later every Creek fighting man was daubing the war-paint on his copper skin. Though the danger of a war with the Creeks was perfectly understood in Washington, the military authorities were too busy pushing forward their preparations for an invasion of Canada to spare much thought for the settlers dwelling along our unprotected southern frontier. But the Indians, under the leadership of the half-breed war-chief Weatherford, had nothing to divert their attention from the business in hand.
A pioneer farmer named Samuel Mimms had built a stockade for the protection of his cattle on Lake Tensaw, twenty miles or so north of Mobile, and here the settlers of the surrounding region had taken refuge, Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana, hurrying a small force of militia underMajor Beasley to protect them. In August, 1813, the place, popularly known as Fort Mimms, sheltered within its log stockade five hundred and fifty-three persons: soldiers and settlers, men, women, and children. Although Governor Claiborne had himself visited the post during the preceding month and had urged on its commander the necessity for the most unrelaxing vigilance, Beasley and his men evidently came to look upon the affair as a false alarm as the summer days slipped by without bringing any signs of hostile Indians. So cocksure did they become, indeed, that even after a friendly Indian had brought word that the Creeks were preparing to attack the place they continued to leave the gates of the stockade unguarded during the day. They paid a fearful price for their negligence, however. At noon on the 30th of August, when the occupants of the fort were at their dinner, a thousand fiends in paint and feathers slipped like shadows from the gloom of the encircling forest, sped on noiseless, moccasined feet across the strip of cultivated ground without the walls, and, before the demoralized garrison realized what had happened, were pouring through the unguarded entrance in a howling, shrieking wave like demons pouring through the gates of hell. Though taken completelyby surprise and outnumbered five to one, the garrison put up a most desperate and gallant resistance. The scene was dreadful beyond imagination. It was hand-to-hand fighting in its bloodiest form: bayonets against war-clubs, muskets against tomahawks, pistols against knives. Increasing the horror of the situation a hundredfold were the women and children, for there was no question as to their fate if the Indians were victorious. Beasley fell at the first attack and every officer died at the gateway in a vain attempt to stem the Indian rush. A young lieutenant, badly wounded, was carried by two women to a blockhouse, but when he was a little revived insisted on being taken back that he might die with his comrades on the fighting line. Though hopeless from the first, the defense was prolonged for hours; for after the men of the garrison had fallen, the women and children shut themselves up in one of the blockhouses, where they held off the yelling savages with the courage of despair. Finally, however, the Indians, by means of burning arrows, succeeded in setting the building on fire, and after that it was no longer a battle but a butchery. Of the five hundred and fifty-three people within the fort, only twelve escaped. It was a dearly bought victoryfor the Indians, however, for piled around the gateway were four hundred of their best fighting men.
From one end of the border to the other rose the cry for vengeance. Nor was it long in coming. The legislature of Tennessee voted to raise men and money to wipe out the Creeks, and called for volunteers. Jumping at this chance to even up old scores with the Indians, the frontiersmen, their long squirrel rifles on their shoulders and clad in their serviceable buckskin dress, came pouring in to offer their services in the campaign of retribution. The command of the expedition was given to a brigadier-general of Tennessee militia who up to that time had scarcely been heard of outside the borders of his own State. He was a tall, emaciated figure of a man, with a clean-shaven, sallow face, a jaw like a bear-trap, a great beak of a nose, eyes as penetrating as gimlets and as cold as a winter’s morning, and a shock of unkempt sandy hair just beginning to gray under his forty-seven years. He was not at all the sort of man that a stranger would slap on the back and address by his first name—at least he would not do it a second time. His garments were as severe and businesslike as the man himself: a much-worn leather cap, a short,Spanish cloak of frayed blue cloth, and great unpolished boots whose tops swayed uneasily about his bony knees. He carried his arm in a sling as the result of a pistol wound received during a brawl in a Nashville tavern. Everything considered, this man who had been chosen to strike terror to the Creeks was a strange and striking figure. You may have heard of him—his name was Andrew Jackson.
