Red Eagle and the Wars With the Creek Indians of Alabama.. Eggleston George Cary
hatred was so violent that they could not restrain its expression; while they granted to Red Eagle the possession of courage and ability, they could not write of him without flying into a passion and heaping hard names upon his head.
One of them, in a grave treatise about the war, scolded in this way about him:
"Among the first who entered into the views of the British commissioners was the since celebrated Weatherford, with whom it may not be amiss to make the reader better acquainted at this time. Weatherford was born in the Creek nation. His father was an itinerant pedler, sordid, treacherous, and revengeful; his mother a full-blooded savage of the tribe of the Seminoles. He partook of the bad qualities of both his parents, and engrafted on the stock he inherited from others many that were peculiarly his own. With avarice, treachery, and a thirst for blood, he combines lust, gluttony, and a devotion to every species of criminal carousal."
That, certainly, is as pretty a bit of angry vituperation as one hears from the lips of the worst of scolds, and so wholly did the distinguished author of the book from which it is taken lose his temper, that he lost his discretion with it, and forgot that so coarse and brutal a fellow as he here declares Red Eagle to have been – a man so wholly given over to debauchery – is sure to show in his face, his person, and his intellectual operations the effects of his character, impulses, and habits. In the very next paragraph this writer tells us certain things about Red Eagle which forbid us to believe that he was a drunkard, a debased creature, a glutton, or a brute. He says:
"Fortune in her freaks sometimes gives to the most profligate an elevation of mind which she denies to men whose propensities are the most virtuous. On Weatherford she bestowed genius, eloquence, and courage. The first of these qualities enabled him to conceive great designs, the last to execute them; while eloquence, bold, impressive, and figurative, furnished him with a passport to the favor of his countrymen and followers. Silent and reserved, unless when excited by some great occasion, and superior to the weakness of rendering himself cheap by the frequency of his addresses, he delivered his opinions but seldom in council; but when he did so he was listened to with delight and approbation."
That does not read like an account of the parliamentary methods of a brutish man, degraded by vice and debauched with drunkenness and gluttony; it sounds rather like a description of the wise ways of some Webster or Clay. Drunken men with the gift of eloquent speech do not hoard it and use it in this adroit way. This is not all, however. Men who are given over to vice, gluttony, and drunkenness usually carry the marks of their excesses in their appearance and their ways of thinking; but our writer who has told us that Weatherford was such a man, tells us how he looked and acted, and what his ability was, in this wise:
"His judgment and eloquence had secured the respect of the old; his vices made him the idol of the young and the unprincipled. It is even doubted whether a civilized society could behold this monster without interest. In his person tall, straight, and well-proportioned; his eye black, lively, and penetrating, and indicative of courage and enterprise; his nose prominent, thin, and elegant in its formation; while all the features of his face, harmoniously arranged, speak an active and disciplined mind." A little further down the page this writer calls Weatherford "the key and corner-stone of the Creek confederacy," and characterizes him as "this extraordinary man."
Our purpose is not now to defend Red Eagle's memory or to extol his character, though there is good reason to remember him with honor for his courage in war and for his good faith in peace; and there are abundant proofs that the praise which the hostile writer whom we have quoted could not deny to the fallen chieftain, was far juster than the abuse he heaped upon him. We have made these extracts merely to show in what spirit of unfair prejudice all the contemporaneous accounts of Weatherford's life and deeds were written. It will be better to form our own opinions of the Creek warrior's character after we shall have reviewed the events of his life; and no one who so examines the facts, although they come to us only from his enemies, can fail to form a much higher opinion of the unfortunate man than that which the chroniclers of his day have offered to us ready-made.
The enmity and prejudice of which we have spoken operate still more strongly in another way to embarrass the biographer who seeks to learn details of Weatherford's life. Where the writers of his day have misrepresented his character or conduct, it is not difficult to discover the fact and to correct the misjudgment; but, unluckily, they too often neglected even to misrepresent him. Caring only for their own side and their own heroes, these historians, who were generally participants in the events they chronicled, took the utmost pains to tell us just where each body of American troops fought; who commanded them in the first, second, third, and so on to the tenth degree of subordinate rank; how many Americans and how many friendly Indians there were in each part of every field; how many of these were killed and wounded – every thing, in short, which they could find out or guess out about the details of their side of the fight, while the other side seemed to them unworthy of any thing more than the most general attention. They were so careless indeed of the Indian side of these affairs that it is in many cases impossible to discover from any of the accounts what chiefs commanded the Creek forces in important battles, or even what chiefs were present. In other cases this information is given to us by accident, as it were, not in the accounts of the battles, but by means of a casual reference in an account of something else. Thus one of the writers devotes many pages and a good deal of stilted rhetoric to his account of the Fort Mims massacre, a bloody affair, in which Weatherford won solely by reason of the fact that he was a better and more skilful officer than the American commander, manifesting indeed some of the best qualities of an able general; but with all this historian's minuteness of detail, he wholly forgets to mention the fact that Weatherford had anything to do with the matter. His neglect is not the result of any want of information, as is shown by the fact that, in writing of other things afterward, he incidentally mentions the Creek warrior as the leader of the Indians at Fort Mims.
To the carelessness of the contemporaneous writers, to whom alone we can at this day look for information upon detailed points of interest, must be added, as a cause of the meagreness of the record, their lack of opportunity. The Indians kept their own secrets. They were fighting to destroy the whites, not to win renown; and the Americans who fought them had little chance to hear news of any kind from the forces on the other side.
Notwithstanding this lack of detailed information respecting Red Eagle's life and deeds, however, we know with certainty that he was, as the writer quoted a few pages back said, the "key and corner-stone of the Creek confederacy," the commander of the Creek armies, the statesman who guided the Creek councils, and the general who planned and conducted the Creek campaigns. His was the master mind on the Indian side, as positively as Jackson's was on the side of the Americans; and therefore while there is an unfortunate lack of information of a strictly biographical nature concerning this remarkable man, it is still possible to write his life by writing an account of the Creek war. After all, it is the things a man does which make up his life; and the story of his deeds is his biography, whether or not it includes the dates of his birth and his death, or tells with precision when or how he did this or that.
Accordingly, instead of beginning this story of Red Eagle's life with a chapter about his birth and parentage, after the customary manner of grave biographers, and following his career incident by incident, confining the narrative to an account of his direct, personal share in each transaction, I shall write an account of the war he made, regarding the whole series of events as properly parts of one great affair which Red Eagle devised and executed.
To make such an account clearly intelligible, however, it will be necessary first to recount briefly the history of the Southern Indians, and to show who and what the Creeks were, what their condition was at the time of the war's beginning, and what they hoped to gain by their contest with the whites – which was not by any means a mere outbreak of savagery like some of the Indian troubles of our time, but rather a war deliberately undertaken with very definite purposes, after long consideration and no little getting ready.
Upon many points the best authorities are conflicting, partly because their works were written each with a special purpose and from a special point of view, and partly because of carelessness in the collection and weighing of facts; but it is still possible to arrive at the truth in all essential particulars, and to construct, out of the fragmentary materials at command, a consecutive account of the brilliant campaign of 1813-14, in