“No other Indian conflict in our nation’s history so changed the complexion of American society as the Creek War,” the author Peter Cozzens observes in his new book, A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South. It was, he notes, “the most pitiless clash between American Indians and whites in U.S. history.”
The Creek Confederacy’s loss ensured the end of their way of life. And the victory by U.S. forces, led by future president Andrew Jackson, gifted the United States with 22 million acres of land in Alabama and Georgia.
American policymakers at the dawn of the Republic confronted a security environment that is hard to imagine today. The United States as we now know it didn’t exist. The French, Spanish, and British had territorial and commercial holdings on the continent, with the latter two even possessing sizable military garrisons. By contrast, the United States didn’t possess a standing army and its new navy was a hodgepodge of ships. Many doubted whether the U.S., with its revolutionary form of government, would endure. Indeed, many of the European courts were betting otherwise.
As President, Thomas Jefferson singled out his greatest national security concern. “There is on the globe a single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” he wrote. “It is New Orleans.” The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 eased Jefferson’s concerns about foreign influence, but it didn’t eliminate them. Jefferson believed that America’s future lay in the West, but he also recognized the need to have “defense in depth” against European powers. As former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick observed in his book America in the World: “Security required settlement.” And that settlement was certain to be bloody.
The war began amongst the Creeks themselves.
The Creeks, Cozzens points out, “Lived in a land of abundance,” with vast territorial holdings that were, the American Indian agent Caleb Swan noted in 1791, “remarkably healthy.” The country, Swan wrote, “must become a most delectable part of the United States…and one day or other be the seat of manufacturers and commerce.”
The Creeks were aware that their lands were coveted by foreigners. Indeed, their own kingdom stood in what was the center of a struggle for empire between Great Britain, Spain and France, at one point comprising half of the present-day Deep South. They tried to play the three powers off one another.
Yet ultimately, the Creek policy of studied neutrality was doomed to fail. America was going to be conquered and settled, either by one of the European nations or by the settlers themselves.