This was the extraordinary man who, early in the autumn of 1813, took the field at the head of three thousand volunteers as rough and ready as himself. A vast amount of nonsense has been written about pioneer troops. Though some of the most brilliant and daring campaigns in which Americans have borne a part were carried through by soldiers recruited on the frontier and though the marching and fighting qualities of these men have been surpassed by no troops on earth, they were, on the other hand, nearly always insubordinate, contemptuous of discipline, impudent to their officers, quickly homesick, and very dependent for success on enthusiasm for their leaders. Jackson was the best man that could possibly have been chosen to command such troops as these, for he had been born and brought up on the frontier, he understood the men with whomhe was dealing, and managed them with energy, firmness, and tact. He rarely had any difficulty in filling his ranks, for he permitted no obstacles to deter him from reaching and crushing an enemy; hence the men who followed him in his campaigns always had stories to relate and were looked upon as heroes in the settlements. To be pointed out as “one of Andy Jackson’s men” came to be looked upon as as great an honor as the scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor is in France.
Jackson’s plan of campaign provided for the construction of a military road, fifty miles in length, from the Tennessee to the Coosa, whence, after building a fortified base of supplies, he planned to make a quick dash southward, spreading death and destruction as he went, until he dictated peace on the Hickory Ground. The Hickory Ground, which lay at the junction of the Alabama and the Coosa, near the present site of Montgomery, was the headquarters of the Creek confederacy and a place of refuge, the Indian medicine-men having asserted that no white could set foot upon its sacred soil and live. Jackson, as I have already remarked, permitted no obstacles to deter him. So, when his engineers reported that it was not feasible to build a roadthrough the unmapped wilderness, he took the matter out of their hands and built the road himself. And when the contractors assured him that it was out of the question to transport supplies for three thousand men to the Coosa within the time he had specified, he commandeered horses and wagons and did that, too. When one of his regiments attempted to settle a dispute over the term of enlistment by turning about and marching home, Jackson, his left arm still disabled and in a sling, snatched a musket from a soldier with his right hand and, using the neck of his horse for a rest, covered with his weapon the column of sullen, scowling mutineers. With eyes flashing and frame quivering with passion, he single-handed held the disaffected regiment at bay, shouting shrilly, with a volley of oaths, that he would let daylight into the first man who stirred. Colonels Reid and Coffee, learning of the mutiny, came galloping up from the rear and took their stand by the side of their commander, while some loyal companies formed up across the road with weapons levelled, seeing which the mutineers changed their minds as to the wisdom of going home and sullenly marched on.
He first met the Creeks on the 3d of November at Talluschatches—now Jacksonville, Ala.—andpromptly attacked them with a thousand mounted men. No quarter was asked and none was given, and when the battle was over not an Indian brave was left alive. Six days later, at Talladega, he swooped down upon a war party of a thousand Creeks who had surrounded a band of friendly Indians and sent a third of them to the happy hunting-grounds. At the same time General John Floyd invaded the Creek country from Georgia at the head of a punitive expedition, while from the west also came an avenging column under Governor Claiborne, of Louisiana. The latter discovered a town of refuge, called Econochaca, on the Alabama. It was built on holy ground, the Indian prophets said, and, as a result of the spells they had cast over it, it was safe from paleface invasion. The Americans arrived not an instant too soon, for, guided by the throbbing of the war-drums, they burst into the village to find the Indians, their ringed and streaked bodies more fiendish still in the glare of a great fire, whooping and capering about a row of stakes to which were bound white captives of both sexes, ready to be burned. When Claiborne’s men finished their work, the “holy ground” was carpeted with Indian dead, and the medicine-men who had boasted that it was immunefrom invasion were themselves scalped and staring corpses.
