The Federal Road Through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Alabama, 1806–1836

THE FEDERAL ROAD

through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Alabama, 1806–1836

THE FEDERAL ROAD

through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Alabama, 1806–1836

HENRY DELEON SOUTHERLAND JR., AND JERRY ELIJAH BROWN

MAPS BY CHARLES JEFFERSON HIERS

Sponsored by the Historic Chattahoochee Commission

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 1989

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Southerland, Henry deLeon, 1911–

Federal Road through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Alabama Henry deLeon Southerland, Jr., and Jerry Elijah Brown: maps by Charles Jefferson Hiers.

p. cm.

Sponsored by the Historic Chattahoochee Commission.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8173-0518-1 ISBN 978-0-8173-0443-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Federal Road (Ala. and Ga.)—History. 2. Alabama—History—1819–1950. 3. Georgia—History—1175–1865. 4. Creek Indians—History. 5. Indians of North America—Alabama—History. 6. Indians of North America—Georgia—History. I. Brown, Jerry Elijah, 1945– II. Title.

F326.S73  1989

975.8—dc19     88-35698

CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8835-5 (electronic)

To Louise Harris Southerland

and to the Memory

of John M. Fletcher of Hallewokee Farm

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: But for the Federal Road . . . 

1. The National Perspective

2. Stayed Couriers

3. The War Road

4. Almost Impassable

5. Passing Strangers

6. Sojourners and Statehood

7. Two Ghosts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

Benjamin Hawkins, Indian Agent

Passport through the Creek Nation

Sam Dale and the Canoe Fight

Gen. John Floyd

Maj. Joel Crawford

Stagecoach Advertisements

An American Stagecoach

Peggy Dow's Memoirs

Lucas's Tavern before Removal

Robbery on the Federal Road

Rolling Hogshead of Early Settler

Alabama Territorial Road Work Act

William Harris Crawford

William Wyatt Bibb and Israel Pickens

George M. Troup

William McIntosh and Chief Menawa

MAPS

Washington–New Orleans Routes, 1806

The Federal Horse Path, 1806–1811

The Military Road, 1813–1814

The Travelers' Road, 1815–1836

Through the Creek Nation, 1832

Principal Lines prior to Statehood, 1798–1819

Creek Cessions, 1805–1832 128

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HISTORIES OF ALABAMA are replete with references to the Federal Road, but except for an unpublished thesis written in 1936 by Mary Ida Chase at Birmingham-Southern College (dealing with only the Alabama portion of the road), a documented history drawn from original sources does not exist. This book began as a master's thesis at Samford University in 1983 and has been extended with joint authorship to a larger exploration of the topic.

The authors are indebted to many who have gone before, particularly to Peter A. Brannon, who wrote widely and well of Alabama's formative period, and to Fletcher Hale, a topographical draftsman who traced the exact route of the Federal Road by studying aerial photographs. Special gratitude is due to the late Dr. James Lewis Treadway, who collected and shared much data on the Federal Road.

Acknowledgment to scholars, in the notes and bibliography, seems too small a way to express appreciation. Special acknowledgment is made to Joseph Hobson Harrison, Jr., Bert Hitchcock, and Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr., professors at Auburn University, for their thorough scholarship and their helpful comments.

The gratitude of those who have been delivered from ignorance, error, and sometimes desperation by kindly stewards of knowledge is extended to Miriam C. Jones, of the Alabama Department of Archives and History; Mary Bess Paluzzi and Yvonne Crumpler, of the Birmingham Public Library; Elizabeth Wells and Shirley Hutchens, of the Samford University Library; Joyce H. Lamont, of the University of Alabama Library; Mary Ann Neeley, of Old Alabama Town, formerly the Old North Hull Street Historic District in Montgomery; Glenn Anderson, Gene Geiger, Barbara Bishop, and Marilyn Thomas, of the Ralph Brown Draughon Library at Auburn University; and Francis Bouilliant-Linet and William M. Russell, Jr., of Macon County, Alabama.

Leah Atkins, formerly of Samford University and now the director of the Auburn University Center for the Arts and Humanities, and Douglas Clare Purcell, executive director of the Historic Chattahoochee Commission, have been faithful shepherds of this work.

