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The British had not learned from the Braddock defeat in 1755, repeated by Burgoyne in 1777, and later by Pakenham in 1815, They continued the style of fighting employed in Europe, advancing openly in drill formation, armed with outmoded smooth bore muskets.
The British were simply unequal to the unorthodox style of frontier fighting; they were no match for the frontier militia and the ?long rifle? and finally they withdrew from the Carolinas and Georgia to Yorkstown and eventual surrender.
THE POST-REVOLUTION MIGRATIONS
The surrender of Cornwallis was in 1781. The peace treaty was concluded in 1782. The boundaries of our new nation, the United States, were the territory of the 13 colonies and the lands between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River.
And what was not won from the British by war was later purchased from France and Spain and otherwise acquired from Mexico.
Thus the virgin wilderness finally was opened to the ax and the plow of the settler ? but with the continued Indian menace, as the Indians were led to believe by the British that the loss of the Revolution was a mere passing episode and that British control would be regained in due course.
Kin, neighbors and friends in the Carolinas, now fanned out in great migrations to Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Among those who were prominent in the post-Revolution era were Andrew Jackson, Daniel Boone, Morgan and William Bryant, James Knox Polk, William Carroll, Thomas Hart Benton, John Coffee, Elijah Clarke, and Harmon Runnels.
WAR OF 1812
Our country?s declaration of war against the British in 1812 found my wife?s ancestors on the frontiers of Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi.
The Mississippi militia, under General Ferdinand Gaines, bore the brunt of the fighting in the Mississippi Territory and the Gulf area during the critical 1813-14 period. Constantly harassed by the marauding Creeks, armed and incited by the British and Spanish, the militia was required to remain on defensive by Federal authority who vainly hoped that the Creeks might be conciliated.
A fortunate circumstance, though, was the maintenance of peaceful relations with the Choctaws in Mississippi, permitting the militia to give undivided attention to the Creeks in Alabama.
Following the horrible Fort Mims massacre in late 1813, the Mississippi militia took the offensive on its own initiative and pursued Weatherford and his followers through the trackless forests to the presumed inaccessible Holy City of the Creeks. A successful surprise attack was made on December 29, 1813. Many Creeks were killed and the survivors forced to flee. The noted Creek leader, Weatherford, escaped by making his famed horseback leap from a high bluff to the Alabama River.
It was at the battle of Horseshoe Bend the following spring that General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia completely destroyed the remaining Creek forces, thus ending the Indian menace and paving the way for his later removal to the West.
My wife?s ancestors in the Tennessee militia also were comrades-in-arms of Sam Houston and Davy Crockett.
Later the Tennessee and Mississippi militia were to combine with militia from other Southern states under General Jackson to give the British a crushing defeat at New Orleans. These British veterans, fresh from their European victory over Napoleon, were slaughtered by the ?long rifles? of Jackson?s entrenched frontier militia, as the Redcoats charged repeatedly over open fields.
I had mentioned earlier that the turning point in the Revolution came in the South. And here again in the South the victory at New Orleans gave our country the only prestige gained in the