The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier

9. The War Revives in New Alabama

335 The months of peace following the federal operation against the Lower Creeks, coupled with the removal of so many Indians during the fall of 1836, stimulated a new rush of people into New Alabama. Many of these people were returning settlers, those who could afford to rebuild destroyed homes, replace stolen property, and start afresh. However, many more of the settlers were new arrivals who purchased property from the land companies or from earlier residents. In some cases, the original settlers sold because they could not afford to return to Alabama, but others sold because the new immigration drove up land prices. These last individuals made a profit by selling their farms and plantations and used the money to finance new starts for themselves in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, or Arkansas. They moved west along with the Indians and became part of the mass of migrants who, in the years prior to the Civil War, occupied and developed the South as a distinctive agricultural region within the world system.1 Newspapers promoted the new immigration into New Alabama by praising the potential productivity of the country and advertising the towns of Montgomery, Wetumpka, Columbus, and Irwinton as ideal places for the marketing and shipment of cotton and other agricultural products. In turn, these towns began to grow as never before, owing to a new influx of merchants and others coming to profit in a developing country. The growth of Irwinton was the most dramatic. 9. The War Revives in New Alabama the war revives in new alabama 336 During the late months of 1836 and early 1837, a number of wealthy cotton planters from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Old Alabama moved in to set up operations on the fertile lands bordering Hatchechubbee, Cowikee, and Barbour creeks. Some of these planters, however, chose to live in Irwinton and built fine homes there. At the same time, brick stores began to appear along the streets near the waterfront. In addition , the Alabama Assembly granted charters for the establishment of male and female academies in the town, and the state of Georgia issued a permit to the Irwinton Bridge Company to build a structure across the Chattahoochee. Another company constructed an expensive racetrack for the town, and W. G. M. Davis started the community’s first newspaper, a weekly, the Irwinton Herald. Thus, what had been a little frontier outpost on the Chattahoochee began to take on the trappings of an aristocratic cotton port, a place that would produce in time more than its share of Alabama governors and other wealthy and influential people.2 Surely the citizens of the New Alabama counties were optimistic about their future, but they still had an Indian problem. They believed far too many Creeks remained in the country. Some of them had fled to the Chickasaws in Mississippi; who knew how many had succeeded in making their way into Florida to join the Seminoles; a few still lived in the swamps of southwestern Georgia; several families of Indians remained at various places in Coosa, Tallapoosa, Benton, and Cherokee counties. The Creeks in these last two counties were part of a group seeking refuge in the Cherokee Nation, and while local settlers seldom saw them, they found constant signs of these fugitives in their corn and potato fields. The state of Alabama kept a couple of volunteer companies in service to protect settlers from these Creeks and to compel their emigration. Meanwhile, Gen. John Wool and the federal removal agents continued their efforts to extract from the country the even larger body of Creeks living deeper within the confines of the Cherokee domain. While Wool and his men had by the end of 1836 succeeded in removing about 1,500 individuals of this group, perhaps as many as 3,000 remained. Possibly a third of these people lived in “the wild and mountainous track of country extending from near New the war revives in new alabama 337 Echota and Coosawatie to the neighborhood of the Valley town in North Carolina,” and had become so well integrated into Cherokee society that Wool feared they could not be extracted by force without causing violence to the Cherokees. In fact, he protested to the War Department that some Creeks had lived in the Cherokee country for twenty years and were so connected to their hosts by blood and marriage that they should “not...