Fort Mims massacre

On August 30, 1813, violence engulfed a fortified homestead lying 35-40 miles north of Mobile, Alabama, in an episode remembered as the Fort Mims massacre, one of the bloodier moments of the Creek War. A sizable body of Creek Indians from the Red Sticks faction, led by Peter McQueen and William Weatherford, overwhelmed the site and broke the militia force defending it.

Once inside, the Red Sticks carried out the slaughter, cutting down nearly everyone left among the mixed Creek residents, white settlers, and militia members sheltering there. Before withdrawing, they seized close to 100 enslaved African Americans as prisoners. The outpost itself had been a modest one, made up of a blockhouse and a stockade wall enclosing the home and outbuildings belonging to settler Samuel Mims.

Background

The Creek Nation found itself splintering internally as the War of 1812 unfolded. One faction, the nativist Red Sticks, wished to hold fast to older ways and resisted further concessions to white settlement. Others among the Creek, generally those with closer commercial and social ties to whites, leaned toward absorbing European-American customs into their own. The Upper Towns Red Sticks rejected both selling land to settlers and the Lower Towns' drift toward assimilation.

Their name derived from a red-painted war club they carried, a traditional emblem used to declare war among the Creek. By the summer of 1813, this internal rift had exploded into outright civil conflict. Red Stick warriors targeted the leaders who supported cooperation with whites. Within the Upper Towns, they carried out a deliberate campaign of killing livestock, animals largely owned by those who had prospered through European-influenced ways of life. Frontier settlers, lacking insight into the roots of this Creek conflict, grew fearful as hostilities mounted, and many sought safety within forts and blockhouses, Fort Mims among them, even as state militias sent additional troops toward the frontier.

Word reached American informants that a group of Red Sticks led by Peter McQueen had traveled to Spanish-held Pensacola seeking provisions, supplies, and weapons. Mateo González Manrique, recently installed as Spanish governor, approved giving the Creek delegation 45 barrels of corn and flour, along with blankets, ribbons, scissors, razors, several head of cattle, 1000 pounds of gunpowder, and a matching quantity of lead shot and bird shot.

Once news of this Creek supply train reached Colonel Caller, he joined forces with Major Daniel Beasley of the Mississippi Volunteers to organize a mounted expedition, six companies strong, consisting of 150 white militia riflemen and 30 Tensaw fighters under Captain Dixon Bailey, with orders to intercept the group. James Caller, sometimes recorded as Call or Cole, struck the Red Sticks during their midday meal in what became known as the Battle of Burnt Corn in July 1813. As American troops turned to plundering the captured supplies, the Creek warriors rallied and pushed them back.

By August 1813, the assault on Fort Mims was under the command of Red Stick leaders Peter McQueen and Red Eagle, also known as Weatherford. Close to a thousand warriors, drawn from thirteen Creek towns among the Alabama, Tallapoosa, and lower Abeka groups, assembled where Flat Creek met the lower Alabama River.

Meanwhile, mixed-blood Creek people from Tensaw, who had left the Upper Towns with the Creek National Council's blessing, sought shelter alongside white settlers inside the walls of Fort Mims. Roughly 517 individuals occupied the fort, among them about 265 militiamen bearing arms. The fort itself stood some 35 to 45 miles north of Mobile, situated on the Alabama River's eastern bank.

On August 21, 1813, a Choctaw messenger brought word to Fort Easley that a force exceeding 400 Red Stick warriors intended to strike there before moving on to Fort Madison. This intelligence made its way to General Ferdinand Claiborne, stationed at St. Stephens, prompting him to dispatch additional troops to Fort Easley. It is said that Claiborne judged Major Daniel Beasley, commanding Fort Mims, capable of withstanding any assault, and considered Fort Easley to be facing the more urgent threat.

Aftermath

Panic swept across the southeastern frontier once word of the Red Sticks' triumph at Fort Mims got out. Settlers called on the government to intervene even as many simply ran from the region entirely. Within weeks of the fighting, several thousand people, roughly half of everyone living in the Tensaw and Tombigbee districts, abandoned their homes and made for Mobile. That town, with only 500 residents of its own, found itself overwhelmed trying to accommodate the newcomers. Few victories by Native Americans matched what the Red Sticks had accomplished here. Yet the killing also signaled a turning point: what had been an internal conflict among the Creek, or Muskogee, people now became open warfare between the United States and the Red Stick fighters of the Upper Creek.

Since federal forces were mostly tied down fighting the War of 1812 along the northern front, it fell to Tennessee, Georgia, and the Mississippi Territory to call up their own militias and march against the Upper Creek towns that had backed the Red Stick cause. Following a series of engagements, Major General Andrew Jackson took command of these combined state forces. With Cherokee warriors fighting alongside him, he crushed the Red Sticks faction of the Creek at Horseshoe Bend, bringing the Creek War to a close.

Today the Alabama Historical Commission oversees the Fort Mims site, which earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places on September 14, 1972.

Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind references the Fort Mims massacre as well. A minor character in the book, Grandma Fontaine, recounts to Scarlett, the story's protagonist, how she watched her whole family die during the Creek uprising that followed the massacre. She offers this as a warning, insisting that a woman should never face the very worst life can bring her, because once she has, fear no longer holds any power over her.