Special thanks also are expressed to two whose hands brought words to the page—to Elsie Reynolds, of the Auburn University Journalism Department, for creating a first draft from near-indecipherable writing, and to Bettye Campbell, for expeditious word processing that produced the finished work. Charles Jefferson Hiers studied our sources, explored the terrain of the Federal Road himself, and read our manuscript before drawing and lettering the maps; he was ably assisted in final preparations by Heather Timmons, graphic artist. Thanks are due to Craig Noll, our able copyeditor, for setting the manuscript on its true course, to Wendy Haught for proofreading, and to Jay Lamar for preparing the index. Serlester Williams's help with other projects indirectly expedited the completion of this book.

Finally, the authors express sincere appreciation to their respective families: to Louise Southerland and the Southerlands' daughter Carolyn Long for their help, encouragement, and understanding; and to Libby Brown and the Browns' daughters, Brooks and Lindsay, for patiently abiding scattered papers, strange mumblings, and a typewriter welcoming the dawn.

Henry deLeon Southerland, Jr.

Birmingham, Alabama

Jerry Elijah Brown

Auburn University, Alabama

INTRODUCTION

But for the Federal Road . . . 

IN 1806, A PATH FOR THE HORSES OF POST RIDERS was opened from middle Georgia to lower Alabama, through Indian country in the section of the United States once called the Old Southwest. Five years later the mail path was widened and rerouted over much of its length to create a military lane for the movement of troops, supply wagons, and ordnance. Instantly, use transcended intention: the road built for soldiers, who would confront the Creeks before engaging the British, became a major pioneer highway, an artery for all travel. Now, after more than 175 years, during which time the road has virtually vanished into the landscape, we can understand how it has meandered into history; we can recognize it as a source and a solution of conflicts, a factor in the location and growth of cities, a consideration in decisions civil and military, and a contributor to local, state, and national identities. Now we can see that one road as more important than it ever appeared in its own time, when it was merely a track, muddy or sandy, through forests and swamps; when, as the official highway, it afforded pioneers the strength of numbers and the refuge of forts and inns.

Although the insight now possible into that Federal Road approaches epiphany, it is not unique with respect to rivers and roads. When T. S. Eliot saw the full influence of the Mississippi on Huckleberry Finn—on the book, the boy, and the writer, as well as on the country—he called the river a strong brown god; similarly, twentieth-century Americans who made their escape to the West knew that, when U.S. Route 66 was replaced by the interstate highway system, more had disappeared than cracked pavement, Burma Shave signs, and lonely diners.

Though the sense that a road may be more than a route for travel or a conduit for commerce comes readily, it is difficult to specify particular contributions. Because a road is not a human character and because it may appear simply as part of the scenery, wandering through the events that occur on or around it, we hold back from arguing that even a prominent road is the sine qua non of a major historical change; none but the naive are likely to be convinced. One may suggest, however, without forcing the thesis, that such a thoroughfare was the Federal Road, sometimes called the Old Federal Road. It was built in 1811 from west-to-east, from Fort Stoddert, near Mount Vernon, on the Mobile River, to Fort Wilkinson, near Milledgeville, on the Oconee, then the capital of Georgia. From Fort Stoddert to the Chattahoochee, across present-day Alabama, the Federal Road coincided with the post riders' horse path that had come down from Athens, Georgia, to make the New Orleans connection in 1806. Where the horse path had turned north, at the falls where Columbus would be located, the Federal Road continued east, to areas where soldiers could be recruited and supplies procured. There, too, in Georgia and the Carolinas were waiting the Americans eager to settle in the fertile new lands to the west.

Started as a post route during the first administration of Thomas Jefferson and fulfilling its usefulness as a military road near the end of the presidency of Andrew Jackson (who made and maintained his reputation by suppressing Indians in its proximity), the Federal Road has been so central that no complete history of the southeastern United States can be written without a mention of it. In 1927, Peter A. Brannon, a historian to whose spadework this study owes a considerable debt, agreed with a nineteenth-century counterpart who compared it to the Appian Way.¹ But for the Federal Road with its forts, Peter Joseph Hamilton had declaimed in 1898, there had been no Alabama as we know it.² Over this route passed post riders for remote New Orleans, militiamen to reinforce forts, stagecoaches bearing European travelers and touring theatrical companies, Aaron Burr under arrest, freight wagons, the maverick evangelist Lorenzo Dow and Peggy (his sensible wife), the horses of highwaymen, the Marquis de Lafayette in a grand entourage, Creeks taking a last look at what had been their lands, and, of course, thousands of pioneers seeking a fresh start. The chances are good that all who trace their ancestry to anywhere in Alabama south of the Tennessee Valley have a forebear who came over the Federal Road. During its period of maximum use, when Alabama fever was epidemic in the Carolinas and Georgia, the population of the territory (later, the state) increased by over half a million.