Nothing more graphically illustrates the savagery and determination with which the American frontiersmen prosecuted their campaign against the Indians than the story of Sam Dale’s canoe fight. Dale, who was a veritable Hercules of a man, while scouting with some companions in advance of Jackson’s army, saw floating down the Alabama a war canoe containing eleven Creeks. Ambushing themselves amid the bushes on the bank, the Americans poured in a volley as the canoe swept by and five of the Indians fell dead. Then Dale pushed off in a small boat with three men to finish up the business. Ordering one of his companions to hold the boats together, the big frontiersman went at the Indians with his bayonet like a field-hand with his pitchfork loading hay. Throwing caution to the winds in his lust of battle, he advanced upon the Indians single-handed, and before he had time to realize his peril and retreat the current had swept the canoes apart, leaving him in the larger one confronting the six remaining Creeks. Two of them were shot by his companions in the other boat, three more he accounted for himself, the only one left alive being a famous Indian wrestler named Tar-cha-cha.
“Big Sam!” the Indian shouted, “I am a man!... I am coming!... Come on!” Clubbing his rifle, he rushed forward, dealing Dale a blow which broke his shoulder and nearly sent him into the river, but before he could get in another the frontiersman drove his bayonet home and ended the fight.
The early months of 1814 were a time of the most intense anxiety to Jackson, for, the terms of enlistment of his volunteers expiring, they insisted on returning to their homes, until at one brief period he found himself in the heart of the Indian country with less than a hundred men. Physical suffering as well as anxiety marked this period of the campaign—privation, exhaustion, irritation, and the drain of a slowly healing wound producing serious effects on a system which was habitually on the verge of collapse. It was, indeed, only his cast-iron will that sustained him, for during one period of anxiety he slept but three hours in four nights. But with the coming of spring the feet of the young men became restless for the forest trails again, and by the middle of March, his ranks filled once more, he was ready to deliver his final blow. The Creeks had by this time abandoned their campaign of aggression and, falling back to their stronghold ofTohopeka, on the Tallapoosa, known to the whites as the Horseshoe Bend, they prepared to make their last stand.
On the morning of March 27, 1814, Jackson’s skirmishers came within sight of the Indian encampment. On a peninsula formed by a horseshoe-like bend of the river, a thousand warriors with three hundred of their women and children were encamped. They comprised the very flower of the Creek nation, or rather, all that was left of it. The neck of the peninsula was only four hundred yards wide, and across it the Creeks, profiting by the lessons they had received from their Spanish and British allies, had built a zigzag wall of logs, eight feet high and pierced by a double row of loopholes. The angles formed by the zigzags enabled the defenders to sweep with a deadly cross-fire the ground over which an attacking column must advance, while trees had been felled at intervals in such fashion that their interlaced branches provided admirable cover for sharpshooters. All in all, it was a tough nut that Jackson found himself called upon to crack. But cracking that particular kind of nuts was a specialty of Jackson’s. His artillery consisted of two small brass field-pieces, not much larger than those employed on yachts for saluting purposes. SendingColonel Coffee across the river with his cavalry to cut off the escape of the Indians in that direction, Jackson planted his miniature field-guns on a little hill only eighty yards from the Creek fortifications. Either the guns must have been very weak or the fortifications very strong, for after a two-hours’ bombardment no appreciable damage had been done. Then Jackson, who was always for getting to hand-grips with an enemy, told his men to go in and do the job with the bayonet. Whereupon the Tennesseeans, who had been as fidgety and impatient as hounds in leash, swept forward with a whoop. As regardless of the withering fire poured into them as if it had been hailstones instead of bullets, they hacked their way through the abatis of branches and clambered over the wall, shooting, bayonetting, clubbing with a ferocity which matched that of the Indians. And, imitating the customs of the savages they had been fighting for so long, many of the frontiersmen paused to scalp the Indians that they killed. For the Creeks it was a hopeless struggle from the first, but they were not of a breed that, finding themselves beaten, whined for mercy. Retreating to such protection as the place afforded, they fought and kept on fighting even after a flag of truce had been sent them with an offer to accepttheir surrender. By three o’clock the battle of the Horseshoe Bend had become a part of the history of the frontier. So completely had Jackson done his work that only twenty Indians escaped. Eight hundred copper-colored corpses lay upon the blood-soaked ground beside the Tallapoosa; the rest were prisoners. It is a significant fact that there were no wounded among the Indians. The Americans had nearly two hundred killed and wounded, among the latter being Jackson himself and a youngster named Sam Houston, who, in after years, was to win fame fighting a no less savage foe on the banks of the Rio Grande.
The battle of the Horseshoe Bend broke the Creek power of resistance for good and all. Since the commencement of hostilities they had lost in battle nearly three-fourths of all their fighting men. The rest, not much more than a thousand in all, fled to their cousins, the Seminoles, in Florida, where they promptly began hatching plans for vengeance. On the 1st of August, Jackson sent word to such of the chieftains as had not fled into Spanish territory to meet him on the Hickory Ground. Here he received their submission and here he imposed on them his terms of peace. His demands were so rigorousas to bring a gasp of astonishment even from the Americans, for he insisted on the cession of an L-shaped tract of land which included more than half the territory of the Creeks, thus forming a barrier between them and the Choctaws and Chickasaws on the west and the Spaniards in Florida.
Jackson now turned his face toward Nashville. He had ridden out of there an unpopular and almost unknown officer of militia. He returned to find himself a military hero, the stories of whose exploits were retailed in every settler’s cabin from one end of the frontier to the other. In recognition of his services, the President commissioned him a major-general in the regular army and gave him command of the Department of the South, with headquarters at Mobile. Our second war with England had now been dragging its tedious course along for nearly two years, marked by British successes on land and American victories on the sea. The air was filled with rumors of a great British armada which was on its way to attack New Orleans, and these solidified into fact when word reached Jackson that a portion of the British fleet had anchored in the harbor of Pensacola and proposed, in defiance of Spanish neutrality, to use that port as a base ofoperations against the United States. Pensacola was in Florida, and Florida was still owned by Spain, and Spain was professedly a neutral; but if the British could violate that neutrality, argued Jackson, why, so could the Americans. Without waiting for authority from Washington (and it was well that he did not, for the city had been burned by the British and the government had fled), Jackson crossed the Mobile River and invaded Spanish territory at the head of three thousand veterans. On November 6 he was at the walls of Pensacola. A messenger was sent to the Spanish governor under a flag of truce with a peremptory demand from Jackson that the fortress be turned over to the United States until such time as the Spanish were strong enough to maintain the neutrality of the port. The governor, emboldened by the fact that seven British war-ships were lying in the harbor, showed his defiance by firing upon the flag of truce. But he didn’t know the type of man that he was defying. Jackson was no more awed by the might of England or the majesty of Spain or the sacredness of neutral territory than he had been by the Indians’ “holy ground.” Instantly he ordered forward his storming parties. So sudden was his attack that the British ships had no time toup anchor and bring their guns to bear for the protection of the town. The Spanish soldiery fought well, however, and a sharp battle ensued in the streets, the batteries opening on the advancing Americans with solid shot and grape while a heavy fire of musketry was poured into them from houses and gardens. But the Spaniards were driven back everywhere by the fierceness of the American assault, whereupon the governor, seeing that further resistance was useless, sent a messenger to the American commander to inquire what terms he would grant him. “Nothing but unconditional surrender,” answered Jackson, and the haughty Spaniard had no alternative but to accept his terms. Slowly the flag of Spain, which had flaunted defiantly above the fort, sank down the staff and in its stead rose a flag of stripes and stars. The machinery of conquest, with Andrew Jackson at the crank, had pared off another slice of Florida.
Jackson’s capture of the fortifications having made the harbor untenable, the British blew up the Spanish forts at the Barrancas, which commanded the harbor entrance, and departed, whereupon Jackson evacuated the town. His work in Pensacola was finished. Eight weeks later (January 8, 1815) he won his immortal victoryat New Orleans, with his untrained frontiersmen and scanty resources meeting and annihilating the British regiments that had conquered Napoleon. At a single bound he leaped from the status of a backwoods soldier to one of the great leaders of his time.
