Forging a Cherokee-American Alliance in the Creek War: From Creation to Betrayal by Susan M. Abram (review)

At the outset of her work, Susan M. Abram laments that historians have never fully appreciated the role that Cherokee soldiers played in Andrew Jackson's victory over the nativist Red Stick insurgents in the Creek War of 1813–1814. She points out that well over six hundred Cherokee men fought alongside their American allies, and historians need to place them "in the center of the action" (p. 4). Cherokee soldiers fought with distinction at the battles of Tallushatchee, Talladega, and Horseshoe Bend, where many of them swam across the Tallapoosa River to secure canoes and engage the rear of the Red Stick army, making a frontal assault possible for the rest of Jackson's army. The American victory, Abram argues, "profoundly depended on many of the Cherokee mounted warriors as guides and translators" as well as on food and ammunition from Cherokee stores (p. 74).

The United States did not reward the Cherokees for their contributions in kind. Rather, Jackson imposed a draconian peace on the entire Creek Nation (not just the Red Sticks) that involved the seizure of a parcel that included 2.2 million acres of disputed Creek/Cherokee territory. After the war, squatters and marauding hoods inundated the land, while Jackson and other southern politicians began calling for the federal government to relocate southern Natives to the West.

A class of young Cherokee "warrior-headmen," who had ironically rejected the overtures of Tecumseh and the nativist prophets and forged the American alliance, felt betrayed by Jackson's coercion and gradually became the leaders of the opposition to removal (p. 102). This military class, which included future national leaders and rivals such as John Ross and Major Ridge, developed an appreciation for republican government during the war and subsequently moved their people toward the construction of a centralized Cherokee state. Abram argues that these men, who embraced "American civilization policy" and the market economy, "represented a tribal 'communitism' or mass movement" designed "to protect cultural identity and tribal sovereignty" (pp. 1, 45). When they tried to fend off the pressures to remove, veterans of the Creek War often reminded U.S. officials of the sacrifices they and their brothers had made at Horseshoe Bend.

Abram also posits that Cherokee men adopted new motivations for war in the late eighteenth century. Before the Chickamauga uprising, Cherokee men fought to achieve social distinction, affirm their masculinity, and avenge casualties. The Chickamauga conflict turned war into an effort to defend territory and preserve Cherokee men's autonomy. During the Creek War, the author suggests, Cherokee soldiers fought for a new reason: "to earn Americans' respect and to prove their worth and value as partners in this Cherokee-American alliance" (p. 101). Interestingly, Cherokee warriors retained some of their old patterns even as they fought for new reasons. For instance, during the Creek War the Cherokee troops divided into seven companies, "a traditionally sacred number" to their people (p. 59).

The narrative text of this book only runs 111 pages; the remainder of the work, some 57 pages, is an appendix that lists the names of the Cherokees who fought in the Creek conflict along with their respective companies, engagements, and injuries. Yet Abram does not merely recite military engagements; she also makes provocative arguments about Cherokee social and political history that challenge generally accepted wisdom. Rather than concentrating on the generational or class divisions that other historians have used to explain factionalism among nineteenth-century Cherokees, for example, Abram calls attention to the experiences of the warrior-headmen and the impact of war on the competing visions of the future they developed for their people. Consequently, Abram's work provides a perspective that will supplement Joel W. Martin's Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees' Struggle for a New World (Boston, 1991), Gregory Evans Dowd's A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian...