“A BRUTAL RECKONING: ANDREW JACKSON, THE CREEK INDIANS AND THE EPIC WAR FOR THE AMERICAN SOUTH” by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 434 pages, $35).
Peter Cozzens opens “A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians and the Epic War for the American South” with a remarkable observation. “No other Indian conflict in our nation’s history,” he writes, “so changed the complexion of American society as did the Creek War, which lies at the heart of this book.”
He backs up his thesis with a detailed history of the Creek people, their interactions with other tribes in the Southeast, their relationship with the white settlers who came first to trade and then to conquer and how Andrew Jackson turned battlefield victories into one of the largest land grabs in our history.
“A Brutal Reckoning” is Cozzens’ third in a trilogy of histories about the Indian wars, the first two being “The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West” and “Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation.” The wars he chronicles are often overlooked or oversimplified in popular history, and he offers needed reexaminations of the causes, complexities and colorful personalities involved.
The Creek War, for example, is often overshadowed by the contemporaneous War of 1812, which is described as America’s second war of independence. But it was much more than that — it was also a fight for land, both along the Canadian frontier and in the South, where America still bordered Spanish territories. And in that fight for land, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw nations lost, whether they were allied with the United States or not.