"Remember Fort Mims:" Reinterpreting the Origins of the Creek War

Abstract

On August 30, 1813, Red Stick Creek warriors attacked Mims, a stockaded dwelling on the southwestern edge of the Creek Nation in what is now southwestern Alabama. They killed most of the soldiers from the Mississippi Territory and several male residents of nearby Tensaw who garrisoned the fort. The Fort Mims Massacre, as the attack came to be known, fulfilled the worst expectations of the citizens of Georgia and Mississippi Territory and triggered a United States invasion of Creek country. Scholars have interpreted this event as the catalyst for an epic struggle between the proponents of war and peace, conservatism and change, millennialists and secularists, nativists and accommodationists, and pivotal in the catastrophe of the Creek War. Placed in the broader context of the War of 1812 and the prophetic movement of the Shawnees, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, the attack on Mims seems to be merely opportunistic: the Red Sticks' chance to strike a blow against highly acculturated Creeks, intermarried whites, and the territorial militia. A closer look at the Tensaw residents who sought refuge at Mims, however, suggests that the Red Sticks chose their target carefully and that the American response to the obscured its real causes. Tensaw's origins separated it from core Creek values as well as from the traditional towns of the Creek Nation, and its development generated conflict long before the arrival of Tecumseh. Thus, the attack on Mims was primarily a punitive expedition against a few errant Tensaw Creeks who had become too closely associated with the interests of the United States and who had rejected a sole commercial association with the Spanish. By narrowing the analysis to this key community, the tensions within the Creek Nation as a whole become more palpable.1 Previous scholars either ignored Tensaw (at least until the incident at Mims), considered the settlers there to be non-Indian or fully acculturated metis, or focused on broader themes involving divisions among Creeks such as nativism and spiritual renewal, or accommodation and economic disparity. At one time, scholars tended to see Creeks in terms of Euro-American social and economic categories rather than focusing on what the Creeks considered important. Claudio Saunt provided the most recent interpretation of the massacre and argued that the economic Americanization of several Creek towns, including Tensaw, provoked the Red Stick attack because he interpreted the leaders of Tensaw as mestizos with American cultural values. Saunt also argued that they had little interest in preserving Creek autonomy. Frank L. Owsley Jr. acknowledged the involvement of half-breeds in the attack on Mims, as did Saunt, Joel Martin, and Gregory Dowd, but none has recognized the divisions within Tensaw. Martin dismissed Tensaw Creeks as wealthy ... river bottom metis who sold out, targets of the ire of conservative Red Sticks. Dowd argued that the Creek Civil War erupted out of disputes between nativists and accomodationists.2 Without a close look at the behavior of individuals in a single community, however, it is difficult to define who is a nativist and who is an accomodationist. Divisions certainly played a role in fomenting the Creek Civil War, but Creek extended families living within Creek communities aligned against one another over economic and political change as well as religion. By couching their arguments in tribal terms, none of these historians have understood the dimension of division on the level of community. By looking closely at Creek matrilineal kinship, recognizing that several Tensaw men took part in the Red Stick insurgency, and acknowledging the almost universal sympathy Tensaw women had for the Red Sticks, the motivations for the attack on Mims become more clear. The settlement of Tensaw originated in the commercial frenzy of the eighteenth-century deerskin trade with British Carolina. …