What’s the story?
In this hastily written letter home to his wife Rachel from the front lines of the Creek War, Andrew Jackson reveals himself as a war hero, a president in the making, and, in a surprising act of both empathy and artifice, the adoptive father of an indigenous Creek baby boy.Writing from Fort Strother in February 1814, just a month before the decisive battle at Horseshoe Bend, Jackson was embattled and defiant. Desertions threatened to collapse his campaign, and enemies at home were working to blacken his name. Bound by the strict honor code of his day, Jackson enlists Rachel, who quietly resisted his national ambitions, to defend his reputation against the “vile miscreants, that thro cowardice, has fled from the Eagles of their country.”
The critical work of reputation management nearly complete, at the letter’s close he anticipates a “return to your arms to live & love together thro life,” and then adds: “Genl Coffee will take to you little Lyncoya — I know you will treat him like an orphan.”
Lyncoya was a Creek infant found clinging to his dead mother at the Battle of Tallushatchee, a battle so brutal that young Davy Crockett later wrote they shot the warriors “like dogs.” Jackson wrote elsewhere that he felt “unusual sympathy” for the child, perhaps rooted in his own experience of being orphaned by the Revolutionary War at fourteen. Yet even in his own time, some observers suspected the adoption was also a political gesture, calculated to soften a brutal reputation as Jackson’s national ambitions grew.
Dr. Rosenbach, who championed the collecting of presidential manuscripts as essential to American cultural memory, would have prized this letter as evidence of Jackson’s greatness and his humanity. Today we recognize those qualities as the deepest contradiction of Jackson’s life and legacy: a man capable of genuine personal compassion who, bound by the ideals of duty and honor of his time and by his own ambition, failed to extend that humanity to the indigenous people his ambitions destroyed. We can be grateful that Dr. Rosenbach’s passion for preserving presidential correspondence allows each generation to reevaluate our shared American history.
What do we lose when the stories of people like Lyncoya survive only through the words of those who held power over them? To what extent should we judge historical figures by the ideals of their own time rather than our own?
This text was written by Jacqueline Bershad, as part of Rosenbach Museum & Library’s spring 2026 course, “The Curator’s Toolkit.”
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theme: Unfinished Revolutionssubjects: Creek War, 1813-1814; Lyncoya
contributing repository: Rosenbach Museum & Library
submitted by: Jacqueline Bershad
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