A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814

Afterword

Convention calls for authors of scholarly volumes to declare up front their intellectual debts and sources of emotional support. There are, I suppose, several good reasons this should be so. Family and friends surely deserve a prominent “thank you” for the encouragement they so sel®essly offer a writer, who in turn must invariably in some measure neglect them, no matter how regretfully , if the solitary task of writing is ever to result in a ¤nished book. And authors’ biases are often revealed by the professional company they keep, so acknowledgments fairly warn readers from the start. But the nature of this book, and how it came to be written, leads me in a different direction. As I researched and sought to unravel the complex ways the story of Fort Mims has in®uenced American history, I was surprised to discover at how many points my own life has intersected with this distant historical event. My earliest contact, albeit indirect, seems to me to have presaged an entire segment of my life. Ethel Morgan, my mother’s great-aunt, had grown up in Wayne County, Ohio, and married an Iowan, Roy Dunham, a teacher like herself . Early in the 1930s they began spending summers in Loxley, Alabama, and eventually, in 1952, bought a house in Fairhope, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. A group of Iowans had founded Fairhope in 1894 as an experimental “Single Tax Colony” based on the utopian precepts of Henry George, who considered private ownership of land the basis of social inequality. Individuals and families who “settled” the Fairhope colony built homes and made other improvements , which they owned, while the land remained community property. (The system effectively de®ated the value of adjacent privately held lands, which remained widely affordable in the Fairhope vicinity for a century, until the real estate boom of the 1990s.) Independent thinkers were attracted to Afterword A Personal Look Back, by Way of Acknowledgment idealistic Fairhope, which became—and remains—a haven for artists and writers . Ethel Morgan Dunham, by all accounts, was one such free spirit. Active at an early age in the suffrage movement, she shocked her staid Methodist family back in Ohio with letters describing nude sunbathing in her hedge-enclosed backyard at Loxley, but she won their approbation by her commitment to temperance , on which she would lecture long and hard at every opportunity. Her modes of self-expression included oil painting and poetry, for which she drew inspiration from the subtropical environs and romantic history of her adopted southern home. In her poem “Sanota,” published in 1939, she imagined the emotional impact of the battle at Fort Mims on Zachariah McGirth and his family. McGirth was downcast, desperate, and longed To die, when with provisions he returned To old Fort Mims, and felt that he was wronged By massacre through which the fort was burned; Felt that he had reared a scalping Indian boy (Rejoined into his tribe, an eagle ®edged For tender prey.) Ingratitude killed joy And then cast pain and fury double-edged. . . . But six months later there was cause for change Of mind, Sanota, ¤ghting hard, was killed At Horseshoe Bend. He could not then arrange The meeting that his grateful heart had willed; Yet, loved ones clasped McGirth, sobbed out the tale Of rescue by a brave who did not fail.1 I suspect Ethel’s limited successes as a published poet are attributable more to persistence than ability, but that is uncharitable of me. Although she died before I could know her, her letters to my mother show that she took a typically exuberant interest in my birth.2 As I type this now, at my home in Fairhope, a few blocks from the site of her now-vanished cottage on North Section Street, I cannot help but think that my great-great-aunt Ethel’s “pioneering discovery” of south Alabama and Fort Mims somehow, subconsciously, had a hand in my eventual retracing of her tracks and interests. Shortly after I turned two, I, along with much of my generation, was swept away to Frontierland when “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter”aired December 15, 1954, on the “Disneyland” television program. Forty million Americans saw a 214 / Afterword ®aming arrow consume Fort Mims in the opening scene. While I claim no expertise whatsoever in the academic discipline of American Studies, which reserves popular culture as its principal turf, I...