If the road has been so important, why is this book, published about 150 years after its demise, the first full study of it? One simple reason is that the story of the road has not been assembled; details of the conception and construction, which might seem interesting mainly to historians of civil engineering, have been strewn piecemeal in hundreds of government documents, articles and books, and private letters. Even now, we know too little of the day-to-day work involved in cutting the road, building the causeways, or establishing the ferries. The single most important reason for the absence of a book devoted solely to the road is the overwhelming presence of other subjects of such magnitude that they have obscured the story of why this road came to be, where it was located, and how it has figured in sectional development. To be sure, other stories have been more spectacular: the movements of the white traders, the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson's career, the Creek and Seminole wars, and the social and political issues pointing to the Civil War. Although a history of the Federal Road cannot be written without retelling some familiar stories (occasionally with new information), this work assumes that they are but bright beads concealing the string that joins them.

Naturally a study that proposes to isolate one element from the complex of national, regional, and state histories must steer between Scylla and Charybdis—avoiding, on the one side, the tendency to focus too narrowly and, on the other, the temptation to veer into digressions. Once upon a time historians could navigate past these perils simply by adding the phrase incidentally of after their main titles. (The best-known example is probably Albert James Pickett's History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi from the Earliest Period.) This history of the Federal Road is incidentally of the territory and the states it influenced, with more attention paid to Alabama and to the courageous but doomed natives whose last days in the southern United States were synchronous with the appearance and disappearance of the Federal Road.

To write about these people, the places they inhabited, and the streams they lived by is to discover how little we know and are likely to know. If it was not easy for the white pioneers to understand how the world looked to the Indians, it is only slightly less difficult now that the races are no longer at war. In the latter part of the twentieth century, we can at least empathize with the Indians' concept of stewardship of the land; the savaging of wildlife, streams, and forests, only recently an issue with us, was recognized immediately by the Indians as alien and destructive. Not directly threatened by death at the hands of the Indians, we, the de facto heirs of their land, are in a position to give a fairer assessment than our ancestors could have, a privilege that is forfeited only when sympathy for the underdog lapses into sentimentality.

What we can see now, maybe more clearly than ever, is how protracted and invasive the process of transition was. Intermarriages of whites and Indians, acceptance of the whites' mode of dress and conduct, and efforts to make Indians into farmers and craftsmen all point to the changing of ways. Though it may seem less significant, the switching over of names was a more critical signal, an indication that conceptions of man and the role of nature were changing. Unfortunately, this important point is easily lost on students struggling with the welter of alternative spellings and pronunciations that have resulted from Americans' efforts to record Creek speech. (This book uses modern spellings for names and places and standardizes punctuation and capitalization, except in those instances when the original provides a glimmer of the writer's individuality or some sharp insight into the times.) Dual Indian and English names reveal how close and how distant the red and white worlds were. As every school-child used to know, William Weatherford, the Creek leader who put his horse off a bluff into the Alabama River to escape death and who was so honorable that Andrew Jackson granted him a pardon, was also called Red Eagle. Few have occasion to know that Creek names, in and out of translation, were also used. In some official correspondence, Big Warrior signed his Creek name Tustenugge Thlucco, followed by the initials of the English name in parentheses. Alexander Cornells, a member of an extended family of mixed bloods, was also Chief Oche Haujo; but William McIntosh, both a Creek chief and an American general, usually went by the name of his Scots ancestors. Many whites also had Indian names; the raconteur-historian Thomas S. Woodward said he was called Chulatarle Emathla. Streams everywhere bear euphonious Indian names (Chattahoochee, Cubahatchee) or names given to honor settlers or describe uses (Milly's, Line). In these small particulars is revealed the true course of transition.

Looking larger to understand how the Federal Road became a character in national development, one may discover an array of motives for its existence. Although the horse path from Georgia to Alabama was opened as one link in the mail route between Washington City and New Orleans, it penetrated the territory of the Muscogees—actually a confederation of tribes and clans called Creeks by the white men, who saw their villages along the watercourses—and stimulated hostilities. As a military road, the passage encouraged exploitation and made expulsion inevitable. Although the stated intent of the horse path or the road was not to remove the Creeks, the passage forced a social, military, and diplomatic confrontation with these fierce, proud people. Their final thirty years in the South were, to say the least, anguishing. As their land was being crossed by the Federal Road, they were crossed and double-crossed by the government and by unscrupulous white men and betrayed, some felt, by their own kind.

It is tempting to speculate on the motives of United States officials. Did they realize that a war with the Creeks would be a likely consequence of the road building? Obviously the more far-sighted were aware of what the intrusion would bring to the wilderness that was wedged between white-dominated sections of the lower South. In his third annual message to Congress, delivered in 1803, Jefferson defined, perhaps unintentionally, the irreconcilable forces. He referred to the ulterior measures which may be necessary for the immediate occupation and temporary government of the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, and the strategy he outlined was the same his administration was following in the Mississippi Territory, created in 1798. The ulterior measures were necessary for confirming to the Indian inhabitants their occupancy and self-government, establishing friendly and commercial relations with them, and for ascertaining the geography of the country acquired.³ Even as Jefferson was speaking, Georgia and South Carolina were making claims to western lands. With such a manifestly contradictory mission—believing that Indian autonomy could be confirmed while their lands were being examined for later use—the country was set on a course that would subdue one people to make room for another.

It is also tempting to see parallels between that earlier time and our own. In extending the authority of the presidency beyond the limits set in the Constitution, Jefferson not only purchased a vast tract of land, he also left a precedent for later chief executives. Andrew Jackson effectively dealt with guerrillas and terrorists, even if his Draconian tactics now offend some sensibilities. Since the construction and implementation of the Federal Road were exercises in the use of raw power, our sense of justice is engaged as we review the consequences. Only students wearing star-spangled blindfolds can ignore the brutality that made the section safe for white travel and settlement—or pretend that the ultimate price was not paid by the Creeks. The heightened consciousness of the nation, to no one's surprise, was late in rising. In fact, the status of the black race has occupied the nation far more than have the injustices committed against the Indians.

Along with the negative moral judgments, circumspection requires that the positive results also be considered. The action started by Jefferson in response to the commonweal and completed by Jackson yielded a unified section of the country, a South that by the late 1830s was emerging from an Old Southwest and becoming an important part of the country's economy and politics. To study the changes wrought by the Federal Road is to understand the formation and the transformation of a section of the United States.

And yet the Federal Road is more than a symbol for the metamorphosis of a single geographic region. Begun in an age when travel and overland communication were synonymous, when no messages, no news, and no military dispatches moved except by horse or foot, the road lasted until rails were being laid across the swamps and ridges, steamboats were plying the Chattahoochee and the Alabama, and telegraph poles were being set in the rights-of-way. A modern world of communications options, one of them electronic even then, was in the cradle. What was happening along and to the Federal Road provides a dramatic illustration of the country's direction.

As alternate routes and alternative communications became available, the Federal Road became less central. No longer needed as the single passage through the Creek Nation, it did not become the spine of a twentieth-century infrastructure—a network of roads, communications, and governmental functions—and gradually it faded. Today only a few remnants remain, familiar for the most part only to local historians. Over most of its length the road is obliterated, and the ruts cut by the wagon wheels of the pioneers are returned to a landscape no longer virginal and haunting, with streams decidedly less clear. To get some inkling of the world implied in the few ruins still visible involves a delving into the facts of how the road was built and maintained and how it affected and was affected by the people who passed over it. Also needed, as always in a pleasurable study of history, is the exercising of an informed imagination. If this study succeeds, the Federal Road will be regarded as a living part of our past, and an illumination of its brief life will help present-day inhabitants appreciate how we came to where we are.

1

THE NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

BY 1803, THOMAS JEFFERSON'S OPINION on the subject of federal post roads had taken a dramatic turn. Seven years earlier, while serving as George Washington's secretary of state, he had seen such projects as a source of patronage that would open a bottomless abyss for public money.¹ Although Jefferson had a point, the fiscal conservatism of the moment apparently blinded him to a lesson in his own experience. During