A Brutal Reckoning
Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South
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The story of the pivotal struggle between the Creek Indians and an insatiable, young United States for control over the Deep South—from the acclaimed historian and prize-winning author of The Earth is Weeping
The Creek War is one of the most tragic episodes in American history, leading to the greatest loss of Native American life on what is now U.S. soil. What began as a vicious internal conflict among the Creek Indians metastasized like a cancer. The ensuing Creek War of 1813-1814 shattered Native American control of the Deep South and led to the infamous Trail of Tears, in which the government forcibly removed the southeastern Indians from their homeland. The war also gave Andrew Jackson his first combat leadership role, and his newfound popularity after defeating the Creeks would set him on the path to the White House.
In A Brutal Reckoning, Peter Cozzens vividly captures the young Jackson, describing a brilliant but harsh military commander with unbridled ambition, a taste for cruelty, and a fraught sense of honor and duty. Jackson would not have won the war without the help of Native American allies, yet he denied their role and even insisted on their displacement, together with all the Indians of the American South in the Trail of Tears.
A conflict involving not only white Americans and Native Americans, but also the British and the Spanish, the Creek War opened the Deep South to the Cotton Kingdom, setting the stage for the American Civil War yet to come. No other single Indian conflict had such significant impact on the fate of America—and A Brutal Reckoning is the definitive book on this forgotten chapter in our history.
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Cozzens (Tecumseh and the Prophet) concludes his trilogy on the dispossession of Native American lands with a fine-grained and often gruesome account of the 1813–1814 Creek War in present-day Alabama. After a vivid opening scene introducing Andrew Jackson as he recovered from his duel with Thomas Hart Benton, Cozzens details the historical and cultural context for the war, which pitted Jackson and other U.S. military leaders against the Upper Creeks. Sometime in the 18th century, Cozzens explains, the Creeks split into two affiliated but nearly autonomous groups: the Upper Creeks, who were further from Europeans in distance and culture, and the Lower Creeks, who were nearer to and partook more heavily of European trade. Tracing the origins of the conflict to a brutal raid on a white homestead near the Tennessee border in 1812, Cozzens details how it grew to involve England, France, Spain, and the Choctaw and Cherokee tribes. Recounting minor skirmishes and major battles, he viscerally describes the miserable conditions and lack of supplies that led to mutinous behavior among U.S. soldiers and draws conclusive links between Jackson's pivotal victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and his signing of the 1830 Indian Removal Act that inaugurated the Trail of Tears. It's a gut-wrenching account of a tragic chapter in American history.