But the victory at New Orleans and the treaty of peace with England did not mean the end of fighting for Jackson. There were still several odd jobs to be done. During the war a British colonel named Nicholls had been sent on a secret mission to Florida in an attempt to incite the Seminoles, the fugitive Creeks, and the runaway negroes who infested the northern part of the province to harass the borders of the United States. While in Florida he built a fort on the Appalachicola River, not far above its mouth and well within Spanish territory, and collected there a large store of arms and ammunition. When the war ended and Colonel Nicholls was recalled, he turned the fort over to the Seminoles in the hope that it would prove a thorn in the side of the United States. From the Seminoles the place passed into the hands of the negro refugees and quickly became a source of anxiety to the American military authorities on our southern border. But, though it was garrisoned by escaped slavesand was a constant menace to the peace of the frontier, the Americans were powerless—according to international law, at least—because it was built on Spanish soil. But when the matter was referred to Jackson he showed how much he cared for international law by writing to General Gaines that the “Negro Fort,” as it was called, “ought to be blown up, regardless of the ground on which it stands.” That was all the hint that Gaines needed, and in July, 1816, he ordered an expedition under Colonel Duncan Clinch to ascend the river and destroy the fort. As the flotilla approached, a boat’s crew which had been sent forward to reconnoitre was fired upon, whereupon the gunboats were warped up-stream until they were within range. The bombardment was of short duration, for scarcely had the gunboats opened fire before a red-hot shot struck the magazine of the fort, where eight hundred barrels of gunpowder were stored. In the explosion that followed, the fort vanished from the earth, and for some moments it fairly rained negroes—or parts of them. Of the three hundred and thirty-four inmates of the fort, two hundred and seventy were blown to kingdom come, and of the sixty-four left alive, all but three were so terribly injured that they died—which was just as well,perhaps, in view of what happened to two out of the three survivors. These, an Indian chief and Garçon, the negro commander, were handed over to some friendly Seminoles to be put to death in the ingenious Indian fashion in retaliation for the death by torture of one of the American sailors, who had been taken prisoner a few days before. From all accounts, the Seminoles performed their task well but slowly.
The destruction of the Negro Fort, though unimportant in itself, served to stir up the uneasiness and discontent which prevailed along the Florida border and which was shared in by Creeks, Seminoles, Spaniards, and Americans. By March, 1817, several thousand whites had settled on the rich lands that Jackson had taken from the Creeks, and the friction which quickly developed between the new owners and the old ones, now fugitives in Florida, resulted in a series of defiances and depredations. While relations with the Indians were thus strained almost to the breaking point there again sprang up the historic irritation against Spain, whom the American settlers accused, rightly or wrongly, of inciting the Indians against them. Meanwhile President Monroe was negotiating for the purchase of Florida, for he fully realized that therecould be no permanent peace along the border as long as that province remained in Spanish hands. Doubtful of his success, however, he took care to see that an army under Jackson was stationed within striking distance, for there is no doubt that the government, now that the war with England was over, was determined to take Florida by force if it could not be obtained by purchase. Nor could anything give Jackson keener satisfaction than the prospect of once more getting his hands on the rich prize which he had joyfully held for a brief moment in 1814. Indeed, he frankly expressed his attitude when he wrote to President Monroe: “Let it be signified to me, through any channel, that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.” In other words, if the government wished to seize the province but lacked the courage to take the responsibility, Jackson was ready to do the job himself.
But suddenly a new element was injected into the already complicated situation. The series of revolts against Spanish rule in South America had attracted thither European adventurers, freelances, and soldiers of fortune of many nationalities, and these, when the revolutionary businessgrew dull in other places, turned their eyes toward Florida. It had a fertile soil, marvellous vegetation, a healthful climate, a notoriously weak government, and, everything considered, seemed to have been made to order for the filibusters. The first to make the attempt to “free” Florida was a Scottish nobleman, Sir Gregor MacGregor. No more picturesque character ever swaggered across the pages of our history. He was a prototype of Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.” Resigning his commission in the British army, he went to Caracas in 1811 and offered his services to the Venezuelans in their struggle for independence. He became adjutant-general to Miranda and, upon the capture of that ill-fated leader, repeatedly distinguished himself in the renewed struggle under Bolivar. He led a handful of Venezuelans from Ocumare to Barcelona in one of the most brilliant and skilfully conducted retreats in history and, upon Venezuela achieving her independence, was publicly thanked for his services by President Bolivar, commissioned a general of division, and decorated with the Order of Libertadores. But an ineradicable love of adventure ran in his veins; so, when peace settled for a time on war-torn Venezuela MacGregor looked elsewhere for excitement. Floridawas still under the obnoxious rule of Spain, and Florida, he decided, needed to be freed. Early in 1817, therefore, he fitted out an expedition in Baltimore and descended upon Fernandina, which, as I have previously remarked, is built on the twenty-two-mile-long Amelia Island, off Florida’s upper right-hand corner. MacGregor declared that as soon as he achieved the independence of the province he intended to hand it over to the United States, which was certainly thoughtful and considerate, seeing how much the United States wanted it; but nobody seems to have believed him. His intentions were of small consequence, however, for a few months after he had seized the island and raised the green-cross flag, along came another adventurer, an Englishman named Hubbard, and drove him off. Disappointed in his Floridan ambitions, MacGregor re-entered the service of Venezuela, and in 1819, organizing an expedition in Jamaica, he eluded the vigilance of the British authorities and made a most daring descent upon Puerto Bello, which he captured after a desperate assault, though subsequently he was surprised by an overwhelming force of Spaniards and was forced to flee. In 1821 he quitted the service of Venezuela—then become a part of the Colombian Republic—and settledamong the Poyais Indians, a warlike tribe on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, where he obtained a grant of a tract of fertile land and, making himself ruler of the region, assumed the title of “his Highness the MacGregor, Cacique of Poyais.” He organized a government, established an army, encouraged commerce and agriculture, built roads and schools, cultivated plantations, and for nearly twenty years ruled in middle America as an independent and enlightened sovereign. But misfortune finally overtook him; Great Britain declared a protectorate over his little kingdom, which was not abrogated until 1905, and its late ruler retired to Caracas, where the Venezuelan Government granted him a pension and restored him to his rank of general of division, and where he died, generally respected, in the early forties.
Shortly after Hubbard had ejected MacGregor from Amelia Island, along came one of the latter’s friends and companions in arms, Commodore Louis de Aury, who, as I have related in “Adventurers All,” had himself been ousted from Galveston Island by Lafitte, and kicked out Hubbard. De Aury’s plan was to make Florida a free and independent republic, such as her sister provinces in South America had become. But it was not to be. The government at Washington, which had other plansfor Florida, now decided it was time to interfere, for it seemed probable that Florida might soon be sold to the United States, provided the spirit of revolution and independence which was rapidly stripping Spain of her colonial possessions left her Florida to sell. Nothing was further from the intention of the United States, therefore, than to let these South American adventurers get a foothold in the province she had so long had a covetous eye upon; so, in the autumn of 1817, General Gaines was ordered to march on Fernandina and eject De Aury, while a fleet under Commodore Henley went down the coast for the same purpose. Henley reached there first and successfully accomplished the ejection, and the green-cross flag of the filibusters came down for good and all.
About this time Indian depredations had recommenced along the Florida frontier, and in November, 1817, General Gaines despatched a detachment of troops to an Indian village called Fowltown, the headquarters of the hostile Seminoles and Creeks. The troops approached the town at dawn and were fired upon, the village was taken and burned, and the United States had another Indian war upon its hands. Jackson was immediately ordered to take command of the operations. He jumped at the chance, for wasthis not the very opportunity for which he had been longing and praying? The Indians caused him no concern, mind you; it was the Spaniards—and Florida—that he was after. Disregarding his instructions to raise his command from the militia of the border States, he recruited a volunteer force from the Tennesseeans who had served under him at the Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans and whom he could count on to follow him anywhere, and with these veterans at his back straightway crossed the Florida border. On the site of the Negro Fort he built and garrisoned another, which he called Fort Gadsden—all this in Spanish territory, mind you, though the United States was (officially, at least) at peace with Spain. Easily dispersing the few Seminoles who ventured to dispute his progress, he pushed southward to St. Marks (the port of Tallahassee), where a war party of Indians, he heard, had taken refuge. The fact that his information was incorrect and that there were no Indians in the town did not disconcert him in the least: he took the place, hauled down the Spanish colors, replaced them with the stars and stripes, and left an American garrison in occupation. Not only this, but he captured two Englishmen who had taken refuge in the town. One was a well-known trader namedAlexander Arbuthnot, who had had commercial dealings of one sort and another with the Indians; the other was a young officer of marines named Ambrister, a nephew of the governor of the Bahamas, who had been suspended from duty for a year for engaging in a duel and who had joined the Florida Indians out of a boyish love for adventure. Though captured on Spanish soil, Jackson ordered both men tried by court martial for inciting the Indians to rebellion. Both were sentenced to death. Ambrister died before a firing-party; Arbuthnot was hung from the yard-arm of one of his own ships. Needlessly drastic and unquestionably illegal as these executions were, they brought home to those who were plotting against the United States that Spanish territory could not protect them.
From St. Marks Jackson struck across country to Suwanee, which was the headquarters of the notorious Billy Bowlegs; but in the skirmish that ensued that chieftain and his followers escaped, though, by means of a ruse unworthy of a civilized commander, he captured two of the most celebrated of the Seminole chieftains, Francis and Himollimico. Seeing a vessel enter the harbor, the two chieftains, who had just returned from a visit to England, rowed outand asked to be afforded protection. They were courteously received, laid aside their weapons, and went below to have a drink with the commander, when they were seized, bound, and, upon protesting at this breach of hospitality, were informed that they were prisoners on an American gunboat which Jackson had despatched to patrol the coast in the hope of intercepting fugitives. The next day the two prisoners, by orders of Jackson, were summarily hung. By such ruthless methods as these did the grim backwoodsman, who well deserved the title of “Old Hickory,” which his soldiers bestowed upon him, impress on Indians and Spaniards alike the fact that those who opposed him need expect no mercy. He had reached Fort Gadsden on his return march when a protest against this unwarranted invasion of Spanish territory was sent him by the governor of Pensacola, the same place, you will remember, which he had captured three years before. Jackson, who always carried a chip on his shoulder and lived in hopes that some one would dare to knock it off, turned back on the instant, occupied Pensacola for the second time, captured the governor and his troops, deported them to Havana with a warning never to return, and left an American garrison in occupation. He regrettedafterward, as he wrote to a friend, that he had not carried the place by storm and hanged the governor out of hand.
In five months Jackson had broken the Indian power, established peace along the border, and to all intents and purposes added Florida to the Union. Though the Spanish minister at Washington (for after the fall of Napoleon Spain resumed the foreign relations he had so rudely interrupted) vigorously protested against this invasion of the territory of his sovereign, he nevertheless hastened—whether it was intended or not that his movements should be thus accelerated—to negotiate a treaty ceding Florida to the United States in consideration of our paying the claims held by American citizens against Spain to the amount of five million dollars. Though the historians dismiss the subject with the bald assertion that Florida was acquired by purchase—which, no doubt, is technically correct—I think you will agree with me that “conquest” is a more appropriate word and that its conqueror was the backwoods soldier Andrew Jackson. No wonder that the land he gave us yields so many oranges after having been fertilized with so much blood. No wonder that it has restored so many sick men after having swallowed up so many well ones.